Podcasts: Two years on
13 Ukraine war podcasts
To mark the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and, five days from now, the tenth since Vladimir Putin ordered his troops to seize Crimea, I’ve pulled together all the podcasts I’ve recorded on the war, its origins, and outlook.
Russia's War – Jade McGlynn (7 April 2023)
Why are so many Russians still behind Putin’s brutal and disastrous project? Where are the mass protests in the diaspora - never mind in Moscow? In Russia’s War (Polity, 2023) – the fruit of a decade of research into Russia's politics of memory and propaganda and close to 60 interviews with prominent Russians – Jade McGlynn explores a toxic mixture of fear, “historical nationalism”, “social racism”, and apathy that makes this Russia’s - and not just Putin’s - war.
Putin’s War on Ukraine – Samuel Ramani (14 April 2023)
The 2022 invasion did for Kremlinologists what the financial crisis did for economists. Even as Putin massed close to 200,000 troops on Ukraine's border, “Russia hands" assured us it was a bluff - he’ll probably do nothing and, if he does do something, it will be to advance to the Donetsk and Luhansk administrative borders. Putin is too clever to try and take Kyiv and the west, they said. So, why did he do it? "The primary motivation for Putin's invasion of Ukraine was to overturn the 2014 Euro-Maidan revolution and its outcomes," writes Samuel Ramani in Putin’s War on Ukraine: Russia’s Campaign for Global Counter-Revolution (Hurst, 2023). "Putin's counterrevolutionary agenda stemmed from his desire to reassert Russia's hegemony over Ukraine and promote his brand of illiberalism within the post-Soviet space".
Belarus in Crisis – Paul Hansbury (21 April 2023)
The battle for Kyiv was launched from Belarus – an independent state now garrisoned by Russian troops and hosting tactical nuclear weapons. Yet, for three decades, president-for-life Alexander Lukashenka tried to walk a line between hugging Moscow close and clinging to a policy independence that is domestically popular and secures power for his family and friends. In Belarus in Crisis: From Domestic Unrest to the Russia–Ukraine War (Hurst, 2023), Paul Hansbury explains why Lukashenka had no choice but to buckle.
The Russo-Ukrainian War – Serhii Plokhy (12 May 2023)
According to “the world's foremost historian of Ukraine”, the “Ukrainian nation will emerge from this war more united and certain of its identity than at any other point in its modern history.” In his The Russo-Ukrainian War (Penguin, 2023), Plokhy writes: "Ukraine’s successful resistance to Russian aggression is destined to promote Russia's own nation-building project. Russia and its elites now have little choice but to reimagine their country's identity by parting ways not only with the imperialism of the Tsarist past but also with the anachronistic model of a Russian nation consisting of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians. By paying an enormous price in wealth and blood of its citizens, Ukraine is terminating the era of Russian dominance in a good part of eastern Europe and challenging Moscow's claim to primacy in the rest of the post-Soviet space".
A Small, Stubborn Town – Andrew Harding (7 July 2023)
From 2-13 March 2022 – only a week into the full-scale invasion – Russian forces tried and failed to take and hold Voznesensk, a small but strategically important town 80 kilometres northwest of Mykolaiv. Looking back, the commander (call sign "Formosa") of the 300 professional Ukrainian troops that repulsed the attacks with the help of civilian volunteers concluded that this "one small, decisive and improbable victory … almost certainly saved Ukraine from a larger encirclement and most likely from the prospect of defeat". In A Small, Stubborn Town: Life, Death and Defiance in Ukraine (Ithaka, 2023), BBC war reporter Andrew Harding tells the story of the battle for Voznesensk through the eyes of its participants - from Formosa to 32-year-old mayor Yevhenii to the "archipelago of stranded, pensionless pensioners" like Svetlana and Mikhail eking out a living and redefining their identities through war.
"An ageing macho with a history obsession" – Mark Edele (13 August 2023)
Putin’s “sense of history is deeply entangled with his sense of self,” writes historian writes Mark Edele in Russia's War Against Ukraine: The Whole Story (Melbourne University Publishing, 2023). “Putin has carefully crafted the personality of the macho … In international politics and in history writing, a macho is politely called a ‘great man’. Putin clearly aspires to become one. But this historically conscious he-man is ageing”. Why - I asked him - “the whole story”? “There was an enormous amount of historical disinformation and misinformation out there. There was a lot of shoddy history in the public sphere and I felt that, as a historian, I had the duty to try to correct the record”.
"A Potemkin empire" – Alex J. Bellamy (28 September, 2023)
"War has finally caught up with the warmonger," writes Alex J. Bellamy in the final sentence of his new Warmonger: Vladimir Putin's Imperial Wars (Agenda, 2023). "Should Russia's imperial dreaming survive its battering in Ukraine, and it is by no means certain that it will, it will be as a Potemkin empire existing only in the minds of those who parrot its tropes". Among the post-2022 books, Alex J. Bellamy takes a different approach by telling the story of Putin’s quarter-century of war-making - starting with the Chechen adventure that made him - and assessing it a failure. Just take Azerbaijan's one-day war to conquer the Armenian-majority breakaway enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, he told me. This region was nominally protected by Russian peacekeepers to help Armenia, Moscow’s loyal ally. Yet Azerbaijan was confident that Russia could do nothing to stop it. “This empire is going to become hollower and hollower until, at some point, there will have to be inevitably some form of reckoning, some sort of collapse, because it is a Potemkin empire that rests not on the willing consent of the people within it but on an increasingly fragile military might”.
"Crimea is by no means secure anymore" – Gwendolyn Sasse (29 September 2023)
The war didn’t begin on 24 February 2022 or even with Russia’s armoured incursion into Donetsk on 11 June 2014. In Russia’s War Against Ukraine (Polity, 2023), Gwendolyn Sasse reminds us that it “began with the annexation of Crimea on 27 February 2014”. Like other authors, she analyses three decades of diverging Russian and Ukrainian politics and society, developing Russian neo-imperialism, and Western temerity. Unique to this book, however, is the restoration of Crimea to centre stage in this conflict. “We've often heard sentences like: 'Yes, 2014, the occupation and then annexation of Crimea was a breach of international law’ but then often there's a ‘but, wasn't it always Russian?'“, she told me. “In our own thinking in the West, it's not differentiated enough and there is one strong colonial claim to Crimea voiced again and again by Russia. The history is much more complex”.
"There is really no going back" – Maria Popova and Oxana Shevel (24 November, 2023)
In Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States (Polity, 2023), Maria Popova and Oxana Shevel trace the two countries’ divergence since Christmas 1991. “The root of the difficult Russia–Ukraine relationship is the misaligned understanding of Soviet dissolution – as the end of common statehood or as its reinvention," they write. "After we trace the divergence over the last 30 years between the two states, we arrive at the conclusion that the full-scale invasion really produced ... a final rupture between Russia and Ukraine,” Popova told me. “There is really no going back to any possibility for Ukraine to be tied back to Russia so the only way that the war really can end is with Ukraine hopefully in its full territory but with Ukraine fully integrated into the West as a member of the EU and a member of NATO”.
The Russia sanctions – Christine Abely (21 December 2023)
While military assistance from Ukraine’s allies has been gradual and cautious, economic retaliation has been impressive. "The sanctions imposed against Russia beginning in late winter 2022 were sweeping, historic and rolled out with stunning rapidity,” writes sanctions expert Christine Abely in The Russia Sanctions: The Economic Response to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Yet, until now at least, most Russians have been insulated from their effects. As the war reaches an attritional stalemate and Putin waits for NATO's resolve to fracture, the sanctions and their lagged effects are taking on critical importance.
"It was almost an insult" – Yaroslav Trofimov (9 January 2024)
After covering the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul in August 2022 and following weeks laid low with Covid, war reporter Yaroslav Trofimov asked his employer (The Wall Street Journal) to send him home. To Kyiv. In January 2022. “The war seemed imminent,” he told me. “And as someone who was born in Ukraine, who grew up there as a child, and who speaks the languages, it seemed to me that my place was there, and I couldn't just not cover it … It was almost an insult. I had this feeling of: how dare they! This is not a war zone … This was the hospital where I was taken as a kid to fix my eyes, and it's overflowing with the wounded. And this is the botanical garden where I had my first kiss as a teenager, and suddenly there are soldiers around it, and there are air-raid sirens, and the streets are empty”. In Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence (Penguin, 2024), Trofimov mixes history and first-hand reporting to recount the opening 12 months of the full-scale invasion.
"Zelensky is in no mood to negotiate" – Simon Shuster (20 January 2024)
Born in Moscow but raised in California, Simon Shuster has reported from Russia and Ukraine for 17 years - mostly for Time. He first met Volodymyr Zelensky during his 2019 presidential run and built sufficient trust to be granted extensive wartime access at the highest levels. Based on off-and-on-the-record conversations with the principals – including the president, his wife, their childhood friends, his chief of staff, his defence minister, and the head of the armed forces – The Showman: The Inside Story of the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky provides unique insight into the command of the war. “He is looking for ways to sustain the fight, to stay in the fight, even if someone like Donald Trump comes in and tries to pressure him to negotiate,” Shuster told me. “Zelensky does not like to be pressured. He is very stubborn. He does not like to be pushed around … Zelensky is in no mood to negotiate”.
The war could "spin out of control" - Michael Kimmage (23 February 2024)
“Russia has found ways to globalise the war,” Michael Kimmage, an Obama-era State Department official, told me. “It's found ways to fight the war over the long haul and I think its ambitions are really quite considerable … So, I think that they do dictate … a generational conflict, a conflict that will last for years - probably a conflict that will last for decades. And the worst-case scenario is that this conflict would somehow spin out of control … There are a lot of things that could just go wrong by accident and that could take us toward something really resembling a European war”. Now a history professor, Kimmage has written Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability (OUP Press, 2024).