This is The Guardian. Today, long-range missiles, threats of nuclear war and North Korean boots on the ground. What is really behind escalating violence in Ukraine?
Hello, it's Grace Ben here from The Guardian's Comforating Podcast. This week, I sat down with comedian Phil Wang, who dish the dirt and the importance of a prompt post-show meal. My wonderful tour manager became expert at timing the delivery order so that it arrived literally the second I got off stage. And people say the famous people are treated like babies. That's Comforating. Listen, wherever you get your foot off.
A couple of days ago, the full-scale war in Ukraine reached 1,000 days. For months, it was a grind. Russia slowly, painfully, winning territory off of Ukraine, which is outgunned, outmanned, but nowhere near giving in.
But over the past week, the fighting on the ground has become much more intense. This week, Ukraine used an American-made long-range missile to strike Russian territory. That's never happened before. The Ministry of Defence saying attack on missiles targeted the Briance region in the early hours. Moscow says five of the missiles were shot down, one was damaged. There are now thousands of North Korean troops on the ground.
Russia's Khorask region, where Ukrainian troops have been fighting to hold land, they seized at the end of the summer. Now they say they're not just fighting Russian soldiers, but North Koreans as well. And not for the first time, warnings by Russia that this war could go nuclear. Published today, a Kremlin decree lowering the nuclear threshold
Russia, now reserving the right to go nuclear, even if attacked by conventional weapons.
But what if all that escalation was not a sign that this war is going to rumble on for another thousand days? What if everything we're saying right now is really just jockeying preparations for the arrival of Donald Trump and what he might mean for the end of this war? From the Guardian, I'm Michael Safi. Today in focus, is the negotiating table in sight for Russia and Ukraine?
Dan Sabat, you are the Defence and Security Editor for The Guardian, covering among other things, military conflicts around the world. And that's why we're talking to you from Kyiv in Ukraine, where it's been an intense week full of escalations from both sides. What's been happening? Well, the big change really has been what happened on Sunday, and it was a sort of
Although in a way it wasn't a surprise, it was also a shock. Russia was launching over 200 missiles and drones across Ukraine, more precisely that included high-speed hypersonic missiles, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and 90 drones as well. So a complex attack, lots of different weapons types designed to keep air defences busy, to bamboozle and defeat air defences. Explosions and sirens
rang out over the capital city of Kyiv, as Ukrainian air defences intercepted missiles. Kyiv's efforts saying it was able to destroy 104 missiles and 42 drones, as residents below took shelter in underground metro stations.
I was woken up at about 7 a.m. by our security guy who said, you know, this is a major ongoing nationwide missile and drone attack. And if you don't mind Dan, can we go downstairs to the bottom of the building and just sort of hang out and be safe? You could hear, you know, in the distance, in a fair distance, some sort of
soft bangs in the background. It was clear that the city centre wasn't being targeted, but something was afoot. And quite quickly it was clear that not only was a kind of a nationwide attack of extraordinary scale and scope, so there were targets in Lviv, in the west, in a desert in the south, in central cities like Vinizia. And not only was it nationwide, it was aimed at the energy network. And what the Russians tried to do was do something they started in spring, but then held off when we were kind of
Grimly Ukrainians are grimly waiting for this to happen. They're trying to knock out the entire electricity network principally now by smashing the substations of the root energy around the network and preventing Ukraine's electricity network from functioning. So what does it do when hundreds of missiles and drones are launched at energy infrastructure? What does that do to daily life for Ukrainians?
When I came out here a couple of weeks ago, I wondered what the kind of power situation would be. We knew that most of Ukraine's coal and oil-fired power stations have been knocked out by the Russians in these attacks in the spring that I'd referred to. But enough of its electricity grid was in order.
And when I arrived kind of weeks ago, I was pleasantly surprised that, you know, as I've travelled around Ukraine, saw no evidence of blackouts or electricity shortages. That changed literally overnight, because although the attack took place in Sunday morning, by Sunday evening, Grinnurgo, which is a kind of Ukraine's national grid operator, if you like, countries.
principal electricity supplier said it was going to introduce a rationing on a nationwide basis. And Ukrainians had to check on their phones to see when the power was likely to be off in their areas. That's really as they try and stabilize the network and conduct whatever repairs they can. I mean, Ukrainians are very adept at coping. You'll find the hum of diesel generators all outside small businesses, these sort of
boxes the size of a trunk, you know, they've got back there are backup systems in place, sort of everywhere, lots of places have generators. So, but it does make it hard to, you know, sometimes there's a challenge to plan your day, isn't it, when you're going to cook your meals, all the sort of stuff. If a substation is totally destroyed, it can take years to fix. You know, the reality is that it's civilians that are hit very hard by this.
Yeah, of course, this is a country that is rushing into what I'm sure will be a very cold winter. Why is Russia targeting energy infrastructure at this stage of the war? What's the point of it? Well, I think the point is, rather cynically, it's caused a kind of catastrophic failure to hold the country to ransom, to terrify civilians, and to tend to affect there's only one winner of this war. And that's us, and that's a message not just to Ukrainian people, to the Ukrainian leaders, but also perhaps to the new.
income administration in America. We've got Ukraine by the neck, if you will, and that's a big problem.
Dan, over the past week, Joe Biden, who is still the president for the next couple of months, has made a couple of key decisions to help Ukraine. One is that they can use American-made mines in their own territory. But the much more important one is that Ukraine can now fire US-made long-range missiles into Russian territory. And just a couple of days after we learned he'd made that decision, we found out Ukraine had done that. They had fired into Russia.
What is the value of giving Ukraine that power at this stage of the war? Well, this is one of the Ukraine's been asking for for a long time to use these US-made attack arms missiles and other long-range missiles like that Anglo-French storm shadow to be able to fire them to targets. Deep inside Russia, estimates vary. These missiles have a range of around about 250 kilometers. At the moment, the longest-range weapons available to Ukraine, they've got a range of about 70 kilometers.
So what Ukraine thinks it can target is sort of Russian barracks, airfields, logistics bases, fuel depots, you know, in the rear and really force the Russians to kind of reorganize or retreat further. And what these American missiles will do? Well, it seems to come with a caveat. The White House announced this or more accurately briefed it on Sunday night in the coordinated waves, the New York Times, the Washington Post, other US media. And they say that the only place that they can be used is in
that's a border region in the west of Russia. So that's a frustrating restriction for the Ukrainians who have had to endure many frustrating restrictions. And what's going on in Kursk is that's where the Ukrainians made this surprising
in the summer in August and have been holding on to a little slug of Russian territory. But now the Russians have teamed up or the North Koreans have joined alongside the Russians and there's about 50,000 troops, including 10,000 North Koreans who appear to be ready to try and expel the Ukrainians from Kursk. The Americans said you can use these missiles in that context.
Okay, so on Tuesday, after Ukraine used one of these missiles, the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called it a signal that the West wanted to escalate the conflict. And just yesterday, the US may be worried about retribution, closed its embassy in Kyiv, saying it had information about a potentially significant air attack. And that's just part of the Russian response to Biden's decision about these missiles. Take me through what else the Russians have said in response.
So the Russians have been engaged in a sort of, the predictably sort of up the rhetorical temperature. So for example, Dimitri Pescofli, Vladimir Putin, spokesperson, talked about this, that Washington was adding fuels, the fire, further inflaming tensions around this conflict. Reckless, dangerous, some Russian figures, and I think Pescof touched on this, some Russian figures have sort of raised nuclear threats and started sort of blackmailed the loose idea that Russia might use it.
nuclear weapon against, I don't know, these are the threats that Russia raises all the time and one needs to be extremely skeptical of them. In reality, this is rhetoric designed to provoke fear, make people concerned. You know, what Russia wants to do is using nuclear threats to scare off Western leaders.
and say, don't help Ukraine too much, because if you do, who knows what might happen when the reality is the kind of escalation it's talking about is so far off the charts and so taboo, then it's exceptionally unlikely to happen at all. Okay, that is reassuring. Now, explain to me the role of the North Koreans. Why are they there and how significant is their presence?
The intervention of North Korea is really, really significant, and I think it's not quite being fully appreciated. This is a second country actively joining the war with ground troops on Russia's side, while Ukraine has had no countries actively intervening to help it. Sure, Ukraine has had Western weapons, but it's not the same. Russia has had weapons from Iran. Components from China.
You also got to remember that this war has been going on for nearly three years now. Whilst Russia is currently sort of got its nose in front on the battlefield, it's gaining ground in the Donbas, it's not doing so decisively. Exact figures are hard to combine, it's all estimates. Maybe Russia's got some 600,000, 700,000 troops in Ukraine.
Ukraine's got something similar, maybe a little bit more in defence. Both sides have got their own issues. Ukraine is having trouble mobilising more people because all the people who want to fight have joined up. Russia has not sort of got an inexhaustible fund of people, though of course its population is much larger.
And with North Korean troops believed poised for combat on Russia's side against Ukraine, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has called on his military to improve its fighting capabilities to prepare for war. North Korean media says Kim made the remarks that a meeting of battalion commanders in Pyongyang on Friday calling for a limitless expansion of his nuclear program to counter the threat from the United States.
What North Korea could bring is a country that sort of fresh the conflicts with fresh troops at the moment about 10,000, not a lot, but there are some reports and fears in Ukraine that there could be 100,000 as many as 100,000 North Koreans might be willing to join or be rotated in and out the front line. And these kind of numbers make a difference.
Have Ukrainian troops actually encountered North Koreans on the battlefield? Have they fought each other yet? The Ukrainians are saying they have. It's a little bit hard to determine. It's not really possible to get up to the sort of cusque sector. It's not safe to go there. And you won't see much reporting from close to that front line. So the Ukrainians are saying it. Other intelligence agencies are saying it. We blew it to be the case. But has it been a sort of full or intense engagement
Have we seen, I don't know, prisoners of war or even North Korean casualties on the battlefield? We haven't seen those kind of videos or that sort of material in any great volume yet. I think this is something that started, but the real fight is to come.
So Dan, these are the bigger geopolitical questions hanging over this conflict. But you have been spending time on the front lines of it over the past few weeks and I'm going to know what it actually looks like at the moment. Where did you go out there and what did you say? I was overnight in a dugout.
used by a drone unit, a few kilometers from the front line near a place called Terezk, which has been a frontline town actually since the start of the war, but where the Ukrainian are going backwards at the moment and the Russians have finally entered half of the town.
Tourette's. So I was in a dugout hidden under a field. We spent time with a crew of four, their drone crew. And yeah, it was a very revealing experience. I tell you what was really revealing was watching that it's the power of the thermal imagery. It's clear luminous whites. So you can see dogs running around stray dogs off the right around battlefields. You can see dogs running around. And if you can see a person, you can you can make a person from, I don't know, perhaps 300 meters.
and it's unmistakable and then identified a potential target and I saw them conduct a bombing run against an individual which was one of the strangest things I'd ever seen but effectively you could see how they fight the war day in day out which is these sort of little battles of ones and twos. Did you get a sense of how they felt doing that, of watching a character appear on a screen, pulling a trigger and that person falls, that person dies?
The Ukrainians are very matter of fact about this. They believe there are no more of national survival against an opponent which is as determined to kill them. They feel they have no choice. I mean, I expect to somebody who, one of the members of squad, Andrei, and I said, how did you feel about that? And he just sounded, it was an old question to him when he sort of looked a bit like jump back as if say funny thing to ask me.
and later just said, I'm satisfied that I'd completed my task. And one of the things that the state is trying to do is to raise performance and reward some of the best units. So in the summer, the military defense or the military introduced this kind of competitive point system has been introduced if you're like a league table between between units. And so if you accumulate anywhere between one and three points, you'll get an FPV drone.
From the state and you get six points if somebody is wound apparently wounded eight points if they are
killed. The brigade I was with joined the system in October. They're already sort of accumulating points and they hope to get more supply on that basis. So it's a performance initiative. Drone warfare has been compared to a video game many times in the past. This sounds like another step in that direction. Kill people and you can get points.
there's clearly something about our point system that is chilling and uncomfortable this idea that you would get points for killing people is it's a bit difficult to comprehend but I have to say and the thing about drones is they can deal death from a distance you know several kilometers away but it's not that dissimilar to the western use of air power and the way that you know western militaries bomb targets from a long distance and do so with safety so I'm slightly
And worry about criticizing the Ukrainians per se when it's something that any number of militaries engage in. But when you're looking at the battlefield from a set of screens, I mean, in the actual bunker, there's a relative, you know, the drone is controlled with a joystick controller familiar to anyone who's seeing a Mavic 3 drone. So I guess you can feel quite disengaged from it in a way. But I have to say that at the same time, you know, there was a constant noise of shelling in the background periodically.
You would get something that would shake the ground a little. This was not a safe, you know, this is a hidden space, but this is not a safe space. War is not a game, and it is not safe for them. Drone operators get killed all the time. Coming up, why some Ukrainians are celebrating Donald Trump's victory?
Hi there, Jonathan Friedland here, columnist at The Guardian and host of our Politics Weekly America podcast. I want to ask for your help. Guardian podcasts depend on the sport of you, our listeners, to help fund coverage, especially in years like this one. We don't have a billionaire owner or shareholders holding the purse strings, which is how we stay independent. To support The Guardian, just click the link in the episode description. And once again, thank you.
Hello, it's Grace Ben here from The Guardian's Comforating Podcast. This week, I sat down with comedian Phil Wang, who auditioned the dirt and the importance of a prompt post-show meal. My wonderful tour manager became expert at timing the delivery order so that it arrived literally the second I got off stage. And people say the famous people are treated like babies. That's Comforating. Listen, wherever you get your portrait.
Some breaking news to bring you now. Sky News can now confirm that sources have told that Ukraine has fired UK-supplied storm shadow missiles into rush left up. President Joe Biden gave the Ukrainians the license to use US-supplied attacking missiles to fight.
You've outlined all these different ways in which it looks like the conflict is escalating again, attacks on energy infrastructure, the intervention of 10,000 North Korean troops. And yet, despite all of this, the political environment in which this war is being fought is about to change, possibly in a dramatic way. What was the reaction in Kyiv to the election of Donald Trump?
quite as adverse as you might think, or more mixed than you might think. You've got to understand something absolutely no love for the Biden administration anymore within political circles and Kyiv. Really, why is that given how much the Biden administration has given them since the start of the war?
What really frustrates the Ukrainians is this sort of Biden strategy of incrementalism, which is largely pinned on Jake Sullivan, Biden's national security adviser. It wouldn't mean direct US participation in the war. It wouldn't mean a continuation of the policy we've had since the war began, which is that we supply the means to Ukraine to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity, and they fight the war.
That is to say, the kind of too little too late approach to supplying weapons, that Ukraine wants sort of high-end Western weapons. There's public lobbying, whether it's for tanks or fighter jets, even further back for long-range artillery.
Yes, we are grateful, grateful very much for every support package that is provided to Ukraine from you, from your countries. But we need more weapons to drive Russian forces off our land and especially in the Donetsk region.
all these lobbying weapons. And eventually the Americans, maybe sometimes the Europeans, but often the Americans by the scenes, the Americans gradually agree to allowing a small amount to be supplied. It takes a long time for them to be delivered. And Ukrainians in the political class feel like they just give a given enough to lose slowly. And at the moment Ukraine thinks it's losing this war slowly.
And they're just frustrated by this Biden incrementalism, and they've had enough of it. And people are willing to roll the dice with the unpredictable Trump. That feels like it's a better option right now.
One thing we've seen since Biden's briefing over the weekend that they would allow the use of those long-range missiles that you told us about was that the Trump camp has criticized that. And there's been some sense that they may roll back that decision, prevent Ukraine from using those long-range missiles. So what is the calculation here for Ukraine? Are they just hoping that in power somehow Trump, who is capricious, who is unpredictable, he won't do what he's indicating to us that he will do?
The strong card that the Americans hold is that they can cut off military aid to Ukraine. I mean, there's an interesting question whether they would prevent Ukraine from buying as opposed to being gifted US weapons and I. That would be an interesting move given that Trump talks about the importance of business and sees things very transactional terms. That would be an even more radical move. And I think that doing that, you'd start to give the impression that the US wants Ukraine to be defeated, that Ukraine would be lost perhaps in the way that Afghanistan was lost under the
Biden administration a couple of years ago. And again, the Ukrainians are hoping that that's what the US doesn't want. The Donald Trump won't want to be seen to have failed in Ukraine and lost Ukraine. Never mind the wider impact that could have because you might see millions of people trying to leave Ukraine in a scenario where Ukraine is being defeated, whether diplomatically or on the battlefield.
Presumably any deal that ends up ending this war, you have to guess would involve some sort of exchange of land. I mean, Russia taking some of the land in exchange for security guarantees for Ukraine. A promise that Russia won't try to take any more, I guess. That's certainly the plan that J.D. Vance, the incoming vice president, has put on the table in the past few months.
If there is a push for Ukraine to accept a deal like that, land in exchange for peace, will they, given how much they've sacrificed over the past 1,000 days, will they say yes and stop fighting? I think there's an increase in realism in Ukraine, you know, it's like the officially state position. We fight to restore our internationally recognized 1991 borders, including Crimea and Donbas. That's what we fight for. There is a recognition that
that the territory that's been taken by the Russians, that it can't be regained, or maybe a fraction of it could be if there was a counter-offensive, but the reality is the territory is gone. Now, I'm not saying that they would recognize that in any kind of formal way, but they might accept a sort of de facto occupation in return for it as part of a wider peace agreement. The real difficulty comes on the security guarantees side.
because Ukraine wants to be part of NATO or something that looks like NATO bilateral guarantees that give it the confidence to rebuild, something like South Korea would be an obvious example. Russia does not want that. Russia wants to demilitarise and denotify, whatever that means, Ukraine and Russia wants Ukraine not to be in NATO but more than that.
to be a weak state and to be somehow beholden to Russia in a kind of security sense, even if it sort of appears to be subtly constructed. And on this point about the future of Ukraine, they're miles apart. And unless the US is willing to, this is what the Trump administration are not saying, unless the US is saying,
It's NATO membership for Ukraine. I can't quite see what the landing point is. Now, maybe all wars end with some sort of grubby settlement. Maybe there will be concessions on both sides. But at the moment, the comments from the Kremlin suggested it's in no mood to concede. And as long as Putin thinks he's winning the war slowly, he's got no incentive to be overly diplomatic.
One thing I'm wondering, listening to all of this, is how much is the increased intensity of fighting over the past week by both sides, not really about winning the war one way or the other, but actually jockeying for a better negotiating position when someone as unpredictable as Trump takes power and tries to, as he says, end this war one way or another.
That's 100% correct, you're seeing the Russians now attacking at the most intense level that they've done, perhaps since the beginning of the war, and their suffering casualties and extraordinary rates, 1500 a day, killed and wounded, according to estimates from the UK and others. And this is where
on the front line, but in a place like Tourette's, for example, the Russians don't have much armor or tanks. Mechanised vehicles, they just throw infantry into the fight in large numbers and the Ukrainians are able to kill a wound a lot of those Russians, but still the Russians keep coming and you see that on the maps that Russia keeps gaining territory, particularly in the
the southern part of the Eastern Front, but in many parts of the Eastern Front are under sustained pressure. Ukraine tries to be very careful about its people, but inevitably it's suffering losses too. But yes, Russia has tried to portray its victory as inevitable, that it's making progress on the front line, and that it's being able to bomb Ukraine into submission from the air.
Ukraine is trying to hang on and, you know, and show that it's capable. And one of the things that perhaps it would like to do with this US attack against weapons in the couple of months available is again show that if Ukraine is properly supported, it can really take it to the Russians. So yes, I think we're going to see hard fight in the winter as
And we're going to see people positioning themselves ahead of January and whatever the Trump administration tries to cook up. And when you put, I guess, how difficult Ukraine's situation is to those soldiers you met, the people actually fighting this war, what do they make of it?
People read the news. They understand what's going on. They know the war isn't going well. If you take the position I went to near Tourette's, it was the eighth position that had adopted since June, each one further back, and they had gone backwards about seven kilometers. In fact, Rostik the commander got out of handheld and just drew it. A ruler on his digital map to show me how far it was. But they also feel they've got
They've got no choice. And I think Ukrainians are fighting for their nation here. And this is a war of independence. And it just comes out again and again when you talk to them. And so one of the things that Rostik said to me, you know, losing us asked what about, you know, losing US support, a time when the war is already difficult for you. And he says, we have no other way to go, he told me. We are fighting for our country, for our families, for our kids, those we have lost.
for those who were killed, who were raped, who were tortured. That's our land, and that's the fight that we have. We don't care who's going to be the US president. Well, Dan, thank you for your reporting and for coming and sharing it with us. Mike, I really appreciate it, and thanks very much.
That was Dan Saba, the Guardian's Defense and Security Editor, talking to us from Ukraine. His work from there is all at TheGuardian.com. Before we get out of here, just a bit of housekeeping. If you listen to this show using Samsung podcasts, and there are some of you who do, it is time to change. Samsung is closing that app down. But you can find us on all the other apps, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocketcast, whatever you like best. And that is it for today.
This episode was produced by Hannah Moore. Sound Design was by Rudy Zagadlo. The executive producer was Homer Khalili, and we're back with you tomorrow. This is The Guardian.
