1000+ DAYS OF WAR: HOW UKRAINE AND THE WORLD HAVE CHANGED – PETER SHMIGEL

As a writer and journalist working in Ukraine, Pete Shmigel has witnessed and chronicled the military, political, social and psychological changes resulting from Russia’s three and a half year old war on Ukrainians. Since the war began in 2022, he has divided his time between here and there, and made approximately 10 trips. He has written over 300 articles in that period for Kyiv Post an English language news website. On Monday 25 August, Peter Shmigel addressed The Sydney Institute on the occasion of the publication of his new book of fiction, The Drone. He gave a hands on update on developments in the Ukraine Russian war explaining the reasons Ukraine has continued to resist and score against the Russians.

1000+ DAYS OF WAR: HOW UKRAINE AND THE WORLD HAVE CHANGED

PETER SHMIGEL

Gerard and Anne have been putting on topics and speakers about Ukraine as an issue since the very start of The Sydney Institute in 1989. I remember speaking here in 1990. Gerard, for example, hosted political prisoners who had just been released from the Gulag in 1990. Who stood where I’m standing today, and it was amongst their first public appearances on tours to Australia. So, well before Ukraine was even known as a noun, Gerard and Anne were well into the subject and providing a platform. So, for that, we’re very, very grateful to them.

I do work as a journalist and as an analyst and, therefore, I’m very committed to professionalism in what I do and high-quality standards. But there’s no denying that I have a point of view. And the best way to tell what point of view a speaker about Ukraine has, is to ask them what caused the war in Ukraine. If they answer you that, well, NATO was making an incursion on Russia and if they say there was a Nazi government in Kyiv, you know that their point of view is pro Putin and pro the Russian Federation.

If, on the other hand, they talk to you about things like a neo imperialistic exercise, – which I would argue is occurring now, a mafia racket which I would suggest is the nature of modern Russia – and the fulfilment of one particular authoritarian’s aspirations, Mr Putin’s, you know that they’re coming from a different point of view – mine. Indeed, you know, Mr Putin has said that he is fulfilling the Grand Designs of Peter I. He’s not secretive about this.

From that point of view, I’m going to talk to you today about what has changed over the last 1000 days. Militarily, socially, psychologically, geopolitically and a little bit of economics as well. At the end, I might actually reflect on what has not changed, perhaps enough, as this war has ground into its third and a half year.

But before I do that, I’ll do the most dangerous thing possible. That is to tell you a joke, of course. So: God worked very, very hard over the course of six days. Creating our universe, humanity and all the various nations that we now have, including Ukraine. He saved that to last because he wanted it to be his masterpiece. He created this beautiful country, immense natural resources, a resourceful people, a rich culture. And on the seventh day he took some rest. He was at his local cafe when a group of Ukrainians came along and said, God, this is amazing. What you’ve given us is given us is extraordinary. But God, don’t you think that it’s a little bit unfair to the other countries? And God turned to the Ukrainians and said, I guess you haven’t met the neighbours yet.

So, let’s start for from what has changed militarily. In some respects, nothing has changed and everything has changed. What do I mean by that? On the nothing side, when you look at the actual line of conflict, it’s barely moved in three and a half years. So, I’ll start with some statistics subsequent to the initial incursion, the initial full-scale invasion by Russia, and then their retreat after the course of about two or three months. From the thousand-day mark, working backwards from today, virtually no movement. They occupied about 12 per cent of the country in addition to the 8 per cent they had in Crimea. And, since taking that initial 12 per cent, in the last 24 months they have taken less than 1 per cent of the territory of Ukraine. To give you a sense of context, along a 1600-kilometre front – that’s from Sydney to Adelaide, the frontline runs – they’ve taken an area that’s about the size of Canberra.

At the current rate of assuming territory, they would take about four and half more years to occupy the four provinces of eastern Ukraine that they set as their original goal. They are stuck in the mud. Quite literally. It would take you about half an hour to drive across the new territory that they’ve gained, that’s how tiny it is. British intelligence has also done an estimation on what the casualty rate would be. If you take the current casualty rate and extrapolate it pro rata, for them to occupy the rest of those four territories in that four and a half years, it would be 1.9 million more casualties. So, it’s an extraordinarily bloody war and, from the Russian perspective, it’s a war that’s not going anywhere in terms of the goal that is territorial occupation.

So, let’s ask ourselves – why? Why is it stuck from the Russian point of view? Well first of all, let’s deal with a myth. The Russian military isn’t actually very good, and it never has been particularly good. Since the middle of the 19th Century, Russia has won two wars. World War II and the Chechen war in the 1990s and early 2000s. It has lost all its other wars. It lost the Russo-Japanese War, it lost the Crimean War, it lost World War I, it lost Afghanistan. World War II you can explain away by the fact that its force of material as supplied by the Allies was overwhelming. Whether or not they had an unfair advantage, we could probably argue. But here is this myth of Russian invincibility that we should deal with right away.

Secondly, they are failing because they are an extraordinarily mafia controlled corrupt state. You only have to remember Mr Prigozhin, who almost drove straight into the Kremlin. If you want some evidence of the extent of the mafia’s control of that nation, it is the infiltration of its supply chains. Things don’t work in the Russian military because contracts are not given out to people who are qualified to maintain tanks, to supply weapons, to cook food and so on. It’s all based on kickbacks. So, the supply chain becomes extraordinarily compromised. If you want an indication of how bad the situation is, all I need to say is, North Korea. Why would a country that feels confident about its military power ask North Korea to send it 10,000 troops? That’s an indicator of weakness, not of strength.

Finally, we hear a lot about sanctions and whether they work or they don’t work well. One indicator of the fact that they work is China’s new relationship with Russia. China essentially has created Russia into a vassal state economically. It’s worth $250 billion worth of trade at the moment. Without that lifeline, without that umbilical cord, Russia wouldn’t even be able to participate in this war. The other side of the coin is that they have failed to go very far because Ukraine’s defences have been resolute and strong. There’s been increasing amount of professionalism that’s entered the Ukrainian military over the last three and a half years. I was in Bucha in 2022, and I met gentlemen who were of my own vintage who had literally been fighting Russian APCs – armoured personnel carriers – with Molotov cocktails in the streets of their suburb. That’s unthinkable now. These are now professional soldiers. They’re trained by Australians in Britain. They are everything that you would expect of a modern army.

In fact, Ukraine is now the largest army in all of Europe. In addition to that professionalisation, you have a factor that is significant in the outcome of every war, and that is technological innovation. The rapid pace at which the Ukrainians have compensated for their smaller size. If your enemy is very big and very strong, what you make sure is that you’re very smart and very fast. And they’ve done that in terms of technologies, which we’ll talk about. Indeed, what they’ve done is transitioned this into the world’s first drone war. Well over 80 per cent of Russian casualties are now from drone warfare.

I had a young man talk to me a couple of weeks ago over the phone and he said to me, “my rifle is redundant”. Effectively, he now battles his Russian enemy with a joystick, sitting with FPV goggles and flying drones over the course of 12-hour shifts. Sometimes thousands and thousands of kilometres away from where that drone actually is deployed. In fact, he showed me his phone and, on his phone, he had an app, and the app basically tracked his position in his unit as to whether he was in first place, second place, third place or fourth place in terms of the effectiveness of his drone missions. The calculus works in terms of the value of the Russian equipment he had destroyed. That particular day he was sitting on about $190 million worth of equipment that he had personally destroyed, and he was in fifth place. A very gentle, softly spoken young man.

On that theme of drone warfare, Ukraine is now the world’s largest manufacturer of drones. They have produced about a million in this calendar year so far and they’re aiming for about 4.5 million in the next calendar year. And it’s not just the quantity of the drones; it’s the quality of the drones. For example, Russia no longer has a Black Sea fleet. Ukraine had no navy, but managed to defeat Russia’s Black Sea fleet, which is quite an accomplishment. The way they did that was through a world first invention of naval drones. Essentially little speedboats loaded with extraordinary amounts of ammunition that blew up one major battleship after another.

Going hand in hand with that drone warfare is the digitisation of warfare. Another app that I’ve seen is that of field commanders. They have uberised warfare. Essentially, what happens is a series of targets pop up on the phone. There’s a Russian APC over there, there’s a Russian tank over there, there’s a column of troops moving there, and so on. The field commanders essentially bid on who will take out what target using which drone technology. They have abolished the classic pyramid of military command. Classically, a commander has to go up through one level and another level and it has to come down one level and another level in order to be authorised to take artillery fire. Here it’s instantaneous using apps. I’ve been in rooms that have been five, six times as big as this one, where every single square centimetre of the wall is covered with a screen and local commanders have absolute line of sight of everything that moves within their district. Using drones and satellite imagery.

It’s an entirely different way of fighting war and it’s yielding results. For example, 25 per cent of the strategic bomber fleet of the Russian Federation has been destroyed. Strategic bombers are the ones that carry nuclear weapons. For a country that considers itself a superpower to suddenly have a quarter less capacity in terms of projecting nuclear power is an extraordinary blow. On the economic side, as of today, something like 14 to 15 per cent of Russia’s oil production capacity has been destroyed through drone warfare. In fact, today’s internet is filled with images of something that has never happened in history before, and that is Russian consumers queuing their cars to fill up their bowsers. The country that probably has more oil and other energy is now out of oil and energy, quite extraordinary and all the result of drone warfare.

What does Russia do – when you’re not making any gains on the ground using conventional warfare? When your supply chains and your material is being pounded with this new technology, what are your options? Well, they’ve chosen perhaps the most savage one and that is you try to apply a campaign of terror to the civilian population of Ukraine. So, as the Ukrainians have become more effective and more capable technologically and from an innovation standpoint, Russia has increased its drone and missile attacks on Ukrainian cities. That is a huge change from the beginning of the war. For example, in July there was a 1000 per cent increase in the number of drones and missiles that were sent from Russia onto the cities and towns of Ukraine. That went from about an average of about 500 a month to about 5000 in July.

The second biggest attack of the war occurred last week. That was 614 in one night. Imagine basically not sleeping night after night after night as these drones and missiles rain down on your homes. Imagine not sleeping in your own bed night after night and having to be camped out on the floor of the local metro station. This is a cold calculus about trying to break the spirit of the Ukrainian people and thereby have them influence their leaders and their military leaders into some sort of an accommodation.

You also have another very important means or method by the Russian Federation – propaganda. In Russian military doctrine, propaganda has been an official component since World War I. They’re the only military in the world, that considers what they call Maskirovka to be part of the way that you make war. Maskirovka means deception. And they have an assigned budget for it, with decades of evolving their practice. The scope of Russian propaganda is vast.

Try asking your AI programme what the causes of the war are. You will find, in about 40 to 50 per cent of cases, your AI will come back and tell you NATO’s incursion onto Russian territory, Nazis in Kyiv. That doesn’t happen by accident. That’s a very specific, elaborate seeding of disinformation onto artificial intelligence by the Kremlin. It’s really quite extraordinary, and it’s part of this overall attempt, which I wrote about in the Sydney Morning Herald last week to essentially create a post truth reality.

If we don’t know what’s right or what’s wrong, if we don’t know what’s factual, if you don’t know what’s objective, it suddenly opens the door to any dictator to do absolutely anything they want. It removes all semblance of accountability. At this point, one of the questions you might be asking yourself is, what is Australia learning from this? What are we learning about drone technology? What are we learning about the use of propaganda in warfare? How does this apply to our own region? North Korea’s part of this battle now. If this war wasn’t regional before that, well now it definitely is. I’ve spoken with senior Australian military officials, retired ones in particular. They say to me, and they’d probably say publicly to you, that we’re not learning nearly enough.

Let’s move on to the social and psychological aspect. Where is the Ukrainian headspace at the moment? Well, all major polls at the moment are showing that Ukrainian support for the war effort is still over 70 per cent. Their capacity to fight, their resolution to resist is still at very high levels. Interestingly, their support for Zelensky is still sitting on about 70 per cent. He’s got popularity ratings that an Australian politician would kill for in terms of positivity.

Having said that, they ran a contest in Ukraine about who was going to be on the new national stamp. They’re ardent collectors of stamps. I think the word is philatelists. They had five candidates for the new national stamp, one of whom was the President, Volodymyr Zelensky. He finished fifth. What finished first wasn’t even a huma; it was a dog. His name is Patron, and he sniffs out ammo and mines in fields. So, Zelensky lost to a Jack Russell puppy. Which says to you something about the Ukrainians and their relationship to authority. You will find no portraits anywhere in the country of the president. It’s not a Ukrainian custom to be hero worshippers or to practise political idolatry. There’s never been a cult of personality, so they change presidents at every election and so on. They simply view their president as a person who has to do a job, do it well, or get out of the way. It’s a very democratic outlook.

That’s part of where their head space is at. Seventy-five per cent in those polls disagree with the idea of swapping land for peace. It’s been suggested in the last month or so, that the Ukrainians should somehow give up more of two of the provinces, and in return there’ll be some sort of security guarantees and there’ll be a freezing of the line of conflict somehow. Well, that sounds neat from a kind of simplistic media driven perspective, but for the Ukrainians it’s a little bit more complicated. It’s not about lines on a map. It’s about existential survival. They’re not giving up X amount of square kilometres. They’re giving up millions of their own population.

And when you look at the conditions that currently exist in the occupied parts of Ukraine, they are horrific. And I don’t mean just from the standpoint of Russification of culture; I don’t mean just from the standpoint of the removal of basic freedoms of assembly and speech. I don’t mean just from the collapse of social services. There are horrific aspects that you would not necessarily wrap your head around right away. For example, one of the places where AIDS and HIV are growing fastest in the world is the Donbas. The reason for that is again, as I mentioned before, the mafia-like nature of the structure of the Russian economy. Part of that mafia-like setup is the dealing of drugs.

The Donbas has become the epicentre of global transport of opium and heroin. And if you flood the marketplace, the local marketplace, with that much heroin and that many needles, the local population is going to be more and more exposed to drug addiction and to HIV that goes with it. It’s awful. So, when Ukrainians look at the idea of saying, why don’t you give this away and suddenly you’ll have peace, they are thinking through the repercussions on a much more human level. It would be from their standpoint highly immoral to give up on their countrymen in that regard. To sacrifice them, if you will, to a very nasty enemy.

One of the key statistics around this whole issue is the removal and kidnapping of 20,000 children from occupied territory in Ukraine to Russia, where they are put through re-education camps and they’re separated from their families. In fact, the only war crime that Vladimir Putin has been formally charged with right now, is the removal and kidnap of kids. If it happened on 20 per cent of Ukrainian territory, what guarantee would there be that it wouldn’t happen on other occupied territory? These are the thoughts that Ukrainians ruminate on. Is the war taking a toll on them? Well, absolutely it is. There are 50,000 amputees in the country. It is a very normal thing to walk down the street in Kyiv see young men who proudly walk in shorts with prosthetic devices. As the unit cost of prosthetic devices coming either from the United States or Germany rose, and demand is high in Ukraine, Ukrainians started inventing their own. One of the leading innovations in the world right now is 3D printing of prosthetic devices to get around costs and to make them better than they were before.

In a war time situation like this, according to the world’s leading psychiatrists, the rate of post-traumatic stress amongst the civilian population is around 30 per cent. That’s the studied figure of conflicts elsewhere around the world. Ukraine is sitting on about 20 per cent. It’s actually lower than what you would expect, which is fascinating. There’s a couple of reasons for this. First of all, war, as much as it’s debilitating, is also mobilising. It gives people a sense of purpose. It gives people a sense of belonging that in some respects may mitigate some of the dramatic impacts that they’re experiencing. Moreover, whilst trauma might be an individual experience, resilience is a collective one. If I see that you’re really standing up and fighting the good fight, it inspires me to do the same.

There’s another aspect to this, and that is history. One of the best things about this Institute is it’s a group of members who actually appreciate history in a society like Sydney and Australia where we’re not that big on history. My point is that the Ukrainians have seen all this before – starting from 300 years of colonial occupation, being invaded by the Bolshevik army in World War I and then occupied by the Soviet Union. Losing 5 to 10 million people to Stalin in a forced famine. Having my generation of peers of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s incarcerated in the Gulag. One might almost say we have a collective cultural DNA that tells us what all this is about. It’s not the worst it could be.

The related aspect here is, Ukrainians don’t have the default position that many of us in this room have, and that is that happiness is guaranteed, and happiness is your expectation of life. Rather, they’ve got a 1000-year-old tradition of Orthodox Christianity, which holds dearly a concept called Theosis. And Theosis isn’t about the pursuit of happiness. It’s not like the Declaration of Independence in the United States. Theosis is about doing the best you can to become the best person you can, given your circumstances. It’s a very different outlook, rather than expecting to go down to the beach every weekend and have a nice BBQ, you almost have a sense of responsibility about your life. And where that takes many of them nowadays is to the outstanding position that’s called normal.

I was sitting with a battalion commander in his command bunker in eastern Ukraine. We’d finished the interview and his press officer looked very happy because his commander had managed to say absolutely nothing that was quotable to this journalist. And so, I put down my tape recorder. I put down my pen. I do what I do only in Ukraine, that is smoke. So, I lit up a cigarette and the commander lit up a cigarette. And he kind of fell for the oldest journalistic trick in the world and started to talk off the record. And one of the most interesting things he said to me was, “Look, Pete, war is the deletion of everything normal. It’s no longer thinking about the holiday that you’re going to go on with your family in Croatia. It’s no longer taking your kid to the soccer match. It’s no longer making sure that your mother-in-law makes her doctor’s appointment. You delete all of that.”

So, what is the response to everything becoming abnormal? It’s to be as normal as possible. So, for example, in Kyiv at the moment the standup comedy scene is booming. It has some of the best restaurants where you can eat in the world; five-star Michelin type restaurants for the cost of KFC are in Kyiv. Young people are absolutely boundless in their creativity and their energy. There’s a massive literary revival going on in Ukraine. I attended a book fair where there were 25,000 people lining up to buy books from various publishers. It’s extraordinary. A lot of this is underpinned by a revival of Ukrainian culture. If one of Putin’s goals was to destroy Ukrainian identity, he’s actually done the very opposite. If one of his goals was to limit NATO, he’s done the very opposite. Finland and Sweden have become members of NATO.

How about the other side of the coin? How about the Russians? In Russia, very strong support remains for the war itself. How do you explain that? One of the ways you explain it is that the residents of Moscow and Leningrad barely know that there’s a war on. Short of the queues that are developing now for petrol, they’ve been isolated from the cost of that. I’ll give you one statistic from the outer republics of Dagestan and Buryatia, which are Asian based republics of Russia. The rate of membership and armed force recruitment is about 66 out of 100 young men. In Leningrad and in Moscow, it’s about 1 out of 100. So, this colonial war also has very colonial characteristics. It’s not young ethnic Russians who are dying by the hundreds of thousands. In many respects, it’s young Asian Russians that are dying. It’s quite racist.

Let’s finally look at the geopolitics of where we’re up to. When the war started, Ukraine was de facto neutral. It had made no active moves to become a member of NATO. It had certainly said that it wants to be part of the EU, but not necessarily serious motions to become a member of NATO and be open to the security guarantees. As I said, Putin has lost that dynamic because now it actively seeks NATO membership.

Right from day one, there was Western support for the war. In fact, there’s a famous story of Scott Morrison standing with the priests of the Ukrainian Catholic Church here in Sydney, literally having a discussion about when the first tranches of military aid were going to reach Ukraine from Australia. It was instantaneous. It was however defined by what I call the “but policy”. What do I mean by the “but policy”? Well, in short order, you could describe it this way. We will help you defend yourself, Ukraine, but. And what that but has meant for the last three and a half years is – we’ll give you enough weapons and material to sustain your war effort, but the idea of empowering you to win, of defeating your enemy, and, God forbid, considering regime change in Moscow. Well, that’s not on the table.

When we reflect on why the borders haven’t moved at all in three and a half years, it’s largely as a result of this policy. How does that manifest itself in reality? Probably the starkest way is no aeroplanes. Other than a handful of jets that have been given to Ukraine in the last 12 months, air superiority is still the province of the Russian Federation. And it is extraordinarily difficult to win mechanised infantry movements on any scale if you don’t have air support in a modern era, particularly when drones are playing such a huge role.

Having said that, what accounts for this inertia on the part of the West? Why the but? Well for me, it’s because we’re still stuck on this mythology of Russia as a great power. We still somehow harken back to the days of the Soviet Union when the world was evenly and neatly divided between the United States and the Soviet Union. My friends those days are over. Our thinking has to move along with that. For example, the Russian economy has gone from 14 per cent of global GDP in the last years of the Soviet Union to less than 4 per cent now alongside $250 billion in trade with China. It is a vassal state of the Chinese.

The interest rate in Russia right now is 20 per cent. Growth this year is 1.5 GDP which is basically stagnant. The worst harvest in 17 years. $300 billion in frozen assets in Europe. Oil prices are capped as a result of sanctions, so income is a trickle of what it used to be. They’re running the biggest deficit in their history of $42 billion. This week at the airports in Moscow, all 800 employees had their salaries cut by 80 per cent The economic reality and the military reality of modern Russia does not add up to affording them or according them the status of a superpower and thinking that we have to manage them like a superpower. The reality is the might of the West, if deployed, would absolutely change that regime in a minute. In the Cold War, we took a view that we needed to win. I don’t understand why we don’t take that view anymore.

My final comment tonight has a bit to do with the gentleman (Trump) in the White House. We could probably have another five talks separately about the gentleman in the White House and what his politics are. I’ll leave it by saying that he is a mixture of some strange toxic brew of isolationism of the American historical variety and a very discomforting sycophancy with regard to Putin. A friend of mine, Andrew Denton, said to me he’d never seen so much cowardice covered up by so much machismo in reference to the recent meeting in Washington.

Perhaps more than anything else, there’s this deal maker dynamic. Having said that, the good news is 65 per cent of Trump supporters still think that Ukraine should be supported. That might hedge some of his future intent. Appeasement of Putin is not an alternative. Putin will only stop when he is stopped. Until such time that that happens, the Ukrainians are going to continue to fight.