The morale of the story: Ukraine's front lines

This episode delves into the current conditions and morale of Ukrainian troops at the front lines amidst ongoing conflicts with Russian forces.

1. Ukrainian troops exhibit remarkable resilience and adaptability under constant threat.
2. They heavily rely on local support and private funding for essential supplies.
3. The strategic use of civilian structures for military purposes helps minimize visibility to enemy forces.
4. Morale among the troops remains high, driven by a strong sense of national identity and duty.
5. The episode provides an intimate glimpse into the personal and collective challenges faced by soldiers.

1: On the Ground in Donbas

The episode begins with a vivid description of the conditions in a small village near the front lines, where everyday life intersects with the harsh realities of war. Arkady Ostrowski: "It's both bucolic and totally surreal."

2: Life in a War-Torn Village

Insights into how Ukrainian soldiers adapt to their environment, utilizing abandoned houses and blending into the local scenery to reduce risk. Arkady Ostrowski: "The main reason is not to draw attention."

3: Inside the Command Center

A look inside a covert command center, revealing the high-tech and high-stress operations central to Ukraine's defensive strategies. Arkady Ostrowski: "We're in the command center with officers monitoring every movement."

4: Personal Stories from the Front

Personal anecdotes from Ukrainian soldiers highlight their motivations and the emotional toll of the conflict. Arkady Ostrowski: "I want my children to grow up in a normal, free country."

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At a hidden command centre our correspondent finds deflated but defiant soldiers. Fight against Russia now, they say, or fight for Russia against Europe later. With inflation poised to play a critical role in America’s election, we ask why voters despise it even though it can signal rude economic health (11:58). And how a century-old novella called “The Vortex” pioneered eco-literature (19:23).

People

Arkady Ostrowski, Alexander Timchenko

Companies

None

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

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Jason Palmer
The Economist hello and welcome to the intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

A lot of voters in America will be judging the incumbent and Joe Biden on the inflation theyve been experiencing. But this time around, that inflation is not a signal of economic ill health that they think it is. And the vortex feels like a timely novella. It depicts a tug of war in the Amazon between environmental protection and economic growth, but in fact it just turned 100 years old. We examine a prescient book that pioneered eco literature.

But first we return today to Ukraine. In recent days, a front has reopened in the war, with russian forces making sharp advances again near Kharkiv, in the country's north, in the eastern region known as the Donbas. Contested since 2014, the fighting continues and continues to evolve.

We're standing in the middle of a village near Konstantinovka, and it's a beautiful sunny day in Kristlopudinan, just standing by a truck which brought us here. And the sounds you hear is there is an air raid siren for the glided bombs, a bit of artillery shelling and a cockerel. The wind in the trees, it's both. Bucolic and totally surreal. Arkady Ostrowski is the Economist's Russia and Eastern Europe editor.

Jason Palmer
He recently traveled to the region with our Europe editor, Chris Lockwood, to get a measure of the morale of troops on those front lines. So on this trip we had a chance that we travel to Donbas, to the town of Konstantinovka. That's near Kramatorsk, and it's very near the front line, the most active part of the front in Chesapeake, which is fewer than 10 km from where we were. And we could hear the booms in the distance pretty much all the time. And Konstantinovk is within Russia's artillery range.

So tell me what it was like in this town. It was very bizarre. It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon, really warm, and we arrived there with a ukrainian military person who was accompanying us, and we stepped out of the car in this tiny village. You know, it could be any village had it not been for the booms of the artillery. There are still people, people living there.

Arkady Ostrowski
And we saw a woman walking with her two kids. We saw an older man planting potatoes. But the military who are in town, that's where they reside. They live in houses, which many of those have been abandoned by their owners. The house where we talked to some of the ukrainian commanders was really no different from houses around it.

So this is the house where just. This is a note. This is the house where they're living. This little brick house, which looks like a country duchess, is where the command is. And then we walk into this house, a completely ordinary house, where we walk through a little hallway with children's drawings pinned to the wall.

Arkady Ostrowski
And then we walk into the main room. And there were about five military people there. There were bouquets of flowers in the corner amongst the Kalashnikovs that were propped against the wall. And this was, in fact, the headquarters of the air defense unit of the 92nd Assault Brigade. Why are they in a house?

Jason Palmer
Why are they not in, like, you know, a big, fancy, portable, like, sort of marquee y, tenty type thing? Why are they in a house? The main reason, of course, is not to draw attention, because, of course, this whole town is completely visible to the russian forces. Had there been a marquee or any military facility, they would immediately become a target. That's why I'm not talking about some of the security detail which could draw attention of the russian intelligence.

Arkady Ostrowski
They have to be discreet. And we were led by this officer, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Timchenko, who is the commander of this air defense unit. He is very tall, very composed, very thin. And his coal name is string. He looks like a string.

He led us around the back of the house, where normally there would be vegetable plot. And then we walked down very well, sort of camouflaged, hidden steps, and suddenly we found ourselves inside a very well lit van, like a camper van. And we walked in there, and there was an officer sitting in front of two very large screens, one showing the skies over Konstantinovka and the other looking deep into russian territory. So we're in the command center with these two officers. They're monitoring russian fighter jets, russian helicopters, russian missiles, smash rockets, and, of course, the russian planes dropping those gliding bombs.

Jason Palmer
It seems a real contrast, then between what you see at the front and this sort of command center vibe in the back. This is both work and living space. Yeah. And, you know, it is life and fighting mixed together. And there are a couple of cats in the house.

So we now started standing in the courtyard with Alexander, who's having smoke. There are cups of tea.

That's for cats.

He's got a female cat and there are lots of male cats, but he doesn't want kittens.

That is russian. So he gets rid of cats. Drone controllers, I guess. But one thing that struck me is how quick Timchinka was to point out that all the equipment we're seeing has been bought with private money, was given to them by volunteers, was not provided by the Ministry of defence at the Kalashnikov. It's a Kalashnikov gun with an optic.

Arkady Ostrowski
Of course, they're part of the ukrainian forces, but they're less reliant, I would say, on the supplies from Kyiv than they are on local volunteer groups and businessmen who supply them with the critical stuff and with the best computers and the best bulletproof vests, flak jackets, etcetera. It sounds as if Lieutenant Colonel Tychenko gave you quite a bit of time and insight, in fact. Yeah. So we're sitting there inside this command center, and you can talk about the lines you see on the screen, the caliber or the type of russian missiles and their trajectory and the speed with which they've been fired. And sort of that was exhausted quite quickly, the technical kind of war staff.

But I was very drawn to him. You know, I was talking to a man who is completely russian speaking. His mother was Russian. He spent his summers, he said, in Karelia, in the russian north. Had a lot of friends there, as a lot of people in this part of Ukraine still do.

And he's been fighting since 2015, which is when he joined the army. He was a successful businessman from Kharkiv. And he observed what Russia was doing since 2014, when it first annexed Crimea and then fan separatism in Dunbas. And that's when he said he became very aware of what it means to be Ukrainian.

When did you start feeling that you are ukrainian? In May 2014.

Until then, I was a Russian speaking Ukrainian.

Arkady Ostrowski
So his mother is actually russian, and she is the patriot of Ukraine.

Since 2014. So he told me how he went to visit his wife and his kids, and they were in Germany and they're in Germany, and he was on leave there on holiday. And he said they bumped into a couple, a man and a woman from Ukraine living in Germany, who asked him, having heard that he is a soldier from Ukraine. So how things. There's how things back at home.

Arkady Ostrowski
And he told me that he didn't know what to say. He didn't know how to speak to this man. He didn't get aggressive. He didn't confront him. But of course, like any military man fighting at the moment for his country, he said he wondered, what's this man of military age doing in Germany?

And he said, well, if you really want to know what it's like back at home, come back and see for yourself. I don't want the Ukrainians in Germany to sit on. You know, women should stay, but there. Are a lot of men in Europe. Ukrainian men, who are just basically who should be here, bearded, strong men.

There are places here not there. And what he said motivated him is the kind of existential nature of this ward. I want to say what I want to say. I don't want censorship.

Arkady Ostrowski
If I want to express myself, I. Don'T want to go to jail for it.

I want my children to grow up in a normal country. Might not be a rich country, but a normal, free country.

Jason Palmer
We heard yesterday on the show about how critical the next couple of months are going to be in this war with the next russian offensive. And Ukraine struggles with ammunition and manpower, its conscription. Visiting all these soldiers, these frontline towns, what sense did you get about morale? The other part of the triangle that Ali Carroll was talking about, I would. Say the mood that I saw in people in Donbas is both realistic, very sober, and very determined.

Arkady Ostrowski
There are no illusions that the Russians have an edge numerically, both in manpower and munition. There is also no illusion amongst this man that the talk of Ukraine restoring 1991 borders is basically at this stage is just talk. They know this is not going to happen anytime soon. As Timchenko said to me, those politicians who talk about it, they should try to get a bit closer, closer to Bahmut, even by 100 meters. But the most important thing that I've learned is their sense that the fight which is at the moment happening in Donbas is not a fight for territory, per se.

It's not because they feel that Konstantinivka, much as they wanted to stay part of Ukraine, they're fighting in Donbas to stop russian forces progressing further. It is to degrade russian army. It's to slow down their progress. The fate ukrainian independence is not going to be decided in places like Konstantinovka, but they are actually fighting for Kyiv. They are fighting for Kharkiv.

They are fighting for Odessa, because if they leave their positions, the russian forces will very swiftly move to attack those cities. Arkady, thanks as ever for joining us. Thank you, Jason.

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Jason Palmer
We talk a lot about high inflation on this show, and it often comes off as an intrinsic evil. Earlier this month, Americas Central bank once again decided not to cut interest rates, citing inflation thats too far above its 2% target. Inflation has eased substantially over the past year while the labor market has remained strong, and that's very good news. But inflation is still too high. Further progress in bringing it down is not assured and the path forward is uncertain.

But inflation isn't a thing unto itself. It can be a sign of genuinely healthy things going on in an economy. Problem is, a lot of people see it as no more than losing purchasing power. Their wages buy less stuff, and they blame whomever is in government. This whole notion of what inflation indicates and how much it can exercise and electorate has a rich history, and for some economists, a frustrating future.

Gavin Jackson
So as Americans head to the polls in November's election, inflation is one of the biggest issues for swing voters. They're fairly angry about it, and they lay the blame at the Biden administration. Gavin Jackson is a finance and economics correspondent for the Economist. That's a frustration to a lot of economists, particularly those on the centre left, who see the better performing aspects of the economy. It's high employment, high wage growth, particularly for poor workers, as the great successors of post pandemic policymaking.

And they think Biden should be getting some credit for that. There's quite a bit of literature the economist asking, why do people dislike inflation so much? That was first asked by the later Nobel Prize winner Robert Schiller back in 1997. And there's a new National Bureau of Economic Research paper out recently that asked the same question, what is it that people dislike about it? And so I looked at that through the lens of what marxist historian EP Thompson called the moral economy.

Jason Palmer
Okay, so let's start there. What is the moral economy? So Thompson studied England's 18th century food riots, and while a lot of historians at the time saw these as just a natural response to hunger, you know, your belly's empty, you're angry. EP Thompson said, actually, there was a political philosophy going on here and the rioters had some kind of resistance to capitalism. They were motivated by the belief that the bakers, the farmers, the millers and so on had violated paternalist customs, that you shouldn't profit at times of scarcity, you should work for the community, you should keep your food local, and you shouldn't amorally follow the logic of supply and demand and seek out the highest price for your product.

But this was food riots in the 18th century, and modern America is pretty comfortable with something more market economy y. Less than moral economy y. Right. Well, I mean, no one is burning bakeries, but they are still fairly angry about inflation. So in this paper, which was by Stephanie Tancheva, she looks at what it is exactly that people dislike about inflation.

I mean, clearly it's. They don't like paying more for stuff. Yeah, sort of. So she asked a series of closed and open questions. So some of them sort of closed question, how would you define inflation?

Gavin Jackson
An open question, more sort of how does it make you feel? That kind of thing. And people basically see inflation not as economists do, and economists see it as just a change in the unit of measurement. If you change every $1 to a two dollar, that doesn't make anyone poorer any more than measuring your height in feet rather than centimeters, makes you shorter. It's just a unit of measurement.

It doesn't change anything. But most of the respondents thought, no, what inflation means is my income going down. It means I get poorer. Rising prices, they say, make life unaffordable. They worry about buying the basics and they believe this is much worse for the poor than the rich, which again, economists don't tend to think about it.

They think of inflation as a bit of a wealth tax. So if you have all your money in assets, those assets get inflated away. And if you have debts, those debts get inflated away. So actually, they tend to think inflation hurts the rich more than the poor. And they also think inflation accompanies a good labour market.

So as people are getting higher wages, that eventually feeds food to prices, which should be good for workers rather than corporations and all that kind of thing. But what normal people think is inflation means I get poorer. It means the poor get poorer fastest, and there is not any compensating increase in employment or a good jobs market or anything like that. In fact, they think there's no trade off between inflation and employment, what economists call the Phillips curve. And they think they go up together.

So they think inflation indicates not a booming economy, but an economy that's in trouble. If all you say is true, then inflation just simply has not only a bad rap, but kind of like the opposite rap from the truth. Well, kind of. I mean, inflation does have a lot of costs. The most obvious one is when prices are changing all the time.

There's a cost to dealing with that for everyone, a psychological cost for normal people. For businesses, it means management time has to be thought about pricing strategies, that kind of thing. It can undermine the credibility of central banks. The redistribution between the rich and poor is arbitrary. It's not like it's targeted well.

And the respondents to the survey are not wrong. The economists are thinking this in terms of textbook model. In fact, inflation has often accompanied high unemployment. The 1970s, stagflation, stagnant economy, high inflation were the most common. That I think people get right, and maybe economists get wrong a little bit, is that they see higher interest rates as prices going up.

Whereas economists don't think of interest rates as a consumer price, they think of it as a policy tool. So when people experience this increase in prices and this increase in interest rates, they experience that a bit as income is going down. And the other thing is there's a lag. Wages are catching up with inflation and have now exceeded it. In America, wages are growing faster than inflation, but initially at the start of the inflationary episode, they weren't.

So people did get poorer. So economists are seeing this almost in sort of the ideal terms, as where they think when everything gets back to equilibrium, where it ends up. And the people responding to the survey are sort of focusing more on all of the different pieces put together, I think. So I don't know if anyone is right or wrong here, but they're just answering the question in different ways. Sounds to me like the Biden administration needs to work on its messaging about what inflation is and its causes.

So this is where it gets back to the moral economy. So in a moral economy, you're not just thinking about curves shifting on a graph like economists do, you're thinking, who do I blame? Whose responsibility are different things? And the Biden supporting economists, they want to say, well, you should give Biden the blame for your wages going up, not just prices going up. You've got a job, it's a good job, it's paying well, all of that.

And that's not how normal people think what they think is. No, I work hard at my job. I applied for this job. I got my promotion, I got my pay rise because I deserve it. I did not deserve those price rises.

Those prices were done to me by someone else. So Democrats tend to think of that as big business, and Republicans overwhelmingly thought it was Joe Biden had done it to them. So I guess what the Biden administration has to hope for is that as inflation fades, people's memories start to go down. A bit of the inflationary shock at the start, interest rates maybe come down a bit, and people do start to give him more credit for the strength of the american recovery and not just the inflationary byproduct of all of that. Gavin, thanks very much for your time.

Thanks very much for having me.

Claire McHugh
100 years ago, the colombian poet and authority Jose Ustasio Rivera finished writing La Vorajane, or the vortex. Claire McHugh writes about culture for the. Economist, and he penned the novella during an expedition to map Colombias border with Venezuela. And it was this extraordinary experience in the jungle that inspired his book. And today, the vortex is one of the most important in Latin America.

The novella excoriates the abuses that the rubber industry inflicted on indigenous people in the Amazon in the early 20th century.

The vortex talks about Casa Arana, the London listed company that enslaved and tortured thousands of indentured workers on rubber plantations in the rainforest. And then this blood soaked river of latex flowed into the insatiable factories of american industrialists. The vortex is really important in Colombia, particularly this year, and Colombia is celebrating the centenary of the book's publication. And at the Bogota Book Fair, President Gustavo Petro praised the vortex for having words that still shine like stars. Antes de a pacionarme por mojer alguna mi corazon alazar.

Anniversary celebrations are taking place across Colombia, including in the Amazon region, where most of the book is set. And I visited one of these places, a town called La Chorera, which lies deep in the rainforest. And as the plane landed on the Runway, all I could see was a carpet of trees wreathed by clouds.

La Chorera is set on the banks of a thundering river in southern Colombia, in the Amazonas region, and in the rain, the jungle looked even greener than usual.

But what today appears to be a natural paradise, in fact conceals a brutal history. This part of Colombia is scarred by violence that began when imperial businessmen fought to extract the wealth stockpiled in the trees underground and in the riverbed. The wooden building that housed Casa Arama a century ago still stands today, although it's now used as a school for the four indigenous groups that live in the area. And every year, La Chorera celebrates the founding of its indigenous reserve in the garden where papaya and palm trees grow. I met Luzmila, an abuela who was dressed splendidly in traditional feathers, seeds, and shells from the jungle, and she explained to me the significance of a mural that was quite recently painted to remember the atrocities endured by her people in Cata Areana.

She told me how the peruvian overseers at Casa Areana tortured indigenous people by burning them before later throwing them in the water to drown during the rubber boom. Some 30,000 indigenous people were killed in this northwest Amazon region. That was about 60% of the population.

I spoke to Bartolomeo, or happy as he calls himself, who's a leader of the Akaina people, and he told me that it's important that the world beyond La Torera learns about these truths.

In La Borahine, Rivera wrote, even in the jungle, civilized man is the most destructive protagonist of all.

A century on these themes feel modern and timely. The world's largest rainforest is still being despoiled and a tug of war is playing out across Latin America between those wanting to prioritize environmental protection versus economic growth. And so in this way, Riveras work can be read as pioneering eco literature. Riveras message is that it is humans who suffer if the destruction of ecosystems persists.

Jason Palmer
Thats all for this episode of the intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

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