 Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Blyth Street. As is customary, we begin by acknowledging the first Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and pay our respects to the elders past, present and emerging. I'm Sam Rogovine, Director of the International Security Programme at the Lowy Institute. I'm delighted to be joined on stage by Zoya Shevtalevich and Mick Ryan, who are introduced more formally in just a moment. We're now a little over a year into Russia's invasion of Ukraine, an operation that, quite apart from the moral and legal judgments we might make about it, has been a disaster for Russia in political, economic and military terms. Ukraine, of course, has suffered much more, unprovoked aggression leading to tens of thousands of casualties, seizure of its territory and economic collapse. Over the last few weeks, you've probably already heard seen analysis of the first year of the war. So today we've decided to do something slightly different, rather than add to the retrospectives. We want to look forward today, both in geopolitical terms, on the battlefield, but also in terms of life in Ukraine. And I very much want to hear from all of you. I'll get started today with some questions of my own for our two guests, but I'll be sure to leave plenty of time for yours. So let me now turn briefly to my guests to introduce them formally. Retired Major General Mick Ryan is a non-resident fellow at the Lowy Institute. He spent 35 years in the Australian Army. His operational service includes deployments to Timor-Leste, Iraq and Southern Afghanistan. His book War Transformed, The Future of 21st Century Great Power Competition and Conflict, was published in 2022. You've seen Mick's commentary, I'm sure, all over the place in the past year or so. Mick retired four days after the Ukraine war began, and he's been, I think, an invaluable source of commentary and analysis on the state of the conflict since. Zoya Shevtalevich is a contributing editor for Politico. She's based here in Sydney. She's a regular commentator on the Ukraine war for ABC News 24. She's just returned from Europe, where she saw President Zelensky address the British parliament and the European parliament in Brussels. Can you please both make it both our guests welcome? So, as I said, we're going to focus on the future, the next year and perhaps beyond, of the Ukraine war. We've called this session Where To Now. Let's begin, though, by just situating ourselves. Mick, I wonder if you can get us started by summarizing the battlefield situation right now. And perhaps this is hopelessly naive way of framing it, but who's winning? There's lots of different answers to that one, but I think Russia's already lost, they just haven't lost on the battlefield. I think it's important to understand that wars like this go through a series of pulses and pauses. Now, it's never 100%, never zero percent, these real pulses of activity and offensive activity, the original Russian invasion, the Ukrainian offensives around Kharkiv would be good examples of that. But there's lots of pauses, humans can only fight for so long, they need to rest, they need to reinforce, they need to reorganize. And up until January, we were in one of those pause periods. But since January, we've seen the launch of the Russian offensive. It's not one of the big pushes that people imagine from the First World War or even Second World War, but it's been a very broad front, almost a damn squib kind of offensive where they haven't made a lot of progress on about the six or seven axes of advance that they've tried to advance on. Ukraine has been absorbing these blows in many respects, whilst at the same time trying to reorganize, reinforce, build additional combat units and absorb a range of different Western weapons systems, including tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and air defense systems, that it will most likely use in offensives over the coming months. Now, I think the Ukrainian offensives will be the more decisive ones. I mean, the Russian military system, I think, from my perspective, is slowly breaking down. It has been a slow learning organization. It has learned slower than the Ukrainians. And it's using people at an unsustainable rate, even for a country the size of Russia. I would expect that if the Ukrainians can make a significant operational breakthrough, like they did in Kharkiv, that will be decisive for several reasons. Firstly, it's good for Ukraine to see its soldiers winning. It's always good to see its soldiers winning and it's good for an army to win. Secondly, it will show the Russians once again that everything they've done to change and reform over the last six months has not worked. And thirdly, it will be important for the West to see that Ukraine can continue to conduct operations and win on the battlefield. That's really important for sustaining diplomatic, humanitarian, economic and military support for it. So, you know, I think over the coming months, the key things will be, you know, the Ukrainian offensive will be vital. It will be a decisive event this year, but production will be really decisive as well. The production of munitions, production of equipment on both the Russian and the Western side will be really important. Strategic patience will be vital. We have to be patient. So, I see this notion of weariness, war weariness. And I don't know what this country has to be war weary about. We're spending six cents per person per day on this war. None of our sons and daughters are fighting there. We have everything to gain from Ukraine winning and without really putting a lot of our national treasure in it. And the final thing is this war has been a battle of learning and adaptation. We've seen both Ukrainians and Russians struggle to learn and improve throughout this war. The Ukrainians are winning this adaptation battle and there's a huge amount we can draw just from the Ukrainian army and the Ukrainian nation as a learning system that we could really pull from it as a country, I think. So, I think I'll finish my opening remarks just by saying really excited to be here as well. I love her work. She's a great journalist and I'm a very big fan. So, it's great to be here with you. Thank you, Mick. And I'll come to you in a moment. So, I just wanted a very brief follow-up, Mick, which was just to ask. My impression was that Western military equipment, particularly heavy armor tanks, while impressive on a one-to-one basis, superior to the Russian equipment, was not going to be supplied in sufficient quantities to make it a decisive difference in the coming year. But I think you disagree with that. Yeah, absolutely. Firstly, you've got to remember the Ukrainians went into this war with nearly a thousand tanks. So, they've already got a lot of them. Secondly, the Russians have supplied them with many more tanks over the course of the war. And thirdly, even a couple of hundred of advanced Western main battle tanks used at the right place and time can be quite decisive. And the death of the tank narrative that certainly is very popular in Cambridge, the narrative is uninformed. And if the Russians and Ukrainians continue to scream out for these things, you've got to wonder, well, maybe they do have utility in the future. Yeah. Now, Zoya, I would invite you to comment on any of that as you wish. But I also wanted to ask you specifically to follow up on something you mentioned upstairs when we were talking before coming down here about the on-the-ground perspectives that you're hearing through your journalism work. I know you're talking to people who are at the very front lines, military as well as civilian, I assume, and just give us a taste of what you're hearing about what this war is like for ordinary Ukrainians. So, my background is I myself was born in Ukraine. I am Ukrainian. And so, I talk to people as a journalist, but I also talk to people as a friend, as a relative. And the thing that has struck me so much over the past 12 months is the extent to which to an individual, the people who I talk to, the Ukrainians I talk to believe they can win this war. And that hasn't wavered. In fact, if anything, now they seem more certain than they were before. And you can see it in practice from the perspective of the way that the Ukrainians are rebuilding. So, as soon as Ukraine has a hole in the middle of the ground from a Russian rocket, cars come in, brigades come in, and overnight they fill potholes. I mean, it's astounding. It's astounding from the perspective of someone who lives in Sydney and who's had a pothole at the front of her house for about seven months now. But it's actually the amount of bravado, the amount of effort that's going into rebuilding in Irkin, which unfortunately has become something of a household name around the world for the war crimes that were committed there. It is a sort of a suburban area on the outskirts of Kyiv. The rebuilding is in full force. I was speaking with someone who's on the ground there right now, and she was saying like, you can't, I mean, literally there's building equipment in every yard. You can't walk a block without just hearing hammering everywhere because people are putting up roofs. People are fixing windows. I mean, it's really astounding because there is a confidence that people will return home. One of the biggest confidence boosts people have is the fact that all of these refugees who fled out of Ukraine in the immediate aftermath of the full-scale invasion, so many of them are now going back home and rebuilding their homes and rebuilding their lives in Ukraine. People are just really committed to the country and to the idea that it will withstand this attack. When we talk about weariness in the West, the irony is that there isn't weariness among the people who are actually losing their sons and their daughters in this battle. These are people who are willing to fight, and I think that is something that is incalculable when it comes to the successes on the battlefield. Now, of course, these people need further military successes to your point. If Ukraine starts losing huge amounts of territory, if things get worse, then that may change. But at the moment, there is this great deal of confidence that the people I'm speaking with have. When it comes to speaking with people who are actually on the front lines, I have sources deep within the Defense Ministry, probably not quite as deep as your sources, but they are also really confident. What they're saying is that the support from the West is both... There is a lot of support that we just don't know about. A lot of support is happening that is not spoken of more broadly. There are allusions to things that the Americans are doing. There are allusions to things that the Brits are doing, that the French are doing, that we will not know about for quite some time. There are supplies going in. I am from a town called Chirnavtsi. It's in the west of the country. It's part of a supply route, an informal supply route that the Ukrainians themselves have set up. Basically, huge amounts of donated things go into a town called Seraf in Romania, and a bunch of volunteers from Ukraine. Men drive their cars to the border of Romania. Women then take those cars because men of service age can't leave Ukraine at the moment. Women take those cars, they drive to this warehouse. They grab all of these things. I mean, it's tons and tons of equipment. They bring it back to the border. The men take those cars back and take it to the front line, take it to Bakhmut. There is an informal network of supplies that is happening in Ukraine that we will never know about, and the only reason we know about it is because people like me have friends and family who are involved in these sorts of operations. I have to stop, but the astounding thing to me is people my age, my sister's age, one guy in particular I'm thinking of, he's in his mid-40s. He's got three kids. He was a computer programmer up until February 24th, 2022, and now he is running arms to the front line for the Ukrainian soldiers. Another friend is a woman my age, born almost exactly the same time as I am. She was in comms, and now she is essentially running logistics for the Ukrainian Civilian Defense League. I mean, everyone is getting involved. People are hosting refugees. People are doing all of these things. I mean, this is a country that thinks it can win. But Zoey, I said in my introduction that the Ukrainian economy had collapsed. That's perhaps slightly floored, but there is no doubt that in terms of the formal economy, Ukraine has suffered a massive contraction. You paint a slightly different picture there. So just tell me, for instance, the refugees here returning home, what are they returning back to? I mean, do they have jobs to go to? Is the government paying salaries? Is the private sector still functioning? The government is paying salaries for a lot of people. There are also informal networks. So for instance, my family, we wire home hundreds and hundreds of dollars every month to various people on the ground. My mom is helping all of the people she used to work with. So there is a huge informal network of people who are keeping individuals afloat. Councils are getting grants. So there are a lot of NGOs, a lot of American and Western NGOs who are channeling money. There are huge fundraising drives that exist in various places. So money is filtering through, but the biggest contributors are, of course, the Western powers. So the US, the European Union, just the other day, they have a new, it's called the European Peace Facility, which is essentially a way of getting money to Ukraine. They've committed one billion euro to that to help Ukraine buy munitions. They look like they're going to commit a lot more. There's also other funds that are being used for rebuilding. So part of this is about President Zelensky drumming up support and getting money flowing into Ukraine. And the crazy thing is that a lot of companies, so I have this friend of mine who is an IT guy, the company that he worked for initially closed down in the first few days after the war, and now it's back up and running, and they're doing contract work for various countries. Again, they have the internet, famous Starlink terminals everywhere. They're still working in a lot of places. People are going as they were. And a lot of this is about confidence in Ukraine to persevere confidence in the economy. And because of the amount of Western support that Ukraine has gotten and the promises that have been made from the EU and from the US, I think that confidence remains on a broader scale. So people are still signing contracts with Ukrainian company. So you both project a sense of confidence onto the Ukrainian people and its government. So question for both of you, and perhaps I'll start with you, Mick, is that sense of confidence based in at least in some part on a feeling that at some point during this war, perhaps immediately afterwards, Ukraine will become an EU member and eventually a NATO member. And is that confidence well placed? Well, my confidence not so much around those after war things, although I hope they happen. And I think Ukraine has certainly earned all those things. You just have a look at the facts on the ground with the Ukrainian military. It's mobilized more people than the Russians had. So there's a quantitative advantage there. There's a qualitative advantage in the kind of training and the leadership that they're receiving, not just on the ground, but these kind of societal efforts as well. And then a whole lot of new weapons systems are coming in. But the biggest asymmetry, which gives me a lot of confidence is purpose. I mean, the Russians in Ukraine, I don't know, they really know what they're fighting for other than a bit of extra money to buy a new apartment or something like that. Ukrainian soldiers are fighting for their existence. I mean, this is existential for the Ukrainian state and the Ukrainian people. And it's pretty hard to beat someone who's fighting for their very existence, particularly when that existence is a democracy that has the support of lots of other Western nations. So, you know, I have a lot of confidence. I don't know whether that will happen this year or next year. The Ukrainians can win, but it's going to take patience and it's going to take all of us kind of supporting Ukraine because, you know, either every democracy matters or none of them matter. And Ukraine matters. And so are you on the EU and NATO question? I think with respect to EU membership, quite frankly, it's unlikely in the near term. I think what is much more likely is some sort of, you know, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, floated this idea of a political community, a European political community, which has access to things like tariff-free trade with the EU single market, but does not have the voting rights that European member countries have on EU legislation. And part of the issue is that Ukraine, while it is definitely a freedom-loving democracy aspirant, there are a lot of issues when it comes to things like corruption, endemic corruption that has many roots in Putin's operations in Ukraine, as well as in its own problems. And the EU is a little bit burnt from its previous enlargement rounds. It's burnt by having countries like Hungary and Poland within the bloc and doing things that the EU sees as illiberal. And so as a result of that, I think the prospects for Ukraine joining the EU proper in the next few years aren't great. When it comes to NATO, that's another tricky one because, of course, NATO doesn't like to, well, prohibits expansion to countries that are at war. And that's part of the reason why, I mean, let's be real. The war in Ukraine started in 2014. Russia invaded Crimea. And that was a key element in preventing Ukrainian talks to join NATO, as well as reticence in Germany and in France. But that is not something that I think NATO is likely to want to undertake. A member that is at war entering the club, which has a common defense clause which binds others to defend it if it is attacked. So I think it's unlikely, again, to become a fully fledged member of NATO in the near term. That said, effectively Putin himself says this is a war against NATO. NATO is involved, whether we admit it or not. NATO is helping with training. It's helping with arms. Ukraine is standardizing its weapons to align with NATO weapons so that it can more easily use weapons that are used by NATO bloc countries. So all of those things indicate that Ukraine is on the path toward NATO and the EU. But I would say in the near term, proper full scale membership of either is unlikely. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about leadership. I mentioned that you were in London and then in Brussels to hear Zelensky speak. I would just be interested in your first-hand impressions of him and actually whether over the journey you've changed in your perceptions of him or whether he has changed. Because he has been such a central figure of the Ukrainian resistance, beginning with that quote that we all know, I don't need a rider, I need ammo. And then I'll throw that question to you as well, Mick. But firstly, just a little bit about your first-hand impressions of Zelensky, but maybe also your thoughts on where Putin stands a year into this. I think with Zelensky. So my first exposure to him was as a funny man on TV. So I remember watching his show, Servant of the People, which has eerily mirrored his rise to power. Before that, he was really ubiquitous. He was on every Russian-language TV channel, and it was mainly Russian-language TV channels. He didn't do Ukrainian stuff. So he ran his own production company. He was on the Ukraine's version of Dancing with the Stars. So when he came to power to me, originally when I saw his rise, I just thought, oh, this is a bit of a joke candidate, and this is a protest vote that people are making because Ukraine has had multiple revolutions in 2004, in 2013, 2014, where they have tried to take a more democratic Westward-Leaning course, and inevitably that ended in disappointment. And to me, what Zelensky felt like when he launched his party, when he started his non-campaign because he didn't campaign, his old campaign was, I'm not going to campaign, that was to me like, oh, the Ukrainians have kind of given up on democracy and they've given up on change and they're just like, oh, I just, I wash my hands of it. It felt a bit Trumpy, actually, when he got elected. So no one was more shocked than I was when, and in the first few years of power, by the way, he was not a particularly popular president. I mean, the Russians were doing their utmost to bring him down via various propaganda channels. There were a lot of corruption allegations around his team, although he himself was a relative clean skin, although he had some issues with oligarch backing, but nonetheless, he didn't have a lot, he didn't have a lot of baggage, but people around him did. And so he was really languishing in the opinion polls, like no one thought, no one thought, A, he was going to run for reelection for a second term or that if he did, he would win. There was no real feeling of love towards Zelensky and certainly I didn't feel any love. That completely changed in the aftermath of this full scale invasion because we went from someone who was denying the facts on the ground, I mean, right up until the eve of the invasion, he was like, no, no, no, there's no invasion happening. And that was because essentially he was trying to prop up Ukraine's economy. And didn't mobilize. Indeed. I mean, it was really, I mean, there were preparations underway, but it was really kind of a blinker situation. When on the 24th, 25th, 26th of February, like the emergence of a wartime leader was astounding to me, I couldn't really understand where this had come from. And of course, we now see, you know, his nightly addresses, his addresses to Parliament's address to the UK Parliament, his address to the European Parliament. He knows how to craft a message. He delivers a speech tailored to each individual audience. He is inspiring. He is galvanizing. He knows when to poke and when to hug. I mean, he is an incredible communicator, truly an incredible communicator. And his courage and bravery has been really astounding as well, because we don't need to look very far to see how these things normally play out. I mean, we look back a year prior to the invasion and we see what happened to Ghani in Afghanistan when the Taliban started rolling in through the country. And he just took the first ride out of town and left his people to their fate. And that is the alternative vision, I think that was the Putin expectation of what would happen when he needed keys. But that to me is astonishing. And now, I was speaking with, so none of my friends, I couldn't find a single friend who voted for Zelensky in the election. All of them had voted for various other parties. They thought that he was a joke. Now I speak with them and I say, look what do you think of Zelensky? And they say, we'll criticise him after the war. So that's the situation on the ground. He has, without a doubt, they say that one man can't make a difference. I think that is incorrect. I think quite clearly his bravery, his courage and his skill as a communicator and his ability to speak everyone's language, and I mean that both literally and metaphorically, has really changed Ukraine's fortunes. Of course, the roots of this are long and were implemented long ago when Ukraine learned from the 2014 invasion, things have been in train. But I think if a different man was in charge, if we had a Poroshenko or, I mean, I'm not even going to talk about Yushchenko or Yanukovych, I think this would be a different situation. We wouldn't be talking today. But Miki, his popularity among Ukrainians also constrains him to the degree that he simply cannot end this war with anything short of, well, let's say, total victory. We can argue about what total means. But of course, the combination of Russia's appalling behaviour, its abuses in Ukraine, and Zelensky's own popularity, his ties to his people, means that he must know that any sign at all that he's prepared to settle for anything less than total victory would be regarded as a betrayal, right? Well, I think up until the atrocities that Buchar and Irving were revealed, there was some even very slight possibility of negotiations. But I think that killed that dead. He talked about this even recently, the profound impact and the turning point that he felt personally, but also for his nation in the wake of the discoveries of the Russian atrocities. If you walk the streets there, I mean, there has been a lot of rebuilding in Buchar and Irving, but you do feel there's a certain evil that's being perpetrated there. You saw it on the face of him when he visited. You saw just the abject horror, pain and everything else. So Ukrainian strategy and politics since then, I don't think, permits a step backwards with the Russians anymore. This is, as I said, an existential fight with the Ukrainians. I think it's when they truly understood that the Russians want to destroy their nation, that they want to destroy them as a people, they want to destroy their culture. And I don't see how he politically, but even ethically, could step back from that challenge now, because he has no choice but to defend the very existence of his nation. So that does bring us to a forward question that I think has been asked since the very day this disastrous operation was launched, which is, how does this end? In your mind, actually, as a sort of preface to this question, last year the Lowy Institute hosted Sir Lawrence Friedman, some of you may have been here for his event here at the Lowy Institute, esteemed military historian and strategist. And I was with him at an event in Melbourne when that question was put to him. And he essentially, for the same reasons we've been discussing, ruled out the idea of a political end to this war. So there will be no peace treaty, if you like, or no political level settlement of any kind. If you could imagine an end to the fighting rather than end to the state of war, that he thought might be possible, which is to say that in formal, in public terms at least, it would be military commanders only from both sides who would meet and decide that even though the political questions will remain unsettled, for the moment we will stop fighting. Does that sound plausible to you, or is there some other path to peace? Yeah, it's a great question, right? David Petraeus' famous question in the march up the back to Linda Robinson. I think Lawrence is on the money here. I mean, you can't tow Ukraine away from Russia. Right. And in fact, you know, Klausowitz talked about passion in the people. This is aroused the passion in both Russians and Ukrainian people and there's not going to be a lot of forgiveness there in at least this generation or the next. So a political solution will be extraordinarily difficult. You know, historical analogies are very inexact and problematic. But if I was looking for one, I'd probably be looking at the Korean peninsula. This is a long term challenge for Central Europe that won't be resolved even if the Russians are beaten on the battlefield. It means the Russians will go home for a while, but it's hard to conceive of them ending their designs for this kind of historical fantasy that Putin has engaged in, not just in the last year, but for many, many years. If you track back his writings and his speeches and stuff, he's been working himself up to this for a very, very long time. And Zoe can probably talk to that more knowledgeably. So, you know, there may be a military solution, an armistice, a peace fire, some kind of peace talks. But I think this is going to be something that the West is going to have to help Ukraine with many years and decades to come, whether it's NATO membership or some kind of security assurance. I'm not sure, but security assurance had not worked before when Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons. We recall they were given security assurances by Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom. This did not to Russian aggression. So there's going to have to be something that deters Russian aggression in the future for Ukraine. And the question is, what might that be? Zoe, I want to hear your answer to that question as well. But just to let you all know after that, I'll come to you and the audience. So please have your questions ready. But Zoe, let's hear your perspective on that. The how does this end question? I think the question is how does this end in Russia and how does this end in Ukraine? For Ukraine, as Mick said, I mean, it is existential and there is a broad sense of complete support to keep going as long as necessary. And now what Putin has done is solidified the idea that Ukraine needs to get Crimea back and all of Donbas. And Crimea is really the tricky thing in that equation because of the historic feelings that Russians have about Crimea. It's a holiday town that was long considered to have been a huge mistake to have gifted it to Ukraine in the 50s. And Russians have long, all sorts of Russians, pre-Putin, post-Putin Russians will lay claim to Crimea. So that is a difficult impasse because I can see very little, I don't see a way that Putin or anyone who might replace him can convince Russians that they won this war without laying claim to Crimea. And equally now for Ukraine, it's very difficult to allow Crimea to be annexed. So that is really the impasse for me and I don't know the answer to that question. Internally for Russia, I would say, so Putin is a pragmatist and he is not crazy. He's actually quite, I think he's quite rational in the context that he lives in. He has put out little test balloons over three, almost three decades. He put out a test balloon with Georgia and with Moldova and with Ukraine in 2014. And the message that he got from the West is, oh, it's fine. You can annex Asetia, you can take bits of, you can roll into Georgia under false pretenses, you can level Grozny in Chechnya, we'll just stand by and watch as you commit mass murder. So I think in that context, what Putin has seen is repeatedly he's learned the lesson of like, oh, I can just take whatever I want as long as it's in my sphere of influence. And so I think what now has happened with Ukraine, with 2022-23 Ukraine is this is the first time that the West has really put up a fight. And I think that will recalibrate the way Putin moves forward and recalibrate the way he presents messages to his people about whether he's winning the war. And really, the thing to realize is that Russia has no free press left. There is no free press at all. So the information that most people are getting is from state TV and state newspapers. And that information is 100% controlled by the Kremlin. Even if it looks like there is dissent, it is not real dissent. It is manufactured dissent because Putin learned long ago that you need to give the appearance, the illusion of dissent in order for people to feel like they're being heard. And those people are all controlled by Putin. There is no one who gets on state TV who doesn't get talking points from the Kremlin. I mean, maybe they have their own little perspective or their own little left or right niche, but the bottom line is that these are all Putin loyalists because anyone who wasn't is long gone. And so Putin can essentially spin whatever he wants to, to the people watching at home. And they will just believe black is white and white is black because they have been conditioned to this, not just over the past 24, 25 years of Putin's regime, but for 80 years of the Soviet Union. And before that, that's ours. So there is no real, there is no real freedom. There was this brief moment of like 10 years after the fall of the Soviet Union where people thought that Russia had a bright Western democratic future and now it's gone. So really he can convince people of whatever he wants. I think the main question will be how he convinces them about what happens with Crimea. And I think that is where this sort of stopping the fight kind of thing happens where probably I reckon Ukraine will be able to take back everything except Crimea. And then the question will be what is the status of Crimea? And it will probably be some sort of shadow kind of gray status where people will just lay down arms. But I firmly believe that if Putin pulls back and is allowed to regroup, he will be back because this is a humiliation for him that he will not allow to stand. And there is a Russian, it's like a piece of the soul which has been, Russian exceptionalism put American exceptionalism to shame. And that is wounded by this tiny little country that they consider to be country bumpkin peasants who speak shitty version of Russian with a terrible accent and who aren't even a real people. And the idea that this tiny little chunk was able to slow or stop the march of mother Russia will be very, very difficult to swallow. Well, let me open it up to all of you now. Please raise your hands. There's a microphone on the way. We'll start in the front row here. Andrea, thank you. If I could ask people just to confine themselves to questions rather than statements or speeches. Thank you very much. Thanks, Zoya. I appreciated the energy and the candor of your conversation. My question is what's the official death count in Ukraine? We don't have an official death count. I was looking at this this morning as very difficult. There is no official death count. Quoted an official death count. The last, so there isn't an official death count. The Ukrainians don't say, so they will say, they will say how many civilians have been killed. But again, it's not, it's not particularly up to date or official. They don't say how many people in battle have been killed. So there is no real official death count, but it is thousands of people. So is that, is that because they don't know or because they do know and they think it'll be too damaging to reveal it? It's a range of things, but essentially they don't want it to be used by the Russian. So when, so there was a few months ago, the, I think it was the Americans accidentally, maybe it was a European, accidentally revealed classified information about how many people were dead. And at that point, various people who I spoke to were basically saying, like, we don't want the Russians to use this as propaganda. And we don't people, we don't want people to freak out about how many people are dead. But I mean, it is, it is, I think at that time it was over 100,000 already. And it's, it's more than that now. I think it's, it's all casualties, forgive me. So again, this is another thing. So because people wounded in battle count in casualty numbers, so it was casualties. And I mean, this is a, I mean, this is one for you, Mick, but in actual fact, like the Ukrainians quite like, and the Russians quite like casualties, because if you have a casualty, you have to, you know, treat them and take them off the battlefield, it takes equipment and people to rescue someone and bring them back and so on and so forth. So they count casualties with great glee as well. So it's, it's not clear, but it was casualties rather than deaths. I'm sorry. I mean, it's actually normal for countries to not keep score. Keeping score is a fairly recent innovation normally of the media in wars like this, the Second World War, Australia was not keeping score. It wasn't. Yeah. Yeah. So most countries will not do this for very, very good reasons. It's a more recent innovation and it's generally pretty unhelpful. And the Ukrainians do release daily counts for the Russian side. So maybe this is what was, what was quoted. But again, I would take that with a giant grain of salt. Andrea, the gentleman in the second row. Thank you. Thank you very much. Trevor Rowe from Rothschild. I'd like to welcome our Ukrainian colleague, Sergei here, that's living in Sydney with his family. Two questions, if I may. One of the problems with this war, which is a war of retrition quite clearly, is that we're not able to damage the military production capability of Russia. Whereas we're having problems in the West with supplying ammunition, keeping it up to date. We're not damaging the Russian manufacturing capability at all. My next question is linked to that is the wildcard here to me is China. My friends in China are saying to me, what hypocrisy from the West? You're supplying weapons, why can't we? And at some stage Xi Jinping, he's got a problem. Once he's in the economy that's integrated with the world, he's reluctant to get on the wrong side of the American sanctions. That's going to come to a breaking point, and I can imagine the Klenstein manner they're doing something anyway. So how does China play out in this question, in your view? And then finally, the West hasn't got a good track record. We took out the Taliban 20 years ago and gave it back to them after 20 years. And we weren't great with Iraq, with Qaddafi and these guys. Do you see the West having the sustainability to stay with us? I have three questions. First one on production. I think sanctions are having an impact. They're having to use rat lines to bring in goods to make advanced weapons. Rat lines? Or they're having to sanction bust to bring in materials to make precision weapons, and they're not able to replace them as quickly as they're using them as we are. But if you have a look at Russia's industrial potential compared to the EU, it's minuscule compared to it. And that's what we're seeing. There's a whole lot of stuff going on, I'm sure, in the cyber realm and others that might be having an impact there. Your final question, or your second question about China coming in, at the moment, I'm sure Xi is looking at this every day going, is it worth it? Is it not? Is it worth it? Is it not? I think at the moment, it's not. Just because the economic damage it would cause to his countries, it's emerging out of COVID and lockdowns and everything else. But that doesn't mean that's always going to be the situation. And for China at the moment, they're very comfortable with this war going on. The longer it goes on, the better it is for China. It keeps Europe and the United States focused on Europe instead of in the Indo-Pacific. And China doesn't care about the number of people being killed, unfortunately. But once that calculus changes, we should be worried. Because if Xi is then willing to support Russia, it means he's willing to take on the United States. That's when we've really got to worry. And your third question was, sorry, attrition. I hate this term, war of attrition. All wars are attritional. Like, you're losing stuff every day. Even when you're doing nothing, guys are falling into pits getting hurt. So, attrition is happening. You just once again, sometimes you have more, sometimes you have less. This is just a return to the norms of the 19th and 20th centuries when big countries went to war, who had lots of population, lots of money and lots of industrial capacity. We've just been conditioned over the last 25 years of these tiny worlds that weren't existential. They weren't even called to our security interests. And we thought that was what war is. It's just one example. We're now into another example that is far more expensive, but which we also have a lot of experience with. We just happen to forget that. There was also the question about Western staying power with regard to Iraq and Afghanistan. You could argue that actually those wars represent the opposite point. I mean, 20 years is a long time to stay in a war. But also, I would say to that, there's a very big difference between how Ukrainians feel about this war and how the Afghanis and the Iraqis felt about those wars. And so I think you don't need the West to have that much staying power in this instance, because it's not like they're going to be welcoming the Russians in like, various people have been welcomed to come back in when you've got the retreat of the Western forces. I think that is a really key difference in this instance. I mean, this isn't costing the West a lot. No. No, compared to GDPs and stuff, this is a very, very small proportion of Western GDPs and military expenditures. If you ever look at all the sums, Kiel Institute, I recommend to all of you, this is a very, very tiny expenditure. No Australian is deploying with the military to fight and die in Ukraine. No one, right? So we've sent maybe half a billion dollars worth of equipment, which in the big scheme of things is an expensive cost, possibly. What's great for the economy is when you spend all of your weapons and expend and send them elsewhere and you have to make some more. Great for industry, great for manufacturing. Economists are going to quibble with that argument. Let's go down to the back there, this gentleman. Oh, good day. John Hallam with the People for Nuclear Disarmament and Mika, I'm very much a fan of yours. So my question is to Mika. Assume that the most optimistic scenario from your point of view, probably from mine as well, takes place and that Ukraine manages to push Russian troops out physically to push Russian troops. No negotiations, no nothing, out of Donetsk, Lukhansk and Crimea. Where does that then leave us? Because it seems to me at some point there would have to be a negotiated settlement of some kind and the negotiated settlement at that point might well be that Russia must recognise the changed realities on the ground to repurpose some Russian rhetoric. Second part of my question is, is that a really likely scenario or are we more likely to end up with some ghastly, costly both in money terms but in body count terms, stalemate that's going absolutely nowhere? Firstly, I'd say it's already ghastly if you're in Ukraine and seen whole cities destroyed and all those kind of things. I'd also say there's five Ukrainian provinces that need to be liberated here, Lhansk, Donetsk, Zafarizia, Kherson and Crimea. The southern ones are really important I think. One, they're a centre of Ukrainian industry whether it's steel making, agriculture, mining and those kind of things, it's where the export ports are and don't think this isn't part of Russia strategy to economically strangle Ukraine as a nation. It doesn't want Ukraine to be able to sustain itself with its own economy. So the south is vital for that reason. The south is also important is because that's a necessary precursor before Crimea. Now you need to take them to even be in a position to negotiate over the future of Crimea and if negotiations fail then that's a decision point about what to do next. Could be a military invasion, could be something different. So all five matter but the sequencing is important and finally on negotiation there's a popular phrase out there that every war ends in negotiation. Well that's actually not true. We didn't negotiate with Japan at the end of the Second World War, we just annihilated them and we didn't negotiate with Germany at the end of the Second World War, we annihilated them. We annihilated its political basis for existence as it was as a Nazi country and rebuilt it from the ground up. Now I'm not suggesting that's what Ukraine is going to do to Russia but you know negotiations that do occur at the end of conflicts take different forms and the whole aim of Ukraine in this war has to be to place itself in the very best position to negotiate whatever comes next whether it's taking Ukraine or sorry Crimea having taken Crimea or not but we shouldn't think that every war has a similar kind of end with a similar kind of negotiation it doesn't. They're all male hands up in the air but let me this gentleman in the second row can you if you could wait for the microphone. David Rollins from the Good Party I'd just like to thank the Lowe Institute for staging this event it's great to have you both in Australia and giving us your points of view. Question for you Mick I want to put your uniform back on I'm going to give you two mechanized divisions with Leopard 2 tanks backed by Bradley fighting vehicles and western train troops with all sorts of really great weapons what are you going to do with them you're now fighting in the Ukraine. Oh so it has to be in Ukraine. Oh yes you're now. I was going to take them to Western Queensland as the Prime Minister suggested. I would use them in one place if you could prevent the Russians from fighting and one of the problems is it's hard to concentrate large organizations now because the meshing of civilian and military intelligence networks means you can be found very quickly and one thing that Ukraine has done is closed what I call the detection of destruction time used to be about 10 minutes it's now about 30 seconds to 90 seconds so whenever you see large-scale concentration of troops which would be necessary to penetrate defensive lines it's much easier to to destroy them the Ukrainians have been doing it every day to the Russians it's fantastic whereas for the Russians it's ours going on for death. So the Russians have a slower so it's less likely the Ukrainians in their concentration for the coming offensives are going to be detected and targeted we saw it in Kharkiv the Russians knew they were coming they just weren't able to get their act together to target them. There's a couple of locations you could do this I think both the east and the south are going to be sequenced one way the other it's not either either it's both you know I think the Ukrainians are going to have to get back to Mariupol-Melotopol but that's extraordinarily difficult because you're kind of going to hold open the left and right sides of a penetration while you're doing this that takes a lot of forces I think the Donets sorry the Donbas is going to be a focus for a while just because that's where the Russians are and that's where the Ukrainians can kill the most Russians and at the end of the day that's part of the theory victory they've got to kill as many Russians as possible to convince them they can't win but the south will then be after that I think but you know I don't know I hopefully I'll get to talk to some senior Ukrainian leaders in due course about this but you know the one thing the Ukrainians have mastered in this war is exceeding all our expectations and every time we've gone oh we don't know whether the Ukrainians can do this they're not just done it but done it in a way we've kind of gone oh wow so my approach to this is unlike some who've written the Ukrainians need to fight like more for like the Americans more I think that's rubbish we all need to learn from them how they fight so ask a Ukrainian what he'd do with those two mechanized because I reckon he'd probably come up with a more imaginative creative and hard-heating way of doing it than I probably could well on on that note I just want to tell an anecdote I we recently spoke with this guy 69 year old guy he had a stroke in 2021 when the Russians were rolling in via column into him he had previously is 27th of February he had convinced a few people from the territorial defence league to give him an RPG launcher and some ammo for it and he saw them coming he'd heard from people further up in in in the line of fire essentially that they were on their way he climbed up onto a trailer and he had been going to the front line in Donbass since 2014 helping out on the front line and bringing supplies and he'd had some training 60 I mean a 69 year old guy post stroke he's lying on top of the trailer and he knew because they had told him just wait for a fuel truck to go past they told him how to recognize a fuel truck so he lets a bunch of this column through and he sees the fuel truck and he fires at it and he hits the fuel truck and it's a huge explosion takes out all of the surrounding parts of the column but most importantly blocks the road so that no one else can go forward this is February I mean you can't go off the road because of the the muck the the mud that will keep you there and he calls in the position he runs and the Ukrainians six minutes later seven minutes later take out the entirety of that column and it I mean that's the the epic image I'm sure you all would have seen it because it was doing the rounds everywhere of an entire column on the main street of Irpin taken out and then there's this video this famous video of him walking down and just swearing blue as you can imagine swearing and the video was for his son who was elsewhere on also volunteering on the front line just talking about how he had taken these mfs down and it was I mean that's the that's what the Ukrainians are doing every like for you don't you don't need a column when you've got a 69 year old with an IPG launcher we all dream of that because there's been a standout military leader on the Ukrainian side is there is there a patent I'm a big admirer of Zolozhin I think as a senior military leader he's he balances a few difficult challenges first he has to balance his relationship with the president and the civil authority because in a democracy just remind us of his position so general Zolozhin is the chief commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces soldier a younger one who was appointed over and above many of his more senior generals so he's had to balance his civil military relationship with Zelensky-Reznikov in a whole bunch of others at the same time he has a relationship with his regional commanders Gershky and others who are hard charging competent generals who will be asking him stuff all the time and then he has to balance off things like training throughput to make sure he's getting enough people through the absorption of Western equipment on top of Soviet equipment and the transition to NATO standards I mean he's he's paying whack-a-mole all the time as a strategic military leader and it's extraordinarily difficult oh on top of this the Russians want to kill him so for me he's a standout leader among many many amazing leaders at every level we've got time for a couple more yes please thanks just a quick one but we haven't spoken about nuclear armament and is there a scenario where they're putting would consider seriously deploying that that conversation seems to have declined somewhat yeah I kind of I have enough conversation in my head about this one where I'm Putin asking the generals should I I shouldn't mean the number one question Putin would ask because don't worry about Russian doctrine on nuclear weapons doesn't matter I mean if Putin wants to do it he's not going to go oh can you get me the doctrine on this I just want to check but probably he's not going to do that but the question that he is going to ask is will this change the course of the war in our favour that is the single most important question that he would have to be assured of because he knows what follows he knows that Russia will be a pariah for generations if he does this so Putin would have to be assured that the use of tactical nuclear weapons and it wouldn't be one it would be multiples would work and change the course in the favour of Russia decisively for it to be worth it well for for the course of this war right but am I going to win if I use these things I don't think he could be given that assurance and therefore he's walked back that I would say you know I had a couple of conversations when I was in Kiev with Ukrainian leaders and different people and they said okay well they can use nuclear weapons against us just means more Ukrainians are going to die before we win I mean that's a I mean you think about that I mean it's kind of a horrific response when you think about it but that gets to this idea is we're not going to lose and and the other element of that is that what does that achieve because again I think he is rational I mean it just is a bunch of I come from I am a technically a victim of Chernobyl so I've lost all my hair when I was a child because I was in the fallout zone like there's nothing good that comes from a nuclear explosion if he wants Ukrainian territory that is useless to him so where is he going to use his nukes that will then be left as kind of uninhabitable it's just not a logical thing to do in this in the scenario and I think that's there has been some really interesting very deeply sourced reporting from the Kremlin it's quite astounding that came out from the Financial Times a couple of weeks ago and from that reporting and I know the reporters involved I've worked with Christopher Miller I know Max Seddon the basically Putin kind of looked over the abyss and went you know what this isn't going to get me anywhere and has backed off because all that does is it crosses a very very red line for the West and if we thought the West was helping Ukraine before like I mean just the that removes all sorts of all sorts of political roadblocks all sorts of communications roadblocks for countries where they can just go look he's used nukes like we've just got to give them everything they want yeah they don't will come in I just say to there's more historical precedent for not using them than using them America didn't use them in Vietnam or Korea uh Russia didn't use them in any of its other wars so I think there's a lot of precedent for not using them and that's a really good precedent for Putin to follow plenty of hands up Andrea why don't you start there the third right back hello uh I've got the wrong one but lucky so take my chance um Sergi Lavrov said that um we want to negotiate but uh Zelensky's signed a decree in September saying that he'll only negotiate he will not negotiate with Putin now you know the examples that you gave of annihilating Japan and Germany those countries got annihilated in this situation it's Ukraine sets annihilated effectively I don't know what it's going to cost to rebuild it two trillion three trillion governors so at what point will one say that we have to um and the western leaders are saying that they don't want to tell Ukraine when to negotiate what what do they want at what point will Ukraine and Russia think that this is now a time to have a chat well not right now um I don't even think we're close to negotiating at the moment I mean generally in a war when both sides think they're a chance of winning they're not going to negotiate and I think both sides still think they're a chance of winning now how realistic and rational their calculations are for that is another thing but while both Russia and Ukraine think they have a chance of victory they are not going to want to let any kind of peace negotiations or ceasefire get in the way of that which is why you know this recent Chinese initiative which actually is just their talking points for the last year doesn't even include Russia leaving Ukraine is is pointless I don't think we're anywhere near either side wanting negotiations and we're not anywhere near them being coerced into them by the West or Russia's other partners you want to offer anything final words on that I agree on that point of agreement will I'm afraid although I know there I see there are so many hands up but we will close our session I think you'll agree that was a fascinating and enriching and enlightening way to spend an hour on a on a Wednesday afternoon Thursday afternoon forgive me would you please thank our two guests