--:-- Noelle King: In late September, Vladimir Putin held a big ceremony in the Kremlin. Pompous, or you could say grand if you're being kind, ceremony in a kind of gold-painted reception room watched by the most important people in this government. The foreign minister was there, the head of the spy agencies. And Putin basically says that Kherson is now, it's a Russian city, it's Russia's forever.
--:-- Luke Harding: But anyway, if you go forward, forever turns out to be six weeks. Tonight, euphoria in Kherson, a major Ukrainian city now free from Russian rule. Ukrainians hugging and kissing their soldiers, treating them as heroes, autographing flags.
--:-- Noelle King: On Today Explained, how Ukrainian troops pulled off a decisive win in Kherson and humiliated Vladimir Putin. A rare moment of good news in a war which has caused so much pain. Woo, love Ukraine! Love Ukraine!
--:-- [Sound effects: Music plays]
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--:-- Luke Harding: Didn't know that. While other platforms duct tape tools together, ServiceNow seamlessly unifies people, data, workflows, and AI, connecting every corner of your business. And with AI agents working together autonomously, anyone in any department can focus on the work that matters most.
--:-- Noelle King: I've never met an AI agent. Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people at servicenow.com.
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--:-- Luke Harding: It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King, and you are?
--:-- Luke Harding: My name is Luke Harding. I'm a journalist and foreign correspondent with The Guardian newspaper and a writer of books.
--:-- Noelle King: Describe, Luke, if you would, where Kherson is and what makes it significant in this war.
--:-- Luke Harding: Kherson is a port and a city in the south of Ukraine on the Dnipra River, which is a massive river with many tributaries that runs across the country, basically dividing Ukraine into two halves, east and west. It's a Russian-speaking city, so people there are native Russian speakers. It has a population or had a population of about 300,000 people, perhaps a little shy of that, maybe 280,000 before Vladimir Putin's invasion in February of this year.
--:-- Noelle King: Its significance is it was the first and the only major regional administrative capital which the Russians occupied. It was a jewel. It was a kind of prize. And it was a place that they captured very early on in the first days of invasion.
--:-- Luke Harding: And what happened on November 11th? The Russians executed a massive and humiliating retreat. They basically abandoned territory that they seized early on in the invasion in February. We're talking about a huge swathe of territory on what Ukrainians call the right bank, the western side of the Dnipra River.
--:-- Noelle King: It's a sort of bulge, including about 80 settlements. It's steppe land. It's rustic. We're talking about fields of sunflowers, of villages with gravel roads, schools, cottages, lots of animals, geese, ducks, dogs yapping, pine trees, poplars.
--:-- Luke Harding: And then the city, the sort of administrative heart of Kherson province, which is also called Kherson, on this wide, rather beautiful Dnieper River. And Herzog sits on one side of this. And it's a big, functional, modern, busy city, or at least it was, with an art gallery, with a neoclassical administration building, with a train station.
--:-- Noelle King: All this time we were like in prison. We could walk around the city, but everywhere we saw these Russian troops with weapons. They could just catch you.
--:-- Luke Harding: And this whole area had been occupied by the Russians for eight months, and they packed up. And having talked to people there, it seems that the Russian troops got an order about 5 a.m. local time on Wednesday the 9th of November. And they got into their armored vehicles, they stuffed them full of things that they'd stolen, everything from microwaves to washing machines to ladies' clothes, to whatever they could find.
--:-- Noelle King: And they rolled off back across the Dnipra with some soldiers jogging across a pontoon bridge, others trying to swim over, and some leaving in good order on military vehicles.
--:-- Luke Harding: So it was a huge Russian exodus and I think a turning point in this war.
--:-- Noelle King: How did Russia take this city and this province in the first place?
--:-- Luke Harding: If you sort of cast your mind back to February the 24th to the fear and dread and the horror in America and elsewhere at Putin's invasion. It was a sort of multi-pronged, a multi-vector assault with Russian troops advancing from the north, from Belarus, through the forests surrounding Chernobyl, the nuclear power plant from the east where there'd been a war going on already for eight years over a territory called the Donbass.
--:-- Noelle King: And then in the south, where I had been standing in January, three weeks later, Russian tanks armoured vehicles came rolling over the scenic isthmus, a place of ducks, of high yellow feather reeds across this landscape, and they kept going.
--:-- Luke Harding: And what's interesting is they went all the way through the sort of southern chunk of Hezón province, and they got to a sort of key strategic installation, which is called the Antonovsky or the Antonivsky Bridge, which is about two kilometres long, spans the Dnipra River, and leads directly into Hezón City.
--:-- Noelle King: And by pretty much, I would say, On March the 2nd, 2022, they had seized the city and a key part of southern Ukraine had fallen.
--:-- Luke Harding: Ukrainian officials say the battles continue there and claim Russian forces are looting the city The Russians Vladimir Putin had thought that his troops would be greeted as liberators that people would rush up to them with flowers and hug them and so on.
--:-- Noelle King: And in fact, there was a military fight back by the Ukrainian army, which we saw most spectacularly around Kiev, pushing the Russians back after about a month of fighting.
--:-- Luke Harding: But also in Kherson, we just saw civilians, hundreds of them, perhaps as many as a thousand, gathering in the main square outside the administration building, facing off against the perimeter of Russian machine gunners, of what the Ukrainians call technical vehicles, basically armored vehicles, waving Ukrainian flags, singing patriotic songs, holding banners which said in Ukrainian, Heson is Ukraine, and shouting at these Russians saying, fascists, go home, occupiers, we don't want you here.
--:-- Noelle King: The first time this happened, the Russian soldiers were relatively restrained. They didn't do a huge amount. I think they were completely taken aback by this.
--:-- Luke Harding: But gradually and predictably, they became more and more brutal. And we saw Russian soldiers firing angrily into the air and eventually by week two, hurling smoke grenades and forcibly breaking up demonstrations.
--:-- Noelle King: and the darkest aspect of all this is that we saw really by I would say the third week of March by around March 20th 25th something like that a massive sweep by Russian military police to round up anyone who had a sort of what they regarded as a sort of pro-Ukrainian attitude so we're talking about people who are in the police force council workers people on the upstate payroll journalists intellectuals, museum curators, by kind of mid-spring, people in Hausson were disappearing.
--:-- Luke Harding: They were being tortured. In some places, they were being killed and murdered. And now the city is being liberated. You know, we're piecing together some of those stories and they're horrific.
--:-- Noelle King: How on earth did Russia lose control after having such firm control?
--:-- Luke Harding: Really what happened actually was Joe Biden happened and the U.S. administration and plus other Western partners. of Ukraine, including the UK, by the summer, by, I would say, probably late June, early July, they started supplying Kiev, the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky, with the kind of sophisticated, modern, heavy weaponry that Ukraine would be begging for.
--:-- Noelle King: And so I think the game changer, actually, or the critical enabler is how it's been described to me, was the HIMARS system supplied by America. It's a highly accurate, precision-guided, long-range artillery system where you scoot and shoot.
--:-- Luke Harding: I mean, I've seen them in southern Ukraine. It looks like a kind of rather large green-painted truck, but it's got a pod of six missiles, and they are devastatingly accurate.
--:-- Noelle King: Basically, if you hit a grid in military parlance and military speech with these weapons, it will destroy everything on the grid.
--:-- Luke Harding: And so what the Ukrainians were able to do sort of systematically and clinically from, I would say, about July onwards, was to degrade Russian logistics routes and supply lines.
--:-- Noelle King: And what the Russians realized to their horror was that it was becoming increasingly hard to supply their forward forces in this large, sprawling, rustic, flat obelist.
--:-- Luke Harding: And I think probably by about October, they had decided that it was just not viable to hold this territory on the right bank of the Dnipra River, Kherson and its environs.
--:-- Noelle King: And again, we know that not because they said so, obviously these conversations are secret. We know that because they began stealing everything.
--:-- Luke Harding: And when I say everything, they stole the city archives in Kherson. They stole hundreds, possibly thousands of private cars, TV sets, microwaves. They went to Hezon Zoo. And I kid you not, they stole the llamas, the donkeys, the wolves, and, and, and, and, and, and, not to forget, they stole the raccoon.
--:-- Noelle King: They stole the zoo's raccoon, bundled it in a sack, and shipped it all off to Crimea.
--:-- Luke Harding: And so it was kind of clear that they were preparing an evacuation. So when they did leave, it wasn't a surprise.
--:-- Noelle King: But at the same time, this was a deeply, deeply humiliating moment for Vladimir Putin.
--:-- Luke Harding: What does Vladimir Putin do? Of course, this was embarrassing. And Putin is a strong man, someone who you've seen him, you've seen the images, who scuba dives, who fishes bare-chested in Siberian rivers, who is an action man, does judo, etc.
--:-- Noelle King: And his troops were running away. Or as one Kherson villager put it to me, they left our village like goats.
--:-- Luke Harding: He said, like goats. He described them as goats running away.
--:-- Noelle King: And so, of course, how does Putin respond? Putin responds by doing what he's done several times this autumn, which is to blitz Ukraine with deadly long-range missiles fired from Russia itself.
--:-- Luke Harding: Tonight, Ukrainians reeling from a relentless Russian missile barrage. The strikes targeting critical civilian infrastructure across the country, from Kiev to Kharkiv to Zaporizhia.
--:-- Noelle King: In the capital city, 350,000 homes left without electricity, while 80% of residents lost drinking water.
--:-- Luke Harding: Putin is really in the most cynical way. He can't win on the battlefield. He's now trying to break morale among civilians and to hope that he can win that way instead.
--:-- Noelle King: All right, so Vladimir Putin is one side of the equation and the other side of the equation is Volodymyr Zelensky. How does he respond to Ukraine retaking, Herson?
--:-- Luke Harding: One of my colleagues describes Zelensky as Churchill with an iPhone.
--:-- Noelle King: And what Churchill with an iPhone has been doing has been recording these messages, both for a domestic audience and for the wider world, for Americans, for Brits, for whoever.
--:-- Luke Harding: We're ready for peace, but our peace for our country is all our country, all our territory. That's why we are fighting against Russian aggression.
--:-- Noelle King: He was quite careful when Kherson was retaken. I mean, there was nothing triumphalist about it.
--:-- Luke Harding: He said it was, you know, it was a great victory, but also urged people living there to be very careful of minds, to watch out for Russian soldiers or saboteurs who may have stayed behind to cause trouble.
--:-- Noelle King: Three days after the city was liberated, he came for himself. I mean, that didn't surprise me.
--:-- Luke Harding: He turned up to Kherson. I mean, he's a kind of genuine action man in the way that Vladimir Putin is a kind of fake action man
--:-- Noelle King: And there was a very moving ceremony outside the administration building where people had been dancing celebrating embracing soldiers smoking, singing sort of slogans.
--:-- Luke Harding: And a pretty serious-looking Zelensky stood there wearing kind of olive green jacket, fleece jacket, and he watched the Ukrainian flag being raised, and he saluted.
--:-- Noelle King: I mean, he described it as not the end of the war, Again, channeling Churchill here.
--:-- Luke Harding: This is the beginning of the end of the war. It's a bit, but it's a long way, this war to the best heroes of our country.
--:-- Noelle King: Ah, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.
--:-- Luke Harding: Ukraine has now recaptured more than 50% of the territory it's lost since February 24.
--:-- Noelle King: I mean, the Russian military is still there. It's still formidable. Putin still thinks, against all evidence, he can win this war.
--:-- Luke Harding: And it's not letting up. But I think the shape of a Ukrainian victory, while we're not there yet, is sort of shimmering to view. It's becoming a possibility. tantalizing possibility.
--:-- Noelle King: Support for Today Explained comes from Built Rewards.
--:-- Luke Harding: These days, it seems like everybody has a rewards program. You swipe your card and you get one cent on the hundred dollars. But with your rent, frequently, you just pay month after month. You never get anything from it other than that roof over your head.
--:-- Noelle King: Not anymore, says Built Rewards. Built Rewards says it lets you earn points on your rent. By paying rent through Bilt, they say you can earn flexible points that can be redeemed toward hundreds of hotels and airlines, perhaps a future rent payment, your next Lyft ride, and so much more.
--:-- Luke Harding: Your home isn't just where you sleep. It's your community. And Bilt wants you to go out and do things in the community. You can eat at your favorite local restaurants, then earn more points. You can get VIP treatment at certain fitness studios. You can enjoy exclusive experiences just for Bilt members every month.
--:-- Noelle King: When you're ready to travel, they say Bilt points can be converted to miles or hotel points all around the world.
--:-- Luke Harding: You can earn points on rent and around your neighborhood wherever you call home by joining Bilt.com slash Explained.
--:-- Noelle King: That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash Explained.
--:-- Luke Harding: Support for this show comes from Macy's.
--:-- Noelle King: It's almost fall, and that means it's time to cycle your wardrobe to the cold setting. because while everyone loves a breezy summer outfit, let's be real, layering is even more fun.
--:-- Luke Harding: That's why Macy's Fall Fashion Guide has everything you need to piece together the perfect look for you. It's your one-stop shop for fall's latest trends and must-haves curated by their experts.
--:-- Noelle King: Add a statement shoe to your collection like the calf hair loafers from Steve Madden or tap into your romantic side with flowy dresses from Cece and sheer pieces from INC.
--:-- Luke Harding: You can even throw in some textural layers for contrast. like a faux fur bomber jacket from Karl Lagerfeld Paris.
--:-- Noelle King: Whether your old favorite sweater or coat is on its last threads, or you're just craving a new vibe to switch things up, Macy's has got you covered this season.
--:-- Luke Harding: Find the perfect layering pieces for you by exploring the Macy's Fall Fashion Style Guide. Shop in-store or online at macy's.com.
--:-- Noelle King: It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King.
--:-- Luke Harding: Luke Harding of The Guardian.
--:-- Noelle King: President Volodymyr Zelensky has called on Ukrainians to fight through the winter. And many military analysts were very surprised by Zelensky making that call. Why is it so surprising?
--:-- Luke Harding: I'm not sure I actually agree with the military analysts. I don't think it's surprising. I think it's inevitable.
--:-- Noelle King: I mean, the logic from Zelensky's point of view and from that of his sort of chief general, Valeriy Zeluzhny, is that when your enemy is on the run, you don't give up and give in time to regroup and consolidate, you keep going.
--:-- Luke Harding: And so we don't know where the Ukrainians will push next. Ukrainian soldiers were given a hero's welcome as the crowd chanted for the military.
--:-- Noelle King: Certainly when I was there, it felt like war. It didn't feel like peace.
--:-- Luke Harding: I mean, it's easy to see these pictures of jubilant crowds and Kherson and think, oh, it's all over. No, I mean, I was hearing the boom, boom, boom from Ukrainian artillery and also the whoosh, whoosh of outgoing grad missiles, which were sort of blitzing over the Dnepra to Russian military positions on the other side and some incoming missiles as well.
--:-- Noelle King: The winter will not deter Ukrainian forces.
--:-- Luke Harding: And just one other thing you have to understand is that people support them. There was no support for Putin's project in Hezon. Everybody hated the Russians.
--:-- Noelle King: And so I think with the support of the local population, which is overwhelming, you can kind of mitigate some of the issues thrown out by the fact that it's cold, dark, and a bit miserable.
--:-- Luke Harding: Do Ukrainians have what they need to fight through the winter?
--:-- Noelle King: I've seen lots of Ukrainian soldiers. Actually, I mean, I was in their frontline trenches around about the 7th and the 8th of November.
--:-- Luke Harding: I was having a little chat with a soldier from Lviv called Sergei. He showed me his lunch. He had pasties. He was drinking grape juice.
--:-- Noelle King: They were cooking for themselves in this kind of underground kitchen. They had a gas canister. Soup.
--:-- Luke Harding: Here you are, please. It's almost like a city in the forest for these guys. They've got the places to eat and kilometres of trenches.
--:-- Noelle King: And I looked at their sleeping quarters. I mean, even in the trenches, they're relatively snug. They have a generator to charge their mobile phones.
--:-- Luke Harding: It's not ideal. Of course not. It's tough, but it's doable.
--:-- Noelle King: I think the big concern the strategic concern from the Ukrainian side is that this extraordinary anti coalition led by America led by the Biden administration might get fatigued
--:-- Luke Harding: There may be political pressures Everyone knows inflation is up that economies are in poor shape, that governments generally all over the place are pretty unpopular at the moment.
--:-- Noelle King: They're worried about whether the West will stay the course.
--:-- Luke Harding: Now, for now, especially in the light of the midterms and the unexpectedly good showing by the Democrats, I think those fears are assuaged.
--:-- Noelle King: But what the Ukrainians want, what they say they want, is weapons, weapons, weapons still.
--:-- Luke Harding: They're burning through artillery at a tremendous rate.
--:-- Noelle King: And what about the Russians? Do they have what they need?
--:-- Luke Harding: They were in total disarray last winter.
--:-- Noelle King: I mean, we can expect more disarray from the Russian troops.
--:-- Luke Harding: I mean, there have been lots of videos of newly mobilized guys, sometimes literally kind of scooped up in provincial Russian towns and villages, being sent to the front after two weeks' training, if you can call it that.
--:-- Noelle King: We were officially told that there would be no training before being sent to the combat zone, this recruit says. We had no shooting, no tactical training, no theoretical training, nothing.
--:-- Luke Harding: Given inadequate clothing, nothing to eat, weapons that are old or don't work, and being flung into battle against pretty experienced, pretty ruthless, now very effective Ukrainian army.
--:-- Noelle King: And of course what we're seeing is we're seeing huge casualties. A lot of Russians are being killed. A lot of newly mobilized troops are being killed as well.
--:-- Luke Harding: But I don't think this makes any difference because the point is that the Ukraine is a democracy, right? It has a sort of civil society. It has a journalist like me, you know, all from the New York Times, the Washington Post. We can wander around and do pretty much what we want.
--:-- Noelle King: Whereas Russia really is, it's not only an autocracy. I mean, it's increasingly totalitarian. I mean, it's close to being a full-blown totalitarian state where, you know, Putin doesn't care if 50,000 people are killed, 100,000 people are killed, 200,000 people are killed.
--:-- Luke Harding: And what's happened is we've had this mass mobilization with so far, I think, as many as 80,000, but probably over the next few months, it's going to be about 200,000 new troops sent to the front line of the war in Ukraine.
--:-- Noelle King: And Putin's calculation appears to be that these troops will turn things around, help stabilize the line, prevent Ukrainians from taking further territory, and also prepare for the spring when Russia will try and go forward again.
--:-- Luke Harding: That's the plan. But I think actually the reality is that these mobilized troops, a lot of them don't want to fight. They certainly don't want to die.
--:-- Noelle King: And I'm not actually sure if they make the difference the Kremlin thinks they will make.
--:-- Luke Harding: And so if Kherson really is a sea change and Russia appears to be on its back foot, what's Ukraine's strategy at this point?
--:-- Noelle King: Well, I mean, Zelensky has been very clear that he wants to liberate all Ukrainian territory. All of it means not just the land that's been lost since February the 24th, since Putin's invasion, but Crimea, which Russia stole in 2014, and Hans Kondonetsk, which had been run by pro-Russian separatist proxies for eight years as well.
--:-- Luke Harding: So he wants to completely evict the Russians and to restore his nation's borders as they were when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
--:-- Noelle King: And by the way, when an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians voted for independence from Russia.
--:-- Luke Harding: Now, there may come a kind of inflection point or a sort of decision point or a dilemma, you could call it, if and when the Ukrainians seize more territory in the south, whether they, at that point, they keep going to try and take back Crimea.
--:-- Noelle King: Because that will be harder.
--:-- Luke Harding: I mean, in Khezon, 99% of the population were against Russia. In Crimea, it's tricky because there's definitely a genuine sort of pro-Russian population there, if only because the pro-Ukrainian sort of Crimeans left, were forced out or have been arrested, deported, intimidated and tortured and so on.
--:-- Noelle King: But essentially, Zelensky has said that he will not negotiate with this Russian president, in other words, Putin.
--:-- Luke Harding: Putin lies all the time, he cheats all the time. and they think that if there's a bad deal, that Putin will just use a window, let's say, to rebuild his army and to attack Kiev again.
--:-- Luke Harding: Okay, do the flip side. What's Russia's military strategy now?
--:-- Noelle King: If I can be crude, it's fuck-you-ism.
--:-- Luke Harding: Essentially, Russia's not been able to prevail. It wanted to take Kiev and install a pro-Russian puppet administration. That plan failed, fell apart in the spring, and the Russians retreated.
--:-- Noelle King: It wanted to take Kharkiv, which is a big Russian-speaking city, very close to the border and to the Russian city of Belgorod.
--:-- Luke Harding: That didn't happen either. That whole area has just been liberated by Ukrainians.
--:-- Noelle King: And it wanted to build a kind of new imperium around the south and the Black Sea with Kherson, this port city, historical city, as a kind of key fulcrum.
--:-- Luke Harding: That didn't work either. And so what Putin is doing, fuck-you-istically, is just destroying as much as he can.
--:-- Noelle King: The truth is Moscow's forces built nothing and destroyed much.
--:-- Luke Harding: This is the TV tower which they blew up as they left, cutting telephone services and the internet.
--:-- Noelle King: There were missile strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure to make everything dark and to switch off electricity.
--:-- Luke Harding: But also what I've seen, what I've seen with my own eyes, is Russians, for example, leaving villages in the south in Kherson province.
--:-- Noelle King: And before they go, I was in a village called Mielova on the 11th of November. They blew up the school.
--:-- Luke Harding: It's a village of 1,000 people, 300 stayed during the operation. They blew up the school and they blew up the nursery where they'd been living.
--:-- Noelle King: And they blew up the TV tower.
--:-- Luke Harding: So these villages, they didn't have everything, but they had pretty reasonable lives. Have no school. They've got no heating. They've got no electricity. They've got no water. They've got no gas.
--:-- Noelle King: They've gone back 30 years, as one of them put it to me.
--:-- Luke Harding: It's not just sort of killing people, rubbing them out physically. It's rubbleizing Ukraine, turning it into a wasteland.
--:-- Noelle King: And its vindictiveness, there's something sociopathic about it.
--:-- Luke Harding: But at the moment, this appears to be current Russian military strategy.
--:-- Noelle King: Luke Harding of The Guardian. His book, out November 29th, is called Invasion. It's about the war.
--:-- [Sound effects: Music plays]
--:-- Noelle King: Today's show was produced by Victoria Chamberlain and Halima Shah.
--:-- Luke Harding: It was edited by Matthew Collette.
--:-- Noelle King: Fact-checking was a team effort led by Laura Bullard.
--:-- Luke Harding: And engineering by Afim Shapiro.
--:-- Noelle King: I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.
