He our own Chelsea Daniels and This is the Front Page, a daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald. It's been three years since Russia invaded Eastern Ukraine, a dramatic escalation in the conflict between the two countries that has been raging for over a decade, and for three years Ukraine has fought hard to defend itself. Over twelve thousand civilians are believed to have died a similar number captured or detained, while estimates on the military deaths range from
tens to hundreds of thousands. During this war, most of the Western world has sided with Ukraine and supported the country financially and with tanks and missiles, but that could soon change, with US President Donald Trump arranging peace talks
with Russia without Ukraine's involvement. New Zealand freelance journalist Tom March has been in Ukraine for much of the last three years, and he returns to the Front Page today from Kiev to discuss the state of the invasion as a potential end to the conflict approaches, Tom, can you give us a lay of the land. How much has actually changed in terms of control of land in recent months?
The answer is not a huge amount. There have been a bit of control. It's worth going back to that August last year because that's when Ukraine actually took its first major chunk of territory in a long time. When it captured it was around a thousand square kilometers in Russia's Cursed Oblast in a sort of a surprise lightning offensive. Since then, the Russians have managed to take back maybe just over half of that, and they have also managed to take a little bit of territory in Ukraine's Don
bas Rea. So they captured a few major towns Karakhove, Velikanovasilka, Selindov. Those names might not mean much to your listeners, but they're basically medium sized towns of ten to twenty thousand people at least before the war, and some of them are being quite important Ukrainian defense of strongholds. But they haven't yet captured pert Krovsk, which is a rather large sized Ukrainian city in the south of the Dnetzk region
that has been their main target for a while. And if you zoom out, it's really they've only captured about half of one percent of Ukrainian territory in that time. Period. So while it's not a good trajectory, it's very very far from them looking like they're going to capture the whole country anytime soon.
I think I have the power to end this war, and I think it's going very well. But today I heard, oh, we weren't invaded. Well, you've been there for three years. You should have ended it three years. You should have never started, and you could have made a deal.
Leading to an unprecedented response from President Zelensky, who accused Donald Trump of living in a bubble. It is unfortunate the President Trump, and with great respect for him as the leader of the American people who constantly support us, unfortunately lives in this disinformation space.
Right.
I guess the big change in recent weeks and in months that there's been some big diplomatic shifts. Donald Trump held phone calls with Vladimir Puden and Zelensky and has decided to initiate peace talks with Russia, but not with Ukraine. Trump's now calling Zelensky a dictator, saying he's done a terrible job and could have made a deal earlier. How do Ukrainians feel about this?
Well, the irony is that this has actually made Zolensky quite a lot more popular to just dismiss the dictator allegations. Nobody in Ukraine who's really calling Zelensky a dictator. There are certainly people who disagree with him politically. There are also military leaders who've criticized his strategic policies on the battlefield, and there are some definitely, particularly in the area of military strategy, where Zelenski can be quite roundly criticized for
his decisions over the last several years. But there's no massive clamor in Ukraine for elections, and rather, actually this is giving Zelensky quite a big boost of support in Ukraine. I think one poll showed his poll numbers had gone up by about ten percent literally overnight since Trump made that comment, Because it's not like Ukrainians are opposed to having new elections. They're opposed to having new elections on the timetable of the US and Russia, who now look
like they're gaining up against Ukraine. And in some ways it's also made Ukrainians sort of feel like even more like they're resisting a great enemy. They're not just resisting Russia, They're resisting both the pressure of Russia and the US. At the same time.
Well, Ukraine's also been under martial law since Russia invaded in February twenty twenty two, and you don't have elections under marshal law, right.
Well, yes, that's according to the Ukrainian constitution. And the thing is, though there are different historical precedents. You can argue the US had elections during the Civil War, Britain and most European countries didn't have elections during the Second
World War. However, to hold an election a few years late after a period of martial war when the country is an a real you know, getting hit by rockets every day, Like imagine trying to imagine if Australia was bombing New Zealand every day and you were trying to set up polling stations in schools, how popular do you think that would be? What would people be saying? It
would be considered a total joke. And so I think what people in Ukraine are really angry at is that the US and Russia trying to use that as a widge to ouse the president for who, whatever his flaws, has been democratically elected. And I will say Ukraine does have many problems with issues about the rule of law and issues with corruption. However, Ukraine has had six peaceful democratic transfers of power since independence. Russia has had the same leader for twenty five years.
This is something that should have never happened, would have never happened. And I used to discuss it with Putin. President Putin and I would talk about Ukraine and it was the apple of Isaya, I will tell you that. But he never there was never a chance of him going in. And I told him you better not go in, don't go in, don't go in. And he understood that, he understood it fully. But I'm only interested. I want to see if I can save maybe millions of lives.
This could even end up in a World War three. I'm mean to be honest with you. You've been hearing now Europe to say, well, I think we're going to go in, and we're going to go all of a sudden, you could end up in World War three.
Well, there are reports that the US now wants half of Ukraine's critical mineral deposits to quote payback the US billions spent fighting Russia. What are these critical minerals? And is this idea even realistic?
So I am I'm certainly not a geologist, so I hope any geologists listening don't tear me to pieces. But as I understand, Ukraine has quite large reserves of I believe lithium, cobalt, I believe a silica that are very deep beneath its sort of steps, particularly in the east. It also has a bit of gold, and it has
quite a lot of coal as well. But Ukraine has never really been in a position to be able to extract all of these, and so originally Zelenski and Trump seemed to be talking about a partnership whereby the US would provide support and help Ukraine to extract these minerals. The US would get the effectively right to verse refusal to buy them, and then would use them effectively to both pay back the money that Ukraine had taken for them for its military defense and also to help with
the reconstruction of Ukraine. So on the face of it, it didn't seem like that terrible an idea when people were first talking about it, particularly when Zelensky met Trump I believe it was November of last year. However, it turned out that Zelensky had basically been given a fake a company be like give US all the stuff and basically not really being given anything in return, not being
given US security guarantees. I remember I was in the room with Zelensky when he was asked this question, and he just said, it just wasn't in our sovereign national interest. It wasn't you know, what we want to what we need.
It doesn't help secure the future of our country. And honestly, I think that's why Trump is so mad, because he's kind of used to having in the US sort of putting all his opponents under his thumb, and now there's one person who's coming out with him, you know, from a small, poor, corrupt country all the way across the rest of the world, is one of the only people who's actually willing to stand up and say, no, that's not in me or my country's national interests, and I'm
not going to accept that. I think that's just driving Donald Trump crazy.
French President Emmanuel mccran hosted European leaders for an emergency summit after they too felt cut out of those peace talks.
How are leaders across.
Europe reacting to the dramatic change in the US's approach to Ukraine.
They're not reacting particularly well. They've been shocked, right, And you know, there was one incident where the chairman of the Munich Security Conference was caught on cam in tears following Vice President J. D Vance's speech. Now, some people are saying that that was a clip slightly out of context, but.
What it really did was sort of it's sort of regardless of how strictly it sticks to the timeline of who said what, when, it sort of captured the overall mood that the Europeans.
Were shocked and appalled. And you know, the security blanket that they'd taken from for granted from the US basically since the late nineteen forties had suddenly been ripped from under them. And at least I felt that this was rather silly of them, because they've had a lot of warnings.
I remember I was at a conference in Prague about three months ago and the President of the Czech Republic gave the keynote speech in which he said something along the lines of, look, Donald Trump was the wrong messenger, but he did have a message we should have listened to, which is that Europe cannot rely on the United States
for its security indefinitely. And they had a warning. This is what Peter Pava, the chef President, said there was a warning between twenty seventeen to twenty twenty one that America, even if it wasn't Donald Trump, would probably end up electing a leader who was not going to see European security as worth investing it. And we've got to do it ourselves. And then another warning came, surely the biggest one of all should have said, the Clatson's absolutely firing
red lights everywhere. That was when Russia escalated its invasion of Ukraine in February twenty twenty two. And yet still they didn't take it seriously. Still, they didn't start massively ramping up production facilities. Still they decided to have the endless, interminable debates over how to drip feed weapons to Ukraine in what announts and at what time periods, and where they were allowed to use them on what square kilometer
of the battlefield. That rubbish. And now they're sort of looking very scared and helpless because they don't really know what to do because none of those countries have invested in their arms. And honestly, there's only really one country in Europe left with a powerful, modern armed forces, and that is Ukraine.
Well, uk PM Kiir Stamer's suggested he's prepared to put troops on the ground.
Is that really likely?
Wouldn't that kickstart a wider kind of NATO conflict, one potentially without the US's backing.
Oh yeah, So this is the worry, right, So what we're trying to talk about now is that one thing is and look, it seems like the peace talks have kind of maybe even broken down before they started, after what Trump's been saying over the last few days. However, one of the ideas that was coming through is Ukraine was basically saying, Okay, look, we're willing to potentially sign up to a ceasefire to ORG recapturing the occupied territories.
But what's most important to us is that we get a guarantee that this is not going to happen again, because the problem is, in nineteen ninety four they signed the Budapest Memorandum where they gave up nuclear weapons. Now, just to be clear, there's a big debate over whether Ukraine could have actually had a functioning nuclear deterrent in the nineteen nineties, but regardless, the piece of paper that
was signed was to respect Ukraine's international borders. Then in twenty fourteen they effectively conceded the loss of Crimea without a fight, you know, and were forced to fight that sort of Russian insurgency in the in the eastern Donbass region. And then remember that Crimea, so they conceded without a fight in twenty fourteen, was then used as effectively one big military base to invade the rest of southern Ukraine.
So they are just worried that the Russians will take any cease fire as a chance to re arm, regroup and come back and do this again in five or teen or twenty five years now. The ideal guarantee of Ukraine's security, their leaders believe, would be NATO membership, But even before Trump was elected, most people in diplomatic circles were saying, we're not willing to sign up to that. So what people are looking for instead is alternative potential
security guarantees. One of those would be to have a European peacekeeping force along the line of contact with Russia, so we're talking along that it's about nine hundred mile long front line. The idea would be that that would be demilitarized, that everybody would move their heavy weapons back that they'd be like a demilitarized zone of say, you know, a little bit like there is between North and South Korea, or like there was between North and South Vietnam.
If Ukraine is ultimately left out of some of the major negotiations and does not agree to any potential deal, what could.
It mean for the future of that country.
Yeah, I mean they always have the final scene, right, I mean, that's definitely the privilege that they have, and they should have and they should be involved in this and at every stage. But I think that one of the leverage points here would be what kind of support are they getting to the United States? That seems to be the leverage the same thing of what is being done to Russia.
Were they given to get out of this?
You know, they have huge inflation, they have a lot of sanctions against them, so there's probably some carrots there. And then again, Ukraine would be depending on the United States greatly, And this is where a lot of the talks right now about Europe and NATO being able to support them directly. That's where I think we're coming to you at this point.
Now, you've met with Zelensky recently, Hey, what did you guys discuss so.
I got very lucky. I was cool to a small, quite intimate meeting of journalists and here it was a couple of journalists and we were in Munich in the Bairishahoff Hotel, and I actually got a chance to say to him, Look, a lot of people in New Zealand and this is honestly true, and we both know it, have sort of switched off from this. They think it's very sad, but that it's sort of a far away conflict with which we can't do anything about, and that
honestly doesn't really concern us. And it's not just how people in New Zealand feel, it's how people in Australia feel, or maybe in Canada to feel. However, and I put that question to him and I said, look, we're a small country, very far away the Lenscape. You just broke and he said, he said, yeah, you should be very very happy you are so far away from Russia. In the room sort of just burst out laughing. I'm from New Zealand. We're a very small country, we're very far away and a lot.
Of people you're very happy that you're.
But then he turned on on a more serious note. Look, this war is not really confined to Ukraine anymore. First, the first other nation to join the war has been North Korea, and North Korea getting a lot of missiles, They've been getting a lot of drones, and in modern warfare, these drones have ranges of thousands and thousands of kilometers and this can be used to affect the security of the Asia Pacific region, which is very relevant to New
Zealand and Australia's security interests. He then goes on to say that there was a you know, there's a possibility of a wider regional conflagration with he just sad other conflicts in the region, and I understand that he was referring to China and Taiwan, but he did. I don't think he wanted to say China out loud because Ukraine does see China as a potential partner that could put pressure on Russia to de escalate its war aims.
And like you said, we are far away. What can the New Zealand government do at this point. Should we be involving ourselves in the diplomatic side of things or is aid the best tool at the moment.
So I was actually contacted a while ago by a representative of Ukrainian government with precisely this in mind, and he said something which was basically, look, you know, New Zealand has a reputation for being a peaceful country, that New Zealand's contribution to peace talks would actually be encouraged. She wanted me to encourage New Zealand politicians to attend the Swiss peace conference that was held without huge amounts
of success a couple of months ago. So there is that, and then it's always worth noting the most important contribution that New Zealand has made to Ukraine's security, which is the New Zealand troops that have been training Ukrainian forces in the UK. They've gotten very good reviews and they've done a very important job. So I think continuing or even escalating to that support to that training mission is
a very important way to do it. It's also low cost not putting New Zealand soldiers in Kalm's way, and from my experience talking to the soldiers there, they were saying it was one of the most rewarding things they'd ever done in their life. So I think that New Zealand training mission is always really important to keep in mind. Thanks for joining us, Tom, No worry, It's always a pleasure.
That's it for this episode of the Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at enzdherld dot co dot nz. The Front Page is produced by Ethan.
Sills and Richard Martin, who.
Is also a sound engineer. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to The Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in on Monday for another look behind the headlines.