An update from Ukraine with a former Minnesotan

[MUSIC PLAYING] CATHY WURZER: One of our top stories, the war in Ukraine has entered a new phase with a counteroffensive trying to push Russian troops out of the territory they've held for more than a year. MPR reporter Tim Nelson has been following developments in the fighting with his former St. Paul Pioneer Press colleague Brian Bonner. Brian's a longtime Ukraine watcher. He lives there and was the former editor of the Kyiv Post, Ukraine's premier English language newspaper. Brian's been working most recently with a Polish NGO, which has published extensive analysis of the situation in Europe. Tim spoke with Brian earlier this morning.

TIM NELSON: Brian and I worked together for nearly a decade in Saint Paul, and I've talked with him regularly on Minnesota Now about the war. Brian, welcome back to Minnesota Now.

BRIAN BONNER: Oh, it's great to be here. Happy Juneteenth holiday.

TIM NELSON: Thanks so much. So I want to start first, with how you're doing. Since Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy acknowledged the counteroffensive is underway, we've been hearing a lot about additional missile and drone attacks on Kyiv. That's where you live. What's it been like? How does it compare to earlier phases of the war?

BRIAN BONNER: May was terrible. We were up every night, almost every night, with missile attacks, drone attacks, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, missiles from air, land, sea. Russia was testing the air defenses. The air defenses help up. We feel really great about that. People in Kyiv feel much more secure. Unfortunately, the entire country is not as well covered as is the capital in air defenses. And so Russia looks like this month has shifted to bombing civilian areas around the country with greater success. Killing people every day. Last night, nine oblasts, nine states, were attacked. And these are just the civilian areas. This is apart from the war front.

TIM NELSON: We've been seeing some reports this weekend of attacks on the other side, on Russian ammunition supplies actually across the border. We've seen the video of the drone hitting the Kremlin last month. But Ukraine's been very mum about what's going on, particularly on the battlefield. Is there a daily sense of something different there of a corner being turned?

BRIAN BONNER: Oh, yeah. Well, there's an official, what they call, informational blockade, but you can piece together things from what's happening. Obviously, there's a great saboteur network, not great enough, but a good saboteur infiltrator network working in Russia. Ukraine denies official involvement, but they're helping. Russians are probably working on the inside who are against the war, doing their destruction. And well, people working inside the Russian-occupied areas for Ukraine.

It goes the other way, too. They arrested a spy for Russia who worked for the Ukrainian state railway who was going to blow up a key railway junction, allegedly, to slow down the counteroffensives. So that game is going on. I think the goal, and I don't know if they've achieved it, is to rattle Russians to the extent that they have to redeploy some of their military force inside Russia and away from the front lines in Ukraine.

TIM NELSON: So we've also been reading a lot about this dam disaster. I saw the death toll has risen to nearly 30 over the weekend. Health officials are worrying about dysentery, other waterborne diseases in the wake of this dam's destruction. It's hard to know how big this is. We've got a lot of rivers here in the US. Can you give me a sense of the extent of this, and if the water is receding yet, and what's next there?

BRIAN BONNER: Well, the death toll is up to 52. This is an amazing scale. I mean, you are a veteran of the Grand Forks flood. This is like exponentially that much greater. I've heard comparisons, the Kakhovka reservoir was as big as Great Salt Lake. That flooded a huge section of Southeast Ukraine, including a million acres of agricultural land that depended on the reservoir for irrigation. We still don't know the entire death toll.

We're talking tens of thousands of houses. We're talking dozens of settlements and villages.

On the Ukrainian side, much more is known because Ukrainians are mounting a rescue attempt even though Russia is shelling them-- has been shelling them. On the Russian side, they've denied international aid. So that's a bit of a black hole.

But as you know, floodwaters go down. They are receding. But being washed into the Black Sea is just an environmental disaster, every chemical, sewage, cemeteries, buildings, and materials. The Black Sea is closed. I don't know when it's going to open. All the mines that the Russians were using to mine the land with landmines to block Ukrainian forces, they were shaken loose. They're going into the sea and those mines come back to shore.

It's a very, very dangerous place. Ecosystems have been destroyed. Animals, I mean, aside from the people. It's just really, really, really a disaster. We're talking a multi-billion dollar disaster. Ukrainians are shocked that the world kind of shrugs at it. I mean, I think Ukrainians right now are pretty over-traumatized and have more than they can handle.

So it's one more thing, but it might not be the worst thing. Because remember that Russia still controls Europe's largest nuclear power plant-- Zaporizhzia nuclear power plant-- and have mined it inside, according to Ukraine. The Kakhovka dam explosion was predicted by President Zelenskyy. In October, he said the Russians are going to blow up this dam. It happened. And I don't put anything past Vladimir Putin in terms of his willingness or ability to create a nuclear disaster through the nuclear power plant. So we're living in a very dangerous times.

And by the way, the reservoir that's now been depleted provided cooling water to the nuclear power plant, but I'm told that they have emergency supplies. But also, it provided drinking water to more than 100,000 Ukrainians. So every day, bit by bit, it gets clearer in sense of the damage that's done.

TIM NELSON: You talked a little bit about the impact of this on regular folks. I think a lot about just sort of making a living there. Obviously, some agricultural exports are getting out. But how are regular people fairing? I mean, are they working? Is the rest of the economy functioning? Are kids going to school? All this war has dragged on and on and on. How do they keep body and soul together?

BRIAN BONNER: The economy is devastated. I mean, we lost a third of our economy, which was not that big in the beginning. In the capital, you get a little bit of a bubble because certain sectors work well. Ag is working. Tech is working. But up to 7 million people might still be living abroad because they find it too dangerous or they can't find jobs here. And Ukraine is never going to have economic recovery until it recovers all of its land, particularly Crimea.

Russia, remember, is only allowing out a fraction of the agricultural exports that Ukraine depends on. It is one of the world's largest food producers. They have blockaded. It's high seas piracy. They've closed off most access to the Black Sea, Azov Sea. Ukraine used to be a two sea country. Now, it's a no sea country. Ukraine is being held afloat by international aid. That can't go on forever. The bills are being paid through tens of billions of dollars of assistance from the US, Europe, individual countries, international organizations. More than half of Ukraine's budget goes to the defense, obviously. Ukraine now spends $44 billion on defense, making it the 11th largest defense budget in the world. It has a very strong army now, but again, a lot of that is Western funded. So this counter-offensive really, really needs to succeed.

TIM NELSON: So you've talked a little bit about sort of the public side of this, but I'm also curious about the private side. I've seen all these pictures of these homes damaged and destroyed. Vehicles wrecked. Stories of random deaths from drone and missile attacks. How are people building and recovering? I mean, do they have any savings? Obviously, insurance doesn't cover acts of war. Does international aid help folks with these houses and their vehicles and putting their lives back together?

BRIAN BONNER: It's happening, but it's happening on a micro-level, case by case, piece by piece. You have a lot of different aid efforts, but there's no coordination. That's happening on the international level. But generally, no, people don't have savings here. They don't have insurance. Nobody will insure anybody here. I mean, the premiums would be outrageous.

So if you lose your house, you lose it. You hope that somewhere down the line, the Russians are going to be forced to pay for this because the damage, aside from the human tragedy, the damage is into hundreds of billions of dollars now and it gets higher as the war goes on.

So people don't have-- they don't have the resources. I mean, on my street, you can't see it now. But, I mean, look at the energy center that was bombed is still empty. Nobody's going to fix it. They're not going to fix it until the war is over. Forget it. The house where the missile missed its target and hit a residential house, killed people, that's still standing there bombed out. It's not going to happen. Some people in some of the hardest hit areas, like if you remember the northwestern suburbs where the Russian troops came in, in the early days-- I was out there in Irpin and near Bucha and those areas-- they are rebuilding a bit. So it's really-- you can't really draw a big picture. Not enough money to go around. People are in big trouble.

I mean, Ukrainians are used to poverty. I mean, they know how to live on almost nothing. This is a centuries-long situation. This is why many Ukrainians have gardens. They go out to plots in the country. They farm themselves. Ukrainians are masters at stretching meager financial resources. So it's almost a cultural carryover from the Holodomor and from World War II and all these traumas that Ukrainians have suffered that Ukrainians know how to live and do live by the land.

TIM NELSON: So Brian, you talked a little bit about Russian reparations. Looking over there, it's hard to tell what's going on in Russia. There seems to be growing friction internally between Vladimir Putin and the Wagner Group. That's the private army that's been doing a lot of fighting there. You mentioned before hearing reports of sabotage in Russia, small protests. I read in Foreign Policy magazine, they recently estimated that Russia has already suffered triple the casualties that helped force the Russians out of Afghanistan. Does it look like the Kremlin can keep Russia together fighting this war?

BRIAN BONNER: We hope not, but I think they can. So I'll break it down into the pieces, Prigozhin and Wagner. My view is that this is authorized opposition. The defense ministry is performing poorly. Putin can fire Shoigu and the whole bunch if he wants to. But he likes to have this managed conflict.

Well, the conflicts and the bad blood, I think, are real. They're manageable. Prigozhin has restated his loyalty to Putin. Defense Ministry is loyal to Putin. So I see this as, maybe, Putin is trying to shake up the regular army and the Defense Ministry. I could be wrong.

And if Prigozhin falls out a window from a high floor or drinks poison tea, you can tell me, Brian, you were wrong about that one. But that's the way I see it.

Can Russia go on? We hope and you'll read every day, a story about Russia's on the verge of collapse. This army is brittle. This is the end of the last wake of the empire. I hope so. I think, ultimately, it's going in that direction, but Russia can do this for a long time. It has 10 times the economy of Ukraine. It has three times the people. It sells oil and gas. Sanctions are being flouted and violated.

There was a time, if you remember, we thought, whoa, Russians ran out of missiles. No, they're finding fragments of the missiles that are shot down and finding out they were manufactured this month. And a lot of the components-- high-tech components-- originated in America. So Russians are also masters at getting around sanctions. So we can hope it's going to go, but that's not the case. Still, Russia has most of the soldiers fighting and dying are from the regions, from ethnic minorities, and so I don't think it's hitting the Moscow, the Saint Petersburg, the urban Muscovites, Russians or the high-income Russians.

So that's not going to happen. Well, I mean, I think the best chance Ukraine has is punching through this land corridor they have so that they can isolate Crimea from the rest of Russia. And, I mean, that seems to be it. Putin's strategy still seems to be I want Ukraine more than the West. This is my country. The West will give up. The West will stop aiding Ukraine, then I will win. And that's what he's banking on so he's trying to hang in there as long as he can.

And the dynamics of war-- I know is not off your question-- it's sort of like two NFL teams that are great on defense, terrible on offense. They keep turning the ball over, not scoring, but the other side is not scoring. And I understand that this is the military technology with drones, surveillance has helped that situation where it's very difficult to advance because you become known right away and you become an open target. But that seems to be the situation.

Obviously, you can see the reports that we're two weeks into the offensive-- counteroffensive. There's no blitzkrieg. They've taken eight villages that you've never heard of and most people have never heard of. 50 square miles, I mean, fine. It's great, they're advancing, but this is not what people need at this point in time. They want a huge breakthrough. And they want Ukrainian forces to take over large amounts of territory.

Here, again, this is where Zelenskyy, everybody warned the West and told the West, we don't have enough military equipment to launch this counteroffensive. We don't have F-16s. We don't have air superiority. We don't have the short-range anti-aircraft missiles to knock off Russia's attack helicopters. We don't have ATACMS-- the longer range missiles. So they're not coming. They haven't been coming. They might come. Who knows when?

The United States is still holding up, not only, it's F-16s, it's not allowing other nations, like Denmark, to transfer their F-16s to Ukraine. So Zelenskyy already said this, that this is going to be step-by-step. It's going to be slow, more lives are going to be lost than necessary if we had all the equipment we needed, but we're going to undertake it. And that's what they're doing now.

Both sides say to this day that they have not committed the main forces into battle, yet. So what we have is Ukraine trying to advance along several lines-- points along the front line-- it's a 1,000 kilometers, 600 mile, front line-- and finding out what is the most promising. And then, as I understand it, I mean, that's where the brigades-- the heavily-armed brigades are going to come in.

Russia didn't sit around on its hands all winter. It dug in. If you remember, very quickly, they got too far in offense and they couldn't hold what they had. They retreated to what is far more defensible lines. That's where they are today.

TIM NELSON: Well, thanks for the update, Brian. We're thinking of you and of Ukraine and the people there. We hope this war ends soon. And you stay safe in the meantime.

BRIAN BONNER: I certainly miss Minnesota and all of you. But thank you for the time and hope to see you soon.

CATHY WURZER: That was NPR's Tim Nelson speaking with former Saint Paul Pioneer Press journalist Brian Bonner in Ukraine.