This month, Putin, Trump, Zelensky, and European world leaders seemed more serious than ever before about finding a path towards some sort of peace and out of the three-and-a half-year-long War in Ukraine. In his first trip to Ukraine as prime minister, Mark Carney announced that Canadian troops could be part of protecting that peace, once it’s reached.
Journalist Tim Mak, founder of Kyiv-based media outlet The Counteroffensive and a former U.S. Army combat medic, gives his take on the peace talks and explains how Ukrainians have been experiencing the war both on the frontlines and on the home front.
You can listen to this episode on Amazon, Apple, and Spotify.
Program Transcript
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HARRISON LOWMAN: Welcome to Hub Dialogues. I’m your host. Harrison Lowman, anaging editor of The Hub. today, I’m very pleased to be joined by journalist Tim Mak, founder of the Kyiv based The Counteroffensive, a media outlet devoted to telling the human side of the war in Ukraine. On February 23 2022 Tim stepped off a flight from the US and onto Ukrainian soil, thinking he’d be reporting for a couple weeks on what could be a conflict between Ukraine and Russia. That night, Russian tanks crossed the Ukrainian border. The full scale Russian invasion had begun. Tim, a Canadian and a former US Army combat medic turned journalist, found himself in the middle of a war zone. Three and a half years later, Tim has quit his old job, stayed in Ukraine to report on the grinding conflict, and even opened up his own media company, hell bent on covering the civilian side of the war. This past weekend, those Ukrainian civilians celebrated the 34th anniversary of their independence from the Soviet Union. Prime Minister Mark Carney was there in person for the first time as PM, to celebrate alongside them and pledged the support of Canadians in the form of billions in military aid. He also did not rule out the presence of Canadian soldiers in Ukraine in the future to secure that elusive peace. In our interview taped before that visit, we discussed whether talks between Putin and Trump mean Ukraine is any closer to that peace, and what the war looks like, both on the front line and on the home front. Tim Mak, thank you so much for joining us on hub dialogue today. It’s a real pleasure. Thanks for having me. So tell me, why does someone decide to make a war zone their home and stay in Ukraine over these last three and a half years?
TIM MAK: Look, I mean, I didn’t think about it that way, exactly. For me, I was on assignment here for NPR in 2022 ended up arriving just the night the invasion happened. Spent the whole first year in a very intense series of interviews and reporting and journalism, and realised I wasn’t done with it, so I ended up leaving NPR and starting my own media company here called the counter offensive, and we’ve expanded. We’re teaching Ukrainian journalists how to do human interest reporting to tell stories of the war. We’re also doing really deep Trade Industry journalism into Ukrainian defence technology and innovation. So we’ve really tried to branch out and do all sorts of interesting reporting and journalism based out of Kyiv.
HARRISON LOWMAN: One of the things I know you’re keeping an eye on is the talks going on, and there are different views of these talks. Some think it’s the first solid few steps towards a lasting peace in the country you’re currently living in. Others have been calling it Munich Agreement 2.0 looking back to what unfolded before the Second World War, Munich, Alaska. What do you see it as? Where do you fit, you know, between those two poles?
TIM MAK: Well, recently, there’s been two kind of major events in this kind of diplomatic, let’s say game, you know. I mean, it’s been this summit between Putin and Trump in Alaska, which is just patently outrageous, right? I mean, you think about, what are the parallels you’ve mentioned, one in the in the era before World War Two. But you know, if we’re trying to, if we would try to make an analogy, now, it’d be like China and Japan getting together in Tokyo to discuss how they’re going to carve up Hawaii is just having the subject of discussions not present is this kind of imperialist mindset in which diplomacy is conducted by great powers and other countries and people so do not have the basic dignity of being involved in the discussion. That is, you know, a pretty big problem. And then there’s the question of whether any of these negotiations will actually amount to anything. Usually, diplomacy is very, very complicated. It’s an art where you have two sides that are, you know, have material differences in their interests, and there’s their desires, and you have a mediator in between that tries to bring these two sides a little bit closer together, halfway by incentives, maybe, and halfway by enforcing some pressure. In order to do that, you need to have someone that’s pretty intelligent and creative and knowledgeable about both sides and what they want. We don’t have that. In this case, we don’t have someone who understands the nuances. Of the relationship and the history between Ukraine and Russia, and it very much shows, it also shows that Trump cannot be really a reliable mediator, because he doesn’t reliably convey information from one side to the other. I’ll give you an example. Donald Trump has said that Vladimir Putin is okay with, you know, security assurances by Western countries. We spent a lot of time over this past week talking about what Western European countries might do in order to provide these security guarantees. But as soon as they had that conversation, Russia publicly stated they were not willing to allow Western countries to provide security guarantees and boots on the ground in Ukraine. So we just wasted an entire week talking about a concept based on Trump, misinterpreting or misleading all the rest of us about the basis for what we should be discussing in a peace deal.
HARRISON LOWMAN: Have Putin and Zelensky ever met privately as leaders of their countries? You know, there’s talk of that now happening in Budapest. I think Zelensky wants it. You know, in one of the Nordic countries, have they ever met face to face? Have they ever looked each other in the eye?
TIM MAK: They have they’ve met, I believe, in 2019 but only once, and prior to the full scale invasion occurring, Zelensky is open to meeting with Putin. But for Putin, you imagine that there will be some real reluctance for a one on one, because Putin has been saying that zelenskyy is not a legitimate leader. Has been saying all sorts of outrageous stuff like, you know, this is a Nazi regime and things like that. So you can imagine that the Russians would be much less interested to seriously contemplate a one on one. I suspect that this meeting will not be forthcoming. It won’t be soon. We have to look at actions, not what diplomats are saying. If we spent our time focused on flashy diplomatic summits rather than the actual actions of the parties involved in those summits, we might say, Okay, well, there have been some interesting steps towards peace. But if we look at the actions of all the parties, you pointed out that Russia has continued to bomb and has continued to kill in Ukraine over the course of all this time that these so called peace negotiations are underway. I mean, actions speak louder than words, and the Russians are not conveying any actions that suggest that they want peace.
HARRISON LOWMAN: What are Ukrainians’ response to this? And we’re now hearing all the realists come out and do podcast interviews saying that Ukraine needs to cut its losses, submit up a slice of territory, lest they lose even more territory or more men, more civilians on the battlefield. What are Ukrainians saying in the streets in response to that.
TIM MAK: Mearsheimer is the kind of person who would say that Russia would never invade Ukraine in the first place, that that sort of that sort of conflict doesn’t exist in the 21st century. But he was wrong about that, and he’s wrong about this. He fundamentally misunderstands Ukraine and Ukrainian attitude towards Russia, that they don’t want to be ruled or controlled by Russia, and they seek much deeper integration with the West. The thing about this is that most Ukrainians understand that if some sort of ceasefire or a peace deal is made in the near term without strong security guarantees, it will simply be a prelude to the next invasion. And that’s really the on the ground attitude here. I mean, you see a rising percentage of Ukrainians who want the war to end. But where the real issue exists and where the real divergence occurs is when you ask them, what are you willing to give up for that peace to occur? That’s where you have a lot less of a uniform response.
HARRISON LOWMAN: What are they willing to give up? Those who say that they are willing to give up something.
TIM MAK: I think there’s a tacit understanding in Ukraine that they’re not gonna be able to win all of their territory, but the idea that they would give up territory that they haven’t already lost on the battlefield and just hand it over to Russia as part of a peace agreement. That’s going to be very, very hard to stomach. You’ve got to realise that unlike Vladimir Putin, who runs a dictatorship, zelenskyy is the president of a democratic society, and he’ll be subject to elections, likely very soon after any peace agreement is reached, and if he wants to maintain an office, he’s not going to be able to sign a weak peace deal. That looks like Ukraine is capitulating to Russia, after all the sacrifices that millions of Ukrainians have made.
HARRISON LOWMAN: You heard this accusation come up again in the Oval Office, those in the right in the US saying that, you know, throwing the dictator comments towards Zelensky, saying, Why aren’t you holding elections? His response being, you know, listen, in Ukraine, in the middle of a war, we are not able to hold safe elections. And also our, I can’t remember. You can explain to me that our constitutional documents say as much. Have you heard this accusation made against them?
TIM MAK: I’ve heard it being made most. Online by Twitter trolls, but the constitution of Ukraine does not permit elections during a period of martial law, which is obviously what we’re seeing right now, a period of martial law and a period of martial law that was instigated by Russia’s invasion. That being said, I suspect that zelenskyy and those around him would be more than happy to have elections as soon as the war is sustainably ended. That being because right now, zelenskyy is still the most popular politician in Ukraine, and there are no obvious alternatives that would really be serious competition for him. So, you know, I don’t think that the zelenskyy camp is at all against the idea of holding elections as soon as possible. The thing that you hear from Ukrainians is that it’s very difficult to hold elections, safe elections during a period where bombings and drone attacks are occurring, that it’s very hard to get ballots to soldiers who are on the front lines. And then there, of course, the millions Ukrainians that are currently refugees in Europe, in Canada, United States, and many other places around the world who deserve some sort of say in their country’s future, but they, you know, it’s very difficult to organise all of those things.
HARRISON LOWMAN: Let’s talk about that fighting. I assume you’ve seen some of it, right? You’re a former US Army medic. Can you explain to folks here in Canada what that looks like, what that experience is like to be there, you know, and for these soldiers to be putting their lives on the line.
TIM MAK: Well, it’s become a very drone heavy war early in the full scale invasion, particularly when the lines were just beginning to form, artillery was the king of battle. But right now, what you see is that 80% of Battlefield casualties are being caused by drone attacks, things like FPV drones, these first person kamikaze drones, first person view kamikaze drones that blow up and are essentially guided artillery.
HARRISON LOWMAN: Really? So you’re basically controlling it, and they’re flying right into their target, whether that be people or some sort of military installation?
TIM MAK: Exactly. Yeah. There’s been a lot of new technologies being developed in the realm of automation, in terms of electronic warfare, that signals warfare, and then drone technology. It’s changed the way that modern warfare is going to be conducted, and so where previous wars relied a lot on mortars, artillery to cause effects on target far away from your position. Now you can just get a drone into the air, put on these goggles, these first person view goggles, and fly them 1520, kilometres away and use them as essentially a guided bomb.
HARRISON LOWMAN: Not only that, you know, you can see footage of this online. There’s GoPros, or the footage of munitions being dropped on people you can actually view, which is pretty horrifying. I think you’ve described. It’s pretty asymmetrical, and we’re entering a whole new battlefield. You say Ukraine could do more with less with its weaponry. What does that asymmetry look like? Like? How does the Russian and Ukrainian army compare to one another at this point, one is far larger than the other, but you know, when you place them next to each other, what sort of features pop out to you in terms of differences?
TIM MAK: Well, the Russian military may have numbers, and because of that, the Ukrainian military has needed to fight quantity with quality. It has the advantage the Ukrainians do of being on the defence rather than the offence, and it’s used that advantage in order to develop really interesting as we were talking about drone technology that is able to hold the line and preserve their limited numbers in ways that they that the Russians have not excelled in the Russians are losing more than 1000 people a day in Battlefield casualties because they view and I think the evidence bears this out. They view their soldiers lives as expendable. The Ukrainians are trying to use drone warfare in order to defend their positions, because they want as much as possible to preserve the quality of their military leadership and their drone operators, which have become some of the most important resources of the entire military.
HARRISON LOWMAN: Another stat I’ve heard you pull out this blew my mind. More Russians have died in the war in Ukraine than in the near decade that the Soviets spent fighting in Afghanistan. In terms of lives lost there. Does that blow your mind as well. Is that surprising to you?
TIM MAK: It blows my mind that many people have died, but it also gives me a little bit of an indication of the domestic instability that is waiting for Vladimir Putin whenever it is that this war ends, you’ll recall that the Soviet failures in Afghanistan played a substantial role in the collapse of the Soviet Union. I wonder if these battlefield losses are going to play a role in the downfall of Putin. In the long term, there are enormous economic costs and demographic costs that have come with this war that aren’t fully realised and the effects of which have. Not really been allowed to mature and take place yet we’ve seen real economic damage done by this war. Interest rates are nearly 20% inflation in the double digits. And then there are, of course, the many tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of soldiers whenever this war comes to an end, these thousands and thousands of soldiers that will go back to their villages and their towns and their cities in Russia with horrific trauma, with some missing limbs and some not returning home at all, that’s going to have serious societal effects, and I don’t think we’ve begun to see those yet.
HARRISON LOWMAN: You mentioned injuries. Have you provided any medical care to any soldiers while you’ve been over there the last few years?
TIM MAK: I have not provided any medical care to any soldiers. No.
HARRISON LOWMAN: We talk about the attacks. We see Ukraine going far into Russia, as far as Siberia, in terms of the recent drone attacks we talked about. And I’m interested in where you place this in your mind, some see this as inventive last gasps of a military that just is eventually going to have to submit to a far larger force. But is, you know, showing what they can do with the technology you just described, or are these signs of Ukraine, you know, breaking through and getting the upper hand on the battlefield, you know, attacking the people that are attacking them, not being defensive, as you mentioned, but taking offensive moves. How should we think about those recent attacks that the Ukrainians have made?
TIM MAK: Look I think Ukraine strategy takes into account and understands that, due to their limited numbers, can be very difficult to make huge, huge breakthroughs on the front lines, but one of the things they can do is make life very, very uncomfortable for Putin’s regime, and one of the ways is to launch these long range strikes into energy infrastructure in Russia, these oil refineries and things like that, in an attempt to raise energy prices and make Russians kind of feel the pain, the economic pain of the war that their government is currently engaged in.
HARRISON LOWMAN: Let’s look at the Ukrainian home front. Ukrainians have been defending their territory for three and a half years. Last time we spoke, you talked a lot about exhaustion. You know, what it does to someone who’s been not only defending physically, whether they’re a soldier, but also having this in their mind, the fact that they’re being invaded, what that does to your economy, what that does to your data? Does to your daily life. Can you describe to me what that exhaustion looks like for civilians in Ukraine on the home front?
TIM MAK: I mean, it all starts with, Hey, can I get a good night’s sleep at any point? And the answer is that Putin’s not going to permit it that every night, or almost every night, you hear this whir of kamikaze drones, these shahedz drones flying in the dark, and it’s ominous. You don’t know which way they you can’t see them in this in the night sky. You don’t know where they’re going, and you don’t know what they’ll hit until you see explosions. You’ll hear these booms of air defence and of explosions from incoming missiles of anti aircraft fire in the night, and all of that is enough. I mean, some people have enough anxiety getting to sleep under normal conditions, but add into that the fact that you got to sleep in your hallway or in a bathtub for some relative safety, and it adds up night after night, to say nothing of the pressures that might be put on you, economically, to your employment, to your your family life because of the war and all those things are cumulative. And so it’s not just a matter of acute stress, it’s a matter of chronic stress is now stretched out for three and a half years, and that can have a real physical and mental toll.
HARRISON LOWMAN: You described to me at one point, soldiers who are leaving the battlefield for a weekend getting married and then coming back on the battlefield because they’re needed to fight? That’s actually happening?
TIM MAK: Yeah, absolutely, that’s happening. You know, a lot of people are understanding just how short life can be, and wanting to to exchange vows or to take care of their loved ones, because there are, of course, payments made out to the family members of those who are are killed on the battlefield. I mean, these are decisions that I hope no one who is listening to this will ever have to make, but these are kind of the dire, real life consequences of understanding in a very, very specific way that life isn’t infinite and that our time is and can be extremely limited. And Ukrainian soldiers just get that viscerally
HARRISON LOWMAN: At the same time, they’re light hearted about things. I guess you have to have a sense of sort of gallows humour you’ve written in the Atlantic about what this looks like in comedy clubs, and I guess all the jokes are about Russians and about air raid sirens and about the missile attacks you described. That’s kind of what humour looks like now in Kyiv.
TIM MAK: Well, humour often has to include an element of political incorrectness and so and humour, particularly with soldiers, involves pushing the bounds of what’s acceptable. There are a lot of jokes about Russian air raids or about not wanting to go out on any particular night because they’re worried about getting conscripted by the mobilisation forces in Ukraine or or whatever else. I mean, that’s that’s just the dark humour that people use in order to cope with a difficult situation.
HARRISON LOWMAN: And how does conscription look like? You mentioned conscription.
TIM MAK: Yeah, conscription is struggling in Ukraine right now. I think there’s no, no doubt about it. I mean, we’re three and a half years into the war, a lot of Ukraine’s finest and most experienced soldiers have been either sidelined through injuries or killed, and so right now, it’s a real struggle getting enough people to the front lines. That said the Ukrainian military is set up in a way that the Canadian military is not or the American military is not. And what they do is that they that if you sign up, you can choose your particular unit that you go to, which has led to a really interesting competition between various units to advertise, you know their skills, the training that they provide to the soldiers that decide to sign up, that they can specialise in drone technology or drone operation. Some units brag about how they give greater amounts of training before sending people off onto operations than other units. And so there’s a real there’s all sorts of advertising campaigns happening across Ukrainian cities. You can see them on billboards trying to one up one another in order to attract talent, kind of like IT companies trying to get the best programmers. You get the same vibe from these advertisements in Ukraine right now.
HARRISON LOWMAN: I’d sent you a link about a day ago because I know you’re initially from Canada, and I wanted to ask you about a controversy we had a year or so ago. There was a documentary put out called Russians at war. It was funded in part by the Canadian government. Sparked a tonne of Criticism and controversy here in Canada. Its director, who has come out and said she’s very anti-war, anti-Putin Anastasia Trofimova, she filmed a Russian battalion, I think, for seven months. She says, Without Moscow’s permission, her attempt, this is what struck me here, was, I guess, somewhat similar to yours. You can tell me if I’m wrong, to try and showcase like the human side of war. She also revealed at the time how ill equipped the Russian soldiers were, how many of them were misled about what they were fighting anyway. There was a tonne of protests. Screenings were cancelled at the Ontario Public Broadcaster, at the Toronto International Film Festival, they eventually had a showing, I think. I’m just wondering if you’ve seen that movie, and whether you think people should watch that film, and what it says potentially about the human side of war, or whether you know this is something completely different, and we should be wary about showing showing this side?
TIM MAK: I guess the question is, who are the folks who deserve our empathy the most? Are they Russian soldiers, many of whom, as her documentary shows, have joined the Russian military for financial purposes, or are they Ukrainians the subject of the invasion? I know that one thing that the documentary which, by the way, I have not seen, but from what I have read about it, the documentary does not include any sorts of descriptions or condemnations of Russian war crimes that have occurred in occupied Ukrainian territory. Furthermore, the documentarian visited occupied territory, which is something that I think a lot of Ukrainians object to. That said, I mean, we’re looking at a deeper question, which is something that filmmakers, documentarians, for a long time have debated, which is there really such a thing as an anti-war movie. Can you make it, or does the medium itself, does the action and the explosions and the seeming sacrifice of the subjects on the screen essentially give a green light, in some ways, to the underlying conduct? If we’re trying to humanise people, should we humanise the aggressor, or should we humanise the victim. I, for one, want to understand the perspective of those who have been traumatised and attacked, and I want to spend a lot less time providing empathy to those doing the attacking. It’s fine to understand the motivations of some of these people at war, but I think one of the big criticisms of this documentary was really, you know, are they the most deserving subjects for our empathy? And then the kind of corollary question, which is, should the Canadian government have been involved in the funding of of that film?
HARRISON LOWMAN: I guess that’s the question, yeah. Can you hold empathy for, you know, multiple sides at once? You know, putting aside those who you know went to war full well, knowing, you know, the atrocities they may be causing, the invasion they were behind, versus those who were potentially misled, putting your blame towards Putin and the authoritarian regime there, as opposed to the people. But you’re saying in some cases, these are, you know, willing actors when it comes to Russian soldiers who are fighting this war. They know exactly what they’re doing and they’re responsible for their actions, right?
TIM MAK: Well, I think, I mean, let’s try to pull a probably incomplete analogy. But you know, if a documentarian embedded with Imperial Japanese forces made no mention of Imperial Japan’s war crimes, and kind of zoomed in close to, you know, the sufferings of singular Japanese soldiers, we would wonder whether that empathy was well directed, whether, given the many, many subjects to cover in the world, whether this is a place where we ought to feel sorry for participants in that kind of military operation. I think that’s an incomplete analogy, obviously, but an analogy that gets closest to the question of, Why should we watch this? Why should the government fund this?
HARRISON LOWMAN: Do you ever given where you are, like, obviously, the Russians are the experts when it comes to misinformation, propaganda. They created this invasion. There’s obviously fog of war on both sides, though. Have you ever found and do you come across and how do you protect against spin from the Ukrainian side, like, how do you sort of handle that being the head of a media outlet in Ukraine?
TIM MAK: As journalists, it’s our job to check facts and continue to ask questions, even inconvenient questions, so a sense of curiosity and sense of scepticism should be our guiding principles, and those things haven’t failed me yet in terms of ensuring that we do not veer into despite our empathy for Ukrainians, that we don’t become, you know, folks that just absorb the messaging of the Ukrainian government or any government, without questioning, without scepticism, and without important questions to hold people accountable.
HARRISON LOWMAN: Just lastly, Tim, this is a message you hear Westerners say a lot. I’m sure you’ll hear it in Halifax, maybe a little bit when you come. These naysayers who aren’t supportive of helping Ukrainians in the fight to defend their country. They’ll say things like: “This, war is going on a million miles away. I can’t pronounce the names of the towns and cities on the map there, yet I’m spending my tax dollars helping folks when we have problems here at home.” How do you respond to those people and make them care?
TIM MAK: I think fundamentally, it’s a question of whether we in the West have responsibilities to fellow democracies, whether we’re better off with friends and what it means to be a good friend, I think that Canada and Ukraine have had long, long standing ties, that one of the largest Ukrainian communities outside Ukraine exists in Canada, and there are many, many Canadians that have Ukrainian roots. But even if that were not so, I think the question is, how do we treat other countries in the world? Do we sit by and say nothing and do nothing when a democratic country is attacked by an authoritarian neighbour, and what happens the next time we’re threatened in similar ways? Remember, of course, that Canada and Russia have had many sorts of diplomatic disagreements in the past, and in some ways, we’re neighbours to Russia, if we, if we think of the Arctic as this area where these two countries might come together, this won’t be the last time that Canada and Russia have disagreements. And I’d want to be on the side of Ukraine when that moment comes.
HARRISON LOWMAN: Yeah, I was just going to add Putin was only steps away from this country, only days ago in Alaska. So these things are closer than they might seem initially. That’s Tim Mak, founder of The Counteroffensive. Thank you very much for joining us today on Hub Dialogues. Let’s remind our audience, where can they find your work?
TIM MAK: They can find our work at www.counteroffensive.news. It’s where we do human interest stories going deep into the who of what’s happening in this war.
HARRISON LOWMAN: Awesome. Thank you so much. Tim, be well. Be safe
TIM MAK: Thank you.
