I look out across the city. Soldiers stand tense at checkpoints, fastidiously examining documents. Shells roar and split the sky. The people here, so long inured to it all, amble about. Shattered buildings, dead friends, missing relatives: all have become just another part of life.
Here, on the right bank of Kherson, a kind of normality continues. Across the Dnieper River, the Russian army is doing everything it can to kill us. This is a city cleaved by Putin’s violence – just like the whole of Ukraine.
I have been reporting from this country for more than ten years. I first came at the end of March 2014, soon after the Russians invaded and then stole Crimea. A few weeks later, they invaded eastern Ukraine.
I was the first Western journalist in the eastern city of Sloviansk on April 12, 2014, the day that local ‘separatists’, aided by Russian thugs bearing no identifying insignias or national flags on their green uniforms, seized the police station and began the war that continues to this day.
90 Seconds to Midnight: Listen to the first episode now
I have reported for the Mail from a tank base hidden in the forest by the Russian border, from the glide bomb inferno of Kharkiv; I embedded with a special forces unit as it carried out a long-range strike hundreds of miles into Russia; and I have reported from the heart of the battle of Bakhmut, which experienced the devastation seen in places like Aleppo in Syria and Grozny in Chechnya.
But the truth is Ukraine is just one of many conflicts raging around the world. From Gaza to Sudan to Lebanon and the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, the world is moving ever closer to the prospect of mass war.
This is the subject of 90 Seconds to Midnight, the Mail’s new weekly global news podcast, which launches today. Its name refers to the Doomsday Clock, a symbolic representation created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to illustrate how close humanity is to a global catastrophe. It’s simple: if the clock strikes midnight, the world ends. Right now it sits just 90 seconds away.
Each week, I will unpack and analyse the foreign news of the moment with a changing co-host. But I will try to do things a little differently: a desire born from the simple belief, that the news is never just ‘news’, it is a grand human drama with people at its heart. So, as well as experts, my co-hosts will be those at the centre of events around the world, from the soldiers on the front lines to politicians making the decisions.
Nor will our recordings be confined to London. A guiding principle of my career has been that to write about foreign affairs, you have to get out and see it. There’s little value in describing world events from thousands of miles away; though many try to, you need to understand what it’s like for civilians under bombardment and for all the victims and perpetrators of war.
This means that some of our episodes will be recorded on location. In the coming weeks I will be journeying to conflict zones in the Middle East, but the first episode comes to you from Ukraine where I travel from Kyiv to Kherson to Odesa. My co-host is the leading journalist Illia Ponomarenko. He has been called perhaps the most internationally famous Ukrainian after President Zelensky and has covered the war from its first hours.
In May, he published his book I Will Show You How It Was, chronicling the battle for Kyiv in the early days following Putin’s all-out invasion in February 2022.
Why did we choose to start in Ukraine? Well, Ukraine is important for many reasons. Just yesterday Foreign Secretary David Lammy and his US counterpart arrived in Kyiv to meet President Zelensky.
And tomorrow Prime Minister Keir Starmer will meet President Joe Biden to discuss allowing the Ukrainian defence forces to strike deep into Russia with British Storm Shadow missiles – which could change the trajectory of the war – yet also inevitably create new dangers.
Ukraine’s is also an important story of defiance in the face of unprovoked aggression and of the perennial need to stand up to bullies: as true in school as it is on the battlefield. It is also, of course, the story of the return of industrial scale war to our continent.
A new age dawned in the scorched forests and shelled cities of Ukraine. It was there that I first understood how our public discourse is increasingly dominated by social media platforms riddled with trolls and bots.
Warfare now exists both on the ground and online; tweets have become a form of virtual bullets fired by Russian aggressors working away in special ‘farms’ to spread the Kremlin’s propaganda, distort the truth and sow confusion. Propaganda is as old as war, but in the era of social media, its range, speed and scope have never been greater. A lie can go global in minutes. A call to violence can mobilise thousands in hours.
Paradoxically, Ukraine is also the story of how the world is reversing back to the future. As I have travelled through its battlefields, I have seen Soviet-era tanks rumble past while AI-powered drones bob overhead.
In Ukraine, it is plain that the reversion to the violence and chaos of the 20th century, which for so many years we hoped was behind us, is with us once again. The truth is that the 80 years of relative peace that we in the West enjoyed after World War II was an aberration only made possible by US security guarantees. Victory in the Cold War and the years of US hegemony that followed lulled us into erroneous complacency. We had won. History was over.
Or so we thought. On September 11, 2001, two planes flew into the Twin Towers – and our delusions ended. Since then, the West has been at war, either directly in Iraq and Afghanistan, or indirectly in Ukraine. And we are losing.
Make no mistake: if Putin triumphs in Ukraine, the defeat will not just be Kyiv’s but ours. The future of the West, and everyone who cares about its values, is being fought on these battlefields. If Ukraine had crumbled in just days, as the Kremlin (not to say several Western intelligence agencies) expected, then Putin’s forces would already be in countries like Georgia and Moldova; he might even have turned his criminal gaze to the Baltic States, which are Nato countries, and a new world war might already be upon us.
On the way to Kherson I drove through the city of Mykolaiv, once the scene of fierce fighting, and recalled my interview with the mayor there in April 2022. He arrived at our meeting with an automatic rifle slung over his shoulder.
‘I move constantly. I don’t sleep in the same place two nights in a row. All I need is my gun and a place to wash,’ he told me.
I asked him if he wanted to say anything to Russia. He didn’t hesitate. ‘In the beginning I’d get messages from Russians telling me to surrender or face the fate of Mariupol. I told them: either go home and live or come here and die. Welcome to hell, motherf*****s.’
Possessed of this kind of spirit, the Ukrainians held out – and have done ever since. Many times politicians and pundits have written it off. Each time Kyiv has surprised them. No more so than when early last month a force of Ukrainian troops crossed the border and marched into Russia seizing hundreds of square miles of territory around Kursk.
It was an extraordinary operation: the first time Russia has been invaded in almost a century and, sources tell me, it even caught Western governments by surprise. According to my briefings, the Ukrainians informed the US and Britain at the last minute, and presented the operation as a fait accompli.
Just over a month later, Ukraine is still holding the captured land, including the key town of Sudzha, and seemingly intends to do so for the foreseeable future.
Things have now changed. It’s clear that Ukraine can still strike back and embarrass Russia. Earlier this week, the Secretary of Russia’s Security Council (and former Defence Minister) Sergei Shoigu declared that ‘naturally we won’t have negotiations with them until we throw them out of our territory’. For the moment, talk of compromise is out.
Then there are the tactical considerations. Ukraine’s Director of Intelligence Kyrylo Budanov claimed in an interview on Sunday that events in Kursk are complicating Russia’s primary strategic objectives of seizing ground in eastern Ukraine.
After leaving Kherson, I met with a defence official who agreed to speak with me on condition of anonymity. Sipping tea in an Odesa restaurant, he told me that the Kursk operation was still in its early stages.
‘We are occupying a significant part of Russian territory, but at the same time, we do not seem to be building any structures that indicate we are staying long there,’ he said. ‘Maybe the aim is to destroy negotiations between the US and Moscow which started the day before [the operation]. Perhaps the conditions of these negotiations were unfavourable for Ukraine.’ His biggest concern was the coming winter. ‘We know the Russians are planning big missile attacks against our energy system. We are already without 90 per cent of our electricity-generating capabilities. We now know that Iran has transferred about 200 ballistic missiles to Russia. These are clearly not for the frontline but for long range strikes against our energy infrastructure.’
It is little surprise that a theocratic state is helping a murderous and gangster one. Ukraine also made something else clear to me: there are two clear sides in this escalating war. On the one the West and its allies, on the other a nexus of states – led by Russia, China and Iran – linked by little except the desire to tear down the international order the West has built since World War II.
Things are more dangerous than they have been at any time since 1945, and what makes things worse is that everything is accelerated by expanding technology and crumbling political systems.
And if the world is more dangerous than ever, it is also more complicated. Week after week, on 90 Seconds to Midnight, you can hear us try to make sense of it all. Listen to it wherever you get your podcasts – and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode.
It’s time we finally understand just where the world is going and begin to act accordingly. There are only seconds remaining.
Search 90 Seconds to Midnight wherever you get your podcasts now.