On Feb. 24, 2024, Globe senior international correspondent Mark MacKinnon answered Globe readers’ questions while reporting from Ukraine to mark the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of the country. Mark has been covering Russia and Ukraine since 2002, when he was first sent abroad to serve as The Globe’s Moscow bureau chief, and has reported on the war since the first attack two years ago.
Readers’ questions were insightful and sweeping, asking about the current state of the war, any hope that its end is on the horizon, the health of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and how people in various Russian-occupied areas feel about the conflict. Here are some highlights.
Questions have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Why is there almost no reporting from the front lines?
Mark MacKinnon: The unfortunate truth is that the Ukrainian military has made it progressively more difficult for independent journalists to report from the front line. It’s still possible (see my recent trip to meet Canadian volunteers in Kupiansk) but it’s time-consuming to go through the formal approval process, and the answer is often No.
The Russian side is even more closed to foreign reporters – many, like me, have been on the Kremlin’s sanctions list since early in the war – leaving front line coverage mostly to the military propagandists on both sides.
What kind of resistance is there to Putin in Russia?
MM: The war has badly damaged the anti-Putin opposition. Where once the pro-democracy movement could call tens of thousands of people into the streets for a protest, now there has been little in the way of demonstrations since the first days of the war. Many Putin opponents left soon after Feb. 24, 2022. Those who remained know they can be jailed – or even sent to the front line – if they publicly defy the Kremlin.
And now, Alexey Navalny is dead. Even if the Kremlin didn’t order him killed that morning (and there are reports suggesting that FSB agents visited him in his cell just before he died), he died because of his opposition to Putin, which saw him poisoned then jailed then moved to a remote Arctic prison.
Navalny was the only opposition figure who could genuinely claim to have a cross-country political network capable of challenging Putin. There’s a small chance that the grieving over his death will snowball into a new political movement, which is why the Kremlin is going to such lengths to prevent a public funeral.
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting of the collegium of the Prosecutor General's office in Moscow, Russia, on March 15, 2023.SPUTNIK/Reuters
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree banning negotiations with Russia as long as Putin is president. Will the ban be lifted to facilitate peace?
MM: I think the decree is largely a symbolic one. If there was suddenly a way to end the war, on terms Ukraine could accept, this decree wouldn’t stand in the way. Presidential decrees can be lifted as quickly as they’re imposed.
That said, I don’t think either side is looking to start negotiations right now. After so much death and destruction, any Ukrainian leader would struggle to sell a peace deal that left Russia in control of Ukrainian territory. And Putin isn’t about to give up what he’s taken, especially not with Russian troops again on the offensive and slowly gaining ground along the front line.
A clear majority of Ukrainians say they wouldn’t trust any peace deal with Putin – they believe he would only use any ceasefire to rearm and attack again. That said, polls suggest a quieter minority is starting to feel that any peace has to be better than more of this horrible war.
As for ordinary Russians, many of those willing to speak out against the war have left. But you can see in the Kremlin’s refusal to allow a public funeral for Alexey Navalny the fear that the anti-war (anti-Putin) movement is bigger than we now see.
Why is Ukraine holding off from having elections during the war? Who would replace Zelensky?
MM: The main reason most Ukrainians agree that an election can’t be held now is that it would unnecessarily divide the country. Zelensky is the agreed-on wartime leader, even if a growing percentage think he should stand down after the war is over. It also wouldn’t be a fair process. How do people in Russian-occupied areas vote? Can soldiers be asked to vote for or against their commander-in-chief? What about the millions of Ukrainians who fled the country?
As for political rivals, Kyiv mayor Vitaly Klitshchko is definitely staking out a separate political position from Zelensky. So to is former president Petro Poroshenko. It has to be said, though, that neither man would have a chance in a 2024 vote vs Zelensky.
After the war, look for comedian-turned-philanthropist Serhiy Prytula to generate a lot of buzz. And Valery Zaluzhny, who was recently replaced as Ukraine’s top general. Before that move, opinion polls suggested that Gen. Zaluzhny had eclipsed Zelensky as the country’s most trusted figure.
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky gives an award to a Ukrainian serviceman during a ceremony marking the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in Hostomel, Kyiv region.Supplied/Getty Images
What is the attitude of the people living in the Russian-occupied areas in the east and south of Ukraine?
MM: I can say (and not everyone will love reading this) that when I first started reporting from Ukraine in the early 2000s there was genuine support/affection for Russia in Crimea and Donbas. And when I came back in 2014 to report on the pro-Western revolution in Kyiv, people in those regions felt angry and alienated by an uprising that threw out a president (Yanukovych) who was elected in 2010, largely thanks to his voter base in Crimea and Donbas. They received, and believed, their interpretation of events primarily from Russian state television.
The question of how to reintegrate Crimea and Donbas residents should Ukraine ever succeed in driving Russian troops completely question off its territory would be a challenging one. Maybe more referenda would be needed – with the votes conducted fairly this time, with international monitoring (unlike the farcical votes to join Russia that were held at gunpoint back in 2014. I witnessed those too).
All that said, it’s important to point out that support for Putin and Russia in the rest of eastern Ukraine – Russian-speaking areas like Kharkiv, Kherson and Odesa – plummeted after the events of 2014.
What is your view on the status of Putin’s health, and its impact on the war going forward?
MM: I’ve read a lot of rumours about Putin’s health, and seen a lot of videos suggesting he might have some kind of ailment, but I’m not going to take a guess based on that.
What I will say is those two speeches Putin made on the brink of war – and that chilling episode where he humiliated his country’s senior military and political leadership and made them each, one-by-one, say that they agreed to the invasion he was about to launch – didn’t look or sound like the Putin I’ve been covering for 20 years.
Not that I think it was a body double or anything like that – just that his personality seemed to have fundamentally changed from the cool and calculating ex-KGB agent to something closer to a mad tyrant. A lot of people have speculated that he lost touch with reality because of the excessive isolation measures he took during the pandemic.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky listens as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks in Kyiv, Ukraine on Feb. 24. The ceremony marking the Russian invasion's second anniversary included Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (second from left), European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen (second from right) and Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo (right).Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
Is there tension between Ukraine and Canada given the number of Ukrainians who came here and given the need for more support in the fight with Russia?
MM: I haven’t heard it from Ukrainian officials, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they started to quietly ask Western allies to do what they could to nudge Ukrainian refugees back home. Not only do they need more men to fight on the front line, they will need men and women and families to come back and take part in the rebuilding process that has already begun.
Where do you get information on how many soldiers have died in the war?
MM: Neither the Russian army nor the Ukrainian military reveals casualty figures. Both sides publish inflated figures of the number of enemy troops, tanks and planes they claim to have killed/destroyed, but it’s best to treat those with a lot of skepticism. It’s safe to say, however, that tens of thousands of people have died because of this war. Almost certainly the real figure is in the hundreds of thousands.
We’ll only get a true sense of the toll afterwards, when military censorship bans are lifted, and when reporters get to visit places like Mariupol to try and calculate the damage done. As we’ve seen after the liberation of other parts of Ukraine, it’s hard to hide giant cemeteries.
How do you see the war ending?
MM: This is the biggest question of them all. There are three endings that I can see. One is a total Russian victory. Russian President Vladimir Putin gets what he wants. That now seems a remote probability. Even if Russian troops took Kyiv and Kharkiv, it’s clear the resistance would continue. Two is Ukraine driving all Russian troops out of the country. A year ago, this suddenly seemed possible. I have a colleague who strongly believed the war would be over by (last) Christmas, with Russia in full retreat. After the failed counteroffensive of 2023, this also seems unlikely now.
That leaves us with something neither side seems genuinely interested in: some kind of negotiated solution. I won’t speculate what that might look like, but it won’t be the complete liberation of Ukrainian territory. And how long would such a peace last?
So that leaves me fearing that we’re nowhere near the end of this, meaning at least several more years of war – unless something truly dramatic happens (like a sudden death in Moscow).