MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Ukrainian rescue teams spent much of today digging through debris left by a massive overnight attack. Russia aimed about 500 drones, about 70 missiles at Kyiv. But despite Russia's most recent large-scale attack, the war between Russia and Ukraine is largely at a stalemate. A stalemate might not be the word to describe the U.S. war with Iran but, like Ukraine, Iran has managed to give a global power a run for its money.
What do these two conflicts tell us about the limits of modern military might? That's a question I explored with NPR international correspondent Joanna Kakissis and national security correspondent Greg Myre. We were speaking on NPR's national security podcast Sources & Methods.
(SOUNDBITE OF EMANUEL KALLINS AND STEPHEN TELLER'S "PLUNGED INTO CRISIS")
KELLY: Joanna, it sounds like you all have had an awful night last night - missile strikes, drone strikes, the worst in weeks. Tell us what we should know.
JOANNA KAKISSIS, BYLINE: Yeah. It was very, very loud, and it was a long night - I have to tell you. Ukraine's air force was able to intercept most of the drones. But the missiles - a lot of the missiles got through, like, about a third of them, and they hit lots of targets - about 20 sites around the city. Most of the strikes happened on apartment buildings. Apartment buildings were hit.
KELLY: Yeah.
KAKISSIS: So rescue workers are still going through the rubble to find the survivors.
KELLY: And I was seeing all these pictures, Joanna, of Ukrainians running down to the metro, to the shelters. For you, do you try to go back to sleep? Are you running downstairs? What do you do?
KAKISSIS: No. We have a safe room here in the bureau that's, like, fortified, so we go there. It'll keep us safe from drones. It's hard to stay safe from missiles because missiles can even hit underground, too. But yeah, I found this new way to relax, which is to listen to K-pop (laughter). It's actually helped a lot. I have to tell you, it's very relaxing.
KELLY: Oh, Lord. So what do we think is going on here? Because we're obviously more than four years into this war.
KAKISSIS: Yeah.
KELLY: Kyiv has been hit many, many times. But I'm wondering if this Russian assault - you know, this mega one it sounds like you all lived through last night - is maybe Vladimir Putin's answer to Ukraine's drone assaults inside Russia? I mean, I've been watching. Putin has been under real pressure with Ukrainian strikes hitting refineries, hitting...
KAKISSIS: That's right.
KELLY: ...Moscow, hitting all the way east in Siberia.
KAKISSIS: That's right. That's right.
KELLY: What's going on?
KAKISSIS: Let me just go back a few days and say, like, yes, Vladimir Putin has acknowledged these strikes. There are real problems in Russia now because of these strikes. Russia's defense ministry today said, yes, that these overnight strikes that we experienced last night were in retaliation for the long-range strikes. And they said that, you know - they suggested that more were to come.
KELLY: Greg, what we're seeing in Ukraine, what it has managed to do against Russia, against a larger army with more money, more weapons is remarkable. What we are seeing with Iran right now - Iran managing to stand up to the United States, which has more weapons and more money and a much bigger military - is that equally remarkable?
GREG MYRE, BYLINE: Yeah. I think so in a lot of ways. I mean, both wars have their own dynamics. But you can see this, where we're seeing the weaker military, the underdog, if you will, not only able to keep fighting but to fight effectively and even get the upper hand in some cases. Perhaps the best example I can give is consider two bodies of water, the Black Sea and the Strait of Hormuz in...
KELLY: OK.
MYRE: ...The Gulf. You know, Russia had full control of the Black Sea at the start of this full-scale invasion back in 2022. It cut off Ukraine's ability to export grain and its other agricultural products absolutely essential to Ukraine's economy. And Ukraine had no navy. And yet they kept finding ways to keep fighting. They shot some missiles from land and hit some Russian ships that got too close. They've opened a channel so they could export, and they keep pushing the Russian navy back further and further in the Black Sea. The parallel, of course, is in the Gulf, in the Strait of Hormuz, where we've heard President Trump talk about sinking more than 150 Iranian naval vessels. They have no, again, traditional ships left.
KELLY: He keeps telling us that Iran's navy has been wiped out, and I keep trying to square that with the fact that it appears to still be pretty tough to get through the Strait of Hormuz.
MYRE: Well, that's precisely the point.
KELLY: Do you think we're going to start thinking differently about who emerges from a war as conqueror and who emerges as conquered? I mean, I'm thinking it feels fair to argue that Iran has managed to emerge stronger from this war with the U.S., at least in certain ways. What about Ukraine, though? I mean, where the war has certainly transformed that country, where they have made all kinds of progress on the battlefield, but the war is obviously ongoing and has deeply wounded that country.
MYRE: Absolutely. And so I think to think of it just in binary terms, winning or losing, is probably not the right way to think about these things. Ukraine has suffered terribly in the war in terms of the people - soldiers and civilians killed and wounded - the damage to the economy. But it's also learned great resilience, great innovation. It's playing a role in the security of Europe that others would not have anticipated a few years ago. I think, in some ways, those who survive this war, and Ukraine as a country, can come out much, much stronger.
You can make that point about Iran, too. I don't want to make a direct comparison. Ukraine is a Western democracy. Iran is a Shiite theocracy that has greatly abused the rights of its own people and killed thousands of them. But certainly, Iran has also dug deep and found a resilience that it didn't have. It looked like it was in terrible shape before this war, with its protests and the government killing protesters, the economic crisis. It now - its leadership and its military feel emboldened in a way that they didn't months ago.
KAKISSIS: If I could jump in there. You know, at the beginning of this war, if you'd mentioned that Ukraine was going to be exporting weapons, people would have laughed at you. And that's exactly what they're getting ready to do now. And because of the Iran war, Middle Eastern countries were, like, burning the phone lines here. Can we have your interceptor drones? Because these interceptor drones - they cost like $1,000. They're, like, 3D printed out. They look like toy rockets. They literally look like toy - they're the size of a big bottle of water. And they could take out these Shahed drones that Iran makes and that Russia has the blueprint for and is making them themselves.
So everybody started calling the Ukrainians and saying, can you help us? And I'm just saying, like, in 2022, nobody was saying that. And all of a sudden, Ukraine finds itself as the innovator in military defense tech right now.
KELLY: That was NPR's Joanna Kakissis and Greg Myre speaking on our national security podcast Sources & Methods. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts.
(SOUNDBITE OF EMANUEL KALLINS AND STEPHEN TELLER'S "PLUNGED INTO CRISIS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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