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00:00Meanwhile there remains as well much confusion about a phone call that the US president-elect Donald Trump is alleged to have had with the
00:06Russian president Vladimir Putin last Thursday. That's at least according to the reporting by the Washington Post.
00:12Now it said that in that conversation Trump had urged Putin not to inflame the situation in Ukraine. The Kremlin has since said
00:19there was no such phone call and that the whole story is fiction. Our chief foreign editor Rob Parsons is
00:25joining me here on set. Rob, enlighten us then, if you can, about this phone call.
00:30Don't expect me to enlighten you.
00:32Who knows?
00:33Really, it is like that. The Washington Post, as you rightly said, reported this story.
00:38They must have got the story from somewhere. What the source was not
00:42particularly clear at this stage, but
00:46it said that Donald Trump in that conversation had warned
00:51Vladimir Putin not to inflame the situation further in Ukraine and reminded him, apparently, that the United States has a very large military
00:59presence in Europe. Hint, hint.
01:02And seemed to be trying to apply pressure on the Russians.
01:07The spokesperson for the Kremlin said this is absolute nonsense, pure fiction, to use his exact words.
01:15You know, where do you go from there?
01:17What can you draw from it? I mean, the big question, first of all, is, you know,
01:22what is it that Donald Trump is trying to achieve? What is his policy going to be in Ukraine? And so often with Donald Trump,
01:29there's a fog of confusion about where things are going. We get conflicting statements. His son, Donald Trump Jr., saying that
01:37Zelensky was about to lose his allowance from the United States, not helping matters very much.
01:43But the impression seems to be growing
01:46from various sources, including Mike Pompeo's
01:49former Secretary of State, not got a position in the current administration, by all accounts.
01:55But he was suggesting that one thing that Donald Trump might do would be to try and
02:00increase the pressure on Russia
02:02in order to get a deal. In other words, he will say to the Ukrainians,
02:06you know, you're not going to get Crimea. You're going to lose in Donbass.
02:10You probably won't be able to join NATO for 20 years.
02:13But, you know, we'll make sure we put plenty of pressure on the Russians as well, and you'll get an equitable deal.
02:18There may be something about that in it, and that could explain, you know, if there's any substance to this phone call
02:25story at all. That's what he was trying to do in that conversation. But frankly, we don't really know, Stuart.
02:30No.
02:31Listening to what Gulliver was saying just a second ago from Kiev, I mean, the fighting on the front line is still very ferocious, isn't it?
02:39No, forget about, you know, up in Kursk, but, you know, in the area around the town that Gulliver mentioned,
02:48Kurakhova and Pokrovsk, nearby there as well, the fighting is really at the most intense
02:54it has been since the start of the war in 2022.
02:59Admiral Tony Radekin, the chief of the defence staff of the British Armed Forces,
03:04saying that the Russians are taking absolutely colossal losses.
03:09On average, in October, 1,500 men a month killed and wounded.
03:15The total losses since the start of the war, over 700,000.
03:19That's more than 40 times than the Soviet Union lost in a decade of fighting in Afghanistan.
03:26And just yesterday, Russia apparently suffered the worst day of losses, close on 2,000 men in one day of fighting.
03:34But Russia has enormous human resources at its disposal that Ukraine lacks and appears to be applying a strategy of intensive
03:45troop usage and prepared to take losses in order to sap the morale of the Ukrainians.
03:51They are taking losses, but almost inch by inch, they're making progress.
03:57Whether it's strategically significant progress at this stage, I suppose, is the moot point.
04:03In the course of the last month, they increased their gains by about nine to 10 kilometres, according to the same Admiral Radekin.
04:13That's more than the Russians achieved in the whole of 2023.
04:17But is it enough to change the overall picture on the battlefield?
04:21Not really clear at this point.
04:22And you talked about the morale of the Ukrainians there.
04:24I mean, are they having a decent effect from the Russian perspective on inflicting damage on that?
04:31Yeah, they certainly are.
04:32You can imagine what it must be like being a Ukrainian soldier at the moment.
04:35A lot of the time, you don't have sufficient ammunition.
04:39You don't have the weapons you want because the supplies are slow in coming in from Ukraine's Western allies.
04:46And at the same time as that, you know, the Russians are attacking in these human wave formations that we were just talking about,
04:53which are enormously wearing on the Ukrainian defenders because they're cupping almost 24 hours.
05:01And so we are seeing a lot of desertion on the Ukrainian side, a lot of people away without leave.
05:11The number of desertions, apparently from January to September this year, according to a leaked document from the Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office, 18,196.
05:22And away without leave, absent without leave, 35,307.
05:29That's up twice on the previous year.
05:31So that gives a pretty clear picture of just how stretched the Ukrainians are and how that's impacting on their morale.
05:39Rob, thanks so much. Rob Parsons, our Chief Foreign Officer here on France 24.