N.S. security expert provides update from Ukrainian border

The last time CBC Radio's Information Morning Halifax spoke to international peace and security consultant Donald Bowser, he was still at home in Tidnish, N.S. On Tuesday, Bowser was doing aid work on the Ukrainian border. UN officials say around two million people have fled Ukraine as Russia's invasion continues. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I know you don't want to talk about exactly where you are. Maybe you could tell us what you're doing there?

Well, at the moment, I'm trying to help procure and ship supplies into Ukraine. 

What are you seeing? 

Well, I was down on the border last night, and what I'm seeing is those refugees coming across the border with little or no baggage. It's women and children, the elderly. There's a huge crowd of Polish volunteers that are on the border that are taking care of people. No sign of international organizations on either side of the line. So what exactly are the major international organizations raising funds for? Because none of them exist currently on the other side of the line in Ukraine where the desperate floods of people are coming in.

Almost two million refugees have now gone through, and that means trudging for kilometres in -10 degrees, coming across an area where there's no warming tents, there's no food. There's nothing. And you have to clear the procedures to cross the border, and there's nobody currently helping that flood of refugees on the Ukrainian side of the line.

Once they reach the EU, there are plenty of people to help. Volunteers, mostly. I didn't see any big Red Cross tents or any other international organization. It was almost all Polish volunteers and Polish organizations that were giving support.

What kind of support are they able to give? 

Well, they're able to warm people, feed them, get them to hotels, help them resettle. So once they come here, people are being resettled and it's the same across the board. Whether it be in Moldova, which is a small country which is flooded now with Ukrainians. Romania. Slovakia. And Poland has taken the largest number of refugees at the moment.

Do you feel that you're in any particular danger?

No. The fact is that the war has not reached western Ukraine yet, so the area in western Ukraine is quite safe. The areas bordering on western Ukraine are quite safe. So there are no Russian forces anywhere here in the west, and that, for me, raises the biggest question: where are the international organizations when they're in no physical danger? Yes, something could happen, but they operate in lots of war zones. And now we have a situation in which the biggest humanitarian crisis in Europe is going on, and there isn't a lot of hands around to sort of help.

So I see in a story last night of how an elderly couple in their 70s had to go through gunfire, mortar fire, tanks rolling behind them, hiding in basements from one spot to another to finally get to a vehicle that would be able to take them. And then once they got at the border, they had to cross on foot for kilometres, which they were barely able to do. 

The last time we saw a mass refugee migration was in Syria. In that case, those who were leaving that country had no intention of ever returning, but they don't believe that's the case with Ukraine. Those who are leaving hope to soon return. Is that the sense you're getting? 

It's going to be hard to because most of the cities in Ukraine are currently being flattened. So somebody from Mariupol, where they're going to go back to, there's going to be two stones ... left on the ground. The level of destruction currently in places like Kharkiv and Mariupol, all of these cities that have been occupied and essentially destroyed. What are they going to go back to? They're not going to have a house for two to three years.

I worked in a conflict zone in the Donbass. It took two years to get the infrastructure rebuilt and things like that. So I don't think that anybody is going to be returning very quickly because even in Kyiv, you have mass destruction. Parts of the city are completely demolished. For example, today and yesterday in the town of Irpin, which is a very nice bedroom community outside — well, it was a very nice bedroom community outside of Kiev — civilians are getting shot at close range. The mayor, Oleksandr Markushyn, got shot while he was trying to hand out food and medication.

Every day that I'm talking to my friends who were there in Kyiv, they are staying on the line. They are still doing whatever they can. And this is not just men — it's lots of women are doing it and a lot of community leaders are doing it.

The sense you get when you hear secretaries of state from the U.S. and other countries is that the worst is yet to come. And they fear the worst for Ukraine. What's your sense of that? 

There is no way that the Russians can take Kiev. It's just that simple. They can flatten it. They can make a Grozny out of it. They can turn it into, like, Aleppo, into a giant parking lot. But there is no way they're going to be able to take Kyiv. I talk daily to guys who are on the line. They're not going to be able to take Kiev, which means they're not going to be able to put in their occupation government. So all we can do is just kill more civilians and keep grinding up their own troops. Russian losses are reported today as of 11,000. 

Can the Ukrainians hold out?

Yes, they can. They can absolutely hold out and they will resist to the end, which means that Russia will fail militarily. If Russia fails militarily, there's a high degree of chance ... Russia itself may turn into a failed state. I don't think that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is going to be able to survive a failed war and a destroyed ... economy when most of the elites are going to turn against him due to the level of punishment. So at the moment, I would be far more concerned about the collapse of Russia than I would be about the collapse of Ukraine.

It's very difficult to get materials in. This is what everybody is struggling with — trying to get materials to the territorial defence unit and other people inside Ukraine. But right now what they need is to keep their morale to finish the fight. And at the moment, everyone I've talked to who's on the line fighting does not believe that Russia has any chance of winning at all. They see daily the tanks they destroyed, the aircraft they destroyed. So they're seeing this on the ground, and they don't believe for a minute that Russia could win, but [Russia is] in the process of committing war crimes and thinking that it will destroy Ukrainian morale. And it just isn't. 

What do you think is going to happen in the next couple of days in western Ukraine? 

There is no threat at the moment for western Ukraine, and the Russian forces have not moved in from the north of western Ukraine. It seems that Belarusian troops are not willing to die for Putin or [Belarusian President Alexander] Lukashenko. So there's been a strong resistance to going in. Now, Lukashenko announced that they probably won't go in. So western Ukraine is safe.

The question for me is where are the international organizations in western Ukraine to help the refugees? That's where everybody is fleeing to. And I would really like to make a plea for everybody to stop booking rooms in Ukraine because now it makes it almost impossible for refugees to find a place to stay overnight because everybody's been on Airbnb booking rooms. We talked to several people last night who said that they hadn't slept anywhere for several nights because they couldn't find any place to stay.

Western Ukraine continues to be mostly safe. They've hit some of the airports, but outside of that, it remains fairly stable and it is the No. 1 choice in terms of people trying to get refuge now.