When the Russia-Ukraine conflict erupted into full-scale war in 2022, things looked grim for Ukraine. Its capital, Kyiv, was under threat almost immediately, and there were questions about how long the smaller country could hold out, even with US support. More than four years later, however, the dynamic is changing. US military support has waned, but not only has Ukraine held its own in years of grinding, attritional fighting, it increasingly has Russia on the defensive.

According to Marcus Walker, who covers Ukraine as South Europe Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal, “it’s certainly possible for the smaller country to survive and have a chance of winning only because it is more nimble and and better at improvising and for large periods of the war has had the edge in terms of innovation.” 

Walker, who, last month, reported on how the war is beginning to shift against Russian President Vladimir Putin, talked with Today, Explained co-host Noel King to explain how Ukraine has held on this long — and how it’s successfully improvising on the battlefield to press its advantage.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, including how Ukraine has recently gained a new ally on the American right who has Trump’s ear. You can listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. 

You recently wrote that Ukraine has Russia on its back foot. How?

To understand what happened this year, we have to go back to the very beginnings of the war, which were in 2014 when Russia seized Crimea and the Eastern Donbas region in a smaller-scale war. And, at the time, Ukraine was a militarily weak country. Its army was pretty backward and had outdated equipment; although, it fought as hard as it could. The society was politically divided, especially over its relationship with Russia and with the West and with Europe. And Russia seems to have drawn the lesson that Ukraine would be a pushover when it launched its full scale invasion in 2022. And, at the time, now four and a half years ago, even most Western governments and intelligence services thought that Russia would win the war easily.

Instead, the very fact of Russian pressure on Ukraine had somehow welded Ukrainians together and created a stronger, more united society and state that shared — whatever the internal differences — at least the determination to have a country called Ukraine. And, in the meantime, they did a lot of reforms to their country and to their military. 

And so, when Russia launched a full scale invasion — thinking, “this will be easy,” — instead they found themselves in a full-scale war that they’ve been unable to win. On balance, Russia is really struggling to get any military result despite the investment of massive resources and the loss of incredible numbers of soldiers in trying to win this war. It just isn’t able to turn its advantage in numbers into victory. 

Right now, it’s hard to see Ukraine collapsing. However, Ukraine’s a long way from winning outright. And the outcome of this war is ultimately still open.

Ukraine must be doing something right on the battlefield. What is it doing right?

It has found ways to counteract Russia’s advantage in numbers, in manpower, and in equipment. And, above all, the asymmetric war that Ukraine has been fighting has come to rely heavily on drones, on its know-how, and on its skill at improvisation to develop a new form of drone warfare that other countries around the world have been trying to learn from, including the US military, including Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, and including other NATO countries in Europe — and, of course, the Russians, too. 

There is a constant arms race here in terms of drone technology and tactics. And both sides are now using incredible numbers of these often very tiny weapons — often 12 or 15 inches big with four little propellers — that can kill at ranges of 20 to 30 miles.

What is Ukraine using the drones to do, exactly?

They’re the most important tactical weapon at the front for killing Russian infantry. They are also using larger bomber drones with propellers or with wings to try and destroy Russian logistics, to blow up trucks transporting ammunition or other supplies on the supply roads far behind the front. They’re using long-range drones that can fly for a thousand miles or more to destroy Russian oil refineries deep inside Russia in an attempt to cut off the oil revenues that are vital for the Russian state and for Putin’s ability to finance the war. 

On the front line, drones are also doing all sorts of work that humans used to do, such as transporting ammunition, and food, and water to infantry soldiers on the front line. So, if you go to frontline areas now, or anywhere near them, you can see ground drones: little remote-control vehicles with big chunky wheels trundling along on their own with no human in sight. 

They also, for example, evacuate wounded Ukrainian soldiers. They will lie down on these ground drones and be ferried out, because that is better than having six men carry you out on a stretcher where, if you’re hit again, then you might have seven casualties.

How did Ukraine end up using drones in so many areas — and so successfully? Is this just weaponry evolving the way it tends to?

Obviously, in all wars, innovation happens very fast under the pressure of necessity. But there is something very particular about Ukraine. It is a country of people who like to improvise. It’s also a country with a large software sector, a large IT sector. And it’s a place where large parts of the military have a culture of, as we journalists sometimes put it, trying to MacGyver solutions. You take what you have, and you improvise. 

It so happened that the drone revolution started with consumer drones, the same kind of quadcopters that people were using to take pictures on holiday. And they worked out ways to attach a claw to them that can then drop a grenade or strap some explosives to it and crash the whole drone into a Russian vehicle. That was how it began at the start of this war in 2022. But, now, these things have become really a deadly fleet of flying killer robots that saturate the frontline area. 

Of course, the Russians are doing the same. So, on both sides of the front line, it has become extremely difficult and dangerous to move under a sky full of these killer robots.

I was reading this weekend that Ukraine has been using drones to target warehouses for this company called Wildberries. It’s kind of like Amazon for Russia. What’s the strategy there?

There are a couple of aspects to that. One is that Wildberries has also been selling a large amount of military gear, such as body armor or drone components. It’s more like an Amazon from which the soldiers can order a lot of gear to continue the war, so it is a way of disrupting military logistics. 

But, also, it strikes a blow to Russian civilian perceptions of the war, because, for years, Putin tried to tell the Russian population that this war is something happening far away, and it wouldn’t touch them directly. Now, it turns out that their equivalent of Amazon deliveries are not going to be arriving, because the warehouse burned down. 

At the same time, it’s a way of damaging the Russian economy, because Wildberries also owes a lot of money to banks. And so, if the company is in trouble, then it also causes trouble for the Russian banking system. And it hurts the tax revenues of the Russian government that pay for the war.

Is Russia showing evolution on the battlefield, as well?

Yes, they have. They have also come up with their own innovations. For example, in the last couple of years, since about 2024, they’ve been using large numbers of drones on fiber optic cables. That means the pilot that’s flying them is attached via a long thin plastic cable or fiber optic cable to a drone that carries a spool and is unspooling this cable as it flies. Now, what does that do? It means that electronic interference with the radio signal is no longer possible, because there is a physical connection between the pilot and the drone. So, that was an innovation that bypassed electronic warfare or the interception of the radio signal of the video feed that pilots need to fly their drones. 

They’ve had other innovations too. The Russians last year, for example, came up with a whole new class of medium-range drones — cheap, fixed-wing drones. The Ukrainians have now responded and made their own versions, which are better, but it really is a constant race of innovation and adaptation. And every time I come back and talk to military units here, everything’s changed. The tactics that worked last year no longer work. And the drones that work now didn’t exist three months ago.

Is there some possibility that Ukraine can win this war by not losing it?

Yes. Winning in war means achieving political war aims. And Ukraine’s aim is to survive as an independent nation state. It can do that. It can achieve that even if it loses currently about 20 percent of its territory that’s under Russian occupation. 

I think it’s hard to see how Russia can achieve its own central war aim, which was to reimpose political control over Ukraine to turn it into a kind of protectorate — really to take back control of the place that was once Russia’s largest colony. It’s very hard to see how the Russians can achieve that. The Russians seem to be counting on the West, on the US and the Europeans getting tired of supporting Ukraine, of sending financing and loans and weaponry. Putin seems to believe that, without this international support from the West, Kyiv won’t be able to carry this on forever.

Fermented food is the hottest new trend in the halls of the White House. Members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet are reportedly walking about with jars of sauerkraut in the hopes that it will give them glowing skin and tiny waists. 

Wall Street Journal’s Liz Essley Whyte told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram that “Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and Vice President JD Vance are all on this eat-a-lot-of-steak-and-sauerkraut diet.”

So, should we all be eating jars of sauerkraut? Or are ferments just the new Florsheims?

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Is there a name for this diet?

Kennedy calls it the carnivore diet. I think people mean different things when they say that, but for him, it includes a lot of yogurt, a lot of kimchi or sauerkraut, a lot of steak, a lot of eggs. Kennedy now travels with sauerkraut. His wife has said that he has asked her to carry it in her purse for him, and she has said, “I actually cannot,” which is an amazing phrase. It seems they all think their skin is glowing, and people online have commented that JD Vance is looking good.

Are we sure it’s not Wegovy?

We don’t have any public knowledge of that, but we do know that he is eating eggs, sauerkraut, pickles, blackberries, and raspberries for lunch pretty often — and beef and lamb with sauerkraut for dinner. Then, when he’s on Air Force Two, he snacks on beef jerky and maybe eats a hamburger with cheese, no bun, and a side of fermented vegetables.

Now that you’re mentioning the full spectrum of JD Vance’s diet, it’s kind of reminding me of their new food pyramid. Is this part of that?

Earlier this year, Kennedy and the other health officials like to say they flipped the food pyramid. They recommended a lot more fruits and vegetables, red meat — which was controversial — and whole grains, and whole milk, that kind of thing. They also, and for the first time in the nation’s dietary guidelines, recommended fermented foods, which was something that was actually agreed upon by a lot of people, and they thought that was a good part of this, even if they had qualms about the red meat recommendations, because those can introduce more cardiac risk and risk of bad cholesterol.

How widespread is this in the White House? Does it go up all the way to the top, to the president?

Given what we have seen of his recent public dieting, I don’t think so. At the Knicks game, he was eating pizza and french fries, and, you know, he still has his Diet Coke button on his desk where he just pushes it and a Diet Coke comes. Kennedy said, once said on a podcast about him, “I don’t know how he’s alive.” 

Does the science back this up, or is this some kind of quackery that ferments can make your skin healthier and help you lose weight?

I don’t think there are a lot of good studies that show exactly that sauerkraut can help you lose weight, but there have been a number of studies that have shown health benefits. Researchers have generally agreed that sauerkraut and other fermented foods can help with digestion and inflammation. There was a 2025 study from UC Davis that suggested fermented cabbage could protect your gut and protect against illness. Basically, they found that the intestinal cells do better with sauerkraut. They help maintain the integrity of those intestinal cells. And, in general, that has a lot of other good health effects. Mainstream scientists, dieticians, are pro-fermented veggies. This is not something that is hotly debated.

Most people in the scientific community are realizing there’s a lot of good fresh science out there about how important your gut really is in your overall health. The part of the diet that is a little more controversial is the focus on red meat. Obviously, that comes with some cardiac risk and some cholesterol risk. That is why when the new dietary guidelines came out and recommended more of that for Americans, that part, in particular, made some dietitians a little upset.

Do you think fermented foods could help people with this parasite that gives you explosive diarrhea?

I personally have not seen any studies on whether fermented foods help with explosive diarrhea, but let me know if you find one.

There’s a new kind of influencer making the rounds on TikTok and Instagram: the loneliness influencer. Most of these influencers are young women, and “loneliness” might be a slight misnomer. They claim they aren’t lonely, simply alone — no friends, no family, no kids. And they prefer it that way.

“I really wanted to convey a normal life of somebody that doesn’t have this big, great, fun social life,” one influencer, Lana Isa, told Vox. “Like, what does a life look like as someone that doesn’t really have this great big social life, is not really interested in dating and generally prefers nights in? If you were to watch a Friday night in my life, you’d essentially just watch a girl enjoying her peace.”

Isa, and influencers like her, are just one representation of a larger trend, though. The Atlantic’s Faith Hill, who recently wrote a story titled “The Strange Appeal of the Solitude Influencer,” told Today, Explained co-host Noel King that, even though you mostly hear about young men facing a loneliness epidemic, women are having a hard time, too.

“If you actually look at some of these statistics, young women are struggling a lot on a lot of these measures, and, in some cases, more than young men,” Hill said.

Hill spoke with Noel about what’s going on with young women, how their crisis looks different from men’s, and why they’re covered differently.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

In the first half of the show, we talked to a young woman who has made a name for herself as a loneliness influencer. What do you think is going on here?

My first impulse when I heard about this genre of video that people are watching is that there’s a lot of people spending a ton of time alone.

We’ve heard a lot of people talk about the loneliness epidemic, so I thought people were getting social connection through these videos from a safe distance, rather than spending time in person with people. Maybe there’s some of that going on. But, I also realized, as I was looking through these videos and reading all the comments, that a lot of the people commenting seemed to have a lot going on in their lives socially, so much so that they were busy, and exhausted, and burned out.

For some people, the appeal was actually in the fantasy of it, in the way that some people would look at influencers posting about these fabulous, exotic vacations they can’t afford to take. People have a very complicated relationship to solitude. People are working long hours. A lot of people [are] taking care of family members without much help. Many people are sort of torn between these needs for social connection and solitude.

Does that mean that this is, perhaps, not as sad as it appears on its face?

I don’t think it’s all sad. My heart goes out to people who are needing more solitude, as well as more social connection. Most people probably don’t have the perfect balance, and I can relate to that myself. I feel like I either have too many plans or not enough.

It’s not necessarily all happy, but it doesn’t mean that there are just so many people out there who are only getting social connection through these videos. I think there’s something a little more complicated going on.

We’ve all heard about the male loneliness crisis. You wrote a very interesting piece that basically said, actually, women are in crisis, as well.

I’ve just been hearing so much about men, and especially young men, being in crisis. I think there’s a lot of reasons we should take that seriously, and I do. But I felt like in those conversations, young women were kind of being flattened into a comparison point where, instead of people talking about how on some measures young men are struggling more than they used to, it got twisted into “young men are struggling more than women.”

There’s this image of the thriving girlboss, the one who is going to college, graduating college, entering the workforce on these conventional measures of success, doing so well. But if you actually look at some of these statistics, young women are struggling a lot on a lot of these measures, and in some cases, more than young men. And so, I don’t think it needs to be a suffering competition, but I did think part of the story was not coming through.

In what ways are women struggling?

Women have, for a long time, reported depression and anxiety at higher rates than men. That is getting worse. It seems like mental health on a lot of different measures — different kinds of stress and distress and suicidality — young women are reporting that at higher and higher rates. It turns out that women actually attempt suicide at higher rates than men do, on average. And the reason that more men die of suicide is that they’re more likely to use lethal means such as firearms.

A lot of times this conversation really revolves around college attendance rates, and women are attending and graduating college at higher rates than men. But a woman with a bachelor’s degree still makes less than a man with a bachelor’s degree on average, even within the same field of study.

When I talk to people for this story, researchers and therapists, I heard that a lot of young women are in for a rude awakening when they graduate from school. They’ve been in this bubble where they did feel like they could grow and thrive and they were taken seriously. And then, you go out into the real world, where sexism is still very real, and a lot of women are working in workplaces where they realize they’re not taken as seriously, or the people around them who are in positions of power are all men. That’s a difficult realization.

Why, if women and men are both in crisis, did men pull focus?

Women, as an overall population, tend to be a fairly high-functioning one in this narrative. I talked to someone who had trained as a medical sociologist, and she told me a saying that they used to use in this field was, ‘Men die quicker, but women are sicker.’

Women are more likely to endure a lot of chronic illnesses and to sort of soldier on with their pain unnoticed. And we might not be taking that as seriously, because the idea that women are struggling isn’t necessarily a new one or a super surprising one to a lot of people. I think men having a hard time is more of a news story, and we have become, perhaps, kind of inert to women’s distress in this way.

I wonder, as you found yourself covering this, where do you find the hope here?

I am heartened that we’re talking about [young adults] a lot. There’s been a lot of concern lately about Gen Z, and a lot of what we’re talking about when we talk about young men struggling also applies to young women, so we’re onto some of the right things.

I wrote another piece about young adulthood a while back that was really about the idea that young adulthood actually is a really hard developmental phase. And when I published that article, I think for a lot of readers, it seemed to be somewhat of a surprise that young adults are struggling, too. Even just since I’ve written that, people have talked more about young adults struggling. So I do think people are starting to take that seriously and understand that this is an age group that might need help.