00:04:14 - 00:08:24
Kassandra
Hey everyone! It's another episode of the deaf in your ears and in your eyes.
10:00:09:00 - 10:00:09:22
Kassandra
I'm Kassandra
00:10:02 - 00:18:10
Daniel
and I'm Daniel, and it is the Q and A edition, which means that we answer your questions and put them to the expert and our global network of correspondents.
00:18:15 - 00:24:19
Kassandra
We're kicking it off with Ukraine's economy. It was in reply to one of our episodes on Russia.
00:24:21 - 00:47:05
Daniel
That's right. So reckless abandon Z left a comment, and I think that Z might tell you a little bit about where this contest loyalties lie. And they say, Does Ukraine even have an economy or just depend on the largesse of other countries? With Brexit and replying Ukraine has no economy, they are totally propped up by foreign money. Funny how W never mentions that.
00:47:07 - 01:06:07
Kassandra
It's a little funny to me how sometimes a lot of these hater comments don't seem to actually watch any of our videos or really engage with the content content, but honestly, I love an opportunity to mythbuster and fact check. So I'm just going to take this one and run with it, because we actually put the question to our correspondent in Kiev, Rebecca Ritter's.
01:06:09 - 01:33:09
Rebecca Ritters
Hi from the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, where I can confirm, yes, Ukraine certainly does have its own economy, one that, though imperfect, was already functioning well before Russia invaded in 2022. Global financial organizations like the world Bank, the IMF, they say, yes, okay, the economy here is under immense pressure and strain, but it is alive with a GDP of around 190 billion USD in 2024.
01:33:14 - 01:56:16
Rebecca Ritters
Now, that's still below pre-war levels, but it's around the same level as countries like Hungary or Qatar. Okay, keeping in mind those countries are much smaller, but $190 billion nonetheless. Now the economy is still going despite the war. You've got farmers who are growing and exporting grain, you've got factories that are still functioning, you've got the tech sector that is still growing and growing.
01:56:16 - 02:14:07
Rebecca Ritters
And if you've been asleep for the last four years, say, and you were parachuted into somewhere like Kiev or another city across the country, you could be forgiven for at least a short while, not realizing that there was a war on at all. You know, shops are open, cafes are full. People are out and about on their way to work.
02:14:07 - 02:39:11
Rebecca Ritters
All helping to keep that economy ticking over. But of course, the war has taken an incredible toll on the economy, and the war is very expensive. Nearly all of Ukraine's domestic revenue goes towards the war effort, making up about 50% of the overall budget. That leaves a huge shortfall that needs to be filled by foreign aid. Most of the foreign aid goes towards Ukraine's civilian government costs like pensions and health care.
02:39:17 - 02:59:01
Rebecca Ritters
So in short, Ukraine does have its own economy. It's battered, but it is functioning. But for now and for some time to come, it will be dependent on that financial lifeline from its allies as it continues to try to fight this war and keep the economy going. At the same time.
02:59:03 - 03:06:02
Kassandra
Thanks to Rebecca for that answer. And now to China. It's another place that whenever we cover it, we get a ton of comments.
03:06:04 - 03:21:12
Daniel
That's right. And this one from Manda Santoso, it says, how come if it's the US who does it first, it's countermeasures. But when China does it in retaliation, it's a provocative act. Should China just stay silent and accept whatever the US does without doing anything?
03:21:14 - 03:25:16
Kassandra
Well, we put that question to DW's China analyst Clifford Coonan.
03:25:18 - 03:54:22
Clifford Coonan
A lot of this is a question of controlling the narrative. When trade talks about how it's a how China likes to present itself as this patient, benign, country that that is acting very reasonably, whereas the, the U.S. is everything is being portrayed by. We have Trump as a figurehead who's a firebrand who seems impulsive, who's attacking friend and foe, the like friend and foe alike with, with trade tariffs.
03:54:24 - 04:18:13
Clifford Coonan
But actually, what's happening in terms of the tariffs on China are things that probably should have happened over the last three decades. There should have been more pressure on China to reform since to since it joined the the World Trade Organization in 2001, which didn't happen because a lot of people did very well out of China's rise by getting cheap goods made in China.
04:18:15 - 04:52:09
Clifford Coonan
And all that that entailed. But now that the economic model in China is changing, and China is competing directly with Western countries, it has an unfair advantage that it's built up over decades with industrial policy, with the fact that it can subsidize its industries, whereas Western companies can't compete with them. So if it had been done in a measured way over the three decades, and if China had been made to follow world trade standards more closely over that period, you might have a more equal situation.
04:52:09 - 05:27:20
Clifford Coonan
But as it is now, China has built up this incredible economic strength, while still having a, an economic model that allows to it to trade and to export its goods into the West, at prices that with which Western countries can't compete. And so while Trump's style does annoy people, a lot of people in trade on both sides, on all sides of the spectrum believe that, that he possibly has a point in trying to to, tamp down Chinese growth in particularly on exports.
05:27:22 - 05:52:13
Clifford Coonan
So in that respect, a lot of what you're seeing then is a question of style, you know, that the, the fact that, China plays, plays itself as a wounded party. And, Trump portrays this very aggressive figure. And so, as to whether China should stay silent and accept what the U.S. is doing without doing anything, it's not going to do that.
05:52:15 - 06:06:13
Clifford Coonan
Obviously. But it does like to portray itself as a wounded party. And I think what I'd say to that is that it if you look at it quite closely, it's actually much more of a clever negotiating tactic than it is anything else.
06:06:15 - 06:14:22
Daniel
Clifford Coonan there. Thank you very much, for doing that for us, Clifford, for answering our viewer question. Plenty of food for thought.
06:14:24 - 06:41:16
Kassandra
That's right. And it's interesting here. Right. Because the US has always exported norms as easily as some of these US companies now are exporting movies and TV shows. So they're used to packaging their power in a way that the world can easily recognize and shaping the way actions are perceived before they're even really analyzed. Right. But the question here is whether China is communicating with the West, or whether it's in fact just communicating with its own people.
06:41:16 - 06:58:00
Kassandra
It's really not really actually about packaging its message in a way that the world can maybe absorb without fear, so to speak. Maybe it just isn't about communicating to the rest of the world at all. Then, of course, in Washington, every reaction from China does seem to be seen as an escalation.
06:58:02 - 07:15:03
Daniel
That's right. And sometimes it is an escalation as well. And the fact is that it looks like the US has been playing a kind of good cop bad cop game recently. We saw Donald Trump supposedly reaching out an olive branch, though some people say that was trolling, basically saying, no, we love that. We love China. We want a good relations with them.
07:15:05 - 07:38:22
Daniel
But then Scott Besson, Treasury secretary, saying, no, China is is doing this just to be an aggressor and it just wants to be in control of everything like that. Something that we just discussed in detail with, Rick last week and. Yeah, I mean, it's it's it's one of these things where people from the kind of Western perspective of assume that they are playing the same kind of linguistic communication strategy as the US is.
07:38:22 - 07:57:19
Daniel
But I think what you said is important that actually they could be talking. It kind of cross-purposes here, while at the same time, following this kind of strategy of at one time reconciliation and another time aggression. Right. And I think that's why we're, we're ending up with this kind of to and fro that you often see playing out in the news media.
07:57:24 - 08:05:06
Kassandra
Right. And another thing we spoke about last week with cybersecurity and you all got in touch with us with the following question.
08:05:08 - 08:21:07
Daniel
F Tuc's 1915. Terrible. Yeah. But anyway, which I'll continue says about cyber attacks, the crucial point is critical infrastructure. There has been a huge fuss about this for years, and now we are seeing a single point of failure. How can this be?
08:21:09 - 08:38:06
Kassandra
It's a great question and we did put it to an expert, James Andrew Lewis. He's a senior advisor at the center for Strategic and International Studies. And so we wanted to know why are we seeing single point of failure that leads to attacks having a large impact on businesses and economies?
08:38:08 - 09:06:02
James Andrew Lewis
Critical infrastructure has been a focus for cyber security, really for decades. And the problem is that the pace of change in network technology and digital technology is too fast for the rules to keep up. There's basic things you can do, like multifactor authentication, like having cloud redundancy. A lot of companies haven't done that. You have to do those things, though, because you're never going to be able to make a perfect defense.
09:06:04 - 09:28:16
James Andrew Lewis
And so think of this as a very complex machine that people didn't always think about security when they built it. And so that's why there's single point of failure. We don't necessarily know what they are, but cyber criminals, their whole day is spent looking for these single point points of failure. And unfortunately, there are enough of them that they're always going to find one.
09:28:16 - 09:37:02
James Andrew Lewis
So it's just think of a very complex machine that wasn't built with security in mind, and now we have to fix it.
09:37:04 - 09:49:09
Daniel
Yeah, that's a great answer from James there. A fascinating conversation. I think everyone should check out our previous episode. If you want to get into depth on cyber security with James. What do you make of it?
09:49:11 - 10:07:20
Kassandra
Yeah, it's interesting the way that the cyber security industry is mirroring a lot of other industries in the sense that we're seeing a lot of consolidation. What's interesting here, though, is that you have, for example, a few companies that, do have the firepower to invest in good protection, and they show their trustworthiness, and then everybody flocks to them, right?
10:08:01 - 10:30:04
Kassandra
And they become the big players. And then each time a cybersecurity company makes a major mistake, their reputation is kind of dragged through the mud. And we talked a little bit, with James about this last week. You see other companies, gather some of those clients, pick up the people who maybe don't trust company anymore, but then the risk in the end, when you step back and look at it, it's really concentrated among those few players.
10:30:06 - 10:42:00
Daniel
Yeah, this concentration could be quite dangerous. I mean, this is when it comes to this kind of single point of failure that could occur when you just have a few, companies who are being entrusted with the cybersecurity of big companies.
10:42:00 - 10:42:24
Kassandra
Well, industries. Yeah.
10:42:24 - 11:12:05
Daniel
And government departments. I mean, like the US Energy Agency and, its involvement with the nuclear power plants and those back on all of this. I mean, we have to if we treat cyber security as a purely defensive cost, then we lose. I mean, the leverage lies in redesigning system so that attacks no longer scale. Right? And this comes back to the idea that you could theoretically break into a system once and infect millions of computers.
11:12:07 - 11:29:15
Daniel
It's getting more difficult to do that just because, a lot of these big companies are finding the the holes to plug as they come along. They do have the deep pockets to pay bug bounties, for example. That's why you pay a hacker to, on purpose, hack into a system and then say, we're going to give you $2 million.
11:29:15 - 11:31:13
Daniel
If you tell us about the vulnerabilities that you...
11:31:14 - 11:33:02
Kassandra
Kind of like White Knight hackers.
11:33:02 - 11:59:04
Daniel
Exactly, exactly. And so the the issue is that when these are still concentrated in those big firms, while they do have the deep pockets to do that, if any of those companies like let's say Microsoft gets hacked, then that is a big kind of concentration of the scale. And therefore the scope of a potential breach. And so in other words, we need to re-architect digital infrastructure to have the resilience built in.
11:59:04 - 12:17:11
Daniel
And that's very difficult with these kinds of concentrations that you just mentioned. And what's clear from James's answer is that, you know, doing less than what we're doing now or continuing doing it slowly in terms of building our defenses against cyber attacks. Right. It's it's just no longer an option, right?
12:17:13 - 12:33:01
Kassandra
It's a lot to digest there. And some of it is admittedly nightmare fuel. But if you have nightmare fuel questions for us, please leave a question or a comment under this video, and we're going to be sure to take a look at it. And of course, if you have an email question, you can email us at the dep@dw.com.
12:33:03 - 12:43:20
Daniel
And we'll be back with much more. From the world of business and finance and trade and economy on Friday, because we'll be back with another edition of The Dead. Bye for now.