Hello and welcome to Outragean Optimism, I'm Tom Rifickarnak.

I'm Cristiana Fijeres.

And I'm Paul Dickinson.

This week we discuss the deeply concerning events unfolding in Ukraine as a result of

Russian aggression and ask the questions about the interlinkages between defence and climate

change.

We speak to two former Foreign Secretary of the UK, William Hague and David Malaband.

Thanks for being here.

So as all listeners will be aware, we are in the midst of an unfolding, deeply concerning

series of events that are happening right now in Ukraine with the remarkable defence

of the country that has been mounted by the President and by the people in the face

of ongoing Russian aggression.

Now obviously this is a source of great concern to all of us and the potential of escalation

is something that every human in the world should be concerned about and in no way are

we trying to distract from the immediacy of this issue but at the same time, many people

have made the point that this conflict is deeply connected to climate change, it's deeply

connected to the fossil fuel industry.

And that's what we wanted to explore this week.

So I don't know if either of you would like to come in with a comment and then we'll

go to our discussions with our two guests and we will come back afterwards for some analysis.

Well my only comment to that Tom is just to make clear that this is not contrary to other

bellicose situations that we've had.

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