Thank you for listening to the RESTISPolitics for ad-free listening, early access to episodes, membership to our chat community.

Please sign up at theRESTISPolitics.com or if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, you can subscribe within the app in just a few clicks.

Welcome to the RESTISPolitics with me, Rory Stewart and me, Alistair Campbell.

And as a lot to get through today, we're going to begin, of course, with Russia Ukraine because we're right in the aftermath of this mutiny by the Wagner group.

Then we're going to talk about Boris Johnson's relationship with Russia and in particular with a man called Lord Lebedev.

Then we're going to talk about interest rates and what's happening in the British economy.

And then we're going to talk a little bit about Southeast Asia and what's happening in Southeast Asia and region we haven't studied much. But where would you like to begin?

Well, let's start with you're a Wagner man and I'm a Wagner man.

But yes, it's a funny one that I mean, obviously the German composers call Wagner.

But for some reason, a lot of the Russian analysts that I talked to call it Wagner. So I'll need to get to the bottom of this.

Well, it's probably because they've named it. Is it not named after Wagner?

Well, there's a lot of nobody will say. So neither, neither it's founder nor its owner is prepared to say what it's named after and why it's called that.

It might just be a set of letters if I have nothing to do with the great the great somewhat right wing musician.

Now, yeah, well, you said when we did the emergency podcast at the weekend, you said some inquiries.

You said this could turn out to be sort of fizzle out in no time.

I think we were talking days or it could become a major turning point in the whole conflict.

I mean, at the moment, it looks like fizzle out. But at the same time, listening to people like Alex Younger,

the head of former head of MI6 and listening to Secretary of State Tony Blinken yesterday and other analysts,

they seem to be thinking it's like it may, if not a turning point, quite a big moment in the decline of pewter.

It's unbelievable, isn't it? So just to remind listeners very quickly what happened since our emergency podcast.

So, Pregozion got quite a long way or at least his people got surprisingly long way up the road towards Moscow.

Of the M4.

...