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Apply with £100,000 annual income or £100,000 savings or investments with HSBC UK or Premier status abroad. Hello. Hello and welcome back to Battlefield Ukraine with me Patrick Bishop and Saul David.

Well, against earlier predictions, the onset of winter has not done much to slow the tempo of the war,

either on the battlefield or the home front,

with intensive fighting continuing to rage around Bachmut in the Donetsk and Putin persevering

with his campaign to freeze Ukrainian civilians into submission. The failure of the Russians to deliver

anything that can be called a victory is creating problems for Putin at home.

One area it's really hard to get a handle on is the fluctuations of Russian domestic opinion,

which is why we're very lucky this week to have spoken to Dr. Ilya Yablakov of Sheffield University.

Ilya is a Russian himself and an expert in Russian information strategy, which has been,

of course, a big part of the war. He will be telling us all about that, as well as painting a very

dramatic and alarming picture of what may be coming next in Russia. But first of all, let's talk a bit

about the fighting and in particular battle around the city of Bachmutt.

This has been pretty underreported, but it's been going on for months and it shows no signs of abating.

Reporters who've been down there recently paint a picture of a sort of 21st century Verdun with imagery of muddy trenches,

constant artillery bombardments and landscapes utterly destroyed. So you've got this sort of sea of mud with tree stumps sticking out, rather

like a sort of Paul Nash painting from the Western Front in the First World War.

What's going on this? Well, it seems to me that Batwood's strategic

value to the Russians is pretty limited. And you look at the map, it's not really near anywhere.

...