Hello and welcome to the battleground podcast with me Saul David and Patrick Bishop.

Well, later we're going to hear from veteran war reporter Julius Strauss about the

conflict from the Russian perspective. But first, let's have a quick update from Kerskoblast in Russia,

where Ukraine's military operation enters its third week and amazingly is still advancing,

still gaining a little bit of ground. According to the Ukrainian commander-in-chief Colonel General

Alexander Sersky, his forces have advanced between 28 and 35 kilometers into Russian territory,

that's obviously more than 20 miles, and now control 93 settlements and 1,263 square kilometers. They are also, notes, Serski, pressuring Russian forces to

redeploy units from the front line in Ukraine, which is, of course, what we assume was one of the

drivers for the operation in the first place. The overall aim, says Sersky, echoing comments made

by President Zelensky earlier in the week,

is to establish a buffer zone in Russian territory to prevent Russian forces from shelling

Sumil blast and, too, as he put it, outpace the efforts of the Russian forces at large.

A third rationale, advanced by Zelensky, was to replenish our exchange fund, referring to the hundreds of Russians

taken prisoner in Kursk and now available to swap for some of the 8,000 Ukrainian POWs held in Russia.

Yes, and the Ukrainian general staff added a little more detail on Tuesday when they noted

that Ukrainian forces are exhausting the combat potential of Russian forces,

particularly, of course, in the Kersk Oblast. I think they're probably referring here to the

three bridges and several pontoons that were thrown up to replace the destroy bridges that

span the same river. This is a river running through Kursk Oblast.

They blew these up using American-Himar's rockets.

And the net result of that, of course, is to severely disrupt internal communications

with the added benefit of isolating up to 3,000 Russian troops who are now kind of trapped as things stand.

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