Hello and welcome to the Friday episode of Battleground podcast with me Saul David and Roger Morehouse.

We're now three weeks into Ukraine's surprise invasion of Russia's

Kurskoblast, and there is no sign of Kiev's troops leaving or being forced out any time soon.

Yet one of the stated aims of the operation to force Russia to divert troops from eastern Ukraine

has not yet come to pass. Instead, Putin seems to be doubling down on his determination to take the

road and rail hub of Pekrovsk. He said of the Ukrainians on Monday, their calculation was to stop

our offensive action in key parts of the Dombas. The result is known. They did not achieve stopping

our advance in the Dombas. I suppose the question we need to ask today,

Roger, is will this high-stakes game of poker backfire on Putin? And does the loss of Pocrofts

matter in the broader scheme of things? Hysterical commentators in the Western press can't stop

describing the town as a strategic target as if its loss will fundamentally change the

course of the war. In my view, it won't, and it isn't any more than Bachmut was. Its fall will,

of course, allow Putin to crow about another minor victory, but at the cost of thousands

of men. Surely, sooner or later, the butcher's bill and the continued presence of the enemy on Russian soil

would come to haunt him, don't you think?

Well, you'd certainly hope that all of this will politically backfire on Putin at some point,

but one has to say, and we've said it many times, these meat grinder assaults are just a new

name for an age-old phenomenon, Russia's customary contempt for the lives

of its soldiers. They did similar things in the Second World War with the Red Army, as we well

know, and they did similar things with the Imperial Army in the First World War. Even at the time

of Peter the Great in the early 18th century, warfare with little concern for one's own losses

was often described as making war

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