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entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. Hello and welcome to Battleground with me, Patrick Bishop, no Saul David this week. He's on his travels.

Filling his shoes, his great friend of the podcast, Julius Strauss, who listeners will know well from his thoughtful analysis

and reporting from the ground in Ukraine in many appearances on the podcast. And you can also

hear his thoughts on his brilliant substack back to the front. We'll be talking, of course, about

Ukraine, and in particular the fallout from President Zelensky's deeply disappointing visit to talk to world

leaders at the UN and the outgoing US President Joe Biden. But today we've also heard the grim

news that after two and a half years, the Ukrainian strongholder Boolodar in the Donetsk region

has fallen to the Russian offensive.

But the world's attention is focused at the moment on Israel, Lebanon, and his Bala,

and of course further afield now Iran.

Now, listeners, I would ask you to remember that we're recording this on Wednesday evening.

A lot can happen between now and when the pod drops on Friday.

So do bear that in mind if we sat a little bit behind the curve on some of the things we're talking about.

The world never stands still, does it?

And these days, any big event inevitably impacts on others.

So we'll be talking at length about how the deepening conflagration

in the Middle East will impact the Russia-Ukraine conflict. We're going to go a bit further

...