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 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 Wollardar 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 sound 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 than that, though. Both of us have been around, Julius and I, covering every major war, I think, since the 1980s.

So we're going to reflect, too, on the current, rather alarming state of affairs that confronts us all.

But, Julius, let's start with the Zelensky visit, a pretty bitter outcome, really, I think,

to achieve with the president and indeed for Ukraine.

What actually happened?

Yeah, absolutely, Patrick.

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