Hello and welcome to Battleground Ukraine with me, Patrick, Bishop and Saul David.

We're in a curious sort of limbo at the moment as the world awaits the outcome of what will

be one of the most momentous U.S. presidential elections in modern history.

But while Ukraine holds its breath, the killing goes on. Nothing it can do seems capable of

stopping or even slowing the relentless onslaught in the east of the country. We'll be looking at that in some detail

and asking whether Russia can keep on defying historical precedent and continue absorbing indefinitely

that Western intelligence successes are running at 1,200 a day.

But the picture for Kiev is not uniformly bleak. We'll also be talking about the Russian

home front where Putin has imposed a wartime economy ramping up massively the military

industrial productivity, but at what cost? There's a growing view among analysts and economists

that the current situation is unsustainable and that 2025 may be the year when the costs of war will at last

start to cause serious pain to ordinary Russians, creating political pressures that force Putin

to the negotiating table. The question we have to ask ourselves, though, Patrick, is of course

whether Ukraine can afford to wait that long. Well, that's precisely it, isn't it, Saul?

There's been a lot of excellent front-line reporting from the Donetsk region where the Russian

offensive has been riding away without cease.

And even after all this time, the Russian disregard for human life, their own as well as

those of the enemies, still has the power to shock.

I mentioned that figure of 1,200 casualties a day, which Western intelligence say

has been the norm for a couple of months now, which makes August and September the bloodiest

months of the war so far.

Well, what this translates to, in real terms, was spelled out in a fine piece by

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