Hello history friends, Zach Twomley here. I was going to carry on as normal and just pretend that

that Ukrainian elephant in the room doesn't exist. But yeah, a war in 2022 between Russia and Ukraine.

Putin is a complete and utter bell-end. I think that was obvious at this point, but jeepers, it's

super obvious now. but there are reasons

to be positive too. Yes, diplomacy failed largely because Putin didn't want it to succeed in the

first place, despite what some people may claim about NATO and that kind of thing. If you're in any

doubt as to what Putin actually believes, make sure you check out that hour-long speech that he wrote himself,

wherein he rambles incoherently about, basically, Ukraine not having a right to exist.

If that doesn't spell out exactly where he stands and exactly why this thing is happening,

then nothing will. I have been asked by a lot of people to cover this incident in more detail, and I'm going to.

I'm going to in the next few days. There will be an episode about this at the end of the week.

I held off for a while because I wasn't sure how things were going to turn out, but now that it

seems as though it's stabilising, and I don't want to be too optimistic in that

respect, but it does seem like the world's pulling together and doing the right thing, and that's

really honestly very reassuring, because I don't know about you, but things seemed really dark

for a while there, and it seemed like evil was going to prevail and thankfully that has not happened and oh boy

people are now discovering what i learned two years ago when i went there in a random trip to

ukraine ukraine is awesome ukrainians are brilliant they are proudly patriotic and they won't stand

for this crap so today we're not going to really change up our formula or anything.

We're just going to carry on with the episode as normal. And hopefully as we do, you can take a little

bit of a break from the very intense news cycle that's out at the moment. Hello to my Ukrainian

listeners out there. Keep up the good fight.

...