320. Peace Falters, Tariffs Bite, and Ukraine's New Weapon
Battleground
Goalhanger
4.5 • 820 Ratings
🗓️ 29 August 2025
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on Battleground, Saul David and Patrick Bishop analyse why recent diplomatic summits have failed to move the needle on peace in Ukraine.
They also discuss two surprising developments: new details about a potential US security commitment to a post-war Ukraine, and the US imposition of heavy tariffs on India to punish it for buying Russian oil. With the tariffs already devastating key Indian industries.
On the ground, a Russian breakthrough near Dobropillya has been contained, but new reports confirm a Russian advance into the Dnipropetrovsk region. Meanwhile, Ukraine continues to hit Russian targets with long-range drone strikes and has unveiled a new, powerful cruise missile, the "Flamingo FP-5," with a 3,000 km range.
Finally, in a new segment with the Centre for Information Resilience, the hosts report that Russian drone activity has effectively cut off a key highway, raising fears of a "drone siege" on the city of Kherson.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the battleground podcast with me Saul David and Patrick Bishop. |
| 0:17.9 | Well, in the wake of the shameful climbdown that was the Trump-Putin-Alaska summit, |
| 0:22.4 | followed by Trump's cordial, if unsubstantive, meeting with Zelensky and a cohort of European |
| 0:28.2 | leaders in Washington, D.C. I think I can confidently say, Patrick, we're no closer to peace in Ukraine, |
| 0:34.7 | or even a ceasefire than we were before the events of last week. How do I know |
| 0:39.4 | this? Because the Russian posturing since has been particularly belligerent. Take, for example, |
| 0:45.6 | Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov's interview with the NBC this week, at which he reiterated |
| 0:51.7 | that Russia views NATO expansion and the alleged violation of Russian security interests |
| 0:57.1 | as one of the root causes of the war. Lava went on to claim that Russia will achieve its war aims, |
| 1:03.0 | which he listed as the removal of security threats to Russia coming from the Ukrainian territory, |
| 1:08.3 | the protection of the rights of ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking people |
| 1:11.8 | who believe they belong to the Russian culture and Russian history and Ukrainian neutrality. |
| 1:18.3 | He went on to claim that Ukraine has the right to exist, but only as long as it lets go of |
| 1:23.3 | ethnic Russians and Russian speakers who decided that they belong to Russian culture. So it's not |
| 1:30.1 | exactly placatory, is it, Patrick? And it doesn't fill me with confidence that Trump's |
| 1:35.1 | spade work in Alaska is about to produce a deal. No, that's absolutely right, Saul. I think there's |
| 1:40.8 | several things going on here. One is that I think the Americans have decided |
| 1:45.2 | that there's nothing much to be gained from pushing this forward. They've got a lot in their |
| 1:51.1 | plate at the moment, all sorts of things going on on the international states, let alone on the |
| 1:55.8 | domestic front. So the impression you get from the Americans from the White House is that they're just going to keep pretending there's forward momentum. |
| 2:05.3 | I'm thinking particularly of the interview that J.D. Vance gave the other day, I think it was yesterday, in which he said that far from Russia stringing America and President Trump along, things were actually moving. The Russians |
| 2:19.9 | have made significant concessions, peace bestore possible in Ukraine, and really kind of denying |
... |
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