Hello and welcome to battleground in Ukraine with me Patrick Bishop and Saul David.

It's been another momentous week in global affairs that began with the astonishing

news on the weekend that on Donald Trump's orders, US Special Forces had captured the

Venezuelan leader Nicholas Maduro and his wife Celia Flores in Caracas and hauled them off

to New York where they were indicted on drug trafficking charges.

Inevitably, in this joined-up world where interests and power are so intimately intermeshed,

this is going to have big possible consequences for our focus of interest, Ukraine.

And a lot more besides, isn't that right, Saul?

Yeah, I mean, just consider this, Patrick. Venezuela is a fully paid up member of what

Roger Boyes in the Times calls a liberal international. And that's the club of autocratic

sanction-busting states that work together to restrict American influence in their respective

regions. It includes, of course,

China, North Korea, Iran and Russia. So by this calculation, the seizure of Maduro, a Russian ally, is not

good news for Putin, not least because it's yet another example of how feeble are the Russian air

defences deployed by the Venezuelans.

US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegeseth made a mocking reference to this

during a visit to a shipyard in Virginia earlier this week,

saying those Russian air defenses didn't work quite so well, did they?

Question mark.

But then we already knew that, didn't we, Patrick, by the ease with which they were

suppressed, that is, the Russian supplied air defences were suppressed by Israeli and US missiles

and planes during the recent strikes in Iran. Yeah, I mean, there's all evidence out there that,

...