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Yeah. Hello and welcome to the battleground Ukraine big interview with me, Patrick Bishop and Saul David.

Our guest this week is Julius Strauss. He's an old favourite of the podcast. He's been on several times.

Julius, of course, is a former journalist. He's also the proprietor of a wonderful wild bear watching lodge in British Columbia, Wild Bear Lodge, it's called. And he's the author of two fantastic

blogs. One's called Back to the Front about his travels when he's not at the lodge.

And the other is about his time there, barely surviving, both highly recommended.

And Julius has just been in Ukraine, visiting all parts of the country from Leviv in the west to Kupiansk, in the east, right up against the

front lines there. He spoke to a lot of people. He's made a lot of interesting observations.

We started off by asking him how he felt the character of Ukraine had changed as a result of the war

from what he'd gleaned on his journey.

Julius, welcome back to the podcast.

Thank you very much indeed for talking to us.

You've been on your travels again in and around Ukraine.

Can you start off just by telling us where you've been and what you saw?

Yeah.

So I haven't been back to Ukraine for two months.

I came back and I was very curious to know how things had changed and also to go to some places that I hadn't been before.

I had only been briefly before. So I started off in Leviv. I wanted to get a little bit of a sense

of history in Ukraine because we kind of come out with these truisms, if you like, that

you know, Lviv is the center of Ukrainian identity and that sort of thing. We tend to sort of take

...