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All they want to do is Kill Zelensky. He is the number one target of the entire Russian machine.

Real Ukrainians are basically saying, look, we've come to the conclusion

that Trump is on Putin's side. Despite the fact that the US has done almost everything conceivable

to weaken the Ukrainian side, actually they've been proved completely wrong. Ukraine now seems to be

almost in a stronger position than we thought it was in six months ago. You're walking around

the place and it's fine and people are just getting around their

business and then suddenly someone will point out to you the top of a building that you just

walk by that has been completely cratered and they'll tell you that some kids got killed

there. The optimism and the sense of national pride is really, really powerful. It's moving

because you feel it every time you talk to anybody.

Welcome to The Rest of Politics with me, Rory Stewart. And with me, Alistair Campbell. And Alistair, you are in Ukraine in a hotel room in Kiev. Last time I spoke to you,

which was Sunday morning, you were in Poland. And you're there right on the anniversary,

the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, speaking, as it were, from the ground. So tell us,

how did you get there? What's going on? Well, we've just come back from the Maidan, where

President Zelensky was leading an event, really moving event, actually, right in the square where all the flags and the pictures that you've seen on television of soldiers who've been killed in the last four years.

And, yeah, I was in Poland the last time I spoke to you.

We were invited to come with Marta Koss, who is the brilliant, I mean, really extraordinary

Commissioner for Enlargement at the European Union. And it is quite a journey. You have to

get to Warsaw, then get driven through some very, very flat countryside, kept looking for a tree

of the day and I couldn't quite get the quality. And then you get taken to this railway station in the middle of nowhere, get onto a sleeper train,

12 hours on the train.

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