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Apply with £100,000 annual income or £100,000 savings or investments with HSBC UK or Premier status abroad. Hello and welcome to the Battleground Ukraine podcast Big Interview.

I'm flying solo this week as Saul is away.

And my guest is an old friend of the podcast, author and journalist Colin Freeman.

As well as writing great books, Colin is, to my mind, one of the finest

foreign correspondents around a veteran of numerous wars, whose adventures include being shot

in the backside in Iraq and kidnapped by Somali pirates. He's currently reporting from

Ukraine for my old paper, The Telegraph, as he's been doing since the start of the current war,

and he's now down

in the Donetsk region. Colin, welcome back to the show, and thanks so much for taking the time

out of your hectic schedule to talk to us. Before we go on to the offensive and what you're

seeing down on the front lines now, I understand you've also recently been up in the border near

Belgarob, which of course is the area where Ukrainian-backed Russian units have been operating

inside Russian territory. Can you tell us what's going on there? Who are these guys? What are

they up to? Yes, Patrick, so. Just had a bit of background noise there. The units that have been doing the cross-border incursions into Belgarod

are primarily groups of Russian nationalists.

There's essentially two groups of them, one called the Russian Volunteer Corps,

and the other one called the Free Russia Corps.

And they include a number of fairly unsavory characters, some of whom are often labeled

...