Hello, this is Saul David from the Battleground Ukraine podcast, and this is just a quick insert to explain that the following big interview with Alan Philps was recorded

before the Wagner Mutiny. It's important to say that all those events took place before

Alan had a chance to discuss the wider issues. Having said all of that, I think it's pretty clear

that his insight into Russia and also the senior military leadership is pretty much on the mark.

Hello and welcome to the Battleground Ukraine podcast, Big Interview, with me, Patrick Bishop and Saul David.

Our guest this week is Alan Phillips, author, veteran foreign correspondent,

and Russian expert who first visited the Soviet Union as a teenager. He spent many years in

Moscow as a correspondent for Reuters and the Daily Telegraph and is the author of a new book,

which looks at the history of some of his predecessors as they tried to cover the Second World War

from the heavily restricted confines of the luxurious, at least by Soviet standards, Metropolitan Hotel.

It's called the Red Hotel, and it's a must read for anyone wanting a highly entertaining

and illuminating account of how the Russian has tried to control the narrative back then

and what it says about their information strategy now.

Alan, welcome to the podcast.

Could we start by asking you to tell our listeners a bit about what inspired you to write The Red Hotel?

Well, this book had a very long gestation.

I first worked in Moscow as a foreign correspondent,

and I was the Reuters trainee in 1979.

That was in the time when the doddering old Brezhnev was still in charge.

After that, I was appointed, for reasons best known to Reuters,

to be the correspondent in Tunis.

And there I discovered the BBC correspondent was an extraordinary woman called Tanya Matthews,

...