Hello and welcome to Battleground Ukraine with me, Patrick Bishop and Saul David.

Well, really sensational news this week.

The meteoric career of Yvgeny Progogsian has apparently

come to a suitably fiery end, plunging to his death in an aircraft that crashed mysteriously

north of Moscow on Wednesday. I say apparently because, as usual, with untimely ends in Russia,

the facts are disputed with some claiming that Pregozhen wasn't in fact on the plane.

But if Pregozhen is dead, who'd done it?

And what does it mean for Putin?

Does it leave him weaker or stronger?

We'll be discussing all that.

But first, what actually happened?

Saul, you always said that after the abortive Wagner

coup two months ago, Pryogsian was a dead man walking. Well, I did say that, but I have to also

confess, Patrick, that the longer time went on from the mutiny, which was, and I think this might

be significant exactly two months ago, to the day Gregosian died,

which, as we're recording, was yesterday. I was actually in a restaurant, got the news,

flashed up on my phone and thought, crikey, we need to cover this quickly. But the longer time

went on, the more you felt that actually he was untouchable. I mean, let's remember back to those

days, Patrick, straight after the mutiny, he was banished to Belarus and we thought he'd better

stay there for his own safety. And yet, within a couple of days, he was flying around Russia,

he was seen in St. Petersburg and also reported to be in a meeting with Putin himself with his senior lieutenants,

many of whom seem to have been knocked off in this, what almost certainly is a state-sponsored assassination attempt.

...