You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones.

Today I'm talking to my colleague James Meek, a contributing editor at the LRB, who reported from Kiev for the Guardian in the early 1990s and was for many years that paper's Moscow correspondent.

He also reported from Afghanistan and Iraq when the United States

and its allies, including the UK, invaded those countries. His fifth novel, to Calais in

ordinary time, came out in 2019. He reported for the LIB from Kiev in the run-up to the Russian

invasion of Ukraine in February, and we last spoke on this podcast at the beginning of March.

He returned to Ukraine in July and has a piece in the current issue of the paper reporting from Mikhailiev. There's also a short film that you can see on our website.

Hello, James, and thank you very much for joining me.

Hello, nice to be here.

So I suppose the first question would be why Mikhailiev?

Why is it such a strategically important city in this war?

It's become an important city, this relatively little known in the outside world part of Ukraine, although it is a big city normally in peaceful times, about half a million people.

It's become important just for strategic reasons because of where it lies.

It does seem that we can't be sure, of course, but there are so many pointers to the fact that

the sort of the base aim for Russia was to, as well as to take the Donbass in the east,

was to take the whole of the south coast of Ukraine.

All of Ukraine's coast is on the Black Sea.

Before Russia seized Crimea, basically the whole of the north of the Black Sea

coast belonged to Ukraine. So when Russia seized Crimea, Russia began taking this attitude that

this is Russia, that Crimea is Russia. Nobody else outside a few countries recognized this, but their idea

was this is Russia. Crimea is our jewel, is our prize. It's where we have the Black Sea Fleet

based at Sevastopol. And we must protect this. So when Russia talks about NATO threatening Russia, it's important to remember that

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