Welcome to the Euro Intelligence Podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me, I'm Zuzana Monsenk and Jacksmith.

Today we will talk about Ukraine. It's been four years since Russia invaded, a war that caused many, many deaths, and a war that is at this point at least not about to end.

Peace negotiations are taking place between the two sides, and this is progress,

and certainly progress has been made on a number of sectors, but there is at this point no

clear path towards a deal. It's still possible that it might happen. We keep a completely

open mind on this, but at this moment, the chances of the war continuing

another four years is at least as big as the chance of a war ending in a peace deal this year.

So we can discuss many aspects of what this war is, what it does, what it will lead to.

One of the thoughts I have is whether this in many ways resembles wars we've had in Europe

in previous times.

And people always refer to the Second and First World Wars.

But I would probably go back even further at the 30-year war, which had been a fundamental

moment in European history.

And it ravaged Europe at the time. It set back,

you know, Germany was left Chatter after it and it didn't recover for a very long time. It also set

the foundation of a new, new world order or a new European order. And the question is whether the

Ukraine war is sort of one of those type of wars,

where this is sort of another great European war.

It's perhaps not a world war, but one of these great European wars that have consequences that have potentially very long-term historic consequences about the development of our continent.

So, Jack, where do you think we are after four years of war? Are we headed for an end?

What are your thoughts? I think that diplomatically, we're at a point where, for I think, obvious reasons,

U.S. efforts have really concentrated on basically getting Ukraine to agree to what the U.S. wants to see in a future peace agreement. This has been

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