Hello and welcome to the first episode of Interregnum, a new fortnightly show where author Richard Seymour will be talking with me about everything from the cruelties of self-help culture to the climate emergency and from psychoanalysis to the state of the Labour Party.

Today's episode is in fact the second we've recorded, but given the awful events in Ukraine and given that Richard is currently

writing about the Russian invasion of the country, it seemed like a good idea to get his thoughts.

We talked about the objectives of the Russian invasion, what Vladimir Putin's broader

geostrategic goals are, and we discussed his extraordinary claim that the invasion is in part

aimed at the denatazification of Ukraine.

Finally, we talked about the risk of direct Western military intervention.

We spoke to each other on Thursday afternoon, and obviously the situation is very fast-moving,

and that was before Russian troops had entered Kiev, and before some of the larger

anti-war protests had taken place in Russia.

I began the interview by asking Richard if he was surprised by the scale of the Russian invasion.

I am surprised because what appears to be happening is considerably more ambitious than just

essentially annexing Darnetsk and La Hansk. It really looks like this is an attempt to comprehensively deal with Ukraine.

I'm not clear that the objective is to annex Ukraine in total, but it is to certainly use the military to essentially destroy Ukraine's autonomy

and certainly prevent it from drifting any further into the orbit of NATO. The reports of

explosions in Kiev are congruent with earlier reports that the majority of the forces that were gathering on Ukraine's border,

which is about three quarters of the total Russian armed forces,

were not aimed at Dernetskanahansk,

but actually, because why would they need to have so many forces

when those provinces are already basically under Russian control. They're

aimed at cities like Odessa and Kiev. So this is quite an ambitious move. And to my mind,

although a certain geopolitical sense can be made of it, in order to make sense of it,

...