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Hello and welcome to Coffey House Shots The Spectators Daily Politics

Podcast. I'm Oscar Ensignen and I'm joined by James Heel and Sophia Gaston, head of

foreign policy at policy exchange.

And we're going to be talking about Kiastama's first

foreign policy tests with big developments in Ukraine

and in the Middle East.

On the one hand, Ukrainian troops are continuing

to push into the cursed region of Russia and it also looked

last night that Iran had ramped up preparations for a possible invasion of Israel.

But let's start with Ukraine.

Sophia, this is the first successful cross-border invasion of Russia since the

Second World War and signals a real change in the Ukrainian strategy. Can you sort of give us a sense

of the significance of this incursion and maybe where we are speaking

on Tuesday afternoon.

So the context for this is that the situation in Ukraine has been pretty dire over the last

few months and certainly a lot of people in Kyiv have been

looking ahead to, you know, with considerable trepidation to the winter to come and where the country is going to be at that time. I mean I think you know the

US election as well as looming large the challenges and getting that aid package

...