I'm Arthur Snell. A major war is taking place on the European continent with Russia's

invasion of Ukraine, bringing you a series of special episodes to help you understand

the crisis as it unfolds. This is Doomsday Watch.

Welcome back to Doomsday Watch. We hope you're finding these war-bulletin's valuable.

A quick reminder that you can support our work on the crowdfunding app Patreon from

as little as £3 per month. Just search Patreon Doomsday Watch or follow the link in the

show notes.

Hello and welcome back to Doomsday Watch. Last week we held a live Zoom call for our Patreon

supporters with the brilliant Alexander Clarkson, who's an academic at King's College and

a massive expert on Europe, on security issues and on Ukraine. This is a shortened version

of the audio from that session. If you want access to similar events in the future, all

of our previous Patreon exclusive content and regular email bulletins from me, search Patreon

Doomsday Watch and become a supporter of the podcast.

So Alexander, welcome to Doomsday Watch.

Hi, thank you. Let's start off with just sort of the war as it is. What's your sense

on where we're at now with this kind of evolution of Russia's tactics, but also the Ukrainians

themselves having surprised the world, if not you, because I think you've been following

Ukrainian military much more closely, but they've surprised a lot of other people with

their staying power.

I think I'm thinking to go back to that. The first thing I would always say is don't underestimate

Ukrainians, and that has been actually a problem with analysis for eight years. It'd

probably be for 30, I think, for maybe for slightly separate reasons.

...