I'm David Knowles, and this is Ukraine, the LASIST.

Today, Francis Dernay and I speak to journalists Sergio Ormos, who's been on the ground in Southern

Ukraine, talking to soldiers and civilians as Ukrainian forces advance towards her son.

As we usually start our recording at 1pm, we also tracked today's extraordinary events

in Westminster, and ask what the resignation of Liz Truss means for British support for Ukraine.

This hideous and barbaric venture of Vladimir Putin must end in failure.

Ukraine can win, Ukraine must win, and Ukraine will win.

Nobody is going to break us. We're strong. We're Ukrainians.

Two week day after noon, we sit down with leading journalists from the telegraphs London newsroom and our teams reporting on the ground to bring you the latest news and analysis on the war in Ukraine.

It's Thursday, the 20th of October, day 239.

And today, I'm joined by our assistant comment editor Francis Dernay, and speaking from Kiev after his recent reporting stint in her zone, Sergio Ormos.

I started by asking Francis for the latest news.

Yes, thank you, David, and good afternoon, everyone. Yes, an extraordinary, I suppose, announcement from Ben Wallace, the British Defence Secretary, that a Russian aircraft on September the 29th released a missile near a British aircraft patrolling in international airspace over the Black Sea.

He said that Britain immediately suspended patrols following the incident involving an unarmed RAF RC-135W rivet joint spy plane, which was on a routine patrol, when it was intercepted by two Russian SU-27 fighter aircraft.

He told Parliament that he wrote to his counterpart and the chief of the defence staff in Moscow about what was, quote, a potentially dangerous engagement to express his concerns.

Moscow had then replied on the 10th of October stating that they had conducted an investigation and put the engagement down to a, quote, technical malfunction.

They acknowledged the incident took place in international airspace, and so Britain has now resumed patrols following this incident.

Now, I think this is significant for two reasons. First and foremost, it shows how in war things can go wrong, things can escalate due to human error, and we've spoken at length on the podcast about instances of history where that has occurred and just the dangers of what can happen in that situation.

Now, we don't know what would have occurred if this plane had been shot down by the Russian aircraft, but one can assume that it would have been a major international incident, one that would have had very, very serious ramifications indeed.

The fact that we haven't heard about it before now, as I say this happened on the 29th of September, I think speaks to quite how significant this was.

I think if it was something that was less significant, we would perhaps ironically enough have heard about it much sooner.

So there's that side of it. I think the second side that's worthy of comment, of course, as well, is the fact that the Russians have publicly acknowledged the malfunction, the error, as it were, and have stated their account.

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