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.

Hello and welcome to Doomsday Watch.

Before we start, some news. We've been working behind the scenes to produce a 10-part documentary series looking at the global threats of tomorrow.

And that's going to launch on the 12th of October.

That means we're going to pause the regular Ukraine war bulletins.

But stay tuned. We've got one today. With Ian Bond, director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform and himself,

a Russia expert and former diplomat will be talking about the dramatic events of the past few days, the mobilisation, the sham referendums and the attacks on pipelines in the Baltic Sea.

But in true Doomsday Watch fashion, we also look at the big picture.

After Ian, I also spoke to Rana Mitter, professor of contemporary China at Oxford University on China, Taiwan and what it all means for global security.

I hope you find it interesting.

Ian Bond, welcome. Thanks very much for having me.

Ian, as is always the case, a lot seems to have happened in the past couple of weeks.

We've had Russia's partial mobilisation for first since World War II and scenes all over social media of very unwilling looking young men being pressed into service.

We've also had the sham referendums taking place in the Lohansk and Donetsk region, but also Kerson and with amazing speed, President Putin redrawing the map of Russia to include huge new areas of territory.

Then finally, the slightly less well reported, but very significant development of apparent sabotage of gas pipelines running under the Baltic Sea.

These are all part of the maelstrom of chaos that has arisen from Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

But I wanted to start with that mobilisation.

What's your sense of the impact of that?

From what one can tell from the outside, it's going very badly.

But of course, we don't have accurate, unbiased sources on what the Russian people are doing and thinking.

First of all, I think it is a sign of some desperation because of the progress that the Ukrainian armed forces have been making.

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