BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts

Newscast is on the face of it, a podcast about the news.

But it's also perhaps the world's most athletic podcast,

we have BBC correspondents dashing in and out,

ready to give us a deeper understanding of the biggest stories of the day.

Thankfully, we let them catch their breath before we actually start recording the podcast.

Listen to newscast every day on BBC Sounds.

Hello, it's 1,350 days since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

And it really does feel like over the past few months, we have been saying that the front line has barely moved.

It is static, pretty much.

But now, Vitaly, we are hearing the place name of one particular area, Pekrovsk.

For our listeners around the world, zoom in and zoom out.

Where is it? And then to zoom out, why is it so important?

Okay, let's zoom in. Bakrovsk is in the east of Ukraine. More specifically in Donetsk region.

And what makes it important? Most of all, it's infrastructure. It was a major railway hub, and Pachrovsk sat on an intersection of several key roads, used by the Ukrainian forces to bring in military supplies and evacuate the wounded.

And also, there was a lot of industry, particularly they made something called

coking coal.

And that is vital for Ukraine's steelmaking industry.

You'll remember that we talked a lot about how oil and gas play a huge role for the Russian economy.

For Ukraine, it's steel.

So once Bakrovs could not make coking coal, that had a huge impact on Ukraine's steelmaking.

Right.

...