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Hello, newscasters, it's Laura, with a special conversation that we recorded in the couple of days before the fourth anniversary of the long and bitter war in Ukraine.

In the early hours of the 24th of February in 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Around the continent and in Whitehall and Westminster,

decisions had to be made about how the UK was going to respond. This week, I sat down with the

former Prime Minister and the former head of the military, Admiral Sartoni Radican, to talk about

those dramatic, worrying,

concerning moments when Vladimir Putin's tanks rolled into Ukraine. I spoke to them about what now

and what could come next and what are the possible ways out of a conflict that has now lasted

nearly as long as the First World War.

Here's our conversation with Boris Johnson and Admiral Sir Tony Vatican.

Take us back then to that moment, the early hours in February 2022.

The phone call came and the invasion was on. Yes, this was about four in the morning, maybe a bit earlier from the National Security Advisor Stephen Lovegrove. And he rang me to say

that it was happening. I mean, we'd been expecting it really the night before we'd all got to bed

thinking probably something was going to happen. And so I think I uttered some sort of

expletives and then went downstairs and got on with it. I think the trouble with it was that

although we in the UK had been expecting it and the Americans had been expecting it,

one of the difficulties in the Western response was that even at that stage,

I think some of our European friends weren't convinced that it was actually going to happen.

And that meant that our initial response wasn't perhaps as robust as it should have been.

And it took some time to get things organised.

And so Tony, you weren't surprised?

No, because I actually think our intelligence services, our Chief of Defence Intelligence,

...