The best things in life for free. If you subscribe to the Spectator, you'll get a whole month for free.

And after that, you'll only pay a pound for full access to our website and to our app.

And if you want to pay two pounds, you'll get our magazine too.

To claim this offer, go to spectator.com.ukh, forward slash free.

Hello and welcome to the edition podcast from The Spectator.

Each week we look at three pieces from the magazine with the writers behind them.

I'm William Moore, the Spectator's Features Editor.

And I'm Laura Prendergast, the Spectator's executive editor.

On this week's episode, we'll be discussing Ukraine's much-heralded counter-offensive,

celebrating the life and writing of Jeremy Clark,

and debating the curious business of fertility. First up, in his cover piece for the magazine,

journalist Mark Galiotti asks whether Putin can be outsmarted by Zelensky's counteroffensive.

He joins us now, along with the spectator's own Svetlana Mornetsk. Mark, to start with,

you describe the counteroffensive as Schrodinger's

counteroffensive. Could you explain why? Well, I think because in some ways, first of all,

we've got the case that people, I think, have this assumption that when the counteroffensive

starts, we'll know it because it'll be this massive hammer blow.

Well, actually, that's not necessarily the nature of modern war. It can begin with a whole

variety of pulsed local offensives and so forth that build up a crescendo, whatever. And also,

the offensive also includes the kind of shaping operations, which are meant to be there to prepare

the battlefield. Things like the recent raid we've had across the border into Russia's Belgorod region.

That may look like a small raid, well, it is, but nonetheless it is actually part of the overall

...