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Hello and welcome to Coffee Houseshots, The Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast. I'm Cindy U and I'm joined by Katie Balls and James Forsyth. So James, over the weekend, the situation

in Ukraine seems to have got much worse. Can you update listeners on what's going on because

the Americans do seem to think that war is imminent.

So there was another Biden-Puton call over the weekend. That does not seem to have resolved anything.

And we have the US warning that a war could start as soon as kind of Wednesday of this week.

That's a frequent feature of U.S. intelligence briefings

on this question. I think what is clear now is that Vladimir Putin has assembled

everything on the borders of Ukraine that he would need to launch an invasion. And the question then

becomes, what will it take for him not to do that? I think the hope that the

threat of Western sanctions that are more severe than anything that's been seen in the past

would be enough to deter him is receding. You had the Ukrainian ambassador to the UK last night

floating the idea that Ukraine might be prepared to say that it doesn't want to join

NATO anymore, if that is what it would take to avert war. That would certainly offer Vladimir Putin

a kind of diplomatic off-ramp, if you see what I mean, in that he could say, look,

I'm pulling my troops back because I have now achieved something, which is that Ukraine is

accepted that it will not be joining the NATO alliance. I still think, as I said

on the Saturday edition of Coffee House shots, but the view of a kind of canniest observers of Moscow

in the UK government is right, that what Vladimir Putin will do is something that is designed

to further expose splits in the Western Alliance. And if he were to simply launch a full-on invasion of Ukraine,

I think the Western response to that would be unified because, you know, no one could accept that.

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