All right, Alexander, let's talk about the situation in the Kursk region, Ukraine's incursion, invasion of Russia, if you want to call it that.

Yeah. Operation invasion Russia. How do you see things?

Well, first of all, I think the thing to say is that this is clearly an offensive. It's not one of

those raids that we saw the Ukrainians carry out before, places like Belgarod and things of that

kind. This is a proper operation, apparently up to three brigades of the Ukrainian army have been used.

They've been apparently some of the elite brigades of the Ukrainian army.

They've been pulled from the border with Belarus.

There's reports that one of them has been taken from Chassev-Yar.

My own view about this briefly is that this is clearly a last desperate gamble by

Ukraine and it's an attempt to try to reverse the course of events that has been building up

since the failure of its major offensive last summer.

So they've launched this attack in Kuzk region.

They crossed the border.

They've captured a number of villages.

They have been fighting around a small town called Sousja.

That so far as I can see, up to this this time is all that they have achieved. There's been a huge amount of a vast volume of talk and discussion and reports about, you know, the Ukrainians

being in all sorts of places. But so far, they haven't achieved anything that could be

in any remote way said to be decisive. And that, now, that however begs a whole number of

questions. The question one, one question which a lot of people are asking is how could this have happened?

How were the Russians called by surprise, as they clearly were, in this kind of operation?

The second, which is the one I'm just going to focus on now, is what was this operation intended to achieve?

Some say that it's intended to capture territory

...