172. Battleground 44' - Operation Bagration
44:02 Share

Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. With the price of just about everything going up during inflation, we thought we'd bring our prices down. So to help us, we brought in a reverse auctioneer, which is apparently a thing. Mint Mobile Unlimited Premium Wireless. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch.

$45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes each detail. Introducing our biggest GMC Acadia ever. Offering bigger screens, bigger views, and even bigger journeys. Live your biggest life in the all-new GMC Acadia.

The land down under has never been easier to reach. United Airlines has more flights between the U.S. and Australia than any other U.S. airline, so you can fly nonstop to destinations like Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. Explore dazzling cities, savor the very best of Aussie cuisine, and get up close and personal with the wildlife. Who doesn't want to hold a koala? Go to united.com slash Australia to book your adventure.

Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Battleground 44 with me, Patrick Bishop. This is the podcast, of course, that examines the great events of the Second World War 80 years ago. Well, virtually 80 years ago, as I speak, the Battle of Normandy was raging as the Allied forces struggled to break out of their hard-won bridgehead and start the march on Berlin.

The memorials to this world-historic moment have been inescapable, with moving images of some of the brave old survivors gamely crossing the Channel to salute their fallen comrades. But

At exactly the same time, another world historical military operation was being launched, Operation Bagration, a huge Soviet push westwards to drive the Wehrmacht out of its conquests and launch three years to the day when Hitler had turned on his old partner in crime, Joseph Stalin. With the Allies crowding in from one direction, Hitler and his armies were now caught in a gigantic vice that would tighten inexorably throughout the months ahead.

Everyone's heard of D-Day. Not so many know about Bagration, though our listeners will be more aware of it than most.

Well, here to talk about it to me today is a master of the subject, Jonathan Dimbleby, legendary broadcaster on TV and radio, who's also established himself as a formidable military historian with books on El Alamein, the Battle of the Atlantic, and latterly, the war on the Eastern Front with studies of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's invasion of Russia, and now Bagration.

His new book just out is called Endgame 1944, How Stalin Won the War, and has received terrific views as well as powering to number two in the Sunday Times bestseller list. Welcome to Battleground, Jonathan. It's very nice to be with you, Patrick.

Well, your book sets out to further shift the historiographical imbalance that's existed in the past, in the West, at least, where we've tended to see the last phase of the war very much from the perspective of the Allied effort from D-Day to Berlin and overlook the enormous struggle launched by the Red Army and the enormous price, of course, they paid for that.

in securing eventual victory. Why do you think that was? Was it a product of the Cold War, or is there more to it than that? It's partially because D-Day and what followed was, of course, extremely important.

And Western historians, in general, have tended to focus on what has been achieved by the Western allies. And I think the Cold War exacerbated the feeling that somehow, because Stalin was a wicked man, that the achievements of the Red Army were somehow less significant than

than the extraordinary resolution shown by those on the Western Front. My own view is that, in broad terms, that when I say Stalin won the war, it was Stalin's armies that broke the back of the Wehrmacht. I believe that Stalin would have broken Hitler's armies, regardless of the intervention of the West, but it would have taken much longer.

and that the importance of what was achieved on the Western front following D-Day, people have been referring to D-Day as the breakthrough, turning point. It wasn't a turning point. It was a very significant, important event, which in fact, in the long run, helped secure Western Europe for freedom and for democracy. Heaven knows what would have happened had Stalin's armies prevailed.

And maybe, we don't know, this is the speculation historians don't like entering, but here I go. It could have been a deal between post-Hitler German fascists, Stalin controlling a very uncomfortably large part of Europe. Yeah, this is all fascinating stuff because one of the strengths of the book is that you do link it to contemporary events and you very much...

emphasize the political element in the grand military strategy. There's a very, very large political, almost a dominant political element in what's happening both in the East and the West. We'll talk about that a bit later on. I think you're absolutely right about D-Day not being a turning point or hinge moment, which is the sort of current sort of trendy phrase.

but where would you say that that turning point was on the it clearly came on the eastern front but when and where did things start swing the pendulum starts swinging back the other way I think that you can go right back and my book that you referred to before this one Barbarossa subtitled how Hitler lost the war I think there's

very persuasive evidence that to all extent that matters, Hitler could not have won the war after being balked at Moscow in the autumn, late autumn of 1941.

After that, because it was Hitler we're dealing with, we're not dealing with a rational, sane military leader looking at what was the least worst way of solving a problem. He believed that he could go further east. So you had the huge, I think Anthony Beaver called Stalingrad the psychological breaking of the Nazis, of the Wehrmacht forces.

Whereas he, I think, goes along with the thought that it was Moscow that was the military break. And then you had the long retreat from Stalingrad. I'm rather against turning points because I think it's evolutionary war. It's slow, grinding, horrible. There's no sudden moments of elixirs that say, ah, now we've done it. The Russians certainly never said, now we've done it. They knew exactly what they wanted to achieve, however.

Yeah, so by the spring of 1944, the Germans are by and large in retreat. There's the odd counterattack, but that's really just sort of a holding operation. When do you actually see the big pushback being formulated and what are its basic elements and who are the authors of it?

After the recovery of Kiev, as it then was, in December of 1943, things were happening of all kinds. First of all, there was a major push, 10 offences into Ukraine. In the book, I refer all the time to the use of terminology at the time, so it was the Ukraine. And

And at the same time, Leningrad was being liberated in the north. These were military operations, very carefully planned, very bloody. You have to remember, and I think you were lighted on it earlier, by this stage in the war, the beginning of 1944, there had been 9 million battlefield casualties on the Eastern Front.

seven and a half million of which had been Red Army casualties. Seven and a half million. The figures sort of defy comprehension almost. On the strategic front, from there on in, they realized that they couldn't continue across the

which was up to 3,000 kilometers in width, even though they had 6 million soldiers. I'm talking about the Red Army now. And they decided to focus. And the focus was going to be on what is now Belarus, Belarusia, in what was called Operation Bagration. In English, it reads like Bagration.

and that was being planned back in March, April. They suffered quite a lot of casualties. Then they sort of suppressed what was happening on the Eastern Front because they didn't do very well because the Germans held them. Army Group Center, which is the most powerful, biggest army of the four army groups that were on the Eastern Front, was putting up a very good defense system.

And they decided they had to focus very narrowly on that front. It was called the Belarusian Balcony. It was a bulge of Belarusia eastwards. And they knew, they decided that they should break through there, which would open the way, if they did, right through towards Warsaw and then Berlin. And that was very clearly in the mind of the Germans, right?

Hitler specifically believed that they would never attack on the center, that they would attack further in the south through Ukraine and up through Hungary and that way. They knew that the attack was coming in the summer.

In parallel with that, politically, which you're right, I find the political strategy, the political imperatives, if you like, of the big three absolutely riveting because they do that overarching sense of competing purposes well.

gives you perspective on what was happening on the battlefield, whether it's the generals, the commanders at the front, or as I try to illuminate the conflict

through the experiences of ordinary men on both sides. So there's a lot going on. What happened on that central front was, I nearly said breakthrough. I guess there are breakthroughs. But it was a huge victory that

took two weeks, essentially, from the 22nd of June, which was only a very short time after D-Day. And it was on a mightily greater scale.

One of the fascinating things is the way that, as you say, these big persons, the big three are very, very important to the whole story and their sort of concept of war and what the aims are and how it should be fought. But looking at the two great villains of the piece, Hitler and Stalin,

One of the striking things is the way that Stalin, for all his multiple, very deep faults, is actually capable of learning from his mistakes, isn't he? So Hitler is still directing things, micromanaging things, you might say, with disastrous consequences. But Stalin is actually giving his marshals credit.

their heads and his senior generals, their heads. Tell us that wonderful story you've got in the book about how Rokossovsky stands up to him, something that, this is a man who's actually been through the purges, he survived the purges, yet he's still got the guts to stand up to the great leader. Rokossovsky, amongst all those

extremely effective generals, was always regarded as the gentleman Soviet Red Army commander. He had been, as you say, he had been tortured, he'd been threatened with death, he'd been imprisoned in 1938 during Stalin's purges, accused of subversion or any other outrage that Stalin's paranoia had detected.

And he was just then told, go back to the front. No apology, nothing. Go back to the front. And he was very important in the defense of Moscow. He was very important at Stalingrad. And he was in command of the first Belarusian front, which was the lead of the four Belarusian fronts that were going to go into Belarusia, a total of more than two million men.

He commanded one of them and he had convinced himself because of the difficulties they'd had during March and April, which I touched on earlier, it's a sort of suppressed in Soviet history, um,

He said, we can't take this town, city. It was called Bobruisk. There were four that had to be taken, which had been defined by Hitler as fortress places. And they were instructed, the army group center, as the other army groups, to hold those places at all cost.

in some extraordinary belief from my perspective, that if you held those places, the will of the German soldiers would stop any further advance.

He saw, Rokossovsky saw, that the only way of breaking through would be to have a movement around either side of the bridge to encircle, as had happened at Ternopil earlier and so forth. And still Hitler didn't get it. And there was a terrific argument in which he was advised by...

Stalin's cronies, Molotov, Beria, etc., that he had to yield. He describes, there are several accounts of it, all overlapping accounts, which you can construct very well there for the story. At this key meeting in April of 1944, he was sent out of the room more than once to rethink, which everyone knew then.

in Stalin's terms, meant, you do what I say, which is to attack this city centrally. And he came back and said,

I can't. It's wrong. And there was a ghastly silence. Was he, as one or two of his predecessors had, being either imprisoned? And in one case, one famous case, Pavlov in June of 1941, executed. And he stuck by his guns. He refused to yield because he knew that the loss of life would be enormous and that success would be less easy to predict. Instead of berating him,

This mercurial character, Stalin, went up to him, clapped his hands on his shoulders and said, I like a man who stands up for his beliefs. That was probably news to a lot of the people who died in the military purges of 1937. I like a man who stands up for his opinions because it's more fun killing them. Anyway, he got his way and it was highly effective. And Rostovsky's forces were

marched westwards as a result to huge effect and were part of an encircling movement, an agression which meant around 350,000 men were either killed or wounded or captured, and 25 out of the 32 divisions of the Army Group Centre were destroyed.

That was where the back of the Wehrmacht was broken and they would never be able to still fight as they did bitterly and desperately because they so feared the consequences of Soviet victory. They could never again fight.

threaten the Soviet Union. And indeed, in parenthesis, they could not begin to threaten the Western allies who were fighting hard, but very, very slowly through Normandy in a campaign that was very expensive in casualties. All very, very fascinating. Do join us after the break to hear what Jonathan said next.

Why wait for Labor Day to save big on window treatments? Save now at Blinds.com's Labor Day Early Access Sale. Blinds.com is the better way to shop for custom blinds, shutters, and shades. 100% online with upfront pricing and free shipping. And Blinds.com has covered over 25 million windows, all backed by their 100% satisfaction guarantee. Shop Blinds.com's Labor Day Early Access Sale now for up to 45% off. Blinds.com. Rules and restrictions may apply.

Awaken your senses with a curiously refreshing Hendrix Cucumber Lemonade. Curious how? Cue the aroma. Marvelous! Cue the taste. Magnificent! Cue the cucumber. That's the refreshing secret. Hendrix is uncommonly crafted with cucumbers, roses, artistry, and imagination. Other gins are ordinary, but Hendrix is refreshingly curious. Discover Hendrix Gin cocktail recipes at HendrixGin.com. Please drink the unusual responsibly. Hendrix Gin, 44% alcohol by volume. Bottled and imported by William Guttman Sons, New York, New York. Copyright 2024.

Overnight, Dunkin's Pumpkin Spice Coffee has sent folks into a cozy craze. I'm Lauren LaTulip reporting live from home in my hand-knit turtleneck that my nana made me. Mmm, cinnamony. The home with Dunkin' is where you want to be.

Welcome back. It is astonishingly quick, isn't it? As you say, and you make this interesting point, it's almost like sort of Barbarossa in reverse, isn't it? So you've got this, you know, pretty devastating initial assault. And of course, it turns out well for the Russians because they've got the depth, they've got the time. But the Russians haven't got those luxuries, even though they do delay things for a long, long time. You know, the fall of Berlin is still a fair way to go.

But something that was very striking, you make terrific use of personal diaries. Very interesting. They've survived. I'd like to hear a little bit about how you came across them. But they give us a very, very strong flavor of history.

the particular bitterness of this fighting. Now, of course, the war's been going on for a long time. It's been a horrible war on the Eastern Front, but even by the standards of the Eastern Front, this is very, very grim stuff, isn't it? It is absolutely awful. And what is intriguing from some of the diaries, I'm thinking now of the Russian-Soviet diaries, first of all, that they were kept and that they survived the

I was very fortunate in my researcher, who is herself a very good historian and brilliant translator, and has written two very good books, incidentally, about women in the Red Army called Ljuba Vinogradova.

She is renowned amongst fellow historians for her genius. I know her, yes. You know her, yes. And she's worked with Anthony Beaver. She's worked with Max Hastings and others. And she manages somehow. I'm sure she won't mind me saying, at the moment, she doesn't live in Russia. And in fact, she has had very great difficulties, one or two of her

friends who have taken the side of Putin in relation to Ukraine, and she is bitterly opposed and lives outside Russia. She somehow has managed to secure extraordinary documents that form a very significant chunk of the book, because one of them is a commissar, a Soviet commissar. And I was

to put it crassly, gobsmacked when I read what he was writing persistently. He knew exactly what was going on on his front because he was informed, it had to be, and he was very, very critical of decisions that were made by commanders.

He hated the fact that the war was happening and the amount of deaths. And that view was shared by many others, incidentally, and on the German side as well, which comes through, I hope, to similar effect. Although there were enough Germans who did genuinely, despite it all, seem to believe that somehow Hitler would carry them through quite a large number. And these frontline diaries...

I mean, I think it's, I sometimes think about us today, armchair generals and analysts who have never themselves experienced the blood of war look on and they talk into abstract terms. We talk about drones. We talk about, it used to be called, the awful phrase used to be collateral damage. And there's a heck of a lot of collateral damage going on around the world. But they talk about it in terms of, they're so detached from the fact that human beings are,

young human beings are killed in huge numbers. And that means guts being spilled, brains falling over their comrades. It is very horrible warfare. And the value of these first-hand testimonies is that they describe that unsparingly. And also their longing to be home, that some of the young German soldiers, to heartbreaking accounts,

of German soldiers who believe it's going to be all right quite early in 1944. And by the end of 1944, if they're still alive, rather than just disappear from the archive, know that it's all over and everything in which they'd allowed themselves to believe as 20, 25-year-olds has turned to dust.

And it's not just the soldiers, is it? I mean, one of the major elements of the war on the Eastern Front is the way that it's the civilians who suffer the most. Something that really struck me about the book was the absolutely nightmarish quality of life in a Belarusian village, for example, in that period, 43, 44, when you have absolutely no security, you have no one who's

actually interested in you staying alive. You'll pray to all sides, including, it has to be said, the partisans. Yeah, the partisans played an important... Some historians have underestimated, my view, the role of the partisans. The partisans, there were, in the spring of 1944, around 140 plus thousand partisans, Soviet partisans or Allied partisans against the Nazis.

They were in conflict often with each other. They, in order to survive, they went into villages pillaging, visiting. We're now inside Nazi German territory, right? And they're pillaging the villages. If any villager is thought to have collaborated with the Germans, they were too often executed, fathers, mothers, and children.

Conversely, when the Germans went in, the SS went in, if they thought that the villagers had been collaborating and where it took a look,

or indeed a suspicion that you might be Jewish, for you to be similarly executed as a summary warning. This was official German policy. Keitel, who was the commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht, he actually issued an order saying that for every one German soldier that's killed, 10

civilians must be slaughtered as well. That was an order. And then this reaches its appalling apotheosis, of course, when you get to what happened in Warsaw and what happened in Budapest later in the year. Now, if you actually look at it on paper, Jonathan, the Red Army should have won. It's got a huge overmatch in all departments, in armor and artillery, in men, in aircraft. But

Having said that, we shouldn't take away from them the skill of the operation and of the plan, and particularly the Maskirovka aspect of it. Now, this is something that the Russians did have a tradition of, but tell us something about the ruses, the tricks that the planners got up to in order to wrong-foot the Germans. It was...

Absolutely extraordinary. Muskarosso essentially means deception. In principle, it's not unlike Operation Fortitude, which was designed to persuade the Germans we were going to attack the Pas-de-Calais rather than where we did attack, and it was very effective. But the scale is what was so extraordinary. Because the Germans were so outnumbered, the more they kept German defenses on the move,

trying to fill a gap here, trying to fill a gap there, the weaker the Germans were becoming. And it was hugely successful from Ukraine in the early 1944 right the way through to Bagration.

and it was a combination of things. They did the usual, the sort of standard techniques of dummy tanks, airplanes flying noisily to persuade the enemy that they were there, and false intelligence, radio signals with false stations, false orders. But they also had scores of thousands of men who believed they were going to be fighting at the front lines,

taken in opposite direction from the one that actually the armies were going to be fighting for. Meanwhile, they were bringing up from the rear hundreds of thousands of men. And in the case of Bagration,

The Germans never saw it. Their intelligence got as far only as saying, it could be that there is an attack that might be launched here. This was only days before. It was, for me, a sort of parallel of how Stalin refused to acknowledge that Operation Barbarossa was going to start, despite all the intelligence.

There were dummy orders, the trains, moving people, moving soldiers and weaponry. They would come up in the daytime with fake weapons.

and then remove them again at night back on the trains. They almost totally hoodwinked until it was too late, the German defenses. It wasn't just one operation of Moskow. It happened all the way through. In Ukraine itself, there were 10 offenses in the spring of 1944-45.

And each of those had maskerovka, all different. So it was incredibly well planned and coordinated. And it goes back exactly to your point. It was not just force of weapons. Of course, that superabundance of weaponry and men was very important. And one should say, too, enormously helped in particular areas, particularly by American lend-lease support of weapons and particularly some kinds of technology,

But the Maskarovka effect, it was regarded as a sine qua non. You could not. It was built into battle plans, Maskarovka.

One or two of the great previous historians of this period have written entire books about Maskarovka and how deception won the day on the Eastern Front. Just as I found that most people didn't know what bagration meant, my peers are peers. Virtually no one knew what Maskarovka meant, and indeed, until I discovered it. I actually discovered it when I was writing about Barbarossa, but then it wasn't much use because they were on the retreat all the time.

There's a strong element of revenge behind Bagration. I'll pronounce it your way, Alain Fausse. We may be assaulted by outraged Georgians, but we might have to lick our wounds.

Because of what's happened, you know, this has been a war without mercy on the German side. And then, of course, when it's time to exact revenge, it's done so very bloodily. But beneath that, there's a kind of strategic imperative, isn't there, which is related, which is that we cannot allow...

post-war situation in which there can be another Barbarossa, there can be a hostile Germany to our West. And so we've got to establish a political landscape which prevents this from happening again. And this of course lays the foundations for the Cold War, doesn't it? So this is very much an element in your book.

I think it's fundamental. We should not shy away from the fact that the revenge was as hideous as the German Nazi horrors perpetrated on the Eastern Front were. Not on the same scale, but just as hideous. Anger, hatred, the kind that just was not there on the Western Front.

And the first of these was Nemersdorf, which was blown up into a huge exaggerated account by Goedels, which happened in early autumn of 1944. But after that, as it happens, as Anthony Peeper has described so incredibly powerfully in his book Berlin,

the kind of things that happened were awful. There was a sort of indifference to it. Zhukov, I think, opposed. He was the deputy chief of staff, but Stalin was much easier about it. Some commanders were saying, "Go on, indulge yourselves. There are women there. Take them if you want them." That was taken literally. Revenge, anger, lust. But you're absolutely, importantly right

The imperative, the political strategic imperative from Stalin's point of view was to secure the Soviet Union, as it then was, from any threat of Western encirclement and other defeat. That was important.

paramount. And Churchill recognized this. Roosevelt recognized it quite openly. The problem was, the strategic problem from the Western Allies' point of view, is that you have to go to Tehran, if I may, in December 1943, where this was defined. The real decisions strategically in diplomatic and political terms were made at Tehran, not at Yalta in February. Yalta was a sort of codicil

There was these secret agreements at Tehran, quite extraordinary reading. And after Tehran, the game had been given away from the Western point of view. Recognition that Stalin couldn't be stopped going as far West as he wanted to. Therefore, you had to somehow negotiate with him to make sure he didn't go too far. And Roosevelt was very much more at ease about Stalin. His relationship with Stalin was far better than Churchill's relationship with Stalin. Churchill

By May 1944, he was saying to Anthony Eden, Foreign Secretary, I fear the very great evil will descend upon the world as the Russian tide sweeps westward.

Roosevelt was entirely, entirely at ease with this because he believed that he and Stalin, with the support of Churchill and the Chinese involved as well, would police the world so that independent nations would be free of spheres of influence, free of great powers. That was his deeply held, rather naive view. And

Very telling phrase, Churchill reflecting on what happened at the Tehran conference, said, there was I, and I realized for the first time what a small country Britain was. There on the right was the great American bison, and on my left was the great Russian bear, and there was I in the middle, the little British donkey. He did not carry clout. Roosevelt left to him

the problem of Poland. If you go from the origins of the Second World War, not the deep origins, but the immediate proximate origins of the Second World War from Britain's perspective through to the Cold War, it began with the ostensible "Casus Belli" was Poland. Churchill spent more time from Tehran onwards

trying to persuade Stalin to yield Poland to independence and self-determination politically, and that he did not any other issue. Churchill was not supported by Roosevelt, who stood on the sidelines. And you go forward to the point where Stalin yielded nothing.

The Polish communists, led by a man called Beyrut, were basically satraps. They were Stalin's gophers.

The prime minister in exile, recognized initially by all the big three, was living in London. And Mikolajczyk, his name was, and he was not able to yield anything. Churchill had suggested and it had been agreed by Stalin and had been endorsed quietly by Roosevelt that

that the Polish border with the Soviet Union should shift roughly 200 miles to the west, two steps left, as Churchill put it, and that the western border of Poland should shift 200 miles further into Germany. And that is actually what happened. Churchill tried to persuade the exiled Poles that they had to accept that, and that if they did,

they would be able to get political freedom. First of all, they refused to accept it. Nikolayevich eventually resigned because he couldn't persuade his peers. Churchill was tearing his hair out. If you read the exchanges between him and Nikolayevich, which I have quite extensively in the book,

The language he's using to Michalajczyk in desperation, to no doubt in my mind, he deeply and genuinely wanted Poland to at least secure a real measure of political independence, is language that you can hardly believe the politicians would use to one another in extensive conversations. It's all there. It was all recorded in those days.

And Stalin smiled, sneered, and never moved an inch. The result, go back to what I said at the very beginning of this passage, the result was the total gradual dismemberment of Polish independence by 1947.

And if you like, Poland therefore being the cause of the Second World War is also the focus for what became the Cold War. It was what happened to Poland that finally persuaded the Americans, now with Truman, that I know it's slightly oversimplifying to make the point that Stalin was not a man of his word. He could not be trusted.

Churchill never believed that he could be trusted. The struggles after D-Day between the Americans and the British, because Churchill had never been an enthusiast for D-Day. He'd always feared huge numbers of deaths, D-Day itself, and subsequently, he wanted to attack

through the Balkans, from Italy up through the Balkans, and encircle the Nazis that way. And also, also stop the Russians, the great Russian tide. And the Americans would have none of it.

And it was very, very bitter, the conversations between Washington and London at this point. We're talking now in the summer of 1944 when the Americans are insisting that they do not go to the Balkans. They will not provide troops for the Balkans.

He was resisting all the way through. Churchill wanted a different approach from the one that eventually prevailed, and successfully so, mercifully. So the idea that somehow the big three were all charms, simply not true. And the idea that Churchill and Roosevelt were always at one with another, equally untrue. But as Churchill himself said, he was a little donkey.

That's right. And that becomes apparent, doesn't it? At the beginning, he's in what appears to be a partnership of equals with Roosevelt, but with the passing of time very rapidly, that changes. Just before we finish, Jonathan, a couple of things. One is

You very skillfully link the experiences of 1944 with the Russian mindset today, if you want to put it like that. Here we are celebrating or commemorating D-Day on one side, and I'm sure the Russians are doing the same for Bagration and their successes. But what we take away from it is very different, isn't it? We're saying...

This is a great moment in human history, really, where the forces of light start to overcome the forces of darkness. If you like, it's very much a sort of Manichean story. On the Russian side, long before the anniversary, throughout the Ukrainian crisis and invasion and all the dreadful things that have happened there since, they keep harking back to the Second World War, to the Great Patriotic War, as they call it.

And using it really as, I think it has two uses. One is there's not very much they can be proud about in their recent history. And this is something that they take enormous pride in simply because it's something they can cling on to, to reinforce their self-esteem. But they also use all the historical aspects of it to justify what they're doing.

And you say this eloquently in your book. Can you just explain your thinking to the listeners? I do think there is a chain between 1944 that links Russia to Ukraine today. And I think you touch on it a light-eyed, absolutely accurately. I think two things. First of all, you have Russia.

running through Russian history, total control of the media, except for moments where it wasn't the case. So, you know, what comes out of the Kremlin is what most Russians learn. Of course, not all. That's one aspect of where we are now. There are two other things. First, Russian people have always been obliged to be obedient, but they also have a sense of their grand history.

Gibbenton through the sieve of whoever was ruling at the time, from the emperors onwards. And so they look back nostalgically to the days when there was a Russian Empire, when there was a Soviet Union, big and powerful, when the leaders were respected, whether it was Catherine the Great or Stalin.

And they see Russia having been humiliated and held in contempt by the West as the Soviet Union crumbled. They don't make, in my view, a big distinction between imperial pre-revolutionary times and the quasi-imperial post-revolutionary times of Soviet communism. So when Putin comes along and says he's going to restore Russian greatness...

That message falls on ready ears. Combine that with the deep underlying fear that there has long been of Western encirclement, represented nowadays from the Russian perspective by NATO, and you have the absolute bedrock sentence for many Russian people that Putin is doing the right thing. He is recovering territory that is rightly ours.

This doesn't stand up in any kind of international court of law, but psychologically, it has enormous resonance in Russia. And I think a lot flows from that. I think that I cannot... And again, I stopped the book in 2014 with the invasion, the known invasion or occupation of Crimea. It was a walkover, really.

because I don't want to trespass into the future, because that's always very unwise, particularly if you want the book to have credibility in a few years' time. So I shy away from that. But I cannot see on the basis of the evidence we have so far any circumstances in which Russia will willingly yield either Crimea or the Donetsk.

Therefore, I suspect for all sorts of reasons that behind the rhetoric from the West of victory, which has no meaning except rhetorical, that there must be a sense that without in any way accepting the validity of the occupation, there will have to be ceasefires, armistice line, something not dissimilar. It's extremely unsatisfactory, not dissimilar from the line that divides North from South Korea.

horrible line, but I suspect that may be the least worst temporary outcome. We'll end on that note, Jonathan, because you've very skillfully managed to combine the two elements in our podcast with 1944 and our Ukraine podcast. I think that's a good, we could talk for hours, but I think we'll have to end it there. Thanks so much for coming on. It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you and we've learned a hell of a lot.

It's been very enjoyable to talk to someone who knows his history. Thanks a lot for that. Well, I really enjoyed that. I hope you did too. Join us on Friday for the latest Ukraine episode. And of course, again, next Wednesday for another episode of Battleground 44. Goodbye.