242. Kupyansk, Kharkiv, and Trump's sanctions threat
39:50 Share

At New Balance, we believe if you run, you're a runner, however you choose to do it. Because when you're not worried about doing things the right way, you're free to discover your way. And that's what running's all about. Run your way at NewBalance.com/running.

Bored with your boring cardio? Stop pedaling that snooze cycle to Nowheresville and try some cardio that's actually fun. Supernatural Fitness, available on MetaQuest. Isn't that right, Jane Fonda? Cardio will never be boring again. Sweat to the beat of thousands of chart-topping songs inside stunning virtual landscapes. Bet your stationary bike can't do that. Visit GetSupernatural.com and join the next fitness revolution. Supernatural VR Fitness, only on MetaQuest. Ready team for team.

So we're now in the northern outskirts of Kharkiv in a pretty rough, I mean they say it's up and coming but it doesn't look like that to me Patrick. I mean we've got a huge kind of Soviet era apartment block directly behind us but I imagine if you're at the top of the building it would have a rather wonderful view because we're looking directly north as we face out from the building and that is the direction of the Russian border. We reckon about

20 miles away and this was the direction the Russians of course were coming both in the initial invasion in 2022 and also more recently in spring of last year when they relaunched an attack into Kharkiv which is what we were talking to the Cartier brigade about yesterday. Patrick what's your kind of feeling of this place and what it evokes about?

this part of Ukraine in the midst of war. That was a bit of a gag actually, about to pick it up and coming out of it. Yeah, it's not, it's certainly not where I would choose to live if I was going to base myself in Kharkiv. And it's very redolent, isn't it, of the old Soviet era. The block's pretty shabby. Babushka-type ladies swaddled against the cold.

coming back from the shops laden with their groceries. And even though the day started off nice and sunny, but this is like the depths of a Ukrainian winter. You can feel the chill getting into your bones. So it's a very wintry scene here. But where we are, we're actually on some quite high ground. And looking north, we're not very far away from the Russian border, which is only, what, 20 miles away of that.

and if there's any fighting going on we'll probably hear it now because the wind's blowing from the east but so far nothing in fact it's been pretty quiet since we've been in Kharkiv we've heard a bit of outgoing what seemed to be to be outgoing anti-aircraft fire presumably aimed at drones it's usually around the time when you hear air raid warnings

sounding, which is a fairly frequent occurrence, but everyone's now inured to it. No one takes any notice of them. So maybe the Russians are on their best behavior for Donald Trump's inauguration today. Well, we're getting pretty much continuous air raid warnings since we last recorded, which suggests that the Russians aren't behaving themselves.

on Donald Trump's inauguration day, but what it actually signifies thus far, we don't know. We're standing out here actually on a hillside trying to see if we can spot any incoming

missiles. It's pretty overcast, so nothing as yet. It's the vague sound of crump of something, whether that's anti-aircraft fire, whether that's artillery fire coming from the front lines. We were speaking to the Cartier Brigade yesterday. Their positions are probably about 10 miles due north of where we're standing up towards the Russian border. So it could be fighting from there, but it's probably more likely, as you were saying before, Patrick, to be

Anti-aircraft fire or anti-missile fire from the Ukrainians themselves. I would have thought so you know another air raid signer has just gone off and the area we're in is a It's a kind of a quite rundown Northern suburb of the city and looking around there's a lot of shell damage on a lot of the small modest homes here and

But it's very empty and a lot of people have just departed. They've boarded up their windows. Some of them are rather sadly taped over the windows to stop them being shattered. But clearly this has become uninhabitable, this area more or less. And it's another... It puts some kind of visual evidence from what we were hearing yesterday about the number of people who have actually fled the city.

Remind me of what those numbers were, James. Before the war it was like 2 million inhabitants. Now it's about 1 million, maybe a little bit more. We heard as low as 800,000 actually, and of that 800,000, 500,000 are refugees, which means of the original 1.8 to 2 million inhabitants, only 300,000 are left.

which pretty much sums up where we are, doesn't it, Patrick? I mean, we can hear the odd voice, someone hammering away, trying to repair his roof, but basically there's no one here. House after house, empty and derelict. Just old people, the people we've seen have been elderly, haven't they? And stray dogs roaming around.

hopefully being fed by some kindly inhabitants who have remained. And our main concern is whether the taxi is ever going to come back to pick us up. We've been dropped off, having able to locate ourselves from our hotel, but actually pinpointing where we are now when there is no sat-nav, because it's all being jammed, is another matter. So we've just reached a particularly devastated bit of the neighbourhood. There are some houses which have just been flattened and clearly damaged.

work's been started to kind of just cart all the debris away but around us there are small these modest houses with their roofs totally smashed in the walls torn down blackened beams from the subsequent fire and it's probably well it is evidence of the

attack on Kharkiv which was actually much heavier than the attack on Kiev and they got much closer to taking the Russians than they did the capital. Of course the subsequent attacks

assault. When was that assault? The next attempt to... May, May 2024 last year. We didn't get this far. It got maybe five or six miles further north of where we are now. The incursion in May 2024, but the initial attack got past here, which is why there's so much bad damage. It looks like, I mean, that building there looks like it's been hit by a shell, doesn't it? You can still see the shrapnel damage on the outside wall.

and all the inner timbers are charred. The house obviously caught fire as a result of the shell fire. It's pretty grim, isn't it? Now, the obvious question is, will anyone want to come back to this? But we must say we've seen some really heartening signs of resilience here. There's a couple of guys who are just putting on a new roof on their house just down the lane here. They seem pretty cheerful, didn't they, working on through the air raid sirens. So, you know, that's the spirit we do have.

don't we, Saul, going around? And James, we were just making the comparison with the rather gloomy atmosphere in Moldova, where there isn't a war. Here there very much is one. And yet, by and large, people seem in pretty good spirits just going about their day-to-day life, leaving aside all the politics of it. Morale seems to be pretty high to me.

Yeah, there's not much sign of the youth around here. Having said that, we know that Baldy lives not too far away and Julius's daughter is staying with him at the moment. But it was quite amusing, Patrick, when you said to the guys in your best Russian, good work. And they knew what that meant because that's pretty clear in any language, isn't it? And we got a little smile from the guy. So, you know, it's bitter conditions. I wouldn't want to be working on a roof in these conditions. But, you know, he's cheerfully getting on with life. And we can just see a building actually just beyond the one that

completely shell torn which has got a new roof on it by the looks of things so again there's there are little signs of regeneration even while the war is ongoing so we've now reorientated ourselves and we genuinely are looking north we think the Russian border is about 10 miles away from here 15 miles probably James yeah I think the Russian possessions are certainly about 10 miles away maybe even closer to 10 kilometers though and we're absolutely on the

edge of Kharkiv city and we know that because we've got to the end of the built-up area and we're just looking at fields and a big Ridge line straight ahead of us Patrick that no doubt the ukrainians needed to get their hands on because if the Russians got hold of that they would be able to shell directly into the city yeah that's the that's the dominant feature and I imagine uh on the other side of that it's a pretty clear run all the way to the to the Russian border so that's really

On the other side of that is a key strategic ground. We haven't heard any more shelling and the sirens have died away so things are pretty quiet here for the moment.

One thing to mention, it's bitterly cold. I mean, we talked about the wind before, but actually now we're right on the edge of the city with no cover ahead of us. You can feel the chill getting right into your bones and you've got to wonder what conditions must be like just a few kilometers away, Patrick, for the Ukrainian soldiers and of course their Russian enemy, some of whom are literally having to occupy holes in the ground at the moment.

That's right. Again, we often said this, but who would have thought it in the 21st century, fighting this very, when it gets down to it, for the infantryman, it's still a pretty ancient business, isn't it? Okay, we'll take a break there. When we come back, we've got a special little insert in which we discuss with Julius Strauss.

Askol Kruselnitsky, Kim, who also went along, and a very young war correspondent, budding war correspondent, Patrick, called Baldy Balthazar, who's of Hungarian descent. And they all went on a trip, which we wisely decided not to join them on, to Kupyansk. And you'll be hearing about their adventures next.

Bored with your boring cardio? Stop pedaling that snooze cycle to Nowheresville and try some cardio that's actually fun. Supernatural Fitness, available on MetaQuest. Isn't that right, Jane Fonda? Cardio will never be boring again. Sweat to the beat of thousands of chart-topping songs inside stunning virtual landscapes. Bet your stationary bike can't do that. Visit GetSupernatural.com and join the next fitness revolution. Supernatural VR Fitness, only on MetaQuest. Wait team for team.

Hi, it's Cathy Kay here from The Rest Is Politics US. We felt at this time, as America is heading into the Trump administration, that we should look back on one of the darkest moments in recent American history. So we have done just that with a series on Trump's insurrection and his attempts back in 2020 to steal the election from Joe Biden.

There was an incitement of an insurrection. They stormed the Capitol. They literally have senators running for their lives. We break it down. We give a hour by hour of all the incidents, the fences smashing, the windows breaking, gunshots firing. Trump supporters smoking joints in statutory hall. Just imagine the bedlam. And incredibly, some of these people are going to be pardoned by Mr. Trump. And so January 6th, I've never told Katty Kay this, but January 6th is my birthday. Okay, tune in.

and Lucille. Yeah, that's not the only extraordinary thing about the date of January the 6th, however. I mean, this is why this story in this series is so important and so gripping because so many of these characters are coming back with us today and so much has been forgiven and swept under the carpet and

America decided in the election last year that they were going to reinstate Donald Trump. With that, there really is no better time to take a look at these events. To hear more, just search the Restless Politics US, wherever you get your podcasts. Hear a clip from this miniseries at the end of this week's episode.

Welcome back. Well, now we're going to hear from our comrades who made a trip to the front lines at Kupiansk. We're now about to debrief, I suppose, our friends who went down to Kupiansk, which is a very hot sector of the line, just to the southeast of here, and hear what they heard and what they saw. Apparently it was a pretty...

pretty lively day. I want to start off actually talking to Kim who was traveling with Baldi who's a young Hungarian journalist and of course our old friends Asghold and Julia. So Kim just give us a flavor of what you saw and what you heard there. So what was interesting for me is we've been to Kupyansk I think three times now this is our third time

And the first visit was, you know, it was bleak. It had been liberated, but you had just a handful of inhabitants. I think you put it very nicely. It was sort of the poor, the old, the handicapped and the stubborn had remained there. And when we came back a year later, even fewer were there. And this trip, you

It's like the heat of these past years have distilled that stubborn, poor, old population to even more intense remains of its original 30,000 inhabitants. Tell us something about the actual... I'm going to just stay at this point, actually, to explain Kim's presence here. Well, Kim is a photographer of many things. She's a...

art restorer, an artist in her own right and a photographer. So when she goes on her travels with her partner, Julia, she finds plenty of material for her camera. But so give us some idea of the actual townscape of the scene that you witnessed there. Yeah, it went empty, wrecked. There was a major market that's now turned into a lattice of metal and torn bits of concrete.

The remaining markets that we saw our previous visits have really shrunk into a tiny little gathering of a few souls. There was one sort of grand building where the World Central Kitchen was giving out food our very first visit. 300 people were sort of lining up and getting bowls of buckwheat soup and things like this.

And this time it was shattered. That big building was a mess and only, you know,

Three or four people were wandering around. Driving through, again, there's very few souls, but the buildings are wrecked. You just go past very large hospitals, very large blocks of buildings, all torn to pieces. Military men walking through with plastic bags. Lots of stray dogs. Of course, the great companion of the people who are left are the animals.

Also, I could say that it was a bright, sunny day, much to our dismay. It was a bit too clear for the threat of drones. We were quite relieved by the evening. It had fogged up.

And we started to see a lot of cars coming in from Hartkiv area, getting back into these zones, which I suppose was too dangerous to travel in the morning. Before you all set out, you were debating long and hard where to go, the various options available to you, which sort of places you would be able to get access to with your accreditation, whether you'd need permission. Kupians was almost last on your list. So why did you decide to go there? And what obstacles did you meet along the way?

Yeah, you're absolutely right, Saul. I mean, we were actually, top of our list was a place called Vovchansk, which is right close to the Russian border. It's, we spoke to the, you know, there's quite a procedure these days. So we spoke to the press officer and he said there's fighting in the streets. So you can't go in with a...

any kind of infantry group. No journalists would be allowed to do that. Perhaps we could get permission to go in with a drone unit or an artillery unit that was supporting that effort, but that would take several days to arrange and substantial different levels of bureaucracy to get through. And we already had permission for Kupyansk. Bordy had arranged that earlier in the week.

Kim and I, she mentioned that we'd been there twice before. Once was the late spring of last year when we went with two local volunteers to evacuate a lady that needed taking out. And then the time before that was the previous year. And we've seen this sort of steady degradation of the situation there. And I think going back somewhere is always interesting. On the one side, it doesn't give you that fresh first impression, which is

which is a lovely thing to have as a journalist. But on the other side, the big positive is you get to make these comparisons of how the war is progressing and how it's slowly changing things. And so we opted for Kupyansk. It's about an hour and a half to the east. The last time we were there,

The Russians were about 10 to 15 kilometers outside the city. Now they're about two kilometers outside the city. So it's certainly all within drone range, which on a bright sunny day like today was something to think about or at least something to be aware of. And yeah, the city had changed. The city had got more deserted, more smashed up and

And it really almost felt now like a kind of a military front line rather than a living active city. Boldy, when you were talking to the soldiers there, did you get any idea of their morale, about the state of their spirits basically? Yes, I think a good example just to show how thinly stretched the Ukrainian armed forces are. We visited one of the medical units.

of the 116th Battalion who were stationed in a house, they were living in a house in Kupyansk. It was not there. This is the place where they come back from their combat position to rest between evacuating soldiers from the frontline. And their doctor explained to me that according to their protocol, every single such unit like theirs should have one university trained doctor

in it and a couple other so-called medevacs who are not quite a bit more qualified than nurses but they are not university trained doctors and those medevacs should go through a one month training program before being allowed close to wounded soldiers these days they just take whoever wants to be a medevac and teach them their skills on the on the field

He said, we just show them what a tourniquet is, how to put it on, how to put on a bandage and then that's it. And it really shows first the determination of the people that they are still signing up to do this job, even though without proper training sometimes, but also just how thinly they are stretched.

Asghal, it was your car that you went in with today. You were driving. How did you find the situation as far as personal safety was concerned? You've made many trips to the front line. How did it compare today? Well, like Julius and Kim and Balder, I've been there several times before and I've been able to compare each time I go there.

I've seen this in other places. A bit more of the fabric of the place is chipped away, destroyed. There are less people in the streets. There are less shops open. The air of desolation is greater. So it's pretty bleak. Is it...

more dangerous than some of the other places. It's not actually on the front line, and you've still got some civilians there remaining there, because many of them don't have the wherewithal or the confidence to move elsewhere. They don't think that they'll be able to find work or a place to live. Others are waiting. There's a minority, but

They're waiting for a Russian victory. It wasn't particularly dangerous compared to a front line, but we were just there for a few hours. I admired the people that took us to visit their place where they stay in between evacuating people from the front lines to a stabilisation point, they call it, just on the outskirts of Russia.

Kupiansk before they go on to a proper hospital. And there were incoming shells. They weren't particularly close. So they said they were about a kilometre away. They thumped the walls around. And you had to... I had to keep...

reminding myself that these people live under that sort of thing constantly. We all were curious because today is the day that Trump is re-inaugurated, going back to the White House. And we were curious to know whether that meant anything at all to Ukrainian soldiers and ordinary civilians. And the people that we spoke to were aware of that.

They, in various ways, said that they didn't have extremely high hopes for good things for Ukraine from a Trump presidency. But also, they weren't worried too much that he was immediately going to leave Ukraine without support and precipitator support.

disaster. And the doctor that we spoke to, the medical doctor come soldier, they all emphasised that they were also riflemen. He said, look, Trump doesn't like very, very much Ukraine. He loves himself. Trump will do basically what is good for himself. But they hope that somehow

along the way because of his own narcissism or desire to be macho, the doctor said, he may actually end up prolonging American help and even bringing the conflict to an end in some way that's not disadvantageous to Ukraine.

So just returning to this question of morale, Paul D, did you feel that there's still enough determination there to keep the war going? Should it go the other way? And should Trump pull the plug on support for Ukraine?

I think Ukrainians realize more and more that they are in the long run can only count on themselves. Like one soldier really nicely put it in the beginning of our trip when we asked him about his opinion on whether Trump's inauguration will change anything. He will say, well, not for me. I'm going to be in the trenches anyway in the upcoming weeks and months.

And I think it pretty well summarizes what is their actual individual perspective. And I think Ukraine more and more realizes that if they want to remain independent in the long run, it's best to rely on themselves. And that's why they try to ramp up domestic weapon development and production. Not necessarily to match Russia's manpower and material, but to be too hard to crack should Putin have ideas again after a ceasefire.

Just to give those of you who haven't been on this road a little feel of what it's like to go out there, because all of us today had been there before, but it's a sort of a very fast 90-minute drive to the east across very flat lands. And then as you come into Kupyansk, you start, we got out of the car today, it was very cold. So we got out of the car, we changed very quickly, you put on a flak jacket, you put on a helmet.

And then you actually drive into the city. It's pretty deserted. You can hear very, very distant shelling at that point. And the city feels empty, but it doesn't feel particularly dangerous. But as soon as you start moving down towards the river, the impacts become much closer. Still not nearly on top of you or anything like that, but they do get closer. And there was one thing which brought home to me how...

little my experience kind of helps me in these situations, which is that as soon as we got out of the car, we had a drone overhead. And the Ukrainians turned around and said, don't worry, it's ours. But then talking about it, we realized that no one actually knew whether it was a Ukrainian drone or a Russian drone.

And you realize at that point that you may or may not have years of experience in this situation, but there's always something new that you don't know. And it kind of keeps you thinking and keeps you humble and keeps you moving. Yes, that's true. That drone was, they said, is ours, Nash. And they said that the thuds are always outgoing and the drones are always ours.

Well, can I just add something on that? I asked somebody else, they went in before me and I asked the soldier, whose drone is that? And he said, nobody knows. It could be Russian or Ukrainian.

Welcome back. We stayed on a bit longer in Kharkiv and then made our way to Kiev, which is where we are now. But looking back, it's still a very much, as I think we've said before, an embattled city. It's not right on the front line, but the front lines, you know, within earshot. We've just been hearing about, apparently last night, things were...

pretty lively there. Big battles being fought or artillery exchanges or rocket exchanges going on just northwest of the city. So all that sort of, you know, very much audible to the inhabitants of Karki. But they're getting on with things, aren't they? So they're

even though at times it feels a little bit grim, most of the time normal life goes on. Yeah, we had to experience, as you've already heard on the pod, the first indication that there may be trouble afoot with the various air raid sirens going off. And they were pretty constant, Patrick, weren't they, during our...

stay in Kharkiv. But at the same time, no missiles actually came into the city. You were referencing the artillery fire yesterday. Actually, some rockets did target a military base. We were told by some people who were there, as Mark McKinnon, the

Canadian correspondent. And that was audible from the center of the city. They could actually feel the, you know, the reverberations of the explosion. So quite glad, Patrick, I have to say, you, James and I got out before all of that started. And then, of course, Asghold, another colleague of ours who was with us in Kharkiv, then went to Zaparicia and had a pretty hot time there. I mean, he could see explosions and fires. And then Asghold went out

and had a look around and you weren't terribly convinced that he needed to do that were you Patrick? Well that's Goldie's bold adventurer and as you say he did go out and see the site of the one at least one of the bombardments there are big fires raging there people were there's at least one death and numerous casualties including a very small child which provoked a response from President Zelensky pointing out that this is an ongoing ordeal that you

Ukraine is undergoing. But interestingly, that came a few hours after President Trump had made an initiative, his first kind of substantial, by Trump's standards anyway,

statement on where he might be going to bring an end to this war. We'll be discussing that later after we've heard some more reporting, but it's an interesting development. We've got some interesting thoughts on it. So tell us roughly what the new president said. Well, Patrick, a lot of water's got to go under the bridge, but as listeners will know from our emergency pod this week, which reacted as we were literally listening to the news

inauguration address. This is the first sign that Trump's actually going to get tough. Now, we heard the breaking news, interestingly, when we were interviewing Colonel Pablo Hazan, who's in charge of electronic warfare, as some of our loyal listeners will know. He was promoted to that position

last summer, I think it was, and he's been a regular attendee on the podcast. But we actually met him in his home. And while we were talking to him about the current war and the prospects for Ukraine, this breaking news came through and we've had a chance to digest it a little bit now the following day. And the headline in The Times is Trump tells Putin end war in Ukraine or face huge sanctions.

Now, this is one of the suggestions that we've been positing, one of the things that might happen, which is that Putin's not going to be prepared to do any kind of deal that's acceptable for the Ukrainians, in which case Trump's going to get tough. And he just gave us some kind of indication of what getting tough might mean. He wrote on his Truth Social website, I'm not looking to hurt Russia. I love the Russian people and always had a very good relationship with President Putin.

But he goes on to write, if we don't make a deal and soon I have no other choice but to put high levels of taxes, tariffs and sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States and various other participating countries. Let's get this war, which never would have started if I were president, over with! We can do it the easy way or the hard way. And the easy way is always better. It's time to, and now he starts using caps,

Make a deal. No more lives should be lost. I mean, this is pretty strong stuff, isn't it, Patrick? Yeah, I regard this as being pretty significant. It tells us two things. One is that he's basically laid down a challenge there, which is, you know, no more...

Ramping up and at the very least no more ramping up of military operations and to the gives us an idea of What his grand strategy is going to be and that is very much on the economic side of things the sanction side of things we all know Trump is

basically kind of allergic to military activity of any sort, isn't he? And so clearly it's the sanctions weapon that is going to be front and centre, at least at the outset. And if that doesn't work, who knows where we'll go. But I would have thought it does actually put Putin in quite a tight spot because if he does, his whole posture has been

The whole Russian narrative is the West is our enemy. They're all out to get us one way or the other, whether by stealth or directly. And so his room for manoeuvre, his room for compromise is extremely limited. So he can't really just turn around and sort of order his commanders to scale down military activity.

Because to do so would be to basically say it's the West that calls the shots. It's this new imperial president in the White House who's telling us what to do, which was completely counter to everything he's saying. So if he carries on, he's going to get very quickly on the wrong side of Donald Trump, I would have thought. That's right. Now, listeners may be wondering...

if this is all rhetoric from Trump, because as we know, Russia is the most sanctioned nation in the world. In other words, what else can Trump do to really hurt them? Well, it turns out actually quite a bit. And the most obvious area to attack

are indirect sanctions on people doing deals with Russia and that of course is chiefly China and India. Already there's been a tightening which we've mentioned a couple of times on the pod Patrick haven't we of sanctions against Russian energy companies which has discouraged places like India from actually buying the oil in the first place. They bought a lot and of course this is funding Putin's war but that tap is slowly but surely beginning to be turned off. We mentioned in the pod last week that the

Ukrainians have now stopped the pipeline running through their country. So that's 5 billion gone immediately. I think was that 5 billion a week, Patrick, they were making from that? Anyway, it doesn't matter. So that revenue stream has gone. And now they can target not only the countries that Russia is selling to, but also other businesses in Russia to slowly but surely try and stifle the Russian ability to make war. Yeah, that's a key phrase, isn't it, where he mentions Ukraine.

sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States and various other participating countries. So we're talking about India and the likes here. And they've already, their ears have pricked up, they've taken note. Indian refineries are now looking elsewhere. They've decided that the nice little period when they were getting a lot of icing on their cake with this cheap,

Russian oil and that's over move on to the next thing. So yeah, it will hurt I'm just going to reference another bit of news that there's come up in an interview that president Zelensky gave to Bloomberg on the subject of peacekeeping forces now this has always been an element of

in the settlement, isn't it? It has to be an international force that will be stationed along the line zero, the line where the competing armies end up. And Zelensky's saying this is not just some token force that he's looking for, a kind of screen of blue helmets or something like that. Forget that. He's talking about 200,000 peacekeepers, and he says including U.S. troops.

We all know the reason for that. They are really going to be the kind of hair trigger, aren't they, for any escalation. So the Russians would have to think very, very long and hard before they broke the ceasefire, which is something they have, of course, a very, very long history of doing in previous ceasefire agreements before the big invasion in the conflict that's been rumbling on since 2014.

Yeah, and on the subject of NATO troops in Ukraine, we've had conversations, of course, with a number of people since we've been in the country. And the general feeling is they want to see more NATO troops in the country. There are actually a significant number of them already. Whether that's been disclosed or not, I'm not entirely sure. But there's

there's a desire among the Ukrainians, not just Zelensky, but the Ukrainian military, of course, to get more Europeans in country, supporting them. And also there, because if some of them start getting injured and wounded, this is going to, you know, be an issue for the Russians. So they provide a certain amount of protection in that sense. But I think the longer term plan, of course, is that Trump and Zelensky, we suspect in the next few weeks, are going to

thrash out between themselves some kind of deal to take to Putin. And if Putin doesn't accept this deal, that's when the trouble is going to start. And as we've just been referencing, it's mainly going to be an economic squeeze on Russia in the first place. Listeners may also wonder, is this going to make a difference? We really think it will, don't we, Patrick? Yeah, I think that's right. I think things are looking fairly good for Ukraine at the moment. And certainly the people we've been talking to, people in pretty key positions, are

are saying, yeah, we can live with a freezing of the lines as long as we're not ceding sovereignty because we shouldn't be too stuck in the present. We've got to look to what happens in the next year, two years, five years. We've often said, and I think a lot of people would agree with us, that Putin states pretty much everything on this war. If it doesn't go his way, if he can't get something that he can present as a victory, then his real political problems disappear.

could begin. So a wise strategy would be to accept what is on the table without ceding sovereignty, wait for the situation to change in Russia, and if it's your country, what's to stop you legitimately taking it back when the time is right? I'm talking about Crimea as well as the Donbass here.

okay that's all we have time for do join us next week when there will be more specials you'll be hearing more from our trip to ukraine lots of fascinating interviews with people who've got a real insight into what's happening here and also another episode of battleground 45 on wednesday and do remember to follow us wherever you get your podcast so that the episode drops automatically goodbye

Here is that clip from our miniseries on Trump's insurrection. And these senators are being kind of ushered out through a very narrow corridor. And one of them says we were 20 feet away from the rioters. If the rioters had just looked the other way and seen that a whole bunch of senators were coming out, who knows what would have happened? Who knows what could have happened to Mike Pence? And I think it is important to point out that Donald Trump was getting these reports and did not care.

The Senate has been evacuated at 2:18 PM. Nancy Pelosi is also pulled out of her chair by the Capitol Police and taken off the podium and taken to a safe location at Fort McNair in Southwest Washington. She originally tried to stay. She didn't want to leave the building, but because of security, she had to get out of there.

One of the Democratic members of the Congress at this point, as they realize that the rioters are starting to breach their area, one of the members, Democratic members of the Congress, yells down to the Republicans, this is because of you. And the members are getting texts. This is how they know that things are bad, because they're getting texts from their family saying, what are you doing there? Why haven't you left? Are you safe?

They haven't got a television. They're not watching it. They're trying to get on with the business of the day. I mean, it's surreal. I keep thinking how surreal it was that inside the chambers, they're trying to do business as usual. And feet away, the rioters are there saying that they want to have some of these people hung and that they want to overturn the election result. So then a few minutes after that, the House floor is evacuated and

literally in front of the rioters. The police manage again to secure a very narrow passageway through the rioters to get them out. And one member afterwards says, I could look in the eyes of those officers and I saw the fear. They knew that the officers were outnumbered. To hear more, search The Rest Is Politics US wherever you get your podcasts.