Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
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Hello and welcome to the Friday episode of the Battleground Ukraine podcast with me, Saul David, and Patrick Bishop. Today we consider the logic of Ukraine's decision to continue fighting for the city of Bakhmut and what the latest Russian missile assault on civilian power infrastructure tells us about Putin's moral and strategic bankruptcy. We're also going to discuss reports that elements of the Russian armed forces, including the elite Spetsnaz special forces,
are suffering high desertion rates and in some instances are mutinying in the face of certain death. And in part two, as usual, we'll be answering another bulging postbag of listeners' questions. But first, we consider Ukraine's decision to fight on in Bakhmut. On the podcast last week, we reported that President Zelensky had told his senior commanders that the costly defence of the city and Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, must go on.
It's a decision that even some respected Ukrainian journalists, notably Ilya Ponomarenko of the Kyiv Independent, who has more than 1.2 million followers on Twitter, have questioned. On the 11th of March, Ponomarenko tweeted, I hope the Ukrainian command really, really, really knows what it's doing in Bakhmut? Well, it's a perfectly reasonable question to ask, isn't it? I mean, only this week, Russian media
Wagner mercenaries stormed a sprawling metalworks on the northern edge of Bakhmut that the Ukrainian forces had hoped to hold as an impregnable bastion. There was a video posted online of a guy claiming to be a Ukrainian soldier, and he described the fight with the Wagner troops in the compound of the Azom metalworks.
as worse than Stalingrad. Do you think that's an apt comparison, Saul? Yeah, I think so. I mean, it's interesting, isn't it? And of course, we need to be a little bit wary, Patrick, of making these historical comparisons because things change. But it does sound
seen to me that Bakhmut is turning into the Stalingrad of the Ukraine war. It's a long drawn out conflict, desperate defense on one side. And what's interesting about it is that we've been anticipating the fall of Bakhmut for quite a while, Patrick. Uh,
We said, I think, in a couple of episodes back, it was really going to happen. Yet it still hasn't happened. So is this going to be Ukraine-Stalingrad? Well, certainly the fighting is vicious at close quarters, and both sides are losing a lot of people. In Stalingrad, it was the Dzerzhinsky tractor plant, wasn't it? That was a big focus of the fighting, a big killing ground. But when I...
look for historical parallels. I'm kind of thinking Verdun as well, don't you think, Saul? I mean, it's the same sort of strategy the Germans picked to fight at this point in the line with the intention of drawing in the French armies and bleeding them white. It didn't actually work out like that. It ended up pretty much in a draw, a very, very bloody draw with about
150,000 dead on either side. It dragged on from February to December, I think, 1916. So as the guy from the Kiev Independent posted, we've really got to have our fingers crossed that they've got this right. Yeah, exactly right. So the question we asked at the top of the program, is there a logic behind all of this, Patrick? In other words, is there some cunning plan that the Ukrainians are operating here? Or are
Have they just decided for propaganda reasons to hold this city because so many men have already died for it? What do you think? Well, if the numbers cited by Ukrainian officials are correct, then it is working. President Zelensky said this week that in less than one week, starting from March the 6th,
We managed to kill more than 1,100 enemy soldiers in the Bakhmut sector alone. He said another 1,500 had been badly wounded. We don't know how accurate that is, but the losses are clearly very heavy. And of course, we don't know what the numbers of Ukrainian killed and wounded are and captured, as they never tell us. However, we have to assume they're nowhere near as high as the enemy casualties. Otherwise, the strategy would make no sense at all.
So there's really a pretty horrific equation being calculated here. And Kiev clearly thinks it's working in their favor. Otherwise, I assume they wouldn't carry on. And on the Russian side, you know, this scale of losses clearly puts a great strain on morale. We'll come on to that question later.
But also on logistics, the field hospitals must surely be buckling under the terrific strain of all this. And I saw a story the other day that seems to illustrate this point. Wagner apparently is no longer allowed to recruit in Russian prisoners for frontline soldiers. Cannon fodder, everyone agrees. But the Russian authorities now seem to be raiding the jails for female inmates who they're sending by train to the Donetsk prison.
area. My guess is that they're going there to act as nursing auxiliaries to try and manage the overload in the hospital. So once again, we come back to the big question, don't we, Saul? Why are the Russians essentially falling in with Kiev's game plan?
Well, the obvious answer, which we've considered before, is that Putin needs a win. He needs a battlefield win, any win. And taking back Moot will give him and his senior commanders the opportunity to at least proclaim what they say will be a major victory. But there's been another intriguing theory supplied by our friends at the Institute for the Study of War, the Washington, D.C. think tank.
And they believe that the Russian military leadership, notably Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of Russian General Staff Valery Grasimov, who, of course, is commanding the campaign in Ukraine now, those two are likely seizing the opportunity to, and I quote, deliberately expend both elite and convict Wagner forces in Bakhmut in an effort to weaken Yevgeny Prigozhin,
and derail his ambitions for greater influence in the Kremlin. Now, if that's true, Patrick, it's pretty remarkable, isn't it? Here we have a system that is so dysfunctional that it's prepared to shed thousands of Russian lives in what is essentially an internal Kremlin power struggle. Yeah, we've also had an update from Ukrainian military intelligence that even if Wagner did manage to capture the whole of Batwood, and that's a very big if,
Ukraine has bought enough time to render the route to the key city of Kramatorsk, which is the next one along going west. Impassable. It's uphill all the way from here for a weakened army against some of our strongest positions. A senior officer was quoting as saying, Bakhmut holds Putin has reached a dead end in the Donbass. But it's still a political gamble for Zelensky, isn't it?
Saul, he's invested huge political capital in hanging on to Backwood. So once again, he must be pretty confident that it is indeed going to hold. But I've been thinking about Backwood. You know, what's going to become of these places after the war's over?
places like Batmur, places like Mariupol. And, you know, going back to Verdun, have you ever visited Verdun? It's a really haunted place. There's a sense of dread that hangs over it. I remember once going on a visit in the middle of the summer and at dusk I stopped off at one of these ruined villages that they've left intact, not intact, they've left as they were, as a sort of monument to the destruction of
And I got out of the car, and even though it was a warm evening, this sort of chill came over me. And I jumped back in the car and headed off fairly rapidly. I mean, there is really a sort of spirit there.
of doom that hangs over the place. Have you been there? I haven't, Patrick, but you could argue on the one hand, of course, a country needs to remind itself of what it went through. And the French are very proud of their defense at Verdun, on ne passeront pas, they will not pass. But you could also say that Stalingrad, which was, you know, torn to ribbons, as we know, they did rebuild it. Volgograd is
apart from the monuments there, there is no obvious sign that the city was totally destroyed. So it could go either way. I take your point, Patrick, there's always going to be a spooky element to it, but it rather depends how this conflict ends as to how Bakhmut is going to be built and in what way it's going to be commemorated. The Russians, I think, as we both know, have a separate name for it, which I can't off the top of my head remember, Patrick, but they refer to it, not surprisingly, by a separate name.
Okay, well, moving on to these new missile attacks on Ukraine's infrastructure and power capacity. This was on the 9th of March.
The Ukrainians estimated that the Russians used 81 different missile platforms from Iranian-made Shahid drones to their own most advanced hypersonic missiles. It knocked out some of Ukraine's power for a while, but it was restored relatively quickly, which seems to be the case these days.
Now, in the opinion of Phillips O'Brien, friend of the podcast, and I think we think one of the most acute commentators on the war, the attack was a sign of Russian strategic and military failure. And he added, it's designed to be spectacular, but reveals Russia does not possess either the equipment or planning capacity to execute attacks.
the campaign successfully. I mean, it seems a bit performative, doesn't it, Saul? I mean, it's... I don't know if you saw that video of these so-called thermite bombs raining down on Vulladai. It looks spectacular. It looks like a shower of molten metal is dripping from the skies. But how deadly was it? Not very, it would seem, because the images come from someone who clearly felt safe enough to stand around there capturing the seed on his phone. And it all reminds me a bit of...
the v1 and the v2 in the in the second world war you know hit those revenge weapons which were supposed to bring britain to its knees in the summer of 44 but of course they did no such thing and i don't think they're going to do it here are they no it's a very good analogy and some you know phillips uh goes on to talk about in in his update on this that actually if the if the russians had any had any proper strategy they'd worked out how much kit they need to
use and keep using this is the real key point here Patrick they're carrying out these attacks I think uh Philip says roughly once every two weeks and that's nowhere near enough to destabilize and have any proper effect on Ukraine's power supply in other words it's a slightly pointless exercise and of course it's making Russia enemies around the world because this is seen as as we've
we've already pointed out, an attack on civilian infrastructure. Now, if you pivot that to the Second World War and the air power campaign that eventually, the Allied air campaign, was eventually very effective because they kept doing it night after night after night, destroying industrial targets. Yes, area bombing too. We mentioned that on the podcast before, but they really did have a material effect on Germany's ability to keep fighting the war. So properly thought out and with enough evidence
kit, this could have been effective, but they have neither or they have done neither.
There's another, I think, more significant indication of Russian weakness, Saul, and that's this wave of mutinies that seem to have been breaking out among Russian troops. We've been waiting for this for a long time, haven't we? We've been saying it's sort of inevitable, given the chaos that they seem to operate in and the losses they're taking. But do you think we've now reached a point where Russia really does have a problem with soldiers' safety?
refusing to fight. Yes, I do. You might have imagined that if there were going to be mutinies, they're going to be all among the newly mobilized guys. And we'll come to that in a second. But some of the most serious mutinies recently have involved senior Russian officers, believe it or not, of the 155th Marine Brigade, which was losing towards the end of last month up to 300 men a day as it tried and failed
to capture the town of Vulodar, which is a town southwest of Donetsk. Now, this was all part of the broader Russian offensive, which we'd been anticipating since the turn of the year. And it was a total failure. Now, the mention of these mutinies is being reported by the Ukrainians. So we have to sound a note of caution. But nevertheless, you know, it is still quite alarming to think that senior officers were involved.
There have also been a series of videos posted online of soldiers from at least 16 different regions blaming commanders for using them in human wave attacks. One of the most striking calls for help came from a group of men called out from eastern Siberia's Irkutsk region and sent to fight in Donetsk. We're just sent in for slaughter, said one. The commanders are telling us in the face we're disposable soldiers and our only chance to go back home is to get injured in fighting.
I'm a bit wary of getting too hopeful about this. For one thing, those refusing to fight seem to be largely from outlying regions where the casualty rates have been disproportionately much higher than in units recruiting in the big cities. And the other day, the UK's Ministry of Defence said that Russian military personnel from eastern regions of Russia are
are 40 times as likely to die in Ukraine as soldiers from, say, Moscow. And it's the Kazakh and Tatar minorities.
who is said to make up 75% of the casualties among Russian military personnel. Having said that, there's also been a claim from a Russian mill blogger that there's a high desertion rate among Spetsnaz special forces. They're often sort of seen as the Russian equivalent of the RSAS and SBS. Apparently, no Spetsnaz units are at their full complement, and some Spetsnaz commanders have actually abandoned their men
So if Russian special forces are legging it, then the Kremlin really does have a problem, I would say. But again, we've got to remember that mutinies on their own don't actually bring down governments. History shows us that there has to be a political catalyst like the Bolsheviks provided at the end of the First World War in Russia, sparking the revolution.
That's not the case in modern Russia, where all effective political opposition has essentially been neutralized. Yeah, actually, I think it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation, Patrick. My view on it, having written about the Indian Rebellion in 1857 and compared it to a lot of other revolutions around the world, including the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, is
both as a PhD and later as a book, is that you do need soldiers to turn against their officers to start the ball rolling. Now, of course, you need political leaders to come in. And that's, of course, ultimately what happens with the Bolsheviks. But when you look at the reason the Russians mutinied in 1917, actually, a lot of the latest scholarship shows that it was just because
of conditions in the trenches, you know, not enough food, not enough time to go home and see their families. It wasn't really a political issue, but of course, politicians took advantage. So Putin certainly needs to be wary that if his soldiers are refusing to fight, this may encourage his political opponents. We'll see how all this turns out, Patrick, but it is undoubtedly a cause for alarm. Okay, that's all for part one. Join us after the break when we'll be answering listeners' questions.
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Welcome back to part two. Before I go any further, I just want to warn listeners that if you hear the sound of yodeling in the background, that's because Saul is on one of his holidays. He's in the Alps this time, so don't be alarmed. Right. Thanks, Patrick. And I hope listeners realize that, you know, we're so devoted to bringing you the news of what's going on that we can't really have a week off. We can do our interviews in advance, but the news, of course, is in real time. So wherever we are in the world, we are
concentrating on events in Ukraine. Okay, so we've been inundated with another great selection of listeners' questions this week. The first one is from Simon Hackett. He's just heard from a Professor John Mearsheimer. Does that name mean anything to you, Saul? No, it doesn't ring a bell. He's not a historian, I don't think. Yeah, well, he's speaking on the BBC's Ukraine cast, and he says that
Russia will win this war of attrition and that Ukraine would do well to restart negotiations. Now, we won't go into all the detail here, but yeah, I mean, we do like to hear contrary views, don't we? We don't like it all to be, you know, a kind of monotone of pro-Ukrainian negotiations.
interpretations. So, yeah, I mean, it would be an idea to get him or someone like him on. And we're always willing to hear another view, even if we don't share it, wouldn't you say? Yeah. And Simon gives a clue about Nearsheimer when he says that he's a political scientist who uses military history examples. Nothing wrong with that.
Of course, we had someone commenting on previous podcasts that actually political scientists weren't terribly good at predicting the outcome of conflicts and military historians seem to have far more of a handle on it. Well, we'll see as time goes on. But of course, we're not averse to hearing contrary views if we think they're well argued and well thought out. We also don't want to get in the habit of bringing endless amounts of bad news to listeners of this podcast forever.
almost for the sake of it, which seems to be happening with news cycles these days, Patrick, almost. That's right. That's the way it works. One from Chris Nichols here. I'm really enjoying the podcast. One area of the war that I haven't heard much about is the air war. Well, if you listen to what David Alexander told us in Wednesday's interview, that's the one that's current at the moment. It's live at the moment.
he'll tell you everything you want to know. Now, a question here from Ian. This is about Russian special forces. And he asks, are there any operations being conducted by Russian special forces against Ukrainian forces in the traditional sense? Or is it that they've just been used as shock troops instead to make up for the poor display of skills being displayed by regular Russian troops? What do you think, Patrick? Have we had any indication of this? Well, it's not really suitable conditions for...
Special Forces is. It's all, you know, the sort of job they do, like reconnaissance or the jobs they do, they're now done by...
and satellites, et cetera. I mean, they did try it early on, the Russians, when they sent in, you know, specialist units to try and kill or capture President Zelensky and the Ukrainian leadership, but they never got the chance. So I think, you know, insofar as they're there, like the Spetsnaz we were talking about earlier on, I mean, they're there as conventional troops. Yeah.
Yeah, and it's interesting that Spetsnaz are mutinying. And I suppose the question is why? You know, my experience with special forces is that they like to be used. These are guys who've volunteered and trained for special missions behind enemy lines, and they don't like to sit inactive. So, you know, we spoke about the issue of Spetsnaz commanders going AWOL. And it could be, I mean, I'm just speculating here. It could be because they're just sitting idle on the sidelines, as opposed to the fact that they're
worried about going into combat because, generally speaking, special forces are not concerned about the latter situation. Okay, I've got one here from 01 Smicha via Twitter. And he says, given Russia's constant aggression and recent military failures, is Ukraine ever going to be justified in taking sovereign Russian territory over?
assuming they can ultimately defeat the current incursion as it stands. I think that would be politically unacceptable to NATO, don't you, Saul? I mean, there have been stories about incursions into Russian territory, but they seem to be sort of rather strange freelance affairs and not part of any official policy, which is very much not to invade Russian territory, because if they did so, Ukraine that is, it would mean ceding the moral authority
However, they obviously feel justified in hitting targets inside Russia and beyond Ukrainian borders, like air bases. Do you remember that story of the spy plane in Belarus that was blown up the other day? Munitions, dumps, fuel plants, etc., which I think can legitimately be presented as defensive acts.
Or even offensive acts, Patrick. I mean, the idea that Ukrainians can't attack any Russian forces in Russian territory is completely mind-boggling to me. And interesting enough, if any special forces have been used, they probably have been used by the Ukrainians. There was the attack on the bridge, remember? Now, it was probably an unmanned marine drone.
But we've also seen other instances where Ukrainian special forces are probably being used. So I don't think it's a conflict in which they are redundant, but there hasn't been that much movement in that regard. Now, this is a very basic question we've got here from Joachim Zander. He asks, it seems very, very clear to me that Putin or any successor will go on and won't stop for anything. So here's my question. How can you personally, you two at the podcast,
believe that this war can ever be won because you seem very convinced when on your show and no real doubt is ever uttered. So that's his question. What makes us so sure? Do you want to go first, Saul?
Well, we're not absolutely sure. But when we look at the cards that both sides hold, we feel that Ukraine's hand currently is stronger. So, of course, we're not absolutely sure. And we would be mad as historians to ever predict exactly what's going to happen. But clearly, with the military and economic support of the West,
the Ukrainians are in a much stronger position. They've also shown themselves to be much more adept at fighting a modern war and adapting to modern war, whereas the Russians on the whole, their strategy and their tactics and their operations have been pretty incompetent. But never say never. I mean, interestingly enough, of course, there have been a couple of developments or at least one particular development that is
very concerning for the Ukrainians. And that is that DeSantis, who's the second of the front runners for a Republican nomination to contest the presidency towards the end of 2024, has now come out on Fox News saying that he would definitely scale back American support for the Ukrainians.
It's a year and a half off, but it's still concerning because the other frontrunner, of course, Trump, has said exactly the same thing. So if this war drags on and it is a long war of attrition, that is very concerning for the Ukrainians. To get back to basics, my reasoning is that Ukraine has a real motivation to fight. Last week, I mentioned this video of a captured soldier, Ukrainian soldier, being shot in cold blood.
by the Russians. And I was speaking to a Ukrainian friend of mine. He said, well, this is a tiny taste of what all Ukrainians feel they can expect if Putin wins. So about as existential a struggle as you can get.
Like you say, they've got the will to fight, they've got the means, they've got the skill, they've got the resources, they've got the leadership. And on the Russian side, the troops are there because they're forced to be there. They're running out of stuff and the will to fight. But having said all that, I do start to have these little tremors of fear.
And one of them, probably the main one, is focused on China at the beginning of this. So do you remember we were saying, I think the kind of conventional wisdom was that the result that the West had shown would make China think again about its ambitions to take Taiwan away.
I'm not so sure at all that they've actually been deterred by what's happened. On the contrary, I think they're watching this with great interest as an object lesson on how not to go about an irredentist policy
I mean, they haven't tempted the rhetoric at all. The capture of Taiwan is presented as almost a sacred duty on which Xi Jinping's legacy is going to rest. And this seems to be the view in across the Atlantic. The U.S. experts are talking about an invasion effort as early as possible.
as 2025. And far from necessarily distancing themselves from Russia, I think China may well calculate that it's actually quite a good strategic arrangement. They get cheap energy, and Russia's always there as a disruptor in its current form with Putin at its head to keep the West off balance when, and many are saying it's when or if, the attempted invasion of Taiwan is
is launched. I hope I'm wrong, but I think that's becoming a real concern. Yeah. And actually, going back to DeSantis for a second, he very much named Czechs China and concern over China.
as to the foreign policy that the US should be concentrating on. We've spoken before about how American foreign policy is often split between people who look to the Pacific. You can go all the way back to the Second World War, Patrick, of course, with this, you know, the Europe first policy and those who see what's going on in Europe. But of course, the two are interconnected. I mean, we know that. OK, should we move on? Charlie from Cumbria asks a question about Ukrainian manpower and
and Western training of Ukrainian troops. He says, with a much smaller population than the Russians, how long can Ukraine sustain the war in terms of manpower? We're going to make a real effort to dig into this down the line, but it's going to take some real reporting, as these are essentially Ukrainian state secrets, aren't they, Saul? I mean, they've consistently...
refuse to give any granular detail about their losses. And I imagine that's going to go on. So we're going to have to do some digging there to get at anything like the truth. There was something this week, Patrick, actually. This is a report in the Washington Post with an interview with a
a battalion commander on the front line in Donetsk. And he gave some really interesting answers, if this is all genuine, and I'm assuming it is, rather than an actual setup by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. And I'll come on to why I think that that might be the case in a second. But basically, what he said is that
The battalion that he was commanding, which was an air assault battalion, had lost almost 100% of its effectives since the start of the war. So about 100 killed and 400 seriously wounded. In other words, he'd had a lot of relatively untrained guys coming in and they had not fought seriously.
that well in his view. Now, he's holding a sector of the front line. He doesn't have enough ammunition and he's got a lot of guys who are relatively untrained. Now, he claims the reason he's talking out in this way, and he's slightly concerned, as he put it to the reporter, that there may be repercussions from his senior commanders is because, you know, he felt that they needed to understand that for guys to fight effectively, they needed to be properly trained. So this was his justification. Now,
The reason I think this possibly is a setup, because what it's really doing is flagging up to the West that there's a real problem with Ukrainian capability. And there's another thing that might be happening here, which is that, of course, the best troops are being kept back and trained for the anticipated counteroffensive, which is something that even this concerned battalion commander said might be a possibility. So you can take it either way.
Yes, on the one hand, it's very concerning. But that 100% casualty rate, if it's true, does give an indication that the size of Ukrainian casualties is very significant. Gerard Joyce says Kia Ora. He's from New Zealand. What does Kia Ora actually mean? When I was growing up, it was a kind of orange drink. Just hello, good day, I think. He's a schoolteacher. He researches military history in his spare time.
And he says, I've been wondering about escalation in this current war. It seems part of the reason Hitler invaded the Soviet Union was that he could not bring his war with the British to an end. Likewise, Japan attacked the West when she was unable to conclude her war with China. Might Putin look to other areas to invade to get quick victories, if no doubt?
solution in Ukraine is possible. Well, Gerard, to me, I mean, my reading of Hitler's intentions was that he always intended to attack Russia. I think if Putin did think it was a good idea to confuse matters and extend the field of operations by invading a neighboring country, I just don't think he's got the wherewithal to expand the war at the moment, wouldn't you say so? Yeah.
Yeah, that's the key. It's the wherewithal. And one estimate by the MOD recently is that 97% of Russia's ground forces have been committed to Ukraine. It doesn't mean they're all there at one time, but it does mean that they've come in and come out. And that doesn't leave an awful lot of men and equipment to do anything else, even if they wanted to. I think the broader question is an interesting one, which is that Putin might well look for a win somewhere else, Moldova or somewhere else.
But, you know, I agree with you, Patrick. I simply don't think he's got the men and equipment to do it. OK, we've got one here from Ian Houston. Doesn't actually say where he lives, but his question is, it's hard to visualize one civilian person living, eating, avoiding artillery and street combat in Bakhmut. He goes on to say that it's estimated that 4000 civilians are still living there. And he asks, have
any of the people we've spoken to been able to give us some kind of sense of how these civilians are managing to survive in what are obviously pretty grim conditions. Patrick, have you got any insight into that?
Our friend Asgol Krushelnitsky was in the town some while ago now after the actual siege had begun. And he did witness firsthand this phenomenon of people staying on. The Ukrainian authorities were desperate to get civilians out at the beginning, but a stubborn core refused to go. I think that number seems to be the one that's
Everyone agrees on about 4,000. Sometimes because they just had nowhere to run to, and in some cases because they were sympathetic to the Russians. Now, that moment, that window has passed. It's too dangerous to get them out now. And paradoxical, though it may sound, they're actually safer staying put, which of course means that they're not very safe at all. Something I've noticed the absence of is any call for humanitarian corridors,
to be opened up. Have you heard anything along those lines, Saul? Oh, it's grim stuff, isn't it? It really is. I mean, what we know in Bakhmut is that the Ukrainians have withdrawn to the south of the river and effectively ceded the north of the town to the Russians.
And actually, if you look at a picture, it's a promontory pressing now into Russian lines. And it looks like the two jaws of the promontory, or at least the two jaws on either side of the promontory, are going to slam shut at any point, which is why we've been assuming Bakhmut is
is bound to fall and conditions inside for civilians must be pretty awful because you've really got a situation now where the Russians can fire on that sector from three different sides. Grim, grim, grim, Patrick. But yes, probably too late to get them out now.
We have a question from Phil who asks, as professional historians, what career advice can you give to listeners who would like to follow in your footsteps and become professional historians? How does one become a professional historian?
Well, our trajectories are pretty different, aren't they, Saul? You start with yours. Yeah, I mean, the obvious route to becoming a professional historian, as Phil puts it, is that you become an academic. In fact, most academics would say they are the only professional historians.
So you do your PhD or some kind of postgraduate degree, and then you get a teaching post and you write books and papers. Now, that's not something I ever wanted to do, although I did do a PhD laterally. I always just wanted to write history. And I wanted to write history that people read, which meant narrative history, which is the sort of opposite of academic history. So I followed quite an odd path. I started writing books, then did a PhD and then came back to writing books laterally.
doing a bit of telly, but basically working in every aspect of history that would allow me to make a bit of money. But yes, you tell yours now, Patrick. Well, I'm a total amateur because I started off as a journalist. I kind of fell into war corresponding and found I rather liked it. So I did see the military close up in various conflicts around the
the world. And it made me want to know more about, you know, the culture, the actual history of warfare, etc. So that's how I got into it. And also a kind of bit of a personal background, I was brought up in Kent, when the
I'm not that old, but the Battle of Bet-War is still a kind of thing there, you know. And I wanted to know more about who were these guys, you know, the few, what did it actually, it was a kind of the myth. I wanted to dig into the myth and find out about the personalities behind this cohort of, you know, great warriors. And so that's always been my approach, really, in my research.
military history, which is the kind of human aspect, the motivations, etc. And fortunately, I had a bit of a hit with that first book, Fighter Boys, and it went on from there. But so I'm not probably a very good person to set as an example. I think your route, Saul, is that kind of hybrid route is probably the way to go. I think these days,
It's good to have an academic qualification. Having said that, you know, the liveliest history, I'm afraid to say, is written by people who haven't necessarily done so from a kind of, you know, strictly academic perspective.
Yeah, and just one last point on that. When I did my PhD, which was after I'd already published five books, I felt very much kind of being pushed into a more restricted type of writing. Academic history is very evidence-based. It's not about the story. There's no narrative. And that restricts you, I think, in writing lively, entertaining history. I mean, you want it to be well-researched, but you also want to tell a good story in the end. So it can be tricky, really. But
The key thing is a love of history and a fascination with why people do what they do. I mean, that's really what we're getting at both in our books and in this podcast, trying to understand why people take the decisions they take. That's right. Yeah, I've always been suspicious of this kind of economic shift.
theory that all events are basically driven by quantifiable forces. I've never thought that. I've always thought that the irrationality of human nature is a big player in everything that happens.
Okay, there's a question here from Ian Leith, and he asks, is there a time in this conflict when you could envisage the direct engagement of NATO? Well, my answer a little while ago, Ian, would probably have been no, because NATO seems absolutely determined not to put boots on the ground. But
quite an alarming event has just happened over the Black Sea. And that's that a US drone, a Reaper drone, all $35 million worth, was brought down, apparently, by a Russian jet. Now, what this Russian jet did, and they've got a long tradition of actually flying very close to allied planes and allied aircraft over neutral territory, which is what this was, this is international airspace. But
But apparently the Russian jet poured both fuel, that is ejected some of its fuel onto the drone in an attempt to disrupt it and knock it out of the sky and then actually made contact with it and damaged its propeller. Now, the Americans think that the contact was probably an accident, but the fact that it was flying so close and trying to disrupt it was not. And they have warned the Russians in no uncertain terms.
that this was a highly irresponsible act and could lead, in their words, to escalation. And that, of course, could mean this is a direct attack on a NATO asset, and therefore there's a danger they might be brought in. So, yes, I can envisage the possible engagement of NATO if something like this gets out of hand. Yeah, that is a concerning story, isn't it, Saul? Yeah.
Well, that's all we've got time for. Saul's got to get back to the slopes. Do join us next Wednesday when we'll be speaking to another brilliant guest, probably the veteran BBC defence expert and former tank officer, Mark Urban. Goodbye. Goodbye.