And it-- and dare I say it, you might not have been the first person to sit in this studio and say, "Oh, goodness me, we're introducing competition to, to the connection between the UK and France." Why is this different?

different?Because the licenses are going through.

That thing up until now has kind of been a-- It's just sort of been an idea, and people have suggested it.

The, the bigger problem, I think, is in order to get the idea across, often the operators go for these overambitious things, like connecting it to Edinburgh and then taking the same train all the way through to Nice.

And given that the UK hasn't been able to build HST beyond Manchester, that's not going to happen.

[clears throat] But there's a whole load of other things going on in Europe.

There's the train line called the Baltic Way.

Um, and it-- But this is being up-- How fast is the push now to make sure that cities are connected overnight?

Was it actually a wise move?

Well, both the sanctioning of Israel, of the legal settlements in the West Bank and Israel's response seem to be focused entirely on domestic politics.

And one of the reasons why the Israeli government have said that they're upset with the British about this is is because they view it as interfering in Israel's upcoming election.

And as you say, that's ironic because it seems like it will actually develop a net in Yahoo.

And touching on the point Rachel was making about how this is the beginning of a fraying of relations that have international impact, but it's being done for domestic reasons.

And has what Labour has chosen to do with sanctioning, is it going to have any significant impact on the ground? Is it really going to aid Palestinian people, is it going to make a two-state solution any more likely? Probably not.

And at the same time, the UK is often, it's kind of... holds itself up as really caring about international law and these are illegal settlements they have been declared illegal the Canadians and the French have both taken similar actions and if the United Kingdom wants to go forward as holding itself up as a nation that upholds international law did they really have a choice particularly when as a nation the United Kingdom now is calling out Russia for its contraventions of international law it You know, you could say it was a difficult international decision by the United Kingdom, but then Israel did put them in this difficult position by breaking international law in the first place.

Good

Are there any key takeaways from the series that would be really useful for people to understand in a bit more detail?

I think there's some themes that appear again and again and again.

One is the value of psychological safety and building, which allows trust and loyalty to be built.

The other is how important it is for things to be rooted in values and particularly behaviour.

The ones that I think seem to come up repeatedly, respect for others, integrity, fair treatment, particularly when it comes to reward and discipline.

And...

the say-do gap, your behaviours have to match what you're asking others to do.

Amongst all the cultures you've experienced and the people you've met along the way, what's one leadership lesson that we can learn from a different part of the world?

How far does her plan depart then from that post-war security order?

Well, the post-war security order in Europe is dominated by NATO.

NATO does a couple of things.

The main thing it does is it draws the United States into Europe and ensures that the US will be there as a backup against the primary threat that NATO was set up for and the primary threat today, Russia.

The challenge that Europe is facing at the moment is there's incidents that affect Europe nations in Europe that are not part of NATO, particularly Cyprus.

There was the attack on the British bases in Cyprus by the Iranians earlier on in the year, and there wasn't really a clear system of how to deal with that.

So the European Security Council is supposed to act a bit like the North Atlantic Council does for NATO.

So what does the European Security Council add to the structures already in place? Well,

Ash, what's your observation on all this?

I saw the video of Witgoff heaping praise and generosity and wonder onto a man who has ordered the most heinous war crimes.

And given how often the right-wing, MAGA-esque Americans talk about the protection of Christianity, given that Vladimir Putin has led to the killing of more Christians than anyone else in recent time, I just think it's...

The level of hypocrisy and corruption is awful.

Those two are so clearly just... trying to create business deals for Trump and his family.

It's obvious.

I mean, the last time that they presented a peace plan to the Ukrainians, it was literally written by the Russians and then translated with chat GPT into English.

But to see ranchers in Colorado using the legal system is something quite remarkable.

Mm-hmm.

We sort of assume they're going to repeat what they did in Crimea if they were to do something in Narva, for example.

But there could be a methodology that is beyond what anyone has already imagined that they might deliver.

Their point, their, their objective here is not to get into a fight with Europeans or with NATO generally.

It's to stop the Europeans in particular from providing support to Ukraine so that they can increase the rate of their conquest of Donbas.

That has had an effect on the Germans who haven't supplied the Taurus missile system.

What this might do is might change the calculation in somewhere like Germany, where Germany may choose to give them the Taurus missile system now or, or other things along of that ilk.

This being Turkey and Israel.

I mean, are, are these little shots across the bow from Russia? We can do more.

So I think primarily it's Russia attempting to coerce Ukraine's allies to reduce their support towards Ukraine.

It seems to have had an effect in Germany.

Germany still hasn't supplied the Taurus cruise missile, which is pretty similar to Storm Shadow SCALP, partly because of fears of escalation there.

Ukraine has asked Musk, Elon Musk, to allow them to use the Starlink satellite system to improve their targeting of drones over Russia to increase the strikes on these Russian missile launchers.

But Trump and Musk have denied that because they fear Russian escalation.

So these efforts of coercion by Russia against, uh, Ukraine's allies have effect in some nations, but it doesn't seem to have had an effect on the United Kingdom.

Why is the UK, just briefly, Ash, but why do you think the UK is, is being less reluctant than the US and Germany, just who you've picked out, in terms of providing, um, munitions material to, to, to Ukraine?

Um, why has Starlink, the, the system that, that Ukraine uses, become so important to the war?

The first thing Starlink does is it allows units to talk to each other.

So when you're coordinating any kind of defensive or offensive action in military terms, you need to be able to talk to each other.

Starlink allows both forces to do it originally, and that's because the satellites going overhead give you consistent broadband access.

The Russians weren't allowed to use it, but they'd basically taken Starlink terminals from other places and were using them during their war on Russ- on Ukraine.

That was eventually stopped by Elon Musk, who's the owner and head of Starlink.

Uh, and Ukraine at the beginning of the year, when that was switched off, those Russian terminals, was able to make really impressive gains against the Russians in southern Ukraine and southeastern Ukraine.

I mean, what does this mean for Ukraine? It's not good news.

How have those experiences shaped your worldview? I

think, I mean, the countries and regions that I've traveled through that have greatest unrest, conflict, challenges that might be unfamiliar to most of us and our daily lives include the border between india and pakistan kashmir then uganda sudan it was an interesting time to travel through both of those and then from russia as i started at the top of norway through russia and then into ukraine and then into the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine, Crimea.

So this was 2018.

So Russia started its invasion of Ukraine in 2014.

So I went there four years after that.

And then the full-scale invasion that most people are aware of happened in 2022.

And I think just being aware of...

So with that being said, why is firsthand travel still such a powerful way to understand the world?

Mm.

But certainly in Russia and Ukraine, it's very popular, partly because it appears to not be easy for the authorities to access it and read your messages.

It doesn't have the same end-to-end encryption that WhatsApp does.

It's slightly different as a messaging system.

But what it is used for is effectively broadcast channels, and since the beginning of this phase of Russia's invasion, as in 2022, uh, following on from the 2014 invasion of Ukraine, it has been used particularly by, I guess you'd call them military influencers, the term-

Mm.

Yeah.

He, so he, he founded Pa- this VKontakte thing, but Ru- the Russian government effectively took over VKontakte, and it is, you know, it's a, it's a Russian, another arm of Russia's extremely effective influence and information system.

But let's start with how did the Army come about? Why did service come about? And what was your route into the Army?

It happened twice.

Once didn't happen, one did.

I was at uni.

I've never really been a particularly decisive person or been very sure about what I wanted.

I started off doing a degree in chemistry and molecular physics and then changed to philosophy.

It's quite a difference.

And I think maybe the classic person is a bit disingenuous.

Mm.

On how he is viewed in terms of his capability.

And the American military is incredibly capable.

They're very good at delivering operational success.

But any military can only work if it has a strategy that its operations are there to deliver.

And it's quite clear, as Daniela was saying, that there wasn't a strategy behind this 'cause Trump has listed so many different reasons to do it.

But the other problem is they're terrible at negotiating.

So I think that is a more important focus than, you know, stock up on loo roll, stock up on water.

So just run us through the plan.

plan.So the Defense Investment Plan tells how the UK is gonna spend money on defense over the next four years, and how much it's gonna spend.

And this is based on the Strategic Defense Review, which is a review of what does the UK need to look after itself and to meet its commitments to NATO in particular.

And that came out at last, uh, well, over a year, and a year and a half ago now nearly, and that laid out what the UK needs to do to get ready.

And then it took over a year and a half to then publish the Defense Investment Plan.

That's the DIP.

And the DIP was supposed to show how all of that was going to be funded.

Firstly, will this be enough to deter the likes of Russia? And will it also chime with what the rest of the West is trying to commit to as well? Because the United Kingdom is not the only cou-country with budget struggles.

It has rolled back partially on this one, but the, the, just the tension and indeed the lack of funding was exposed really starkly.

Uh, yeah, and it's worth having a bit of context here.

So UK defense spending has been falling a lot over the last thirty, forty years, from about five percent in the '80s to below two percent in 2015, and that was at a time also when the military was focused on Iraq and Afghanistan.

So it had spent ten years, maybe longer, focused on operations, buying kit for those operations, training for those operations, rather than modernizing.

And then as the threat of Russia increased, we realized here in the UK that something more needed to be done.

So when Labor came into power, they commissioned this thing called the Strategic Defense Review, the SDR.

This was supposed to figure out what the military needed to get ready for this threat and how much it would cost.

But it, it lands the UK in what kind of trouble as a result?

Russia seems convinced apparently that the best way to get its neighbor to capitulate is to target the civilian population.

It's something that Russia's been doing since about October 2022, and it's in stark contrast to Ukraine's approach to long-range strikes, what Ukraine calls its long-range sanctions, which are targeted on Russian oil infrastructure in particular to cut off revenue to Russia.

The Russian approach has been to attack civilian infrastructure, particularly power generation, heat generation, which did cause a lot of issues for Ukraine over the winter, certainly damaged morale.

But I think after four years of Russia doing this, despite the awful tragedies of the lives lost and suffering that happened in this most recent spate of attacks, I can't see howThis is going to change the course of the war.

Again, in stark contrast to what Ukraine has been doing, which is developing medium-range strikes, which has been able to interdict the Russian supply line between that occupied part of Donbas along the Azov Sea through Mariupol into Crimea, to the extent that Russia's hold on that southern stretch of Ukraine and even Crimea is starting to become fragile.

And it's, it's, it's not funny, but it's almost farcical that Russia is saying this is in revenge for the strike on the student dormitory, which, uh, the evidence that has been shared publicly suggests that that was not a student dormitory.

It was being used for military purposes in any case.

Uh, Ash, do we not care about the World Cup anymore?

Can you clarify what the entry/exit system is and who it affects?

Yes.

So it relates to the Schengen area, and the Schengen area is twenty-five EU countries on the continent of Europe, in-- plus a couple of other countries that aren't part of the EU, so Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland, and also Iceland.

And what the EES, the European Entry/Exit System, does is when you arrive at the outer border of Schengen, you have additional checks.

Then once you're in Schengen, you can cross all of those borders as if it was a domestic trip.

The intention of it was to do a couple of things.

One was to check how long someone had been within the Schengen area.

So how much, uh, is this down to Brexit?

I well know that wheel.

Yeah.

So, you know, you've got emotions on here, but an emotion is a very physiological thing.

And we're often not conscious of it.

When someone is being sure or frustrated, frustrating or argumentative, those are external behaviors.

But underneath it, there's an emotion.

But it's not until they become conscious of it that it becomes a feeling.

I'm just wondering whether you think that there can be a role for travel to also kind of open up new appreciation or levels of interest in things that perhaps weren't always on the radar.