Odesa

Thursday

William Moore

SAS betrayal, the battle for Odesa & in defence of film flops

48 min listen

This week: SAS SOS The enemy that most concerns Britain’s elite military unit isn’t the IRA, the Taliban or Isis, but a phalanx of lawyers armed with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), writes Paul Wood in The Spectator. Many SAS soldiers now believe that if they kill a terrorist during an operation, they’ll spend decades being hounded through the courts. Paul speaks to former SAS soldiers who say that stories of men being ‘dragged back to be screamed at in interview rooms’ are ‘flying around the canteens now’. Soldiers feel like ‘the good guys have become the bad guys – and the bad guys are now the good guys’.

Tuesday

Justin Marozzi

How a small town in Ukraine stopped the Russians in their tracks

The other day, John Simpson, He Who Cannot Be Removed From The BBC, tweeted something purportedly about Volodymyr Zelensky. What it was really about, though, was John Simpson – how many world leaders he had interviewed (200), over how long (more than 50 years), and who he most admired (Zelensky, Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel). It is difficult to imagine Andrew Harding, a veteran BBC foreign correspondent, tweeting something like that. He is a much more understated reporter, and less prone to foreground himself at the expense of his interviewees. He is just as likely to be on receive as transmit and understands that he is not the story. The