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entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. Hello and welcome to Battleground with me, Patrick Bishop.

Today we're going to move away from the battlefields and front lines of the Ukraine war

and talk about the character and values of the people who are defending their country with

such fortitude and bravery. The idea that there's a separate Ukrainian identity and culture

is of course one that is denied by Vladimir Putin, who maintains that the 40-odd million

inhabitants he's declared war on are simply deluded Russians. That lie is comprehensively nailed in a marvelous new

book which told me more about the nature and values of contemporary Ukraine than anything else I

read. Its author is Julian Evans, a writer, translator, adventurer and filmmaker who's known the place

intimately for more than 30 years and is bound to it by ties of love and kinship.

He has a particular connection with the Black Sea port city of Odessa.

The title is Undefeatable, Odessa in Love and War, and it's a beautiful book.

It's also an important book by a superb writer who's doing what writers should do but rarely seem to nowadays,

using his powers to illuminate one of the great and most consequential events of our time.

Julian, welcome to the show. Just tell us to start off with, what drew you to Ukraine all those

years ago when the place had just emerged in Soviet domination and was taking its first

unsteady steps as a democracy.

That's a really interesting question, and it deserves an answer. I haven't given anybody else.

...