Hello and welcome to Battleground with me, Patrick Bishop and Saul David.

Shockwaves following the fall of Bashar al-Assad are still reverberating and will do for some time, we reckon.

We'll be looking at the way this profoundly important event has reshaped the Ukraine conflict and the global order generally.

We'll also be asking whether this brings the prospect of peace closer or pushes it further away.

And we'll be looking at the battlefield and trying

to get a feel for how much trouble Ukraine might be in as Putin's forces move ever closer to the

strategically important Donox city of Pokrovsk. But first of all, so how much damage do you think

the overthrow of Assad has done to Putin? Well, it would be easy to underestimate it, but I think that would be a mistake.

I think it has done a lot of damage.

It's, you know, the really obvious points are it's overturned this narrative that Putin's

been pushing a long time, that Russia is going to become a world power under his leadership.

It weakens his relationship and his standing with his fellow

authoritarian leaders in Iran, North Korea and China. And it really leaves him in the end, and now

entirely dependent on achieving a victory in inverted commas in Ukraine to shore up his rule.

Now, we're probably going to talk a little bit

later on in the podcast about the threat that his economy is under, certainly when we get to

questions. But there was an interesting piece addressing just that in the Daily Telegraph this week

by Ambrose Evans Pritchard. But there was an extra bit where he talks about the effect of Syria, and he writes,

Putin's strategic victory in Ukraine was far from inevitable a fortnight ago, and it is less

inevitable now after the Assad regime collapsed like a house of cards. And then he quotes Tim Ash,

a regional expert and a Chatham House fellow who said the limits of Russian military power

have been revealed as a result of this. This event, of course, is of great significance for more

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