Dan Snow's History Hit - Ukraine's Dam Destroyed: Water as a Weapon

Episode Date: June 12, 2023

On the 6th of June, 2023, an explosion tore through the Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine. A torrent of water cascaded downriver, flooding towns and villages, displacing thousands, and causing a catastrophic ecological disaster. Many observers suggest that this was a deliberate act of sabotage by the Russian occupiers - if true, then this would not be the first time that an army has destroyed critical infrastructure to gain the upper hand on the battlefield. Neither would it be the first time that water has been used as a weapon.Dan is joined by historian Frank McDonough, an expert on the Third Reich to unravel any parallels between what we're seeing today in Ukraine and the 'scorched earth' policies of Nazi Germany in WWII.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail].

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It was a mighty dam across the Dnieper, one of the wonders of the industrialised world. But it was now under direct threat from an advancing enemy force, and the decision was taken in Moscow to destroy it. Secret service operatives travelled to the Ukrainian dam, dynamited it and blew it sky high. Huge swathes of the country beneath the dam were inundated. Thousands of people died. One witness reports, all night there were cries for help. Cows were swimming and mooing and people were climbing trees. There was no one to save people. I'm talking about the 18th of August 1941,

when Soviet forces blew up the massive Dnieper Dam at Zaporizhia to delay the advance of the German Wehrmacht. On the 6th of June this year, the mighty Kharkovga Dam, a hundred miles or so downstream of Zaporizhia, was blown up. Western intelligence officials are being cautious, but it seems likely that those orders came from Russia. As many military historians have pointed out, it's very rare for the advancing side to blow up dams or dikes, cause massive environmental damage, and make their advance more challenging. In this episode of the podcast, I'm going to look at a few times when flood inundation has been used as a weapon of war.

And I'm also going to talk to Professor Frank McDonagh, he's one of our favourite guests on the podcast here, about an order Hitler gave right at the end of his life about destroying the infrastructure of the Third Reich and what that might tell us about Putin's mental state. T-minus 10. Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again.

And lift off. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Welcome to the pod, folks. The shocking pictures out of the Dnieper Valley, sadly, are nothing new to historians who've seen this kind of thing before. Usually a desperate measure to halt advancing troops, but occasionally something designed to actually keep a thing of great value out of the hands of your enemy.

In late 1941, the Soviets were reeling back as German advances penetrated deep into Soviet lines and circled hundreds of thousands of men and inflicted gigantic casualties. A senior Soviet official justified the destruction of the massive dam on the Dnieper by saying the explosion should prevent the enemy from moving to the other shore, but also to destroy as much of his equipment and manpower as possible. Other Soviets said that this gigantic dam, built and completed with so much fanfare just before the outbreak of the Second World War, could not fall intact into German hands. They could not be allowed to benefit from the electricity generated by the massive hydroelectric plant.

The Guardian, in late August 1941 described the destruction of the deeper dam, which fed the most powerful hydroelectric plant in Europe and took eight years to complete, as the most spectacular act of destruction in Russia since the burning of Moscow in 1812, and the most gigantic act of sacrificial sabotage in the world's history. Extraordinarily, the Germans patched up the dam and did try and generate hydroelectricity there, but when their turn came to retreat from this part of Ukraine in 1943, they blew it up again and there were further inundations. Water and flood are such powerful weapons of war.

Of course, they're very, very difficult to control by their nature, but it is very difficult for armies to cross inundated ground. There's an old expression from the Mesopotamian campaign in World War I when a British expedition struggled on its way to Baghdad before being surrounded and surrendering at Kut. There's an old expression which said that it was too wet for the army, but it was too dry for the navy. It was just marsh. It was shallow water that made walking impossible and bogged down any vehicles that tried to cross it. But it wasn't deep enough

for the Brits to deploy even their shallow draft boats and craft and ships that would have allowed them to cross that inundated plain of the Tigris and the Euphrates. And as a result, artificial floods have often been deployed by desperate defenders. In fact, when I heard the news that the dam had been blown up, I was on the Normandy beaches on the anniversary of D-Day, 79th anniversary of D-Day, and flooding was used widely in the D-Day campaign, or certainly before it. The Germans had deliberately flooded fields behind the beaches. They'd done that to deny those fields as potential landing strips for aircraft. And they'd also done it to stop men and vehicles

fanning out across the dry countryside, particularly behind Utah Beach. You can go back and look at the maps and you can see that the Germans very cleverly flooded the rivers around there into agricultural land, so that if troops did get ashore, if they started pushing inland, they'd have to use only one or two higher routes through that inundation. And that meant those causeways could be brought under carefully calibrated fire by German artillery and machine gun positions that were perfectly placed to do that. And going back through history, the real pioneers, the real geniuses at this kind of defensive flooding were the Dutch. Just go back and look at a map of the Netherlands, what we now call Holland, 500 years ago. It was like an archipelago. It was the Rhine estuary. It was just fragments of land,

sandbanks, islands, scraps of territory. And through enormous centuries-long engineering project, the Netherlands has vastly increased its landmass. Well, that means that much of it is below sea level, which gave aggressors and defenders opportunities to use seawater to achieve a military end. There's an extraordinary example in 1574, which I was reading about this week, the Siege of Leiden. The Spanish were besieging the city of Leiden, and the Dutch assembled this sort of ragtag, shallow-draught flotilla, and they just started cutting through dikes. That would flood the next area, and then they'd just sail across that one and cut the next dike. And they were sort of, at some stage, like there might not be enough water or they might not make it.

They just waited for the sea to sort of fill it up like a bathtub. And then they would move through and crash through the next dike. And in the end, the Spanish found themselves, the waters rising around their positions. Many of them sort of panicked and fled. Some of them panicked and fled, some of them fought, but the siege of Leiden was lifted by this armada, this Dutch fleet that sailed across what until very recently had been fields. The Dutch learned the lesson from this. Over the next hundred years, they started constructing a series of sluices and dikes that were meant to be breached so they could transform the westernmost

province of the Netherlands, which is actually the province of Holland, with its three great cities, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and The Hague. That could be transformed into an island. It could be entirely cut off from mainland Europe. And that was put into action on occasions. Louis XIV swept north in 1672, and the Dutch flooded the whole system and stopped Louis in his tracks. The Dutch were able to live and fight another day, enormously frustrating for Louis. Not only was the land inundated, but special strong points were built, forts were built, which meant that interlocking fields of fire could be established that would turn these waterways also into death traps for anyone trying to cross them.

Amazingly, the water defences of the Dutch were enlarged, they were built upon the 20th century. There was thought about using them, flooding them in the Second World War, but it was all over so quickly, partly German airborne assaults on key bridges and places meant that there was no point flooding and cutting the dikes and opening the sluices and flooding the landscape because the Germans had already moved past those defensive positions. And even into the Cold War, the Dutch did still expand some of their water defences. Imagine that, the Soviet shock armies advancing west and the Dutch triggering those extreme defensive measures. They did fail on a particularly famous occasion in the 1790s when a very cold winter came along and the French, the invading French armies of the Republic, were able to walk across those water features on the ice that froze on their surface and they were able to capture

Amsterdam. And that's one of the reasons that the Dutch became a vassal kingdom of Napoleon from the 1790s to the end of the Napoleonic Wars. In 1806, Napoleon even put his little brother, Louis, on the throne of the Kingdom of Holland, one of the many siblings of Napoleon who benefited from his largesse. During the First World War, the Low Countries, this time Belgium, was fought over. And at the end of 1914, desperate Belgian defence saw them inundate their front line. The Belgians unleashed a huge flood against the German army who were advancing on the Iser River in West Flanders. A lake 10 miles long was formed. Many of the German

front line troops saw their trenches get inundated and the flooding did halt the enemy advance but also devastated the landscape as you can imagine. There was one eyewitness who wrote, devastated the landscape, as you can imagine. There was one eyewitness who wrote, Picture to yourself a bare sinister plain. Here and there the inundations have produced great sheets of water whence emerge the ruins of farmhouses, and on which all sorts of rubbish is floating, and often corpses. Inundation, flooding hasn't been unique to European warfare. It was an appalling event in China in the 17th century that I came across once reading Geoffrey Parker's massive book about the 17th century crisis, how global cooling led to massive instability and starvation right across

Eurasia and beyond. He taught me about an incident I'd never heard of. It's the siege of Kaifeng in 1642. Both sides were dug in. Both sides were desperate after six months, the Ming governor and a peasant rebel leader outside the walls. And it's unclear exactly what happened. It seems like they both might have tried to make the decision to somehow use floodwater from the Yellow River to advance their cause. And they've either both broke the dikes holding back the Yellow River at the same time in October 1642, or it could be that heavy rain and huge pressure on those dikes exacerbated some of the damage, some of the undermining they were doing anyway. Either way, the dikes were blown away and a gigantic wall of water smashed into Kaifeng. It's said that something like three

quarters of the residents were drowned instantly or died in the dislocation, the hunger, the pestilence that followed as this sewage-ridden, smashed, plagues-drewing landscape slowly dried out. Interestingly, that was the end of, they call it, the golden age of Jewish settlement in China, because a huge centre of Jewish settlement had been kowtowing and the synagogue was destroyed, and Judaism in China never recovered. That tragic moment was echoed in 1938, and this is weird because it was June 1938. The anniversary was just a few days ago, almost on the anniversary of the destruction of the dam on the Dnieper. The Chinese destroyed dikes on the Yellow River to stop a Japanese advance into the Sichuan Basin. Remember in 1938,

the Japanese had invaded northern China. They were pushing ever further into central China, invaded northern China. They were pushing ever further into central China, desperate to wipe out the nationalist Chinese government and seize huge swathes of China for themselves. This inundation did certainly slow down the Japanese advance, but it killed gigantic numbers of Chinese farmers. It covered the land in silt. And in the years that followed, despite the Chinese government initially blaming the Japanese for it, so just a quick reminder there that actually both sides blaming each other for these atrocities is nothing new. In the years that followed,

the communists found it a particularly fertile place to make recruits because there was such anger about the actions of the Chinese government destroying lives and livelihood across an entire region. Back in Europe, we've just recently had the anniversary of the dam busters, so we should mention that. I mean, I feel it's not quite in the same category, this one, because the flooding of the dam busters raid was a consequence of the primary desire, which was to destroy the hydroelectric capability of those dams and indeed remove the ready supply of water for the steel industry of that part of Germany. The flooding itself did a lot of damage, but it was not seen in itself as a hugely important

outcome. I think a better parallel for the events that we've seen more recently are when armies are retreating. Let's go back to the First World War. In fact, the Germans flooded huge areas on their retreat back to the Hindenburg Line in 1917. As they move back from the Somme battlefield of the previous year, people will have seen the film 1917, they'll remember that, you'll recognise there was that strange phase where the Germans withdrew and the Brits cautiously moved into the space they left behind. They withdrew to very well-prepared, amazing defensive positions on the Hindenburg Line. And they used flooding to slow down and frustrate the Allied advance. They sought to follow them up.

But we should also remember February and March 1945, the Germans deliberately flooded huge areas of the Rhineland, basically the area between the Rhine and then the kind of Maas and the Ruhr River. And that was to stop the push onto German territory itself from the British, the Americans and the Western Allies. The Allies advanced into the Reiswald Forest, Operation Veritable and Operation Grenade, you might have heard of them, and they had to deploy amphibious vehicles as they moved across a landscape which had been deliberately left to flood by the desperate German defenders. So there you go, there's some examples of inundation being used. Usually,

it has to be said, nearly always, by a side that feels itself to be on the defensive, is worried about the offensive operations of its enemy. The Kakovka Dam on the Dnieper held back 18 cubic kilometres of water. It supports vast swathes of Ukraine's agricultural economy. And as a result, the loss of that water will put a serious dent in Ukraine's output of cereals. And it's also an ecological disaster. It's estimated that rebuilding the dam will take five years and cost billions of dollars. The Russian denials that it was them ring very hollow. And it's thought by most commentators, very likely that the Russians, that Vladimir Putin ordered this destruction. Now, this is the interesting bit I want to talk to Frank about.

Was this a tactical move? Did it seek to deny Ukrainian forces stable terrain on which to advance towards the Russians? Or was this the act of a pessimistic tyrant who wants to tear down everything as he faces eventual defeat? Or is it both at the same time? This had me thinking about the so-called Nero Decree. At the end of the war, the 19th of March 1945, the last few days of Adolf Hitler's life, he ordered the general destruction of vast swathes of Germany's economy. Why? I guess if he couldn't have it, no one could. Let's talk to Professor Frank McDonagh, author of so many wonderful books about the Third Reich, for some of his insights into what Hitler was thinking with that decree and what parallels there might be today. You listen to Dan Snow's

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Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Frank, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Oh, it's always a joy, Dan. Now, I know that we have to be always very careful, don't we, about looking for parallels and examples in history.

But it is interesting that the reports coming out of Moscow at the moment that Putin does not want to hear any information that's bad. He actually punishes people if they bring him information that paints a pessimistic picture of how the Russian forces are doing. Talk to me about Hitler's mental state at the end of the Second World War. He was exercising a kind of minute control over military affairs, wasn't he? How was his relationship with real factual evidence? Well, I think the generals around him at the Nuremberg trials, they admitted that they kept the bad news from him. I mean, there's that famous scene, isn't there, where there's supposed to be a counter attack

outside Berlin in April 1945, and they don't tell him. Then they do tell him, then he hits the roof. I suppose the biggest example of this was he was in some ways coming to terms with the fact that Germany was going to lose. I suppose it's the famous Nero order towards the end of the war. It's 18th of March. He meets with Albert Speer. Albert Speer has decided that he wants to preserve the industrial heartland of the Ruhr. Even if Germany loses, he says, it'll never recover if we destroy the Ruhr. Anyway, he meets with Hitler in Berlin. He sends him beforehand this memorandum. I'll read it to you because it's interesting.

If the war should be lost, then the nation too will be lost. That will be the nation's unalterable fate. There is no need to consider the basic requirements that a people needs in order to continue to live a primitive life. On the contrary, it is better ourselves to destroy such things, for this nation will have proved itself the weaker, and the future will belong exclusively to the stronger Eastern nation. This is Hitler writing to Speer, you see.

Those who remain alive after the battles are over are in any case inferior persons since the best have already fallen. He doesn't think much of the German people at all. He's so blasé about the whole thing. Hitler later commented he meets with Speer, who says that it's impossible to destroy the roar. And Hitler says to him, always when any man has to see me alone, it's because he has something unpleasant to say to me. I cannot stand anymore, these Job's comforters. And on the next day, he ignores Speer's advice. He writes the

destructive measures on the Reich territory decree known as the Nero Order after the Roman emperor who supposedly engineered the great fire of Rome. In his edict, Hitler ordered the destruction of all military and industrial transportation and communications, plus electrical facilities, bridges, railways, ships, warehouses, and so on. Hitler gratefully acknowledged Speer's organizational talents, but he derided him at the meeting as an artist by nature and unsuited to life and death crises. He told Goebbels of his deep anger about Speer's memorandum, which he felt was influenced by capitalist industrialists. So there was a showdown between Speer on the 30th of March then,

and Hitler said to Speer, did he think the war could be won? In response, Speer said, no. Hitler then told Speer he would give him 24 hours to change his mind. And then in that 24 hours, Speer comes up with some form of words where he says he thinks that the war can be won. And so he keeps his post. That's a typical exchange at this time with Speer, really someone who wanted to preserve Western Germany at the time and surrender to the Allies. And so, yes, there is a parallel there. Obviously, Hitler was kind of his own man,

not willing to listen to anybody else. He never took anyone's advice. You see all these meetings he has, because they're all in Goebbels' diaries, these meetings with Goebbels, who actually is quite pragmatic and says, look, we're going to lose the war. We need to decide on who we're going to negotiate with. And Goebbels says, the Russians, you know, and then Hitler says, I don't know, why would they negotiate with us? Then he says, the West, he says, says now Churchill and Roosevelt are egomaniacs. They don't want to step down and negotiate with me.

He said, so negotiation is fruitless. In fact, he was right there on that matter, that negotiation was fruitless. But I think you're right in saying that, you know, he wouldn't listen to anybody. And if Putin is that type of person and all the evidence is pointing to him being something of a kind of tyrant now, then I think it's going to be difficult, isn't it, to get him to change his mind? We'll come back to the destruction of the Reich, basically. This weird, gigantic bonfire of your own country as it faces defeat. Because there was previous for that, right?

fire of your own country as it faces defeat. Because there was previous for that, right? When they withdrew from St. Petersburg, they deliberately smashed up lots of the great palaces, the Roman office and the aristocrats. Hitler wanted to blow up Paris, didn't he? And destroy bits of the Netherlands. What is it? What is that urge? It's like, if I can't have it, no one can have it. What's going on there? Well, I think there was a pragmatic version of that, which was Stalin's version of Scorch. Well, I think there was a pragmatic version of that, which was Stalin's version of scorched earth. I mean, Stalin withdrew and then operated scorched earth. As you know, he rebuilt factories and so on.

Then the Germans, after 1943, they did destroy all the infrastructure as they moved west. So there already was a kind of scorched earth policy in the east being operated at that time. So Speer was sort of saying, let's have one for the West as well. Let's think about this scorched earth policy. He didn't believe in it, of course, because he thought that West Germany, with the help of the Western allies, America and Britain, could survive if it kept its industry intact. History would prove Speer right in that respect in Western Germany. Yeah, yeah. There's nothing psychological then about Hitler wanting to completely destroy Paris.

Is that just an act of vindictiveness? There's more than just a military decision there, isn't there? Well, I don't think he kept to that idea for long. He went on a tour of Paris, didn't he, on a sort of whistle-top tour in the morning, I think, in a big limo. And he said, oh, this city is too beautiful to destroy. So he went off that idea. As for Amsterdam, I don't think he thought enough of it, really, artistically, to spare it.

He did think a lot of Rome, didn't he? Remember, he did order the evacuation of Rome so that Rome's monuments were not destroyed by the Americans and the British when they occupied in 1944, I think. What did Hitler want to see happening with this Nero decree? He wanted to blow up bridges and dams and factories and power stations right across his own country by that stage. He wanted to destroy the entire Ruhr industrial area, which was kind of where the Rhine bridges were. That was the heartland of Germany. That was where they made all of its armaments, its steel, its coal, its iron, et cetera.

So it was a hugely important economic area. I think it accounted for something like up to 50% of GDP of the whole of Germany. So it was a very important economic area. So by saying he was going to destroy it, he was saying, look, we're going to actually destroy the whole of Germany, you know, the kind of got a dammer on idea. You know, if we lose, you know, I'm going to destroy everything.

You know, all the cards are on the table. And if I lose, I'm going to blow them all up. Do you remember that film with James Cagney, The Big Heat? It's a bit like that. Hitler was a bit like that. You know, get top of the world, Ma. You know, blow the entire world up. I mean, that was Hitler.

Thank God he didn't have nuclear weapons, because we wouldn't be doing this podcast. What do we know about Hitler's mental state in that march when Speer and Hitler are having those conversations and Hitler's saying, just blow the whole thing to pieces? so Ribbentrop, either they gave testimony at the Nuremberg trials or they left behind memoirs. Now, you could say that in a sense it was a bit like, you know when a family disputes a will, the ones who got left out the will are all eager to say

that the person who died was a bit out of his mind when he wrote the will. And I think these people were trying to write their own history. Hitler was the madman. Hitler was the one who was going for all. We were trying to stop him doing this. But it doesn't really hold water, really. You just get the impression that they're trying to say, you know, Hitler is completely mad, he's unhinged.

But they're not unhinged. They're going along with all these policies, but they're not unhinged. They're perfectly sane. they're going along with all these policies, but they're not on edge. They're perfectly sane. Now, I think with Hitler, he's in an incredibly stressful situation. I don't know anybody who wouldn't sort of crack up under that pressure, the pressure he's under.

He's being invaded from the east. He's being invaded from the west. He's in Berlin. He's in a bunker. The world is shrinking. All the people around him are untrustworthy. They're all trying to make deals with the Allies, Spears, Himmler, Gehring. So I would say he was incredibly agitated. I really don't like the words mad or lunatic and all these words, because it seems to be saying that these people are kind of,

they're not part of the human race. Oh, great. I'm not the same as Hitler. You know, I'm different in some way. My mental makeup is different. We just don't know, Dan, how other people would have reacted. How would Churchill have reacted in that situation? We don't know. He never got to that stage, did he? Neither did Roosevelt. Stalin did. He went to pieces a little bit. So I tend to think that, you know, I think, is his secretary, Troudal Young, who was in the bunker at the same time. And she says that at times she'd ask him certain questions. And when you listen to those conversations, you think, he doesn't sound mad in that conversation. There's one conversation in which she says to him, do you think national socialism will ever come back into fashion? And he says, no,

there's no chance of that. He says, maybe in 100 years. But even then, he said, you'll have to rewrite history for the public to see what I was trying to do was in favour of the nation. He said, but no, national socialism's dead. You mentioned Goebbels earlier. He kills his own children, doesn't he, with his wife at the very end of the Battle of Berlin. And is that kind of, in some ways, is that similar, is it, to destroying your country and ripping down everything, killing your own family? Because what life after Hitler, life after the Third Reich is simply not worth continuing. I think Magda Goebbels wrote a letter and she wrote it to her sister and she said something like

we've decided to end our lives and that of our children we don't believe a world without Hitler is worth living in and we don't think our children will thrive in such a world they'll become part of a freak show traveling around in an American freak show. And as you say, the disturbing parallel there, of course, is that Vladimir Putin does have nuclear weapons. And so if he gets into a similar mindset, he could do some very serious damage. Unless his equivalent of Albert Speer ignores him as well. If there is an equivalent of Albert Speer.

And even so, it was kind of at that stage, the fabric of German society was collapsing. So Speer sort of knew that he could take that decision and there wouldn't be any ramifications. What's interesting about the Speer meeting is Speer gets qualms about not telling Hitler, and he decides to visit him in the bunker. On the 23rd, Speer comes. He says he goes back to the Führa bunker, he says, with conflicting emotions.

In his welcome, Speer later recalled, there was no sign of the warmth with which he had responded a few weeks before to my vow of loyalty. Speer then admitted the Nero decree had not been carried out. Hitler displayed no anger whatsoever, looked Speer firmly in the eyes and said nothing. He then told Speer death would be easy now and a release and emphasised once again that he didn't want to fall into the hands of the Allies. As Speer prepared to leave, he felt Hitler had treated them during their encounter with calm indifference. It was proof positive that Hitler-Speer friendship, which had endured since Hitler come to power, was over. And Speer recorded in his memoirs it had been no friendship at all.

He'd used it for his own career. So I guess as you refer to there, like society was breaking down. So rigging up all the factories of the Ruhr and blowing them all up would have been a massive job, right? I mean, it was just beyond anything that the German state was capable of by that stage, thankfully. It was destroyed anyway in Allied bombing at the end of the war. Interestingly enough, because of the way the war ends and the decimation in the Ruhr,

industrial production didn't pick up there for years. So in fact, the Nero Decree didn't really even have to take place. Germany was so badly damaged. The bombing did the damage. Let me finish, Frank, by asking you where we started. Historians like you are always very cautious to see parallels. As a scholar, when you are looking at the reports coming out from what we know about Putin and Russia, do you feel that your work is of relevance here? Do you recognize patterns and behaviors? there. But in this case, the more you go through this, the more you can see the parallels. And whereas people used to say, it used to be called God wins law, didn't it? That if you brought in Hitler, you lost the argument. Well, I'm not sure you can really say God wins law works anymore because the way Putin's acting, he's a pure tyrant who wants to take territory and to

move into kind of controlling particular areas. I mean, we don't know where he would go next. I personally think that the parallels are very strong between the kind of desire for war and not to think about the consequences of the war and then to ignore all the outside noises because that's what Hitler did, wasn't it? He invaded Poland. The world was outraged. He just carried on, planned what he was going to do next, and he carried on all the way through

there. The parallel with Hitler is that Hitler is a very shrewd politician in the period 33 to 39. Then when he stops being a politician and becomes an ideologue, just focused completely on territorial expansion, he stops being a clever politician and he focused completely on territorial expansion. He stops being a clever politician and he just carries on and on. Really, it's like watching a sort of gambler lose all of his money. You've got a window there. You can say, look, you're going to lose that. Stop.

He couldn't stop. He was impulsive, compulsive. And I don't think that we're going to turn Putin around because really what you could say is beforehand the jury was out. It wasn't certain there were people, quite shrewd people, who were saying this. You know, Putin is a real danger to the world order. And people say, no, I'm not sure. I think he's just trying to get concessions from the Americans or Chinese or whatever. But I think since it started, we see those shades of Hitler, the Dr. Jekyll and the Mr. Hyde definitely is coming through now. And I think anybody who's not clear that this is the biggest danger to the world order, you know, better think

again. Frank, on that bombshell, thank you very much indeed for coming on. Thanks, Dan. Cheers, mate.