Dan Sabbagh

speaker

102 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 17 Jun

Dan Sabbagh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Today in Focus · Russia warship fires warning shot at British couple – The Latest · 17 Jun 2026 podcast

But the reality is, again, if you don't know if its transponders are off and you don't quite know what you're dealing with, but you're seeing something in the distance, you might be surprised.

But it comes at this time of kind of heightened tension between Britain and Russia.

Well, we all know the wider context is, you know, a long history of tension between Britain and Russia made a lot worse by the Russian full scale invasion of Ukraine.

And, you know, Britain, meanwhile, supporting Ukraine.

And so, you know, that's one of the backdrops.

Britain's been involved with sort of hitting Russia with a string of economic sanctions alongside the EU and the US, although that was more so in the Biden era.

And, you know, but some of this tension is being played out, you know, on the high seas, you know, around us.

Why?

Because Russia needs to export oil.

And so it feels like there was always going to be a point where something was going to happen.

And in a way, it's probably better that this happened, something a bit comic and a bit unfortunate than something, you know, perhaps more serious or more direct conflict between a British warship and a Russian warship.

So look, what you've seen over the last few months is a sort of more concerted effort by European countries to try and clamp down on Russian oil exports as principal means of finding a solution.

funding its war in Ukraine, and doing that by seizing some of these sort of stateless or poorly maintained Russian tankers.

The French have done it.

The Swedes have done it.

The Brits have helped out.

But this, what we saw last week, seizing this tanker Smrtos, was the first time the British had led

led a seizure themselves.

And so, yeah, I mean, in a way, you know, the Russians have been hit with these seizures for some time.

But what was different, or again, what got everyone thinking was, could this, in the first instance, could this incident be linked to what happened last week because it was the first time the Brits had acted?

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