General Sir Patrick Sanders

speaker

1,311 appearances 12 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 2 Sep

General Sir Patrick Sanders’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 12 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 4.

Appearances

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The General & The Journalist · How Ukraine’s leadership crisis impacts the war · 29 Jul 2026 podcast

And he took over, you'll remember, from Valery Zelozny, now the Ukrainian ambassador in London, after Zelezny was removed by Zelensky. voice-verified

I thought Aunt Lloyd did a sketch on him in the Times and did a brilliant uh sort of characterization. voice-verified

He described him as spartan. voice-verified

And austere. voice-verified

He's pretty relentless. voice-verified

And he gained, I think, possibly, probably unfairly, a reputation as being a bit of a butcher, someone who didn't care about casualties and about the welfare of his men. voice-verified

And that was really brought about by three big battles: grinding attritional battles, very much in the sort of World War I style of sort of the Somme or Passendale. voice-verified

So you remember Bachmut. voice-verified

Then Avdivka and then Pakrovsk's. voice-verified

There were almost shades of of Verdun, you know, the French army bleeding themselves out over these decisive battles. voice-verified

But it's also worth remembering that in during the invasion in 2022, it was Sirsky who organized and led the defense of Kyiv. voice-verified

And that was absolutely crucial. voice-verified

And he was awarded, you know, the highest honor in the country for that, a hero of Ukraine. voice-verified

He was also the architect behind the successful and astonishingly successful Kharkiv counter-offensive, and of course, that recent voice-verified

He's Soviet trained, he's indoctrinated, and what you've seen I think is a culture clash as you were describing playing out. voice-verified

It's interesting, voice-verified

place. voice-verified

I'm I'm sort of careful about characterizing a Soviet way of war in that way. voice-verified

I mean it certainly involves mass, but they were also astonishingly good at operational maneuver, particularly towards the end of the Second World War. voice-verified

So, you know, there is a lot of sophistication as well, but it definitely involves scale and mass. voice-verified

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