Like every other publisher, AI is eating into The Telegraph’s traditional site traffic routes. To combat this, the paper is taking an aggressive approach to building our off-platform strategy, including podcasts. As The Telegraph's most successful podcast to date, Ukraine: The Latest is a core part of that drive, including the decision to start publishing in Video. But the team were committed to the listeners that have been with them since the beginning, and so have separate workflows to ensure the audio version maintains quality and continues to publish at the same time it has done for four years.

Ukraine: The Latest is a flagship podcast of the Telegraph. It demonstrates that a pay-walled, subscription-based publisher can generate mass-interest and attention on a story that is emotionally challenging, and requires significant concentration and commitment to understand.

Every weekday, the team combines battlefield updates, political analysis and interviews, always putting the voices of Ukrainians at the heart of their reporting. They also feature The Telegraph’s roster of journalists on the ground and regularly travel to Ukraine for exclusive testimony.

In February 2025, the team launched Ukrainian and Russian translations thanks to a sophisticated AI voice cloning and translation model, replicating the English version of the podcast into both languages, while maintaining the cadence and tone of the presenters. This allows those living most affected by the conflict to access our reporting and expertise. Thetea, decided to retire daily translations in February of this year, but continue to use it to let Ukrainians appear on the podcast, in their own voices, even if they do not speak English.

In 2025, months later, the team travelled to the port city of Odesa, reporting from an exclusive patrol with the Ukrainian navy off the coast, and speaking to Odesites about the battles for the city’s identity in this predominantly Russian-speaking region.

Later in the year one of the hosts, Adélie, travelled to Ukraine to witness a child stolen by Russia smuggled back into their country. That incredible moment will feature in a narrative documentary to be released in the next few months telling the story of Ukraine's Stolen Children. Given the sensitive nature of these stories, often part of complicated war crimes legal proceedings, and featuring vulnerable young people who can't be identified, audio is the only medium to do this story justice.

Since launching back in 2022, the podcast has gone from strength to strength, despite many of our competitors winding down their coverage of the war - the BBC recently stopped publishing Ukrainecast.

In February 2026, the team passed 138 million listens and counting. Their audience is extremely engaged, with a listen-through rate on Apple Podcasts of 75% - impressively high 1075 episodes into coverage of a grinding war. More than that, they receive a minimum of 100 emails every week, and often considerably more, and over 150 comments on episodes every single day.

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