CIA Russia Expert on What the West Gets Wrong About Putin's Russia | Sean Wiswesser

CIA Russia Expert on What the West Gets Wrong About Putin's Russia | Sean Wiswesser

➡️ Watch the full interview ad-free, join a community of geopolitics enthusiasts and gain access to exclusive content on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics ➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://stationzero.substack.com/ ➡️ Buy your own Geopolitics of the Western Pacific Map Print: https://decoding-geopolitics-shop.fourthwall.com/ ➡️ Get Sean's book: Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin's Secret War This is a conversation with Sean Wiswesser, a veteran CIA operations officer who spent almost three decades working for the agency deployed in various places around the world. And a majority of his career was working on and in - Russia - and in particular on Russian intelligence services - basically he was a spy, recruiting other spies. He recently wrote a book detailing what he has learned about how Russian intelligence actually works, including everything from the Russian illegals and assassinations program, their preparations for invasion of Ukraine, their many failures and what almost everyone fails to understand about them - or what does someone with decades of experience of working on Russia think about the stability of the regime and where the country is going.

Kate Bondar: Russia Is Quietly Building a New Army - And NATO Is Completely Unprepared

➡️ Watch the full interview ad-free, join a community of geopolitics enthusiasts and gain access to exclusive content on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics ➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://stationzero.substack.com/ ➡️ Buy your own Geopolitics of the Western Pacific Map Print: https://decoding-geopolitics-shop.fourthwall.com/ Over the past year, something has been happening inside the Russian military that received very little attention but that will have - and is already having - pretty significant consequences. While the world has been focused on casualty numbers and frontline movements, Russia has been building an entirely new kind of army - one based on drones, autonomous weapons, and AI. It has been pouring enormous resources into it - and it's not a project for some distant future - it's already being widely used by Russia in Ukraine right now and it’s already changing how the Russian military fights a war. And even more importantly, it’s putting Russia way ahead of most NATO members in ways that should be setting off alarm bells in European capitals - but largely isn't.  My guest today is Kateryna Bondar, a fellow at the CSIS Wadwhani AI Center who just wrote a major new report on exactly this - detailing how Russia is building this new military ecosystem, how far it's gotten, what will be the consequences of and how The West is mostly failing to notice and react to it.

Jack Watling: The Next Great War Is Already Taking Shape. What Happens Next Decides Everything

➡️ Watch the full interview ad-free, join a community of geopolitics enthusiasts and gain access to exclusive content on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics ➡️ Buy your own Geopolitics of the Western Pacific Map Print: https://decoding-geopolitics-shop.fourthwall.com/ ➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://stationzero.substack.com/ This is a conversation with Jack Watling, a Senior Research Fellow at RUSI and one of the most brilliant defence analysts in Europe. He is the author of Statecraft — a book about how the rules of global powers have radically changed over the last decade and what the West needs to do to survive what’s coming next. We get into why a beaten-down and much weaker Iran may end up coming out of its current war with the much more powerful United States in a stronger position than before, and what that says about American power. We talk about Taiwan, and why Jack's assessment of what's coming there is much darker than what you usually hear. We talk into Russia and Ukraine — why the West has consistently misunderstood about Moscow’s behavior and what are the costs of that, and why 2026 is the inflection point of the war and where will we go next - and much more.

Michael McFaul: America Is Burning Down Everything It Built. Its Enemies Can't Believe Their Luck

➡️ Watch the full interview ad-free, join a community of geopolitics enthusiasts and gain access to exclusive content on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics ➡️ Buy your own Geopolitics of the Western Pacific Map Print: https://decoding-geopolitics-shop.fourthwall.com/ ➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://stationzero.substack.com/ This is a conversation with Michael McFaul, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia and a special advisor on Russia to president Obama, professor of international relations at Stanford University and one of the most respected American experts on foreign policy and geopolitics. He is someone that I would call a typical transatlanticist - someone who spent his whole career working on build a strong alliance with Europe, promoting democracy abroad and deterring autocratic adversarial regimes - and so it’s really interesting to talk at a time when both US foreign policy and the world looks very very different. And so we talk about his thoughts on the war with Iran, whether it will end up as a strategic defeat for the United States and how it will change America’s standing and influence around the world. About the current crisis in the relations between Europe and the U.S., Trump’s desire to leave NATO, whether it's going to happen and whether it wouldn't be for the best in the end. And about the fight between autocracies and democracies that he writes about in his new book and how this fight changes if the world’s leading democracy doesn't seem that sure on which side it actually is and what it means for the rest of us - and much more.

NATO Information Warfare Chief: Russia's Plan to Defeat Europe Without Firing a Shot | Janis Sarts

➡️ Watch the full interview ad-free, join a community of geopolitics enthusiasts and gain access to exclusive content on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics ➡️ Buy your own Geopolitics of the Western Pacific Map Print: https://decoding-geopolitics-shop.fourthwall.com/ ➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://stationzero.substack.com/ For over 4 years, Russia has been fighting its full scale war in Ukraine and despite all its efforts it’s not particularly successful at it. But for much longer than that, Russia has been fighting a second war in parallel, one that gets far less attention but which is arguably far, far more successful. It's the war for hearts and minds: in Europe, in Ukraine and across the Global South  - and while it might seem abstract, it’s very much real and it’s bringing Russia very real benefits - often enabling it to win battles without needing to fight a single shot.  To understand how that war is being fought - and why is the West on the backfoot - I'm talking to Janis Sarts, the Director of NATO's Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence. This is the organisation that sits at the heart of NATO's efforts to understand and counter Russian information warfare, which makes Sarts one of the most informed people in the world on how this domain actually works. We get into why Russia is so effective at this despite being outmatched in almost every other domain, why Western governments talk about the threat constantly but do so little to counter it, and what it would actually take to fight back - including the lessons from Ukraine, which has done something no Western country has managed: take the information fight directly to Russia.