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This is a conversation with Minna Alander - a research fellow at the Finnish Institute for International Affairs who's focusing, among other topics on Finnish security and defence policy, Nordic defence cooperation and Arctic security. 

Finland is quite an exception among European countries - because while today many are panicking and trying to make up for years of underfunding, Fins seems to be quite calm - as they have been ready to fight Russia on their own for decades - as they have done in the past in multiple iconic conflicts.  

In this conversation we talk about why is Finland prepared for war better than almost anyone else, what is the Finnish perspective of the Russian threat, how did Finland joining NATO completely changed the calculus for both NATO and Russia and what would a Russian invasion fo Finland look like.

Thank you to everyone who is supporting this podcast on Patreon - it's incredibly helpful. And now, enjoy the conversation. 

This is a conversation with Thomas Van Linge - a freelance journalist and a researcher covering the world's forgotten conflicts, including the civil war in Myanmar. Recently, he came back from a research trip to the rebel-held areas in Myanmar where he stayed with the rebels, visited the frontlines and saw up close what the war looks like.

In this conversation, we talk about why is the military starting to lose and how close it is from a final defeat, why is Russia supplying the military dictator, what is China's role in the conflict and what will happen to Myanmar once the dictatorship falls.

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This is a conversation with Ben Hodges, a retired three star general of the US army, the former Commander of US Army Europe and someone who spent more than three decades as a military officer and achieved one of the highest posts in the US Armed Forces.

In this interview, we discussed what the latest military package means for Ukraine, why the West seems to prioritize avoiding escalation more than defeating Russia, whether we should send troops to Ukraine, how could Ukraine retake Crimea or whether we should worry about the fall of Putin's regime. 

Thank you to everyone who supports this podcast on Patreon - and now, enjoy the conversation.

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Thank you to everyone supporting this podcast - and now, enjoy the conversation.

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This is a conversation with Brian Hart - a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and an expert on China's military and its foreign and security policy. We talked about what is the real capability of China's military, whether it's a paper tiger or if it's prepared and ready to take Taiwan by force, if 2027 is the year when we should expect the war to happen or how ready is Taiwan to fight back. 

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This is a conversation with David Gioe. David has two decades of experience as an intelligence officer, starting his career in the FBI and then joining the CIA, first as an analyst and later as an field-qualified operations officer. He deployed a number of times overseas and worked on counter-intelligence, clandestine operations and covert action. After retiring from the CIA, David has moved to academia and today he works as a professor of History at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and he is a visiting professor of Intelligence and and International Security in the Department of War Studies at King's College London.

We talked about how the world of intelligence really works, how it has changed since the cold war or how agents working in the field do their job at a time when anonymity is increasingly disappearing. And how the CIA manages to stay ahead of the Russians, why Chinese spies work differently than anyone else and much much more. 

Thank you to everyone who supports this podcast on Patreon. If you want to follow David you can go to his Twitter or website and now, enjoy this conversation.

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This is a conversation with Mark Galeotti - an honorary professor at UCL, a senior associate fellow at Royal United Services Institute, director of Mayak Intelligence and one of the most renowned experts on Russia and Russian politics.

We talked about the attacks in Moscow - whether he thought it could have been a false flag, or whether the Russian propaganda will succeed in shifting blame to Ukraine. And about the broader picture - when might the war in Ukraine end and how, whether Russia is weaker than it looks and much more.

Thank you to everyone who supports this podcast on Patreon, and now enjoy the conversation.

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Dr Ulrike Franke is a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations who's focusing on German Security, Foreign and Defense policy and has a deep insight into the inner workings of German political and security institutions.

We talked about how Germany has changed since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, why it struggles so much to rebuild its military, why it still refuses to provide Taurus missiles to Ukraine, whether the German public has abandoned its pacifism or whether Germany should get a nuclear bomb.

Thank you to everyone who's supporting this podcast on Patreon and now enjoy the conversation.

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This is a conversation with Alex Vatanka - a Tehran-born expert on Iranian domestic and foreign policy and a director of the Iran program at the Middle East Institute.

In this conversation we talk about Iran's geopolitical strategy - what is it trying to achieve, what are its motivations and goals but also about whether it would benefit from a large regional war, to what extent it controls Hamas, how stable is the Iranian regime and much much more.

Thank you so much to everyone for supporting this podcast. And now enjoy the conversation.

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Support this podcast on Patreon, help me make more episodes and get bonus content, early access and ask questions to the upcoming guests.

This is a conversation with General Mick Ryan. Mick is a former high commanding officer in the Australian Army and today works mostly on the topic of the future of war. He wrote two excellent books - War Transformed in which he explains how technology will shape future conflicts and White Sun War - a fictional account of war over Taiwan in which he brings these ideas to life and shows how devastating a superpower conflict would look like. In this interview we talk about all of that and much more.

Enjoy the conversation.