Dmitri Alperovitch talks to Russian military analyst Rob Lee and Wagner Group expert Jack Margolin about the implications of reports of Prigozhin's fiery death in a plane crash in Russia. Where does Wagner go from here? What happens to Russian ambitions in Africa? Does this event help restore Surovikin, Russia's most competent commander of this war, back to command one day? And what impact this might have on the future of the war

Music: Richard Wagner's Funeral March

In this joint Geopolitics Decanted and Risky Business feature interview, Dmitri Alperovitch and Patrick Gray talk to Illia Vitiuk, the Head of the Department of Cyber and Information Security of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) about the cyber dimension to Russia's invasion.

From turning off Ukraine's power grid with a cyber attack in 2015, to the Viasat satellite communications hack in 2022, Russia's intelligence services are world renowned for executing creative destructive cyber campaigns. Despite this, after a year and a half of Russia waging war on Ukraine its power grid is up, its telcos are functioning and its banks are still processing transactions.

How has Ukraine been able to withstand Russia's onslaught in the cyber domain? Illia Vitiuk joins us to reveal insights into how Russian intelligence services are operating in Ukraine, and how the SBU is countering them.

Dmitri Alperovitch talks with geoeconomist Douglas Rediker (Senior Fellow at Brookings and formerly with the IMF Executive Board) about the enduring dominance of the U.S. dollar and why it won't change any time soon.

Why the dollar continues to have no realistic alternatives and why Chinese renminbi is not a viable replacement.

Also, what are the prospects and obstacles for seizing Russia's Central Bank Reserves to pay for Ukrainian reconstruction and other budget needs.

And is there anything that China can do to diminish the impact of any future U.S. sanctions if it choose to invade Taiwan?

Dmitri Alperovitch discusses the evolution of AI with Teddy Collins (former Assistant Director for Technology Strategy at the White House, Research Scientist at Google’s DeepMind and co-author of "Teams of Teams" with General Stan McChrystal):

- The AI triad of Talent/Algorithms, Data and Compute which has driven so much improvement in the last 5 years

- How AI could disproportionally benefit the large and rich technology platform companies

- The challenge of Sim2Real jump and why using AI to solve many real-world problems in the physical world could still be years away

- Why AI is unlikely to give an edge to attackers or defenders in cybersecurity

- The dark side of AI

- And what might be the most profound implications for societal change driven by AI