The Russia Guy

Today's guest is Rob Lee , a doctoral student in the Department of War Studies at King's College London, a former Alfa Fellow, and an ex-Marine. Rob joins "The Russia Guy" to talk about the 33 Russian nationals arrested in Belarus on July 29, 2020. Officials in Minsk say the men are mercenaries from the “Wagner” private military company (PMC) who planned to incite riots ahead o...

Today's show welcomes back Wilson Center Disinformation Fellow Nina Jankowicz , who first appeared on this podcast way back in December 2017 . She's back now to discuss her new book, How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict , which "takes the reader on a journey through five Western governments' responses to Russian information warfare tact...

Today’s show looks at the case against Khabarovsk Governor Sergey Furgal, whom federal agents arrested on Thursday, July 9, and promptly flew him to Moscow where he was arraigned on charges that he organized violence (including several contract killings) against business rivals in 2004 and 2005. Today's guest is András Tóth-Czifra , a political analyst based in New York and the author of the...

A freelance journalist in Moscow with bylines in The Guardian , The Telegraph , Foreign Policy , The Nation , Politico , and more, guest Alec Luhn discusses reporting Russia’s Arctic and journalism about environmentalism more broadly. How do you sell Western readers on these themes? What does it take to get to remote areas where the climate crisis is most destructive? Listen and find out. Follow A...

Today's guest is Yuval Weber , the Kennan Institute Associate Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies. He was also the inaugural Daniel Morgan Graduate School-Kennan Institute fellow and previously taught at Harvard University as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Government. Dr. Weber is working on a book now that asks why pro-market economic reform efforts in Russia follo...

On today’s show, “The Russia Guy” welcomes Michael Schwirtz, a journalist from The New York Times staff who just won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. The award was granted for “a set of enthralling stories, reported at great risk, exposing the predations of Vladimir Putin’s regime.”  The newspaper's winning work includes six articles and two documentary videos published in 2019....

Today’s guest is Miriam Elder, a political reporter at BuzzFeed, where until recently she worked for many years as the world editor. Before that, she was the Russia correspondent for The Guardian, and her work has been featured in many other publications, including The Financial Times, The Atlantic, The Moscow Times, and more. Miriam is also the first Western journalist who reported extensively on...

Today’s guest is Brian O’Toole, a senior fellow in the Global Business and Economics Program at the Atlantic Council. Brian previously worked at the U.S. Treasury Department from 2009 to 2017, becoming a senior adviser to the director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). As a senior adviser, Brian helped manage the implementation of all OFAC-administered economic and financial sanctions...

Today’s guest is Jill Dougherty, a Russia expert who worked as a journalist at CNN for 30 years before shifting to work in academia. At CNN, she served as a White House correspondent, a foreign affairs correspondent covering the U.S. State Department, as a U.S. affairs editor, a managing editor for CNN Asia/Pacific, and for almost a decade as Moscow Bureau chief. Jill was kind enough to come on th...

Today’s guest is the man behind one of the longest-running, best Russia blogs ever written. If you’ve even a fleeting interest in Russia’s military, you’ve probably read the Russian Defense Policy blog at least once, and on today’s episode of The Russia Guy, you can finally hear from the author, who asked to remain anonymous, which is how he’s always maintained his blog, of course. How do you sust...

Today's guest is New York Times Moscow correspondent Anton Troianovski, the author of the March 6, 2020, article, “As Bernie Sanders Pushed for Closer Ties, Soviet Union Spotted Opportunity,” which addresses previously unreported archival documents uncovered in Yaroslavl, where Sanders traveled in 1988 in a combination of civic diplomacy and his own honeymoon. The story has been provocative a...

On The Russia Guy’s 100th episode, today's guest is Julia Ioffe, now a correspondent at GQ Magazine, a former Moscow-based reporter, a prominent public figure in both academic settings and cable news, and the author of an upcoming book about Russia. In the interview you’re about to hear, Julia talks about the steps that led her to journalism, the differences of working with official sources i...

Today's guest is Oliver Carroll, the Moscow correspondent for the British newspaper “The Independent.” Ollie has lived in and reported from Moscow and Kyiv for more than a decade, he’s back in the Russian capital now, and he was kind enough to come on this podcast to discuss the latest political shakeup in the Russian government and the constitutional amendments, as well as his long career re...

Today’s guest is Elizaveta Fokht, a journalist the BBC’s Russian-language service, who's also reported for Russian news outlets like Dozhd and RBK. Earlier this month, she and her colleague, Andrey Zakharov, wrote a spectacular story about a new media holding company called “Patriot,” which unites several websites with connections to Evgeny Prigozhin, the Russian catering magnate (who also da...

Today's guest is Lincoln Pigman, a Master’s graduate student at Oxford University and a research fellow at the Foreign Policy Center. He’s written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many other outlets, usually about Russian cyberspace. About a year ago, he wrote an article in the Journal of Cyber Policy, titled “Russia’s Vision of Cyberspace: A Danger to Regime Security, Public...

Today's guest is Ariel Cohen, a scholar focusing on political risk, international security and energy policy, and the rule of law, working as a specialist on Russia, Eurasia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. He’s currently a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, the director of the Energy, Growth, and Security Program at the International Tax and Investment Center (which promotes tax ref...

Today's guest is Olesya Vartanyan, Crisis Group’s analyst for the “EU Eastern Neighbourhood.” Based in Tbilisi, she researches and produces reports on regional security issues in Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, with a particular focus on breakaway regions in the South Caucasus. She told Kevin what it’s like to go from a career in journalism to the world of professional analysis, and let him...

Today's guest is Gasan Gusejnov, a linguistics professor at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics. Many people in Russia are learning about him right now because of a Facebook post he shared on October 29, where he complained that Russians show too little interest in other languages. He said specifically that newsstands in Moscow — a city with hundreds of thousands of ethnicities besides Russia...

Today's guest is Tikhon Dzyadko, a journalist who’s worked for Russia’s top independent radio and television broadcasters, Ekho of Moscow and TV Rain, or Dozhd, and he’s now deputy director of news programs at TV station broadcast online in Russia, RTVI. Tikhon talked to Kevin about how he got into journalism, the challenges facing independent reporters in Russia (specifically when it comes t...

On today's episode, Kevin reflects briefly on his first trip to Moscow in seven years, and reviews a new investigative report by Meduza about special government communications services issued by Russia's Federal Protective Service — and why nobody actually uses them. Read the article here: https://meduza.io/en/feature/2019/10/09/nobody-s-homeSupport this very podcast here: www.patreon.co...

Today's show welcomes back Dr. Alina Polyakova, a fellow at the Brookings Institute, an adjunct professor of European studies at Johns Hopkins University, and a specialist in far-right populism and nationalism, and Russian foreign policy. Last month, Alina and her colleague, Chris Meserole, wrote a policy brief for Brookings, titled “Exporting Digital Authoritarianism: The Russian and Chinese...

Today's episode looks back at the Beslan school siege, which took place 15 years ago this month, and claimed the lives of 334 innocent people, including 186 children. Journalist Mike Eckel, now with Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, then a correspondent with The Associated Press, reported from on the ground in Beslan during the school siege. He kindly came on this show to talk about the expe...

Alexandra Urman, a PhD Candidate at the Institute of Communication and Media Studies, University of Bern, is one of the co-founders of the “Here We Stand” initiative, a student project created to bring attention to three university students — Egor Zhukov, Daniil Konon, and Valery Kostenyok — who were charged with rioting in Moscow for their participation in peaceful demonstrations this summer. The...

Christopher Miller, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty’s Kyiv correspondent, has worked at Mashable and The Kyiv Post, and he’s been published at Politico Europe, The Guardian, The Times, The Atlantic, and many other outlets. Chris is one of the stand-out foreign journalists reporting from Ukraine, and he came onto the podcast to discuss his career and talk extensively about journalism in Ukraine a...

Leonid Ragozin now writes often for Al Jazeera, and has worked in the past for the BBC, Newsweek, The Guardian, and many other outlets, reporting on Russia and Ukraine mostly. He is also co-author of the Lonely Planet Guides to Moscow, Ukraine, and several other Eastern European destinations. Earlier this month, he wrote an article titled “Putin Risks Losing Moscow.”Follow Leonid on Twitter: https...