The Global Agora

How much should we be surprised by the scale and quickness of the demonstrations in Sri Lanka? What has led to such turmoil? I talked to Ashok Swain . He is a Professor and Head of the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at the Uppsala University. We have also discussed what's next for Sri Lanka's powerful Rajapaksas' family and if the Russian war against Ukraine contributed&n...

"If the current amount of support from the West to Ukraine was present in 2014 over the annexation of Crimea, we could have avoided a lot of people being killed. But I'm glad that Ukraine is receiving support, and hopefully, there will be more support and long-term support." This is what Anton Barbashin said to me during our debate. He is an editorial director of Riddle , which is a website a...

Ben Hodges is a former commanding general, United States Army Europe. He believes Ukraine can win the war Russia started on February 24th. Why does he believe this? How should the West help Ukraine? Should it send troops? "I would say right now we have the best strategic advantage over Russia we have had in the last 70 years," General Hodges told me. What does he mean by this and why doe...

Do the conservative Justices at the Supreme Court impose their religious beliefs on America? The Supreme Court overturned the Roe vs Wade verdict that was the law of the land for almost 50 years. Prior to this decision, I talked to Diana Carlin . She is a Professor Emerita of Communication at Saint Louis University. We had a debate about how the Supreme Court works, past precedents, culture wars,...

Toni Alaranta is a Senior Research Fellow in the European Union Research Programme at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs ( FIIA ). His areas of expertise include Turkey’s domestic and foreign policies, in particular Turkey’s relations with the EU, the US and Russia. According to him, Ankara has the maximalist and the minimalist position toward the Finnish and Swedish NATO bid. We also...

We have started our conversation talking about Germany and about what German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is doing or not doing regarding Ukraine. But, and perhaps inevitably, we have moved our discussion to what is going on in America and what might happen. And the question is: Does Russian President Vladimir Putin only need to survive until Donald Trump will be back in the White House? At the annual G...

Would Russia be willing to use nuclear weapons? And what about the West, especially the US? I talked to Alexander Bollfrass , a Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies ( CSS ) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology - ETH Zurich. Why does he think that it seems that Russia makes a whole class of nuclear weapons exclusively for television? We also discuss if the risk of a nuclear...

As CNN pointed out , it's the third time in recent months that American President Joe Biden has said the US would protect Taiwan from a Chinese attack, only to have the White House walk back those remarks. Over a few decades, the US has intentionally maintained a position characterized as strategic ambiguity when asked whether it would come to Taiwan’s defense in the event of an attack by China. B...

On May 14th, 18-year-old Payton Gendron killed 10 people and wounded three; 11 of the 13 shot were Black residents and the attack took place in a predominantly African American neighborhood in Buffalo. The far-right terrorist wrote a manifesto connected to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory and according to CNN just before the attack, he invited people to the chatroom at the messaging social...

Should we call Russian President Vladimir Putin a war criminal? And what are the consequences of using such terminology? Are we witnessing genocide in Ukraine and does Putin talk about Ukrainians in genocidal terms? About this but also about much more, I talked to Paola Gaeta . She is a Professor of International Law at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. Thi...

As many other journalists can attest, Maria Avdeeva is doing an excellent and brave job informing the world about what is going on in Kharkiv and Ukraine. I talked to her just before the Russian invasion, shortly after , and now again. Maria is a Research Director at the European Expert Association where she focuses on international security and combating hybrid threats and disinformations. "...

Emmanuel Macron won the French presidential election as he received 58.5 percent of the vote in the run-off round against far-right candidate Marine Le Pen who was supported by 41.5 percent of voters. It was a hard-fought victory but the French president cannot sleep on laurels as the legislative election is swiftly approaching. What's Macron's vision for the next five years? Does he want to be th...

How healthy or unhealthy is Russian President Vladimir Putin? Why is the Kremlin bragging about the nuclear arsenal? What led to Bucha and the other massacres by Russian soldiers in Ukraine? And does Putin think everything is fine and how delusional is he? About this and much more, I talked to Andrei Soldatov , a Russian investigative journalist, co-founder, and editor of Agentura.ru, a watchdog o...

"Germany lost its compass and is going through a soul searching." This is how Jörg Forbrig , a Senior Fellow from the German Marshall Fund and director for Central and Eastern Europe, assess Berlin's reaction to the Russian war against Ukraine. But he also emphasizes that there are things Germans got right and those should be acknowledged. So is Russia's war against Ukraine also Germany's fault an...

What if the only limit Hungary's PM Viktor Orban has after the election is his own imagination? Orban's far-right populist Fidesz just clearly won the election that took place on March 3rd. The Prime Minister's party will have a constitutional majority in the next Hungarian parliament. Fidesz won 135 mandates in the parliament that has 199 seats. The united opposition lost badly, they only have 56...

Does war in Ukraine make Russian President Vladimir Putin nervous? "If there is anything human in him, he should be nervous." This is how a Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations Kadri Liik answered my question. We talked about why she thinks that this war looks like Putin's crusade, about the peace negotiations, and the role of Roman Abramovich, and if she is surprised...

"We have to be extremely careful making preliminary judgments about what is really happening on the ground." This is what Franz-Stefan Gady said to me when I asked him if Russia gets anything militarily right when attacking Ukraine and how Ukrainian forces are doing. My guest is a Research Fellow for Cyber, Space and Future Conflict at The International Institute for Strategic Studies. What is his...

Christopher Chivvis is a Senior Fellow and Director of the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment. He most recently served as the U.S. national intelligence officer for Europe. "The course of the war is notoriously difficult to predict," he said to me when I asked him about what we could expect in regards to the Russian invasion against Ukraine. But we have tried to talk a...

How many people are arriving? What is their motivation? And could it help Ukraine which is under Russia's attack? All of these questions are related to the establishment of the International Legion of Territorial Defense. Trying to find the answers, I talked to Kacper Kerawek . He is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX) at the University of Oslo. His book Brown...

Maria Avdeeva  is a Research Director at the European Expert Association where she focuses on international security, cooperation of Ukraine with the EU and NATO, combating hybrid threats, and emerging security challenges. For years she was fighting Russia's disinformation war against Ukraine. From February 24th is her country under military invasion ordered by Vladimir Putin and Maria s...

The number of casualties is growing as Russia wages its war in Ukraine. Will President Vladimir Putin escalate even further and why does he talk about nuclear weapons? I talked to Mark Galeotti who is, as his Twitter bio says, an analyst of murky topics from Russian politics to global crime. Dr. Galeotti is the director of the consultancy firm Mayak Intelligence. He is also an Honorary P...

Russian President Vladimir Putin is a man of dark emotions. But it's good that the West still engages with Moscow diplomatically. This is what Andrei Kolesnikov thinks. He is a Senior Fellow and the Chair of the Russian Domestic Politics and Political Institutions Program at the Carnegie Moscow Center . We talked about Putin's decision system. if he listens to somebody and what it all means for th...

Maria Avdeeva lives in Kharkiv, just 40 kilometers from the Russian border. She is a Research Director at the European Expert Association where she focuses on international security, cooperation of Ukraine with the EU and NATO, combating hybrid threats, and emerging security challenges. I talked to her on February 13 when we debated extremely tense situation as the Russian troops are surrounding U...

To use her own words, she a disaster researcher and scientist for fiction with irrepressible curiosity about our wonderfully weird universe. This is how Mika McKinnon introduces yourself. If you listen to my podcast regularly, and I hope you do, you know that I usually cover foreign policy events and trends. But not exclusively, so this is an episode about disasters. Mika McKinnon is a perfect gue...

According to current polls, less than 50 percent of Finns oppose the membership of their country in NATO. This is for the first time ever. Is it caused by Russian actions? I talked to Charly Salonius-Pasternak , a leading researcher in The Center on US Politics and Power at Finnish Institute of International Affairs. Does it mean that Finland will apply for NATO membership any time soon? And if it...