What World Leaders NEED to Know about Russia

In this episode, Elvira Bary audits what Russians actually lost after four years of Putin’s full-scale war against Ukraine. Russia did not only lose soldiers, money, and military prestige. Ordinary Russians lost access to the world, normal travel, foreign media, familiar brands, reliable routes, working bank cards abroad, affordable credit, European energy markets, arms customers, and the educated...

In this episode, Elvira Bary asks whether Russia can actually become a normal country — one that does not attack its neighbors, worship empire, or depend on the moods of a single ruler. Replacing Putin alone will not solve the problem if the same autocratic machinery remains: centralized money, caste privileges, state monopolies, censorship, controlled courts, obedient media, and security agencies...

In this episode, Elvira Bary looks inside Russia’s pro-war camp and asks what happens when the loudest supporters of Putin’s war stop believing in the victory they were promised. The Z-community imagined Kyiv falling, Ukraine collapsing, the West retreating, and Russia rising as an empire again. Instead, they now see drone attacks, fake frontline reports, shrinking definitions of victory, vulnerab...

In this episode, Elvira Bary explains why Crimea matters so deeply to both Russia and Ukraine — and why the peninsula has become one of the hardest problems in any future peace settlement. Crimea was Putin’s great imperial trophy in 2014, a symbol of restored Russian power, Soviet nostalgia, Sevastopol, naval glory, and the myth that borders could be changed by force. But the war in Ukraine has tu...

In this episode, Elvira Bary explains why many average Russians choose to “believe” tyrants like Putin — not because they are uniquely brainwashed, but because the system trains belief into a survival strategy. Russia’s dictatorship works through caste, dependence, fear, corruption, and negative selection: the loyal are rewarded, the competent are pushed out, and public agreement becomes a passwor...

In this episode, Elvira Bary compares post-war Russia with Germany after the First World War and asks a dangerous question: what happens to a country that expected victory but receives humiliation, economic stress, dead soldiers, angry veterans, and no satisfying triumph? Germany’s defeat produced the “stab-in-the-back” myth, a comforting lie that protected national pride and helped open the road...

In this episode, Elvira Bary explains what happens when a war that Russia tried to keep distant finally comes home. For years, Putin’s regime worked to make ordinary Russians feel that the invasion of Ukraine was somewhere far away, safely outside their daily lives. But Ukrainian drone strikes, burning factories, airport chaos, fuel shortages, collapsing businesses, broken air defenses, and offici...

👉Grab your own EWIN gaming chair and save 30% with code "Elvira" here: https://tidd.ly/3WAfxcu In this episode, Elvira Bary looks inside the world of Russia’s Z-bloggers — the most loyal and aggressive public supporters of the Russian army and its war in Ukraine. These pro-war Telegram voices believed the invasion would make them part of a new patriotic elite, but the reality is turning...

In this episode, Elvira Bary explores one of the quietest but most dangerous shifts inside Russia: the death of emotional ownership. Putin’s war was sold as a shared national mission — our boys, our front, our fight, our future. But more and more Russians now support the war publicly while privately wanting it to end, avoiding the word “war,” distancing themselves from responsibility, and watching...

In this episode, Elvira Bary explains how Putin’s propaganda convinced many Russians that the West is the one living inside a media hallucination. The Kremlin does not need people to believe one perfect lie. It only needs them to accept two dangerous ideas: everyone lies, and the West lies more beautifully. From Bucha and Mariupol to Iraq, Libya, and Yugoslavia, Russian propaganda turns Western hy...

In this episode, Elvira Bary asks a blunt question: is Russia actually a giant mafia extortion racket wearing the costume of a state? The answer lies not in mysticism, but in structure. A mafia system monopolizes power, property, information, violence, and even the right to succeed. From Muscovy’s survival economy to modern Putinism, this video traces how Russia built a cage where protection repla...

In this episode, Elvira Bary breaks down how the Kremlin may try to sell defeat as victory if the war in Ukraine ends without the triumph Putin promised. Kyiv did not fall, Ukraine still stands, and Russia has paid a staggering price — but authoritarian regimes cannot simply admit failure. So the target shifts from Ukraine to “the collective West,” exhausted people are offered peace as the ruler’s...

In this episode, Elvira Bary explains why recent drone attacks on Moscow and the Moscow region changed the emotional reality inside Russia. For years, many Russians were trained to treat the war as something distant: a “special military operation” happening somewhere else, to someone else. But when explosions reach the capital, the old bargain begins to crack. If Putin’s system promised protection...

In this episode, Elvira Bary goes inside the hidden world of Russian contract soldiers’ wives, mothers, and widows — women who search Telegram for missing men, fight through paperwork, fear sealed zinc coffins, and still often defend the war that destroyed their families. This is not simply a story about propaganda. It is about poverty, status, grief, money, heroism, and the unbearable need to bel...

In this episode, Elvira Bary looks at the war in Ukraine as a turning point in military history. Russia entered the war with the old imperial logic: more men, more tanks, more artillery, more mass. But Ukraine showed that the future of war belongs less to sheer size and more to adaptation, drones, visibility, distributed production, fast repair, and resilient societies. From battlefield transparen...

In this episode, Elvira Bary breaks down the real Russia-China relationship behind the red carpets and “friendship” speeches. This is not a new Soviet bloc or a partnership of equals. It is an asymmetrical bargain in which China gains leverage while Russia loses options: markets, machines, technology, energy routes, and political room to maneuver. Putin went to war to restore Russia’s greatness, b...

In this episode, Elvira Bary looks beyond the battlefield and asks what happens when the war in Ukraine finally slows or stops. A ceasefire may bring relief, but it will not erase the habits, incentives, and damage the war has created. Ukraine may read the outcome as survival and statehood, while Russia faces humiliation, demobilized veterans, a warped war economy, shrinking civilian life, and peo...

Russia doesn’t behave like a modern state of citizens—it behaves like an internal empire that colonizes its own population. In this episode, author Elvira Bary breaks down the extraction logic: how the state sits on economic choke points, uses “technical” money changes to drain purchasing power, turns default into policy, and normalizes coercion as “participation.” From early monetary shocks to So...

In this episode, Elvira Bary explains why life without Putin terrifies many Russians, including educated people who can see the damage his rule has done. The fear is not always love for Putin or blind propaganda. It is fear of chaos, fear of patron networks collapsing, fear of losing protection, status, income, and national identity. From buried memories of civil war to the belief that a “lucky” r...

In this episode, author Elvira Bary breaks down the hidden war tax inside Putin’s Russia. The Kremlin is not financing the war in Ukraine from some secret treasure chest—it is funding it by making ordinary Russians poorer: through food inflation, shrinking savings, pressure on private business, stalled construction, damaged export infrastructure, and a civilian economy slowly hollowed out to keep...

In this episode, Elvira Bary argues that four years of war in Ukraine have produced Russia’s third great rupture in just over a century. This is not only a battlefield story. It is a story of a country changing its internal operating system: a war economy feeding on civilian life, privilege narrowing around force, property turning into a lease from the Kremlin, daily life absorbing the front, and...

In this episode, author Elvira Bary looks behind Russia’s macho state mythology and asks a blunt question: if so many men are gone—killed, wounded, mobilized, drunk, aging out, or fleeing—who is actually running the country now? We follow the labor shortage through the people quietly holding Russia together: women pushed into “male” jobs, grandmothers who never really retire, migrant workers the r...

In this episode, Elvira Bary explains why Hungary’s election mattered far beyond Budapest. Viktor Orbán was not just another European leader. For years, he served as one of the Kremlin’s most useful voices inside the EU and NATO—slowing support for Ukraine, defending Russian energy ties, and helping Moscow sell the story that Europe was divided and Putin still had friends in the West. This video b...

At first glance, war in Iran seems like good news for Moscow: oil prices rise, the world looks away from Ukraine, and Russian propaganda gets fresh anti-Western material. But in this episode, Elvira Bary shows why that first impression is misleading. Higher prices do not help much if export infrastructure is damaged, extra revenue does not improve normal life for Russians, and a crisis inside Iran...

In this episode, author Elvira Bary explains the only war Putin can realistically win: not a tank war, but a war against democratic attention, trust, and cohesion. Russia cannot defeat the United States or the wider West in a fair military contest, so it shifts the battlefield inward—into algorithms, influence operations, propaganda laundering, sabotage, corruption, and emotional exhaustion. We tr...