Ukraine

Guardian journalist Shaun Walker talks about Yevgeny Prigozhin, the tough-talking convict-turned-businessman who recruits soldiers from Russian prisons to fight in Ukraine. "It's just so out of the realms of fantasy that this former convict is going to fly around prisons in his helicopter and offer people salvation for fighting for him at the front, and then lead these battalions of prisoners to their almost certain death," He says. "It's so dystopian that it's really hard to believe. But yet it has happened."

Time magazine's Vera Bergengruen says Ukraine's citizen IT force, led by a 31-year-old minister of digital transformation, is blunting Russian disinformation and galvanizing international support.

On a recent reporting trip to cover Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Time reporter Simon Shuster visited an air base on the Polish side of the Ukrainian border. Watching as U.S. planes brought in loads of weapons for Ukraine, Shuster felt like he was standing on the brink of something massive.

Historian Mary Elise Sarotte tells how NATO expanded into Eastern Europe after the fall of the U.S.S.R, and is now obligated to defend nations near Russia's war in Ukraine. Her book is Not One Inch.

Yovanovitch was relieved of her post following a smear campaign orchestrated by Trump lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. She also testified at Trump's first impeachment. Her new memoir is 'Lessons from the Edge.'

New Yorker staff writer Masha Gessen says there's been an exodus from Russia in the last week and a half: "It's a sudden and drastic descent into a sense of having no country."

Historian and former State Department official Michael Kimmage says the war in Ukraine is going "surprisingly badly" for the Kremlin: "It didn't get the politics of Ukraine right. It didn't expect the Ukrainians to fight." We talk about possible scenarios of how this conflict could end, and what that means for Ukraine, Europe and the U.S.

Journalist Anne Applebaum has been covering the war in Ukraine for The Atlantic. "I don't think that we will ever again smugly assume that borders in Europe can't be changed by force," she says.

The retired Army officer who testified about President Trump's call to the president of Ukraine, talks about the experience and the price he paid. Vindman's new memoir is Here, Right Matters.

New Yorker writer Adam Entous says the U.S. could face further retaliation from Iran for the death of Qassem Soleimani: "If you look at their history, they take a long time before they strike back."

Time correspondent Simon Shuster recently spoke with Ukraine's president. After six months in office, Shuster says Volodymyr Zelensky is "quite cynical" and feels "there are no reliable allies."

The Trump administration's pressure on Ukraine is the center of the impeachment inquiry, but foreign influence expert Ben Freeman says the influence also worked in the opposite direction.

New York Times reporter Andrew Kramer says impeachment puts Volodymyr Zelensky in a tough spot: "He may be dealing with a President Biden next year, or he may be dealing with President Trump."

Bloomberg Businessweek columnist Joshua Green says Trump fell for a media campaign on Ukraine designed to help him: "The irony is that the target was supposed to be the Bidens, not the president."

New York Times reporter Ken Vogel says that Paul Manafort engaged in illegal lobbying to burnish the image of Viktor Yanukovych, the authoritarian president of Ukraine.

Atlantic journalist Franklin Foer says before Manafort became Trump's campaign manager, he rewrote the rules of lobbying and then became entangled in the world of dictators, oligarchs and dirty money.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum explains how Stalin killed millions in the '30s by orchestrating a famine to suppress the nationalist movement and strengthen Russian influence in Ukraine.

Wired's Andy Greenberg says Ukraine has been the victim of a "cyber-assault unlike any the world has ever seen." Cybersecurity experts think Russia is perfecting attacks that could be used on the U.S.

The New York Times' Sabrina Tavernise was among the first to arrive at the site of the downed flight in Ukraine in late July. She says it's hard to get the faces of the dead out of her mind.

Michael McFaul, ambassador to Russia from January 2012 to February 2014, says, "I've never seen [Putin] devote a speech to the necessity of reuniting Crimea with Russia. That came only recently."