History in the Making: The War in Ukraine

Who's going to win the US elections, and what will the impact be on Ukraine? Could we be moving towards peace in 2025? And ultimately why do we in the West need to even care about supporting Ukraine?To answer these questions, I did something a little bit different in this episode and had my old co-worker and friend Martin Belchev, Practice Leader at FrontierView, interview me on the the outlook for the US elections, what the policy towards Ukraine would be from either a Harris or Trump presid...

For those of you who support Ukraine on social media – and LinkedIn specifically – many of you may have wondered: Who is Marijn Markus? Marijn is one of the most consistent and outspoken supporters of Ukraine for years now – but he’s not Ukrainian, isn’t from the military, doesn’t work directly for a government, and has no formal academic background in Eastern Europe or international relations… So how has he become one of the most ardent and listened to voices about the war on social med...

How and when will the war in Ukraine end? Can history teach us any lessons where this war is going? This is Part 2 of my interview with Professor Harper is an expert on US Foreign Policy and the Cold War, having written 4 books related to the Cold War and teaches a course at SAIS titled American Foreign Policy Since World War II. Originally from the US, he lives and teaches in Bologna, Italy.To learn more, visit: https://ubn.network/ Listen to more episodes on Mission Matters: https://m...

How and when will the war in Ukraine end? Can history teach us any lessons where this war is going? The clear answer to all of this is that we indeed can find useful analogies in the Cold War to understand where this current war is going and predict its future. US foreign policy towards Moscow during the Cold War proves to be highly instructive to understand how current US foreign policy will develop.To dive into this and understand the future of this war by looking at the past, I had th...

In this episode, I had the pleasure to speak with Jane Alieva, arguably one of the busiest women in Ukraine who has devoted her life to helping the tens of thousands of children traumatized by Russia. Jane runs and/or is a part of 3 different charity groups currently, all committed to helping kidnapped children and other victims of Russia's war.Listen in to hear what is unfortunately a highly underreported story regarding the untold tens of thousands of children Russia has kidnapped and who r...

Today I spoke with Roman Sulzhyk, a real Ukrainian patriot who has embraced his life's mission and decided to come back home to Ukraine to help rebuild his country. Roman has been a part of Ukraine's independence movement from the first Orange Revolution in 2004, to the Maidan in 2014, to the war today. He has a fascinating perspective, having seen this whole independence drive of the past 20 years.Roman worked hard and was able to get out of Ukraine in the 1990s and create a successful caree...

What's it like to be a Ukrainian prisoner of war held in Russian captivity? How do you survive the torture and beatings? This is Part 2 of my interview with Bogdan Zarytsky, a Ukrainian soldier who was taken as a POW into Russian captivity. In this episode, Bogdan tells us about the end of his time at the camp in Olenivka, transfer to a detention center where conditions were dramatically worse, and then finally his liberation. Hear more about how POWs are treated by the Russians, ab...

What's it like to be a Ukrainian prisoner of war held in Russian captivity? How do you survive the torture and beatings? This the story of Bogdan Zarytsky, a soldier of the Azov Battalion. In this first part of our interview, we discuss Bogdan's life as a soldier before the full-scale invasion in February 2022, then fighting in Mariupol and the Azovstal complex upon Russia's full-scale invasion, and finally his captivity in Russia's POW camp in Olenivka. Hear how Bogdan survived it ...

What would inspire a young Ukrainian man to leave his civilian life, voluntarily sign up for the military, and start training in order to be sent to the front? What do his friends and family think about his choice? How would you feel just days away from joining the Ukrainian military amid this extremely bloody war with Russia?To understand what it's like, hear the story of Andriy Nedilko, a 28-year old normal guy living in Kyiv who felt compelled to leave his civilian life, leave his girlfrie...

You think your job is hard? Imagine being the HR director of one of the most important companies in a country that has been at war for more than 2 years, is managing a labor market struggling from an outflow of refugees and loss of men to mobilization, and all while trying to recover after a 30% drop in GDP. Your company's task includes the transmission of electricity from generation to distribution networks, as well as the operational and technological control of the Ukrainian Power System, ...

In this episode, my guest Kateryna Odarchenko, government relations specialist and head of political consultancy SIC Group, discussed some of the top investment challenges in Ukraine, including the need for strong government relations teams, the importance of transparency, the recent passage of the Lobbying Law in Ukraine, the evolving Ukrainian business culture, and much more. Kateryna has nine years of experience in democracy building and democracy campaign management. She is th...

This is the second part of the episode of what is it like to be the wife of a Ukrainian soldier captured by the Russians and beaten and tortured as a prisoner of war? This is the story of Natalia Zarytska, the founder of "Women of Steel", an NGO dedicated to saving the soldiers who fought in Mariupol and at Azovstal in 2022. Despite being told her husband was dead multiple times, scared for her own life and the life of her child, and even harassed and threatened by Russians, Natalia neve...

What is it like to be the wife of a Ukrainian soldier captured by the Russians and beaten and tortured as a prisoner of war? This is the story of Natalia Zarytska, the founder of "Women of Steel", an NGO dedicated to saving the soldiers who fought in Mariupol and at Azovstal in 2022. Despite being told her husband was dead multiple times, scared for her own life and the life of her child, and even harassed and threatened by Russians, Natalia never gave up hope on her husband and successf...

In this episode, Pavlo Narozhnyi - Founder of Reactive Post, an NGO that provides support to soldiers on the front lines - shared stories from the frontlines in the war, while also describing where the war is today and his vision of how the war develops in the coming year(s). Filled with anecdotes from soldiers' experiences, plus the broader picture of both Ukraine and Russia's capabilities and vulnerabilities on land, in the sea, and in the air, Pavlo brings greater clarity to the war in his...

In this introductory episode of the podcast, I introduce myself - my personal, academic, and professional background - what the podcast will be about, and why I have moved to Ukraine to start a business. In short, I have been passionate about this region my entire life and have studied and worked on it my entire academic and professional career. For this reason, I have moved to Ukraine to make whatever small contribution I can make to help the country recover. In this podcast series...