Marshall here. Welcome back to the Realignment.

Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. Today's episode is going to be a little different.

I decided to bring on Sagan, my good friend from college, Jack Dech, who is the Pentagon

correspondent for Foreign Policy magazine. You may have heard that Ukraine launched a major

offensive in the eastern half of the country over the weekend and I thought, speaking

of Jack as a reporter who's covered the conflicts. The start of the war will be a great opportunity

to examine how this could possibly change the game on the ground and shape always conversations,

whether it's US support, NATO expansion, overall Western alliance, the conversation of energy

going into the year 2023. If you enjoy this different style of interview or you enjoy our other

types of content, whether they're the Q&A episodes, the discussions or longer form interviews,

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wherever you listen to podcasts. Hope you all enjoy this conversation.

Jack Detch, welcome to the reallignment.

Good to be here, Marshall. Yeah, great to chat with you. We've known each other for,

I guess over a decade now, so it's good to find someone in this Pentagon reporting space who

you could just reach out to and actually just ask pretty basic questions of them. Sure,

everyone has right now. Let's just start with the basics. What happened in eastern Ukraine

over this past weekend? What the Ukrainians were able to do were to seize some of the major

railroad junctions in eastern Ukraine that the Russians seized back in April when they launched

this big Donbass offensive. They basically put a baker's dozen of these major rail intersections

...