Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Jake Hanrahan. He's a conflict journalist,

documentary filmmaker and the founder of Popular Front. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been

going on for a week, but it's felt like a year. Social media, YouTube and news channels have

been awash with stories from on the ground, and even the Wikipedia page has had over 500 contributors

and is more than 20,000 words long. Given this, I wanted to find out what life is actually like

on the ground in Ukraine from someone who's been there. Expect to learn what protection the

Ukrainian citizens have access to from bombings, where civilians are getting all their guns from,

how you coordinate citizen militias with zero military training, whether world champion boxes

are actually helping the effort, how skeptical Jake is of the press coverage, how many Russians

actually want this war, and much more. This was a conversation I really wanted to have. I want to

try and cut through all of the noise and misinformation and disinformation and tick tocks and live

streams and Instagrams and really try and find out exactly what life is like from a citizen's

perspective. I understand that the geopolitics of this are having repercussions and is NATO going

to push back and what Biden going to do and blah blah. But I think that first and foremost,

this is an issue which is affecting people and understanding the plight and suffering of people

on both sides and how they feel and what it's actually like to be there is a pretty important thing

to do and the work that Jake does with popular front is really important. So if you like it, you should

go and support him. He's got a Patreon, he's got an Instagram and Twitter and stuff like that. So

go and follow him and give him some support. In other news, this episode is brought to you by my

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