Love this podcast.

Support this show through the A-Cast supporter feature.

It's up to you how much you give,

and there's no regular commitment.

Just click the link in the show description to support now.

Again, look, the Russians are basically geopolitical guerrillas. They're a relatively weak country trying to basically force the outside world to treat them as

if they're a great power and all of politics is about perception. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines.

Here are your hosts. Hello, welcome to War College. I'm Matthew Galt and I'm Derek Annan. We need to talk about Putin. Of all

the leaders of state nobody is as maligned, studied, and overanalyzed as Russian

President Vladimir Putin. He's a KGB thug.

He's playing three-dimensional chess

while everyone else is playing checkers.

And he's turned to state that was into decline

into a global superpower through information warfare.

No one is as cunning as Putin. Or at least that's the story

we tell ourselves here in the West, or one of the stories we tell ourselves here in the West.

Here to help us dispel some of those myths and set the record straightish is friend of the show Mark Goliati.

Goliati is an expert on the Russian military, politics, and underworld, the author of many fine, and an honorary professor at University of College

London and a Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.

He's got three, count him three books coming out this month. We're going to talk about two of them.

One is we need to talk about Putin, how the West gets him wrong, and another is Russian political

war moving beyond the hybrid. Mark, thank you so much for joining us. You've been very busy.

...