Hey, everybody. It is Wednesday, June 28th. You're listening to the Mo news podcast. I'm Mo Shwanunu.

And I'm Jill Wagner. This is the place where we bring you just the facts.

And we read all the news and read between the lines so you don't have to.

Jill, I hope you have a mask ready. Our understanding is that the smoke from Canada could be

headed back into this region today. Well, yours truly spent hundreds of dollars

on air purifiers a couple of weeks ago. And so we're ready. We're ready in my house.

Yeah, so we'll get to that later in this podcast. I know those of you in the Midwest have been sending

in your pictures as you've been impacted by it. So we'll do a full recap on that. We should also

make mention that yesterday I spoke with Ian Bremer of the Eurasia Group, a political scientist,

Russia expert, to talk through the events of the weekend. We put that out to everybody.

It's in your podcast feed. Actually, should be just below this podcast in your podcast feed.

Really interesting insights, I thought. Interesting, Mo Shwanunu. You asked Tim,

why Putin decided to keep pregozion alive? Yeah, that's the big question coming out of the weekend,

right? Like for many lesser offenses, people have seen the end, right? Have been put in prison

for life or been killed at the hands of Putin and people around him. In fact, we put a list

together in yesterday's newsletter of all those people. And in this case, the way that Bremer

explains it, you should listen to it in the full episode, is that for Putin, the last thing he wanted

was war in the streets of Russia. He knew he could take pregozion, and it's no doubt that he

would have finished off pregozion and the Wagner group. But he didn't want to take away from objective

number one, which is in Ukraine. And as far as Putin's concerned, pregozion is just alive for now.

Bremer's like, he's on borrowed time. I wouldn't be very confident about my a long-term

situation if I'm pregozion. And so I thought that was really interesting insight. And another thing

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