Welcome back. I'm Ian Masters and this is Background Briefing, available 24-7 at

Background Briefing.org. And joining us now is Anders Aslan, a senior fellow at the Stockholm Free

World Forum, a professor at the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at Georgetown

University and a member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. He worked as a Swedish diplomat in Moscow

and serves as an economic advisor to the governments of Russia and Ukraine. And his books include

Ukraine, What Went Wrong and How to Fix It, and Russia's crony capitalism, The Path

from Market Economy to Kleptocracy. And he has an article at the Kiev Post, Why Ukraine Can and Will Win, and another at the Hill,

Jake Sullivan's new essay reveals a Biden administration in denial about Ukraine.

Welcome to Background Briefing, Anders Asland.

Thank you very much, Ian.

Well, thanks for joining us, and we're just learning that the wife of the head of Ukraine's military intelligence, Mariana Budanovah, has been poisoned by some heavy metal poisoning.

Of course, the Russians have a history of using poisons against political opponents,

Navalny, Skripal in the UK.

Yushenko, opposition leader in Ukraine, 2004,

was poisoned with dioxin.

And of course, Alexandria Litvinenko,

KGB, former colleague of Putin's,

was murdered in London with polonium.

So we know that that's a tool used by Russian intelligence, but how did they get so close to Badanov because his wife works in Badanoff's office.

Well, works and works. She lives in his office because he thinks that it's necessary for their security.

But, of course, there are possible Russian agents all over in Ukraine.

You don't see a difference between the Russian and Ukrainian.

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