Hello and welcome to a special edition of the Josh Marshall podcast. I'm your host,

Kate Riga. We're bringing you a special pod today in addition to our main weekly one with

some special guests. And I'm joined right now by my esteemed colleague Josh Kovinsky investigative

reporter here at TPM. Hi Josh. Hi Kate, thanks for having me.

We just had a really great conversation. Josh, why don't you tell us about who our last

surprise guest was today and why you wanted to have a bond? Sure. So we had a Russian independent

Russian journalist on today named Mikhail Zigar. He has spent last 20 or so years covering

both Russia and Ukraine. He also founded a independent intelligence station called TB Village

or TB Brain that has been suppressed pretty heavily by the Kremlin recently. And he's kind of

one of the few independent Russian journalists who can offer sort of claims offer a credible

way inside accounts of the Kremlin's decision making. And he just came out with a book called

War in Punishment, which goes over the lead up to the war in Ukraine. It actually starts in

the villages. It gives you a deep history of Ukraine. Depends on how that ends up leading through

the Putin administration, Putin's leadership into the invasion in February of 2022 last year.

One thing that was interesting about it to me is that the book largely deals with the interplay

of Russia, Ukraine and the US. So you have coverage in the book of the 26th election your

appearance about how Putin comes to see the US as a threat to him domestically. Not just

to his own regime, but also via the US war on policy towards Ukraine and how both Ukraine

and Russia end up recognizing that there are two political parties in the US. I had to figure

out how to look at both of them and if you look at both of them to get what they want. So that's

kind of no review of what was interesting to me about him. Yeah, and we hit on all these topics

in our conversation. We get into really kind of interesting stuff about how Putin sees the

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