Thank you for joining me for another Warner Rocks podcast. I am here with

Dimitri Gornberg, a senior research scientist at the CNA corporation as well as a

fellow. Associate? Associate, sorry, at the Davis Center at Harvard.

And so, Dimitri, thanks so much for joining us.

We're gonna be talking about Russia today.

Well, thanks for having me.

No problem.

And so, Dimitri, first, you know, we have this series called The School House, where we talk about the

intersection food policy and scholarship, and I just think you're a really good example of this as a trained academic

that does a lot of research into policy relevant stuff actually often for the government

directly and indirectly. So before we get into all this awesome stuff about

Putin and the Russian military and Ukraine and Syria.

How did you become one of our nation's sort of leading experts on the Russian military and Russian strategy?

Well, actually sort of serendipitously, I got my training and political science at Harvard,

but I worked on ethnic politics and in Russia but not really on security issues or the military at all.

And after I finished my PhD I ended up getting a job at CNA and... Which used to be called the Center for Naval

Analysis where I'm also affiliated but now it's just now we just use the acronym.

We won't talk about why, but go on.

And nobody was interested in I think

conflict in Russia in the early 2000s.

So I started working on naval issues on Russian foreign policy on security issues and you know over

time kind of developed an expertise in that decided at a certain point to start a blog

...