The Bulwark Podcast - Amanda Carpenter and Evan Gershkovich: Trump's and Putin's Authoritarian Projects

Episode Date: September 29, 2026

Vigilance is still in order, but Trump’s efforts to rig the midterms have so far flopped. And that includes Trump’s self-sabotaging of his own plan to blame China for hacking our voting machines. But should the Dems win back Congress, they’re going to be busy tracing all the money that was stolen for the ballroom, the arch, and Pentagon contracts with Trump family members. Plus: Evan discusses his new book, which memorializes both his 16 months in Russian captivity—and the recent history of Russia at war under Putin.Amanda Carpenter and Evan Gershkovich join Tim Miller.show notes: Evan’s book, “This Cursed Beautiful Land” Protect Democracy’s Substack Andrew in “Morning Shots” on impeaching Trump again Sam and Will on Texas’s Bo French The Bulwark’s campaign to help the Haitian community of Springfield The Bulwark store

Welcome to the Bullwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller, coming at you live from Washington, D.C.C., Bollwark H.Q. So Charlie XX.X. Last night. Segment one, we've got the Charlie of the Bullwark Diaspora. Stick around for segment two. We have Evan Gershkovich, who has a new book out, this cursed, beautiful land, about the 500 days he spent in a Russian prison targeted by Putin when he was reporting in the country. It's a really great conversation, so do stick around for that. But first, formerly at the Bullwark, he's now a writer and editor at ProtectDemocracy.org. their substack is if you can keep it, it's Amanda Carpenter. What's up, girl? Hey, I think I should be complimented by being compared to Charlie XX, but I'm not totally sure.

That said, I do need some advice. My daughter wanted me to take her to a concert. Her favorite band, Weezer, is in town in D.C. So we're going. I have not been to a concert probably in 15 years. So I have no idea what I'm supposed to do, but I think the vibes will be high. And I'm very excited. Where is Weez are playing?

I'm at Capital One Center in D.C. So we're driving on in on Friday night. Still selling out the arenas. The shins are going to open and Silver Sun Pickups. Weezer, look at this. Weezer Blue album when I was in fifth grade was the first CD I bought. I'd bought tapes before that because we're old. But the first CD I bought was the Weezer Blue album.

Say It Ain't So. Maybe we'll take people out with a little Say It Ain't So. Let me inform you of this. My kids who are a middle school and a high schooler, they all like to collect CDs like vintage albums now. So she does have the blue CD. My son is into gorillas. All these bands are big right now.

And they all have CD collections that they're building out like old-timey things that sit on their shelves. So live with that one. Just put me in the grave. Okay, you'll have a great time. I'll send you to a show of a great time. Reno's bumping there, doing some renovations. It was good last night. Same spot.

We're kind of already doing a vibe check. So let's start with that because you have to schlep in to Capital One Arena from the boonies. You know, you're out there in Trump country. I do like to just kind of do a check in with you. Like, what's the sign? Like, are you seeing signs? You know, the hats, hat count, you know, small talk at children's sporting events. Catching any vibes?

I've got to say the signs have not been out. It is very low key. We ran a 5K on Saturday night, which was a fundraiser for our local sports team. My son dusted me, which is just embarrassing because he's 13 years old, has not trained, and just demolished me. So that's good and bad in many ways. but the local Republican Party was sponsoring it. And it was just no signs about anything, just the elephant, like kind of old school. So I was a little bit like, oh, is this going to be like a MAGA thing?

No, low-key, quiet vibes are low. Not to brag about. It gives me just a slight worry about the polls. It kind of cuts both ways, right? On the one hand, midterms are all about turnout and enthusiasm. So if the Democrats are really enthused to answer polls, that means there to be enthused to turn out. But I'm a little worried that the MAGA crowd, it's just kind of embarrassed right now.

You hear this in Sarah's focus groups and they get a political poll and they're like, yeah, I'm not going to do that today, but maybe they still, but I'm a little worried that there's kind of a little undercount happening, we'll keep an eye on it. I want to do the protect democracy side of the midterms first. And since we've been hopium pill lately on the podcast,

I want to start with the hopium side of it, which is they have a ton of failures on this front. And they've been trying to rig the midterms or at least put their thumb on the scale or influence the midterms basically since as soon as he got in, redistricting flop, the mail-and-voting takeover is a flop, election lies, a bunch of other stuff, just kind of wondering, like, what your assessment is, having been kind of monitoring and fighting all these efforts.

I'm happy to walk through their failures in flops, but I don't want people to think that we are complacent or advising anyone to be. Sure. Because any of this stuff could go haywire at any moment of time. Yeah. We're not complacent. We're just pointing and laughing while staying. vigilant. Absolutely. So our framework for analyzing the election was always that Trump is going to

deceive the public with election lies so that he could disrupt the process and deny results later. So this deceive portion was big. You know, what was the next big lie going to be? And then you saw him setting up all these allegations of non-citizen voting, voter fraud, setting up all these pretext so that you could have the federal database to purge voters. None of that has worked so far. As you've mentioned, the mail-in voting takeover has flopped. The save database that they've tried to get everyone to use on a mandatory basis has largely flopped, although there was that Supreme Court decision on Friday where they are allowing to go forward for individual checks. So I do want to say here very plainly, the people most at risk for being flagged on this falsely are naturalized citizens.

So if you are a naturalized citizen planning to vote, please check your registration now. if you get something in the mail asking you to affirm that you need to follow up with it. So we really need to raise. That's a good flag. If you have a nationalized citizen friend that isn't listening to the Bullwark podcast, maybe give them a heads up. Yep. Yep. And so be on the lookout for that.

Check your registration and make a plan to vote. But that said, getting everyone to conform to this federal database that, you know, the USPS is going to be in charge of has failed. You saw these attempts come out after Trump's big election speech in July that was largely a flop. even networks like Fox would not cover it, and people like Maria Bartaromo are benched. You saw Secretary Lutnik, which I am being very careful to say correctly. Had that big census report that he said was going to find thousands of non-citizen voters flop. Everyone could see through the fake statistics on that almost immediately. You then had Mark Wayne Mullen come out with another separate report more recently where he was saying,

oh, we have 16,000 illegal voters, another flop. That number went down to zero. And so there's been these attempts to try to set this up is not working. That's not to say they're not still peddling lies about Chinese parts in voting machines and pressuring Lutnik to designate voting machines as critical infrastructure. This stuff is still out there. But the big lies that they have tried to push as pretext to set up these processes are not working. And so our message to people has been that, yes, we were worried that they were going to throw

up obstacles between the voters and the ballot box. but right now that path to the ballot box is clear. Everyone needs to make a plan to take advantage of that. And then we're all going to work together to do two more things. Make sure every vote is counted and every rightful winner is seated. So this is not over yet, of course, but their plans are feeling spectacularly. I wanted to dial in on one of the things that you mentioned because it was so stupid. And I forget if it was when I was on vacation or if it was just so stupid, I didn't want to deal with it or if I was leading into vacation.

but the election lies speech, the big speech that he gave, I do think it's important to kind of step back sometimes and take their lies at face value rather than just glossing over them or make fun of them, right? I mean, the president of the United States gave a prime time address where he accused China of rigging our elections in the past. And that was two months ago. And here we are last week. he invites Chairman Cheek to the White House and fetes him, compliments him, says how great of a guy he is, which betrays either an unbelievable weakness that the person he thinks rigged the election he still wants to suck up to or like his heart isn't even in the lie, you know?

Everything is done at Trump's convenience. I mean, this lie that they are peddling is set up for his convenience so that he can deny results that he doesn't like. And I don't want to dismiss this because that lie is still. I don't know if you saw just yesterday Secretary of War. Pete Huxeth put out a memo saying that, you know, I'm on special notice to make sure that there is no foreign interference in the election with machines. And so, was he just doing that to say like, oh, I'm kind of doing something and make the boss happy? Maybe, but they're still on this. And so they very much want this pretext so that they can go raid voting

machines potentially. All these scenarios are still on the table. I'm just saying they don't have the momentum and the buy-in from the public for that fever pitch that we saw in like 2020. And they don't even have the guys to execute it, right? I mean, part of it is on the media side, the propaganda. You know, we've talked about this a couple times the last couple weeks, but like the right wing podcast, manosphere stuff, like they're not even talking about them anymore. He's not giving them a narrative. You can't, like, these guys need a little bit more of a narrative if you're going to try to blame China for stealing the elections. You need something to go on.

And then you bring Chi to the White House and don't say anything. Like, what are you supposed to say if you're Benny Johnson about this? Like, oh, the president, the president is, you know, it's a cute, maybe it's Qaeda. Maybe he was really mean to him behind the scenes. You know, playing 40 chess and make a deal with Chi. You know, you can see how people can get there. And people are leaving. Yeah, as you've pointed out, that you had Joe DeGeneva, who was brought in to look into how former administration officials were improperly investigating Trump.

and they're going to go after the investigators. Him and Card Olson quit. The number two of the FBI, Andrew Bailey. He resigned. That's another number two. Dan Bongino had already left. He's a big election denier.

One thing I'm worried about is kind of the bottom up. There obviously are still some true believers in the county offices, but they don't really have the people to execute the scale of what they would like to do with the election. Yeah. I mean, I guess we could put on the scenario. that these people are leaving so that they get back from the outside in. Like, I don't totally expect someone like Eagle Ed Martin to totally disappear. But the point is that they don't have people in positions to press the levers of power that they planned, I think is absolutely right.

I mean, we went from Pam Bondi to Todd Blanche and Tulsi's gone. And a lot of the people involved in that Fulton County raid, which I thought was extremely instructive because they did get access to materials that was based on a bad warrant full of bad information. that never should have been accepted. But that is good because now we can put people on notice that you don't have to take these claims at face value. Judges do have some kind of obligation to evaluate the veracity of the documents when you were presented with a search weren't like that.

But the idea, I mean, we can't say it yet, but I think we need to get comfortable with saying that the whole Trump 2025 project is going down the tubes. It is failing on every level if you really look at it. They had a good, robust six months in getting what they wanted. But now if you look at his big weaponization project for the Department of Justice, you mentioned the fact that Joe Jedanavah, I'll get that right someday, and Kurt Olson

have left, they were supposed to be the ones for you're hitting this grand conspiracy thing where they were going to get all the bad guys who went after Trump and put those scalps up on the wall. They have no case. They have left without prosecuting anyone. And I know. that there are some indictments going forward, but as a project and what they promised and what this big campaign of retribution that they said was going to rain down on anyone who ever criticized Trump or pointed out his illegality, it's just not come true. And so I really hope that people aren't afraid anymore. There was a time where people were afraid, and I think retreating to their respective corners. But this project is failing. And if the midterms go the way that the polling indicates,

I think we really need to start branding this presidency as the worst one we've ever seen, failing by its own merits, by its own design, and just showing that we have rejected this authoritarian direction once and for all and then really recalibrate to hold people accountable and make sure it never happens again. Yeah, it's funny. The, you know, 1984 North Korea taxpayer-funded propaganda that Trump is running, I kind of locked in and focused on the line about how he's going to expel the warmongers from our government, which just shows how out of date...

Show yourself at the door. Yeah, the audio that they were taking was for this old ad that we're all paying for with our money. But there's another line in there, too, about how we will demolish the deep state. And I think this ties together to what you're talking about, the failure of the weaponization project, the fact that, you know, the MAGA media sphere doesn't have a good story to even tell their own people. And it's like, Sam and Will did a thing yesterday on Beau French, this guy running for railroad commissioners, racist guy in Texas, and how many times in the past he called for like the execution of Trump's foes. Like, this was all very common language in this world.

Like, Trump was going to get in and they were going to jail all the people that had come for them, that had supposedly weaponized the government and the Biden administration. And they have Bupkis. Again, what is Benny Johnson and Dan Banjinna supposed to talk about on their podcast? Like, who are the deep state operatives that they've gotten? Nothing. Yeah. I mean, again, I don't want to get too far ahead of things, but I think we can fairly start to judge us on the merits.

Go back and look at what they set out to do. The high standard that they put out for themselves, I don't care what metric you want to put on it, whether it's the bullshit retribution or the spending cuts or the terrorists or the war. I mean, you name it. I am trying to generously think of one thing that they are successful. seating at and I think I could have got there in the first six months. The border.

I don't know. His own people don't think there's enough deportations. So I can say that you're doing deportations, but by their standard for what they said out to do. I don't mean the immigration policy overall, but like the border. But you have no one to blame. You had a Republican Congress, right? No. No excuses.

So I'm, I'm ready to start framing that out. All right. Well, we have ongoing corruption efforts. That is one thing they've succeeded at. Amanda. They do have some ongoing corruption efforts. I enjoyed this. Shout out to Zach Everson over on Blue Sky. He skied this. He identified this. A Don Jr. backed drone parts manufacturer congratulated an Eric Trump-backed drone manufacturer on winning a DOD contract. People don't even understand the scale of this. One of them was called unusual machines. The other one is called Extend. This is just how the business of our government is working. Our national security. contractors. Like, you've got to put a Trump family member on the board in order to ensure that you're going to get a taxpayer money. It is stunning the level involvement. The Trump and Lutnik and Whitkoff son, are they all sons, probably all sons, are involved in defense,

tech, AI, crypto, policy, and contracts. I mean, it is a gold mine for them. And in many cases, I don't know if you looked at these mining contracts that some of them are also involved in. Kazakhstan. I mean, it is like the Cylindra. A lot of expertise on Cossackstone. Do you remember Cylendra? We call it Venture Socialism. And it's essentially part of the same thing.

You have these investors who go in on a project and then get the government financing to back it, even though it is unproven, you don't know what you're going to get. And they get to get out before everything goes in the tank. I mean, we don't know that these projects are going to work out. but they stand to make a lot of money because the Pentagon budget is gone and big on the loans. I mean, I'm not like a big economic analyst, but I can understand how this works and it's a scam. And so there's just so much investigating and following the money to see how this stuff happened that needs to happen in a new Congress. But I do think there's just something even more easy to understand for the general public.

And that is Trump is stealing your money. Look at this ballroom. Look at these PSAs that he's putting out. How is he getting the money to do this? Congress never authorized it. There's documentation where he is raiding other pots of money from the Secret Service, from the National Parks, to do this thing that nobody said he could do. I mean, this is illegal spending.

And at some point, there has to be a Congress that says, you know what, we're going to assert our spending power. Because honestly, if Congress does not protect its spending power, what is the point of of Congress. You just have a president who can use money to do whatever he wants. You might as well just pack it up and go home. And so on the ballroom, there was a decision that said it could go forward, but that ruled just on the standing. It did not rule on who has the power to decide that this money should pay for it. Right. And then you add on the lie that he's soliciting private donations to pay for the whole thing. Okay, let's take that at face value. Who's giving him the money? How much? What oligarch? Like, how booby-traff?

with Chinese and Russian spyware is this thing going to be at the end of the day? Because there's no, it's following no processes and no standards. You can say Clark Construction is a reputable company, but I don't know. Seems to me like they're doing illegal work on property that Trump does not own.

So I think there's a lot of problems with that. And just following the stolen money, there's a paper trail for all of this, right? And there's people who are moving around money that should not be moving around money that way. And so I think there's fines and penalties that can be imposed and absolutely need to be. And because this one is so documented and is contained between Congress and the White House, I don't have any doubt that we're capable of finding out what happened and who is responsible and holding them accountable for it.

Yeah. And in addition of the ball around, when you're going around D.C., like there's more and more random shit that's going up over on the Memorial Bridge. So when I saw this for the first time, it's this, I know people don't like my take about, how the Oval Office got a little bit of an upgrade at the beginning before the gold threw up. I'm going to say you're into the gold, the dictator sheik. There was some. I could have used a little more color. The Oval Office was a little dreary, okay?

That's all, I said. But, I mean, we don't need gold everywhere. On the Memorial Bridge, which is the bridge between Arlington Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial. Those are my favorite statues. Yeah. This is like, this is fucking horse with like a couple of, I'm looking, I took a picture, a couple of muscled. Is this like a kind of a bronze age pervert? Well, the horses were there, but he re-gilded them.

So we've gilded the horses. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. So they're super shiny now. Yeah. Total bronze age kind of pervert vibes. And that's right where he wants to put the arch, which also is illegal.

Yeah. You kind of mentioned where's money coming from. And there was the big recisions and, you know, case also last week that you mentioned and kind of the question about standing all this. Like, is Russ vote managing the ledger here? I think Russ Vote is doing a lot of it. So they came in with the game plan so that they would argue that this thing called rescissions is constitutional and like pocket vetoes, which essentially what they're saying is that even though Congress passes bills to authorize the money and decides how it's going to be spent, once it goes to OMB, he thinks that he can kind of override Congress and redirect the money however he would like to do it. That is not true.

Congress needs to fight him on that. And I don't know if you saw there was a story of the last few days where they did another pocket rescission for $800 million across a bunch of programs. And now members of Congress, I don't know if they're pretending. You know, Susan Collins was listening to the story saying that she is concerned about it. Isn't she the chair of the Appropriations Committee? About it. Yeah. You think she would have some more to say.

But this has been a longstanding issue between Congress and Russ vote since the beginning. So this is not like a new thing that's happened. but what we need to have is a Congress who actually fights him on it and goes to court on these issues, especially in something so egregious as the ballroom because I just want to point out, Trump asked Congress to fund the ballroom. He asked Republicans in Congress to do it. They didn't. That is essentially saying no.

And so the fact that he's going around them anyway to steal money from Secret Service in national parks to do it anyway when this thing is probably going to end up about as good as the reflecting pool, to be honest, because again, like, what, controls we have. The architect quit because of health and safety standards because it's a fire hazard. So just end the darn thing because it's probably going to be nothing but a huge problem for the next president down the road. There's so many reasons to go into it. But primarily, you don't have to care about the ballroom to care about this issue because it is a constitutional separation of powers matter. And Congress needs to fight on it. I like your all caps energy on the

ballroom. It's nice. It's good. I need a kick of my ass on locking in on ballroom outrage. And now a message from our sponsor, the Reading Room. Here at the Bullwark, we talk a lot about Jeffrey Epstein and how important it is to keep the story in the news. Well, some friends of ours actually printed all 3.5 million of the released Epstein files, bound them into 3,437 volumes and built a free traveling exhibit so the public can bear witness to these crimes. It's called the Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room.

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If you want to know more about how you can donate or visit the reading room, there's more information in the MorningShots newsletter, or you can visit Trump Epstein readingroom.com slash bulwark. That's Trump-Ebstein readingroom.com slash bulwark. Dem Congress. We're going to assume that the Dems take the House, potentially the Senate. They could have both sides, which I think adds an interesting wrinkle. What is a game plan from the Protect Democracy perspective? And obviously, there's only so much going to be done. Trump's still the president. And they're not going to have a veto-proof majority. But there's obviously a bunch of going to be done on the oversight side of things.

Where are you at on prioritization? I will say, as a baseline, there's a lot of energy on the Democratic side from the right people to do stuff on corruption. The problem is that there's too much to go after, which makes it very difficult. And so what you're seeing now is like the oversight chairman's going to do this, the judiciary chairman's going to do that. They're starting to divvy it up. But just so like people can keep it straight, there's really like three main things that need to happen very quickly in all those places. Number one, you have to investigate. Like you do have to do the fact finding exercise of finding where the stolen money is. Who is? Who is?

responsible for taking it, and you can apply that to like whatever topic you want. It needs to happen a lot of different places. They also need to start legislating, doing things with the power they have. You can start to pass things called riders on appropriations bills and say explicitly, no funds can be used for construction of the ballroom. No funds can be used for this. Make it super explicit that you cannot do this so that when you go to court, there's no doubt about it. Okay. And then I think we also have to start think about like what kind of anti-corruption reform package could be passed one day so that a president can't get away with this again because the fact is there are laws that apply to people like judges and members of Congress, but just don't

apply to the president and the vice president. So I would like to see that get together. And then we have to litigate. Like I do think Congress does have to go to court to defend its spending power and get a court to rule on these very basic issues, which are just reiterating what is in the stinking constitution anyway. But let's do all those exercises and in the process. I think that is accountability in itself. But I want to find out who is awarding these contracts, the shady contracts, who is moving the money around.

All this stuff is discoverable. And so let's do it. Yep. And the fact finding, like the other thing is sometimes when I hear people poo this, it's like, well, this administration doesn't follow the rules. They're not going to play ball. They're not going to testify. That I could turn documents over.

And that's true. But you just go back to impeachment one. And there are still government career employees in the government. They have to execute some of the stuff. Like the tungsten deal in Kazakhstan isn't just Peter Navarro and Don Trump Jr. Right? Like they, there are actual functionaries. And there's people on the private side, on the business side.

other people in the transaction who are outside the reach of government. We've already seen that just on that Navarro. I forget if it's a tungsten or a different one on the Don Jr. Navarro contract where it's like, you know, there's somebody in the Department of War. I like how you follow Bullwark style on the Department of War. The Department of War, you know, there was somebody that had to like execute the contract. And so there was the back and forth. They're like, why am I executing this contract? And it's like, oh, because Peter Navarro said so.

Like that's just one example of something that we've already found. And who the hell knows how much more of that there is? I think there's a lot. I think it's going to keep Congress busy for the next two to four years. I think so too. Andrew, your last thing this morning is on the Impeachim again train. Where are you at on Impeach Him again? I mean, if you have a good case, I wouldn't say no.

But like, I think there's a lot of reasons to do it. But like I want to see exactly what we're going after. and I haven't seen anyone who is in position to do something like that begin to put it together. Put together the articles, yeah, to see what it looks like. Okay. For everybody out there that is full of bloodlust and just wants like 26 impeachments in 2007, impeach him every other week. We do have a new show coming to the Bullwark Podcast Network soon.

It's called Psychopolitics, George Conway. In here we have sort of a colloquial name for it as well, which is the impeach the motherfucker again and again and again. an again show. So that will be there right here on the Borg network. And Amanda, anything else that I missed that you're hot on over, you're monitoring over a PD? I don't think so. I think that covers most of it. I mean, there's other stuff. But yeah. A lot out there. We'll have you back either right before the election, depending on kind of what shenanigans are up to or right after to talk about all that kind of fallout stuff, which is sort of the next phase of this,

what happens between Election Day and the seating of the new Congress. And In the meantime, enjoy Weezer. Great. Thanks. All right. Everybody else, stick around for Evan Gershkevich. See you, Amanda. All right, we are back. He is the foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal based in Berlin.

Previously, he's posted in Moscow. He spent nearly 500 days in a Russian prison on a fabricated espionageon charge. His experiences recounted in his new book, This Curse Beautiful Land, which is out today. It's Evan Gershkovich. Hey, man. Hey, Tim. Thanks for having me. So you're in Berlin now.

And I don't know, I was just there. summer and Kreuttsburgh. There's a lot of still East Berlin stuff there. It's just feeling a little close for comfort to me. Like had I been imprisoned by the FSB, I'm going to gotten a little further away. I don't know. Maybe San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Orleans. I've gotten that question a lot. I mean, you're not the first. Yeah. I mean, and it's still like at the center of things, you know, in the sort of new conflict that is burgeoning. My main takeaway, you know, we get things right about Russia. We get things wrong. I've gotten some things right. I've clearly gotten some things wrong. Part of the reason I'm here talking to you today. But one thing that I think I do get right is their

approach to the way they class people as either traitors or, let's say, enemies or opponents. And I go into the latter category. So a Russian citizen who they see as being opposed to them or switching sides, like let's say the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny or of somebody who was working in the Russian intelligence services who's now collaborating with Ukrainians or the Europeans or the Americans. And, you know, we've seen these cases where they poison them or target them abroad. I see my situation as I was a really useful, you know, sort of asset for them to trade and get something in return. And I've done my, you know, I've done my job in a way. I mean, they don't really need anything else from me. And I don't really see myself as very dangerous to them. I might

have been kind of an irritant, you know, the reporting that I was doing. That might be why I put a target on my back in a way as a sort of easy guy to set up and cab and swap. But I don't really see myself as posing a danger to them currently. Again, I've gotten things wrong before, so I can't claim to be the perfect, the best analyst on Putin's Russia, but I think I'm a decent analyst. All right. Well, If you just decide that you want a little bit easier setting, we can put in a call to the editors at the Wall Street Journal. I think that after 500 days in prison, you know, you could get like kind of a warmer climate for your next post. But we'll talk about it. Barcelona.

Yeah, Barcelona. For people who do not know, I just, I thought maybe we could just start with kind of a Reader's Digest version of how you found yourself in the Orals with a black sack over your head and, you know, maybe take us from, I don't know, high school to the black sack and in a couple paragraphs. Oh, that's a big, that's a big task. I'll try to be a brief. I'll have a couple minutes. I'll try a couple minutes. I was born in New Jersey, but my parents were Soviet of McGraths. They left in this big wave of Jewish departures from the Soviet Union, Russian speaking.

My mom's from present day Russia. My dad's from present day Ukraine. They met in the States, had my sister than me, and enforced a Russian speaking home. So in the home, it was completely sort of this kind of like Soviet, you know, know, bubble in a way. We spoke Russian. Our names were in Russians. So my name's Vanya at home. And then when we, you know, we watched Russian or Soviet movies and cartoons. And then when we steps out outside of the home, we were in a kind of like typical suburban New Jersey. Though I guess not so typical because it was Princeton. So it's also a kind of bubble onto itself

in central Jersey. And I, you know, got into the idea of journalism. I was messing around with it, got lucky enough to get a job at the New York Times in New York, but really competitive. I was what's classed as a news assistant, and some people worked their way up to become reporters, but it's really difficult. And, you know, a bunch of colleagues were like, dude, you speak Russian. There was an outlet called The Moscow Times that had been working in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. It was launched in 1992, and it's an amazing independent outlet that, you know, tons of foreign correspondence went through. They were looking for a reporter. I applied, moved to Russia. in late 2017.

So I'm 25 at this point, about to turn 26. And Putin had been, you know, in charge of this country now for 18 years at this point. He had, you know, already invaded Ukraine. You know, Russian journalists had faced increasing pressure at this point. An opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov, was murdered in the streets near the Kremlin. So it's not like it was some sort of, you know, perfectly safe place, but reporters could report, even Russian journalists were doing amazing investigations at that point, and foreign journalists were treated as kind of like quasi-diplomats. If the Kremlin was unhappy with you, you may get your

visa not renewed. That wasn't even happening at that point. The last time a foreign correspondent was taken on fabricated espionage charges was in the late 80s, so Soviet period, not even contemporary Russia. Then comes the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. I had just started working for the journal, And so then everything we're covering at that point becomes war-related. That's the story of the day. But also these kinds of rules of the game had shifted because once Russia sent completely its armies into Ukraine, it passed these really draconian censorship laws. You couldn't even call the war a war.

Legally, you had to call it a special military operation. So any story we were doing was violating the law. So some foreign bureaus left. We stayed. There was a debate. The foreign ministry actually called us in. and asked what our plans were. And during this meeting, the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman told us that we call men women

and women men in the West so we can call this a special military operation. It wasn't the same. But some of us stayed thinking, you know, we'll see, we still think it's really a red line to cross. And I was reporting stories how Putin was getting his information from the front and making decisions about the war. I went to a town where the 76th division of the Russia's air forces is based, which had occupied a town in Ukraine called Pucha and committed a series of war crimes there. So I was doing, you know, we can call it sort of fearless investigative reporting or reckless reporting in a way as well. You know, we could also look at it that way, the flip side as, you know, Russia was at war with not just Ukraine in its view, but what it called the collective West.

And in the turn of 2023, when 2020 started, I started reporting a story about how Russia was preparing for Ukraine's telegraphed counteroffensive that Ukraine was, you know, saying it was going to take back swaths of territory in the south, get to Crimea. The West was talking about this, but not much reporting was going on about how Russia was preparing his defenses. At the same time, Putin had addressed his domestic intelligence service, the FSB, formerly known as the KGB, and told them to catch a spy. And lo and behold, I was set up in a sting operation.

I was meeting with a source. And we were reporting a story on how basically the economy is switching over to military production. Overall, students were being employed by factories seven days a week, three shifts a day. And we were also looking at how we thought incorrectly that perhaps looking at, say, missiles would be much too sensitive. but, you know, tanks don't go up in a really big amount, you know, maybe 10 more a year or 20 more a year. That could be away a data point in. And it turned out to be a setup. And so I was nabbed by FSB agents, a hood put over my head.

And then I think some listeners know the story held for a year and a half and used in a swap. So one thing to kind of allude to there that you write about the book and that you do subsequent reporting on after you get out is this question of, like, did they actually think you were a response? right? And like the degree to which this was a setup and you kind of write about how when you're in present, you could tell that some people obviously knew you weren't and but that was harder to determine that the people that actually nabbed you and about what Putin's thinking was. Like what's your view on that now? Was it like just a pure setup or was there some element within the FSB that actually thought you were spying? It's a great question. I think it's still an unanswered question and in a way it will remain

unanswered. I mean, after the Soviet Union collapsed, the KGB archives opened up for a brief period. And we, you know, journalists were able, you know, foreign journalists included and book researchers, academics were able to rifle through documents and, you know, old cases became more clear. What two FSB officers say in a private conversation, I'm not sure we'll ever get a full picture into it. But I think it's a mix of factors. And I think, you know, human beings are complicated, not everything is so black and white. I mean, one thing that is certain is that, when Putin gives an order to his domestic intelligence service, the FSB, they fulfill that request. So before the World Cup in 2018, he gave this address to them where he said, we need to make sure that there's no terrorist attacks during it.

It's this big showcase event. We need to catch terrorists and they went about that year arresting Antifa and anarchist teenagers and claiming that they were set out to take down the regime. So they're good at this. he gives them an order, he says to catch a spy, they go out and do it. And then, yeah, I mean, the kind of reporting that I was doing, I think, was probably raising, not just curiosity, but interest and perhaps suspicion, which I try to detail in the book about why that might be how Russia uses still to this day journalists as cover for its intelligence operatives.

So they might say, why should we trust you that you don't? I have a first meeting with this source, which I think is a way, perhaps by FSB officers, to check whether their suspicions are correct or to set me up to then go to Putin and say, look, this guy really is up to espionage, let's arrest him. And so whether they really believe I'm a spy or not, I think is an open question. Whether he blames, I'm a spy is not an open question because I think he truly believed the narrative. And we have that, you know, I reported he had these conversations, Tucker Carlson, for instance, or, you know, a head of state that I can't name.

Well, so Tucker, I'm forgetting now, when I read it, where Putin was like, because somebody pushed back on him and was like, well, I mean, if he was the spies, like kind of obvious, like doing these meetings out in the open. And Putin was like, well, he's just a stupid spy or bad or, you know, something to that effect. Exactly. And that was with the head of state, I can't name. But, yeah, he, you know, the head of state was essentially saying, look, if he was a trained officer, if he was a CIA officer,

he would probably understand how sting operations work, probably see them coming and Putin banged his fist on the table and said, no, he's an idiot. He was a rating much too in the open. And you can see how filtered the story filtered through his understanding might track versus our understanding of well, the journalist doing his job.

And perhaps he was pushing things too far. And maybe, you know, they cynically set him up, which I think they still did. You know, I do think they still cynically set me up. The Tucker thing was interesting. I think Putin was really confused. And after their interview, who, you know, Putin was giving him a tour of the Kremlin, and he said that he was confused that the U.S.

would work so hard to get back a basketball player, but not a spy. And Tucker at that point, sort of, you know, it was a similar sort of situation where it's like if you, if you read this story through our lens, well, obviously they're working hard to get a journalist back as, you know, what's important to our society versus in his system, which is, you know, you get back your people, you show them that we'll have your back even if you're caught. I want to get back to your story and then what happened in prison, but just, you know, because obviously this is something I think, like, this is an ongoing story. Like, what is the status now of, like, journalists who are in Russia, Western journalists, like after what happened to you? And do you feel like we're getting even less information? Like, what is your advice to people that are trying to report on this? Yeah, I mean, there are fewer people. Some people made a decision to leave after my arrest.

You know, it might just be too dangerous. the people that are there are putting more handbrakes on. They're sort of censoring what they can do. And I think their argument is that it's still worth being in the country and seeing what people think. Valerie Hopkins from the New York Times just reported a story about how she had to track receipts to see how prices were changing in supermarkets because people were too scared to talk to her. So it's even becoming more difficult to get information that way because people are scared. So my advice would be, you know, clearly be on the watch for any sort of setup.

especially if a Russian spy gets arrested abroad and they want to now have another person to swap. But I also don't, you know, I don't want to make any sort of judgments from the outside because I haven't been doing that kind of reporting for a few years now. And the environment's obviously changing. And so I would, you know, advise just being careful. And that, yeah, I mean, for us, it's difficult. This is the problem when countries become so authoritarian. It's really because local reporters haven't been able to do the kind of great reporting they used to be able to do for a long time, let alone foreign journals.

And the local journalists, obviously, were better source than we ever were. So you get imprisoned, eventually sentenced before you're swapped. What's life like in 500 days? Like you wake up, what's a day like in a Russian prison? I think the Russian state is quite calculating in how it treats people. And, you know, when I've taken to the station, I'd reported stories before at how people are tortured, people are interrogated. They're deprived of food, of water, of hot showers. And I was treated.

Put the clamps on the nipples, the whole deal. Exactly. Yeah. I'd report a story. Somebody had the clamps put on the tip of his penis and electro-shocked that way. And that's, you know, quite harsh, to put it mildly. And I didn't have anything. Unless you're into it.

Unless, right. You know, I just had my charges handed to me, told I was accused of espionage, brought to Moscow, never really interrogated. I was brought to Lafortevo, which is Russia's most, you know, high profile in the Tories prison, the difficulty there is that it's sort of psychologically difficult. It's really isolating. It's really small. The cells, you're with one cellmate. Only one person can fit going up and down because of a bed on one side and a desk on the other. And it's about six to seven paces for an adult person. So it's tiny. You don't see the outdoors. And that really weighs on you. You don't see the outdoors at all.

Like you don't get an hour in the yard or whatever. You get an hour in another cell on the roof of the prison where you can look at the sky through barbed wire or a netting really, but not, you know, the ceiling. And so that's that's really what you're dealing with. But it's clean. It's well organized. They sort of treat you with respectfully. They use the formal form of you, which there's not obviously distinction in English. There is in Spanish or French. That's very different from other Russian prisons. And then I'm treated, you know, particularly well. because, you know, there's a Ukrainian journalist, Victoria Rusina, who got taken captive while she was reported in Russian occupied territory in about the same time. And she was killed in Russian prison and sent home in a body bag without her organs. So her family can figure out what happened to her. Oh, my God. Versus me where there's a kind of constant knowing tell, you know, on state TV. They talk about how they, you know, sort of added to what they call their quote unquote exchange fund of people to be swapped.

You know, anytime the U.S. Ambassador came to visit me, you know, they would check on my conditions to make sure I couldn't complain about anything. You know, and I hurt my knee exercising in that kind of walking pen at one point. And I went to the durs, gave me some exercises for my knee, even checked me out. And so when the warden came to check on me before one of these U.S. ambassador visits, he asked how I was doing. And I said, you know, doing all right. And actually, you guys, you know, I'm surprised to the extent that you're looking after me. And he said, well, you know, you care about your. health. And I made this joke like, well, you know, obviously the package has to be whole and undamaged. Otherwise, its value will go down. And he, you know, checked his shoulder and then quietly said, you know, I didn't tell you this. But yes. So it was this sort of kind of like constant. Did you get some good meals at least, Donovan? Or were you getting slop? What are they feeding you? It's slop, but it's better slop than in other prisons. It's sort of cacha in the morning, soup for lunch, more casha and then fish in the evening. And people can pass you good. So my friends were passing me, you know, even fresh fruits and vegetables and ready-made meals into prison, which is a sort of age-old Russian tradition, even through the Gulag and before and the Tsarist period, that you can get items in that complement your life there.

As long as you have, you know, friends and family that are willing to do this. So I had Russian friends who are risking, you know, a lot in a way to be, you know, helping me during that period. So I had this kind of treatment. I had this incredible support network. I could get information so I could see all the efforts that were being made to get me out by my, you know, newspaper by the U.S. government, the German government that was participating in this. My friends were collecting letters to get in. So I felt, you know, I felt like I wasn't alone. I'm also blessed, you know, with the fact that I have a sense of humor, which I think is really important in a Russian prison or any prison to, you know, you have to kind of darkly laugh at the situation or you're going to be really depressed.

And being a reporter for five and a half years before that happened, and I had an idea of how the penal system works, how these cases go, how swaps work. So I was sort of sober about how I was going to play out. And then I also made this decision really early on kind of a coping mechanism of like, well, I can't do anything about the situation. And in a way, it's interesting. So I might as well report on it. And so my friends had passed.

me these notebooks, which I basically turned into a report, you know, part kind of like written therapy, but part reporter's notebook. I would take notes at what I would see and I would, you know, interview, you know, cellmates, but also prison officials and FSP officials in a way. And that gave me sort of a kind of purpose there and, you know, meaning to prison, which really, really, really helped. And so, yeah, that's what gave me structure. There were a lot of moving passages for that. And I was also interesting in some of the reporting you did as the interviews, some of the other people in there.

I mean, famously in every prison, you know, there's no guilty man. Right. But like, what is your sense for, like, the people who you're talking to, like how much of this was, you know, people being targeted, you know, people getting, etc. What's astounding, and you know it as a reporter before, but it's a vast amount of people because people are targeted. There are people who violate the law, obviously, right? And there's a large chunk of people you would have to assume more than half

who've actually violated the law in some shape or form. But a lot of people are targeted even not in political cases. So one thing I outlined in the book is the so-called, they call it the people's crime in Russian. It's the drug. It's violating the drug crime. And actually, a lot of people who end up in Russian prison on drug charges weren't even had even violated the law. They were entrapped into it. And the reason is that the police

and it's called the investigative committee in Russia that's sort of like the FBI. And then there's the FSB who arrested me. They have different classes of crimes they answer for it. You know, it's a corrupt system. And they, in the courts are this kind of conveyor belt. Ninety-nine percent of people are guilty. So it's really easy to get your numbers up by just setting people up. So they might, and a regular traffic stop while they're searching the car, place a bag of cocaine in it, and then find it, and the person's caught. Then they're political prisoners, and some political prisoners would be entrapped, but some of them actually violated the law.

And I met in the second prison where it was a bit more loose and I could meet more people. I met people who opposed the war, spoke out against it, and were getting double-digit sentences. It was really tough to deal with for me because I had a kind of survivor's guilt of knowing I was going to be swapped, and obviously I was swapped only a year and a half later, and these people were going to be spending more than 10 years in prison. One guy I met wrote four words on a wall protesting the word, like in spray paint, and he got arrested and sentenced to 17 years. And if we think about our ask of Russians in terms of protesting the regime, that is what the price is.

And that's aside from, you know, the FSB going and pressuring somebody and saying, you know, we know your mom works at this hospital. Sure. you know, she might lose her job, but then the actual price, the latter of that, to spend, you know, years and years in obscure and horrible custody. And they're treated not like me in that situation, right? They're treated horribly. as somebody who's got Catholic guilt from my mother and that's a pretty powerful

amount of Jewish guilt that you had that you are in a prison cell for something you did wrong and you already have prospective survivors guilt when you've not quite you and you've not yet survived like that's

I mean I get that guilt is sort of like you befriend these people that's your sort of support group your community and you know that you know and they have these conversations amongst themselves about you know hoping the regime will collapse because that's the only way they will, you know, get out before 18 years

are up or 17 years are up. And I am sitting there knowing, well, so when I'm convicted for 16 years, I understand I'm not going to spend 16 years in prison. And they're really, you know, it's really heartwarming and they're supporting me. You're checking in how I'm feeling. And you're feeling guilty, the survivor's guilt of like, well, I'm going to get out. It's, yeah, you're right. You're right. It's Jewish Catholic. We're bred from this from the beginning, basically. I'm just curious, like now, you've been out, what, over a year? Over two, actually. Yeah, over two. Are we at over two? Over two now. Yeah, yeah. How long did it take to be able to get back into the rhythms of life? Like, you know, I'm going from, again,

500 days, you're in one room, 23 hours a day, six paces to, you know, kind of where you are now. Like, do you have residual trauma? Like, what, you know, what was that process like? So it took a lot of work. I mean, I, you know, I think I wasn't surprised that it was difficult. I was surprised to the extent of how difficult it was. The beginning, you know, I think I took this sort of approach, kind of like, call it stoic approach to prison where I felt like I have to keep my emotions in check. I have to, you know, never let myself cry because then I'll break down. And the cost of that is when you get out, all the emotions start coming out. And that's, you know, everything from tears and saddest to anger. And then, yeah, the isolation, I was hit with panic attacks,

could freeze in crowds of people, completely taxed by having a conversation with more than two people in a day because I'm not used to socializing with that many people. I quickly started working with the therapist for PTSD. And that's a kind of like six-month process. You track the symptoms. So are you sleeping better? Are you getting less angry? Or, you know, you're starting to feel normal. And one of the things that therapist told me it was interesting was it's sort of like landing a plane through turbulence because you've forgotten what normal life is. You know, time moves differently in prison versus on the outside. So it took, you know, a year to remember what a year on the outside looks like. Then he let me go.

He's like, you graduated. Your symptoms are improving. So we let you go. But I felt like I wanted to keep working with a talk therapist. And because of this weird split dual identity I have in prison, I was the Russian side. I was referred to in Russia and only spoke Russian. I kind of dealt with it with my kind of like dark human resignation. So I went to a Russian speaking therapist.

And I also, you know, the book in, you know, I want this book to be, you know, it's not just a memorializing my captivity, but also I think this period in Russian history. And I want it to be consumed by an audience that might be interested or learn something about Russia to or ourselves. But it's also really personal in the sense that I think it's a way we get through trauma. I spoke with one trauma therapist that ended up not working with who told me that basically, you know, you twist your knee, the spring goes away. You tear your ACL, you have to do surgery.

And with trauma, it's like you step into the street and a car whizzes by you, you realize you might have been killed. That's a shock. You're in a car accident where a few people die. That might be a residual trauma that keeps coming back and you have to deal with it. And the way you deal with it is facing it, talking about it, processing it, speaking or writing, and that's what the book is. So I finished it in the late spring, and then I finished it, got out of my system, finished my therapy, felt like I'm tired of analyzing, and got back to work

as a reporter. So I've been working for the journal again, and it felt like a normal person. And it feels now like an experience that it's kind of like, you know, you finished college two years later, you're in your job, and obviously it's an experience that was important, and it informs your adulthood, but you don't think about it every day. And it doesn't, come back. And so some of the stuff I describe in the book of dreaming about prison and waking up in a sweat, that's gone. I think I've worked through it and I'm not haunted by it, but it took a long time. And I mean, it took, I guess, the same amount of time, if not more, that I spent inside. And also, you know, there was a while where I was so, I had to stick to such a discipline schedule

because an institutionalized person gets so used to that. It's comforting. And it took a while to kind of like, remember, it's okay if I have lunch at two and not at one. know, or if my friends, you know, want to have dinner. Someone invites you to something on a whim and you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're like, well, I have this plan for the day. I can't, you know, well, but now, you know, now it feels like something completely in the past, which is, which is great. I love that for you.

I love to hear that. Thank you. I want to just talk about just some of the news stuff that is related to the intersex with the book a bit. And you just mentioned some of the other guys you're in prison with, like, their hope is for regime collapse. Yeah. It's a constant, you know, hope and discussion and, and, and, and, you know, and, you're in prison.

And Putin obviously has a stronghold on the country. There was, I guess, a very weak, maybe quasi attempt on that a while ago now. So I'm wondering what you think kind of the state of play is based on your reporting and what a future of a Russian state might even look like. I mean, for those guys, is there any hope that the successor is any better? I mean, the successor might just as well be worse, probably. Yeah, I mean, it's completely possible. I mean, basically, my sense is as journalists, we have to play this kind of. predicting game, news analysis, because that's what, you know, readers in the audience want this, right?

And so it's difficult to not write up stories that are trying to predict what might happen, but often everything seems like forever until it's not. There's that amazing, Alexei, your talk book about the end of the Soviet Union, everything was forever until it's no more. And we see autocratic regimes, they're chugging along, and suddenly there is a potential, a coup attempt, like in Turkey, right, or administration back then, you know, the autocracy He deepened our Putin post the fail of the temple I was in prison. But you get any precaution in 2023. On the other side, you have Syria, you know, Assad falls kind of out of nowhere.

Right. Gets replaced by an al-Qaeda guy who's like now trying to rebrand himself as Al-Qasariah 2.0 Davos edition or whatever. And it's like, okay. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And to your question of what comes next, I mean, you know, one way of looking at it could be, you know, he's 73. He's pretty healthy.

while he's alive and in power, the logic of continued repression is in place, right? He's not going to wake up one day and think, you know what I need to loosen up? I need to reform. We need to be a little more liberal now. We've gone too far. It's sort of like you continue the spirals and the paranoid deepens with time. I think the issue is it's not like it's impossible for people who come after him for Russia to, you know, one day open up again. You know, people do sprout up there like the late opposition leader Alexe Navalny or Boris Nemtsov

were trying to build a democratic and free Russia. And there was a real demand for that, you know, at the late Soviet period and then the early 90s and there was an attempt and the kind of security services with Putin took back over. I wonder, you know, with the state of the world in terms of this conflict that's deepening, this kind of like, you know, maybe not World War III, but a kind of hybrid World War III where we're at, countries don't really in a situation like that decide that they're going to take another stab at liberal democracy. You know, this kind of axis of authoritarian countries is deepening. Those alliances may stick. Russia's still at war when Putin's gone. You know, and there's a generation

growing up at war and a war that, you know, with propaganda is saying isn't just with Ukraine, but with what they call the collective West with the U.S. and NATO at its head. And so you hope, you hope that there's another chance and you hope that it's possible. And I don't see why it's, it's not possible. You know, obviously there's a deep and long history in Russia of being an empire and trying to take over its neighbors and, you know, those poor neighbors are always getting taken over and Ukraine is facing that again, yet again. But I don't think it's impossible. As somebody who's an alleged spy, never actually a spy, but a legend jailed spy. I'm just curious your thoughts on what's happening coming the other direction with Russia,

giving us, and particularly in the Trump administration. There have been a couple of stories recently around weddings. Trump Jr.'s wedding was paid for by the head of the Boxing Association. Alina Habba's wedding, my colleague Michael Weiss noticed that a suspected Russian double agent like there in a picture with her and with Cash Patel. You know, who knows the extent, and you talked to Tucker since he advocated for your departure. Tucker, sure. is sounding a lot more friendly to Russia than he used to. Maybe that's just a policy change of his.

But I don't know. I'm like, what is your view of like the sense of which like the Russians have are trying to manipulate and target people in Trump's orbit? I mean, I think I, you know, without being a counterintelligence expert, but I assume as much as you do that, it's a counterintelligence nightmare. I mean, it must be right. If your job as a counterintelligence officer is to be monitoring the environment. for contacts and you're hoping that.

Well, my guess is they're not. I mean, I don't know. I don't know. You think people working for cash? I mean, I'm sure there's people. Yeah, I'm sure there's people. I mean, yeah, it's a good question. Maybe Michael Weiss knows more.

But I'm sure that, you know, the counterintelligence department of the FBI is still staff with career officers. Right. That despite everything, maybe the staff is lower that are still trying to put an effort in. But I'm sure you're right. I'm sure it's lower than it used to be. and you can't monitor everything when it's just, yeah, I mean, it must be a kind of intelligence nightmare. But the other side of it is, you know, the FBI announced last week that it caught a ring of five foreign nationals working for the Russians who were trying to carry out an assassination on U.S. soil.

Yeah. And that, I think, is another. Yeah, and that's another ratcheting up in, you know, okay, the swap that I was part of. An FSB assassin murdered somebody in broad daylight in Germany. And then they swapped me, you know, and a host of others for him and a host of others. But that's sort of the main archer of the swap. That hadn't happened that they were targeting the U.S. And I think that's another red line that were, you know, either approaching or have crossed.

And it's picking up kinetic action in Europe. European countries shut down, kicked out a lot of diplomats at the embassy. so the quote unquote official spies are gone, harder to, harder to operate. And so they're paying on the internet for people to do a job. And they're called sort of like one-off agents. Josh Wiaf and the New Yorker wrote a really good piece on this. Sean Walker and the Guardian has written about this. And that's really difficult to monitor.

Yeah, gig terrorists. Exactly. And so these kind of like shadow spy war is really increased. You know, we just see more and more signs of it increasing. And so it's, it seems to me. obvious that any open context like that would be a kind of counterintelligence nightmare. And I want to challenge you on one element of the book. It's a little touchy, I guess, but you know, I'm just interested in your perspective on it. Obviously, you have such a deeper

perspective on this than I do. But in the title, you called the land cursed. And cursed kind of implies that like almost as with like fate or bad luck has befallen the Russian people, you know, in some way. And you obviously reading the book talk a lot about your affection for Russian people and culture. And I'm not here to say that every Russian person is bad, obviously. But like, is it really a curse or is there not like something at play, it's like a cultural rot at play in Russia that has led to this? And there have been like a series of choices that have been made culture-wide through the country that kind of have resulted. and I this decades upon decades of tragedies that we've seen.

Yeah, but I mean, I guess how far back do we want to go with that question? That's something I try to, you know, I kind of explore in the book. And I'm sure, you know, I'm sure perhaps rational response from the Ukrainian would be like, you know, we're the ones who are cursed because we're neighbors to this country. And I think I bring that up in the book, you know, and brought it up in this interview that the curse kind of extends to the, you know, the surrounding periphery at Baltics, Poland, Ukraine. It's like centuries of, but, but, you know, you can look at a regular Russian person today in Russia, you know, who's born, let's say they're born in 2005. Putin's already back

for five years. You know, they've suffered through the financial crisis of 1998. They suffered through this, you know, there's a stab at democracy from 91 to 93 until Yeltsin decided parliament wasn't working as well. And then there's a rigged election 96. There's, you know, 75 years of Bolshevik history. there is the Tsarist period and the Tsars were at complete control the country and Russians were surfaced until 18, you know, from up until 1861 without really a chance. I follow some people that are on Instagram that were probably born around 2005, that live in Moscow that are having a pretty good time. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know.

I look at some of those people and I'm like, wait a minute. I wish they were more cursed. Yeah, but I also think that those people, you know, we brought this up earlier in this conversation. It's sort of like, okay, I mean, here's one way we're thinking about it. So they go out, they go out, they pick it on Red Square. They go, peace for all. That's considered to violate Russia's law and fake news now, which can land you for 10 years in prison. So they do that.

In the lead up to it, you know, they used to support Alexei Navalny. They went out to some protests before the war. You know, they tried to election monitor. They maybe worked as a journalist for Novaget, who worked. He already had a journalist murdered on Putin's birthday in 2006 on a Politkovska. And so this person is like, you know, tempted some sort of life where they're trying. And there's people living in Berlin all these years or happily living their life, going to Bergen, clubbing, loving their lives. And their government is buying, you know, it was guzzling down Russian gas like Heffel Eisen.

I mean, it's like, what, do we want to, where's the collective responsibility lie? Do we want to blame all Germans for not voting out, you know, voting out their government saying, you know, that's what stocked Russia's coffers as well. We were paying for Russian gas and oil. And so I think, I just think it's a really complicated question. I think you're right that there is cultural rot at play. But how far does it go back? How difficult it is to, you know, I think one thing is that the kind of arm of the security services is always constant. concentrated at all scope, right? That's the heart of the empire. And the reforms for the Russian

Federation, they split up the KGB into multiple agencies. The idea being, let's get power out of the hands of the security services. Guess what? Nine years later, former KGB officer was head of the FSB is in charge again. And the FSB, which is essentially like, you know, the FSB, the NSA and CIA all wrapped into one, is that, you know, carries out his wishes, and that is the country to a degree. So I agree with you that if I was a Russian citizen, I would hope my compatriots would, you know, be seeking out some information, caring, you know, independent information, besides the propaganda that's all around me, trying to care about what's going on in Ukraine, being horrified by it, finding some way to stay tapped in. So when there's the next,

the next chance for, you know, liberal reforms in Russia, everybody's involved in them. I think it's hard to blame, like, you know, every regular individual of Russian. I mean, what would we be doing in the situation? Like, that might be another question. Yeah, I don't know. It's tough. I don't know. You're right.

You were talking about your cellmate or one of the guys in the jail who was, like, who thought it was cool that Putin mentioned to you or whatever. And I was like, guy, you're in jail. I was like, why? So, I don't know. It is tough. But I mean, you're in Germany now. And people could have said the same thing, probably about the Germans in the 1950s.

So like this is, you know. Or I mean, the call to, you know, the way charisma works is, you know, works in democratic politics, right? And there's, you know, there's people, you know, our president. There's a, you know, it's called a subset of people who no matter what he does, they're obsessed with him. It doesn't really matter. And he said that. That was the depressing part of this. I was thinking about us, about our people.

It's just like, God, we could get to a point where you're jailed and you're still like, you know, I love this guy. He jailed me. He said, what was it his first campaign? I can go out on Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I won't lose an ounce of support. Like, he's aware of that. And I was asked by several diplomats from the EU from Greece and Spain about the Russian soul and why they love autocracy so much. And I said, you know, the Russian soul is not different than any other.

There are people who can't essentialize them. And it was the Greek diplomat who asked me that in the Spanish diplomat signed a push back and said, well, it is clearly different. They love autocracy. I was like, both of your countries had a, you know, autocratic regimes, not that long as well either. Fine, Russia's is much longer. It's much deeper. Again, maybe it's cultural or up, but it can change, right? It can change in a different way, hopefully. Hopefully, man. It's powerful. It's so happy. I kind of want to, I don't know, I'm feeling like

your mother right now. I kind of want you out of Berlin. It's just a little, I'm feeling a little uncomfortable. Come on back to the States. A lot happening here. Reporters at my paper have been, you know, duxed and criticized by the current administration here in the U.S. too. I mean, it's clearly not the same. I mean, nobody's going to be, I don't think tomorrow anybody's being set up as a foreign agent. But, you know, anyway. You're right. You're going to be fine.

What am I doing trying to try to worry? There was something when I was in Berlin, the sirens on the, on the call on the police cars, they're louder. And they're like they are in the, it's the same siren from like all of the procedurals that I watched about like communism and going, you know, going behind the curtain and the. Like, it's the same siren noise. And so it was, you know, I don't know. I was like, I'm on a little distance. Yeah, we'll see. More kinetic, you know, more Russian attempts to blow up the airport in Leipzig.

Maybe, maybe we'll see. We'll keep an eye on it. I'm happy you're safe man and out. And I appreciate all the time you brought to us today. And everybody should go check out the book. I mean, it's beautiful. So please go get it. It's called This Curtis Beautiful Land.

Thanks so much as Evan Gerskowitz. Thanks, brother. Appreciate it so much. Thanks, Tim.