175. Graeme Robertson - "We came here in vulgarity and trampled over their territory looking for Nazis."

Prighozhin’s calculated outbursts, the incursion into Belgorod, the fall and then encirclement of Bakhmut by Ukraine… everything seems to be happening all at once. What is going on – and could this war be over much sooner than most military experts predict? Here’s a quote from the latest video dropped by Prighozhin, and he says a lot in it that Ukrainians could actually concur with: “We came here in vulgarity and trampled all over their territory looking for Nazis. While we were searching for Nazis, we nailed anyone else we could find. We approached Kyiv, and then, as is said in Russian, shat ourselves and retreated. Came upon Kherson, shat ourselves and withdrew… We conducted the Special Military Operation to de-nazify and demilitarise Ukraine, but instead of denazification we turned Ukraine into a country that the whole world knows about.” ---------- SPEAKER: Graeme Robertson is a Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Director of the Centre for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies. His work focuses on political protest and regime support in authoritarian regimes. As well as Putin v. The People, Graeme is also the author of Revolution and Reform in Ukraine, and The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes: Managing Dissent in Post-Communist Russia, published by Cambridge University Press. He has published articles in many academic journals including the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, The Journal of Politics, and the British Journal of Political Science, as well as contributing regularly to the media on Russia and Ukraine. ---------- BOOKS: Putin v the People: The Perilous Politics of a Divided Russia. by Graeme Robertson and Samuel Greene (2023) Moscow in Movement: Power & Opposition in Putin’s Russia Samuel Greene (2014) The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes: Managing Dissent in Post-Communist Russia by Graeme Robertson (2010) ---------- LINKS https://www.linkedin.com/in/samuel-greene-27aab56/ https://twitter.com/samagreene https://politicalscience.unc.edu/staff/graeme-robertson/ https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/samuel-greene ----------