#104 Andrew Monaghan: The West Still Doesn’t See Russia’s Real Plan. Ukraine Is Just the Beginning

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This is a conversation with Andrew Monaghan, a longtime Russia analyst and one of the most interesting – and contrarian – voices in the Western debate about Russian strategy and power.

A lot of Andrew’s recent work focuses on a simple but uncomfortable idea: that the West fundamentally misunderstands Russia - not because we lack information, but because we keep using the wrong lenses. We tend to see Russia as irrational, tactical, reactive, or simply blundering its way through events – especially since the invasion of Ukraine. Andrew argues something quite different. That Russia is strategic, that it has a long-term view of where it’s going, and that many of the things that look like chaos or incompetence make a lot more sense once you look at how Russian strategy is actually conceived and implemented.

In this conversation, we talk about whether Russia really has a grand strategy, what that strategy is trying to achieve, and how the war in Ukraine fits into it – or doesn’t. We get into Russian geoeconomic thinking, mobilization, maritime power, and why focusing only on battlefield performance might be misleading when thinking about where Russia is heading over the next decade. Throughout the conversation, we push back on each other a lot and I'd say that even now I still disagree with much of what he says. But I find his perspective that challenges a lot of deeply held assumptions in Western analysis really interesting - and definitely worth a listen.