This year’s NATO summit was very unusual on multiple levels. Amid the disruption brought by Donald Trump’s presidency, and with Ukraine’s European allies adamant that continuing U.S. leadership is needed to help the embattled country at the most critical point in its defensive war against Russia, NATO members made an unprecedented commitment to spend 5% of GDP on defense by 2035. Where is NATO headed under Trump 2.0? Will its European members be able to implement the defense spending targets set in The Hague? What lessons is the Kremlin taking from the summit, and how could NATO affect Putin’s war optimism?
Podcast host Alex Gabuev is joined by Nicole Grajewski, a fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Arkady Mil-Man, a senior researcher and head of the Russia Program at the Institute for National Security Studies, as well as a former Israeli ambassador to Russia, to discuss the fate of Russian influence in the Middle East amid the Israel-Iran conflict.
Podcast host Alex Gabuev is joined by Alexandra Prokopenko, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center and one of the leading experts on the Russian economy, to assess the current state of Putin’s wartime economy and discuss its future prospects.
Podcast host Alex Gabuev is joined by two representatives of the independent Russian media outlet Mediazona—English-language editor Mika Golubovsky and data team technical lead David Frenkel—to discuss their work counting Russia’s losses in spite of Moscow’s attempts to obscure that data.
Podcast host Alex Gabuev is joined by Arkady Ostrovsky, Russia and Eastern Europe editor for The Economist, to discuss the role of Victory Day in Russia and how it has evolved under Putin.