The

The Hey everyone, welcome to the Empire Files podcast.

This is a sample of a two-hour episode you can only hear on our Patreon.

We talked to our two Russian friends, both of whom were born in the Soviet Union,

Evgenia Kovda, an artist and filmmaker, born and raised in Moscow before moving to the U.S.

and Yasha Levine, journalist and author of Surveillance Valley, who's part

Ukrainian and moved here from the USSR as a child with his parents.

We wanted to give space to their perspective because they are both opponents of NATO, but

also have a deeper understanding of what the war means for Russian society and the disastrous

invasion under Vladimir Putin. The full episode is packed full of important and unique perspective, so if you want to hear

the full thing, as well as lots of other patron-only content, join our subscriber community

at patreon.com slash empire files.

And we have some actually information.

You just don't people we know in Russia.

Like, we know like that like it's

pretty clear that they thought they were going to win in a couple of days oh yeah that

this is a cake walk you know again just like Bush neocons man they they thought they were just

gonna walk in there flip the country you know and like walk right out and everything will

be fine I mean he walked into this giant pit, you know, that like everyone could see it.

Like you don't go in there.

You don't like walk into Ukraine and try to like with tanks and missiles and like soldiers.

He did it, you know?

...