Andriy Zagorodnyuk

Ukraine’s Minister of Defence from 2019 to 2020, in the first Zelensky government under the Honcharuk cabinet. He ran the Ministry’s Reforms Project Office from 2015, after volunteering when the war began in 2014, and chairs the Centre for Defence Strategies, the Kyiv think tank he founded in 2020 to work on operational concepts and strategic research. He is a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council and a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and sits on advisory boards at the Center for European Policy Analysis and the International Centre for Defence and Security in Tallinn. He now works on unmanned systems and on the middle strike concept that is stretching this war’s battlefield deep into Russia. He has also read the Crimean War for years as a hobby, in Soviet sources and Western ones both, which is what this episode is about.

Photo: still from Episode 21, filmed in Kyiv.