Subscribe: iTunes / Spotify 2.5 years as a POW under Russian captivity. Daily beatings and humiliation. A bombing of his barracks by Russians while in captivity. And even met Steven Seagal, who challenged a Ukrainian POW to a fight…only to then back down…And now that Gennady has been released, you’ll be amazed to hear what he’s going to do next. Gennady Kharchenko, Soldier of Azov Battalion. Born in Zaporizhzhya, Ukraine, Gennady joined the military as a volunteer in 2014 to stop Russia’s initial invasion of this current war. Gennady fought in the Azovstal complex and was then taken into Russian captivity in mid-2022 and…
Author: Mark McNamee
Subscribe: iTunes / Spotify What is the corruption situation like in Ukraine and what does the future look like? Will Ukraine be successful in reducing corruption in the coming years and become more like a Western nation?In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Oleksandra Keudel, who is a renowned expert in politics and governance, about the corruption environment in Ukraine historically and where things stand today. Ukraine of course has a major problem with corruption, but is in fact one of the more transparent countries in the world. The ongoing fight with corruption has seen clear improvements, but there is…
Subscribe: iTunes / Spotify The psychological damage to children has been one of the most underreported stories of this horrific war here in Ukraine. How are children coping, especially those who have lost parents and other family members?In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Oksana Lebedeva, the founder of the NGO Gen.Ukrainian, which is devoted to the mental rehabilitation of children and adolescents who have experienced psychological trauma as a result of war, such as loss of parents, captivity, or forced displacement. Oksana spoke about the children her organization works with, the trauma they have faced, and how they help…
Subscribe: iTunes / Spotify Did you know Russia starved to death at least 4 million Ukrainians in a single year?The Ukrainian man-made famine of 1932-33, known as the Holodomor in Ukrainian, is recognized by most Western nations as an act of genocide conducted by Moscow on the Ukrainian people. In light of the annual commemoration of the Holodomor on November 23, 2024 (always the 4th Saturday of November), I spoke w Tetiana Soproniuk, a PhD candidate at the Nizhyn Mykola Gogol State University in Ukraine. Her research is focused on the public sentiments of the Ukrainian population of the 1920s and 1930s, Soviet propaganda,…
Subscribe: iTunes / Spotify Who’s going to win the US elections, and what will the impact be on Ukraine? Could we be moving towards peace in 2025? And ultimately why do we in the West need to even care about supporting Ukraine?To answer these questions, I did something a little bit different in this episode and had my old co-worker and friend Martin Belchev, Practice Leader at FrontierView, interview me on the the outlook for the US elections, what the policy towards Ukraine would be from either a Harris or Trump presidency, and why the West needs to wake up to understand the…
Subscribe: iTunes / Spotify For those of you who support Ukraine on social media – and LinkedIn specifically – many of you may have wondered: Who is Marijn Markus? Marijn is one of the most consistent and outspoken supporters of Ukraine for years now – but he’s not Ukrainian, isn’t from the military, doesn’t work directly for a government, and has no formal academic background in Eastern Europe or international relations…So how has he become one of the most ardent and listened to voices about the war on social media?Listen in to find out!And hear more about Marijn’s devotion to fighting Kremlin disinformation, where…
Subscribe: iTunes / Spotify How and when will the war in Ukraine end? Can history teach us any lessons where this war is going? This is Part 2 of my interview with Professor Harper is an expert on US Foreign Policy and the Cold War, having written 4 books related to the Cold War and teaches a course at SAIS titled American Foreign Policy Since World War II. Originally from the US, he lives and teaches in Bologna, Italy. To learn more, visit: https://ubn.network/ Listen to more episodes on Mission Matters: https://missionmatters.com/author/Mark-McNamee/
Subscribe: iTunes / Spotify How and when will the war in Ukraine end? Can history teach us any lessons where this war is going? The clear answer to all of this is that we indeed can find useful analogies in the Cold War to understand where this current war is going and predict its future. US foreign policy towards Moscow during the Cold War proves to be highly instructive to understand how current US foreign policy will develop. To dive into this and understand the future of this war by looking at the past, I had the pleasure of speaking with my former…
Subscribe: iTunes / Spotify In this episode, I had the pleasure to speak with Jane Alieva, arguably one of the busiest women in Ukraine who has devoted her life to helping the tens of thousands of children traumatized by Russia. Jane runs and/or is a part of 3 different charity groups currently, all committed to helping kidnapped children and other victims of Russia’s war.Listen in to hear what is unfortunately a highly underreported story regarding the untold tens of thousands of children Russia has kidnapped and who remain apart from their families. And hear the inspiring work Jane and her organizations are doing…
Subscribe: iTunes / Spotify Today I spoke with Roman Sulzhyk, a real Ukrainian patriot who has embraced his life’s mission and decided to come back home to Ukraine to help rebuild his country. Roman has been a part of Ukraine’s independence movement from the first Orange Revolution in 2004, to the Maidan in 2014, to the war today. He has a fascinating perspective, having seen this whole independence drive of the past 20 years.Roman worked hard and was able to get out of Ukraine in the 1990s and create a successful career abroad. After years of working in finance the US and UK,…
Subscribe: iTunes / Spotify What’s it like to be a Ukrainian prisoner of war held in Russian captivity? How do you survive the torture and beatings? This is Part 2 of my interview with Bogdan Zarytsky, a Ukrainian soldier who was taken as a POW into Russian captivity. In this episode, Bogdan tells us about the end of his time at the camp in Olenivka, transfer to a detention center where conditions were dramatically worse, and then finally his liberation. Hear more about how POWs are treated by the Russians, about Bogdan’s life since his release, and what freedom means to Bogdan now after such…
Subscribe: iTunes / Spotify What’s it like to be a Ukrainian prisoner of war held in Russian captivity? How do you survive the torture and beatings? This the story of Bogdan Zarytsky, a soldier of the Azov Battalion. In this first part of our interview, we discuss Bogdan’s life as a soldier before the full-scale invasion in February 2022, then fighting in Mariupol and the Azovstal complex upon Russia’s full-scale invasion, and finally his captivity in Russia’s POW camp in Olenivka. Hear how Bogdan survived it all: the deaths of his fellow soldiers, the beatings, the starvation, the extreme weight loss, the lack of energy,…