Understanding foreign policy in Russia is complicated. Over the past weekend, the media said Russia was undergoing a coup and then they weren’t. The leader of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was a brutal military figure, then suddenly a liberator of Putin’s hold on Russia. These entanglements in narratives require an impartial judge, someone who can make sense of it for the way it is. After years of doing this on a daily basis for the president of the United States, Ray McGovern joins host Robert Scheer on this episode of Scheer Intelligence to do just that.
As an analyst tasked with a portfolio focusing on “Soviet foreign policy toward China, Vietnam and the rest of Asia,” McGovern had to know the ins and outs of Russia. The bank of knowledge—good enough to inform the president everyday—continues to expand concerning the war in Ukraine and now these developments within Russian borders. McGovern not only discusses the action itself but everything within his famously coined “MICIMATT” complex—or Military, Industrial, Congressional Intelligence, Media, Academia, Think Tank complex.