The Cipher Brief: National Security news, analysis and expert commentary.

The Cipher Brief made its first reporting trip to Ukraine in February of 2022. That’s when we first met Tymofiy Mylovanov, the President of the Kyiv School of Economics. When we sat down with him then, Ukraine was preparing to mark one year since Russia’s brutal invasion. Mylovanov was sober at the time about what it would take to win the war and rebuild the country. Just over a year later, with an aid package that has been held up for months in Washington - I sat down with him again to talk about what it will take to rebuild Ukraine even as the war rages on - and why he still has hope even amid the challenges – for what lies ahead.

CNN anchor and Chief National Security Analyst Jim Sciutto is out with a new book called “The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China and the Next World War.” Drawing on his reporting from current hot spots like Ukraine, Taiwan and the Middle East - and in depth interviews with top U.S. and foreign leaders, Sciutto has written about the precarious nature of global security and how developments in each of these hot spots impacts the other. We’ll talk to him about how Chinese President Xi and Russian President Putin have similar views about their destinies in expanding their countries borders.

There are few who understand this war better than Nataliya Bugayova. She lived and worked in Ukraine for years. Her present focus – as a non-resident fellow and the former Russia team lead at The Institute for the Study of War, is on the analysis of the Kremlin’s operations and on what’s happening in Ukraine today. She also serves as Director of Strategic Intelligence at a company called Vertical Knowledge.

Bugayova was part of a visiting delegation with The Cipher Brief that was led by General David Petraeus last fall. We sat down shortly afterward, to get her perspective on how this war is ‘really’ going and how she sees it ending.