council s top ukraine expert at the time. lieutenant colonel, great to see you. we re actually getting to talk about your area of expertise, ukraine. what do you think about what za l zalensky is saying? do you believe him? it wouldn t surprise me. the first thing that came out was he was wanting to assassinate montenegro when he was wanting to join nato, and there was a plot the gru was behind it. it wouldn t surprise me that elements behind the gru are pursuing these types of enabling operations. what they are looking for is to potentially destabilize the government in ukraine while they conduct maybe military offensive. to me the most important thing is there is a situation brewing on the border of ukraine and russia. in a lot of ways, it s a continuation of russia s effort in 2014 that was driven by