Live from Kyiv and Dnipro, Chris Sampson and Shaun Pinner break down the reality behind Russia’s ongoing invasion — and why sustaining it is becoming increasingly difficult.
00:00 – Live from Kyiv: April snow, war context
02:00 – Why being on the ground matters
05:00 – Yanukovych, influence & narrative framing
10:00 – Shaun Pinner joins (Dnipro)
12:00 – Has the war slowed down? Reality check
15:00 – Shift to terror tactics against civilians
20:00 – Infrastructure strikes & daily life disruption
25:00 – Russia’s struggle to sustain invasion forces
30:00 – Drones, adaptation & battlefield limits
40:00 – Energy war, blackouts & survival
50:00 – Civilian vs frontline reality gap
58:00 – Hardship vs actual combat conditions
1:05:00 – Psychological impact of long-term war
1:15:00 – Western perception vs Ukrainian reality
1:25:00 – “Just give up territory” argument
1:35:00 – Occupation reality: filtration, coercion, control
1:45:00 – Shaun’s capture & 2022 encirclement
1:55:00 – Personal cost: Mariupol, Crimea, displacement
2:00:00 (End) – Why concessions don’t end the war
The Men in the Room Where It Happened
Two hours with Shaun Pinner — on convergent actors, Budapest betrayals, and what it means to fight from inside the story
It is April 10th. Kyiv has had snow. We thought winter was done.
That minor betrayal of the calendar feels appropriate for a week in which every diplomatic headline has arrived as a variation on the same theme: things that were supposed to be settled are not settled. Rules that were supposed to hold are not holding. Men who were supposed to be on one side are sitting in rooms with the other side.
Shaun Pinner joined us from Dnipro. He is a former Royal Marine. He fought in the Azov battalion during the siege of Mariupol. He was captured in April 2022, held in Russian captivity for over two years, tortured, tried in a Russian kangaroo court, and sentenced to death. He was released in a prisoner exchange brokered in part by Roman Abramovich and Saudi Arabia. He now lives in Ukraine, files legal proceedings against the Russian state in the British High Court, and joins The Wire Tap most Fridays to give an account of where things actually stand.
Sixty people were watching live. We are not Timothy Snyder. We are also not interested in pretending that reach is the same as accuracy.
Convergent Actors
Before Shaun came on, I was working through a piece I had just published — triggered, as often happens, by watching a friend get into an argument online with a disinformation account.
The account had pushed the old line on Viktor Yanukovych: that he was forced from power, that his pivot away from the EU association agreement was somehow ambiguous, that “Kremlin puppet” was too simple a framing. My friend used the term. There is nothing wrong with the term. But it sent me back into the archive.
I have been on the Yanukovych case for over a decade. I live in Kyiv, a few kilometers from where these events actually happened. I work daily through hacked and exfiltrated email archives from the Ukraine Cyber Alliance. The record is not ambiguous. November 9, 2013: Yanukovych flew to Moscow for a meeting with Putin. He came back within days and reversed course on the EU agreement — against the expressed will of the Ukrainian public, which had been polling strongly in favor of European integration. Nobody here asks for him back. Nobody.
But the term I have been working with is not “puppet.” It is convergent actor.
The distinction matters. A puppet implies a hand inside moving the limb. A convergent actor is something more dangerous: a figure whose personal ambitions align so completely with the needs of another power that coercion becomes unnecessary. Yanukovych was not simply executing Kremlin orders. He was a product of the post-Soviet criminal oligarchy — driven by his own appetites, his own survival calculus, his own fear of losing what he had accumulated. He converged with Russian interests because Russian interests happened to protect him.
The same analytical frame applies to the current American moment. The arguments about whether Donald Trump is a Russian “asset,” a “useful idiot,” or a “fellow traveler” have been running for nearly a decade. They share a common deficiency: they all presuppose a discrete relationship — handler and handled — that is cleaner than the reality. Trump, like Yanukovych, appears to operate primarily from personal survival and personal ambition. He happens to converge with what Moscow needs. They happened to share the same campaign manager: Paul Manafort, now a convicted criminal.
The convergence is the point. The personal motive makes it more durable, not less.
The Week That Was
When Shaun came on, we moved quickly into the operational picture — which is the only honest place to start.
He lives in Dnipro. He said it has been unusually quiet since he returned from a UK trip earlier this month. One jet drone into an apartment block. Otherwise, outskirts. But he was careful to separate the local weather from the broader pattern.
The terror campaign has not slowed. It has expanded. Since the Iranian war theater began absorbing Western attention, Russian strikes have gone after trains, buses, apartment blocks — civilian infrastructure with no residual military logic, pure pressure. The UN has not said an absolute thing about it. The Red Cross has not said an absolute thing about it. The international monitoring architecture that supposedly regulates this conduct has gone quiet in exactly the moment it is most needed.
Part of the calculus here, Shaun argued, is that political attrition can serve the same function as military breakthrough. You do not need to take territory if you can stop Western support from reaching Ukraine. You do not need a front-line advance if you can create enough instability in Budapest, Bratislava, and Washington to freeze the pipeline. The terror campaign is not irrational. It is a component of a strategy that understands politics better than the people supposed to be countering it.
On Russian mobilization: Shaun cited Minister Fedorov’s assessment that for the past four months, Ukraine has been generating Russian casualties faster than Russia can recruit replacements. That is the direction the curve is moving. But Russia is also raising recruitment bonuses — which suggests external financing, possibly Chinese, filling a federal budget deficit that the official numbers do not fully reflect. Ukraine’s continuing strikes on Russian oil infrastructure mean the high oil price windfall from sanctions relief is being partially neutralized before it lands.
The headline I wrote this week — Zelensky Deals Russia Couldn’t Stop — makes the argument that is easiest to miss when you are focused on Washington. While Trump administered chaos across the Middle East, Zelensky was building a Gulf defense architecture: ten security agreements with Arab states, a Japanese initiative developing interceptor drone technology in the Kharkiv region, Moldova exiting the Commonwealth of Independent States. The Japanese ambassador to Russia has since been summoned to the Kremlin for an explanation. That is how you read the map. When the aggressor starts calling in envoys, the deals are working.
Shaun put it plainly: Putin’s only friends in the Middle East are now designated terrorist organizations. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar — these countries have real leverage over Russia, over the Caucasus, over the entire southern exposure. The exchange that brought Shaun home was brokered in part by Saudi intermediaries and by Roman Abramovich. Shaun holds a view about Abramovich that some of his supporters find uncomfortable: whatever Abramovich’s history, he went out on a limb and got 150 Ukrainians home. In a world where most wealthy men with leverage use it only for themselves, that is not nothing. Pragmatic diplomacy means dealing with people you would not choose to deal with. The Trump administration, by contrast, has inverted this principle — applying maximum pressure to the invaded party while extending de facto accommodation to the invader.
Lost in Budapest
The most significant analytical thread of the week was Hungary.
On April 7th and 8th, JD Vance appeared at a stadium event in Budapest — a Hungarian-American friendship spectacle that was presented as organic and came off as precisely scripted at nation-state level. I processed all three transcripts: the stadium speech, the press conference, the interview. Combined running time was close to ninety minutes. I stripped the transcripts to bullet points, identified the repeated themes, then watched the video to read visual cues. The resulting piece was called Lost in Budapest: The Vice President of the United States Just Campaigned for the Kremlin’s Best Asset in Europe.
What struck Shaun — who had visited Budapest himself — was the media failure that surrounded the event. CNN, BBC, none of the major outlets stopped to note that the entire thing was scripted under conditions of near-total media control. Orban controls roughly 80% of Hungarian media. There was no opposition press in the room, no adversarial questioning, no moment that had not been pre-arranged. The Western correspondents who filed on the event treated it as a diplomatic visit. It was a production.
The week also brought the Michael Weiss story: transcripts of conversations between the Hungarian Foreign Minister and Sergei Lavrov in which EU-confidential documents were passed to Russia in real time to help orchestrate responses to aid flows into Ukraine. This is not a soft allegation. This is documentary evidence of a NATO and EU member state acting as an intelligence conduit for the adversary. The EU has begun to respond. Whether Hungary’s Sunday election — where opposition polling was running around 70% — produces a change of government will determine whether that response has a counterpart on the other side.
Shaun made the historical observation that is easy to dismiss and wrong to dismiss: the arc of European conflict often runs through Hungary. The mechanisms are different now. The logic is not entirely different. A Russian-aligned government in Budapest, with access to EU decision-making, sitting at the intersection of multiple security arrangements, is a structural problem with consequences well beyond the bilateral.
I raised the NATO withdrawal question that keeps circulating in our comments. The answer is more precise than the panic: Section 1250A of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024 — co-sponsored in the Senate by one Marco Rubio — prohibits the President from withdrawing the United States from NATO without Senate approval or an act of Congress requiring a two-thirds supermajority. The NDAA also prohibits the use of federal funds to support such a withdrawal. Trump can damage NATO. He has been damaging NATO. He cannot unilaterally exit. What he has managed to do, as Czech President Petr Pavel — former NATO military commander — put it directly: Trump has done more to reduce NATO’s credibility than Vladimir Putin managed over many years.
We talked for a while about whether the MAGA dissent of recent weeks — Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a few others — represents a genuine fracture or a pressure release valve. Shaun’s read, which I share: it is the valve. Trump will massage the egos, the dissenters will fall back in line, the base will consolidate. Putin used the same mechanism — managed protest, controlled ventilation, the appearance of internal debate without any structural challenge to the center. The “No Kings” rallies are not the same as Maidan. Maidan happened when the regime started shooting at protesters. Until that threshold is crossed, the protests are noise that the system absorbs.
The Intelligence Failure and What It Costs
In the final stretch of our conversation, we moved into the intelligence degradation question — which is the thing I find most alarming about the current American moment.
Putin went into Ukraine in February 2022 with parade uniforms packed in the BMPs headed for Kyiv. The FSB had ample intelligence about Ukrainian resistance capabilities and public sentiment. What it did not have was a culture that permitted anyone to tell Putin the truth. The intelligence was there. The institutional pathway to deliver it was not. That is a cultural failure inside an authoritarian system.
Trump’s version is structurally different and in some ways worse. He has actively gutted the machinery that would tell him the truth. The counterintelligence units covering Iranian operations were decimated under Kash Patel. Tulsi Gabbard at the top of the intelligence community cannot tell the truth about fundamental operational realities. Pete Hegseth’s tenure at Defense has been a cascade of departures, leaked Signal chats, and diminishing credibility. What you are left with is a leader who wants to hear what confirms his narrative, surrounded by people who have been selected for their willingness to provide it. This is the same failure mode as Putin, reached through a different mechanism.
When JD Vance walked into Budapest, the Americans would have had copies of those Lavrov-Hungarian foreign minister transcripts. Either they did not read them, or they read them and went anyway. The second possibility is worse.
What We’re Actually Watching
Shaun said something toward the end that I want to put on the record cleanly.
We noted that we had spent a substantial part of a two-hour conversation about Ukraine talking about Trump. Not Putin. Trump.
That is not an accident. It is the operational function of the current American posture: it absorbs the oxygen. An ICC-indicted war criminal conducting the largest land war in Europe since 1945 — with six million forcibly displaced people inside Ukraine alone, and 1.3 million of his own citizens killed or wounded — is generating less analytical bandwidth than the trade and diplomatic dysfunction of an American administration that has not fired a single shot.
Trump shields Putin. Not necessarily by intent. By effect. The attention economy of the Western media follows Washington. Washington is generating maximum chaos. Putin continues his war under reduced scrutiny while his primary adversarial alliance — NATO — is being damaged from the inside by a head of state who has the personal incentive structure, and perhaps the personal leverage exposure, to do exactly this.
Russia have something on him, Shaun said. And if Russia has it, Mossad has it. And if Mossad has it, China has it. That is an assessment, not a documented fact. But it is the assessment of a man who spent over two years inside Russian captivity and has spent his time since studying how these systems work.
Coming Exchanges
We are watching for an Easter prisoner exchange.
April 12th is a significant date in the calendar of the Mariupol siege — the window in which the largest wave of captures began. Three years on, Shaun has been working for three years on legal proceedings that would be the first case of an individual suing a state before the British High Court for war crimes committed against them in a foreign country’s territory. If the case succeeds, it sets precedent for Ukrainians to pursue claims against the Russian state. The paperwork is now in the High Court. A press release is expected in the UK national papers this weekend.
He is heading to Canada next week — talks with the Ukrainian Canadian community in Edmonton, and at the University of Toronto, where Timothy Snyder is based. He is hoping Snyder drops in.
Moldova has broken from the Commonwealth of Independent States. Ukraine intercepted at a high rate this week. Territorial gains in Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions totaling 480 square kilometers. 160 daily combat engagements in the past 24 hours. The front is active and the situation is not what it was in the final months of Biden’s first term, when we were burning smoke signals instead of artillery and I was telling people in Kyiv to think about whether they needed to leave.
We are not in that place. We are in a different, more complicated place — where the war is being won on the ground faster than it is being won in the information space, and where the most consequential battles this spring may be decided in Budapest on Sunday and in Washington in the months ahead.
The Wire Tap publishes weekly on Substack. Shaun Pinner’s account can be found at @ShaunPinner. Paid subscriptions support his ongoing legal proceedings against the Russian state in the UK High Courts.
Slava Ukraini.
