Shashank Joshi

speaker

307 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 22 Jul

Shashank Joshi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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The Intelligence from The Economist · Kyiv brawl: Ukraine’s top general fired · 22 Jul 2026 podcast

Ukraine's president Voltimir Zelensky has just fired his top military general Oleksandr Srski, this very controversial figure in the army.

This came after days of public protests, calling for Sersky's sacking, but also calling for the return of the Ukrainian defense minister Mikhailo Fedorov, who was dismissed last week in a cabinet reshuffle.

And I think what's at stake here is the very ethos of the Ukrainian military and the nature of its war effort.

So Fedorov, to take a step back, was appointed as defense minister at the very beginning of this year.

And he was previously Minister of Digital Transformation.

He was a young, very well-regarded minister among Ukraine's allies.

You know, I met him a few years ago.

His office was covered in drones.

He had done a huge amount to scale up Ukraine's use of drone technology, but also reform the way in which these things were produced.

procured, for example, creating incentives for different brigades to hit more Russian targets that would get them more drones and more ammunition.

So he was pretty well regarded in that respect.

But he had clashed repeatedly with the army, and particularly with Sersky, the commander-in-chief, who was viewed as a kind of very Soviet-style, rigid, disciplinarian general who had very crude tactics, a very divisive figure within the army.

And these clashes got worse and worse.

So, for example, Fedorov, as defense minister, would say: you have to consolidate your

Best brigades and make sure that they're located along the same points on the front.

Sersky split them up and put them at different points on the front.

Fedorov tried to channel resources towards those units and brigades that were doing the most interesting things with technology.

And he would find that Sersky had basically taken some of those units and put them into assault regiments, which had the highest casualties.

So again and again, there was an enormous personality class.

But I think much more importantly, a culture clash between this young reformist minister and an army that he saw as blocking him and obstructing him at every turn.

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