UKRAINE MILITARY HISTORY
How wars are really fought — from the people who have fought them.
Samuel co-hosts with Rob Lee and Dmytro Putiata. The guests are commanders, Marines, and the people who were in the room — not analysts describing a war from somewhere else.
If you build or fund defense technology, start with the four ★ GATEWAY episodes below. They are the ones that change how you read your own roadmap.
Reporting from Dobropillia, the pressure on the fortress belt, and what a winter mobilisation would mean.
Rob Lee · Francis Farrell
The most sophisticated assault of the war so far, armour being lost to drones, and Ukraine’s new commander.
Rob Lee · Dima Putiata
An elite commander on rat tactics, the eighty-percent drone war, and where special operations go next.
A GUR special forces commander, anonymised
Two Marines, one siege, and what came after it.
Shaun Pinner · Ievgen Malik
E-points, busification, and an army’s systemic crisis. Part two of the Fedorov panel.
Zelensky fires his defence minister, and soldiers say what they think of it. Part one.
Rob Lee · Ryan O’Leary · Dmytro Putiata
Mordovia, and what Russian captivity does to a man. Part two.
Ievgen Malik
The fall of the city, and the descent that followed it. Part one.
Ievgen Malik
Poltava, the decision to fight, and the last stand at Mariupol.
Ievgen Malik
Operator-level ground truth: three-layer drone doctrine, fibre-optic versus radio FPVs — the end-user feedback founders never get.
Colonel “Shram” Tovstyi, UAV Battalion Corsair
Effectively a frontline requirements document: drone economics, UGV shortfalls, AI targeting, what the West must build.
The single best primer on the drone-defined battlefield your product will have to survive.
Rob Lee · Dmytro Putiata
A Hero of Ukraine on bottom-up innovation under fire — and why victory is the worst thing that can happen to military innovation.
Lt. Gen. Zabrodskyi
Infiltration tactics and electronic-warfare adaptation, from the front line as it is.
Rob Lee · Dmytro Putiata
Where the series starts, and why the past is the most practical thing on the battlefield.
Rob Lee
BEYOND THE PODCAST
The same argument, made for founders.
Why War Matters is the talk this company is built on. Part I is free.