The Lawfare Podcast: Emily Hoge on the Strange Evolution of Russian Veterans Organizations

Jen Patja, Benjamin Wittes, Emily Hoge
Monday, April 25, 2022, 12:00 PM

Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
Brookings

Emily Hoge is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, writing a dissertation on Russian veterans groups from the Afghan war and their evolution over time. She wrote a recent piece in Lawfare about how these groups, which started as anti-war, anti-state, pro-veterans activist organizations, morphed into a big part of Vladimir Putin's propaganda operations. She joined Benjamin Wittes to talk about the history of these groups, how they emerged from the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan and the collapse of the Soviet Union to represent veterans all over the country, how Putin adopted their victimization narrative and made it key to his vision of the state's relations with the international order more broadly, and how these groups are now promoting the war in Ukraine.


Jen Patja is the editor and producer of the Lawfare Podcast and Rational Security. She currently serves as the Co-Executive Director of Virginia Civics, a nonprofit organization that empowers the next generation of leaders in Virginia by promoting constitutional literacy, critical thinking, and civic engagement. She is the former Deputy Director of the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier and has been a freelance editor for over 20 years.
Benjamin Wittes is editor in chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of several books.
Emily Hoge is a Ph.D candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation, titled "Combat Brotherhood: Disabled Afghan War Veterans, Traumatic Masculinity and the Mafia State," studies Russian veterans of the Soviet-Afghan War after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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