#289 – Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine

Ukrainians' resistance deserves to prevail here. Russia deserves to lose. No war of aggression, like they've committed here against Ukraine, should prevail if we can do anything about it. I support, 1000%, the continued supply of heavy weapons, including offensive weapons, to the Ukrainians as long as they're willing to resist.

The Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression was one of the greatest gifts the West has ever received.

P.J. O'Rourke, the comedian who died this year... He said there were two things that are always characteristic of any American embassy abroad: one is a political protest outside and the other is the longest line you've ever seen for visas ... Non-western countries envy and admire the West, but they also resent the power of the West.

On Twitter, Russia has completely lost the war. In reality, they failed to take Kiev, they failed to capture Kiev, and they failed in Phase 2, as they called it, or Plan B, which is to capture the entirety of the Donbas.

We're three months into the war. If you had made a judgment about, let's say, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, a definitive judgment, after three months, you might have got the outcome wrong there. If you had judged the Winter War, the 1939/1940 Soviet invasion of Finland, after three months, you would have got that wrong, too... So, we're early in the game here, and we have to be careful about any definitive judgments.

When a war doesn't go well, it looks like lunacy to have launched it in the first place.

War never goes according to plan. All war is based upon miscalculation, but not everybody is punished for their miscalculation—all aggressive war we're talking about, not defensive war.

We see President Zelensky decides to risk his life on behalf of his country, Ukraine. He decides to stay in the capital; he's not going to flee; they're going to stay and fight. And he could be killed. He can die. It's a decision where he put his life on the line.

Ukraine doesn't have an economy anymore. They have somewhere between 33% and 50% unemployment ... Their metallurgical industry... is a ruin now. And a lot of farmers are not planting the fields, because the harvest from the previous year still hasn't been sold abroad because the ports are blockaded or destroyed. And so you don't have an economy.

The doomsday arsenal that Russia possesses is enough to destroy the world many times over, and that's been the case every year since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. And so, of course we're concerned about that.

Russia can't actually use a nuclear weapon tactical battlefield one in Ukraine without also firing it at it itself. And in addition, it's that same dynamic I alluded to earlier, which is to say, you bomb a hospital, you bomb a school. there's more heavy weapons going to Ukraine from the West.