This is CBSI on the world. I'm John Batchew with Serhi Ploki, professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University, the author of the new book, The Russo-Ukrainian War, The Return of History, written between the winter of 22 and the winter of 23. The war 500 days plus unknown future. We are discussing the

roots of it because that will somehow be present in when there is an end of it, or at least a

ceasefire. Professor, Vladimir Putin becomes critical here because it's his authority that drives the tragedy.

He becomes president in May of 2000 with a constitution that empowers him, although it limits him to two terms.

Later on, of course, that will become something he can manipulate because the presidency in Russia,

thanks to Boris Yeltsin and vouchsafed by Bill Clinton, is much more powerful than our understanding

of checks and balances here in the United States.

That gives Putin the power both to play the friend of the U.S. during the war on terror and also move towards the assumption that he has the right to dictate who can join NATO, who can join EU, who can be Western regarding, and who cannot.

You identify April of 2008 as an important summit for NATO and Bucharest. At that time,

Georgia and Ukraine both wanted to join NATO. What happened? What happened was split within the

alliance. The United States at that time led by President Judge W. Bush

was in favor of inviting Ukraine and Georgia joining the alliance and part of the Western

Allies, in particular Germany, opposed to this idea.

So what happened as the result of the summit was the worst outcome possible for Ukraine and

Georgia. They invited to summit. Mr. Putin traveled to summit as well, trying to lobby the European

members of the alliance to say no to Ukraine and Georgia. At the end, alliance never reached

an agreement. So there was a promise given to Ukraine and Georgia that one day

they would become the member of alliance. But there was no specifics on when that day would come.

But there were quite a lot of specifics in Mr. Putin's thinking about the whole issue.

Within a few months after the Bucharest summit, he starts

war in Georgia in 2008, invading the territory and really, really de facto annexing parts of Georgian

territory, making Georgia uneligible to join an alliance because the country had a territorial,

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