4/8: The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History. Hardcover – May 16, 2023 by Serhii Plokhy (Author)
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🗓️ 19 August 2023
⏱️ 10 minutes
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4/8: The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History. Hardcover – May 16, 2023 by Serhii Plokhy (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Russo-Ukrainian-War-Return-History/dp/1324051191
Despite repeated warnings from the White House, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked the world. Why did Putin start the war―and why has it unfolded in previously unimaginable ways? Ukrainians have resisted a superior military; the West has united, while Russia grows increasingly isolated.
Serhii Plokhy, a leading historian of Ukraine and the Cold War, offers a definitive account of this conflict, its origins, course, and the already apparent and possible future consequences. Though the current war began eight years before the all-out assault―on February 27, 2014, when Russian armed forces seized the building of the Crimean parliament―the roots of this conflict can be traced back even earlier, to post-Soviet tensions and imperial collapse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Providing a broad historical context and an examination of Ukraine and Russia’s ideas and cultures, as well as domestic and international politics, Plokhy reveals that while this new Cold War was not inevitable, it was predictable.
Ukraine, Plokhy argues, has remained central to Russia’s idea of itself even as Ukrainians have followed a radically different path. In a new international environment defined by the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the disintegration of the post–Cold War international order, and a resurgence of populist nationalism, Ukraine is now more than ever the most volatile fault line between authoritarianism and democratic Europe.
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, Anna Richardson here. I just thought I'd leave you a quick voice note to tell you |
| 0:06.6 | about my new advice podcast. It can't just be me. |
| 0:10.8 | I'll be getting super honest about my own topsy-turvy life, as well as helping you solve |
| 0:18.0 | your life dilemmas with the support of some very special guests and experts. From Podimo |
| 0:24.0 | and Max created, it can't just be me, wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:31.0 | I'm John Batch with Professors Erhi Ploki, Ukrainian professor of history at Harvard University. |
| 0:40.0 | His new book is the Russo-Yukrainian War the Return of History. It is the Spring of 2021, |
| 0:47.0 | the summer of 2021. Russia continues to run troops up to the Ukrainian border and then |
| 0:53.5 | pull back, but leaves its equipment in place. There's talk back and forth between now President |
| 1:00.5 | Biden and Vladimir Putin, a meeting Geneva. There's talks by the director of the Central Intelligence |
| 1:07.5 | Agency in Moscow warning Putin not to do this and took and Putin talking about his demands. |
| 1:15.5 | There's taunting going on in Ukraine all that spring, summer and fall of 2021. Of a |
| 1:23.5 | Mr. Biden makes it clear again and again the professor reporting that no U.S. troops are going to |
| 1:29.5 | Ukraine. No weapons are going to Ukraine. Professor, this is a colossal misjudgment of Putin. |
| 1:36.5 | Was it purposeful? Did it serve NATO's purpose to pretend that Putin wasn't a deceiver and a predator? |
| 1:43.5 | The U.S. intelligence did a fantastic job really reporting to Washington on the modern |
| 1:55.5 | the Kremlin, on the plans for the war, even predicting if not the day and the hour, |
| 2:02.5 | then at least the week when the war would start. And the Mr. Biden's administration in the |
| 2:12.5 | White House made an unprecedented move of releasing almost in real time the intelligence |
| 2:19.5 | information on those things that they were getting. So the hope was that they would shame |
| 2:25.5 | Putin into not doing that, into not attacking, almost to trick him into saying that, |
| 2:32.5 | okay, you told that I would attack and I would prove you wrong. My understanding that |
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