Anne Applebaum on Ukraine: One Year Into the War

Conversations with Bill Kristol

News, Society & Culture, Government, Politics

4.7 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 15 February 2023

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

One year into the war, where do things stand in Ukraine? What have we learned about the character of Ukraine, Putin’s war aims, the fault lines in European politics, and America's resolve? Why should the West continue to support Ukraine? To discuss these questions, we are joined by Anne Applebaum, a leading scholar of Ukraine and Pulitzer Prize winning historian. According to Applebaum, Ukraine’s impressive strength speaks to Ukraine’s virtues in defending itself—as a free country—through an appeal to liberal nationalism and patriotism. This is why an independent Ukraine represents such a threat to Putin’s regime. And Putin remains very clear about his war aims: the destruction of Ukraine as an independent nation. We must not allow this to happen, Applebaum argues, because a Russian victory not only would imperil Ukraine but also the whole European order, and embolden autocratic regimes like China around the globe. An expert analyst of European politics, Applebaum also reflects on responses to the war by European nations, and describes how current Polish-German relations present tensions in the alliance.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome back to Conversations. I'm very pleased to be joined again by an Apple
0:20.5	Bound. We had a conversation almost exactly a year ago. I think it was the day before the war began.
0:26.1	We assumed Putin wouldn't wait and actually your comments from the time your analysis
0:30.4	sends up very well in terms of Putin's motives and the way we conduct the war in terms of Ukraine,
0:37.6	a little bit on Europe, so I want to go back overall of that, but just to reintroduce and
0:42.0	I feel surprised when the historian, uh, writer must read writer for the Atlantic on
0:47.8	not just on Ukraine and Russia, but focusing on that obviously in the last year. That's why I
0:51.9	wrote a democracy, an excellent book written a couple of years ago, and I guess maybe you're best
0:56.4	known for the books on Soviet Union, on the Gulag history, and on Stalin's war in Ukraine,
1:03.5	and those are all terrific books. So a rare combination of historical depth and, you know,
1:11.1	crisp commentary on the current, on current events. So Anne, thanks for, thanks for joining me again.
1:16.0	Thanks for having me again. So let's go right to it and let's just talk about, you know,
1:21.2	so much about Ukraine, Russia. I feel like some of the conversation about the war
1:24.7	understandably, and I engaged in this too, is very general autocracy democracy, which is fine and
1:28.9	important, but let's talk about the actual country. So it's a year in. So what have you learned?
1:34.3	What surprised you? What should we all know about? Let's just begin with Ukraine since let's
1:38.0	begin with the the uplifting side rather than the rather than Putin's Russia. So what about
1:43.2	Ukraine? So the Ukrainians have surpassed all expectations. I mean, if you look back to what
1:50.0	people were saying a year from now, I was part of a lot of conversations in Washington and elsewhere
1:55.6	in which the fall of Kiev was widely anticipated. The assumption was that, okay, there would be a
2:01.6	guerrilla war and the fighting would go on for a long time, maybe even many years, but, you know,
2:07.1	the the Ukrainian state was very unlikely to survive. I did think that this was a this was a
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Conversations with Bill Kristol, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Conversations with Bill Kristol and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.