And the Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome back to Conversations. I'm very pleased to be joined today for the third time, I guess,

Vai Ann Applebaum, a preeminent chronicler of all things Soviet, Russian, Ukrainian,

European, and American now in terms of authoritarianism here as well.

So unfortunately, the authoritarian beat has

turned out to be a very good beat to be on end so unfortunately yes yeah but

you've done a great job with it your Your book Autocracy Inc. is coming out in about a month and we'll talk about that some, but we've had two conversations about Ukraine right at the beginning of the war and then a month in, we're now a year in, we're now two years plus in. Let's begin with that and

then get to Europe and then the broader questions. Where do we stand in Ukraine?

So it's a, it's a, it's a, it Ukraine? So it's a complicated picture to describe because there's actually, instead of one war, there are now three wars.

There is the land war, which is the thing you read about the most.

And in the land war, Ukraine is very much still on the defensive.

It's true that the Russian attempt to push towards Kharkiv has mostly stopped.

The Ukrainians, thanks really to the last minute arrival of USA,

the Ukrainians have been able to stop the Russians.

So they have not succeeded in taking huge amounts of

territory, but they did make some gains while Congress was stalling. But

they've stopped it, but they're not moving forward and it looks it looks muddled, although there although there are people who are trying to find a way

out of that but that's a separate story. There's a second war which is taking place in

the Black Sea and this is mostly Ukrainians using long-range missiles

drones to attack Crimea and targets in and around Crimea and they're hitting airfields and they're

hitting air defense and they've hit they've hit enough ships so that the

Russian Black Sea fleet is mostly moved away from Ukraine, which has allowed Ukrainian

shipping to resume normally.

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