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Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood. The usual two top today will hear from Anatole Leven on What Else, the war in Ukraine, and then Anne Romberger on abortion politics, notably the transformation of conservative Christians early tolerance into fervent opposition.

Anatole Leven, the frequent guest in this show, wrote a piece for the Quincy Institute website, the DC-based Think Tank, where he's a fellow, on diminishing prospects for peace in Ukraine and rising risks of more generalized war.

The interview was recorded early this week, and at that point Russia had not yet formally annexed portions of eastern Ukraine.

They're now in the process of doing that, so that issue has been resolved, and the prospects for peace have been rendered grimmer.

At the end of the interview, I'll read some comments on that development Leven made for me this morning.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Anatole Leven covered the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and the wars in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and the Southern Caucasus, for the financial times and the times of London.

He's now a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Anatole Leven.

The gloomy events just keep coming. First of all, what do you make of this referendum that Russia is staging?

There is a possibility that this is like the declarations of independence in the Donbass in 2014, which Russia did not actually recognize,

it didn't recognize Donbass independence until eight years later on the eve of the invasion of this February.

So there is a possibility that Russia will bank this as a diplomatic bargaining counter, and will not move to accept the referendum and immediately annex these territories to Russia.

If it does annex them to Russia, then basically any hope of a negotiated peace settlement has disappeared because that can never be accepted by Ukraine or the West.

There is a possibility that at some stage there will be a ceasefire either resulting from a Ukrainian victory or a Ukrainian exhaustion or a combination of the two.

Ukraine gets back enough to be able to claim victory but loses so heavily in the process that it decides not to fight on.

But if Russia annexes these territories that it's occupied, then a ceasefire is the most that we can hope for and it will take a considerable time to get to the point where even a ceasefire is possible.

Should assuming the vote would be accounted honestly, should the people of these regions vote to join Russia, should we read that as a legitimate desire or it's the whole process illegitimate from the start?

In Crimea, which Russia occupied and annexed in 2014, most independent observers have said and certainly from my previous trips to Crimea,

then in fact the great majority of local people did want to join Russia remembering that this territory was part of Russia until 1954 and was transferred by Soviet decree and that the referendum result was in fact fair and legitimate.

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