And the Hello and welcome to Belabering the Point. I'm your host Kate Riga.

Today TPM's own Josh Kavinsky and I chatted with Seri Plohi who is a professor at Harvard.

He has a new book out, and we chatted with him

about kind of the state of the Russian-Ukraineian war

and how, you know, really where goes Ukraine goes democracy at this point, you know, that it's a,

there's much more at risk than just kind of the future of this one country,

especially as we're seeing waning support

in the United States mostly emanating

from the hard right flank of the Republican Party.

So Josh, what did you kind of glean from the conversation? What did you find interesting? of the Ukrainian history and also just kind of like the history I think of ideology in the

west and translating that into where the conflict is now and where it's different

paths might take in the future. So that's like a really broad way of you know I

think describing one point he made, which was saying that like, there's this one moment where he was talking about these like huge kind of industrial wars that have taken place throughout history, you know, we have like all of these countries maybe not even ones

they're you know directly fighting each other but countries that are you

producing huge amounts of weapons and they're all just going to these front lines and

all these it's horrific where all these people die but they also as he said, these really deep marks on the kind of trajectory of the world.

And that was sort of how he ended up framing the Russia-Ukraine war, was that, you know, there's a kind of broader question here.

It's not just, you know, there's a kind of broader question here.

It's not just, you know, the issue of Ukrainian sovereignty,

but there is this broader issue of, you know, whether a big autocracy can go and kind of

quash its smaller neighboring democracy. And that's why I thought he did a good job of kind of quash its smaller neighboring democracy.

And that's why I thought he did a good job of kind of framing.

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