This is GPS, the global public square. Welcome to all of you in the United States and

around the world. I'm Farid Zakaria coming to you live from New York.

Today on the program, just what is the Russian military doing in Ukraine? Is it drastically

reducing its assault on tea as the Kremlin claims? Or is it simply repositioning? I'll

talk to NATO's former Supreme Allied Commander Admiral James Stavridis. Also, at the heart of

this conflict lies one man, Vladimir Putin. I will talk to the person who came closest

to challenging Putin's grip on power and paid dearly for it. Russia's oligarch turned

dissident Mikhail Kodorkovsky. Finally, a brief respite from war in music. I talk to John

Batist and Billy Joe. But first, here's my take. All wars are fought twice. The first time

on the battlefield, the second time in memory. That's what the Vietnamese American novelist

Viet Thannu and once wrote. In the case of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the start of the

fighting also launched a battle over the history that caused the war. It's worth understanding

this intellectual conflict because it will likely shed light on the end game of the actual

conflict. At the heart of this historical debate is the question of NATO expansion. Some

have argued that the Western decision to admit several countries from the former Soviet

Empire created a deep and lasting resentment in Moscow that morphed into full-scale aggression.

That case has been made more sharply by the University of Chicago's scholar, John

Mirshayev, as well as many others over the years. As it happens, when NATO first started

considering expansion, I was one of those advocating caution. While I was not entirely

opposed to it, I argued that even as NATO admitted Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech

Republic, it should also begin serious negotiations with Russia to ensure that any further expansion

was part of a stable security arrangement that took Moscow's concerns into account.

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