I'm here with Julia Yafi, longtime Washington correspondent who is now at Puck where she's a founding member of that fine institution.

Welcome, Julia.

Hi, Peter. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for coming on. I know you're very busy. I appreciate your time.

I have a very basic question for you. You are in Washington, D.C.

You are covering a war in Ukraine and Europe.

You're also trying to understand what's happening in Russia.

How are you keeping track of things? What are you relying on for your sourcing and news?

Well, I'm glued to every which screen.

So looking at Twitter, looking at Telegram, I also am talking to friends in Moscow, to friends in Kiev.

I'm talking to my sources here in Washington, checking in with them as often as I can.

What they're thinking, what they're saying.

What's your level of confidence about? It's war is by definition murky and hard to understand.

Even if you're in the middle of it. And on the one hand, this seems like a conflict where we have lots of basic questions about motivations and why things are happening.

And we also seem incredibly informed, at least there's a ton of stuff coming across our screens.

Do you feel like you have a handle on things or are you just as clueless as anyone else who's watching something flow across your screen?

I think it depends what level you're talking about.

So things like casualty counts, I'm not clear on, I don't know that anybody is.

But things like why this is happening, how it's going, what the effects of this are probably going to be, who's losing, who's going to win, who's going to lose.

That all seems pretty clear.

One thing that I can't quite get a handle on from the outside is, and I don't know that I would, if I were inside the country either,

is what Russians think about this. But if you tune in later to Puck, there will be some answers.

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