I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Thursday, March 3rd.

You know David Remnick is editor of The New Yorker and host of the New Yorker Radio Hour here on WNYC, what you may not know is that way

back in 1988, he started a four-year tenure as Washington Post Moscow correspondent, an experience

that formed the basis of his 1993 book on the former Soviet Union, Lenin's Tomb, the last

days of the Soviet Empire. In 1994, Lenin's Tomb, the Last Days of the Soviet Empire.

In 1994, Lenin's Tomb received both the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and a George Polk Award

for Excellence in Journalism, the New Yorker reminds us. And while David doesn't usually write that

often for the magazine while he's editing the magazine. He picks his spots. And with his

Russia expertise, he's been writing a lot in the last few weeks about Russia and Ukraine. So let's get

David Remnick's take. David, it's always great when you come on the live radio side of the station.

Welcome back to the show. It's great to talk to you. First, I'm curious to hear your take on the

situation on the ground from New Yorker correspondence or other media reports because I'm starting

to feel maybe a disconnect between almost the entire world rooting for the Ukrainians against

the monstrous invasion and the Ukrainian army army, plus some Ukrainian civilians, taking up

arms overperforming and holding off the tanks outside of Kiev so far, but we now have

reports of 2,000 Ukrainians or more killed already, and a million refugees and that 40-mile- long column of Russian tanks on the way to

the Capitol. So what is Russia actually perpetrating here as far as you can tell?

Russia is perpetrating a full-scale invasion of a sovereign state. And with the erratic but full scale power of its military.

I think the in the initial days of the invasion, Ukraine, through the force of its army, through

the inspiring personality of its president and the Ukrainian people, as well as assistance from abroad,

but not fighting assistance from abroad, were able to, if not hold off, but slow down

the Russian incursion. And there were, you know, we will never know how many – we're not

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