I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Monday, February 28th.

We're very happy to have the opportunity now to speak with chessmaster, Russian dissident, and global democracy advocate,

Gary Kasparov. These days, among other things, he is chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative,

which describes itself as a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering the public

to uphold constitutional principles in their civic behavior. He is also chairman of the group known as

the Human Rights Foundation. And maybe you saw Gary Kasparov's op-ed in the Daily News on Friday

called how the free world gave Putin the green light. He also notes that Ukraine is fighting hard.

Putin's army is not invulnerable. And if aid arrives in time, Putin could find himself in a difficult situation. He also wrote a book in 2015 called Winter is Coming, Why Vladimir Putin and the enemies of the free world must be stopped. So Mr. Kasparov, I know you're very busy with the situation going on right now,

so thank you for making some time for us today. Welcome to WNYC. Thank you very much for inviting me.

You argue in your op-ed that the West, in effect, invaded Ukraine, not just Russia, because Europe

kept doing economic business as usual with Putin after he invaded

Ukraine and annexed Crimea from there in 2014.

You wrote another op-ed published in the Daily News back then, and I mentioned your book

from 2015, Winter is Coming, why Vladimir Putin and the enemies of the free world must be

stopped.

Are you in the unenviable position today of saying

I told you so?

Yes, but it doesn't make me feel happy. So I'm watching to the latest development in Ukraine,

and it's a tragedy. And it's even more tragedy because it could be voided if these

warnings were not ignored because we saw Putin's plans. He was not hiding them since 2007 when

he made his infamous speech in Munich at security conference in Europe, he was not hiding his plan to reorganize the international order and to bring us back to the past, to the 19th century, where big countries could dictate smaller countries

how to behave and run their domestic and international affairs. And he backed his words by

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