HAS THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION SWITCHED SIDES TO KYIV? 2/8: The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History. by Serhii Plokhy (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 14 July 2025
⏱️ 9 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
1920
https://www.amazon.com/Russo-Ukrainian-War-Return-History/dp/1324051191
Despite repeated warnings from the White House, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked the world. Why did Putin start the war―and why has it unfolded in previously unimaginable ways? Ukrainians have resisted a superior military; the West has united, while Russia grows increasingly isolated.
Serhii Plokhy, a leading historian of Ukraine and the Cold War, offers a definitive account of this conflict, its origins, course, and the already apparent and possible future consequences. Though the current war began eight years before the all-out assault―on February 27, 2014, when Russian armed forces seized the building of the Crimean parliament―the roots of this conflict can be traced back even earlier, to post-Soviet tensions and imperial collapse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Providing a broad historical context and an examination of Ukraine and Russia’s ideas and cultures, as well as domestic and international politics, Plokhy reveals that while this new Cold War was not inevitable, it was predictable.
Ukraine, Plokhy argues, has remained central to Russia’s idea of itself even as Ukrainians have followed a radically different path. In a new international environment defined by the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the disintegration of the post–Cold War international order, and a resurgence of populist nationalism, Ukraine is now more than ever the most volatile fault line between authoritarianism and democratic Europe.
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| 1:00.0 | This is CBSI on the world. I'm John Batchel with Seri Ploki, Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard |
| 1:05.2 | University, the author of the new book, The Russo-Ukrainian War, The Return of History, |
| 1:10.5 | written between the winter of |
| 1:12.0 | 22 and the winter of 23, the war 500 days plus unknown future. We are discussing the roots |
| 1:20.5 | of it because that will somehow be present in when there is an end of it, or at least a ceasefire. |
| 1:27.5 | Professor Vladimir Putin becomes critical here because it's his authority that drives the tragedy. |
| 1:36.8 | He becomes president in May of 2000 with a constitution that empowers him, although it limits him to two terms. |
| 1:45.4 | Later on, of course, that will become something he can manipulate because the presidency in Russia, |
| 1:51.6 | thanks to Boris Yeltsin and vouchsafed by Bill Clinton, is much more powerful than our understanding |
| 1:57.7 | of checks and balances here in the United States. |
| 2:00.7 | That gives Putin the power |
| 2:02.5 | both to play the friend of the U.S. during the war on terror and also move towards the assumption |
| 2:13.3 | that he has the right to dictate who can join NATO, who can join EU, who can be Western regarding and who cannot. |
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