Hello and welcome to the GZero World podcast.

This is where you'll find extended versions of my interviews on public television.

I'm Ian Bremmer, and today we are asking this question, is Ukraine losing the war?

A year and a half ago, Russia was in bad shape.

Moscow was struggling to resupply troops on the front lines.

Its naval fleet in the Black Sea decimated.

Battlefield commanders were abandoning offensive positions, troop casualty estimates as high as half a million.

But a disappointing Ukrainian counteroffensive and a six-month delay in critical U.S. military aid gave Moscow the opportunity to rearm and regroup.

In recent weeks, Russian troops have taken territory in the northeast and southeast at a faster

clip than at any point during the war and are closing in on Harkeith, Ukraine's second largest city.

In a sign of just how badly the situation is

deteriorating, Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, abruptly canceled all international

trips in mid-May to focus on the Russian offensive. So what comes next? Is this the beginning

of the end? And what happens if U.S. Congress stalls on additional aid or worse fails to pass another package altogether?

My guest, President of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and former U.S. ambassador to NATO, Ivo Daldor.

He joins me today from Estonia.

Let's get to it.

Welcome back to the show.

Great to be back.

Ukraine.

You're in Estonia right now.

That is not far from the front, as we know, but I want to start. I'll ask you about Estonia and the Baltics and where the war could go. But I want to start with Ukraine because, of course, over the last few weeks, I'm hearing increasingly very negative things from U.S. leaders, from NATO leaders, that it is getting harder and harder to constrain the dynamics of how this Russia-Ukraine war is going. Yeah, I think that's true. I think we will

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