Karen Dawisha and Marie Yovanovitch provide a deeper look at Russia's war in Ukraine

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4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 25 March 2022

⏱️ 17 minutes

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Summary

It's been nearly a month since Vladimir Putin attacked Ukraine, so we are taking another look at how we got here. First, an interview from 2014 with the late political scientist Karen Dawisha on how Putin and his cronies became so fabulously wealthy. She told NPR's Arun Rath that leveling economic sanctions would have been effective because Putin expected military action instead. Second, we have a new memoir from Marie Yovanovitch who was ousted as ambassador to Ukraine by President Trump and played a key role in his impeachment. She told NPR's Mary Louise Kelly it was a painful experience.

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0:00.0	Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. It's been about a month since Russia
0:07.8	began its war on Ukraine. And it's hard to wrap your head around a crisis as big as this. Sure,
0:14.1	yeah, there's the sort of obvious narrative of Putin's aggression on the world stage,
0:18.6	but then there are all these other parts of the story that play into
0:21.6	why the war's been so hard to stop. In a bit, we'll hear from Marie Yovanovitch, who was
0:27.0	removed from her position as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine back in 2019 as part of a politics play
0:33.8	from former President Donald Trump. But first, President Putin has always played a long game
0:38.9	when it comes to keeping his money straight, which is why a few weeks ago, the U.S. had to target
0:43.7	sanctions against specific elites and oligarchs beneath Putin on the Kremlin org chart.
0:49.6	In 2014, during Russia's previous actions into Ukraine, NPR's Arun Roth spoke with the late
0:54.9	political scientist Karen Deweisha about her book, Putin's kleptocracy, Who Owns Russia?
1:00.3	To find out, how did Putin and his cronies gain control of his country's economy?
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1:49.8	Karen Deweisha, professor of political science at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio,
1:53.8	spent the last five years investigating how Russia's president, Vladimir Putin,
	...

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