There’s only one story we wanted to do a deep dive into this week: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The conflict has escalated in recent days. It’s a humanitarian story, an economic story and a story of history.

Someone who is well familiar with that history is Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist at Stanford University. Fukuyama is known for his 1992 book, “The End of History,” in which he argued that the great ideological battles between East and West are effectively over.

On the show today, we check in with Fukuyama about that concept, given today’s context and the significance of a land war on the European continent.

“One of the reasons that people have paid special attention to Ukraine is that it sets an important precedent for what will happen in East Asia,” he said. “Ukraine may be kind of a dry run for how much resistance there’s going to be to what’s happening in that theater. The biggest challenge to current world order actually is not Russia, but it’s China, simply because Chinese power is much more multidimensional than Russian power.”

In the News Fix, we discuss Western media coverage of the conflict in Ukraine and how it compares to coverage of conflicts in the Middle East and Africa. Plus, the U.S. is the world’s top oil producer, so why does it still import oil from Russia? We’ll explain.

Later, we hear from a listener who paid a big price for a cheap app. And we get an answer to the Make Me Smart question that has us wondering about a linguistic phenomenon. (Hopefully you can help us.)

Here’s everything we talked about today:

• “What Next in Ukraine?” by Francis Fukuyama from American Purpose
• “In reporting Ukraine’s plight, some in media use offensive comparisons” from The Washington Post
• A Twitter thread about a woman from Sierra Leone trying to leave Ukraine
• “Why Does the U.S. Buy Russian Oil?” from The Wall Street Journal
• Texas Primary Election: Live Updates and What to Watch from The New York Times
• A Twitter thread about how the helium shortage is affecting the National Weather Service

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