From the Heritage Foundation, I'm Tim Desher, and this is Heritage Explains live.

As the situation in Ukraine continues to escalate, there are so many questions being asked.

So we wanted to take them head on. What is at stake there? Is Russia going

to invade? What happens if they do? On this episode of Heritage Explains Live, we talked with

Robert Wilkie. He's the former U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs and the Undersecretary of Defense

during the Trump administration. He's now a visiting

fellow here at the Heritage Foundation, so we're so lucky to have him join us on this episode of

Heritage Explains Live. Just wanted to give you a quick plug here, though. If you want to see this

conversation happen on video, we're going to link to it in the show notes.

You can log on to YouTube or Facebook and see it happen there.

So without further ado, let's roll the interview, John Pop.

And we are live. Heritage explains live.

We are here, and we're going to get right into it. As you know, we are talking Russia and

Ukraine right now. We're seeing videos of trains rolling through Russia, moving tanks, guns,

ammo to eastern Ukraine. It's looking very similar to the footage. Some of the footage we saw

back in 2014 when Putin moved troops into Ukraine and then annexed Crimea, which was a huge deal under the Obama administration.

And so now we're getting all these reports, journalists on the ground, they're reporting a lot of different things, a lot of different stories, a lot of different angles to this.

And so we wanted to kind of

cut through a little bit of that noise and get right to the heart of things. And that means we got to go

live here. So just as an introduction, my name is Tim Decher. I'm the co-host of the Heritage Explains

podcast. And today, we're joined with someone who is, you are the right person for this

conversation. You've been covering this thing ad nauseum. And you are Robert Wilkie. You're the

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