From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Hello and welcome to Free Expression, the weekly podcast with me, Jerry Baker, the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

This week with events in Europe dominating the headlines and dominating everybody's thoughts. I'm privileged

to be joined by an old friend, Neil Ferguson, a very distinguished historian, currently the Milbank

Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and managing director of Greenmandal, an investment advisory firm,

but of course he's been a professor at Oxford, Harvard and elsewhere. And I think Neil also have I may say, so you're very much involved in the founding of this new university committed to principals of free speech, University of Austin. That's right, isn't it? Yes, I'm one of the founding trustees of the University of Austin, so I wear multiple hats these days. Well, thank you very much indeed for joining us. We're recording this, I should say, given that events are moving so fast that by the time some people hear this, things may have moved on a little bit. We're recording and we're going to try and keep to the larger issues, to the general principles of what's going on right now in Europe. We're recording this on Monday morning, Monday the 28th of February. So, Neil, let me start with you. You're a historian, as I say, a very eminent historian. You've written widely about global history, economic and financial history, but of course geopolitical history. And it's been your job for getting on for 40 years to analyze and interpret historic events and to sort of sift events, the really significant events from the chaff, if you like, of the run-of-the-mill events.

As we watch what's going on right now, we're on day five of Russia's invasion of Ukraine,

how do you estimate this episode in terms of its historic significance at this point?

I wrote a book called The War of the World back in 2006. And one of its central themes was why that particular

part of Europe has been so violent historically. An enormous proportion of the organized lethal

violence of the 20th century happens in and around Ukraine.

There's this kind of deadly triangle between the Baltic, the Black Sea and the Balkans,

where just a terrific amount of conflict has taken place.

It's therefore, from a historian's point of view, not terribly surprising that war

is raging in Kharkiv, in Kiev. These places have a tremendously bloody history. So if one asks the

question, why did this happen? The obvious answer is that Vladimir Putin, the Russian president,

resolved to bring Ukraine back under Russia's control, direct or indirect.

We can't know whether he aspired to annex Ukraine

or simply to restore it to its vassal state of phony independence.

So that's the obvious starting point for all of this.

He published an article last July on the historic unity of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples,

a long pseudo-historical article.

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