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Welcome to Pod Save the World. I'm Ben Rhodes, and Tommy is still out, as you know, taking some needed time off.

So, continue to keep the chair warm for him.

But we have a great show today. We have two guests with us, Joshua Yafa, who's the New Yorker's Russia Corp.

And we talked to us from Keith, where he's observing firsthand the preparations being made for potential invasion in the country of Ukraine.

And then we talked to Amarnaf Amar Asingham, who is an expert on radicalism and extremism in Canada.

So, he's the perfect guy to talk to you about the continuing insane, trucker, freedom convoy, far-right,

Mishmash, QAnon, Mass Up in Canada. Some connection between these two topics, and that the same kind of far-right,

ethnic nationalist force that Putin himself represents is, as you'll hear from our guests, creeping into our usually much more peaceful and civilized neighbor to the north.

But first, let's catch up a little bit on the main story, which we've all been following, which is the situation in Ukraine.

The United States continues to prepare for a potential invasion at any moment, taking a very dramatic step in closing the embassy in Kiev,

and essentially moving that diplomatic representation to a city far, far to the west of Ukraine, closer to the Polish border.

We've also heard from the administration that they're preparing tabletop exercises to be ready for a potential Russian invasion,

one including cabinet members, walking through the scenarios I used to do these in government. What do you do? The first hour, the first day, the first week of a potential scenario.

And so, for all intents and purposes, the U.S., Ukraine, the world remains unhigher. NATO Secretary General has said that members of the Alliance have not seen any sign of de-escalation from Russia.

President Biden, as I'll get to later, you can mention today that the number of Russian troops around Ukraine is 150,000, which is a higher number than we've heard.

While the U.S. and NATO continue to sound the alarm, Putin began to sound something of a different note. He appeared on television this week, including one appearance at a very large and long table with his foreign minister, who was briefing him on the diplomacy around Ukraine.

Putin said that Russia is, quote, ready to continue on the negotiating track. But we'll keep pushing for a rollback of the NATO presence in Eastern Europe, and a guarantee that Ukraine will never join NATO.

We've also seen some announcements out of the Russian government that they're prepared to begin to pull back. Some of those troops that have been encircling Ukraine, but we've yet to actually see that pullback happen.

And I can tell you from first-hand experience as much as I hope that that is the case, and that those troops begin to pull back.

It is not above or beyond Vladimir Putin or Sergey Lavrov to just lie in the things that they say, so we'll have to monitor what happens.

Meanwhile, in Ukraine, President Zelensky declared a day of unity on February 16th, the day that this podcast comes out, and the day that some experts have identified as a potential start date of a Russian invasion.

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