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What Next | Daily News and Analysis

Putin’s Obsession With Ukraine

What Next | Daily News and Analysis

Slate Podcasts

News, News Commentary, Daily News

4.32.4K Ratings

🗓️ 23 February 2022

⏱️ 31 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

President Vladimir Putin has begun sending Russian soldiers into Ukraine after spending months massing troops on the country’s borders. Why is Putin risking so much to take the Donbas region? And does this latest incursion signal a failure of the west’s foreign policy approach to Russia? 

Guest: Josh Keating, global security reporter at Grid.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Their skiff'd have ever received has to be a bike when I was younger, a pedal bike.

0:07.0

It was a sort of slick little road bike and I remember it was all like it was so it was all wrapped up

0:12.7

but it was so obvious what it was obviously because nothing shaped like a bike and had a little ribbon on it

0:16.4

and I was so gas. For that was a life changer and I'm still sort of big on cycling around my area now

0:21.7

so for that one change really.

0:23.7

Joy in every sip with red cups now back at Starbucks.

0:37.7

Here are a few of the words you might use to describe what's happening in Ukraine right now.

0:43.7

You might call it an incursion of Russian troops. Maybe the beginning of an invasion

0:50.7

but one word some are resisting using so far at least is war.

0:56.7

This is not the all-out nightmare scenario we were fearing.

1:01.7

Josh Keating covers global security for the new site grid.

1:05.7

It was always clear that if a war started that Danyatsk and Luhansk these two breakaway regions would be the kind of tripwire for it,

1:13.7

it's less clear that it's how that conflict is going to end.

1:17.7

Separatists in Danyatsk and Luhansk have been fighting to join Russia for years.

1:22.7

And Josh says when Vladimir Putin recognized the so-called independence of these regions on Monday

1:28.7

and then sent what he calls peacekeeping troops into defend them,

1:32.7

he was pulling out a page from a familiar playbook.

1:36.7

Russia has traditionally used these kind of frozen conflicts or breakaway regions as a way to sort of expand Russia's influence in its region.

1:46.7

It's what they did in Georgia in 2008. There were these two breakaway regions there

1:52.7

and they basically sort of goaded Georgia into attacking them first,

1:57.7

which then gave Russia all the pretext that needed to launch an all-out invasion.

2:02.7

This time I think Russia was trying to kind of do the same operation

...

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