Russia. Ukraine. Nukes.
The Bill Press Pod
BP Pods
4.7 • 601 Ratings
🗓️ 1 March 2022
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What the hell is going on with Putin and Ukraine? To provide some expert context, our guests today are two experts on foreign affairs. Steve Pifer was our Ambassador to Ukraine in the last two years of the Clinton Administration and was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State with responsibilities for Russia and Ukraine in the first four years of the George W. Bush Administration. He is currently a Fellow at Stanford University and the Brookings Institution. Joining him is Joe Cirincione, a Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He previously served for over 12 years as the President of the Ploughshares Fund, a foundation focused on nuclear nonproliferation and conflict resolution. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Today we salute the great work of the Ploughshares Fund. More information at Ploughshares.org and the Pro-Democracy Podcast Coalition. More information at Represent.US/Podcast.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, friends and neighbors. Welcome back to the Bill Press Pod. These are scary times, |
| 0:12.2 | as we know. It's a scene we've never thought we'd see in our lifetime for the first time |
| 0:18.1 | in over six decades a ground war in Europe. |
| 0:21.6 | And worse yet, an unprovoked war, a war of choice by Vladimir Putin, |
| 0:26.6 | sending Russian troops into the neighboring Ukraine. |
| 0:30.6 | It's a war that has united, not just the United States and the rest of Europe, |
| 0:35.6 | but almost the entire world against Russia. |
| 0:39.4 | And for us, it does raise a lot of interesting questions, including, what is Putin's |
| 0:45.8 | ultimate goal? Can Ukraine possibly defeat Russia's much larger army? How far is America willing to go |
| 0:53.5 | to defend Ukraine? And is there a risk that Putin |
| 0:57.0 | might use nuclear weapons? One week into the invasion, we look at every aspect of the Ukraine |
| 1:04.4 | war today with two men who know the country and the issues involved very, very well. Joe Sirincioni, former president of the Plowshares |
| 1:13.6 | Fund and Stephen Pfeiffer, who is America's ambassador to Ukraine from 1998 to 2000 under President |
| 1:21.9 | Bill Clinton. Ambassador Piper and Joe Sirencioni, welcome both of you to the Bill Press Pod. Thank you so much for |
| 1:29.7 | joining us today. Our pleasure. Yeah, thank you for having us. Well, I want to start, Ambassador, |
| 1:35.4 | with you a question that I think a lot of Americans are asking themselves these days, why is it so |
| 1:42.3 | important to defend Ukraine? What's at stake here? Yeah, no, that's an |
| 1:47.8 | understandable question. Ukraine is 5,000 miles away, but I'll give you a couple of reasons. One, |
| 1:54.4 | Ukraine, if you have a stable and secure Ukraine, that contributes to a stable and secure Europe. |
| 1:59.8 | That's a U.S. goal going back to |
| 2:01.3 | 1945. Second, Ukraine has done some things that were very much in the U.S. interest, |
| 2:08.1 | including in the 1990s, they gave up the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world, |
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