I'm John Batch with Professor Serhi Ploki, Ukrainian professor of history at Harvard University.

His new book is The Russo-Ukrainian War, The Return of History.

It is the spring of 2021, the summer of 2021, Russia continues to run troops up to the Ukrainian border and then pull back, but leaves its equipment in place.

There's talk back and forth between now President Biden and Vladimir Putin.

They meet in Geneva.

There's talks by the director of the Central Intelligence Agency in Moscow, warning Putin not to do this, and Putin talking about his demands.

There's taunting going on in Ukraine all that spring, summer, and fall of 2021.

But Mr. Biden makes it clear again and again,

the professor reporting, that no U.S. troops are going to Ukraine,

no weapons are going to Ukraine.

Professor, this is a colossal misjudgment of Putin.

Was it purposeful?

Did it serve NATO's purpose to pretend that Putin wasn't a deceiver and a predator?

The U.S. intelligence did a fantastic job, really reporting to Washington on the mood in the Kremlin, on the plans for the war, even predicting

if not the day and the hour, then at least the week when the war would start.

And Mr. Biden's administration in the White House made an unprecedented move of releasing almost in real time

the intelligence information on those things that they were getting.

So the hope was that they would shame Putin into not doing that, into not attacking, almost to trick him into saying that,

okay, you told that I would attack and I would prove you wrong. My understanding that was at least

part of the thinking behind the idea of release this information in real time. But what was not happening was not, there was very little acting on the basis of that information

in terms of helping Ukraine to withstand the possible and very certain in the eyes of the American intelligence

attack that indeed came in February of 2022. So the plans were or the expectations were that

...