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This is the Politics and More podcast. I'm David Remnick.

It's impossible to understand the destruction and slaughter that Vladimir Putin is

unleashing in Ukraine without understanding his most basic conviction, that the breakup of the Soviet

empire was a catastrophe that Russia has yet to recover from. No one I know understands this history

more intimately than Stephen Kotkin.

Kotkin is a professor of history and international affairs at Princeton University, and he's a

research scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. He's written two volumes so far on the

life of Stalin, with one more to come, as well as books on the Soviet Union in its

last years. We've been hearing from voices, both from the past and the present, telling us that

the reason for what has happened is, as George Cannon said, the great blunder of eastward expansion of NATO.

A modern realist historian like John Mearsheimer tells us that a great deal of the blame for

what we're witnessing now must go to the United States.

So I thought we'd begin by your analysis of that argument.

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