SURRENDER NOW RATHER THAN LATER: 4/8: The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History. by Serhii Plokhy (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 28 April 2025
⏱️ 10 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
1882 ISTANBUL
https://www.amazon.com/Russo-Ukrainian-War-Return-History/dp/1324051191
Despite repeated warnings from the White House, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked the world. Why did Putin start the war―and why has it unfolded in previously unimaginable ways? Ukrainians have resisted a superior military; the West has united, while Russia grows increasingly isolated.
Serhii Plokhy, a leading historian of Ukraine and the Cold War, offers a definitive account of this conflict, its origins, course, and the already apparent and possible future consequences. Though the current war began eight years before the all-out assault―on February 27, 2014, when Russian armed forces seized the building of the Crimean parliament―the roots of this conflict can be traced back even earlier, to post-Soviet tensions and imperial collapse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Providing a broad historical context and an examination of Ukraine and Russia’s ideas and cultures, as well as domestic and international politics, Plokhy reveals that while this new Cold War was not inevitable, it was predictable.
Ukraine, Plokhy argues, has remained central to Russia’s idea of itself even as Ukrainians have followed a radically different path. In a new international environment defined by the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the disintegration of the post–Cold War international order, and a resurgence of populist nationalism, Ukraine is now more than ever the most volatile fault line between authoritarianism and democratic Europe.
Transcript
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| 0:34.1 | I'm John Batch with Professor Serhi Ploke, |
| 0:37.1 | Ukrainian professor of history at Harvard University. |
| 0:39.3 | His new book is The Russo-Ukrainian War, The Return of History. |
| 0:43.3 | 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. |
| 0:56.8 | There's talk back and forth between now President Biden and Vladimir Putin. |
| 1:01.5 | They meet in Geneva. |
| 1:03.4 | There's talks by the director of the Central Intelligence Agency in Moscow, |
| 1:09.3 | warning Putin not to do this, and Putin talking about his demands. |
| 1:15.1 | There's taunting going on in Ukraine all that spring, summer, and fall of 2021. |
| 1:23.2 | 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. |
| 1:32.2 | Professor, this is a colossal misjudgment of Putin. |
| 1:35.9 | Was it purposeful? Did it serve NATO's purpose to pretend that Putin wasn't a deceiver and a predator? |
| 1:43.7 | The U.S. intelligence did a fantastic job really reporting to Washington on the mood in the Kremlin, |
| 1:56.1 | on the plans for the war, even predicting, if not the day and the hour, then at least the week when the war |
| 2:04.2 | would start. And Mr. Biden's administration in the White House made an unprecedented move of |
| 2:15.8 | releasing almost in real time the intelligence information on those |
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