Hi everyone and welcome. Today I'm joined by George Beebe, the former director of the CIA's

Russia analysis and current lead director of Grant Strategy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible

Statecraft. Thank you for taking time. I've been looking forward to speaking with you again.

My pleasure. A lot to talk about these days. Yeah, we're just saying we have a plan to talk

today about narratives because you wrote a very fascinating article about how the reality is winning

the Ukraine war, as the headline of your article said,

but it's very difficult not to address the main issues at hand, which is this debacle in the

Oval Office, sorry, in the Oval Office, and followed by a very short-lived ceasefire proposal by Macron, almost a ceasefire at least.

I was wondering if you could give your overview of what happened in the Oval Office, because again, we're here in Europe,

and all we were shown on the news was Zelensky entering the room before being bashed by Trump and Vance.

So how did you read the situation by the evil Americans?

Well, I think this is in part very much related to that narrative war that we can get into.

But I think at its heart, the argument that we saw in the Oval Office

has its roots in fundamentally different understandings of why this war began and how do you

get out of the war. The Zelensky approach to this, his understanding of how this war began, which is, I think, widely shared in Europe and in the United States, at least in mainstream media discussions, is that this is a war of imperialist aggression, plain and simple, that Vladimir Putin decided, you know, he wanted Ukraine no longer to be a country, but to be a part of Russia, that it really was an artificial country, that it, you know, it was occupying territory that is rightfully part of Russia's, and he simply said, you know, enough, we're taking this over.

Much the way Nazi Germany behaved in 1939, the start of World War II.

And Zelensky's prescription for how you deal with that problem flows from that same model.

You don't negotiate with an imperialist aggressor.

That actually whets the appetite for more aggression.

It constitutes appeasement.

And we've all learned the lessons of Munich in 1938. You know, you don't appease.

That only makes the problem worse. You have to stand up to this aggression. And the belief is that

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