Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs magazine.

My guest tonight is Katrina Vanden Hovel. She is editorial director and

publisher of the nation and president of the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Corps. She's also

a columnist for the Washington Post, member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and she's written

for years on Russian affairs and has recently been writing editorials

on the origins of the present crisis in Ukraine and possible paths out of it.

Katrina, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you, Nathan.

Well, in the lead-up to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, you wrote a number of columns where you warned, in fact, you had one where you warned

that the United States could even be stumbling towards either a proxy war with Russia

or even a direct war with Russia.

And you were cautioning that American diplomatic decisions or the lack of American

diplomacy was inflaming a very tense situation. But I want to, so I want to lay out some of

that context, but I first want to start by asking you, when Russia ultimately did invade Ukraine.

Did it take you by surprise? Was this the, did you see this

as the logical outcome of a process that had been unfolding in slow motion? Or was it still

something completely unexpected and out of the blue in some ways?

So, Nathan, thank you for mentioning the American Committee for U.S. Russia Accord. Ambassador Jack Matlock is a member of the board.

He was Reagan's ambassador to the USSR, and he presided really over the beginning of the end of the Cold War.

He was shocked. He was shocked. He spent

years, decades, studying Russia, working in Russia, the language, the history. Many people were

shocked. Anato Levin, very important voice, who wrote a major article for the nation a few months ago on Ukraine, perhaps.

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