Welcome to Pushback. I'm Erin Mate.

Joining me is Richard Sackwa. He is professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent.

His books include Frontline Ukraine, Crisis in the Borderlands, and his latest, Just Out,, deception, Russia Gate, and the New Cold War.

Richard Sokwa, thank you for joining me.

My pleasure.

I want to start with Ukraine and Russia.

As we are speaking, there have just been talks between Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and the U.S. Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken.

They ended pretty quickly.

Now there is talk of a summit between Biden and Putin virtually.

If you could set the conflict right now in Ukraine in context, how did we get to this current moment?

Yeah, this is the second time this year that we've seen a war threat emerging with

Russian troop movements, Ukrainian troop movements, and so on.

The immediate issue clearly is concern on both sides that there's going to be a forcible

attempt to resolve the Donbass question, that is the secessionist republics in that part of Ukraine.

But the larger context is like a Russian doll, a Matroska doll, in which that conflict is nested in the larger one, which in the immediate context is the model of Ukrainian state building since 1991, where a certain

Russophone population was objecting to a particular vision of Ukrainian statehood. A lot of authors

who have pointed this out over the years, and it came to a crunch in 2014.

And so then we had the counter movement, Crimea and Donbass.

But even bigger than that is the failure since 1991 to establish what the Russians would certainly call an inclusive and equitable security order.

And that, of course, is what was being discussed

at the OSCE security conference just these last few days where Blinken and Sego-Lavreau

of the Russian Foreign Minister met. So let me put you the conventional narrative that we get

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