Hey, everyone. It's Sunday, February 27th. I am usually not in your feed over the weekend,

but with the announcement today that Ukraine has agreed to diplomatic talks with Russia,

and with Vladimir Putin putting his nuclear arsenal on high alert, we wanted to get this

conversation out a bit earlier than usual. We recorded it last week.

Many observers have been caught off guard by Ukraine's ability to fend off Russian forces so far.

But Slate's Fred Kaplan? He's not among them. In this conversation, we talked about how the history of Russian aggression and

democratic pushback have led us to this moment. All right, here's the show.

When I asked Fred Kaplan, who writes Slate's War Stories column, whether he had anticipated the kind of open warfare

were seeing in Ukraine,

he had an admission to make.

I have to confess I was surprised.

Fred actually came on this show back in December

and made a prediction that an invasion wasn't really

what Putin wanted in Ukraine. He was wrong about that. For Fred, it's still sort of stunning.

It would be interesting of the archives ever reveal when Putin made up his mind to go for it.

You know, he'd assembled this massive force.

He could have found some way out to gain a few victories and go home.

But now that this invasion has happened, Fred's been thinking about the history here,

the moments that, in retrospect,

seem predictive in some way. He's found a lot of them. What's happening right now? Versions of it have happened in Crimea, in Georgia. And before all of that, in Czechoslovakia, in 1968, back then, Czech leaders were sounding a lot like the leaders in Ukraine do today.

The country was opening up to democratic change.

The head of the Communist Party in Czech Slovakia, Alexander Dupchev declared that he was pursuing

...