This is Sarah Stewart Holland and this is Beth Silverce.

Thank you for joining us for Pantsy Politics.

Hello and thank you for joining us for a very special episode of Pantsy Politics.

Russia invaded Ukraine a year ago and is Sarah and I considered how to mark that time and reflect on

all that transpired before the invasion and what has transpired since.

We knew we wanted to talk with someone with real meaningful expertise in Ukraine and someone

who has been in relationship with Ukraine and we could think of no better person than former

ambassador Marie Ivanovich. Ambassador Ivanovich served as the US ambassador to Ukraine from 2016 to

2019 and that is just one piece of a long dedicated career and public service that she's documented

in her book Lessons From The Edge. We were so honored to spend an hour with Ambassador Ivanovich

and so enriched by the conversation and so without further ado I just want to get right into sharing

that discussion with all of you. Ambassador Ivanovich we are so thrilled and honored to have you here

today. I wonder if we could go back in time a little bit and I know that to fully understand the war

right now you have to go way back in time but could you take us to the orange revolution and just

tell us a little bit about Ukraine as a developing country and the relationship with Russia.

So I will try to keep this brief because as you noted it's super complicated and there's so many

different elements extending over the centuries but in 1991 the Soviet Union as we all recall

dissolved and it left 15 new countries including Russia and Ukraine and its wake and all of these

countries had to figure out where they were going and most of them said you know we want to be a

democracy we want to be a market economy but you know the leadership pretty much I think without

exception was the same as it had been the day before which is not the Soviet Union for each of

these new countries you know they all had been you know in the pull of bureau the first secretaries

...