Hello again, I'm Orrin Al-Ne, and this is To the Point.

Who is Vladimir Putin? Why the barbaric warfare against a peaceful neighboring country? How far is he prepared to go?

These are questions that are likely to be with us for the foreseeable future and we'll get some authoritative

responses today. May not get any answers, but at least we'll get some very important responses.

We are privileged to have with us, Angela Stent. She is a professor at Georgetown University. She

directs the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies. She's been a policy planner and an intelligence operative in two administrations,

and she is a non-resident fellow at Brookings.

Most important for this moment, her latest book, Putin's World,

Russia Against the West and With the Rest.

Welcome, Professor. Thanks for spending some time with To the Point.

Glad to be on your show again. How does the invasion of Ukraine comport with your idea of Putin's world?

So Putin, for a very long time, has harbored great grievances against the West.

He goes back to the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he has described as the greatest

geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century because so many Russians were left outside of Russia

when it collapsed.

He no doubt goes back to his own experience

as a mid-level KGB operative in Dresden in East Germany in 1989 when the war came down

and the East Germans, the mob, came up to the headquarters of the KGB and wanted to see their

files and he was up all night

burning the files. He then had to go back to Russia, to the Soviet Union, as it still was then.

He had missed the Gorbachev period. He essentially lost his job. So the collapse of communism

and of the Soviet Union is a personal problem for him. And then, of course, he is exaggerated

...