I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Monday, February 21st.

Well, check on these developments around Ukraine to start off today. The Thursday summit with

Vladimir Putin that President Biden has agreed to

in principle, they say, as long as Russia hasn't invaded Ukraine by then. There's speculation about

why either side would agree to this right now. Is Putin just playing the West, as I heard

someone suggest on TV this morning, while he provokes Ukraine into a pretext for an invasion,

or is he more afraid than he admits of Western banking sanctions that would cut off Russian oligarch's money and turn them against Putin?

There's the chilling story, first reported by Foreign Policy Magazine, that says Putin has a list of specific Ukrainians

to kill, kidnap, torture, or put in detention camps after an invasion. The victims would

reportedly include opponents of Russian domination, plus members of ethnic minorities and

LGBTQ Ukrainians. The U.S. has reportedly warned the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights about that.

And on the larger question of why this is happening at all, the analysis runs from its defensive against NATO.

How would we like it if a Russian military alliance wanted to include countries on our border

to Ann Applebaum's provocative new article in the Atlantic, have you seen this,

that says the reason Putin is doing this is that he wants democracy to fail and not just in his own country.

Let's talk about this with someone with deep experiences covering both the

Washington and Moscow sides of it all, Susan Glasser, who writes about Washington for the New Yorker.

She spent four years of Putin being an apologist. I should say, she spent the four years of

Putin having an apologist in the White House writing the letter from

Trump's Washington column for the New Yorker, and she spent four years covering Moscow for the

Washington Post. Susan Glasser has also been editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy Magazine,

so that's obviously relevant, and as co-author of the books, The Man Who Ran Washington,

...