![]() ![]() ![]() He became the owner of atrocities and a wrecked country, Syria. But what does that mean? It means that Putin became the part owner of a civil war. I kept telling people, “Seriously?” He intervened in Syria, and he made President Obama look like a fool when President Obama said that there would be a red line about chemical weapons. People kept saying he was a tactical genius, that he was playing a weak hand well. Putin’s strategy could be described as “I can’t have it? Nobody can have it!” Sadly, that’s where the tragedy is right now. And yet they need their house, and the Russians are wrecking it. They’ve pushed the Russians out of some of the land that the Russians conquered since February 24, 2022. Ukraine has beaten back the Russian attempt to conquer their country. Unfortunately, that’s the situation we’re in. And, so, if I wreck your house, are you winning or am I winning? Me, I’ve got another house, and my other house has a thousand rooms. It’s your house and you don’t have another. But I’m still there and I’m still wrecking. You push out a little corner, you push out another corner, maybe. You’re trying to evict me from the two rooms. And, from those two rooms, I’m wrecking your other eight rooms and you’re trying to beat me back. And let’s say that I barge in and take two of those rooms away, and I wreck those rooms. Let’s say that you own a house and it has ten rooms. A lot has happened since then, but is that still the case? Last year, you told me, at a very early stage of the war, that Ukraine was winning on Twitter but that Russia was winning on the battlefield. We spoke again last week, and our discussion, which appears in different form on The New Yorker Radio Hour, has been edited for length and clarity. He is well connected in Washington, Moscow, Kyiv, and beyond his analysis of the war draws on his conversations with sources as well as on his own base of knowledge. Kotkin is a top-flight scholar, but his ties to the subject are not limited to the archives and the library. Once the Russian military failed to achieve its early hope of taking the capital, Kyiv, and supplanting the Ukrainian leadership, it has prosecuted a vicious war of attrition, in which more and more human beings on both sides are sacrificed to Putin’s pitiless ambitions. There have been hundreds of thousands of casualties––it is folly to attempt a more accurate reckoning––and much of Ukraine’s infrastructure is in ruins. Now we know: the Russian invasion has been a catastrophe in every sense. In our conversation last year, we delved into the nature of the Putin regime, his decision to invade, and what the war could look like as time unfurled. After spending more than thirty years at Princeton, he is now at Stanford. Kotkin has published two volumes of a projected three-part biography of Stalin, and his works on the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its aftermath are without peer in their precision and depth. I’ve been doing that, for good reason, since the final years of the Soviet empire. Last year, not long after Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, I turned to the historian Stephen Kotkin for illumination and analysis. ![]()
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