This week marks exactly one year since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his troops to invade Ukraine. There is now little doubt that Putin failed in his initial goals: Kyiv is still standing, Ukrainians are determined to keep fighting, and the West has so far stayed resolute in its support of Ukraine. If Putin had hoped to weaken NATO, the very opposite has happened, with Finland and Sweden on the cusp of joining the transatlantic military alliance.
But beyond the goals of one leader in Moscow, it is also clear that Ukraine has suffered horrors of a historic nature. By one estimate from Harvard University, more than 130,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or severely wounded, in addition to the deaths of more than 7,000 Ukrainian civilians. Ukraine’s economy and infrastructure have been dealt blows that will take decades to recover from.
What will another year of war look like? What can we glean from the current state of play on the battlefield? FP’s Ravi Agrawal spoke with two of the very best Russia experts: Angela Stent, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest, and Michael Kofman, the research program director of the Russia studies program at the Center for Naval Analyses. Watch the conversation or read the condensed transcript.
