There's been a very active debate about how outcomes in Ukraine what in the in the war change both likelihood of proliferation to additional states and whether states with nuclear weapons are likely to engage in nuclear black map which is essentially what Russia is doing. I am somebody of the belief that these effects are more limited than they're often portrayed. There's a bunch of countries in Eastern Europe in NATO who have pretty acute threat perceptions before those threat perceptions have almost certainly gone up as a result of the war. As far as nuclear coercion goes I think it is important that Russia's nuclear threats are broadly seen to have been ineffective.
To mark a year since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Galen Druke brings back two experts who first joined the podcast when the war began. Samuel Charap is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation and author of the book “Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia.” James Acton is a physicist and co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Together they describe why the war has not turned out as originally expected, what the risks of escalation are today and how the conflict might come to an end.