CNN's John Defterios asks if we had been talking a year ago today, would you have predicted the war that Putin was about to launch on Ukraine? He says he thought it was maybe 30 to 40%, no more than that, that the odds were against. Right up to the point in which Putin's forces crossed the border, defterios said, Putin was winning. But what this really illustrated was the degree to which rational actors can make deeply stupid decisions based on their own perceptions and information they are being given.
Mark Galeotti is one of the world’s leading experts on modern Russia. His new book, Putin’s Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine, details how Vladimir Putin and his conflicts have shaped Russia in the 21st century. In conversation with the New Statesman’s Katie Stallard, Galeotti shows how Putin has used warfare through incursions into Georgia, Crimea and Ukraine, to influence both Russia’s domestic politics and the geopolitics that play out on the world stage.
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