This Is Not A Drill with Gavin Esler cover image

The Ukraine War Ep. 1: The Eve of the War

This Is Not A Drill with Gavin Esler

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The European Union's Provocation of Russia

Stephen Pfeiffer was US Ambassador to Ukraine from 1998 to 2000. He says most Western countries were reluctant to give it what it needed, even though it was now fighting a full ground war in the East against Russia. We would not send weapons to Ukrainians when they were begging for them because we didn't want to provoke Vladimir Putin by showing weakness," he said. Stephen Pfeiffers: The rise of Russian power came as a direct result of chaos and humiliation of Russia in the 1990s. This doesn't mean that Putin's rise was inevitable, but it is essential to his argument that the Soviet Union need not have ended as it did.

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