I stand by the assessment that Putin is a rational actor, but I think he started this war based on extraordinarily bad information. It's clear he had a tiny circle of decision makers around him that he didn't have good intelligence or he ignored good intelligence. But again, none of that speaks to me of irrationality. It speaks to me as bad information. And we have seen a bloodbath.
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.