Samuel Altschuler: Russian military underperformance was the big surprise, but what can we attribute it to? And also at this point, would you say that regime change in Kyiv is basically not going to happen very unlikely? He says some of the factors I'd point to there are obviously others as well. The Ukrainians benefit from all the intelligence capabilities of NATO member states, particularly the U.S., he adds.
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.