Amana Seaton  

RCL Extra Credit  

April 13, 2022 

 

Russian and Ukraine: How We Got Here   

First off, this podcast was highly informative and had an excellent delivery. The Russian Ukraine topic is a hot topic right now, so it was remarkably interesting hearing the perspectives of other professionals.  Recently my favorite hobby has been listening to Political podcasts that focus on contemporary politics and current events. I enjoy that most political podcasts maintain a connection with an existing media source and its listeners.

Like many others, I too was very curious about the initial cause of the Russian Ukraine conflict. After listening to the podcast, I was able to understand that The Russian leader’s initial aim was to overrun Ukraine and depose its government, ending for good its desire to join the Western defensive alliance, Nato. But he failed to capture the capital Kyiv and has now shifted his ambitions to Ukraine’s east and south. Currently, according to an organization for security and Cooperation in Europe, Russia has committed human rights abuses and broken international humanitarian law during its invasion of Ukraine. This conflict has left Russian alienated from many western countries, which in turn has affected the current state of their economy 

Michael Berkman mentioned an important point which is that it seems like Russia could spend the next 15 years trying to get out of this situation. If this were to happen, one line of direction for Russia might be to flatten much of  Ukraine and then rebuild it again. But that requires massive amounts of revenue that the Russian government had been pulling in from its oil and gas sales and its natural resources.  However, there is also another possibility that the Russian Government could defeat the Ukrainian government which would give Russia ownership of central, eastern, and southern Ukraine. 

A few weeks back I had read an article discussing the Ukrainian President. Donna Bahry mentioned the same point that I had previously read which is that Russia underestimated Ukrainian Forces. Even so, Russian forces have still managed to siege Ukrainian cities and cut off food, water, heat, and medicine. The podcast also discussed how President Putin has been stunned by the scale of the Western response to his invasion. He knew Nato’s members would never put boots on the ground in Ukraine, but he could not have guessed the extent of the sanctions that are already having a dramatic effect on Russia’s economy – and he is furious. 

After listening to the arguments made in this podcast, it is clear that this conflict goes back to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 — what Putin saw as a disaster and what Putin has been driven by since that time and since he took over in the year 2000. President Putin may have been driven by an obsession with restoring Russia to national greatness. And his plan to do that is not to make Russia great, it’s really to drag everybody else down, in this sustained campaign against, any of the former territories of the Soviet Union and the former Warsaw Pact countries, to restore Russian influence.