I'm Dan Kurtz-Valen and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview.
There was this impression,
certainly the Russians believed that they would roll over and invade Ukraine and it would play out the same way as Crimea in 2014 where there really wasn't any resistance.
They assumed it would go that way and it didn't catastrophically wrong for the Russians.
And I think a lot of anchoring about the Russian military has been tied to that time,
that initial catastrophic blunder, but a lot has changed in the past four years for the Russians.
And I think we have to face what's happening here.
Ever since Russia started its war in Ukraine,
our assessments of its military power have vacillated wildly.
First, Russian forces were supposed to overrun Ukraine and crush any resistance in a matter of days.
Then they were thought to be so weak that a Ukrainian counteroffensive or new capability might cause them to collapse altogether.
Now, with the war in its fourth year and Donald Trump's return to office,
bringing uncertainty about Western support,
it has started to seem once again that time might be on Moscow's side.
Dara Masiko argues that none of these images reflects reality.
Since the invasion began, Masiko, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
has been writing in our pages analyzing the state of Russia's military,
its failure and its surprising resiliency.
But what has struck Masiko more recently and what she thinks many observers are missing is the extent to which Russia has managed to learn and adapt in Ukraine and beyond.
She warns in a new piece for foreign affairs that the Russian military will emerge from its invasion with extensive experience and a distinct vision of the future of combat,