I'm Dan Kurtz-Valen, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview.
In many ways, I don't think that Russia's goals have changed very much since the outset of this war.
The war is not sustainable for Russia.
If you look at material constraints, if you look at economic factors.
But currently, it is more sustainable for them than is for Ukraine.
After three years of war, the mood among many of Ukraine's allies has turned grim.
Russian forces are making steady gains, Kiev is running low on ammunition,
and the return of Donald Trump to the White House has only added to anxieties about the conflict,
casting doubt over not only the future of American military aid,
but also the prospect of a negotiated settlement that is satisfactory to Ukraine.
In an essay for Foreign Affairs titled Putin's Point of No Return,
Andrea Kendall Taylor and Michael Kaufman argued that the risks are even greater,
that Putin's Russia will pose a threat to Western interests even
if the current fighting in Ukraine ends.
Kendall Taylor is a former intelligence official and scholar of authoritarian regimes and Russian politics.
Kaufman is one of the most astute analysts of the war in Ukraine.
I spoke with them about the battlefield dynamics and the political dimensions of the conflict,
and about Vladimir Putin's enduring ambition to reshape the global order.
It follows a couple of other fantastic essays that two of you have co-authored over the past few years.
I would point back especially to a very prescient one from 2021 about what you called Russia's persistent power and the then common mistake of writing off Russia as a disruptive force in geopolitics.