I'm Dan Kurtz-Valen, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview.
I think you know what, the Wagner episode shows us that,
as usual, all authoritarian systems are brittle and fragile,
that there's a lot of fighting behind the scenes that war always intensifies those stresses,
that something could happen at any point,
and that the authoritarian leader himself is the wild card in the system.
With the fighting in Ukraine well into its second year,
the question of the war's endgame has gotten, if anything, more complicated.
Wagner-Chief Yevgeny Progosian's short-lived mutiny has raised doubts about Vladimir Putin's grip on power,
yet Ukraine's counter-offensive is not going as well as many had hoped,
as Ukrainian forces have yet to make a major breakthrough across heavily defended Russian lines.
To talk through these developments, I was recently joined by Sam Cherup,
Fiona Hill, and Andrei Zagorodnyak for a Foreign Affairs Live event.
We discussed what's going on on the battlefield,
the state of Putin's power, and possible end games to the war.
We are holding this as Ukraine's long anticipated counteroffensive starts to unfold.
It's been more a few weeks in.
It comes in the wake of last week's NATO summit and Vilnius, which on the one hand,
left Ukraine an official stress-rated with a lack of any clarity on membership,
but did, I think, reinforce the NATO commitment to Ukraine over the long haul,