one year in, why have so many predictions about the war in ukraine been so wrong? when russia showed its cards early on that it wanted to not just stay in crimea or in eastern ukraine, they wanted to go straight to the capital. straight to kyiv. most people in the west thought if that s what russia wanted to do, that s what russia would do. i think the expectation was that russia would be toppling the the national government in kyiv, if not taking over all of ukraine in fairly short order. that was not the universal expectation. i would say that was the broad expectation in the west. russia in fact never got anywhere near doing that. at a more granular level, i think most of the west expected russia would at least control the skies over ukraine. russia would effectively control
and not the top down. a lot of young people run it. you see many ministers and deputy ministers in their 30s and 40s. they led the country until eight or nine years ago. and we misread how the war would go. so i think it is worth continually asking ourselves whether we re not misreading what will happen in the next few months, or the next couple years as well. so i think your framing in that sense is absolutely right. and all of those mistakes, or false assumptions, things going wrong, they all lend to us overestimating russia s capabilities and underestimating ukraine s. is it possible after a year that we re in danger. overcorrecting and overestimating what ukraine can withstand, underestimating what russia, particularly the russian
battles. even beyond that, even as president biden announced another half billion dollars in u.s. military aid to ukraine today, the ukrainians are nevertheless pressing further for the u.s. to deliver american f-16 fighter jets as well. and that is something president biden has thus far said no, he will not do. but tls some influential bipartisan support to go ahead and do it. even as the republican party appears to cleave. some of them say yeah, ramp it up and send them the f-16s. others are saying we should be on putin s side. what putin is doing is no problem. we have no issue with putin. why are we helping ukraine? we ll get some expert help talking about the political concerns and the practical concerns. the open questions about how long this war will go. but today, as a first principles matter, today was history. it was the american president s
a dominant room of isolation, when he took those steps in 1940 and 41 before pearl harbor. but he gradually educated the american public a few of the fight in britain was important fight for us. first of, all it would prevent us from getting into the work possibly if britain could succeed. but even more importantly would repairs if we had to get into the war. so i think the challenge for president biden is going to be he has to persuade the american public, he will have to use that bully pulpit and maybe that is what tomorrow speech is partly about. but he is going to have to keep doing that because we also roosevelt was able to educate the american public so that when these came up, i thought, well it ll never, pass this is laziness congress want allowed to happen. it passed and by a good majority, because through his fireside chats he had already educated people on why this was necessary. so that is going to be the continuing battle, i think, for president biden to use that public or
going on inside the kremlin. we don t have any way of finding out. many things could change very quickly. public support for the war in russia could crumble very quickly. public support in the sense of, you, know a small number of people around putin could change rapidly. once it becomes clear that the war can t be one. so, you know, there are a lot of strange unexpected factors that i, you know, i would hate to sit here and make bad predictions one year into the war when, as i said a year ago people got almost everything wrong. but as you say, i think it is wise to say, watch out for the unexpected. and i think that actually includes watching out for what we are going to hear tomorrow from president putin and his sort of state of the state speech. those potential previews that you gave there in terms of what people be looking for moving to a wartime economy in potentially closing the borders and other extreme measures like that. kept essentially put things on a very different footin