we of course feared he would push further into the east, that he would try to take a city like mauriopl in order to create a lands bridge to crimea, but this kind of all out assault on the entire country honestly wasn t something we believed at that time would happen. but in terms of what changed, i do believe we re probably looking at three things. one of them is what happened in belarus, the sustained protests, how close belarus came to actually getting rid of l lukashenko, a dictator who s the only one in power longer than putin in europe. and clearly putin responded very aggressively to that. the second is putin s complete mismanagement of covid. at one point we had officials from russia 1,000 people died a day, and some estimated over the course of a year russia lost a
last sunday s ryan air flight 4978 started out as just another trip from athens, greece, to lithuania and but it was a pawn in an international incident after a security alert caused it to land in belarus. once on the ground it was boarded by those who arrested roman protosevich and the thorn in the side of belarus president l lukashenko and it was widely and strongly condemned by western nations. let me bring in hannah luibok
a feeling that we as a nation for the first time are united in saying what we want and what we want is to be a democracy and to elect our own president. lukashenko manage totd stay in power. he lived through the crisis. partly because he escalated the level of violence that he had been using. and partly because he got support from russia. and so he was offered this hand of friendship from putin and that was clearly what prevented him from leaving the country and what made him decide to stay in power. i don t think the fact that he is still there means that people are any less determined that he should leave or that they don t want him to leave. but the level of violence there is now at an extraordinary high. i m not sure that people outside of the country will believe it or really understand what has happened. people are being arrested off the street, people are tortured in prison and raped in prison. there have been several deaths in prison recently. a few days ago, a very young boy o
information and condition of real ax biguity. it is like battlefield command. and she just sensed that the institution had lost its nerve. you had this amazing moment where you described how george w. bush reads john berry s book about the spanish influenza, and he decides that in fact the u.s. has exactly as you say a very bad national public health administration and he tries to reorganize it. does it work? it does work. i mean, it is an amazing story, that bush, you have a traumatized president with 9/11 in the rearview mirror and katrina just happened and someone thinks it is good idea to hand him a book about the 1918 pandemic and he comes back and said what is our plan and comes the answer, we don t have a plan. and these this collection of people, particularly two doctors, carter mitscher and