Anastasia Edel - Once Again Western World Entirely Failed to Predict or Understand Russia’s Actions.

GUEST: Anastasia Edel - writer and social historian.
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Until February 2022, the war in Ukraine could be dismissed by some as a
“quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing”,
especially if they had been influenced by aggressive Russian propaganda
and the techniques of hybrid information warfare. But in 2022 the war
became full scale, and the propagandistic subterfuge far less effective.
The West had believed that mutually beneficial commercial activity
created a guarantee against a full-scale war in Europe, that would see
hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded; that a Russian elite with
financial, property and commercial interests in Europe would not risk it
all for an imperial adventure or fall in behind the desperate acts of a
genocidal autocrat. But once again, we entirely failed to predict or
understand Russia’s actions. The trauma and misfortune Russia has
wrought on its peaceful, democratic neighbour is reminiscent of WWII -
but will the leaders that unleashed this barbarism go the same way as
the Nazi elite in 1945?
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SPEAKER:
Anastasia Edel is a Russian-born American writer and social historian.
She is the author of Russia: Putin’s Playground, a concise guide to
Russian history, politics, and culture. Her writing has appeared in the
New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times,
Project Syndicate, Quartz, and World Literature Today. She teaches
history at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at University of
California, Berkeley.
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LINKS:
Twitter: @AEdelWriter
Staring Down the Black Hole of Russia’s Future
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/03/10/russia-ukraine-putin-war-future/
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