Where this was said
Ukraine Under Fire: Kyiv Attack and the Costs of Russia's War
At 39:07 · chapter starts 38:30
Tim Miller plays live audio from Bulwark reporter Caelan Robertson, who filmed a hotel on fire in central Kyiv as ballistic missiles exploded overhead [1] — Susan Glasser "Putin's strategy for 4 years has been to target the population of Ukraine itself. It's a war in many ways of extermination of the Ukrainian…" 39:07 . It is described as an obvious deliberate attack on civilians — residential buildings in the heart of a city of millions. Susan Glasser contextualizes Putin's strategy as a four-year campaign of extermination against the idea of Ukrainian statehood, contrasting it with Ukraine's more surgical counter-pressure: targeting Russian oil refineries in Moscow, attacking during the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, and cutting off Crimea from fuel and food supplies. The asymmetry is stark — one country targets military and economic infrastructure; the other conducts random violence against individual citizens. The contrast, Glasser argues, is the difference between a democratic military and something like Putin's Russia.
Russia has suffered an estimated 1.4 million casualties in Ukraine — deaths and serious injuries combined. This surpasses the Napoleonic Wars and is Russia's deadliest conflict since WWII. Susan Glasser argues this level of human destruction carries inherent instability, but warns that hardline successors to Putin could be even worse.
