Luke Grant speaks to Zoya Sheftalovich, a contributing editor at Politico, who has written brilliantly about the latest from Ukraine where she says Putin has massively underestimated the resolve of the Ukranians and in particular their leader.

Watching Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine play out, she says, it seems the Russian president has vastly underestimated and misunderstood Ukrainians and their president.

Putin, a one-time KGB operative who in 2004 said “there is no such thing as a former KGB man,” has made clear that he lives in a world of the past. The world that existed before the end of the Cold War, a world in which the territories of the former Soviet Union, potentially even the countries of the former Warsaw Pact, are run out of Moscow, says Ms Sheftalovich.

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