On today'southward BradCast: Nosotros'll get out the drumbeat of war machine experts and 24-hour, round-the-clock war porn to the cable news nets, and focus instead today on a path to peace, with a longtime expert on the complicated relationship between Ukraine and Russian federation. [Audio link to full prove is posted at stop of this summary.]

Kickoff Upwardly, however, back here in the U.Due south., more than astoundingly proficient new jobs numbers were reported by the Labor Section. Some 678,000 new jobs were created last month, and revisions to monthly numbers for Dec and January add some other 100,000 to the already record numbers. Also, the unemployment rate vicious even farther to a charge per unit of 3.8%, not seen since before the pandemic. Much of that, according to experts, is thanks to Biden and the Democrats American Rescue Program, passed without any Republican support early on last year.

But even while Biden'south economy continues to blast with a tape 6.6 meg new jobs created over the past yr --- the most for any single twelvemonth since record-keeping on this began in the 1930s --- and the highest growth in GDP since the 1980s, Americans announced completely clueless about these facts. Former WaPo columnist, Dan Froomkin, now author of the Press Watch newsletter, explains today why he blames the media for their dismal failures in properly educating the electorate on the basic, cold, hard facts. "When the public thinks upward is downwards," he argues, "it'southward fourth dimension to rethink coverage."

Next, regrettably if necessarily, it'southward back to Russia's horrific, unprovoked state of war on Ukraine, after a harrowing dark during which the largest nuclear ability constitute in Europe came under assail by Putin'due south forces, setting part of it afire for a fourth dimension and rattling a lot of nerves in the bargain, and not only in Ukraine.

We're joined today from Great United kingdom past ANATOL LIEVEN, a one-time war correspondent in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Chechnya and other quondam Soviet nations. Lieven has served as a professor in Qatar and at the War Studies Dept. at King's College London and has written a number of books about Ukraine and Russia and other Eastern European conflicts following the autumn of the USSR. He is now a Senior Inquiry Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft where, on Thursday, he penned a quite welcome article on "How to get to a identify of peace for Ukraine".

Lieven shares his deep expertise not but on that roadmap, and the hard, but necessary choices it'll crave from Ukraine, Russia, the U.S., the Eu and NATO, only also much more on how we got to this horrific place; what Putin really wants both on a macro historic level and out of this current conflict; what could happen if peace is not achieved; how this war is beingness understood by both boilerplate Russians, among heavy-handed media restrictions, and those close to Putin; and whether Putin should exist taken seriously regarding his recent, repeated, barely veiled threats of unleashing his nuclear arsenal.

We embrace quite a bit of ground in this chat, all of which is well worth tuning in for. But, just to cover a few of the central points from Lieven today...

On whether Putin is really hoping to brush back NATO's eastward expansion following the end of the Cold State of war or whether his assault on Ukraine is an attempt to prevent the threat posed by a prosperous, Western-leaning, market place-based democracy in a neighboring, sometime Soviet county, Lieven believes it'due south the onetime. He explains that while Putin has been previously willing to accept some NATO expansion, he draws the line at border countries similar Georgia and Ukraine, as would the U.S. if, for example, United mexican states entered a military alliance with Mainland china.

"I recall the reason so many people in America, in the West, in NATO" are now challenge this is nearly preventing a blossoming democracy on Russia'south western edge "is, basically, to cover their ain tracks. They were warned, repeatedly, that this was going to lead to war. They didn't want to listen. And now, they're saying that it wasn't most NATO expansion considering they don't want to acknowledge they were warned that this would lead to crisis," Lieven argues. "That doesn't, of course, alibi Putin'southward invasion. We don't know what's going on in Putin's head, but we exercise know what the Russians have said repeatedly for almost thirty years."

On Putin's claim that the invasion was meant to end an ongoing "genocide" and to "demilitarize and denazify Ukraine," Lieven scoffs, describing some of the realities about the limited reach of the ultra-nationalist Azov Movement in Ukraine. "This is absolutely grotesque Russian propaganda, colossally exaggerated," he says, adding that the allegation about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is Jewish and lost family members to the Nazis during WWII "is unspeakably mendacious and grotesque. This is not Nazi-ism and this is not genocide. That is a prevarication on a truly monstrous calibration by Putin."

Every bit to his proposed plan for peace, and the difficult choices that will come up with it for many in the West, as he detailed yesterday at the Quincy Institute, it largely comes downwards to an agreement where Ukraine declares neutrality (non dissimilar Austria did in the 1950s), which means they won't join NATO, simply they as well won't join an alliance with the eastern military bloc either; ceding Crimea and the eastern Donbass regions held by Russian federation-backed separatists before the war to the Russians (though internationally-observed referendums should be held past the citizens of each region and territory gained during the current crisis would be returned to Ukraine), and all of the Western sanctions on Russia, both earlier and during the war would exist lifted. There is, of class, a flake more to it, but that seems to be the general contours.

I enquire if Putin would accept such an agreement and whether it would be seen as rewarding him for his aggression. "If what you really care virtually is ending the war and saving the lives of Ukrainians, and eliminating the threat of nuclear annihilation, people need to say only what is incorrect with an agreement along these lines," Lieven answers. "If this were offered and the Russians then refused it, and introduced new demands, like replacing the Ukrainian government, then we would know that Putin's ambitions went much further. And that, of course, would be totally illegitimate and a peace agreement would be incommunicable. But we don't know that until that has been offered."

"In international affairs, alas, y'all always have to mix some combination of respect for international law with respect for realities on the ground if y'all're not prepared to fight," he tells me. Or, as he quotes Robert A. Lovett, U.Southward. Defense Secretarial assistant from 1951 to 1953, at the start of his commodity laying out this roadmap: "Forget the cheese --- let's leave of the trap."

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