"The war has gone surprisingly badly for the Kremlin," Kimmage says. "It didn't get the politics of Ukraine right. It didn't expect the Ukrainians to fight, didn't expect the Ukrainians to support their government, didn't expect [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy to become the hero that he's become."
Kimmage joined the State Department's Policy Planning Staff examining Ukraine-Russia issues in 2014 — shortly after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine. He left the State Department on the day Donald Trump took the oath of office in 2017 and now chairs the History Department at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.
Kimmage says Putin's actions in Ukraine are a reflection of extreme hubris: "[Putin] just believes that he can do a lot of things. He's isolated. He's not getting a lot of great information, I assume. And he thinks that he can accomplish more than he can."
Kimmage and co-author Liana Fix warn in Foreign Affairs that a Russian victory in Ukraine would mean that "a new era for the United States and for Europe will begin." He says the political war is likely to go on indefinitely.
"I see no way in which [Russia] can succeed politically," he says. "I think they have created, already, an immense nightmare, obviously for the Ukrainian people, but an immense nightmare for themselves. ... [Putin's] destroying the very thing that he wished either to take or to create in Ukraine."
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