Anne Applebaum

The real interesting part of this story is not so much that Ukraine has gone from defense to offense, is that Ukraine has changed completely the way this war is being fought.

And so what you have to understand about the Ukrainian front line is that it's a kind of 20-mile-wide zone.

It's not like a line that people are fighting against.

It's a 20-mile-wide zone, which is now completely transparent.

And the Ukrainians can see everything in it because of their extraordinary, the literally millions of drones that they've built in the last couple of years.

They have reconnaissance drones.

They have short-range drones, long-range drones.

They can see the whole front line.

And every time any Russian truck or car or person comes into the zone, they see that person and they can hit them.

And these huge numbers of people dying.

Yeah.

a thousand a day, 30,000 a month, or being dying or being wounded, are coming from the fact that despite the existence of this zone, the Russians have, until now, continued sending people in it.

And, you know, even at the beginning of this year and late last year, by doing that, they were able to move it forward a little bit.

They were, you know, so many resources were being thrown into it that they were still moving.

That has now stopped completely.

They cannot move forward.

You know, what binds this group of autocracies to work together, and right now the most important ones are Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, you know, plus a handful of others, is really not religion and obviously it's not any ideology.

you know, ideology doesn't matter.

I mean, the Chinese are communists and the Russians are nationalists and the Iranians have a theocracy.

You know, what binds all of them is rather their dislike of and fear of the language of the liberal world.