Anne Applebaum

Petersburg and they were kind of billowing black smoke over the city while people were walking to the conference hall.

So that's pretty, you know, it's pretty stark illustration of what it is that they can do.

They're really beginning to damage the refining capacity and also beginning to cut off

a lot of supply lines into Crimea and into southern Ukraine with these longer-range, so-called medium-range drones.

And they're just making it very hard for the Russians to continue fighting the war.

That doesn't mean that Putin doesn't have things he can do.

He can still hit Ukrainian cities with missiles, and Ukrainians have very little missile defense left, or relatively little.

He can still create anger and hardship.

But the Russians are now very...

publicly and clearly not winning.

And here's where we can connect this part of the conversation to the previous part.

Putin has also been seeking to persuade the Russians not to pay attention to the war.

It's inevitably a Russian victory.

We're going to win sooner or later.

We're much bigger than they are.

They're not a real country.

You know, their country's run by Nazis.

They aren't.

It's not a real government.

And we're going to win.