His critics say President Trump is selling out Ukraine just as Franklin Delano Roosevelt supposedly sold out Poland at the 1945 Yalta Conference. Some historians have compared Trump's "appeasement" of Putin to Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler in 1938. Or, as Democrats contend, Donald Trump is betraying the Cold War legacy of Ronald Reagan. What if none of these historical episodes can be applied to today’s crisis, as Ukraine defends itself against a nuclear-armed Russia? In this episode, historian Sergey Radchenko of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies compares and contrasts the past and present.

Recommended reading:

To Run the World: The Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power by Sergey Radchenko

The Talks That Could Have Ended the War in Ukraine by Samuel Charap and Sergey Radchenko (article in Foreign Affairs)