Katrina vanden Heuvel

"I think what we’ve seen, Amy, over these last years is that the corporate media has a one-sided debate. You don’t hear from informed, analytical scholars or writers who are not there to justify but to provide history and context about what we’re witnessing today in the proxy war, but the war between Ukraine and Russia. And there’s a marginalization of those voices and a preference for voices which are about how to escalate the war, how to cover the military, not cover the history. And I think the venerable journalist Walter Lippmann once said, “When all think alike, no one thinks very much.” And that seems to be the framework in what we’re witnessing. And I think it’s very important that there’s not an intellectual no-fly zone, even while understanding how barbaric, how illegal the Russian war against Ukraine is."

"So, Mikhail Sergeyevich was a deep democrat. He was a social democrat. It’s interesting, out of the Communist Party, one party, he emerged social democrat. He introduced the fairest and freest presidential and parliamentary elections to Russia.... he finally saw in Ukraine — and, by the way, Nina Khrushcheva knows this very well. Raisa was half-Ukrainian, I think, and Gorbachev has family, Ukrainian. He despaired of the war in Ukraine. And I think, in that, he saw that Putin was — you know, he’s the Russian, Soviet — he’s the Russian statist. He’s anti-communist. He is the Russian myth, the Russian world. And Gorbachev was, you know, a social democrat of a more European kind... One thing that Gorbachev always said — and I’ll end here — at the end of the Cold War — and this is something that was shared by George H.W. Bush at the beginning — there was no winner. There was no winner. But the triumphalism of America, I think, in the end, opened Gorbachev’s eyes to the dangers of making agreements with the West, which would be broken, as was the promise not to move NATO eastward, a broken promise which was a stab in the back against Gorbachev’s policies and success."