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Bette Davis and Jack Warner with Davis’s Oscar in 1936.

What will win Best Picture this year?

Nobody ever knows for sure. But the best guess I have is: Netflix.

Twenty years ago, few imagined that the company that mailed people DVDs of movies would someday be gunning for the biggest prize in American cinema. But Netflix is an empire, one of the “big six” movie studios (along with Disney, Paramount, Warner Bros., Sony, and Universal) in Hollywood, and they’ve been trying to get a Best Picture Oscar for years now, with films like Roma, The Irishman, and Marriage Story.

None has yet nabbed the top prize, but the streamer has two dogs in this year’s fight: Adam McKay’s end-of-the-world comedy Don’t Look Up and Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog. One is a relatively conventional Hollywood blockbuster-style movie populated with a bevy of A-listers — Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Timothee Chalamet, Cate Blanchett, Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, that’s just a handful — and the other is the kind of arty drama-thriller that Campion is known for, starring its own list of stunners, all four of whom (Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, and Kodi Smit-McPhee) are nominated for their own prizes.

A director behind a camera with an assistant nearby against a mountainous landscape. Kirsty Griffin/Netflix

Jane Campion on the set of The Power of the Dog.

The Power of the Dog feels like a favorite for the prize; it raked in 10 nominations, the most of any film this year, and has the right balance of artfulness, accessibility, and big names attached to it. (Campion is, among other things, the first female director to ever be nominated twice for an Oscar; the first time, in 1994, was for The Piano.) In that way (and perhaps only that way), it’s not unlike recent winners such as Spotlight or The Shape of Water.

But Don’t Look Up seems just as likely to win — a hugely popular film about a current topic (in this case, climate change) with loads of big names. Most importantly, Don’t Look Up has been presented by its filmmakers as the most “timely” film, a movie that aims to make a difference in the world, and it’s a comedy, which moves it into roughly the same category as, say, 2019 winner Green Book.

Either way, Netflix wins.

But could something else win? Absolutely. These two seem to make the most sense, but each of the nominees has something going for it. One truth about the last six or seven years of the awards, roughly since Spotlight’s 2016 win, is that the Oscars have grown more and more unpredictable. There’s little similarity between, say, Moonlight and Green Book; in 2020, the Academy anointed Korean-language super-dark comedy-drama Parasite as the winner, a thing few people expected to happen.

The reasons have to do with the shifting makeup of the Academy, as we chronicled last year — and that makes the contest just a bit more chaotic and thus more exciting.

How can a movie be nominated for both Best International Film and Best Picture?

This is a question about the Japanese film Drive My Car — and it’s worth noting that Parasite won in both these categories in 2020 — but I’m going to expand it to explain a little about “niche” films and the Oscars.

A few Oscars categories silo films into specific slots — notably Best Animated Feature, Best International Feature, and Best Documentary Feature, added in 2002, 1956, and 1941, respectively. The aim here is a noble one: to make sure that movies in categories that aren’t typically nominated for the big one (a.k.a. Best Picture) still get recognized.

But no good deed goes unpunished, and the unfortunate result of this siloing is that international features, animated movies, and documentaries rarely actually show up in the Best Picture category. Technically, any film that’s eligible for an Oscar is eligible to be nominated. (There are also categories for short films, which arguably might be worth bringing into this discussion.)

But in nearly all cases, the nominees are English-language live-action fiction films. In more than nine decades, 12 non-English films have been nominated for Best Picture, including Drive My Car; only one, Parasite, has won thus far. Only three animated films have been nominated for Best Picture (Beauty and the Beast, before the Animated category was created, plus Up and Toy Story 3). No documentary has ever been nominated for Best Picture.

A young man looks around in a dark club. Neon
A scene from Flee, nominated for Oscars in three categories: Best Animated Feature, Best Documentary Feature, and Best International Feature.

Some of that is due to simple and perhaps even understandable bias: The Oscars are based in Hollywood, the center of American filmmaking, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is largely made up of American film industry professionals: actors, writers, producers, directors, editors, sound and art designers, animators, publicists, studio heads, and so on. The bread and butter of Hollywood — English language fiction movies with actors performing live and in living color — is precisely the kind of film they are inclined to nominate. (Notably, critics and journalists are not allowed to be members of the Academy.)

But one might make the argument (and I certainly would) that the Academy needs to broaden its horizons a bit. The nominations this year for international films that go outside the international category — like Drive My Car (up for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay), Flee (Best Animated Feature and Best Documentary Feature), and The Worst Person in the World (Best Original Screenplay) — indicate a small creep toward change. And yet none of those films’ stars are nominated in acting categories. We’re still waiting for a nonfiction movie to be considered in categories outside the niches (though Flee was nominated in all three). And animation is often relegated to the “children’s entertainment” land.

If winning Oscars at least partly helps determine the directions in which Hollywood’s money flows, then an expanded definition of what can be a “Best Picture” can only lead to more variety and creativity in film.

Why isn’t Spider-Man: No Way Home nominated?

The easiest way to explain this is that not enough people voted for it.

Of course, it’s slightly more complicated because this is the Oscars. The first reason has to do with ranked-choice voting, which means that even if a lot of people did put it on their ballots, it likely wasn’t on enough ballots to make the final cut. Ranked-choice voting is strange and byzantine and if you want to read about it, you can, but you could also go out and live your life and nobody would blame you.

The real reason this question comes up is that some have posited that the film, which got pretty decent reviews from critics and was a massive, record-breaking success even during a pandemic where most movies have faltered, should be a shoo-in for at least a nomination. But mass-market superhero films (and mass-market films generally) have often had a harder shot at the Oscars, presumably because voters don’t consider them “serious” enough. Or, if you want to get a little more facile about it, because Oscar nominees have to be “serious” and arty films for snobs with monocles.

Two actors in suits and two scientists walk down a hallway. Netflix
According to Netflix, Don’t Look Up was its most popular film … ever.

A glance at the nominees quickly puts that notion to rest. Dune is a mega-budget blockbuster based on an enormously popular novel that did brisk box office business (and features a lot of big stars, including Spider-Man’s Zendaya). According to Netflix, Don’t Look Up, populated by a whole bevy of Oscar winners, was hugely popular. West Side Story is a remake of one of the most popular films of all time by one of the most popular directors of all time; CODA is a feel-good family comedy pitched straight at the average moviegoer; Nightmare Alley is a big, scary, and kind of goofy melodrama that’s more at home in a multiplex than an art house, and the feel-good accessibility of a classic sports drama like King Richard (starring one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars, Will Smith) is hardly snooty fare.

In the end, the answer to this question is that not enough of the 10,000-ish film industry professionals who decide the Oscars thought it was worthy of a Best Picture slot. And no matter how you feel about that, it’s far from unusual.

What happened to Passing/Lady Gaga/Parallel Mothers/that Bruno song from Encanto/the other thing I really love that didn’t even get nominated?

Here’s the thing: The limited number of slots in any category, combined with the large number of voters, means that things get left out or, in the preferred parlance of the entertainment industry, “snubbed.”

Sometimes that just feels like a fluke. (Remember when the Mister Rogers documentary failed to even get a nomination in its category?) But in most cases there are very real, if not totally satisfactory, reasons that your favorite movie or star or song didn’t make the list. 

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Lady Gaga in House of Gucci.

In any given year, there will be some things that never get nominated, and that can be a shame for the filmmakers, actors, and producers. But that’s the nature of the beast, and if a film is great, often history will reclaim it.

Okay. So did anything cool happen with these Oscar nominations? Any firsts? Anything I can tell my friends about?

Given the changing shape of the Academy and of the film industry more broadly, every year’s nominees come with their own set of records or cool facts. So if you’re looking for some trivia on Oscar night, here are some of the highlights:

Smith wears a tracksuit and the actresses playing his daughters stand nearby. Anne Marie Fox / Warner Bros

Will Smith as Richard Williams in King Richard. If the film wins Best Picture, he’ll share the award with the film’s other producers.

So what happens now? How do you win an Oscar?

Winning an Oscar is a lot like running a political campaign, and I’ve written about the process at length. The playbook is so similar that political campaign experts are sometimes hired to consult during Oscar season. You have to tell a good story (about your film’s “importance,” or the great lengths an actor went to in order to craft their performance); you have to meet and greet the voters; you have to make myriad media and event appearances to stay in people’s minds.

Opposition research is also a big part of the Oscars, due largely to Harvey Weinstein, who managed to eke out a win for Shakespeare in Love over the heavily favored Saving Private Ryan in 1999 by running what’s been called a “bully campaign” — starting negative whisper campaigns against the opposition and pestering members to vote for his film. Winning an Oscar is expensive and time-consuming, but studios and artists often engage in it because of the glory of winning the award and the career boost it provides.

In practical terms, the various Academy branches are now engaged in the process of deciding which films to vote for in their particular categories (everyone votes for Best Picture). Starting March 17, they can cast their ballots, and the nail-biting begins.

What does winning an Oscar really mean?

Let’s start with what it doesn’t mean. You don’t get money. Depending on your category, you may not get fame, either. You don’t get a trip to Disneyland or something. You don’t get the guarantee of everlasting glory and success forevermore.

But you do get the respect of at least some of your peers. You (and all your fellow nominees) get the opportunity to join the Academy, if you aren’t already a member. You’ll be in the history books, and it’s more likely that people will return your calls. You might have an easier time securing funding for your next project or landing a juicy acting role. Your movie might get a box office bump.

And you get a gold statue to put on your mantelpiece.

When are the Oscars?

Glad you asked. The Oscars are on Sunday, March 27, 2022, at 8 pm ET. Wanda Sykes, Amy Schumer, and Regina Hall are the hosts, and the show will air on ABC. Get hype.

In 48 hours of fighting, the Russian military has not subdued Ukraine, though that could change at any moment. As experts have noted, Russia has only committed about a third to half of the tens of thousands of forces amassed at the border so far, and battles are continuing across Ukraine Friday into Saturday morning. Experts warned that the possibility of a severe escalation was possible in the coming days.

Putin’s attempt to redraw the map of Europe may still lead to the most devastating conflict on the continent since World War II. It could cost thousands of civilian lives and create hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the violence in Ukraine.

Emilio Morenatti/AP

A woman sits in the middle of a crowd as she waits for a train to leave Kyiv on February 24.

Emilio Morenatti/AP

A woman holds her baby inside a bus as they leave Kyiv on February 24.

Emilio Morenatti/AP

People rush through a subway to get a train to leave Kyiv on February 24.

Emilio Morenatti/AP

A crowd of people struggles to get on a bus as they try to leave Kyiv on February 24.

The United States imposed the toughest financial sanctions ever on Russia, and other allies joined them in putting harsh penalties on Russia. On Friday, the United States and the European Union announced sanctions on Vladimir Putin himself.

But this is all unlikely to stop Russia from waging its campaign in Ukraine, leaving Ukraine — and the world — in a perilous and unpredictable moment.

Ukraine is under siege

After months of building up troops on Ukraine’s borders and failed diplomatic talks, Russia is now waging a full-out war on Ukraine.

Tensions escalated quickly this week when, on Monday, Putin delivered an hour-long combative speech that essentially denied Ukrainian statehood. He recognized the independence of two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine where Moscow has backed a separatist rebellion since 2014 and sent so-called peacekeeping forces into the region. As experts said, that was likely just the beginning, setting the stage for a much larger conflict.

Days later, that larger conflict materialized. Putin on Thursday announced he was launching an assault “to defend people who for eight years are suffering persecution and genocide by the Kyiv regime,” a reference to a false claim about the government in Ukraine. Putin claimed that the Russian military seeks “demilitarization and denazification” but not occupation. He demanded Ukraine lay down its weapons or be “responsible for bloodshed.”

Soon after Putin’s speech, reports emerged of explosions around cities, including Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine and the capital Kyiv. The Ukrainian foreign minister called it “a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.”

Putin has just launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Peaceful Ukrainian cities are under strikes. This is a war of aggression. Ukraine will defend itself and will win. The world can and must stop Putin. The time to act is now.

— Dmytro Kuleba (@DmytroKuleba) February 24, 2022

By the afternoon in Ukraine, Russian troops and tanks had entered the country on three fronts. According to the Pentagon, Russia launched more than 100 missiles into Ukraine, an opening salvo that defense officials said may be leading up to a full-on effort to take the capital of Kyiv.

Russians have targeted critical infrastructure, like airports, with airstrikes, and have launched ground operations from different directions, including from Belarus, from the north, from the east of Ukraine, and from the south. On Thursday, Russia seized the decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear plant 80 miles north of the Ukrainian capital, the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster. The International Atomic Energy Agency is monitoring developments there “with grave concern.”

Fighting continued across Ukraine into Saturday morning. Kyiv looks to be the target, and there are continued reports of explosions and gunfire in the capital. “They had maximal war aims,” Michael Kofman, research director in the Russia studies program at CNA, said in an interview posted on Twitter. “They had a military operation that’s now in progress, first to try to achieve regime change, encircle the capital, and try to overthrow the Ukrainian government, and then a much larger set of pincer movements to encircle and envelope Ukrainian forces. Try to do this quickly and force surrender of isolated pockets.”

The Russian army, however, has not been able to completely roll over Ukrainian forces, and some analysts have suggested Moscow may have been surprised at the resistance. “It’s not apparent to us that Russians have been able to execute their plans as they deemed that they would,” Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said Friday during a briefing. “But it’s a dynamic, fluid situation.”

Margarita Konaev, associate director of analysis and research fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), said she agreed with the assessment that Russia has been surprised by the early successes of the Ukrainian forces — but added that nobody chooses to start a war thinking they’ll face overwhelming resistance.

Putin himself has called on the Ukrainian army to “take power into their own hands and overthrow” Zelensky, a sign that Putin remains focused on regime change. “According to the available intelligence, the enemy marked me as a target No. 1 and my family as the target No. 2,” said Zelensky, speaking in a T-shirt on Thursday night.

Russia has gone back-and-forth as to whether they are willing to negotiate, but Zelensky indicated on Friday that they are in the process of figuring out where possible negotiations could take place. But, across conflicts, there is usually a severe escalation in fighting before ceasefires, as everyone attempts to maximize their leverage. “I think that they want to inflict maximum damage to pressure the Ukrainian government to seek some sort of ceasefire that is effectively a surrender,” Konaev said.

At least 137 Ukrainians have been killed so far, Zelensky said Friday. He also said that more than 1,000 Russian troops were killed in one day. That would be an unprecedented number, though experts said all these statistics should be treated with extreme caution because of the fog of war and the incentives both Russia and Ukraine have to push a particular narrative.

Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images
Black smoke rises from a military airport in Chuguyev near Kharkiv, Ukraine, on February 24.

Ukrainian officials have also accused Russia of war crimes after reports of a shelling of an orphanage and kindergarten outside of Kyiv. Across Ukraine, thousands of civilians, of all ages, are enlisting to fight. Ukrainian officials called on residents to “make Molotov cocktails” to defend against the invasion. About 18,000 weapons have been distributed across the country, according to Ukrainian officials. Meanwhile, more than 50,000 Ukrainians have fled in the past 48 hours, mostly to neighboring Moldova and Poland, according to the United Nations. Huge crowds have rushed to board trains in Kyiv to cities in the west, such as Lviv, while some of those staying put have sought shelter in subway stations.

The roots of the current crisis grew from the breakup of the Soviet Union

Over the last few months, Putin had amassed close to 190,000 troops near the Ukrainian border, a force that military analysts said was clearly prepared and ready to launch an invasion.

Such an invasion would — and does — contravene security agreements the Soviet Union made upon its breakup in the early ’90s. At the time, Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, had the third-largest atomic arsenal in the world. The US and Russia worked with Ukraine to denuclearize the country, and in a series of diplomatic agreements, Kyiv gave its hundreds of nuclear warheads back to Russia in exchange for security assurances that protected it from a potential Russian attack.

But the very premise of a post-Soviet Europe is also helping to fuel today’s conflict. Putin has been fixated on reclaiming some semblance of empire, lost with the fall of the Soviet Union. Ukraine is central to this vision. Putin has said Ukrainians and Russians “were one people — a single whole,” or at least would be if not for the meddling from outside forces (as in, the West) that has created a “wall” between the two.

Last year, Russia presented the US with a list of demands, some of which were nonstarters for the United States and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Putin demanded that NATO stop its eastward expansion and deny membership to Ukraine, and also made other demands for “security guarantees” around NATO.

The prospect of Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO has antagonized Putin at least since President George W. Bush expressed support for the idea in 2008. “That was a real mistake,” Steven Pifer, who from 1998 to 2000 was ambassador to Ukraine under President Bill Clinton, told Vox in January. “It drove the Russians nuts. It created expectations in Ukraine and Georgia, which then were never met. And so that just made that whole issue of enlargement a complicated one.”

Sergei Grits/AP

Damaged radar and a destroyed vehicle are seen at a Ukrainian military facility outside Mariupol on February 24.
Wolfgang Schwan/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Ukrainian firefighters arrive to rescue civilians after an airstrike hit an apartment complex in Chuhuiv, Ukraine, on February 24.

Ukraine is the fourth-largest recipient of military funding from the US, and the intelligence cooperation between the two countries has deepened in response to threats from Russia. But Ukraine isn’t joining NATO in the near future, and Biden has said as much. Still, Moscow’s demand was largely seen as a nonstarter by the West, as NATO’s open-door policy says sovereign countries can choose their own security alliances.

Though Putin has continued to tout the threat of NATO, his speech on Monday showed that his obsession with Ukraine goes far beyond that. He does not see the government in Ukraine as legitimate.

“Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space,” he said, per the Kremlin’s official translation. “Since time immemorial, the people living in the south-west of what has historically been Russian land have called themselves Russians.”

The two countries do have historical and cultural ties, but as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp explained, Putin’s “basic claim — that there is no historical Ukrainian nation worthy of present-day sovereignty — is demonstrably false.”

As experts noted, it is difficult to square Putin’s speech — plus a 2021 essay he penned and other statements he’s made — with any sort of realistic diplomatic outcome to avert conflict. It was, essentially, a confession that this wasn’t really about NATO, said Dan Baer, the acting director of the Europe Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. “It was about that he doesn’t think Ukraine has a right to exist as a free country,” he said before Putin’s escalation Wednesday night.

Evgeniy Maloletka/AP

A woman looks at her a damaged house in the aftermath of Russian shelling in Mariupol, Ukraine, on February 24.

This is the culmination of eight years of tensions

This isn’t the first time Russia has attacked Ukraine. In 2014, Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula and invaded eastern Ukraine and backed Russian separatists in the eastern Donbas region. That conflict has killed more than 14,000 people to date.

Russia’s assault grew out of mass protests in Ukraine that toppled the country’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, which began over his abandonment of a trade agreement with the European Union. US diplomats visited the demonstrations, in symbolic gestures that further agitated Putin.

President Barack Obama, hesitant to escalate tensions with Russia any further, was slow to mobilize a diplomatic response in Europe and did not immediately provide Ukrainians with offensive weapons.

“A lot of us were really appalled that not more was done for the violation of that [post-Soviet] agreement,” said Ian Kelly, a career diplomat who served as ambassador to Georgia from 2015 to 2018. “It just basically showed that if you have nuclear weapons” — as Russia does — “you’re inoculated against strong measures by the international community.”

Since then, corruption has persisted in the Ukrainian government, and the country ranks in the bottom third of the watchdog group Transparency International’s index.

Ukraine’s far-right presence has grown and become somewhat normalized, and there are government-aligned fascist militias in the country. But Moscow has drawn out those issues to advance false claims about genocide and other attacks on civilians as a way to legitimize the separatist movement in eastern Ukraine and to create a pretext for invasion. In his prerecorded speech shared on the eve of the bombardment of Ukraine, Putin said he sought the “denazification” of Ukraine.

To be clear: The Ukrainian government is not a Nazi regime and has not been co-opted by the far right. Zelensky is Jewish; he speaks proudly of how his Jewish grandfather fought against Hitler’s army.

Anatolii Stepanov/AFP via Getty Images
Ukrainian servicemen get ready to repel an attack in Ukraine’s Luhansk region on February 24.

Yet, days earlier, Putin used these sorts of claims as part of his explanation for recognizing as independent the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic and the Donetsk People’s Republic, the two territories in eastern Ukraine where he has backed separatists since 2014. “Announcing the decisions taken today, I am confident in the support of the citizens of Russia. Of all the patriotic forces of the country,” Putin said before moving troops into the regions for “peacekeeping” purposes.

At the time, most experts Vox spoke to said that looked like the beginning, not the end, of Russia’s incursion into Ukraine.

“In Russia, [it] provides the political-legal basis for the formal introduction of Russian forces, which they’ve already decided to do,” Kofman, of CNA, told Vox earlier this week. “Secondarily, it provides the legal local basis for Russian use force in defense of these independent Republic’s Russians citizens there. It’s basically political theater.”

It set “the stage for the next steps,” he added. Those next steps are now clear.

How the rest of the world is responding

The United States and its allies around the world have condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz called it a “dark day for Europe.”

Michal Cizek/AFP via Getty Images
Demonstrators rally in support of Ukraine at Venceslas square in Prague, Czech Republic, on February 24.

“The events of last night mark a turning point in the history of Europe,” French President Emmanuel Macron said after Russia launched its attack.

Biden announced Thursday afternoon that the United States will impose sanctions on Russian financial institutions, including cutting off Russia’s largest banks from the US financial system, and on Russian elites in President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. America will also implement export controls on certain technologies. Along with penalties from the United Kingdom and Europe, these are the “massive” penalties the West had been warning Putin about. On Friday, the EU and US imposed sanctions on Putin himself.

The United States has said it will not involve troops in any Ukrainian conflict, though the US has shored up its presence on NATO’s eastern flank. On Thursday, the Pentagon said it would send 7,000 additional troops to Germany. Biden had previously said that the US will continue to provide defensive support for Ukraine, and some are calling for the US and its partners to provide more lethal aid to the largely outmatched Ukrainian army.

Russia knows that the US and its partners do not want to commit themselves militarily, and, early Thursday as Putin launched his invasion, he offered an ominous warning as he touted Russia’s nuclear arsenal: “There should be no doubt that any potential aggressor will face defeat and ominous consequences should it directly attack our country.”

Maciej Luczniewski/NurPhoto via Getty Images
American soldiers at the Polish- Ukrainian border near Arlamow, Poland, on February 24.

NATO has vowed to protect its members from any Russian aggression. On Friday, NATO announced that it was activating part of its NATO Response Force — a 40,000-troop unit modernized after the 2014 Crimea invasion — to protect allies on NATO’s eastern flank. “We are now deploying the NATO Response Force for the first time in a collective defense context. We speak about thousands of troops. We speak about air and maritime capabilities,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said.

Yet these are largely defensive measures, which means most of the punishment against Russia will come in the form of sanctions. Thursday’s announcements didn’t include some of the most dramatic options, like cutting Russia off from Swift, the electronic messaging service that allows entities to communicate about global financial transactions, and targeting Russia’s energy sector. But the penalties are still some of the harshest sanctions ever directed at Russia or a major power like it. That will come with potential costs to the global economy, and especially to Europe and the United States. The price of oil spiked to more than $100 per barrel on Thursday before coming back down.

“This is going to impose severe cost on the Russian economy, both immediately and over time,” Biden said while announcing the sanctions. “We have purposefully designed these sanctions to maximize a long-term impact on Russia and to minimize the impact on the United States and our allies.”

The prospects of a settlement with Russia are impossible to contemplate as bombs are falling on Ukraine, but the US and its allies are going to have to do careful diplomacy to isolate and put pressure on Russia in the long term. The US and its allies are also likely going to have to decide how much they want, or can, support Ukraine as it tries to battle Russia.

“The real question, I think, is going to come down to what extent the West can and will try to support and supply a long-term insurgency against Russia,” said Paul D’Anieri, an expert on Eastern European and post-Soviet politics at the University of California Riverside. “And what level of success does Russia have in fighting back against? Unfortunately, it seems like the best strategy for peace right now is when enough Russians die, that the Russians decide it’s not worth it anymore.”

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