Few nations elicit such fatalism among American policymakers and analysts as Vladimir Putin’s Russia. For some, the country is an irredeemable pariah… - Victoria Nuland

It has been an enormous interagency effort, but it’s also taught a whole new generation of American diplomats what it takes to rally global support in defense of democracy, what it feels like to be part of an endeavor that is absolutely existential for the world that they are going to live in going forward.

Because I had seen our best efforts to forestall a violent choice by Putin fail in ’14, I was more prepared than many... Everybody at the beginning was relatively skeptical — with the exception of the Canadians and the U.K., ...that he would actually take this step. The fact that we found the [Russian war] plans when we did — and they were as robust as they were... gave us the time that we needed to prepare. A lot of us were veterans of 2014, ’15 and ’16, and felt that if we had done more faster then to help Ukraine, we might have had a better result... The day of was this horrible, awful realization that he had not bluffed... We were preparing for many scenarios in which the Ukrainians essentially had to get Kyiv back...We didn’t know which scenario we were going to be looking at... There were many things we were expecting that actually didn’t happen... None of us expected the Ukrainians to be able to withstand as strongly as they did in those first four or five days... All of a sudden, we realized that Ukraine — and particularly the government, the leadership, the capital — might be able to resist... we began to become more optimistic that if we helped Ukraine as much as we possibly could, that the country might survive.

Ukraine has biological research facilities, which in fact, we are now quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of, so we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach.