DOLLAR & SENSE: THE BROOKINGS TRADE PODCAST   “An update on Ukraine—security, economic, and humanitarian conditions”

One of the authors of the Index, Constanze Stelzenmüller, who directs the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings, joins host David Dollar to discuss the Index and the latest data on Ukraine’s economic, security, and humanitarian conditions. [...] And the “Iraq Index” and the “Afghanistan Index” went over years and built up a really rich trove of data to give some quantitative depth to what was a highly complex, and to many non-experts confusing image of what was happening on the battlefield, in Iraq and later and Afghanistan, and later in reconstruction and peacemaking, peacebuilding efforts. [...] And we thought that since this is does not look like a war that will be resolved any time soon, and because there are so many moving parts to it, this—and and also, of course, because of the salience of this effort, this is the worst war in Europe since 1945 and probably the greatest both in quantitative and qualitative terms, the greatest efforts America has made in the postwar period since 1945. [...] But the longer that they are away, the worse that their country of origin is just destroyed, the 5 economy is destroyed, the worse the conditions that they would face as they return, the greater the incentives are to stay. [...] I mean, Ukraine is an extraordinarily rich and large country and if it were possible to negotiate or to find to to end the war on terms acceptable to Ukrainians and see Ukrainians return to build up their country to reconstruct it, I think that would be a tremendous boon to the prosperity and to the security of Europe.