Stanford University Director of Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies & Associate Professor of History Amir Weiner joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss the latest on the Russia-Ukraine war.

Video Transcript

- Let's bring in our first guest for the hour. We've got Amir Weiner. He is Stanford University director of Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and associate professor of history.

Professor, it's good to talk to you today. There was always a fear that any kind of resistance from the Ukrainian side would lead to an escalation of assault from the Russian side. Is that what we're starting to see here? And how quickly do you think some of these cities are likely to fall?

AMIR WEINER: Certainly that's what we are seeing and our fear is always that it will turn into a second Chechnya, Chechnya redo, when the Russians invaded, were rebuffed, were quite humiliated based on their very clumsy performance. And what they've done, it's what they usually do, come back with much larger force, with indiscriminate carpet bombing and erasing cities. In this case, it was Grozny in Chechnya. And our fear, of course, is that it will start repeating itself in Ukraine with much larger cities. We already have reports about looting and abuse of population in Kherson, that fell yesterday. But indeed this is the nightmare that might be unfolding in front of our eyes.

BRIAN CHEUNG: Amir, it's Brian Cheung here. When we talk about just the developments that we've seen so far, obviously Kyiv in focus, what do you see as the Russian advancement on the nation's capital? We know that there's a lot of proximity of the capital to Belarus, which obviously is an ally of Vladimir Putin right now. Are you seeing any sort of developments that would suggest the Russians are close to perhaps taking the capital?

AMIR WEINER: Taking the capital, it's a little bit too early to say. Certainly laying a siege on it, that's quite clear it is the obvious target. Whether they will dare entering the city of three million people and with fierce resistance and turning into an urban warfare, we still don't know. I don't want to predict. We got everything wrong almost from day one over the last one month what Putin actually wants. But quite likely, it will be a siege and they're trying to remove the Ukrainian government, that the government under Zelensky will flee, we don't know where, if he will enter the city, that will be a true nightmare.

- Amir, let's hone in on that question that you just asked, which is what exactly does Vladimir Putin want at this point? We have seen the Western sanctions take hold. Granted it's only been a few days. It will probably take a little while to understand the scope of the impact. The Russian economy though already getting hit, do you think this has any influence in terms of how President Putin is thinking about his next steps? Or do you think ultimately it is about a military victory for him?

AMIR WEINER: I believe that it's about achieving his goals. He's told us all along what he wants is to take Ukraine as a viable sovereign actor off the map. His goal has always been to recreate this sphere of influence, zone of influence of satellites on the mode of East, Central Europe during the Cold War.

The issue is that Ukraine and Belarus, that we always have to keep in mind that Belarus is another actor here, are not recognized as sovereign nations even by the Russians. It's the "Little Russians," the "White Russians," as they refer to Ukraine and Belarus respectively. And the problem is what do they want to turn it? A Soviet Republic on the style of Soviet Republic? Quite likely. This is apparently the goal here.

So the goal is to decimate them as any viable nation-state.

- Going back to what Brian asked earlier, which is about the capital city. We have continued to follow this Russian military convoy. We've heard British intelligence officials now say they are about 80 miles outside of the city center. How do you see the Ukrainian resistance in the capital city? Will it in fact fall to Russian forces? Or is that not an inevitable outcome?

AMIR WEINER: The Russians certainly have the military capacity to subjugate Kyiv and the rest of Ukraine militarily. What they will do with it, it's another equation. I doubt that they have the power and the might to control a country of 42 million people stiffly resisting their presence there. But to take out the military resistance, they can do it. The point is, of course, in what way they will do it, whether it will be simply indiscriminate bombing and deportations, the expulsion of a population, they can do it. They showed that they've already willing to do that as it was in the case of Chechnya, which we always have to fall back on when we discuss Ukraine nowadays.

But whether they can achieve the goal of controlling Ukraine, this huge territory, this country the size of France that certainly does not want the Russians there, that is another matter. I doubt very much that they have the capacity, but that's simply a recipe for barbarization of the warfare.

- And we've heard from President Zelensky there sort of warning that things could certainly get worse over the next few days. Amir Weiner, appreciate you joining us today, Stanford University director of Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies.