Anne Applebaum

And of course, now Zelensky is offering some of their technology to the Gulf states as well, which for which they'll also get

money or other weaponry.

So it's one of the few good examples at the moment of how a more open society can defeat or can at least stand up to a much larger closed society.

And so if you want to feel better about democracy and liberalism, then this is your example.

It's not stable, but it's true that the Russians have found a lot of ways around sanctions.

It's true that European and American and other companies, lots of Chinese companies, are still finding ways to supply Russia.

It's also true, though, that an enormous amount of their budget is going into making weapons.

They have labor shortages.

They have very high inflation.

And as I said, they have these exploding refineries all over the place.

The exploding refinery seems to be preventing them from benefiting from the rising oil prices the way they could.

So it's a big country.

It's very hard to know.

And all the statistics are fake anyway.

So it's hard to know exactly what's going on.

But, I mean, it doesn't look from the outside and from the little news we have from the outside, it doesn't feel very happy.

You know, they...

They know they're not winning.

They know they're not prospering.

They can see they're falling behind in all kinds of other races, the AI race, the technology race.