Anne Applebaum

There's often a lot of, in the UK now, there's almost a kind of, they keep writing articles in the British press about how great Poland is and what if Poland catches up to Britain.

I mean, it's almost there's a kind of cultural snobbery there.

Like, it can't possibly be the case that Poles are as rich as we are.

But there is something happening whereby they are, they're coming, certainly they're a lot closer in terms of

of GDP per capita anyway than they were ever before.

It's really hard to say.

So first of all, I had a lot of Russian friends at one point, and they are all gone.

They have all left Russia.

They're elsewhere in Europe.

Some are in the U.S.

And so I don't have friends inside Russia anymore, at least none that I would be able to talk to.

It's also...

It's genuinely impossible to measure something called public opinion in Russia because this is a country in which to be against the war is illegal.

And people are arrested for saying things that are against the war.

And so that means that if you're conducting an opinion poll and you call someone up and you say, how do you feel about the war, what are they going to tell you?

They're going to say, I'm all for it.

It's not a...

It's not something that you can measure.

And there isn't also a kind of public sphere in which these things are discussed.

It's not like there's a place where people talk about the war and debate whether it's good or bad in any real way.