Anne Applebaum

Doesn't mean there aren't brilliant people there and great companies and all that.

But it lost so many markets and so many opportunities through that one stupid decision that I worry it's falling further behind.

And I don't want that because I lived in London for a long time.

I'm a fan of British culture and many other things.

But that's what, anyway, it's interesting.

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?