Dex Hunter-Torricke

And a lot of the students who were on my program at Oxford, these were kids who were apologists for Putin.

It was the wildest thing.

What do you mean?

In what way?

You'd literally get into debates with them and they'd say, oh, he's making Russia strong again.

And he's a great ally of the West.

And anyone who questions that entire thesis is just anti-Russian.

And it was like, I love Russian literature.

If you want me to talk about Russian literature and food and all of that, we can do that.

But that's not what we're talking about.

We're talking about the fate of nations.

And of course, we got to a moment when suddenly people realized that all the things that we had sort of swept under the rug in the name of just having a nice cozy alliance, having Vlad Putin at the table in the club, all these things were actually meaningless.

There were a different set of interests at work.

So here's something I've always wondered about Russia is like,

I mean, I think it's possible that a nation as complex as Russia is both being reactive...

and proactive, both at the same time, and has a very divergent range of interests that might explain all the things it's done over the last couple of decades.

I mean, there are fascinating historical debates now about were there moments in the lead up to the end of the Cold War and right after where you could have dramatically shifted the path that Russia eventually took.

And there were moments where even after Vladimir Putin came to power, he

at least rhetorically, explored very different scenarios of what a different security architecture could look like for Europe.

People back in the early 2000s literally had discussions about, could Russia join NATO?