Fiona Hill

He will have the ability to basically press this to a final conclusion that despite all the losses, all the incredibly high costs, and he is ruthless and he's prepared to pay that price, everybody else will fold.

That's his bet.

Yes.

In fact, that's a great analogy.

Also a very small leader.

Exactly.

Probably above the size of Vladimir Putin.

In fact, I know he's on a horse.

Well, it depends, right?

Everything always depends.

And this is what Putin is very good at.

He's got strategic patience.

He is, and everybody talks about now, it's become a complete cliche, but it certainly wasn't 20 odd years ago when people were trying to understand Vladimir Putin.

I

We've got 25 years of data points from a man that we knew very little about, the Masha Gessen called the man without a face.

We now know his face.

We know about his family.

We know all kinds of different things about him that we did not know before.

And what we also know is that he bides his time.

If you think about Yevgeny Prigozhin, who a couple of years ago we thought, oh my God, is it all going to teeter?