Francis Foster

That's not what happened at all.

Sure, there were some Western people who came and did business and profited.

It was actually Russians that used the moment to steal as much wealth as they could.

And after that finishes, and all the chaos of that eight-year period finishes, you've got a former KGB colonel who comes in.

He's not elected.

He's appointed by the previous president to make sure that his corruption doesn't get prosecuted.

And the Russian people are perfectly happy with 26 years of a KGB colonel being in charge.

Right, exactly.

And it comes from...

Hundreds of years of history.

I don't know if I've ever talked about this on air, but it comes from the times of trouble, really, but also before that, which is the time Russians learned that instability is worse than anything else, literally.

So you can have the worst tyrant ever, but that's still better than chaos.

well yes well because you know the times of trouble is a period of time when a very short time due to in political instability and some other things that happen like a like a third of the russian population gets wiped out you have foreign foreign fake rule after foreign fake rule after foreign fake ruler coming in and people go okay we've got to have stability right but that's precisely my point is people with that mental attitude um

I might be right for their geography, might be wrong for their geography, but what it does is it creates a culture that I think is not compatible with the way that we do things.

And the evidence is there.

I mean, the Polish people or the Ukrainian people, they didn't go down the same path as Russia after 1991, after 1989, because Russia wants to be a power center.

It doesn't want to be part of a thing where it's not the main thing.

That's my argument.

I have access to both perspectives.

Well, because people within... I have friends who are Westerners who live in Russia and love it there.