George Barros

And I think they're desperate to try to achieve through a negotiation these concessions that they're unlikely to seize on the battlefield anytime soon.

Yeah, I think you have a massive problem because I don't think there's enough jobs in Russia to actually accommodate all the people that would be returning to civilian life.

I mean, you'd have major upsets, major shocks.

The Russians actually have a term for what happened in the aftermath of the Soviet-Afghan war in the late 80s when that conflict terminated.

And we had all of these men, thousands of men, much smaller scale what's happening in Ukraine right now, by the way.

Right.

Returned from the Soviet Union.

And these were people that were traumatized.

They had PTSD.

They didn't call it that at the time, but they had PTSD.

And they actually resorted to the lives of crime.

They became the mafia bosses that sort of ruled unruly Russia in the 1990s.

They call this the Afghan syndrome.

It's the syndrome of these violent, unruly men who are not afraid of the use of force, coming back to domestic civilian life, but there's no opportunities for them.

And they became these sort of robber barons and mafiosos and the oligarchs and all that sort of thing.

And so I think Putin is very, he understands there's a big sociological problem here connected with ending the war, which is why he doesn't want to stop the war, which is why he's actually building up the forces and streaming us all along and wasting all of our time.

Because actually, in many regards, ending the war causes more regimes to build the problems than muddling along and protracting it.

Yeah.

Are we going to have to prevent?

I'm going to have to professionally disagree with Mr. Wyckoff here.