Nika Kovacs

And what's interesting to me about this is that

Okay.

Putin has now moved in the company of like North Korea and to some extent China.

But the point is that North Korea never had internet access.

The Chinese built this firewall.

So they kind of built the system to be controllable and accessible to mass surveillance.

It's been there all along.

Yeah.

So whereas Russia had an open internet-based society, right?

Like they were connected, you know, to all the same things we are.

And it just, I ask people to imagine all that being taken away and not just, again, your ability to kind of go to, you know, NYtimes.com or something, your ability to like order food online, your ability to do any e-commerce, your ability to communicate, like you said.

I just have to wonder whether this kind of Putin paranoia and desire to kind of wall off Russia entirely and create a

total police state there, at some point, there's a combination of that, casualties, you know, disabled people coming home.

Like, when does this start to tip against him?

A lot is going in Putin's favor right now, including the war in Iran, including higher world prices, including getting sanctions relief from the U.S.

So this is more a three-year, five-year question to me.

But like, this has got to be pissing people off.

Yeah.

I think what it reminds you of is like we talk a lot about the war in Ukraine has been trending well for Putin in a lot of ways, right?

But that doesn't mean it's trending well for Russians.