Sarah Paine

So let's start with Putin here, Vlad the Bad, on his little Mongol pony, a continental mode of transport.

If you live there, what can you get out of it?

It's a long horse ride if you're going to do it that way.

So whom can he blockade?

Well...

He's got one aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, which has been under repair since 2018, a long time to be in the shop.

It required the largest dry dock that Russia has to repair it.

And then it flipped the dry dock, which then gashed the hull.

And there's been all sorts of charges of embezzlement, various fires on board.

It's not getting repaired anytime fast.

And it's just like an occupational hazard vehicle.

problem.

So that one's not doing him any good.

Putin has got two liquid playgrounds that he likes.

One's the Black Sea.

Before he got involved with Ukraine, in theory, he could have blockaded, I guess, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, and Georgia if he wanted to.

That was why he's so interested in the Kursh Strait, which would blockade the Sea of Azov, because he wanted to take Ukraine from east to west.

That was part of the plan.

Oh, yeah.

And he used to have—or maybe still does, unknown—