Sarah Paine

So the Baltic is really a NATO lake.

There's not too much Putin can do there.

So his latest gig is cutting undersea cables.

That's about where he's at.

I mean, look at trying to leave the Baltic.

It doesn't happen in wartime.

You're stuck in there.

So it turns out that Putin, Russia is much more vulnerable to blockade than the other way around because it's very easy to close up the Baltic and Black Seas.

You look out on what's going on and...

They're hemmed in, and it's all way up north.

Russia has two really big naval bases, one on the Bering Sea and one on the Barents Sea.

But the problem is when they deploy out of those bases, they have to go by NATO territory.

So in the Barents Sea, you can see why Greenland and Iceland are so strategic, because for Russia to deploy, it's got to go in between those places.

And then on the Barents Sea,

The more promising one for Russia has to go by the United States.

But the problem is, how do you supply the thing on the Bering Sea?

It's just a long way from any industrial base.

So another part of Putin's sad story has to do with NATO.

So if you look at NATO, you can look at its accession in arcs.

Initially, in the Cold War, the early Cold War,