Sarah Paine

It's all of these smaller European nations.

And everybody's smaller than Russia.

It's by far the biggest country on the planet.

And why they need more territory remains a mystery.

But initially, it's the smaller places joining NATO to protect themselves.

And then at the implosion of the Soviet Union, it's all its former satellites fleeing at the first possible moment and saying, NATO, NATO, let me in.

And then with the Ukraine, 2022, part of the Ukraine war, Sweden and Finland, which long had preferred neutrality, said, oh, no, no, we're going to join NATO.

Now, the Russians look at this and they go, well, this is NATO coming at us in arcs.

They're ignoring their complicity in all of this.

If you occupy places and brutalize them for generations, this is what you get.

So here is Putin's muse, or I don't know if it's his muse, but it's a guy who expresses a lot of ideas like Putin's, Alexander Dugin.

Here's his view of how the world should be.

It's not over a universal rules-based order where we all trade with each other.

It's rather we're going to divide it up into these spheres of influence where each is a world into itself.

Dugin's worked it out for all of us.

But here are the places that Russia's actually taken lately.

At the end of the Cold War, it took Transnistria from Moldova.

In 2008, it took Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia.

And then 2014, it's taking Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk from Ukraine.

And then look how it really works.