Sarah Paine

But they use this Russian orthodoxy and spread the Russian Orthodox Church back in the day deep into Eastern Europe.

So when the communists get in, they're not spreading Russian orthodoxy, they're spreading communism.

The problem for Putin...

is today neither communism nor Russian orthodoxy are marketable ideologies.

So he's just stuck with being a really big place.

That's where his little focus is.

And Russia has a nightmare scenario.

They don't always win these wars.

They lose quite often.

And the Mongol yoke or the yellow peril, their terminology, not mine,

is the 13th century when the Mongols just swept in and the Russian elites became tax collectors for the Mongols, an extractive role that has endured.

You think about Russians, they extract resources, their own, other people's, but they're not known for producing wealth.

It's just resource extraction.

And this is some of the legacy of all of that one.

And the Russians have also suffered devastating defeats to Napoleon II,

in World War I and World War II that just devastated Western Russia.

So they've had bad times.

And in our own time, Putin is dumping all of his ordnance on Ukraine, leaving Siberia wide open to China's ambitions.

So if he keeps the game up, he may well wind up with a Chinese yoke, and his nightmare will be there for him.

The Chinese also had their own big ideas, not religious ideas or empire, but about civilization itself.