Sarah Paine

I'll explain how it works.

So there's the Rome we all know about, the Rome, Rome.

That was Rome number one, the one where the Pope is.

Rome number two, according to the Russians, has to do with the Byzantine Empire, and that was Constantinople or Istanbul.

So when that falls, the Russians go, ta-da, it's Moscow.

Not really.

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.