Tomas Ilves

Well done.

Oh, it's clearly, well, not necessarily from this conference because it's kind of a meeting of sort of common minds here, but certainly even now after 2022,

It's not really quite reached everyone.

And you still detect people and hear about that in various countries in Europe, they're just champing at the bit to get back into Russia.

you know, the Eldorado of... Due deals.

And due deals, right.

I mean, what worries me about that is that we haven't learned the lessons of the, let's say, 89-91, which we should, because in 89-91, everyone thought, okay, communism is over now, you know, the default option is democracy.

We should know by now that looking at Russia, looking at

Yugoslavia, the default option is not democracy.

And in fact, it can be quite terrible, as we see in Ukraine today, as we saw in Bosnia and Herzegovina 30 years ago.

So the dangers are still quite real.

If you put yourself in the position of the Russian leadership, you have several million men who have come back with PTSD.

We read about horrible crimes being committed by people who have come back from Ukraine.

And if I were a Russian leader, I'd go, well, I wouldn't want them in my country.

Let's have another war.

Maybe we can get them to go elsewhere.

On the other hand, there is this narrative of the Baltics are next.

I don't see that as necessarily the option.

I mean, why wouldn't you say Georgia's next or Kazakhstan is next?

I mean, you can do that without testing NATO.