I'm John Batchel with my colleague, Anatole, Leaving the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

We've been focusing on Ukraine. The impossible is in front of us. Nobody at this point has a resolution.

But we turn to the bigger picture, which is NATO, which is Europe, which is the future.

There was a moment, Anatole, when I watched the video of a burning building in Moscow

following the day before a burning building in Kiev.

And both sides were boasting how many drones they'd shot down, despite the evidence that

some had not been shot down and had struck their mark,

with U.S. surveillance providing details, with Russian surveillance providing details.

And it came to me that this is the future. This is SkyNet.

These are robots attacking cities that have civilians in them,

and doing it with the presumption, well, we'll only hit

military targets or we'll only go after deployment.

It is a bizarre world that Russia and Ukraine are living in, especially Russia.

Is this something that Moscow is just going to shrug and get on with, like the Blitz?

You know, we carry on.

Is that the future?

Well, yes. I mean, uh, as you talk about the Blitz, I mean, you know, both Britain and Germany

in the Second World War and indeed Iran during the, um, the Iran-Iraq War absorbed vastly, vastly greater levels of damage than anything that Moscow,

or actually even Kiev, have suffered to date.

So this kind of, I mean, the weapons are new.

The strategy is not.

And I have to say the strategy, historically speaking, has generally failed, unless you can,

...