Hello and welcome to the Battleground Ukraine podcast with me, Roger Morehouse and Patrick Bishop.

Been a rather momentous year, Patrick. I hope you had a good Christmas. Where did Christmas find you? I was in Norway, in the far north of Norway, actually, Roger, right up not very far from the Russian border, actually. I was near North Cap, which is the furthest north you can go in the European continent.

But when I got back, I was chatting to a friend of mine.

He said, oh, I was up there many years ago when the Norwegian government invited him as a journalist

at the start of their program to joint program with Russia

to add G-commission old nuclear, nuclear-bound submarines and lighthouses. I didn't know there was such thing, but there we are. Wow. And, yeah. Nuclear-powered lighthouses. Yeah, I guess why you need that. I suppose it makes sense. Yeah. But, you know, what it struck me, and I'm sure it strikes you, that, you know, not so long,

this program only came to an end, it went on for years, only came to an end, when through Russia

and invaded Ukraine.

But there was, you know, Russia was a fully functioning or semi-functioning member of the international

community and could engage in these, you know, presumably quite pretty sensitive joint enterprises like this for the mutual benefit of all, you know, and it's sad how they now live on the dark side of the moon, don't they? I mean, diplomatically, economically, at least for us, and it's just another casualty of this war.

Yeah, it shows you how far we've come so, I mean, comparatively quickly as well, I suppose,

that we're back to the, you know, the very depths of the Cold War in terms of that

Western relationship with Russia.

There's an interesting, wider problem now.

I think there's a kind of a Kremlin mindset, and this goes back, you know, back way beyond,

you know, even the communist period, but

something identified very, without absolute clarity by, you know, George Kenan, you remember

his long telegram. This idea, I think, you know, Russia, its default is to sort of view

its relations with the outside world as a sort of zero-sum games. And this is another example of that. So when

they do cooperate, like you said, in those sort of international efforts, then it's almost like a,

you know, what's in it for us kind of thing. And, you know, they don't see international

cooperation necessarily as a benefit of itself. You know, it's always Russia first in that sense. So, yeah, I think

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