I am Gaius John Batcherr, this is the Friends of History Debating Society.

Germanicus is traveling.

He's in Pick Country in Edinburgh.

And we're observing the magical thinking in Kief.

Now we go to the magical thinking in Moscow.

Kremlin.

Vladimir Putin, the president who is running for re-election within months,

provided an interview with a celebrity journalist named Carlson who is

late of Fox News I believe and the interview gave us no new information about the

confrontation with NATO but it did give us information about how Putin's been

reading history.

Germanicus. It's good that Putin has a historical background and it's good that he's

applying himself to it but I'm puzzled about how he means to live. I mean he's like he's thinking

he owes something to Alexander Neffsky. He's got some vision of Russia that's going to confront the Europeans and freeze them in place

so that they, what, cooperate with Russia?

He doesn't want to conquer it, he wants to be respected by it how did you hear him well at

the extreme risk of skirting any appearance of empathy for the tyrant himself.

I think looking at his, you know, conveying his side or Russia's side of a situation in which the West has been oburately unwilling to even entertain where Russia is coming from in a situation like that where he wants to

explain and yet he has been so totally and thoroughly rejected for so long, what a person will do in that situation

quite naturally is want to try and go back to the beginning and explain every little detail so that, you know, in some perhaps desperate attempt to say, look, there's something going on here I want to explain this and yet

there's no way that he could ever explain the Russian point of view here and it is really quite interesting because there is a lot to explain. There is a lot going on in Russia going back not just to Catherine the great, but Peter the Great, even back to, you know, the so-called Ivan the terrible.

You know, there's been an effort on the part of Russia all these centuries to insinuate itself into Europe and it has never quite succeeded.

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