This is John Batchel, a conversation with colleague Ivana Stradner of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies,

who is born Serbian, so has a very clear sense of humor about the Slavic world.

Ivana tells it a witticism, a joke, a setup, not just about the peasant, but about the peasant as Vladimir Putin,

how Putin thinks.

Here's Ivana Stradner on how Putin thinks, told with a version of a Russian anecdote that is humorous

and at the same time deeply ironic.

More of this later.

It is an old actually Russian jokes that actually illustrates Putin's mindset perfectly.

So here it is.

A peasant lives between two houses that each have a cop. And then he complains to God that he doesn't have

his own. But then when God actually offers to provide him with one, the peasant actually replied,

and he said, no, I prefer that you just kill my neighbor's cows. And you see, that's a key problem because we do not understand this zero-sum game that Putin is playing.