Hello, welcome to another episode of Realpolitik. I am your host, Viras Modad. I'm continuing with the question of

Russia, Ukraine, and trying to give the broader context of the conflict. In the previous episode,

we went over Russia in the 1990s and the relationship between Russia and NATO in the 1990s.

To summarize, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Russians, the Soviet Union was dissolved,

and the Russians ended up being governed by Boris Yeltsin, who was more or less a drunken, corrupt buffoon, who helped hand over the

country to a big bunch of pretty horrible oligarchs that mainly got rich by taking control

of state assets at ridiculously low prices and then proceeding to milk them

for all that they were worth. This liberalism dubbed shock therapy and strongly recommended

by the IMF and by the West in general and by the United States as the way to modernize

Russia's economy culminated in 1998 in Russia defaulting on its debts, the currency collapsing,

massive inflation. Throughout the 1990s, Russia was more or less governed by criminals, actual gangsters,

as well as oligarchs associated with them.

And this internal weakness very much allowed NATO to expand its influence.

So we saw the breakup of Yugoslavia and subsequently the breakup of Serbia,

a key Russian ally given that it's Slavic and Orthodox,

the last bastion supportive of Russia in the Balkans.

And we saw, obviously, in 1990, the defeat, the complete and comprehensive defeat of the Iraqi

military, which had been supported by the Soviet Union.

So Western weapons really proved that they could do enormous damage to Soviet equipment

with minimal losses to the West. We saw that NATO kept on expanding, even though the agreement

that allowed the reunification of Germany was based on promises from NATO

that it wouldn't expand one inch eastwards if the two German republics,

...