I'm John Batchel with my good colleague, Anatole Levin, who is the director of the Eurasia Project at the Quincy Institute and widely traveled.

The events in Venezuela are persuasively confusing. I walk past them, fog of war.

However, there is an incident these last hours that suggests there's something of the

Cold War incident about everything. And that's the seizing, boarding, detaining, an empty

oil carrier, to my knowledge, in the North Atlantic, somewhere between Greenland,

Iceland, and UK gap. That's Cold War talk. Odd. This is not about Venezuela, although

you could argue maybe at some point as a member of the shadow fleet, it was

designated to carry some part of the oil from Venezuela to China or Cuba. It is about a challenge

directly to the Kremlin purposeful, because there was much reporting about the Navy chasing this or in pursuit of.

And there was talk out of the Kremlin of a submarine from the Russian Navy being designated to watch the watchers.

All very strange fog of war, Cold War shadows.

That's what it felt like. You never had a hard fact. But Anatole, it does look like

this is, two big dogs going to fight to quote the line from Dr. Strangelove. Is this an accident or

is this purposeful? Oh, I think it's entirely purposeful,

and it's a way, of course, of asserting, you know,

control over global oil supplies, starting with Venezuela,

but also putting pressure on Russia to, you know,

abandon its bigger demands and come to a deal over Ukraine.

I mean, obviously, though, this is a very dangerous move from two points of view.

I mean, the first is that, you know, under international law, it's totally illegal.

You know, these sanctions have not been imposed by the

United Nations. They're purely, you know, unilateral on the part of the U.S. And they set a

...