This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Bats with my colleague, Anatole Leven, of the Quincy

Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Anatole is published in the Guardian newspaper,

a summary of where Russia has been these many years with regard to Ukraine, but also

the former Soviet Union, all of the republics, including Georgia, including Azerbaijan,

and Armenia, and Moldova, including the Baltic States, so many. And what Russia's vision

of the future was, Anatole in the Guardian newspaper, has a quote that Vladimir Putin published

in 2012, which is tempting to interpret, quote, Russia is an inseparable, organic part of

greater Europe, of the wider European civilization, our citizens feel themselves to be Europeans.

Anatole, I read that today, and it's almost utopian, as in nowhere, not as in paradise, as in nowhere,

and yet is there a way to get back to that moment? Can it be repaired in some fashion with something,

oh, I don't know, like a Congress of Vienna. I'm just using that as how Europe tried to repair its

damage after Napoleon. It's going to be very difficult and it will take a long time.

There is tragedy here, because I was a journalist in Russia in the early in mid 1990s,

and then I mean only a quite small minority of ultra-hardline communists and ultra-nationalists

believed in Russia as a separate civilization. The vast majority of the population believed that

Russia was part of Europe and should aim at a system like that of Sweden or Germany, a social

democratic system. As you know, this quote indicates for a long time Putin espoused a vision which

was sometimes called the Third West. In other words, there is a first West as Europe, there is a

second West which is America obviously part of the West, but with significantly different elements

of political culture as well. And so why should Russia be a Third West? Now that has now been

comprehensively abandoned by the regime in favor of this language of Russia as a separate

Eurasian civilization, but you know, on the other hand, if you talk to educated Russians,

...