Hi everyone and welcome. I'm Glenn Dyson and today I'm joined by Alexander Mercurus and Dr. And

Andrei Kortunov, the Director General of the Russian International Affairs Council. And, well,

for the past 30 years, we've seen the Western Russia appear to have been slow walking towards

confrontation.

We see this escalation, especially since 2014, then intensifying from 2022.

And again, at the end of 2024, it looked as if with this direct attacks, that catastrophe

might be close.

Indeed, with the absence of diplomacy, it really looked

very dark times ahead. And now suddenly, it's all been changed. The US change course.

They're openly talking about Russian security concerns, something I haven't heard about in 30

years. And, yeah, Dr. Coyotan, you have written that a grand bargain is underway.

How are you reading this, I guess, historical situation, I think is appropriate to describe

what's happening now between the Americans and the Russians.

Well, thank you, Glenn.

First of all, let me say that it is definitely my pleasure and my honor

to be a part of this discussion. In the spirit of full disclosure, I have to say that I recently

retired from all my administrative positions at Riyadh, so I'm just an independent scholar right now. But speaking of the grand bargain, I remain rather skeptical about whether a ground bargain is attainable under the circumstances.

And there are a couple of reasons why I think we cannot repeat what we did 80 years ago after the end of the Second World War.

First of all, we do not have a war, a real world war behind us,

which means that there is no way to fix the exact balance of powers in the contemporary world. We don't have the victorious side that could

impose its decisions and its preferred the move of the game on the defeated side. Moreover,

I think that right now the world is much more complex than

...