The Rest Is History - 162. Putin's Russia

Episode Date: March 10, 2022

[Episode 4 of 4] 'In the noughties, Russian democracy becomes a form of show business' In the final instalment of our Russia mini-series, Tom and Dominic reach the climax of Putin’s rise to power, charting how a former KGB agent managed to climb from relative obscurity to become the uncrowned Tsar of Russia. The episode also touches on his relationship with oligarchs such as Roman Abramovich, the hall of mirrors he's created, and a look at how his character has changed over the course of his presidency. Join The Rest Is History Club for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. Editor: Vasco Andrade Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producers: Tony Pastor & Jack Davenport *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello, welcome to the final episode in what has been our very first four-episode series, and it has been on Russia, the recent history of Russia, end of the Soviet Union, rise of Putin, obviously very, very immediate, important subject at the moment. And we have reached the stage where Putin has become president of Russia. So Dominic, the election of 2000, is Putin, I mean, is he a popular figure at this point? Is he well known? Or is he a kind of new broom? It's the funny thing. He's unknown. A year earlier, he was unknown. He's a new broom. A year earlier, he was completely unknown.

But by, what is it, April 2000, I think it is, he is identified with the Second Chechen War, which has been a great success from the Russian perspective because they've basically wiped the floor with the – Putin, I think his expression is he says, we've greased the terrorists, I think is his expression. He sort of has this populist way of talking about the war that pleases a lot of ordinary Russians. So just on the Chechen War, there is a guerrilla war that goes on for years. There's the Beslan siege. Remember that, Tom?

In the school 2004 where Chechen militants took hundreds of people hostage in the theatre on both occasions, the Russian armed forces stormed the place where the people are being held hostage and lots of people are killed in the crossfire. Horrific. But Putin ends up winning in Chechnya. So the Chechen guy who they install in the long run is a guy called Ramzan Kadyrov. Are you familiar with him, Tom? No. He is an absolutely terrible man. Is he the one who's still on the scene now?

Yeah. So he's the guy who wants to go in and murder everyone in Ukraine? He is. Yes, I am familiar with him. So he's an Instagram addict. He's had a tiff with John Oliver, the American comedy presenter on Instagram. He does have a comedy beard. His birthday party in 2011 was attended by jean-claude van damme

uh hillary swank seal and vanessa may the violinist what a party that must have been well um i had a producer was telling us that john oliver is english but i think of him as american yeah he is english he was uh he was a comedy partner of andy zeltsin i know but he's famous the tms the test match special scorer He's not famous in England, is he? Well, that's two degrees of separation from Test Match Special to the Chechen warlord. Wow. Well, okay.

That's brilliant. So anyway, you actually, the question was actually, I was just determined to read my notes about Ramzan Kevlar. No, fair enough. That was worth it. But the question was actually,

how did Putin win? Well, he won on the back of because he's fighting a communist isn't he ganadi zyuganov well yes right he's fighting zyuganov was the guy who he's um yeltsin beat in 96 and he's also going to run again in 2000 the communist uh putin is younger he's the new broom he's hard he's won the war so of course people vote for him he's very very good at um the weird thing is actually in 2000 if you look at some of the sort of press commentary in the west people said well maybe he'd be more liberal you know obviously we started the previous podcast with george w bush's now yeah frankly blackly ironic you know stuff about looking into his soul and inviting

him to his ranch because he thought he could trust him putin nobody actually knows what putin is putin is a blank slate um in in 2000 but he is lucky his reign coincides with a sort of uptick in in oil prices um and russia's going to start to make a lot of money from oil and gas. They've finally reached some degree of economic stability after the chaos of the 90s. Also, a thing that Putin does that isn't appreciated, I think, popularly in the West as much as it is, he cracks down on the oligarchs. He does, doesn't he?

Very popular. Yes, he does. So often people say now… Boris Berezovsky, the notorious one, isn't it? Well, it's notorious because he, of course, was found hanged in, I think, 2011. Outside Asgard. Yeah, there was this suspicion about what happened to him.

And Khodorkovsky, also, who you mentioned earlier. Yes, exactly. The richest man in Russia. He was the richest man in Russia and had been very close to Yeltsin, had known Putin, there were lots of photos of them together, but had dared to criticise Putin and had to argue with him.

And basically Putin has him, you know, all of these oligarchs. Yeah, he's sent to prison for 10 years in Siberia. Very dastardly. Just absolutely. And then he serves his term and he gets another six years. Yeah, he's eventually, Putin pardoned him, I think, in 2014. Well, he's in London as well. Yeah. So all these, Putin pardoned him, I think, in 2014. And basically- He's in London as well.

Yeah. I mean- So all these oligarchs flee to London. One of the things that people say about Abramovich is that, why did Abramovich buy Chelsea? Buying Chelsea was actually a brilliant way of protecting himself. It made him very famous, gave him a bolt hole in London, gave him a place in the kind of British and Western imagination. Oligarch- famous gave him a bolt hole in london gave him a place in the kind of british and western imagination oligarch as something other as something yeah as something other than just a

kind of the guy who ran sibneft and it made him harder to touch you know well because barakovsky takes him to court doesn't he in london barakovsky did take him they had a massive over the corpse of it they were absolutely so what's actually put Putin's reign in some ways has represented is the kind of securocrats, the siloviks, the siloviki, as they're called, taking power back. So people who are involved with the army, particularly with the intelligence services, they are the people who surround Putin now more than ever.

Not so much the people with the sort of the glitzy yachts who made all their money in the 90s because there's been a bit of a backlash against them he's so it's the securocrats who really have taken have run the show in the last 20 years so to dominate one of i haven't read hugely about this period, but one book that really, really sticks in my mind was by Peter Pomerantsev, who was actually born in Kiev, I think. His parents were exiled to Britain, and so he grew up British. And then he went to Moscow to work in TV in the early years of Putin's presidency, and he wrote a brilliant book, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible. And his theme essentially is that Putin's power rests on his ability to manipulate reality, and that he is bringing the expertise that he has garnered as a KGB officer.

And he is recruiting all the people, all this, all this kind of, the security services who've done this, quite a lot of the ideologues as well in the Soviet period. And they, you know, essentially he's weaponizing them. And Pomerantsev points out that when Putin becomes president, the first things that he essentially

gets his claws on, it's not the utilities, it's not the utilities, it's not the oil, it's not even the security services, it's TV. And that he uses TV to create a kind of hall of mirrors. And I don't know whether you think that that's a theory that you would go along with. Well, you definitely see the hall of mirrors now, don't you? I mean, there are accounts, social media accounts online that are are i can't remember the name of the guy who's doing it there's a particular guy who's a francis something who's got this incredible account where he tells you what's on russian tv every night during the ukraine war and the

parallel world the parallel reality um you know the fact that basically they're showing pictures of kiev that are look like nothing that's happening now. They're fake, basically, or all these sort of things. I mean, you're right, there is a Hall of Mirrors, and to some extent there always has been. But I don't think it's purely that. I think for a lot of Russians, Putin does represent stability and strength

because if you think about the story that we've told, the 80s and 90s, of course he represents stability after that utter chaos. And so that's the importance of his masculinity, the bare chest and all that kind of thing. Yeah, I think so. I mean, that's all laughable to us. than Boris not getting off the plane or Gorbachev, you know, just sort of lost in his own committees and reading Lenin

and everything kind of falling to pieces around him. They see Putin projecting kind of old-fashioned masculine strength, don't they? And I think that obviously has a tremendous appeal. Plus there is this thing, you know, the Weimar parallel that you mentioned right at the beginning, there is this thing, the Weimar parallel that you mentioned right at the beginning,

the Robert Harris thing. I mean, one of the things that animated Germany in the 1920s and then the 30s was the sense of amputation. There are all these Germans cut off. And Putin and his sort of ideologues, the people who are in this sort of TV hall of mirrors, they can say, well, you know,

30% of the population of Estonia when the Soviet Union broke up was Russian speaking. All these people in Eastern Ukraine speak Russian. You know, people in Transnistria and Moldova. I mean, that's also what they've weaponized, a genuine sort of sense of grievance about what people see as the mutilation of kind of Russianness and the Russian nation. But also a sense that a war can be a kind of source of empowerment, that it will make Russians feel good while also, I guess, intimidating them.

Because, you know, you're getting this news footage from Grozny or whatever, and you're thinking, well, if he can do that there, what could he do to us? I mean, that's also, so there's a kind of, you're simultaneously being empowered and intimidated by this. Would that be true? I suppose that is true. People are frightened of, yeah, people are frightened of Putin. They'd be frightened of him even without a war. I mean, the war in Crimea, the annexation of Crimea,

and there wasn't really a war in Crimea, it was just a sort of a silent coup. The little green men and then the annexation. I mean, that was tremendously popular in Russia. Opinion polls showed it was very popular. The war in the Donbass, that's your hall of mirrors because Russians believe that they haven't been fighting in the Donbass. They think that it's purely separatists fighting Ukrainian Nazis. I mean, that stuff is crazy.

Okay, let's take a quick break, make a cup of tea, maybe have a slug of vodka, and we'll see you after the ads. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip, and on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment

and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello, welcome back to the rest is history so peter pomerantsev argues that in the noughties russian democracy you know it's it's all of it's it's it becomes show business it becomes a kind of source of entertainment that you allow people on political shows so you have communists you know to appeal

to the the old people and you have you know liberals to appeal to the the nerds and you have um nationalists you know who are kind of mad but but quite entertaining but it's like watching the big brother house and if you go too far you know if you start misbehaving if you start directly threatening putin then you'll be voted off the big brother house. You know, you will, you will just vanish. And so democracy is degraded into becoming a form of entertainment.

And then it just kind of fades away completely. Now I thought that was, you know, really, really kind of fascinating take, but the other thing, the other, I listened to a podcast.

Tom, I actually listened to a podcast and it was jordan peterson's podcast well oh my god i can people are well people are either whooping for joy tom or they're oh they're turning off well now and he had on a guy called frederick kagan who's a military historian specialist in russia um son of uh famous classicist and he i would guess is pretty much the opposite of pomerantsev so peter pomerantsev writes for the lrb you know he's very much that that kind of world frederick kagan i would get well i mean definitely because he's on a jordan peterson podcast is not the kind of guy who would give his pronouns right but he definitely wouldn't give him to jordan peterson but he's basically he's basically saying the same thing he's talking about uh um putin's policy in

crimea and he's he's talking about hybrid warfare this idea that you essentially what you're doing is you're creating again this idea of a hall of mirrors where nothing is real you can't be certain what anything is and his his aim is to get people particularly in the west but also in ukraine and russia to look at the war and to say well you know we don't really know what the truth is there's probably a bit of this is a bit of that when basically it's just an invasion and he he produced this astonishing fact i hadn't realized that the negotiations at minsk in 2014 to try and kind of arrive at a settlement between r and Ukraine. Russia isn't a kind of participant in the peace talks. It's an arbiter. It's there with France and Germany as an arbiter.

Yeah, they're pretending that they're not. You see, that's the point. They're pretending they're not really involved. Yeah. Whereas what's changed this time around is that now Putin is doing absolutely nakedly. I mean, there's no attempt to create this kind of haul. I guess because it's been blown out of the water by the CIA. Well, but there is a haul of mirrors in Russia. I mean, there is a colossal chasm between what ordinary Russians think about the war and what we think about it that did not exist with, for example, when they went into Georgia in 2008. So that was probably the moment when that was the trial run, if you like, the war against Georgia.

So George W. Bush, who appeared in the previous podcast, George W. Bush said, we're thinking about NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. They can aspire to it. And at that point, obviously, alarm bells went off in the Kremlin. And the first thing Putin did was go into Georgia just months later. So what happened then? Brutal war, all the rest of it.

But I don't think there was a sense then of an iron curtain, as it were. No, but even in 2014, there wasn't. Because there were lots of people in the West who said, oh, well know, Ukrainians are all fascists. That argument that Ukrainians are fascists, which was absolutely kind of generated by Putin's genius for malevolent propaganda. I mean, not entirely, but definitely quite significantly. And that played a crucial role in persuading the West not to get too het up about, you know. Yes, I suppose so.

I mean, I think that, but also it's the fact that the Russians now are so sealed off. So, you know, it's virtually impossible now, I think, for ordinary Russians to get hold of a lot kind of hall of mirrors telling a story about what you're doing. How is that different from what people would have done in history? I mean, I'm thinking about- Well, it's funny you ask that because when I read Pomerantz's book, what it reminded me of was Augustine Rome. Yeah. The creation of fantastical stories that kind of almost anesthetized people

who'd emerged from a civil war in a period of absolutely convulsive trauma and people embraced it and welcomed it that that you see do you know i'm so glad you mentioned that and it is funny how we because the parallel that's sometimes been in my mind with putin is you know i obviously think putin is a terrible person and wish him i mean i hope listeners won't be offended when I say I really do wish him all the worst. But he's on a spectrum and somewhere on that spectrum is Octavian, you know, who becomes Augustus, who obscure, people don't rate him, you know, does deals with the right people, can be utterly ruthless and cold well i think the difference is that um obviously octavian the the murderous terrorist who utilizes war to attain supreme power and then promote himself as a prince of peace the arc of putin is the other way that he's gone from presiding over bit taking

in the west appearing to be a man with, Bush looks into his soul and it's good, who is now the new Hitler. Yeah, I suppose so. But surely, you think about Octavian and his war, for example, against Antony and Cleopatra, the way that Russian Augustan propaganda. Absolutely. No Roman would have got a sense of that war as we have of it

even our sense of the war is completely coloured by their propaganda so Putin's propaganda is not unprecedented in history absolutely not he truly is the third Rome that's a depressing thought I told you when we started I said I've got the flipping piles of notes. I know they've got the names of people running, you know, the under minister of tractors.

Yes, in minutes. That I haven't been able to use. But there are some brilliant books on this. There's a book by Serkii Plokhi, a Ukrainian historian called The Last Empire empire i think it is about ukraine and the the collapse of the soviet union there's the book i mentioned last time vladislav zubok's book and there are two other books tom that i'd like to mention because i think they are absolutely brilliant they're by the new yorker editor david remnick and he's talking about um uh russia in the late 80s and then in the early 90s now i can remember that the second one is called

resurrection and i can't actually remember the name of the first one having said how brilliant they are but i like to leave the list of something to do no it's not crucifixion i like to leave the list of something to do so then it is lenin's tomb yeah our producers just it that is an absolutely unbelievably good book um so i really recommend that um but yeah would you say it's a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a mystery or well i think that's going back to that kind of thing that we talked about the last podcast which is about the russian soul isn't it i think there were i'll tell you the in the rate what if tom i mean there's this is the great what if of our time what if the soviet union hadn't broken up would we be would a lot of people, there's an argument, I would, there's a reason, a lot of people who are anti-communists would say, God, what a terrible

speculation. But there is surely an argument that a lot of people who are now dead would still be alive, actually, if the Soviet Union had kept going. If, let's say, Andropov had lived for another 10 years and then handed over to somebody more hard-nosed than Gorbachev, that it would still have been a bit repressive and autocratic, but it would have moved towards a market economy. Maybe still bad things would have happened, but perhaps not on the scale of the Chechen wars. But well, except what I'd say to that is that ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, the one thing that people across the world have been able to draw solace from is the fact that nuclear war between two rival superpowers is unlikely and perhaps the one of the well i think the most unsettling aspect of the current crisis is that um putin is now starting to talk about using nuclear weapons and one of the disturbed you know the reason that's disturbing is that people say oh

it's just gamemanship but every threat threat he's delivered, every threat that he said he has actually acted on. Yes, there was a brilliant article by a woman called Fiona Hill. The British soft Russian expert in Washington, right? Exactly, the British expert who's recently been involved in all kinds of shenanigans in Washington. And she said, you know, every time people say he won't do this. He does it.

He does. Yeah. And in a way, that's the surprise about Putin, that he's turned out not to be this sort of coldly ruthless chess player, but he looks now

more like a gambler whose gambles have succeeded and succeeded and succeeded. And now he's taken the biggest gamble of all. And as people often say, it'll either end with the destruction of Ukraine or the destruction of himself and his regime. And it's quite a dark story, you know, not just for Ukrainians, is it, but for Russians as well?

Right, it is. Yeah, it is. It's a story of – it's funny, actually, because one of the things son had at Christmas, or I was given at Christmas, but he loves it, is the private eye annual for last year. He doesn't understand, he understands about 10% of 20% of the jokes. So we should explain that for people who aren't British, that it's a kind of satirical magazine that comes out fortnightly about British politics. and i think if you're in any way interested in politics and you're british it's it's a kind of gateway drug to understanding how politics it is exactly works because you have to work out who the characters are yeah so arthur loves it he likes all the jokes about boris and stuff um but he said to me he said gosh there are a lot of jokes here

about vladimir putin and you wouldn't be able to do them today because, of course, he's Hitler now. And he was telling me how at school, you know, all the 10-year-olds say he's Hitler, all this stuff. They're all excited and discussing where they're going to hide in the event of a nuclear war and stuff in the way that 10-year-old boys do. And I sort of thought it is, you know, we did our very first podcast on the subject of greatness.

And in that podcast, we ended by saying, is there anybody who will be regarded as great? And we talked about Vladimir Putin, certainly his sense of himself as great. And Russians, you know, he has, we talked about that sense of greatness that's born of martial prowess, glory, conquest, strength, the projection of the kind of image of virility that Alexander had and Pompey had and all these, I don't know, Henry VIII or Napoleon or whatever. And we talked about Putin. But of course, that's not a conversation we'd have in the same way today. Do you think, Tom?

No, we wouldn't um even though he's what he's doing to the cities in ukraine is what he'd already done in syria right in chechnya so and what conquer commanders have done in history in a way that people pass off in the footnotes oh by the way he leveled this city smashed up corinth he destroyed thebes he and we sort of say oh i know that was another sign of his of his greatness but actually when you read that against the news it makes you think a bit more deeply and we sort of say, oh, ha, ha, ha. I know that was another sign of his greatness. But actually, when you read that against the news, it makes you think a bit more deeply about the consequences. I think you're being harsh on us as a collective because I think we did push at those kind of paradoxes there

and the moral complexities of the idea of greatness. When the war began, I put out a tweet where I said kind of Vladimir Putin, Peter the Great, or Anthony Eden. Oh, yeah, I saw that. Some people didn't like that. when the war began i put out a tweet where i said kind of vladimir putin peter the great or anthony eden oh yeah i saw that yeah and some people didn't like that some people were very very upset by that yeah i suppose i wasn't quite sure why they were upset i suppose the implication that that putin could in any way be great but obviously you know peter the great was great because he he built russia on the i mean you know in the case of st petersburg literally on the backs of the bones of those who built this

extraordinary city out of the kind of the mud flats of uh of the north but i mean he killed a lot of people and peter the great like stalin is one of the two great heroes of of put. And that is a kind of model of greatness that he's consciously aspiring to. Absolutely. Or will he turn out to be Antony Eden, i.e. will he be brought down by sanctions? Well, I mean, I think it's fair to say that we're hopeful, aren't we? But the extraordinary thing is that I'm still kind of struggling to get a sense of is the extent to which russia in the last few days has been cut off behind a renewed iron curtain you know none of these media organizations now working in russia so we're not getting the same information we were once getting twitter banned in russia so you know

we're not getting the same flow of social media um and this possibility that actually in the next you know few months things will happen will happen in cities in russia and we'll just take garbled reports of them as we would have once done in the 1980s months, things will happen in cities in Russia and we'll just take garbled reports of them as we would have once done in the 1980s and actually not know what's happening. People are posting restaurant reviews, aren't they? Yes, yes, I have. Google Maps reviews to try and get messages across to Russians.

But also vice versa. Are they posting reviews of tea rooms in Stonewall? Yes. Help, we're being attacked kind of thing all right golly yeah yeah i'm sure that'll be clear i mean if we're talking about it on a podcast i'm sure the uh the russian security services are on to that jeff and they listen to this podcast i doubt it i very much doubt it anyway uh all very depressing um but the story that we told in those four episodes so i now i now wish you know i want

to do that subject for ages and i and i slightly wish we'd done it in even more depth um because particularly i think russia in the 90s it was such a crazy period and at least what it was absolutely the wild east there's so many i mean domin Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson's erstwhile advisor, now fiercest critic, sort of the brains of Brexit. He was in Russia in the 1990s, I think trying to develop an airline. Isn't that right? And he was about 10, wasn't he? Yeah.

I think he just left university and went straight to Russia in that way that some people did. And some people obviously became incredibly rich. But the combination of that, of the looting and the oligarchs, with the collapse in living standards, the poverty, but also the insane politics. So another thing we didn't massively touch on was the fact that, I mean, we talked about it as Weimar,

but the political scene in Russia was so extreme. And there was so much anti-Semitism, for example, and fervent kind of nationalism. And one of the really remarkable things is that right is that in the 90s all these different political forces kind of coalesced behind this what you would call you could call a kind of red brown you know communist stroke fascist um coalescence as the I've used coalesce twice but there you Um, so I was only just seeing yesterday, the head of the communist party who we mentioned in the podcast, Gennady Zyuganov.

He came second to Yeltsin in 96. He gave a press conference yesterday, Tom, yesterday saying that, um, NATO and the Americans have established biological weapons labs in Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine just over the border.

And they're preparing their biological and chemical weapons to attack the Russian people. And that's why, you know, Putin should go further and go faster kind of thing. I thought, how at least he hasn't said put them in the Baltic Republics, which would be no, I suppose that would be terrifying. So Dominic, I mean, I'm aware that we're now getting strung into politics and we're we don't want to do a Rory alistair campbell do we don't we don't but just just because you know much more about this than me the the end game i mean what is there any conceivable end game it's really that you can see because i mean it's obviously gone terribly wrong for putin the war's gone wrong gone badly yeah the economy has been hit much worse than he'd anticipated

there's no the only way that he can really row back is to kind of say i got it wrong and he's never going to do that he's not going to do that no so the only option really seems to be to escalate it isn't it and to to try and get in a kind of fight fight with nato i mean that's a very very grim um way of putting it i think he so my reading of it is this that putin like so many people ended up believing his own propaganda just being surrounded by people who told him what he wanted to hear that the west was weak the ukraine was basically a complete shambles and a frankenstein's monster of a country do you think he really thought that they were a bunch of nazis i mean he's literally saying about a state led by a jewish president i mean that's crazy i think there's a bit of him

it's impossible to say isn't it did did hit there's a bit of him. It's impossible to say, isn't it? Did Hitler believe all the mad things that Hitler... Yes, I think he did, didn't he? I suppose he did. Did Stalin? Yes. You end up believing it yourself, don't you? I mean, this is the thing with politicians.

You end up... Part of you knows that some of it is contrived, exaggerated, all of that stuff, but you end up convincing yourself, especially if you're in an echo chamber where other people just articulate your prejudices to you. Or is it an illustration of my thesis that Hitler has become the devil and that your enemies, if you're in a kind of Manichaean, good and evil, light and dark, your enemies have to be Nazis because that's the only

possible justification. That's absolutely true in Russia because what's happened in russia in the last 20 years is the second world war i mean god think how much we beat ourselves up in britain about this uh the second world war has become a stifling kind of national myth so everything is seen through that prism um and and in a way yeah they're now even if there's no evidence of nazism whatsoever i mean by the way there are there are far-right extremists in Ukraine, but they are such a minority on the political spectrum. They don't even hold, I think, any seats in the Ukrainian parliament. No, and to repeat, their president is Jewish.

Their president is a Russian speaker and is Jewish. Exactly, Tom. And so part of the paradoxical horror of what's happening is that the Russians have become their worst nightmares. They're making Stalingrads out of Ukrainian cities in which they are playing the part of the Germans. They are indeed. And they're laying siege to Kiev as the Mongols laid siege to it. So they're playing the part of the Mongols. Yeah, agreed. I mean, it's a terrible situation. Anyway, you asked about the endgame lay siege to it. So they're playing the part of the Mongols. Yeah, agreed.

I mean, it's a terrible situation. Anyway, you asked about the endgame. Sorry, Tom, I rambled and didn't answer. You asked about the endgame. Pugin is now in a position where when he wakes up in the morning and thinks about his options, continuing fighting is probably his least worst option as he sees it. He can't stop and say it was all a mistake.

He can't really declare victory and go home i don't think um there's almost no way back for him now with the west it's hard to see you know it's not like he can say he can say sorry i've made a mistake and people will relax the sanctions i mean that's not really how it works i think he thinks i will just power through he perhaps thinks there'll be if there's a change of administration in America, if the West will lose interest, people get bored, I'll present them with a fait accompli. I mean, he's no stranger to frozen conflicts as well.

So Georgia, Transnistria, places like that, where basically the Russians are still there, but there's just a stalemate in these places. So perhaps he thinks I'll just keep fighting. It'll end up being a stalemate in Ukraine forever and ever. And eventually I'll get what I want because they'll lose interest and all this stuff. I mean, the problem he'll have is losses of troops and losses of money. Expensive losses of money. Yeah, you're right. I mean, the trouble is a lot of young Russians have been connected, haven't they, to the sort of world network.

I mean, just even small things like they're not going to get Netflix, they're not going to get the new cinema releases, they're not going to get Apple products, they're not going to get all these things. And of course, these are all kind of middle class things. But often the middle class is the very people who drive revolutions and regime changes. Sorry, this is a very morbid end to the podcast, Tom.

Well, it's a morbid subject, isn't it? It's hard not to feel depressed about it. We should be back, hopefully, with more jolly material. Maybe Tom will do some impersonations next time to cheer us up. And on that note, we'll say thank you for listening. Goodbye. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History.

For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip.

And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com