Hi, everyone, Peter Zion here still in DC coming to you from the Kennedy Center. We’re talking about leadership. And the next person I want to talk about is Vladimir Putin. Now ruling the Soviet system slash Russian system isn’t nearly as much of a challenge as you might think, yes, you’ve got billions of rest of minorities. Yes, your national security strategy rests upon, basically enslaving them and turning them into cannon fodder. But you do so via a very simple method, you use an intelligence service that infiltrates everything within your country. And whenever there is a hint of dissent, you stamp it out, lethally and quickly. And when you have a system like that, you basically base your government on information control. And as long as a security apparatus is functioning, you can then press gang, the entire population to do whatever you want. It’s not particularly efficient from an economic point of view. But Russia has existed for nearly four centuries in its current form, more or less, and it does it put into position it kind of strategic stability within the country that is fairly durable. Now, the Putin government is the successor of a coup that happened in the Soviet Union in 1982. At that point, in 1982, the KGB basically overthrew the other factions within the Soviet ruling coalition within the Communist Party, and so on, drop off chair mirrored, and Gorbachev, We’re all ears to that legacy. And Putin is the inheritor of that legacy. Now, you combine that concentration of power with the collapse of the educational system in the Soviet system around 1986, with the country’s demographic collapse, and it means that the total elite throughout the entire Russian system is only about 130 people. And Putin has had 23 years to basically purge it down to the people that he feels he can trust. So if Putin were to slip in the shower and fall in some duct tape and sit in a chair and throw himself into a pool, we probably wouldn’t have any serious policy changes, because everybody who’s left is more or less on the same page. Okay. So with an elite that is that concentrated in that small, the capacity to manage the entire system is limited. Now, this isn’t quite as bad as it is in China. I mean, China is a one man show now. And even if you Jing ping were the smartest person on the planet, he still wouldn’t be able to micromanage everything in the system. And that’s why we’re seeing the policy, ossification and cracks forming throughout the entire Chinese system. That’s not that bad in Russia. But Putin has had to reach out to manage the system by aligning with other factions at one point or a bunch of technocrats, like the former Prime Minister of Finance Minister accouter in, but more reliably, he’s partnered with organized crime. This is one of the reasons why the Russians have proven to be so Troubleman in cyberspace until very recently. So you’ve got this combination concentration of power, which urges corruption that is partnered with organized crime, which loves corruption. And as a result, the whole system is cracking apart. Putin himself, in part because he doesn’t matter. I don’t know how people live here. Putin himself, because of the concentration has sharply limited who has access to him simply because there aren’t a lot of people to choose from. So he has an inner circle of about six people, three of whom are absolutely incompetent like the defense minister, Choi Gu, who’s one of his old buddies back from East Berlin. Excuse me, in terms of the people that are competent, one of them is the chair of the cage or KGB FSB. Whose name Primakov, no, crap, Patricia. Wow. Sorry. It’s been a long month. Who is providing him with information and internal security but as of less use on the battlefield, and his chief propagandists is one of the six people is in the inner circle. So imagine if one of your six sources of information that used to manage everything in your life was either Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson. He’s just not getting information. That’s great. And it doesn’t help that he kind of insist that everybody lie to him about everything. So we get this brittle system that’s very top heavy, but not top competent. And in that sort of environment in dynamic situations, like I don’t know, a war, you are flirting with state collapse. On the security front. Now the Russians launched their assault in Ukraine, not because they were mad, or because Putin has an ego or wants to rebuild an empire know, the Russian demographic is in collapse. The Russian ethnicity is going to cease to exist the century it’s just a question of how long the state can hold on.

Ukraine is on the way to two of the big invasion access points into the Russian space. And with a demographic that’s in collapse, Putin rightly feels that unless they can control those gateways the next time there’s a major war or the Russian system will dissolve, because there won’t be anyone to defend it. So you have to concentrate forces in the access points to make a block. That’s what this is all about. This is what it’s always been about. That strategic desperation is why this war is happening. But the only thing that would be worse from the Russian point of view of not launching it, and probably seeing the Russian system disintegrate between 2040 and 2070, would be the launch and fail, because that would leave Russia completely open to all those invasion avenues. At the same time, it has paid all the costs for the war. At the same time, it is now under the degree of sanction from pretty much everyone as long as this government is in power. So we are looking if the Russians lose this war, at a complete disintegration of the system on the timeframe of like 10 years. Remember, with the recent mobilization, we’re pulling about a half a million Russian men in their 20s out and throwing them into the meat grinder, they might be able to make a difference, you throw half a million men at anything, it’s going to make a difference. But it’s going to come at the cost of the depletion of the last generation that the Russians have to even generate kids in the first place. There are less than 8 million Russian men in their 20s. And we’re now looking at about 10% of them being involved directly in the war. This isn’t gonna be the last mobilization either, because the Russians don’t have the tech all they have are bodies. And in half of the wars that Russia has been in where they’ve won, they’ve won on numbers. But this time around, those numbers are all they have. And when they’re gone, they’re depleted and they’re never coming back. There is no next generation. So Putin like she is likely to preside over the

end of his country. All right. That’s it for me. Next time we’re talking about the Saudis Mohammed bin Salman. Whoo, take care.