25 Years of Putinism with Sam Greene
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Welcome back. I'm Max Bergman, director of the Stuart Center and Europe-Russia-Eurasia program at CSIS. And I'm Maria Snegovaya, senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia. And you're listening to Russian Roulette, a podcast discussing all things Russia and Eurasia from the Center for Strategic International Studies.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Russian Roulette. We hope you had a great holiday season and are excited for what is definitely going to be a very interesting year for Russia, Ukraine, and the broader post-Soviet region. Maria and I are joined today by Dr. Sam Green. Sam is a professor of Russian politics at King's College London and also the director for democratic resilience at the Center for European Analysis, SIPA, here in DC. Sam is joining us today in London for a conversation marking 25 years of Putin.

Having lived in, studied, and written about Russia for years, Sam is perfectly positioned to help us understand the first quarter century of Vladimir Putin's rule. Sam, thank you so much for joining us today. Well, thank you for having me, and thank you for reminding me how long I've been doing this. Yes.

Well, I don't think there'll be another quarter century of Putin rule. But Sam, maybe we could start by kind of going back to the beginning, to sort of the origin of Putin ascending to power, becoming president of Russia 25 years ago at the stroke of midnight on January 1st, 2000. At the time when he came to office, he was described as a man without a face by Masha Gessen. There was many in the West that were hoping that this is maybe the democratic reformer that Russia needs.

And then it sort of all goes awry, essentially from a Western perspective. But I guess the question is, was Putin ever sort of a democratic reformer? Was there a moment that things sort of went off or was Putin sort of the, you know, which is the other narrative, the kind of embodiment of the Syloviki sort of taking back power and then pushing the kind of grand imperial project for making Russia great again, effectively? How do you kind of see Putin as becoming a leader in his sort of initial evolution?

Well, so I really appreciate the question, particularly the last word that you used in that question, because I think there's been a tendency, particularly in the last three years, to read history backwards, right? To assume that everything that we have been through has been leading up to this. I mean, on some level, it has been leading up to this, right? But that can often imply kind of an intentionality to it, as though Putin and the people who put him in power and the people who supported him from the very, very beginning had exactly this destination in mind.

And of course, that's not the way the history works, right? History happens from front to back, not from back to front. And people learn in the process. And it is an evolution. I think Putin has been one of those people learning as we've gone through this.

Putin was a president by design. He was identified by Yeltsin's elite towards the end as somebody who would be, they thought, I think, to a certain degree manageable. And I think that's where the person without a face comes from, right? Somebody who would come in, not necessarily with his own agenda. You know, on some level, I think he delivered on that, right? He didn't come in as a representative of one of the warring sort of factions around Yeltsin at the time.

he wasn't going to compete for his slice of the pie. As it turned out, he ended up accumulating maybe kind of the entirety of the pie at

as a whole, but I don't even know how intentional that was. He did, however, come in with, I think, a set of predilections and priorities, which really had to do with the functioning of the state and with the primacy of the state. It always seemed to be very important to him going back, as he described it in his first person biography that he released in lieu of a presidential campaign.

He tells the story of the moment when he was in East Germany and the protesters at the gates and he calls for instructions from Moscow and Moscow doesn't answer. And that seems to have been sort of a very jarring, informative experience from him. His imperative was always to make sure that Moscow was there and that Moscow would answer whatever the circumstances were.

But he inherited a Moscow that didn't have a lot of leeway, that didn't have a lot of autonomy. It was heavily indebted. The government was indebted both internationally and domestically. It really was...

beholden to corporations. We have these apocryphal stories of the government coming to Gazprom to ask for taxes and Gazprom basically saying, "Well, who are you to ask us for money? We're the ones earning the money here." And so I think very early on, we saw him try to reassert the primacy of the state, and that meant going after those forces that were capable of limiting the autonomy of the state.

That started with television. It then goes on to the oligarchs. It then goes on to the governors. It goes on to the Duma and the entirety of the political system. And I think kind of the trap that Putin put himself in very early on was that every time he dealt with one challenge, again, whether that's the television, whether that's the oligarchs, whether that's the political parties or the governors, there always seemed to be a new one around the corner, right? There always seemed to be somebody else that he now had to think about, had to worry about, who might be potentially hemming him in.

and a degree of paranoia that seems to beset almost anybody who begins to accumulate that degree of power. But I do think that was a learning process. I don't know that Putin knew, you know, when he started going after Kuczynski and Berezovsky to take over their television channels in 2000, 2001,

that he would end up taking over Yukos a couple of years later. When he took over Yukos, I don't know that he knew that he would end up going after the governors and appointing all the governors for a number of years. I don't know that at any point that he knew he was going to try to hive himself off

of relations with the West, although I think he was always skeptical to a large degree over the fate of that relationship. I think this has been a process of discovery, even if I don't necessarily agree analytically with the things that Putin seems to have discovered for himself.

Sam, thank you very much. I'm actually a big fan of your work with Graham Robertson, the book entitled Putin versus the people, in which I think you very pointedly flag the importance of this constructed perception of the social consensus in Russia and how it's actually this middle group of the people in between the hawkish anti-Westerners and the staunch liberals who constitute the majority of the Putin support.

claiming that to them, essentially, it's where the propaganda is targeted, is trying to convince them that the policies are taken in their favor and the majority is supporting Putin, which makes indeed the imaginable true. The majority does side with Putin. I wonder, of course, the question on everybody's mind is how did this Putin consensus change?

or did not since the start of the war? Do we see the major shifts, or is the basic premise and the logic of this constituting crafting the majority support basically remains the same despite these unprecedented changes Russia goes through? Well, I'm not really sure that we know the answer to that question, and I'm not sure it is knowable. There are, as you know, Maria, some debates about our ability to understand what's going on in Russian public opinion. They are very much live debates. I think

Look, the argument that Graham and I were making in Putin versus the people, and thank you very much for the plug, was that Putin has to work with the material that's available to him in the Russian public. He can't create public opinion out of whole cloth. And so if you go back to, I know you asked about the war, but if we go back to 2012 or so, 2013, when he's still struggling a little bit to marginalize the Bolotnaya opposition that

began to bubble up, this anti-authoritarian opposition movement that began to bubble up in the major cities after his return from his hiatus as prime minister. It was kind of experimental. He just started throwing stuff at the wall, or his team started throwing stuff at the wall to see what would stick, right? They worked on some anti-migrant sentiment that didn't work too well because, turn out, the opposition was at least as xenophobic as the regime was, if not more in some ways. They settled on LGBT issues.

They settled on religious issues, things that seemed to work, but they tried a number of things along the way. Remember, they tried banning American adoptions of Russian children. That didn't stick very well because it seemed inhumane to too many Russians, right? So they go where the public will allow them to go. But I think what we've learned since the war is that the public will allow them to go quite some distance.

So, I think Putin himself was a little bit nervous about the state of public opinion and how public opinion would react to this war. He understood that Crimea itself in 2014 was a bit of a unicorn. It was something that could be done almost bloodlessly, certainly bloodlessly for the Russian military itself. It was over before most people in Russia really even knew that it was happening. Didn't go so well in Donbas in the early years, and that forced a little bit of a climb down from Moscow.

And so the prospect of a large scale war was one that I think he thought that the Russian public might not be ready for. And I'm assuming he's probably pleasantly surprised by the inertia when it comes to the Russian public responding, really not responding to images of atrocities coming out of Ukraine. For a while, we sort of maybe believed that most Russians didn't know that was happening. I think that's an untenable assertion at this point. Most Russians seem to be aware.

and certainly can be aware if they want to be aware, and they choose to dismiss it. They choose to dismiss the number of Russians coming back in body bags. They choose to dismiss Ukrainian drones landing in Russian cities and chunks of Russian territory itself being occupied by Ukrainian excursionary forces. And so that doesn't mean that Putin could get away with anything. We've seen that he does seem to be running scared to a certain extent of Russian public opinion when it comes to the issue of mobilization and calling up Russians

for military service, again, something that you've written about. But this is also a learning process for Putin. Putin thought that he could get away with military mobilization. It turned out that he couldn't. And he thought that he might not be able to get away with this scale and duration of warfare. And it

I just think we need to be very sort of humble and circumspect. There are things that we can learn, but we will make mistakes and Putin will make mistakes when it comes to public opinion over the course of this war, in part because I think sometimes as analysts, we assume that public opinion is just sort of the sum total of millions of individual opinions.

and that everybody sort of forms their opinion in isolation. And sociologically, you can just sort of go and count it all up and you get some big number at the end that tells you what the distribution is. The reality is that we all form our opinions in conversations with other people. And so public opinion tends to be very, very sticky until it's not. It can move very rapidly. In fact, it doesn't tend to move gradually, right? It tends to move in leaps and bounds.

And Putin will be aware of that as well. And so I think that his management of public opinion and his management of this war reflects his fear that things can change faster than he will be able to respond to them. Although I have to mention that we get to see the change. I'll just give an anecdotal evidence of the reaction to this war by one of my colleagues.

acquaintances in Russia, every time I raise this question, she shuts down. The issue just does not exist. And it's not just me. The person just completely ignores the topic altogether. So it does not exist. It does not concern her. It's somewhere else. We can talk about anything else, but when it comes to the war, there's just this wall. It was actually quite interesting from the psychological perspective to sort of see how this adjustment works, and I wonder how long it can last.

I think that's absolutely right. But I think that's not limited to the war. I think that's an extension of the way that most Russians have dealt with politics and the role of the state in their lives really since the end of the Soviet Union. We go back to the work of sociologists like Sarah Ashwin and others who were describing patience and how Russians really dealt with all of the difficulties of life in the 1990s. They dealt with it by insulating themselves from the state, by turning inwards to one another.

and trying to keep the state as far away from their lives as possible. And that habit has turned into a tremendous asset for Putin and a tremendous burden for the opposition. The biggest challenge for the opposition was always to convince Russians, not that Putin was corrupt or that the country was poorly governed. I think people always understood that. It was to convince them that the state could ever do anything useful if you were to elect somebody different.

And that habit, it's I think that same habit of insulating yourself and isolating yourself from the state has allowed people to try to isolate themselves from this war. One of the narratives about Putin in public opinion, particularly I think during the first decade or really the first two decades of Putinism was that the grand bargain with the Russian public was that Putin came in, brought order, the economy started growing and booming.

And basically the bargain with the Russian public is, Russian people, you stay out of politics. Your standard of living will be fine, but just leave it to me. And if you get involved in politics, then the hammer could come down on you. I wonder what you think about that narrative. But also, was war sort of always part of Putinism? So was it not just stay out of politics and your lives will be better off?

But is there a nationalist element to this as well, that this is a nationalist economic project, essentially, that the Russian public sort of bought in to making Russia stronger, the war element? Putin came in, there was a war in Chechnya, then we've had a war in Georgia, Ukraine, Syria, and the Russian public has been with him on each of these.

So I'm curious both how you see that kind of former narrative about the Russian public essentially being bought off to stay out of politics, and then maybe what about the nationalist component here? Has that always been core and the Russian public seems to have sort of bought into that side? A couple of really good questions there, but I think somewhat separate questions, right? So the first question about the social contract,

I've always been a little uncomfortable with the idea of the social contract, particularly that particular sort of constitution of it, because I don't think it's ever been borne out by the evidence. There have been ups and downs in the Russian economy. There have been times when things have been really increasingly difficult for people, and we haven't seen them punish the government. We haven't seen the flip side of that, right? So if it's true that people will stay out of politics as long as the government delivers,

Well, we haven't seen people get into politics when the government doesn't deliver. We have seen people get into politics when the government gets in the way. So when the government starts to reform housing rules, for example, or when it starts renovation, large-scale demolition of buildings in Moscow, for example, or when it starts to plant

garbage dumps in people's backyards, that kind of things that directly affect people's autonomy in their lives, that does tend to provoke protest on some level, resistance on some level. And often, in fact, it's quite successful and the government tends to back down, mostly because it's not things that the top level of the government cares about that much. So I think to the extent that there is a social contract, it's this

kind of referred to as a Soviet-style divorce, in which there was a housing shortage. And so you could get divorced from your spouse, but you couldn't move into a different apartment. You've got the government and the population that really don't like each other very much, don't trust each other, but they have to share this space that's called Russia. And so they just try to stay out of each other's way, let each other live their lives. And as long as the government observes that, usually it can get away with it. I think that's what the government transgressed with the

When it started to say, we're going to take you out of your quiet little lives where you could ignore the war and force you to get involved, right? That risks a mobilized response because you're taking people out of these sort of individualized coping mechanisms and worlds that they've built for themselves over the last few decades. And I sort of want to...

the government has backed down. But I think this comes back to the issue of ideology, what you were asking about in terms of the war. Part of Putin's learning trajectory over his 25 years in office now has been about the role of ideology. He started off really trying to be all things to all people and trying to avoid ideology at all costs. He would use it, I mean, he brought back the Soviet national anthem and some symbolism here or there in order to sort of get the support of older generations, but he could also be quite modern. The tandem with Medvedev was a perfect

example of this, because if you wanted freedom and iPhones, you supported Medvedev. And if you wanted Soviet nostalgia, you supported Putin. At the end of the day, you were supporting the same thing. But...

After he comes back into, or he says he's going to come back in 2011 after he returns to office in 2012, with the advent of this anti-authoritarian opposition, that becomes increasingly difficult, in his view, impossible to do. And so he brings in ideology in the form of wedge issues to really marginalize the opposition and galvanize his own support.

And that begins to take on a life of his own, because the way that that gets framed is, well, we need to defend Russia against this encroaching West, but it's an ideologically encroaching West. You go back to, again, his one campaign speech in February 23rd, not by accident, Defender of the Fatherland Day, right, in 2012 at Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow, and he's quoting

patriotic poetry about Napoleon's invasion and the Battle of Borodino. And he's saying, this campaign isn't a battle between competing political forces in Russia. It's a battle about the future of Russia itself with the West. And in some ways, that discourse begins to manifest itself into the kind of conflict that we are seeing now. He begins to, I think, have to put the force of the state behind

the rhetoric that he uses. But there's another sort of subtle shift that went with that. You mentioned the second war in Chechnya, in which the Russian public were with Putin to a much greater extent than they were with Yeltsin in the first war. Of course, the second war was much more successful. It was also prosecuted in an environment with much tighter political and media control. And so people were much less aware of exactly what was happening, but eventually they still become aware of the scale of

atrocity in Chechnya, and they're still willing to accommodate it. I think this accompanies a couple of other shifts. So Putin is bringing back the centrality of World War II in Russian myth-making and political legitimation, as well as a sense of the newfound competence of the Russian state. The '90s were a period in which the state was falling apart, wasn't able to do very much, and now all of a sudden, it can do things, including through the military.

I'm old enough to remember when what people would say in Russia about World War II was, "Just let there not be a war." And at some point, while Putin was quarter century in power, that pivoted to "We can do it again," the "it," right? That can be done again, being taking Berlin and conquering the Reichstag. And that made, again, the Russian public available for the kind of adventure that Putin decided to undertake in Ukraine.

It strikes me just listening to you that perhaps Russia is just full of NIMBYs and not in my backyard. So totally willing to kind of go along, but as soon as you sort of put demands on whether it's mobilization or putting a dump next to someone's house, that's how you get some of the mobilization. But let me turn it back over to Maria. Yes, Sam. Actually, my next question is very short. Does Putin equal Russia?

Based on what you've said, right, we do see, while at the same time there's some continuity, there's also very different potency. And today's realities are reshaping the Russian society through the proactive pushing of the ideological narratives as you flagged yourself, also the reshuffling of the Russian society, the exodus of the Russian liberals. So at this point, 25 years in, also like a quarter century in power, it makes him one of the longest-ruling dictators in the world.

Do you think that at this point we can credibly argue that maybe Russia is Putin? Well, I think they certainly constitute each other, Putin and the Russian public. Putin does what he does because he's able to rely on the Russian public being below him and behind him. The Russian public find him useful.

I think more as kind of as a lodestar and as a symbol than as an actual material being. Back when Graham and I were interviewing people for Putin versus the people, we were talking with people who had just gotten through voting for him in 2018.

some of whom were optimistic about their own economic prospects, but they weren't thanking Putin for it. They were going to vote for Putin anyway, but they were going to vote for Putin because it was a way of communicating that they were sort of normal members of Russian society. Now, that, of course, is enabled by all of the ways in which Putin has exercised power, the fact that he's consolidated power and is able to communicate to ordinary Russians that the normal sane thing, the Russian word is sort of adikvatnosti,

is the important one here, that the way that you communicate that you are a normal upstanding member of Russian society and a trustworthy member of Russian society who understands how things are put together and how the world works is to communicate that you're just like everybody else. And being just like everybody else means supporting Putin. Does that mean that has to last forever, right? And I think kind of the subtext of your question is, is Putin Russia? Does that mean that what we get after Putin is a continuation of Putin just under a different guise?

I don't know that that necessarily follows. I do think it depends to a certain extent, maybe we'll talk about this, about how Putin leaves office and how his successor is then generated. But to say that Putin rests on the support and the complicity of the Russian public is, I think, absolutely true. But that doesn't mean that Putin is the only kind of leader that the Russian public is capable of supporting. Thank you. And from that question, Sam, since you already hinted to my next follow-up question,

What does it make us think about the possibilities of this succession? Of course, it's probably even at this point too early to speak of Putin leaving anytime soon. But what do you think potentially is the more likely scenario? We have seen across the Central Asian states

The natural passing of the dictators of this kind typically tends to be followed by a replacement of this leader on top of the power vertical with another authoritarian figure. Alternatively, we can perhaps envision more turbulent scenarios with certain popular uprising or maybe even a coup if, say, the war ends up going really badly against what the Kremlin anticipates it. So what essentially is the most likely scenario here we're looking at?

The problem with authoritarian succession is it's always too early until it's too late, that we almost always get the timing wrong on those sorts of things. So I'm not going to predict the future, if you'll excuse me. But I think the most likely scenario is inertia, right? The most likely scenario is Putin continues, and the world seems to be conspiring to make it increasingly easy for him to do that at the moment.

But the most likely thing is that he continues until biologically he just runs out of steam. It will be very difficult for him to organize the kind of transition that, for example, Nazarbayev tried and eventually failed to organize in Kazakhstan. It worked for a while until it didn't. Putin will have learned a lesson from that. But the stakes, in part because of the war, are, I think, much higher in Russia. And Russia was always more

competitive, less monolithic, I think than the Kazakh regime was as well. And so that scenario always struck me as not terribly likely. Is it possible that people could decide it's time to get rid of him? It's not impossible. What we've known for a long time is that there's lots of people in the Russian elite who think that he's not doing a great job, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they think that anybody could do any better. And the problem with an organized transition, an elite-led coup, is that it will inevitably create winners and losers.

At the moment, everybody in the system is a winner to one degree or another. They might not be as much of a winner as they'd like to be. They're almost certainly not as much of a winner as they were before the war. But if it's going to create winners and losers, and you have no way of knowing whether you're going to be a winner or a loser, your powerful incentive is on your hands.

until things get to be so catastrophically bad that everybody becomes a potential loser unless things change. And I think we're very, very far from that at the moment. There's still a lot to play for in this system. And we see the Russian elite really organizing itself around that. The bigger question for me is if the Russian elite are able to see their way to trying to get rid of Putin and create something to replace him,

What is it that they want to create? Is it the system exactly as it was before February 2022? Because they've lost quite a bit of autonomy and power since then. But that requires probably opening up access to the West again, which is something that could potentially be very difficult, unless they're going to be able to undo all of the things that Putin did in Ukraine, which itself would be very difficult, partly because it's already been written into the Russian constitution. And because the Russian public, at least for the moment, is behind it.

And so if all they're looking for is sort of a continuation of this status quo, but without the potential that Putin might make it worse down the road, I think that's potentially quite unstable. I'm not among those who thinks that Russia is about to disintegrate. I don't think that that's on the cards, but I think a period of difficult elite competition over the future of Russia and over the spoils of the

This now more limited system and limiting system that Putin has put in place in the last three years is probably the most likely outcome. It seems like what you're saying is that sort of the vessels or vectors for change in Russia will only really come about if things get very bad, either situation in Ukraine, the economy, or if Putin just is, you know, he's 72, so in five, 10 years of some health situation.

either something bad, quote unquote, happens vis-a-vis Putin's health, the war in Ukraine, the economy, then that would push Russian elites and Russian society to say, "Okay, something has to change here." But it leaves a lot of space then for Putin to sort of continue on ruling Russia sort of uninterrupted, at least for the time being. For the time being, except

I'm not going to sit here and say that it can only happen when things are objectively visibly very bad, because it could all happen tomorrow, right? And I could look stupid in about five minutes. I'm trying to get a prediction out of you to make you look stupid. It's not going to happen. I mean, look, there are informational problems. There are things that we simply don't know and don't have great visibility of. And the Russian state is going to great lengths to make it difficult for us to get visibility of that. It is important to note that

It doesn't have to be bad in objective terms, right, for this kind of dynamic to happen. It has to look and feel catastrophic or potentially catastrophic for the people in the moment. But that can be a very situational feeling. You know, we've been through an election in the U.S. just recently, right, in which people were voting on the basis of

economic sentiment that doesn't entirely match up with actual economic numbers. But all of these things are very emotional. And all of these things, we were talking about public opinion a moment ago and how it sort of formed in this very dynamic process of socialization. That's true of the elite as well, and of Putin's constituents at the top of the political food chain in Russia. I think things can be very difficult to predict. They can be very dynamic.

but I do think that all other things being equal, right, it will require people to think that they really have no other choice but then to get rid of them. Maybe a final question, which is the question sort of roiling Washington presently. We're recording on January 9th. Donald Trump is set to take office in 11 days. He's pushing for peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. I'm curious what you think are the kind of prospects

for those negotiations, but also more broadly for US-Russia relationship? Or is there a chance of sort of a rapprochement between Washington and Moscow? You know, if Washington offered, would Moscow accept and vice versa? Or is there something inherently anti-Western about Putinism? How do you kind of see perhaps the next few years playing out? And do you think there's room for movement in terms of the US-Russia relationship?

David Schawel: So Russia right now is addicted to this war. At the very least, it's addicted to geopolitical confrontation with the West. It's the only thing that's driving economic production at the moment on any scale. It's the only thing certainly that's driving growth. The country would be in stagnation if not in recession if it weren't for the war. It justifies repression, both of the population at large and of the elite.

And it becomes very difficult to see how Putin could pivot away from that. It sounds odd to say this, but Putin is risk averse. If something's working, he doesn't like to change it. So as long as this is working, I think he's likely to stick with it, which means I think the room for rapprochement with the West as a whole is quite limited. Whether that means that there's no room for rapprochement with the United States is...

is a different question. Moscow has spent a long time, decades really, trying to drive a wedge between Europe and the United States, usually because it thought that it would be able to form a coalition with Europe against the United States. Something very different is happening now, right, in which it seems to be aligning in certain, at least ideological ways, with the United States and picking a fight with Europe, whether that's about geopolitics or wokeism or whatever the flavor of the minute is. But that is...

I think a little situational. And I think that Moscow, having been through one Trump administration already, is a little unwilling to give the Trump administration a lot of rope. I think that they are not inclined to trust agreements and trust promises made by Trump. I think we'll want to make sure that they are very much the ones in control of what happens next in Ukraine and along the European-Russian sort of borderlands.

As a result, I really don't see, I certainly don't see a peace agreement being available. If a ceasefire is available, I think it's not beyond the realm of possibility. But again, Moscow will want to make sure that it's the one controlling escalatory dynamics along the front line. And so I think it will be loathe to accept the kind of things that might make a ceasefire acceptable to the Ukrainians. In other words, robust Western-backed guarantees against further Russian aggression. Now, whether the US is going to care about those things under a Trump administration, or

or whether it would like to pivot on to other domains, we'll have to wait and see. But again, I think that Moscow will want to maintain flexibility. It's really an odd moment in which Russia, although it's stronger now in some ways, has demonstrated strength through this war to a degree, more so than many would have liked, is not institutionally strong. It's not conventionally strong. It cannot compete with the

the West on those sorts of terms. And so it usually has tried to maximize its advantage by being the most unpredictable person in the room, by keeping everybody guessing about what their intentions are. When they're facing a Trump administration that has shown itself just in the last several days to be geopolitically unpredictable, even to a degree that Putin could not imagine, it

that I think puts Putin in a very uncomfortable position. I'm not saying that's by design of the Trump administration in order to make life difficult for Putin. I'm not sure they've thought it through to that degree. But Putin, I think if he's going to play that game of unpredictability, he needs the other variables in the equation to be held more or less constant. And I think that Trump is oddly making that very difficult for him at the moment, as a result of which Putin probably will not himself want to tie Russia down to any

durable commitments. So if I'm going to make a prediction, Max, that's going to be it. Russia will continue to maximize flexibility. I think that's a good prediction and a good place to leave it. Sam, thank you so much for joining Maria and I for what was a really tremendous conversation. And thank you as always to our listeners for tuning in. If you'd like to engage with more of Sam's work, please check out his substack, TLD Russia. We have a link included in our show notes. The substack's really fantastic.

Our dear producer, Nick Fenton, is a huge fan, Sam. So thank you so much and keep up the good work there. And if you haven't already, please subscribe to our show. Give us a five-star rating and also please check out our sister podcast, The Europhile, wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again and see you next time. You've been listening to Russian Roulette. We hope you enjoyed this episode and tune in again soon.

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