 Okay, we're going. So I'm Carol Hinkle. I think you got my introduction before. I'm not I'm still hanging in there past president Mary McEwen our new president could not be here today because she's ill. A couple of brief things I want to thank all the members for their support throughout the pandemic. I know it's not over but the heart of the pandemic I mean you stood by us you watched us you joined and we were worried about whether we could keep it going and without you we couldn't have kept it going so thank you thank you. We're going to have Q&A about quarter of three and we will want you to ask questions being live and people on zoom to ask questions also by going to the Q&A ask your questions anytime. We will alternate Q&A here Q&A here so everybody hopefully will have a chance to ask their questions. We do need volunteers to post our lectures on your local front porch forum and here's Carol Roach she's got black on with an orange lanyard see her after the meeting if you can help with that we really would appreciate that. Turn off your cell phones please and now I'm going into my co-program chair mode. I do want to thank Beth Wood and Michael Orlansky neither of them are here today but for years and years and years you know they've provided such wonderful programs for us and we really appreciate all that they've done. So a big thank you to them maybe a little applause even in case they watch us on zoom because we appreciate them. Okay so now we're going to hear about Russian public opinion in peace and in war. Will Pyle our speaker is the Frederick C. Dirks professor of international economics at Middlebury College where he has been on the faculty since 1999. His teaching spans topics from microeconomic theory to the Chinese economy to economic journalism. His research regularly appears in professional journals and generally focuses on the Russian economy. In recent years Will has held visiting positions at institutions in Munich, Helsinki where he just came back from and New York City. He and his wife Sylvia live in Middlebury they have two sons Matthias and Lucas please welcome Will Pyle. Well thank you so much it's wonderful to be here with you all on such a beautiful day I understand this is the first meeting in person of your group for a couple years and so I'm honored to be your first guest back in back in person. I start with this picture here to make a simple point about the role of individuals in history. Mikhail Gorbachev passed away just 10 days ago as the Soviet Union's last leader he was responsible more than anybody else in my estimation for bringing an end to the Cold War. He let the countries of Eastern Europe go their own way and he helped set in motion events that ultimately led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This past February Vladimir Putin decided that Russian forces would invade a peaceful Ukraine. The suffering and death that we've been witness to in the months since are down to his decision alone. They are his responsibility in full. Powerful individuals shape the course of history both for better and for worse. Now while recognizing that fact while remaining sensitive to the suffering and death in Ukraine in my remarks today I'd like to take a step back from the actions and the mindset of powerful individuals like Putin and address the mindset the worldview if you will of the Russian public. My thesis is that Russian society under Putin both at peace and at war has been greatly shaped by the experience of the country's exit from communism in the 1990s. A decade that brought tremendous shocks both to the Russian economy and to Russian's collective identity. This picture and I hope you can see in the back this picture captures well the country that Russia has become in the 21st century since Putin became president in 1999 the Levada Center a professional and wholly independent Russian polling organization has been asking the Russian public in face-to-face surveys in their own homes do you generally approve or disapprove of Putin's performance. For 22 plus years Putin's approval rating has exceeded 60 percent a level of popularity that Joe Biden can only dream of and I've got in place there the the red line that's Joe Biden's current popularity approval rating of 43 percent. You'll notice that immediately after where I put two red arrows there are spikes up in Putin's approval from roughly 60 percent to well over 80 percent. The more recent one all the way on the right comes from the March 22 poll taken right on the heels of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The earlier one comes in the winter of 2014 immediately after Russia forcibly annexed Ukraine forcibly annexed the Crimean Peninsula in Ukraine. A third peak in Putin's approval came right after Russia launched a brief and largely successful war against its southern neighbor the country of Georgia in 2008. This is Russia in the 21st century country that likes Putin and really likes Putin in the wake of military aggression in the former Soviet republics. Now perhaps you're skeptical of these numbers can we really believe opinion polls taken in Putin's Russia can there be independent polling in such a repressive and authoritarian country will people respond truthfully when strangers representing a polling firm even one with an unimpeachable reputation for independence come into their homes and ask questions about their political views. In my estimation there's good reason to believe that these polling numbers do come very close to capturing Russians true feelings about Putin. Political scientists have popularized a way of eliciting truthful responses from survey respondents in conditions in which they may want to conceal what they truly believe. It's called a list experiment. The way it works is you have a relatively large group of respondents and you split them into two similar groups and something like a scientific experiment is conducted there's a control group and a treatment group respondents in one group the control are asked something like how many of the following three people or the following three policies do you have a favorable opinion of you don't have to say which ones in particular you just need need to give a numeric answer I have a favorable opinion of none of them or one or two or three the other group of respondents is asked about four people or policies the three that the first group was asked about plus an additional one and that's the one that the the folks conducting the list experiment are really interested in you can then compare the average responses across the two groups to infer how many support the person or policy that only the second group was asked about nobody's compelled to answer a question about any specific person or policy so it's less intrusive and thus less apt to be biased by potential fear of the respondents that they're responding to a stranger the list experiment that you see here behind me was carried out by a group of western political scientists in russia back in the winter of 2015 when putin was polling in the mid 80s in their experiment each of roughly 800 people in a first group was asked how many of the following three leaders how many of the following three leaders do you have a favorable favorable impression of joseph stalin lenid brezhnev and boris yeltsin their responses could be any number between zero and three the average across the 800 respondents was 1.18 and maybe you have in mind which one of the three they found most of their liking and maybe which one of the three they found least to their liking in the second group of 800 respondents were given a list that include the same three names but in addition there was added to the list the name of latimer putin respondents were asked how many of these four do you have a favorable opinion of the average in that group was 1.98 the difference between the two groups averages 1.98 minus 1.18 or 0.8 or 80 percent can be inferred as the level of support for the person who's added is the fourth name that only half the group half the uh the respondents see that 80 percent was just a tad below what putin was polling at in the public uh levada center polls in 2015 in other words the list experiment conducted by those western political scientists seemed to confirm that putin's extremely high level of support in the public polls was pretty legit maybe you're still skeptical here's a different question that asks about whether russia is headed in the right direction you've seen these sorts of polls before asked of respondents in the united states is the country on the right track so in this case russians are not being asked about a repressive leader who's proven that he's capable of using force to silence his opponents rather they're being asked an arguably less sensitive question about the general direction of the country a couple of things are evident here one in the years immediately before putin became president in the late 1990s that's the pink area here to the left very few russians felt the country was headed in the right direction in fact in 1998 less than 10 percent of respondents to the survey felt yes the country is on the right track but ever since the turn of the century ever since that pink area that is after putin became president the numbers have been consistently much higher and when have they been highest when russia invaded former silvia republics now it's it's hard not to come away from that sort of evidence concluding anything but that there is a healthy segment of the russian public that responds quite positively to russian military aggression in what russians call their near abroad the former silvia republics so how do we make sense of that how do we make sense of putin's popularity how do we make sense of russians positive feelings about their country's direction particularly in the aftermath of invading other countries i think a good place to start is in that pink region in the 1990s the decade that was the decade russia exited from communism the decade after the silvia union dissolved it was a very tough time for russians both individually and collectively output collapsed real wages plummeted many russians were forced to find into unemployment for the first times in their lives and they had to find new jobs between 1990 and 1998 the gdp the economy of russia contracted by 40 percent that was more than the economies of eastern europe which were undergoing a similar transition away from communism at the same time but it was roughly on par with the contraction experienced by the other countries that emerged from the silvia union countries like ukraine and kazakhstan the 1990s also saw huge increases in inequality in russia as both the most enterprising individuals and the most politically connected individuals took advantages of opportunities to do good by servicing new markets and to do bad by stealing state assets here we see a graph that shows the income earned and the wealth held by the top one percent of russian households by that shows the income earned and the wealth held by the top one percent of russian households both spiked upwards in the 1990s and have been relatively stable ever since much of the new wealth in the 1990s was very in your face high end new restaurants and clubs fancy imported cars at one time in the late 1990s moscow was the city with the highest per capita ownership of mercedes sedans you can imagine how jarring all that new wealth was to a country to a people that had been socialized under communism and the value it put upon economic equality but again dramatic increases in inequality weren't unique to russia looking at the hard data what did stand out about the russian experience was the demographic picture life expectancy dropped dramatically in the first half of the 1990s as mortality rates from cardiovascular disease alcohol poisoning alcohol poisoning and even suicide spiked up particularly for working age males in fact the decline in life expectancy for men in russia in the first half of the 1990s was and still is unprecedented in the post war era the post world war two era in an industrialized country neither the former communist countries of eastern europe nor the other former sylvia republics experienced anything like that collapse in uh in life expectancy five years ago at middlebury i taught a freshman seminar on the old sylvia economy and its its collapse i chose the reading and viewing for that uh that course to emphasize not the perspective of elites but the perspective of average people i wanted students to get some sense of what it was like to be a citizen to be a worker to be a consumer in sylvia society to live in a country that was a global superpower that made claims of ethical superiority to other industrialized societies and then for all that to change for that life to disappear in the span of just a couple years some of you may have read it was on the new york times bestseller list back in the 1970s it was the first book that i ever read about the sylvia union um by the uh the journalist hedrick smith and it was called the russians and it was all about daily life in uh in in moscow during his years being uh based there as a as a foreign correspondent i wanted to give the the students in my class some of the same sense that smith gave his readers of what it was like to live on the other side of the iron curtain one of the books that i assigned was an oral history by a biella russian journalist svetlana aleksevich whose pictures behind me she won the nobel prize in literature back in 2015 for a series of oral histories most of which focused on the sylvia era her book that i assigned for my seminar was called secondhand time it's about how average russians experience the demise of communism her interviews highlight a real nostalgia for the sylvia union's achievements and a deep sense of loss at its collapse the book is full of individual stories about people's struggles to adapt to the new environment of the early 1990s more than anything else that book got me thinking about the factors that shape russian national identity and russian's belief about the way the good society should be ordered reading it i couldn't help but think that for russians enduring the transition from communism to capitalism while witnessing their empire crumbling around them would leave anything but a deep and lasting imprint on their worldviews so as an economist as a quantitative social scientist i started thinking about how can i bring to bear data the bread and butter of my discipline to address the sorts of themes that aleksevich it's explored in oral history i asked myself how i could draw on what might what some might call harder evidence to explore if and how that period less a lasting effect on russians worldviews how had that period in some sense laid the groundwork for putin's russia there's a hypothesis from social psychology that one's life experience in young adulthood uh leaves a more lasting influence than life experiences occurring at other stages of life this is often referred to as the impressionable years hypothesis not too long ago two uh two economists put that hypothesis to the test by looking into whether living through a downturn in the economy when you were 18 to 25 affected your worldview later in life so they looked at lots of survey data from the united states going back to the middle of the 20th century and what they found was that if you were living in a part of the country that was going through tough economic times a regional recession while you were in your impressionable years you are more likely to hold progressive economic views later in life than somebody who hadn't experienced that sort of economic downturn in their impressionable years in the russian context i'd like to think of the impressionable years idea slightly differently reading through the oral histories like alexiaevich's as well as sociological and anthropological studies so many of them pointed to the years right around the collapse of the sylvia union as having a lasting impact russians in the early 1990s were learning lessons for the first time about how a market economy with private property function about how democracy and free elections function and they were drawing conclusions and forming beliefs for russians their life experiences in those early post-communist years had the potential i hypothesize to leave a deep and lasting impression so rather than thinking about impressionable years as referring to young adulthood i'm using that phrase to refer to what i hypothesize was a stage of history in which all russians regardless of age were prone to form enduring memories and beliefs based on their own individual life experiences i home in particular on the years between 1989 and 1994 it's a period that covers the last three years of the sylvia union the years of borbachev and the first three years of an independent russia it's a period that's bracketed on one side by the dissolution of sylvia control over eastern europe and the unraveling of the sylvia economy and on the other side by the privatization of a large swath of russian industry it's a period in which the old rules governing society how governing how society was organized were thrown out and new ones were introduced it's a period when so much was so new for so many i couldn't have explored my hypothesis without a wonderful data set the european bank for reconstruction and development carried out a massive survey of the former sylvia union in 2006 asking a whole bunch of questions of at least a thousand individuals per country the questions that i was most interested in had to do with respondents attitudes particularly whether they felt democracy was a good political system and whether an economy based on markets was better than the alternatives here we see that only 25 percent of russians expressed that they felt a market economy was better to any other economic system and only 33 percent believes that democracy was preferable to any other political system both of those numbers were much higher in other former sylvia republics now these are their attitudes and beliefs circa 2006 well into the putin years which had begun back in 1999 i was interested in investigating my impressionable years hypothesis that a person's life experiences in those years immediately around the collapse of communism and the collapse of the sylvia union did their experiences particularly with economic hardship like losing a job or experiencing a big cut in their income did that explain their attitudes to these questions one set of questions that the ebrd survey asked had a retrospective quality a looking back in the past quality asking about particular life events in 1989 1990 91 and they asked them specifically did you experience the loss of a job during any of these these years and if so which year did you experience a big pay cut in any of these years and if so in what year and what i found is that those russians who suffered the most in those early years when everything was changing on average had a very different outlook on the world they're more skeptical of democracy they're less supportive of the market economy in effect they were more likely to hold on to what we might call sylvia values rather than to embrace the values that drove russia's transition away from communism with respect to the other countries of the former sylvia union although they also experienced profound economic shocks after the collapse of communism i didn't find the same similar pattern now i think it's quite possible that the reason has to do with russians economic suffering in the early 1990s being compounded by a psychological blow that they but the citizens of but not the citizens of the other former sylvia republic suffered for russians identification with the sylvia union was always much stronger than it was for the people of other post-sylvia states the sylvia union's collapse was for russians experienced much more as a psychological loss in svetlana alexievich's book that i mentioned earlier there's a story of a a woman in her her fifties a doctor who's describing her memories of the early 1990s she starts out talking about the economic difficulties of that time she talks about inflation and devalued savings and the difficulty of retooling and finding a new job but then without missing a beat she's speaking about just having seen a down on his luck veteran selling off his war model war medals on a moscow street to western tourists the pain and shame that came through in her description that we were once a superpower and now look what we're reduced to that pain and shame of status lost seems equal to and totally mixed in with the economic hardships she reported suffering that the peoples of former empires may bear a particular psychological cost when the empire collapses has been noted by many including russian commentators i cite here two relevant quotes the first is from an unsigned editorial from the leading sylvia government newspaper izvestia on the eve of the sylvia union's dissolution at the end of 1991 christmas 1991 the union is dead but parting with it will be long and difficult the great power idea is as potent as the national idea and in the right circumstances can unify millions the other quote comes from yegor guide are the brilliant economist and courageous public official who assisted boris yeltsin when he was the leader of russia in the 1990s guide are wrote in his final book before he passed away quite early in his life the identification of state grandeur with being an empire makes the adaptation to the loss of status of superpower a difficult task for the national consciousness of the former metropolis and here he's thinking clearly about russia the exploitation of the post imperial syndrome is an effective way of obtaining political support and here of course he's thinking about putin and the way he manipulates the russian public the concept of empire as a powerful state that dominates other nations is an easy sell product like coca-cola or pampers it doesn't take intellectual effort to advertise it putin for one has long been nostalgic about the sylvia union's imperial power in 2005 in a kind of state of the nation address he said first and foremost it is worth acknowledging that the demise of the sylvia union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century and for the russian people a genuine tragedy putin's words immediately drew the attention of western commentators and officials fearful that they might signal expansionist ambitions what many didn't realize at the time was that those words reflected the belief of average russian citizens as well in fact from the early 1990s up until the present day a majority a solid majority of russia the russian public has consistently expressed regret for the collapse of the sylvia union back in february back this february on the eve of the invasion of ukraine cnn commissioned a poll of over a thousand russians and a thousand ukranians asking if they had a positive view of the sylvia past 71 percent of russians said they did whereas only a third of ukranians said that they did now is it in part or in whole the memory of having been a superpower that make russians think so fondly of the past the levada center that independent polling agency that i mentioned earlier has posed a version of this question to the russian public almost every year for the past two decades would you rather see russia be first and foremost a quote respected and feared great power or a country with a quote high standard of living the red portion of these bar graphs represents the percentage of respondents who answered respected and feared great power for a couple of years right after russia sees Crimea in 2014 in Putin's popularity soared russians were split equally between the two responses for all other years however anywhere between 32 and 43 percent of russians chose the respected and feared great power option some commentators have looked at those numbers and argued that russians really don't regret the passing of the sylvia union see they argue a majority would rather live in a country with a high standard of living but i wonder what does it say about a country that roughly 40 percent of its population is willing to sacrifice a high standard of living to live in a country that's feared and respected is that 40 percent of noteworthy number does it strike you as high average low without a benchmark it's it's kind of hard to say my colleague at indian University michael alex seif and i thought we should look at questions like these in a comparative way that is we should benchmark russians responses against those of citizens in other countries holding up the opinion of russians to those of residents from other countries we feel can give us a better sense a better vantage point from which to assess what's unique about the russian worldview if russians don't feel the pull of the quote great power idea if they don't suffer from the quote post imperial syndrome then we shouldn't observe unique patterns and how they answer questions about national identity or their attachment to their country there's a rich literature highlighting different ways that individuals can feel an attachment to their country one seminal work in this area distinguishes between a patriotism defined by quote the degree of one's love for and pride in one's nation and a more maligned patriotism which reflects quote a perception of national superiority and an orientation toward national dominance another recent work in this area further refines the character rate characterization of the more malignant type of patriotism as being quote linked to aggressive militarism and demanding quote blind and uncritical allegiance to country the international social survey program a multinational survey initiative was designed to get at these sorts of distinctions once in each of the past three decades individuals in several dozen countries around the world has been asked questions like the ones that you see in the slide here some questions capture simple love of country how close do you feel to your country is it better to be a citizen of your country than any other country in the world these questions get it a benign patriotism a benign patriotic attachment to one's country another set of countries another set of questions the questions on the right hand side of the slide get it the type of patriotism the blind and militant type my country should follow its own interests even if this leads to conflict with other nations people should support their country even if their country is in the wrong and i would like my country to increase its military and defense spending even if doing so requires increased taxation what michael and i found is that russians are not exceptional in any respect with respect to how they answer the questions under the benign patriotism heading but they're exceptionally exceptional if they're such a thing that's not redundant with respect to the questions on the right hand side here's the statement my country should follow its own interests even if this leads to conflict with other nations the answer is on a scale from one definitely disagree to five definitely agree russians consistently express the highest level of support for the statement across time mid 1990s mid 2000s mid 2000 teams here's the statement my country people should support our country even if they know it's in the wrong again the answer is on a scale from one to five one definitely disagree five definitely agree russians are either the first or second most supportive of that statement and here's the statement i would like my country to increase its military spending even if doing so requires increased taxation again russians are at or near the top of the pack consistently across time now there are a couple points to to make about those three slides um first russians are clear outliers their patriotism is reflected in how they answer these questions is consistently more blind and militant second that outlier status is not exclusively an artifact of the Putin years that orientation was there in the 1990s as well and incredibly as we see here in this last slide even in the midst of the economic collapse of the 1990s russians were at least in a relative sense quite supportive of diverting resources away from the civilian economy to the military and to the defense sector a country whose citizens on balance espouse a relatively blind and militant strain of patriotism a country a solid majority of whose citizens regret the dissolution of the sylvia union this is the country that Vladimir Putin inherited not so much the country he has created on the eve of the invasion back in february cnn asked a thousand russians whether they felt the use of force was justified in keeping ukraine from joining nato 50 percent said yes 25 percent said no 25 percent said it's hard to answer that question but two to one in terms of yeses and noes russians endorsed military action pulling the russian public in the weeks since the invasion has become much more complicated and fraught some would say impossible since speaking out publicly against the war has been criminalized in russia it's reasonable to believe that many russians who oppose the war might either refuse to take part in surveys or falsify their preferences when asked nevertheless there have been more than a few efforts to take the public pulse the levada center for one has continued to ask russians every month since the war started whether they support the actions of the russian military in ukraine they can't ask specifically do you support the war in ukraine because you cannot in public refer to what's happening in ukraine as a war in march 81 percent of the respondents supported the military action in ukraine either definitely or somewhat those numbers have remained more or less consistent in the months since now though the levada center has a unimpeachable reputation for independence their publication of these polls has been widely criticized by those arguing that war opponents may have lied or disproportionately may have refused to participate in the survey in april two researchers at the london school of economics carried out a list experiment and we just talked about what a list experiment was um they carried their list experiment was not on prudent's popularity but on uh support for the military conflict in ukraine they used a russian internet platform and they recruited 3000 respondents and asked them how many of the following three policies do they support one monthly monetary transfers for poor russian families two legalization of same-sex marriage and three state measures to prevent abortion some of the uh participants were provided a list with a fourth policy the action of the russian military in ukraine here's the distribution of the respondents to this online survey as you can see if those numbers are big enough it skews younger more urban and more educated than the population at large that is it wasn't a really representative sampling of the russian population and we know from earlier polling that the young the better educated and residents of big cities like moscow and st. petersburg are more opposed to the war than the average russian this bar chart shows the support for the invasion using both the list experiment and a direct question the darker blue bar on the left is the list experiment it shows 53 percent support for the invasion the lighter blue bar shows that when respondents were asked directly when whether they support the action of the russian armed forces in ukraine 68 percent said they did so it's apparent that when asked directly during wartime there's a small segment to the russian public that if asked by pollsters will dissemble they won't share their their true feelings of course even the 53 percent of support that came from the list experiment would almost certainly be higher if this were a representative sample of the population since greater shares of older and less educated russians tend to support the war applying a simple correction for the age and education distribution in a survey group the authors estimate that roughly 61 percent of russians truthfully support the war it's not the 81 percent that the levada center researchers estimated but still i think for us as a foreign audience considering the costs that the war has and will continue to impose on russians in both blood and treasure it's a surprising endorsement of putin's actions you know clearly there's a lot to unpack in russians endorsement of the war there's a lot of context that i don't have time to go into uh including of course the unrelenting stream of propaganda and lies that russians get on state-owned television which for many is their primary source of information i'd like to conclude by saying that i hardly know what the future holds i was one of the many who didn't think putin would invade i i do believe however that there was a great deal of wishful thinking and commentary particularly early on about putin potentially losing the russian street and facing a popular uprising of course there are courageous russians many courageous russians who've protested against the war thousands have been arrested but russia is a country of tens of millions and putin has remained consistently popular with most of them over the past two decades increasing numbers of russian casualties increasing economic pain from the sanctions will put that popularity to the test but i'd be very surprised if there's any appreciable public uprising in the foreseeable future russians see putin as responsible as the leader responsible for bringing stability and an end to the shame of the 1990s the wealth support for him for doing that remains deep i'll end with a rather provocative quote from svetlana aleksevich from an interview she gave to the new york time six years ago in the west people demonize putin they don't understand that there's a collective putin consisting of some millions of people who do not want to be humiliated by the west there's a little piece of putin in us all thank you thank you will this is wonderful we're going to start with questions and answers now we have one on zoom let's start with that one first and then we'll do a lot i'll go first we're going to move then i'll circulate so you do you feel that gore do you feel that gorbachev moved too quickly in dismantling the soviet system that's a great question it's a very hard question um gorbachev liberalized both the economy and the russian political system the sylvia political system simultaneously there are dictators around the world that have learned from that that you shouldn't do both at the same time there's stacks of white papers in beijing right now that communist party officials there have been reading about the history of the late 1980s and the early 1990s that gorbachev did indeed go too quickly now yes he he did go quickly and much much liberalized much more than any other prior sylvia leader but he also was never fully committed to the liberalization path that he started down in 1986 and 1987 he kind of take one step forward and then a half step back and then one step forward and then a half step back and particularly with respect to the economic reforms that just made a hash of the the sylvia economy and really sped up the dissolution of of the sylvia union i think if if gorbachev had been truly decisive and gone even bolder the outcome could have been better um he got caught in the middle okay uh i think you have just given us a pretty good social history of the make america great again movement it's much the same perceptions yes we at one point we could kick ass all over the whole world and now look how timid we are yes and then same-sex marriage gets in there somehow too we have lost our masculine advantage yes i i you know i i think there's a lot of truth to that um russia went through a very rapid decline in its industrial base in the early 1990s it lost its superpower status um at one point in the middle part of the 20th century our economy's gdp accounted for half the world's gdp we were able to influence events in all corners of the world we had a tremendous amount of self-confidence i think we've lost that self-confidence and we've seen some of that lost self-confidence play out in very dysfunctional politics here because of technology technological changes and globalization we've also seen a hollowing out of our industrial base not nearly as fast as what russia experienced in the 1990s but pretty quick you put together decline of global status with economic dislocation that's a powerful brew for populist politicians to take advantage of so yes i agree with kind of the premise of your question very much so would you just please explain the meaning of your choice of that particular symbol at the ending at the end of your talk so this is a ukrainian flag it is it's not blue it's purple oh well it should maybe okay that explains it thank you okay yeah yeah yeah sometimes on these projectors you know you get a little distortion of the uh the colors you know i honestly i i um i have a ukrainian advisor whose family was displaced in 2014 when soviets when troops loyal to Moscow and Putin basically took over large portions of eastern ukraine north of Crimea and her family was displaced then they had to move to Kiev the capital of ukraine and of course earlier this year Kiev was being bombed by by russian troops and she was on pins and needles about this and at various points in time my wife and i have tried to console her invite her over for tea i saw her i just got back from from finland and she stopped by my office and we had just moved into a new building that had been renovated and so i had unpacked all my all my gear that had been in boxes for the past year including a big map of russia uh and i put it in a very insensitive way and i didn't even cross my mind that it could be seen as kind of an aggressive statement um because i'd always had it up on my i study russia so it's and she walked in and it immediately hit me how how she might have reacted to that and so i actually just went online and bought a little you know i know quite of a two foot by three foot ukrainian flag to hang up or to put on my so just it looks just like just like that yeah so thank you so much for your lecture it's very uh informative my question may may not be easy to differentiate between two things because i'm having a problem with it but one of your one of the questions asked the russian people was uh referred to the potential of nato uh ukraine taking over they're becoming a member of nato and i'm wondering is there an element of fear in the russian public about nato and the importance of the powers outside as opposed to that more patriotic sense that they wish to regain their you know future as as are past as the soviet republic but if if the fear is a big factor how would that impact or how would that affect their potential aggression towards the scandinavian countries that are now going to join nato so i think you're absolutely right in the sense that there are two things that are operating um in the russian mind one is this kind of memory of super super power status and the old geographic footprint of the silviate union the russian empire goes back centuries and the land borders of of that empire and so that that gives rise to an impulse for expansion but there's also this very real fear that russia is being surrounded and potentially will be attacked by western forces the russian media has really played up this angle that the forces that russian troops are fighting in ukraine yes they're ukrainian but they're really just proxy forces for nato nato is supplying them with arms nato is providing advice it could as well just be the united states and the other countries of the north atlantic alliance there's an awful lot that's there's been a huge debate uh you know i'm an economist and i it's it's really more of a political science debate or a debate for international relations scholars about whether we made a mistake in expanding nato in the 1990s into eastern europe even into former silviate republics like estonia latvia and latinia i just returned from from finland which in a couple months couple weeks maybe along with sweden will join nato and the fins have really done a 180 from being very proud of neutrality during the cold war to now we want to join the military alliance because we feel very very much afraid i think the expansion of of nato definitely rankled the russians it's what those countries wanted in central and eastern europe where we expanded into and i i'm pretty sure that if nato was not in the baltic states right now which used to be part of the silviate union that russian troops would be in in the baltic states so for me it's it's really hard to kind of to weigh that yes we we kind of poke the bear a little bit we expanded nato quickly in the absence of any immediate threat but there's probably some countries that have retained their freedom to this day because of because of that thank you will this has been that am i on i think we have to stop at because cctv stops at three o'clock at dead but maybe will would be willing to stay a few minutes if some of you want to have questions absolutely wonderful thank you so much