 So I'd like to go ahead and introduce our three panelists. So first, I'd like to introduce Dr. John Hall, who is an associate professor of political science here at Middle Georgia State University. He's been with us since 2015. His doctorate in political science is from Auburn University. I'd also like to introduce our colleague, Annie Watson, who is an assistant professor of political science just joined us last year in August of 2021. And her doctorate is from the University of Georgia. And let's see, her expertise is in things like human rights and women's rights in particular. So I'm sure she has lots to contribute there. And then Dr. Thomas Matrock, who is an instructor of political science here at Middle Georgia State. He's been with us for about a year and a half or so. And he is a former professor at Air University, UNC Greensboro and the Army War College. He's also the executive director of the Joint Civil Military Interaction Network, which deals with things like humanitarian issues and things like that. So definitely something relevant to what we're talking about today. And his doctorate is from Nova South Eastern University. And his doctorate is in a conflict resolution negotiation. And last, not least, or probably least actually, I'm the moderator, Dr. Christopher Lawrence. I'm the chair of the Department of Political Science and associate professor as well. And I'm in my 10th year here and my doctorate is from the University of Mississippi. So how we're gonna do things today, basically is we're gonna start with a few questions selected by the moderator with the help of our participants. While we're asking those questions and while they're answering those questions, you're also welcome to ask questions in the chat. We'll try to get to those in some sort of order or we'll try to prioritize questions from MGA students. And if we do have some other people in the community members as well here as well, we're happy to have questions from them as well, as well as other people from the community as well. And we'll try to answer or try to let everybody who wants to ask a question at least have one question each. So if you do have more than one question, please try to focus on your one question until you move on to ask another. And please be courteous and civil to each other in the chat window. I do reserve the right to kick people out if they misbehave. So just bear that in mind and let's see. So some of the questions we're gonna talk about today, I'm just gonna show you very briefly some of the things we're gonna talk about, background conflict, what's Russia's goals in the conflict if we can figure out what those are. The response of Ukraine, other actors as well like the US, the European Union, NATO, regional actors, what sort of impact this could have on or is having on vulnerable populations. And last but not least, how these events may affect other conflicts in nations both in the region and globally. So I will make this slide go away so you can see our, oops, let's see. Is that one I wanted to do? Yeah, we'll try that. Okay, so I'll let everybody get started here with our first question. So to get us started off here, how would you summarize the current state of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine? And I don't know if anybody wants to go first on that. I will jump in if no one else is and thank you Chris for the introduction. Thank you to everyone joining us tonight, especially students. Thank you, Dr. Beak, again, the Dean for being here with us this evening. This has changed so dramatically from a month ago when Chris and I were putting this together. We'll have to do several of these a semester. So for anyone who enjoys this tonight, there will probably be more coming. The question's worth theoretical. What will happen? What do you think will happen? Well, now we know what has happened and what has happened is a war in Europe for the first time in my lifetime since the Clinton administration in the 90s. The Russians have invaded. President Vladimir Putin's aspirations of growing or bringing back the Soviet empire of old have begun. The devastation that we're seeing on the news, the attack, the constant perpetual attack on the capital of Kiev, fighting has occurred in the East, the South and North. Russian soldiers have come in from Belarus from the North, from Russia, the East, from the Crimean Peninsula, from the South and this is a nightmare. That's the quickest summary that I can give you. Again, originally this question would have described of what could potentially happen. So, well, we're in that now. So what is happening is quite literally the worst thing that can happen. Russia has attacked a sovereign liberal democracy with an elected government and there are obvious negatives. There are surprising positives that we're seeing and that is the extraordinary bravery and resilience of the Ukrainian people. The fact that we are almost a week into Russia's invasion of Ukraine and we're not talking about Russia's puppet government that they're about to set up. They haven't even gotten to Kiev yet. They still haven't taken Kharkiv in the East, the second largest city. Their invasion has been somewhat unimaginably slow against this Ukrainian defense. So that is extraordinary. We're also seeing an unimaginable unity from not just the Western nation states of the world. We're also, we're seeing extraordinary unity from the EU, from the United States, from NATO obviously. We're seeing the world coming together and condemning President Putin for what he's done. When given the opportunity to vote yes or no to formally rebuke what Russia has done, the fact that China abstained was in and of itself extraordinary. The fact that Turkey is saying they don't want belligerent Russian naval forces to come through the Bosphorus. These are extraordinary examples of the world looking at what President Putin is doing and almost unanimously saying this is horrifying. That's a quick summary of where we are. The other panelists can take that into a multitude of directions, but I'll turn it over to Annie or Tom. Annie, would you like to go ahead? Sure, I think John did a great job talking about the kind of state of military and the global response we've seen as well. This has moved so quickly that I made sure to check in just a few minutes ago to see sort of what today looks like. And so just today, we have seen the first face-to-face talks between Russian and Ukrainian officials since the invasion began. Those talks did end without a resolution. Everybody who's a party to these talks has now gone back to their respective capitals to consult with their leaders. We have seen the Treasury Department announcing that it's going to freeze assets of the Russian Central Bank that are held in the United States. They are imposing sanctions on the Russian Direct Investment Fund. There are other countries freezing assets as well and implementing their own sanctions. We, soccer's global governing body has suspended Russia and its teams from all competitions. And sort of at the same time, we're also seeing a really large convoy of Russian forces moving closer to Kiev. This is a convoy of several hundred vehicles stretching out at least 17 miles with just this one convoy alone. And so we're seeing sort of like John said, the tensions are rising, the bad things are everywhere, but there are also some very strong responses from the international community as well. Sure, John and certainly you identify some incredibly important points. And I would just like to add a little bit or build on which you both had spoken to. One of the things I would suggest is that certainly, what are we seeing today? One, it's an incredibly fast moving event, it's fast moving train. And it's incredibly difficult for us to get it into focus while it's moving this rapidly. And so as you I think point out Andy, and just all of us watching the TV or doing our social news on phones, you just can't keep up with it. I mean, as soon as you read one thing, but 30 seconds later, you're realizing something else. What I would like to add to the discussion is that certainly what we do see or what we do know is that Russia is certainly challenging the transatlantic security structure that's been in place for more than 70 years now. What I would suggest is that Ukraine is also presenting us or demonstrating to us how we completely misunderstood what we were seeing. And I appreciated that at the very beginning the title of posturing or World War III. And it brings me to the point that we see or we are looking at, and I say we, big picture, are looking at Ukraine through World War II lenses. And we are stuck in a peace war binary. We're believing that well, if we're not at war, we must be at peace. Well, that is not the way Russia viewed it. And from the end of World War II on, Russia has considered itself at war with the West and very specifically the United States. Now, over the years, through many different administrations, we attempted to reset our relationship with Russia. Certainly Germany thought that if it opened up markets and bought oil from Russia, it would change its behavior and enter into the community of nations. None of those things have happened. And we knew that along the way for the past 70 plus years. And one of the ways we know that is that Russia invaded Georgia and controlled South Ossetia and Abkhazia. And it went in on the pretext that it was protecting ethnic Russians from the Georgians. That was really proof of concept because the West really did not push back against that. And when Putin realized that we didn't push back against that, he pushed into the Donbass and Crimea in 2014. And again, the West did not push back in any meaningful way. And so we had for all these years, we saw over all these years, events that led us up until we are now and we should not have missed them. They were clear and obvious to us. But we got stuck in this peace war binary and did not realize that Putin saw this or Russia saw this as clearly a confrontation against the West. And our goal should have been to manage the confrontation so that it did not slide into a conflict or into combat where we find ourselves today. So I just wanna swing it back because I think that was an incredibly important question, political posturing or World War III. It depended on what side of the line you're standing on. On ours, it was political posturing. From the Russian side, we've been at war with you since the end of World War II. And so I think where are we at today? We're in a mess of our own device. I mean, I don't know how else to put it. So I'll stop there. Okay, great. Thanks. So you've anticipated, all of you have anticipated some of my later questions. So some of these may sound a little repetitive, but nonetheless, I have a question that we haven't really talked about. What historical ties do Russia and Ukraine share and how does that impact the current relations between these two states? I guess I can start us off on this one. So Russia and the Ukraine were two of the founding members of the Soviet Union in 1922. And so we see the progression through World War II in particular in 1991, the Soviet Union was terminated via a treaty and Ukraine became independent and also got at the time a significant stockpile of nuclear weapons that they later destroyed as part of the Nuclear Disarmament Treaty. In 2014, we saw protesters in Ukraine overthrow a president who was friendly to Russia and have a sort of a, I don't wanna call it a minor rebellion. They had a revolution where they ended with a election to the best of my understanding of a new regime. In 2014 later in April, we saw Russia invade and then annex Crimea. They signed ceasefire agreements in 2014 and 2015. And so we've seen this sort of increasing tension in the area over recent years, but ultimately it goes back to the idea of them being founding members of the Soviet Union and President Putin in particular being convinced about the sort of necessity of their continued alignment in this way. Absolutely. Annie, I would backpack on what you have just said. You nailed it there. You can actually go back further in terms of Russian and Ukrainian involvement. If you go into the birth of the very concept of Russia, you will be in what we now call Ukraine. From the ninth century on, Kiev was the genesis of what we now know of as Russia. There were many centuries where multiple powers would have control over that particular area of Eastern Europe. In the late 18th century, the imperial Russians take Ukraine back into the fold. Then we can fast forward into, as we've already mentioned, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Ukraine is independent for a couple of years, but then becomes a part of the Soviet Union in 1920 all the way through the Cold War until the collapse in 1991, which Annie has already picked up from there. The history is deep. The history is long. One thing that I've had several students ask me in terms of the history is why does Russia care about Ukraine? There's another historical component there. If you're familiar with Europe, there's a portion of Northern Europe above several mountain ranges that represents a flat plane that allows you to get straight into Moscow. It's perfect for French armies under Napoleon. It's perfect for tank armies under the Nazis. Russia has a reason for wanting this buffer zone between themselves and Western Europe. That's another element. Russia has always and will always be interested in Ukraine. In terms of where we are today, a lot of this is going to fall onto the unique personality of President Putin, which is something that we'll get into later. But again, he is in terms of the history, he remembers the Soviet Union. He called the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 the single worst thing that happened in the 20th century. Now, if anyone here is familiar with history, a lot of things happened in the 20th century. We're looking at World War II, World War I, the Holocaust, the devastation of Manchuria by the Japanese in the 1930s. We have the depression. A lot of great things happened as well. But if you look at the entire 20th century and consider the fall of the Soviet Union to be the single worst thing that happened and you actually mean it, that puts us into the head of President Putin. That desire to bring back the glory of the Soviet Union of old. And his plans are to start that, not start that. Because again, Tom, you mentioned as he pays into Georgia, his violence with the Chechen rebels. But his intentions are to rebuild the Soviet Union starting here with Ukraine. I did not perceive him going with a full-scale invasion the way he has, we can talk about that later. But the history is quite literally very deep and it will never go away. Yeah. John, are you down? I'm sorry. Yeah, certainly, absolutely. It's been a troubled relationship, if anything else, between Ukraine and Russia and no need to go into that long history that both of my colleagues have articulated. I would say, and I think that when, to understand that troubled relationship, we at least have to begin in the Middle Ages. And at that time, Ukraine, that area in Crimea were incredibly heterogeneous. And it was following Russia's annexation of Crimea in 1774 that that heterogeneity began to disappear. And Catherine, back to our history again, under Catherine the Great, there was a move to bring a lot of Russian, ethnic Russians into what is Ukraine and Crimea and change its ethnic character. And the reason I bring that up, I believe that's important because it's the same strategy that Putin had followed in Georgia and in the Donbass was to move ethnic Russians into those areas in Georgia so that he could create a fiction that he is moving to protect the rights of ethnic Russians in these regions and that he's obliged to do that. So that, I was just always, I always found it curious that he was following the same strategy as Catherine the Great. The other is that with this troubled relationship is that Ukrainians have never considered themselves any part of Russia. And my experience in working with Ukrainians has been, do not make the mistake of calling them Russian because you'll be corrected very quickly. Because Ukraine's history is really to the West. It was really Poland and Lithuania under which Ukraine developed and emerged into the world. And so it's always been a Western leaning country. It's always been a Western leaning people. And probably if I wanted to find that one spot and my colleagues discussed it, where this relationship really, if there was a relationship came apart, it was in 1932 with the genocide in Ukraine commonly referred to as extermination by hunger where seven and a half a million Ukrainians were killed under the Stalin regime. And memories are long. For many of us in the West where it's hard to remember last week, these types of events live in people's memory as if it happened yesterday. And that's part of that that Ukrainian, Ukraine's collective unconscious, part of it's culture and anyone who's been in any of my classes is probably tired of hearing me say culture Trump strategy, that culture always wins. And so I think when we look at that relationship, it's certainly a troubled one. And it's one that at least has its roots probably back to 1560s as John, as you had mentioned, 1569, I think, when Ukraine was part of a Poland and Lithuania. So just some additional thoughts. Okay, great. Yeah, I think it's really the point about the whole demor is well taken. I think that's something that probably a lot of people in the West really don't know that much about. And so that, as you say, memory, that was 90 years ago, but still, memories run deep in, particularly in Europe. I also was kind of struck by the idea that Ukrainians being insulted by being called Russians, it's kind of like trying to calling a Scottish person British or English. So putting that levity aside, and John sort of got into some of this before, but I want to see if you would elaborate. How would you summarize the effect of President Putin's personal experiences and perspectives on his current foreign policy decisions regarding Ukraine? And for that matter, I guess the rest of the Russian, you're abroad. Did you direct that at somebody? Chris, I'm sorry. I did not direct it, somebody, I guess it's kind of your turn to go first though, if you do want to go first, Tom. No, okay, that's an incredibly important question. Certainly as we look at the great man theory of leadership and those different types of things. And I think both John and Annie even spoke to the point where one of the goals, and we'll talk about them, I think later on, of Putin is to re-establish the Russian Empire. His goal is to bring back the glory, the glory of Russia as he sees it. And we've all read this in the news and I've certainly seen it on television, but I really think his KGB experience cannot be undervalued. Undervalued. Putin had said that, is on the record is saying that the fall of the Soviet Union was his saddest day. And that he wants to undo that. He wants to, here he is, a 70 year old guy. He's looking to re-establish the glory of Russia and the Empire and himself and be there with the czars and Stalin and the rest of these folks. And I think that's the way he sees the world. And Putin is not a grand strategist. He's not a military theorist. He's not a political scientist. He was a KGB agent. He was the worst of the worst. And he's carried that mentality, I believe. That's those are the, again, like we look at World War II lenses, these are the lenses through which he sees the world. These KGB lenses, there's us and them. There's good and evil. There's no gray area for them. And so I, and again, he's not an intellectual. As I said, he's not a strategist. He's none of that. And so we have a very dangerous man in the Kremlin right now who does not have really an academic or an intellectual foundation with which to make informed decisions. Arguably, I think it was yesterday. He just turned to his generals and said, put our nuclear forces on high alert. That if we, we know from our background how dangerous the Cuban Missile Crisis was when our planes with nuclear weapons were put in the air because of an offhanded comment at that time. So this is incredibly dangerous stuff when you have someone who does not have that background, who does not have that grovitas as a political or military leader. He's just a, he's just a mad man right now. I hope I was clear enough, let me say that. I didn't want to jump in front of you, Annie, but I agree at the time you did a fantastic job summarizing that, that brings up the scary thing that we might get into later. And that is that while I don't have a degree in psychology, I think I would be, I'm comfortable considering President Putin, something of a sociopath. And his goals of reestablishing a Soviet empire, I recognize that as what he was, but the terrifying thing is unless he is aiming for Moldova, he is out of countries once he gets beyond Ukraine, if he can. The former Soviet Union is mostly in NATO and Article V would bring in all NATO members. If he were to try to go into Lithuania or Latvia or Estonia or Poland or Romania, that would be World War III by definition. So just to piggyback on what you were saying there, Tom, I agree completely that that is his goal. And that's terrifying because I don't know where he would go from here without stumbling into World War III, de facto. May I just have an alibi real quick on that one? I just want to, John, if I can, you're absolutely right in that psychological background. And one of the things I think is as you're right, I mean, unless you go and look at, he's got two people, like you said, like he's got, you know, Belarus and as you said, go to Moldova, whatever. But here's one of the issues. If we remember back when he first went into the Donbass in 2014, I believe it was the Polish, Poland's prime minister. I think it was his prime minister who was caught on a hot mic saying that he did not believe that the United States would come to the defense of Poland. That was an incredible statement. And again, back to that psychology, if he's making a bet, is it just rhetoric or would the NATO allies all stand up and actually go into a general war in Europe? Would we be willing to tell a mother in Bugtus, Iowa, your son or daughter needs to go defend Estonia? And again, I know where I stand on this, I'm just suggesting it's, we're betting, we're putting all our cards, if we're in Vegas, we're putting all our cards on the table that we're gonna back up Article 5. That's an open question right now, I'm sorry. Hey, I'm sorry, Annie, thank you for the alibi there. I would, to that point, one of the grand principles of international law is Pact of Student Cervanda, promises must be kept. And so if we do not uphold the NATO agreement, I worry what that means for other agreements as well, which is sort of a separate consideration entirely from what we're talking about with President Putin's mindset. And so while I'm going to steer away from trying to diagnose him psychologically, because that's not my background, I can speak a little bit more to the context that he's operating in, which is a general fear of sort of a predatory west, predatory west. And as both my colleagues have already pointed out, many or most of the former Soviet republics, most of their allies in Europe have already joined either the European Union or NATO. NATO in particular is very strong militarily, but the European Union also has a great deal of power. And part of the reason that we have seen this push in Ukraine is because Ukraine also wants to join and is actively trying to join both of these organizations. And so this could be kind of a final death knell almost for Russian power in Eastern Europe. We've also seen a couple of other recent events that would be expected to drive some of Putin's choices in this time. And so first we saw the switch in the U.S. administration from President Trump, who was quite friendly with Putin and spoke quite negatively of NATO to President Biden, who is much more committed to the alliance and much more outspoken against Putin. But we've also seen last year opposition groups in Russia had some of the largest anti-Putin protests in years. And so there may be some attempts here to energize nationalism at home and try to get more support from himself in order to kind of stave off some of these protests. And so we've got multiple forces acting on President Putin beyond just Ukraine itself. Some reasons that it would not be it's certainly unreasonable, but it would not be out of the realm of possibility for these to be some of the considerations he's got on his mind. Okay, great. So again, some of this may come back to a question of what sort of rationality do you expect from a madman? But what are the goals that Russia is trying to achieve with this invasion and are they likely to be successful in achieving them? Great question, I'll jump in on this. There are certain goals that we don't have to speculate. We know President Putin has demanded that Ukraine not be allowed into NATO ever. And of all the demands outside of not being able to be dictated to that way, that's actually something that's possibly accomplished. There's a reason Ukraine is not in NATO right now. It's not just that Germany and France didn't want them. And there was a reason for that. And that reason was what we're experiencing right now. If Russia were to invade Ukraine and they were a member of NATO World War III and at the time you bring up a great point, we don't know if our commitment would be what we would like it to be. I think we would. It would be a collapse of NATO if the United States did not respond. I have to believe that Putin has in his mind and his calculations as bad as they've been lately the thought that the United States would militarily commit to NATO. There's a huge difference between the overwhelmingly vague language that exists between U.S. commitment to Taiwan versus U.S. commitment in Article 5. So he wants Ukraine to not be a member of NATO and he wants demilitarization of NATO nation states that were brought in after 1997. That will never happen. That is something that is not possible at all. And again, for any students out there in all of our classes, in terms of that 97 before or after, that gets us into a lot of Eastern European nation states that were once in the Soviet Union. That actually was viewed by Russia and some could argue understandably as kind of provocative on the part of NATO. We have pushed NATO up to Russia's very boundary. So that's another element for President Putin and it is this rage at NATO's aggressive push up to Russia's borders. So those two specific requirements, one possible, one impossible, are what Russians want specifically. Beyond that we've addressed in terms of President Putin's desire to rebuild a more powerful or something resembling the Soviet empire of old, which again, I consider to be impossible. Right now in terms of the goals, I think they would just like to take Ukraine. I don't think anyone's thought a week into a full scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. We would still be sitting here wondering if they can conquer Ukraine. So no membership in NATO for Ukraine and pulling back military forces from post-97 NATO members in Eastern Europe. And again, as of right now on the ground, conquering Ukraine, militarily subjugating the Ukrainian people, which has proved to be an overwhelmingly difficult task for the Russians. The Ukrainians, again, I think we're all aware if we've watched the news have redefined what it means to be brave. They have redefined impressive for a population for an elected president. And being said, just from a military perspective, if Putin doubles down and says, and I don't see how he can, and this is what's so scary. If he doubles down and says, I have to take Ukraine now, this is the respect and honor of the Russian military on the line. If he starts to unleash an unrestricted air campaign and artillery campaign against Kiev, it could become even more disastrous. But I would throw that in as what President Putin is looking forward to most right now. And that's actually doing what he started out to do. And of course, we also hope he can't. Okay, I can jump in. And I just want to swing back to a point you made. I could not agree more about your comment regarding international law. And I would then add to that, that both the Minsk and Budapest memorandums were also disregarded. And in that Budapest memorandum, I believe that we made a commitment that if Ukraine hands all of its nuclear weapons back to Russia, we would guarantee its security. So that alone, I just want to bring that back. I agree that we should own up to our commitments and we would have to start with the Budapest one that we did not. Well, I would say absolutely, Melinda Harding was writing in foreign affairs on a few days ago. And she, I think, proposed four objectives that she believes Putin has, the four of which I agree, she sums it up nicely. The first one is to stop the Westernization drive. And I think John, you spoke well to that, this idea that we brought data right up up to the borders of Russia. And that Putin can see this as a security threat. And Russia for centuries has had security problems and saw everybody as a security threat. So that's nothing new. I think the other goal he has is clearly to destroy NATO unity. And I think to some degree he's betting that the longer he can keep this going, the harder it's going to be to maintain that NATO unity. Certainly before Ukraine, there was a rising nationalism in Europe as well. And one has to wonder, will that nationalism raise its head again? Will that begin to fragment the unity of the alliance? Will countries begin to go in their own direction if he can keep this going on? The other goal, I think the third goal is he wants to humiliate the United States. And that, enough said about that, that's kind of clear all on its own. And fourthly, he wants to rewrite the European security architecture. And he's created this fiction as well. I think to advocate what you're saying, John, he's created this fiction that NATO is somehow a security threat to Russia. This is just, this is hogwash. There's no security threat from NATO to Russia. And he knows that. What threatens Russia is a prosperous and democratic and vibrant Ukraine on his border. That's what scares him. That his population sees Ukraine as prosperous and democratic. And when you add the other Baltic states in there, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and then of course Poland furthest to the south, Baltic state, then this is what threatens him. And so it's not, the fiction is that somehow, and I've seen Mirheimer and others argue this point that, oh, we should have never allowed NATO to advance. We should never have allowed those other countries to become part of NATO. Well, that's, every country has the right to its own sovereignty and to choose who it partners with. And to your point, John, I think well made, nobody has partnered with Russia. And so I believe those, but his goals are that, are to stop the Westernization, not necessarily the military threat, but the Westernization, the democratic values, that structure. And he wants, the way he sees he can do that is to destroy NATO unity. And one way to do that is to let this, to not have a lightning strike. I would think that would go against his goals. If he has a lightning strike into Ukraine and takes right over, then this doesn't drag on and begin then to stress NATO unity. And that's how he rewrites the European security architecture in that way. If he can let this thing go so that the 29 countries begin to fragment. I think we've done a pretty good job talking about the goals that Russia is trying to achieve. And so I'll focus more on whether or not they're likely to be successful in achieving them. At least so far, NATO is not giving in to Putin's pressure. So in December, Russia made a list of demands to NATO. John touched on some of them, but some others include backing out of the Bucharest, I believe, declaration. So Ukraine and Georgia were, there's a formal declaration that these two countries would eventually be welcomed into the alliance. And so they demanded that they back out of that. And on Thursday, the NATO chief invoked that declaration. So that is still in effect. NATO has spoken quite negatively about the implication that Russia could possibly choose who it allows into NATO and who it doesn't and have guaranteed as recently as Friday that while they might be open to talking about Russia's security concerns, that same dialogue would have to include things like Russian missile deployments and satellite tests and disinformation efforts. And so, so far, we have not had any indication from NATO that they're willing to concede on any of the demands that Russia has offered to them. And we've seen some analysts really expressing concerns that Putin knows this and is setting up kind of a list of impossible demands that there's really nothing to stop him from continuing with the war. There are some who have disagreed with that approach and has said that maybe these are the opening positions and open to some wiggle room later, but there are certainly concerns that this is really just meant to set him up to not have to back down. Okay, great. So, kind of falling up on that one to some extent. Are there any specific vulnerable groups in the region that are suffering or likely to suffer disproportionately as a result of this conflict? I can jump in if it's okay. Yes, the short answer is yes. And I just started marking down a few that I think are vulnerable groups that oftentimes aren't considered when we think about conflict or combat. One is the elderly. Another are those who are handicapped. Those in wheelchairs, those who have difficulty on mobility problems. We begin to see now children being born in the middle of, in the subway at night. I was listening to the Poland's ambassador to the UN talking about the number of babies that were born on the border by refugees coming across. Children are certainly an affected group of people that we don't often think of. Of course, we have debates in our country about whether or not our children should wear masks in school. But thinking of children in a war zone or as refugees who are moving around effectively as internally displaced persons or as refugees is something. Another we don't often think of are those with mental illness as well. To understand what is going on and to make decisions and to have caretakers. And where I see these problems in my background where I've seen these problems manifest themselves are in refugee camps that don't make allowances for people from these populations. You can go into a refugee camp and never find a port-a-potty that would accommodate a wheelchair. And so I don't mean to trivialize it or trivialize it but these are groups of people that somehow become absent and unseen in conflict. And I think that we need to pay attention to those folks as well. I was waiting on you. Anyone else? I would add to that a couple of other groups as well. I completely agree with everything that Tom has named so far. But in addition to that, we know for example that women disproportionately suffer during times of conflict. In fact, we have an entire United Nations Security Council Resolution, that's 1325, focused on the issue of gender during times of conflict because women and girls are far more likely to be targeted for not just physical violence, violence broadly, but also sexual violence during any kind of upheaval. Both during the upheaval itself and after when you're trying to re-establish peace and structures in society, they're also much more likely to be ignored from or excluded from peace building talks and peace building efforts. As part of sort of those same refugee camps, we know that they're often not enough restrooms period, restrooms split by gender also. And so what you have is girls who are increasingly unable to go to the restroom at night for fear of being attacked. In this particular case beyond sort of gender broadly, we also know that members of the LGBTQ plus community are quite concerned. I've seen interviews that with members of this community saying that in Russia, LGBTQ people are persecuted and their concern is that if Russia occupies all of the Ukraine or even a big part of the country, they won't allow them to exist peacefully. They won't be, not only just won't be supportive of them, but will start or increase attacks on them. The right to marry is not supported in Ukraine right now either, but these interviews have talked about how the country has made some recent advances and they're worried about seeing all of those protections to get stripped away. One other specific community in the Ukraine are the Roma. And so this is a problem with Ukraine and Ukraine's practices beyond this particular conflict. This is something that organizations like Human Rights Watch have called Ukraine out for repeatedly for a long time, but anytime you see a conflict like this, what you see are heightened abuses. And so because of the already quite overt discrimination against this community, I would expect some concerns about how they're treated by security forces and how they're treated in refugee camps as well. Great and very thorough responses there. I don't have an enormous amount to add. Not a group of people that I would throw into this specific category, because again, they've done a great job of hitting groups that are tragically targeted or ignored in wartime. I am not turning this over to then look at men who are not seen, but the 18 to 60 year old group. Somewhere in Kiev, there is a political science professor who is a lot like me, mid 40s, who by law now has to say goodbye to his family and go and be given a machine gun with absolutely no training whatsoever and go face the Russian army. Now, as amazing as the Ukrainians have been in their defensive struggle, that has to be terrifying. It's almost unimaginable to be quickly brought up on military tactics. And then, hey, there's the Russian army. Let's confide them. That would also be terrifying. But again, y'all did a much better job in identifying those groups that are often neglected and often specifically attacked. Can I just swing back one? Sure, I appreciate what you brought up, Ann, and I just wanted to swing back to the part about women and protection of civilians, which is certainly crucial. And you filled a hole that I did not have on my sheet right here. One of these I want to talk about is one of the things we see in Ukraine too is something much, much different than we saw, for instance, in Syria and Afghanistan. When those countries began to collapse, all the males of fighting age left, if we see all those photographs of Syrian refugees or we saw a refugee in Afghan refugees, you see males of fighting age leave. What we're seeing in Ukraine is the opposite of that. We're seeing women as refugees and IDPs moving westward and the males moving eastward. And as you pointed out, John, the law in, was it 18 to 60, I think, in Ukraine, all the males have to stay, and they are. And as you said, I had a colleague of mine taught a course together at the National Defense University in Ukraine, and he texted me on a chat and said, you know, I've just dropped my wife off in my son in her village close to Poland, and I'm headed back to Kyiv looking for a weapon. And this is that cultural mentality that is gonna be so difficult for the Russians to wedge out. And I think, Andy, your point is critical as well about how poorly women are taking care of themselves when we talk about IDPs and refugees. Okay, thanks. Oh, sorry, go ahead, Annie. Hey, sorry, I just wanted to highlight, especially since we're talking about civilians and their treatment, we do have some very weak numbers on what's happened so far. And so coming out of the UN, Michelle Bachelet, who is the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said that by Sunday night, so that's not including today, her office had already reported 102 civilian deaths, including seven children, and had confirmed that more than 300 people have been injured. We've also seen, I think, we're above 500,000 refugees out of Ukraine by this point. And it is wonderful and necessary that refugees from Ukraine are accepted into neighboring countries. But I do think it's something I noticed one of my colleagues on Facebook actually earlier today mentioned that there's a real gap in how refugees from this crisis have been treated in the media and have been treated by neighboring countries compared to how we've seen refugees coming out of Syria recently, for example, there's been significantly less pushback to accepting them in their countries. And so it is so important that we do make a place for refugees and that we protect them and that we provide them some place to go. But I think we can't have any discussion about refugees without also acknowledging that some refugees are treated very differently than others. Okay, thanks, Annie. So we've had lots of questions in the chat and I'm not sure, well, I know we're not gonna get to them all, but nonetheless, here's a question that I actually originally had scripted, but a number of people have asked about it as well. So I thought it'd be a good kind of jumping off point. How might Russia's successor failure in Ukraine have an impact on Chinese policy towards Taiwan? That is a trillion dollar question there. I'm gonna cheat and go two different directions. Number one, if Russia is successful in Ukraine and outside of incredibly significant sanctions, there is no military pushback from NATO. If Russia is able to consolidate, control over Ukraine, install a puppet regime and move on from there, intuitively you would think that Beijing would look at that as a relatively good rational argument for their ability to then go on eventually at some point and militarily take control of Taiwan. The other hand, what is happening now could force Beijing to recognize all of the negatives that go along with just deciding to take over a foreign nation state that is sovereign. Now, with regard to Taiwanese sovereignty, there's a, that's far more questionable in terms of how Beijing, of course, looks at them, but there's two different ways. As the horrible failure that's actually good in this case by the Russian military would have to make Beijing recognize that this is not a foregone conclusion that you're gonna come in and conquer another population with great ease. But again, those are the two directions that I'm seeing for Beijing and we don't know which will be which because we're not finished yet. But at this point, if I were Beijing, I would be more hesitant to even think about invading Taiwan. If the other hand, it winds up being successful for the Russians, then it could be a precursor for China to go ahead and turn it over the rest. I agree with John that those are probably the two main routes it can take. What I will add is that the Taiwanese government has explicitly stopped, asked the world to stop comparing them to Ukraine. They're quite concerned about the effect on sort of public morale as well as I think disturbing the peace maybe too far, but they have, as late as today, suggested that the two cases are very different, that their geography is different, their place in the economic pipeline is very different. And so they and China actually as well have argued that these two cases are very different. Now, at the end of the day, if Russia is successful in the Ukraine, I agree that that is going to have some impacts on the Chinese mentality around this issue. But at least for now, the two actors are requesting that the world stop comparing the two. Yeah, oh, thank you. John, when I saw this question on the sheet, I immediately thought of the old adage. If you've seen one hospital, you've seen one hospital. Each one of them is uniquely different and each conflict is uniquely different and looking for to make analogies can be a fool's errand. So I sort of fall down on that. That is that they're just two completely different conflicts. They have different histories, different actors. And I sort of, yeah, I just can't see how they're connected. You know, we could make that connection. I agree with what you said, John. I agree that both are correct approaches. It's just, I think they're so uniquely different. And the time when he's asking us to please stop comparing, I think they're making a great good argument there as well. Because historically, it's just not a lot of similarities. I agree, Annie, Tom, great points. From my perspective, what makes them similar, if one authoritarian regime, I refuse to consider Russia an illiberal democracy anymore. I don't know why I have it for so long. If one authoritarian regime conquers another nation state and the world lets them do it. And then there's another authoritarian regime that wants to conquer another nation state and they saw the world let them do it the last time. That's the connection I mean, you all are both right. In terms of the actual logistics, the situations, the governments, the histories, very, very different. But at the end of the day, authoritarian regimes can or cannot conquer their neighbors in terms of whether the planet Earth lets them do it or doesn't. That's the connection. Right now, the Russian invasion has been so extraordinarily incompetent. And again, I don't mean that as an insult to any Russian people. I mean, that is a direct insult to the hierarchy of the Russian defense, President Putin, not to take away from the extraordinary valor of the Ukrainian people, bravery that I can't even comprehend. And I don't think you can unless you're in that situation. In many instances, we're talking about columns of Russian armor running out of gas. They're not fighting this on the moon. This is a neighbor is almost incomprehensible that the Russian military would go into Ukraine with such extraordinary gaps in their logistics. And that's one of the more peculiar elements of this campaign is how incredibly bad the Russian military looks right now and how great the Ukrainians up here, how great they are fighting to protect themselves. But the incompetence shown by the Russian military is astounding in my layman's eyes. I'm not a, I don't have a PhD in military history, but the floor's open. No, I think you're right, John. And if I could just on top of that, we were talking in the class today, and there's an old adage as well in the military. And I'm sure you've heard it. That is that amateurs talk tactics and professionals talk logistics. And that's the game. When you're attacking, there are certain principles, three to one, you have to have a three to one ratio when you're attacking as a minimum. You certainly want more. I'm saying if I was in the military, I want more. I want every advantage. I want an asymmetric fight. I want every advantage I can get over my adversary. But yes, I mean, we're dealing with a conscript army. We're dealing with Russian soldiers who have no idea where they're at, what they're doing, or why they're doing it. You know, their commitment is always been questionable. But there's always been a tendency for many of us to make these people, to make the Russian military these 10 foot giants, you know, this massive wave of Russian military that will come across the board. And, you know, as you said, you're being stopped by essentially civil defense forces, people who did some weekend training to learn about how to shoot a rifle and do first aid. And they're bringing it to a grinding halt and to your point, because of, you know, if you can't get fuel and food forward, and secondly, how are you gonna, if you are successful, and I don't think they will be, I don't think they will be successful. But if they were, the amount of resources it would take to occupy a country the size of Ukraine, the third largest country in Europe, that's just an incredible amount of resources that would have to be committed. And if it devolves into a guerrilla kind of fight, it's just gonna be ugly, just gonna be ugly. And so, yes, I think your points are well made, Jenna. Thank you. I really appreciate the sort of a passing comment you made about the Russian troops not knowing where they are. One of my favorite things about how Ukraine has responded as a people, their national road agency issued an order to take down all the road signs. And so people around the country have just been taking down every possible way to navigate. And we've seen, I think it's Google that has also cut off live traffic transmissions and some things. And so there are agents actively working to make it difficult for them to know where they are. Also, to John's point about the kind of calculus of authoritarian officials, I absolutely agree. And Ukraine has actually argued that some of this was, if not caused by, but at least precipitated by, maybe the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, they suggested that this might be a sign of weakening American resolve abroad. And so this is a test of not just American resolve, but also the world's resolve to intervene when we see this just extreme level of injustice and encroachment on sovereignty norms. If I could make one last comment, you remind me of it, and John. And that is 2022, we now have more authoritarian governments than democratic governments. So authoritarianism's winning. I disagree with that. I'm against, I mean, obviously I'm on, but to your point, John, when we look around and say people are looking and it's authoritarianism that's on the rise right now. And that is, I think, should cause us all to pause and think that through. Okay, so to try and get this, some more questions in, I'll throw you guys a softball. Would implementing a no-fly zone over Ukraine be a good idea? No, that would be World War III if we were to implement a no-fly zone. I get the desire to help the Ukrainian people first and foremost, as of right now, the Russians still haven't established their superiority. No, as of now, the Ukrainians don't have to have that, but the problem with a no-fly zone is you have to enforce it. If you enforce that, if NATO were to put that in over Ukraine, that would be NATO F-16s, US F-15s, F-22s. Having the intercept Russian fighters, Russian bombers, Russian transports, and that's not gonna end well. A no-fly zone would be, to me, a guarantee of World War III. Yeah, and I agree with you, I think that the Ukrainians are doing a mighty fine job right now in knocking Russian aircraft out of the sky. Okay, yeah, I figured that would be a pretty easy one. I wanna ask you about the tweet from an NBC News guy that basically said, why don't we send over some A-10s to shoot up the columns of tanks? Literally said that on Twitter today. But anyway, you've allured to this, summon your answers already, but how are the Ukrainian people responding to Russia's invasion of their territory? Yeah, and we've touched on it throughout the past hour or so. It's incredibly patriotic people and rooted people, grounded people that understand their history, their culture, their identity, their place in the world. And I think they're a unified people. You just, because of that, it's all brought together. And I said in this patriotism that they have, and you just can't help but be moved when you see these interviews of young people, 17, 18, 19 years old, and they're clear on their identity and they're gonna fight for their country. This is their home and they're not leaving. I think that is a one heck of a strength that the Ukrainian people bring to the fight. And I guess no one wants to fight, nobody wants to war. That's the bottom line. Nonetheless, in this defensive act, the people are protecting their homeland and I think that's, they're doing a mighty fine job. And I think it was wrapped up in Zelensky's comment. I don't need a ride, I need ammo. The Ukrainian people are not asking for anyone to come and fight their fight. They are doing it themselves. They just are asking for the help. And I had in my notes here for our talks, I mean, Sweden gave up its neutrality and is sending 500 missiles to the fight. Finland and Sweden are having referenda right now, whether or not to join NATO. I think I can predict where that votes go. So I think the Ukrainians are giving us all a lesson on how to fight in this new age, this third millennium. I agree with Thomas, it's hard to add to that. The Ukrainians have been impressive. The prospect of Russia not winning militarily eventually. It's a prospect. It's not something that I don't think anyone would have imagined on day one of the invasion. And now that's a possibility, which could itself, especially with the sanctions that are targeting members of the political and military hierarchy of Russia, the longer and harder this becomes, especially with the incomprehensible possibility of Russia losing militarily could help out in the end by Russia ending this problem with their own solution. And that could be a coup in Moscow. You could see those around President Putin taking matters into their own hands as they start to recognize that he is driving them down a black hole. So again, the Ukrainian people have been incredibly impressive. I don't want to sound like I'm cheerleading too early. The prospects of Russia defeating the Ukrainians is still very, very much there. But yes, they've been impressive so far, but it's far from over. To add to that, I would say that they're being brave in other places as well. Not just in Ukraine, but also in Russia. There are thousands of protesters, anti-war protesters in Russia, many of whom have been arrested. I think I saw something about somewhere between 1800 and 2000 arrested at anti-war protests in Russia. There are around 300 Ukrainian nationals and supporters who have been protesting in front of the Russian embassy in Seoul. And so they are being brave, not just inside the borders of Ukraine, but they're also being brave outside as well, particularly to protest publicly in Russia. Seems like a very risky move. And so I wanted to add that. Okay, thanks. So another question from the chat. I'm kind of fusing together two or three questions that kind of ask more or less the same question. So assuming, I know this is a bit of a big assumption at this point, if they do succeed to some degree in Ukraine, what is the next step for Russia here? Is this a stepping stone to trying to reclaim the Baltic States, the Caucasus, Moldova? Where does Putin think he's going next? If anywhere, if he does win, I put that in quotation marks in Ukraine. Great question. And again, the reason I threw Moldova out there, it's the only geographically neighboring European nation-state left that's not a member of NATO. If the Russians were to achieve military victory and somehow conquer the entire nation-state of Ukraine, subjugating their military, the vast majority of resources out of a dwindling number of economic resources that Russia will have will be dedicated to maintaining and securing Ukraine for the rest of time. Again, I agree with Tom. There is no pacification of the Ukrainian people. They have shown us already that that is not the direction this will go, even if they do have to downshift into insurgency. So to answer the question, that's a great question. Their future will lie in continuing to fight in Ukraine forever because the Ukrainian people will make them. And then the possibility, again, I keep going back to this because this is what I think about and smile about at night when I wonder about how this could possibly end and that would be a coup in Moscow that somehow ends without President Putin being President Putin. I also think the international community would have to start asking itself, even harder questions. Say somehow, somehow, horrible somehow, Russia was completely successful with Ukraine and they did not need every ounce of their resources to maintain its control and did start looking elsewhere. At what point does the international community have enough? If we don't stop it now, if we don't stop with Ukraine, who are we willing to sacrifice to Russia next? And so I think that what we are seeing right now with the wave of support coming from international organizations and individual countries and for-profit companies, what we're seeing is in complete intolerance of this action for Russia. And so I can't imagine that that would at all decrease enough to let them stay, but certainly enough to let them expand elsewhere. Yeah, if I could, if I could add to that and again, expanding out of that peace war binary I was talking about earlier. Of course, when we look at Ukraine, we look at this, it's in front of us. One of the things we need to consider, I think, is are all the elements of national power, diplomacy, information, military and economic. And when, if we look at it as combat, conflict, confrontation, so the combat may end. And this, what we see, will then morph into a conflict. And ideally we could move it back into a confrontation and then manage that confrontation. So I think that's what we're going to see. We're not going to see a military victory or defeat. We're going to see this morph from active combat into a conflict. And so then we enter and we are in it now, but even when the shooting stops, we still are going to follow a multi-domain fight. And we're going to bring all those elements of national power forward. And we're going to take this fight on in these six domains, human, land, cyber, sea, space and air. I mean, we're going to fight cyber-enabled info wars. We are going to fight cyber battles. We're going to engage in asymmetric hybrid activities. So this is not going to end. I don't see that we're all going to get together on the USS Missouri and Sina Peachtree. We're just going to see this. And then this was the issue with the end of the Cold War. We were in a confrontation with the Soviet Union beginning in 1945 and up until the collapse of the Soviet Union. And we fought that battle in many different ways, whether it was through small regional wars or proxy fighters or whatever. But this confrontation has been going on for quite some time and will continue to go on for quite some time. One of the things I did, I had in my notes I wrote down, I think it might work. I just want to swing back to that when the Soviet Union did collapse, interestingly enough, three Soviet leaders, Medvedev and Putin being two of them, advocated for NATO membership. They wanted Russia to be part of NATO. Again, back to this creative fiction about NATO being a threat that I know Yeltsin, Medvedev and Putin all talked about joining them. So just kind of makes it foolish to say I want to join the security threat into my nation. I did want to piggyback off that just a little bit. You mentioned cyber battles and how those will occur. They're occurring now as well. So what we've seen are reports from a lot of big social media sites that they are actively trying to track down misinformation and attacks on Ukrainian officials in particular. So Metta, Facebook's new company name, said Sunday that it had shut down influence and hacking campaigns targeting its users in Ukraine. Efforts were tied to people in both Russia and Ukraine and a hacking group thought to be affiliated with Belarus. Twitter has said that the company has removed more than a dozen accounts that participated in the same campaigns. They blocked a number of links for being shared on Twitter. YouTube has shut down five channels with not particularly many subscribers. They're not getting a lot of traction, but they've been shutting down accounts. Metta has also detected a hacking operation that targeted military leaders and politicians in Ukraine as well as at least one journalist. And so there are cyber battles already happening right now. Yeah. And to that point, thank you for bringing it up here because the key point there is one of the things we want to do is prevent as many simultaneous dilemmas as we can to our adversary to overwhelm and stress their decision-making processes. And so yeah, to your point that the battle is going on inside, we don't see it. You know, it doesn't, it's not like you can see a tank. You know, you can see in a helicopter, but you can't see a cyber fight. But these are incredibly important activities in creating those overwhelming simultaneous dilemmas that the adversary just can't deal with. And so they just, you stress and their whole system just collapses. And so to your point, I think it's well made. It's one of the, John mentioned earlier that he likes to warm himself falling asleep at night with thoughts of a coup in Russia. I'm being warmed by the thought of these companies actually stepping up increasingly. We saw them staying uninvolved far too many times leading to violence and destruction. And so for them to be trying now is at least progress on their parts. I agree. And not to take away from the economic sanctions and the global community. I think President Putin has made it very clear he does not care. He could not possibly care now. I don't think he will care later. I think he is viewing the world in a different way than we are. Hopefully I'm wrong. I just, to me, I don't see how this ends without a coup in Moscow. Which again, I will wait for. And if I, that makes great good sense, John. If I could swing back to Annie real quick because earlier a comment about, you know the cyber battle and the Ukrainians taking down all the road signs and doing a lot of kinds of things. Which is very interesting because in 2014 when Russians were moving into Crimea and into the Donbass region, the way we knew where all the troop movements were was because of all the Russians were taking selfies with the road signs behind them. And so we were able to track open source troop movements because of the cyber. So it can go one way or the other. But it was, I wanted to point out since I have the like on three occasions now in a public forum express my desire for a coup, I want to point out that they are by definition illegal and nine times out of nine, I would not be in favor but in this one case. So just that one case, I'm not an advocate for coups except Moscow today right now. I would, this is a little bit of a side note but one of the groups that we have not mentioned is the Russian people. And particularly with that comment about sanctions, this is also a group that will suffer. And so what we know about sanctions is that without very careful targeting what you end up hurting or who you end up hurting is the people who are already hurting worst in society, the most marginalized individuals experiencing poverty. And so that's what we're going to see. We've already seen Russia's economy take a pretty sharp hit because of all of the sanctions and actions being taken by global actors. And while there are some efforts to target those sanctions and to target the pain at the government actors, what we will see is that those government actors often have the resources to temper that pain whereas the average Russian is not going to have those resources. And so we should certainly not forget that they are not the ones who have asked for this war, they are not the ones who have asked for the violence. I think you made a great good point, Ania, that is about the utility of sanctions. Certainly when we've had some hellacious sanctions on Iran and North Korea for a good long time now and the track record of sanctions, though they look good and make us feel good is really not all that good. And I think to your point, those with resources, whether they be an oligarch or a part of the North Korean elite, they have resources and they have ways to hide money and react and do all those types of things. So yes, the folks in the street, unfortunately, that feel the pain of the sanctions most readily, thank you. Okay, great. So this actually gets to something that John was wishing for, I guess, for lack of a better term. The thing that was sort of popping in my head is what support for this war is there beyond Putin? In other words, if there is a coup in Moscow, does whoever picks up the pieces Medvedev or whoever, do they sue for peace or are they going to double down or is Putin the problem here or is there a deeper, I guess, bench, if you will, that if Putin goes, they'll just next man up basically like Al Qaeda or something. I think to the video that we've all seen, I forgot the office, it was a defense minister. The dressing down of one of his officers right before the attack began, when Putin was asking him about his support for annexing the particular areas within the Donbass. Does everybody know one of his many famous meetings with his version of a cabinet where he is sitting at one end of a mile long table and all of his supporters are off in the distance. It was very clear to anyone watching that Putin was bullying this man and he was literally putting words into his mouth. He would say, I would support and Putin would stop him, you would support or you do support. It was overwhelmingly clear that at least with this one individual who, forgive me, I think it was a defense minister, I forgot his name. I think he was the head of intelligence. His intelligence. He was clearly bullying this man into saying exactly what he wanted to hear. So that is anecdotal evidence. I don't have anything beyond that. So I just thought I would throw that out there as the possibility that yes, President Putin is in fact the problem. I am sure there are old guard former Soviet officers within the upper echelon of Moscow that are overwhelmingly big fans of this operation and expanding Russia further wherever that might be. That's a great question. I think Chris hit and hits the million dollar question, how much support is there in the Russian government for this and how many people are just going along because they know what happens if they don't? You know, if I jump in real quick, John, build on what you were saying. Yeah, I, you know, about a coup, I said the challenge of the coup is, I guess definition-wise, it leaves the same government in charge, the same system. And I would argue it's the system. It's the structure of the system that is wrong. And so to your point about authoritarianism. So I get, and that was telling when I watched that intelligence chief, I mean, it was his expressions were incredible when he was being dressed down by Putin. What I would add to that is Putin has the support of the oligarchs. There's a lot of people in Russia benefiting from what he's doing. And their interests are in protecting themselves and advancing their own interests. And Putin does that, Putin meets that need for them. Now, to your point, feel over steps and the oligarchs begin to feel the pain. Then things can shift rather rapidly. If when he's no longer useful to the money power, the oligarch, the corruption of Russia to begin with. I think that's gonna be, that's where you gotta get moved. You gotta get the oligarchs hurt. We can also potentially see some generational shifts. I think that older generations are probably still more attached to or embedded in the kind of Cold War tensions and disagreements and hatred and headbutting cultures. But I don't think that younger Russians have that same attachment to it. I think that they are less willing to go to war in general, but particularly for this kind of reason. And generations take time to change over, but Putin is starting to age and there is only so much more time that he can have control. Now, whether it outlasts him, whether we see the perpetuation of the system, even with him gone, that remains to be seen. But I think that younger Russians in particular, as they start getting older and having more resources, if we have hope, I would find it with them. Okay, thanks. So if, well, we're getting close to our closing time, but I don't know if you'd be willing to indulge maybe one last question, and then we'll go ahead and wrap things up. So this question came from the chat or sort of came from the chat or came from multiple chat questions, I guess. With, in Western Europe, Germany and some of the other countries, they rely very heavily on oil and gas exports from Russia through Gazprom and the various pipelines and things like that. To what extent would developing alternative sources of energy and alternate sources for their current energy needs, perhaps, affect geopolitics going forward in terms of their dependency on Russian exports? Yeah, that's a great question that you could ask any country. I mean, how many situations do we see where a petroleum exporting country through that economic reality has the ability to, if not dictate, but influence the foreign policy decisions of other nations states. Europe has a problem. This is a weakness. They do currently, compared to US efforts, are somewhat leading in terms of alternative energy development in terms of solar and wind. In Germany in particular, I don't have any raw data on me here, but I do know that many Western European countries are advancing there, but that's a problem. Oh, that's a bad answer. It's a weakness of Western Europe, but at the same time, given the economic sanctions that are already on Russia, if the Putin administration were to aggressively cut off all oil to Western Europe, I mean, he's in a position where that's almost economically suicidal, I would think, not that that would stop him. So I'm gonna stop this rambling answer with that's a problem and I do not have the solution for Europe other than advancing other sources of fuel, particularly alternative energy, renewable energy. Yeah, like I said, oh man, this is a tough one because we look around the world too and we characterize Russia as a gas station with a flag, essentially. You look at other Saudi Arabia, you look at Iran, these are not necessarily the good actors out there. So we're still a carbon-based world and this transition to green energy or alternative energy sources, absolutely we know that we have to move in that direction. However, in the interim, during that transition, are we willing to hand the keys to the car over to the drunk? And that is those people who possess the oil, the energy needs that industrial states need to move, to operate and right now we're not in a position, we don't have enough windmills or hydroelectric or to compensate for carbon-based energy. And so yeah, it's a challenge, we're in a really tough spot now. We know where we have to go and we know we need to get there quickly, but until we can, we've got some bad actors out there who have some influence on country's foreign policies and economic growth and development. Yeah. So we're not going to have to go through that. We're not going to have to go through that. And economic growth and development, yeah. And I'm rambling now, so I'll stop. I suppose I'll pick up and take the ramble just a little bit further and say that while Russia doesn't have, I mean, I found one quote earlier that said that they're incredibly unimportant in the global economy except for oil and gas. And that is largely true, but not entirely true. And so what we have seen as well is that they are also gay and Ukraine are also strong contributors to food production. And so Russia is the world's largest supplier of wheat and together with the Ukraine, it counts from nearly a quarter of total global exports. And so that flow of grain makes up more than 70% of Egypt and Turkey's total wheat imports. This is going to put further strain on Turkey. They are also, so Ukraine is known as the bread basket of Europe and since more than 40% of its wheat and corn exports to the Middle East and Africa and Lebanon gets more than half of its wheat from the Ukraine. And so this is, it's not just Russia who is affected by this situation, it's also Ukraine and Ukraine's exports and the countries that depend on those exports. And always the people who suffer most are the poor, the people who can barely afford food to begin with or can't afford food to begin with what we're seeing already are food prices rising. And it is important to do things like power our cars that it's necessary, it is necessary to be able to heat our homes, particularly in very cold countries, but we can't overlook how important it is to have these food supplies. Okay, well, thank you very much. I don't know if any of you have any closing comments you'd like to make, but we're pretty much out of time, but nonetheless, I did wanna give you that opportunity. One thing before I do open the floor for the last time, if you are an English 11-02 student and I've not posted that in the chat, please do so. I know some of you may not be looking at the chat, so be aware of that. It is the second icon on the top right of your screen, I think, so from the left, kind of hard to describe, it looks like a bubble. So anyway, John, did you have anything you wanted to add? In the interest of time, I will just summarize the situation. We have a war in Europe and it is terrifying. What makes it less so is the extraordinary bravery of the Ukrainian people who continuously impress us and show us new ways to be impressed on a daily basis. That was my quick talk. But I guess I can get it. Echo John's comment, we have to be impressed by the courage and bravery of the Ukrainian people who are standing up, not just for Ukraine, but for the world. This is a global fight and this is set to, as I said, to disturb all of the international institutions that have developed post-World War II. And the Ukrainians are on the front line and they are holding it together for the world right now. And I also do want to say that NATO, the EU, the Transatlantic Alliance, that have been tested, they have stepped forward and they have met this fight I think extremely well, extremely well. And the unity, the way in which all countries, Sweden, Germany, I mean, these are within 24 hours, it made some incredible shifts in policy. I think Germany is going to today, a hundred billion dollars extra to defense, going to enshrine the 2% NATO requirement in their constitution, Sweden giving up in neutrality. These are, we are seeing some incredible tectonic shifts in the international community right now, all because all being allowed by the bravery of the Ukrainian people. So I do want to echo exactly what you said, John. Both of you have done really beautiful jobs talking about the Ukrainian people. And so I think I'm going to add a little bit more about the international community. Many of the international principles that we hold dear, like the responsibility to protect, for example, came out of international failures. We saw international failures to intervene in really horrible situations and genocidal situations. And so my great hope is that we have the opposite of that here, that the international community shuts this down and that's a message to the rising number of authoritarian governments that we see around the world, that the world will not tolerate this kind of activity. I fear what becomes of us if they do not. That was not the hopeful message to end on. That's okay. Nonetheless, that is probably where we're going to have to leave things off for this evening because we have been here for an hour and 40 minutes and probably could be here for another hour and 40 minutes. I'd like to thank all of you for your great questions. Sorry, we didn't get to them all. If you're in Dr. Hall's class, I'm sure he'll be happy to answer those questions for you on Tuesday or Wednesday, or if you're in Dr. Matrock's class or Dr. Watson's class for that matter, or any of our classes, I'm sure we'd be happy to answer some questions as well, but that kind of leaves us for this evening. So I'd like to thank our panelists, Dr. John Hall, Dr. Annie Watson, Dr. Thomas Matrock, taking their time out of their evenings. I'd like to thank you guys for coming out this evening, our fellow students here, as well as our faculty and staff and community members. If you're interested in watching this again for some reason, we will have a video of this posted on our brand new political science department, YouTube's channel, which I just set up two hours ago later on today. So I will be sending out that link to at least some people that asked for it. And if you, again, if you have any other questions, let us know. Keep it out for future events and we, I guess have as good an evening as you can under the circumstances. Thank you all. Thank you Chris. Thank you Chris, appreciate it. Thank you, see you John, see you Annie. Thanks everyone.