even during the downtime NUMBER_TOKEN is still very well you know above what our u.s presidents get so there are people on the right in this country who kind of like putin too because he says talks about law and order he talks about religion what is putin up to i mean you wrote a book called putin's playbook russia's secret plan to defeat america rebecca koffler what is his playbook what's he up to right uh well first andre if i may i want to address very briefly the religious aspect of it yeah please um putin tries to present himself as this religious you know man right and he resurrected the spirituality in russia you know um and he is raising the stature of russian orthodox art church trying to really pretend that they uh that the russians are very similar to american religious people and nothing can be further from the truth right there's big differences and we can go into that later and so uh when president former president bush looked into putin's eyes and saw a soul he was mistaken president bush was sort of a victim if you will of uh putin's manipulations because the russians profile u.s leaders routinely right with whom they deal and including president biden which is why you see you know putin uh being able to outmaneuver president biden so back then he knew that president uh bush is very religious and he was trying to establish some you know common interest with him so that's one thing and then with regard to putin's playbook uh which i wrote uh the russians developed a very unique and very sophisticated strategy to prevent the united states from letting putin achieve his strategic ambitions which has rebuilt the imperial russia and again we could get into that later and if we stand in their way which putin understands we do because our national interests are on the collision course he's even prepared to defeat the united states including militarily and there are a lot of non-kinetic aspects in his playbook and one of them is cyber which is why you see the dhs recently announcing that the russian uh cyber attack is in the works and somehow we should be bracing for it you know somehow we suppose now to defend ourselves you know from the russian cyber attack even though we have a very strong national security apparatus but unfortunately there was sleeping at the wheel while putin was developing his strategy and we were not paying attention and we were not developing counter-strategy when you say he wants to rebuild imperial russia you're talking about russia even before the soviet union right so well i kind of um i'm sorry andrew i used this word uh colloquially let me just be uh very nuanced uh about this so what putin wants is to reconstitute a um a supranational state not unlike the former soviet union right he wants to integrate the post-soviet states into one entity that would be um sort of similar to a combination of three things uh nato european union and soviet union right he uh the nuance here is that there's no plan right at least right now to incorporate baltics into that supernatural state because putin understands the baltics latvia lithuania
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