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People think the last election was stolen, et cetera, et cetera. he thought this was the moment he could seize on the american nervousness, american retreat, after, let's face it, real disasters in afghanistan and iraq and elsewhere, and a trump presidency. he thought, this was the moment, and it's gone awry. but he's willing to shed a lot of blood to correct it. >> david, you were talking a few moments ago about his dependence on convincing the russian people that they are in the right, russia is in the right in ukraine, and most of what they see or have heard is fake. what is it about the ru...

It's ukraine that's humiliating russia, whether at some point he really starts trying to bait us. whether he tries to bait nato to go in. whether he tries to bait the united states in. >> that's what i think. >> for putin, it's critical for every reason in the world, that this battle is between russia and the united states, who he says has been trying to destroy russia for 20 years. >> that'd feed into his narrative. that's what i was going to ask you, david, as a student of russia, and you wrote "lennon's tomb," about the end of the soviet empire. put it into some context if you can for our v...

Invasion, russian tanks being driven through a town. one of the generals on twitter said, oh, my god, look at the lack of discipline in the tank formation. is it children? i was like, can you tell that from a tank formation going through town? you can, obviously. claire, you were on the armed services, is that right? >> 12 years. >> okay. >> i'm not going to ask if you ever saw this coming because none of us saw this coming. but how could -- and i'll ask david next -- how could the russian military be performing so poorly after this post-georgia was vladimir putin's top project? >> this is the...

Hostilities between ukraine and the russians, their command and control operations, the russian's, was completely amputated in a day. that doesn't happen without our technological assistance. >> exactly right. and the training we provided. people forget, a lot of the leadership skills you're seeing in ukraine, a lot of that training happened via the united states of america military. >> david, i'm curious about this military collapse. you know, in june of '41, the germans were able to sweep across russia so quickly because stalin had purged all of his effective generals because he feared the m...