Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you for having me. If there are follow-up questions, or things I could provide more detail on, please let me know and I'll do my best.

Foreign Affairs committee  They're not touting their superiority. They're just quietly pointing out that by the way they're a nuclear power, and “Look at these systems”.They talk about their systems capacities to defeat missile defences. Well, of course, their systems are capable of defeating missile defences.

Foreign Affairs committee  It's a little different in different parts of the region. The Islamic State, Daesh, is in Russia. There was a local group, the Caucasus Emirate, that was very active for a number of years. They fell apart recently, in part due to Russian government pressure, in part due to internal pressure.

Foreign Affairs committee  That's a great point. I think the perceptions and the actuality of economic difficulties do tend to be a breeding ground for various forms of populism, those kinds of easy answers. That's why these sorts of parties are growing in strength in Ukraine. That's why there is an appeal of these sorts of solutions in the United States, and obviously in Europe.

Foreign Affairs committee  That's a fantastic question. I'm not sure that I've seen good polling. First of all, it's hard to do good polling in Russia, for a lot of reasons. I will go and check to see whether anyone is asking that question of Russians and what kinds of answers they get. My guess is that most Russians don't think their children will live better than they do.

Foreign Affairs committee  Russia doesn't want to rely on its nuclear weapons entirely for deterrence. As I said, they kept the threshold for nuclear use in their official doctrine high. Nuclear use is only allowable in case of a threat to the existence of the state—an existential threat to Russia. We can argue about what that might mean.

Foreign Affairs committee  I think we make a mistake if we blame the Russians for exploiting our weaknesses. Our problem is the weakness, not the Russian exploitation of the weakness. Speaking as an American, let me say that if we have a system that can be so easily.... Look, I don't think the Russians got Donald Trump elected in the United States.

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes, I think that's right. There is a tendency on the part of reformers to cast it that way, because it's a better sell to the opposition, rather than saying that we have to deal with this because of this neighbour who is stronger. That worked early on, and I think they really made a mistake in selling the reforms as “this is our path into western institutions”, as opposed to “this is our path to being a sustainable, effective country that Russia would not have been able to invade if we had done this earlier”.

Foreign Affairs committee  That's a great question. What I said was that when I was there in November, I heard a number of people say it was a mistake. Now I've heard people characterize the mistake differently. Some people thought the mistake was not marching to Kiev; other people thought the mistake was getting involved in the first place.

Foreign Affairs committee  There are three questions in one here, I think. In terms of bipolarity, I would say that Russia needs the United States because it needs the North Pole, right? When it talks, it talks about multi-polarity, but China is a component here; Europe, maybe, is a component here. In its ideal universe, you're back to the Cold War.

Foreign Affairs committee  A lot of this is about citizenship laws and language laws. These countries are more successful when they.... You could sort of line it up. There are all sorts of things in play here. You're looking at the extent to which populations are intermingled as well as the policies and you can't ignore that, so you don't have perfectly controlled experiments.

Foreign Affairs committee  I haven't done this study. Estonia has had a tense relationship with its Russian-speaking population. Lithuania has a different model because proportions are different and so has Latvia. I would actually want to put them side by side and look at the numbers to give you a good answer but this is the sort of thing I would be looking at.

Foreign Affairs committee  I think Russia sees the Balkans as one more area to destabilize European unity, which is a project that has gone surprisingly well for it—I don't think it expected the levels of success it's had either in the Balkans or elsewhere in Europe—and it's going to keep pushing. I think it's interesting, in terms of Russian policy going forward, that Russia's success is based on a disruptive strategy.

Foreign Affairs committee  I would say that education, integration, and media all have a very important role to play in this. I would say the Baltic countries to varying degrees have worked harder or less hard to actually integrate these communities and trust them more and less. The less they're trusted and the less they're integrated the more they will turn to Russian sources of information and Russian media because they don't have domestic sources of media and information.

Foreign Affairs committee  Those are great questions. I think it's very interesting to watch Belarus, because I think Lukashenko has been playing what he at least sees as a fairly calibrated game, in which he keeps the Russians on the side. Belarus and Russia will be doing the West 2017 exercise shortly. There's no reason to think that's being called off.