I absolutely agree with that.
Moreover, that is what President Putin has understood. In the American Congress, we even saw a general explain that two Russian ships had sailed away from the Black Sea ports just before the start of a battle. History may hold this against President Biden. From the outset, even before the intervention began, the Russians had already been told that we were not going to send troops on the ground. So we accepted, de facto, a kind of sharing of spheres of influence, a situation in which we concede that the heart of the Russian state is in Ukraine, in Kyiv—with all due respect to all my Ukrainian nationalist friends, who rightly hate this notion. Yet this is how things are understood in Russia, where they reject the idea that the heart of the Slavo-Orthodox civilization could one day end up in the American orbit.
This has been obvious since the Bucharest Summit in 2008. The French and Germans said that extending the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, or NATO, alliance to Ukraine was out of the question, and the Americans insisted on a resolution promising that one day Georgia and Ukraine would be part of NATO. This red line, which President Putin has been talking about a lot recently, was already mentioned in 2008.
It is incomprehensible to think that Russia would stand idly by. Russia represents 3% of the world's gross domestic product, or GDP. How can we expect to have a dialogue of equals with a poor foreign power, a country that is essentially an exporter of natural resources?
The Russians have a large number of nuclear warheads. The figures vary according to sources, but they have about 6,000, of which 1,500 are deployed. They have invested heavily over the last 15 years in developing hypersonic technologies that are capable of defeating the elements of the missile shield that we have deployed on their doorstep, in Poland and Romania, as you know. So they have been preparing for this confrontation for a long time. They feel they can teach us a lesson in humility, and the feeling is mutual. It's like when two guys with big arms meet in a bar and each one thinks he is stronger than the other. It could end up in a tough fight.