Well, I don't want to reveal my age, but I remember going to school in the eighties. The academics who taught history, whether it was Russian, eastern European or whatever, were all schooled in the Soviet school of academia. They all spent their summers in Moscow being wined and dined by the KGB, and they would come back and repeat, really, Soviet lines of thinking.
There is concern in the academic world that Slavic and eastern European studies have been colonized by the Russians, so we need to start with our educational institutions, start decolonizing them and focusing not on the Russian imperialist view of the world but on the other countries neighbouring Russia, namely Ukraine.
We have politicians, staff and advisers at Global Affairs who take a very benign view of Russia. When the full-scale invasion started, many of them were sitting there and saying, “Oh my God, the lion ate my face. What happened here?”
It's a question of restaffing with individuals who understand what Russia is today. The Helsinki Commission is recommending to the U.S. government and to other governments that they need a reset, and I'm not talking about the Obama reset. We need a complete rethinking of our approach to Russia and to identify it as a global security threat.