“At no point did the Russian Chief of General Staff publicly stand up and say, hey guys, if we want to invade the largest country in Europe, then it's not going to cut it with 120,000 men. And by the way, we're a mobilization force, we need to mobilize, which is none of what happened. It was quite obvious that it was a security services plan: we're going to walk in there with a coup d'etat, we're not going to face serious resistance, it's going to be over in 10 days.”

No, I think those are really, I mean, the General Staff’ does a lot of things by virtue of being on top of the military system. But in terms of kind of what's analytically interesting and relevant, I group them into command, being the ultimate command post of the Russian armed forces and the architecture for commanding the Russian armed forces, military districts, the joint strategic commands from the highest levels. It is generating military theory and preparing Russia and developing strategic foresight, preparing Russia for future war and for future conflict and preparing the entire state, putting the intellectual foundation to where Russia should be. And I mean, foresight and strategic planning is really important in the Russian system. And then as a political actor, and you ask how much influence? Well, I think the trajectory from this book is really one way. It's from a very strong and influential general staff that played politics in the 90s and the 2000s down to in the 2010s and 2020s, a very subordinated servant that does not speak truth to power or at least voice their best military advice. And I mean, the 2022 invasion is just the culmination of this. It is a long trend, but at no point did the Russian Chief of General Staff’ publicly…