Slop.

When I read about the bungling attempts by American and European negotiators, envoys, etc, to work over Russia I often think about the difference in education between the two parties. Putin and his advisors are almost certainly all dyed in the wool neoliberals, but they have one significant advantage over their western neoliberal counterparts - they grew up in the Soviet Union and were taught some kind of material analysis rather than the tautologies and false truisms of a western liberal primary and secondary education. They have the basic foundational building blocks of real analysis while our western dingbats just think they're right because they're better.