To help us better understand the situation we're turning to Doug Casey's friend, Mark Gould.

Mark is an executive for a company in the oil industry, also working on several media projects. He also has 30 years of experience in Russian telecommunications as co-founder of CTC Media (previously NASDAQ:CTCM); and afterwards pioneering digital compression for TV (the core technology for video streaming) on the Soviet Satellite system, Moscow Global. Mark currently lives in Moscow.

International Man: Naturally, Americans have a lot of misconceptions about Russia. And that's what we want to help clear up today. The importance of Russia to world affairs is simply too important to ignore or to not understand properly.