Angry Planet - The Weird Way Americans Talk About Ukraine As War Looms

Episode Date: February 14, 2022

Ukraine. Things are changing rapidly, but at this moment the Kremlin has the country surrounded. It’s conducting military drills in the Black Sea, marshaling troops in neighboring Belarus, and recalling mercenaries from Africa. Recently Putin even made a rape joke during a press conference to imply what he wanted from Ukraine.It doesn’t look good. But to hear Ben & Jerry's Ice cream tell it, this is all because of the imperial U.S.-led aggression in Eastern Europe. Why does it seem like some Americans, from right-wing pundits to your terminally online socialist friend, can’t seem to take the Kremlin’s threats seriously?With us today to answer that question is Christopher Atwood. Atwood senior advisor at the Souspilnist Foundation in Kyiv. He’s lived in both Russia and Ukraine.You can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world with their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello, welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Matthew Galt. Jason Fields is still on sabbatical. Ukraine. Things are changing. rapidly, but at this moment, the Kremlin has the country surrounded. It's conducting military drills in the Black Sea, marshalling troops and neighboring Belarus, and recalling mercenaries from Africa. Recently, Putin even made a rape joke during a press conference to imply what he wanted from Ukraine, which is all to say it doesn't look good, but to hear Ben and Jerry's ice cream tell it, this is all because of the imperial U.S.-led aggression in Eastern Europe. why does it seem like some Americans from right-wing pundits to your terminally online socialist friends can't seem to take the Kremlin's threats seriously?

With us today to answer that question is Christopher Atwood. Atwood is a senior advisor at the Suspilinist Foundation in Kiev. He's lived in both Russia and Ukraine. Sir, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. All right. So I want to introduce the audience to you a little bit here at the top, kind of get your credentials. in order, so to speak. First of all, you lived in Russia for a few years, right?

That is correct. I actually spent some time first in Kiev. Then I moved to Darnetsk. This is around 2010, 2011. Then I spent a good deal of time in Moscow and in Yucatsurinburg before everything on Euromidon happened. When the war started, I left Russia, came back to Kiev, and then I bounced between Kiev and the states since then. And you kind of, we were talking a little bit before the call, you kind of said that it was interesting to be in Ukraine at the time because you were there for, you know, the, the, the midden, and then you were there for the anti-Miden too in, in eastern Ukraine. So kind of can you tell me what it was like to see both sides of that?

Yeah, that was fascinating. So I lived, like I said, in, in, uh, in, uh, Kiev-Darnetsk around 2010-2011. I moved to Russia after that and I kept my contacts in Ukraine. I, you know, visited Ukraine every six months or so or every three months whenever I needed to leave Russia for a stamp in my passport. And, you know, I happened on to my Don in December 2013 when everything started getting very, very, very serious. I had a business trip to Kiev and I was explicitly told, don't go to my Don. So I went to my Don. You know, it was a very, you know, I hadn't. I wasn't in the States for Occupy Wall Street, and it felt like what I imagined Occupy Wall Street would have felt like. You know, it was very communal. It was very friendly. You had lots of people from different backgrounds coming all together and, you know, being able to put their differences aside politically and take on one serious issue to all of them, which was government corruption and brutality. I visited Donetsk after the revolution. You know, that was just a trip to visit my friends and just see how everything was going on there. And that just happened to be the first day of like the major protest that eventually turned into the DNR, the Donets People's Republic.

And that had such a different vibe. You know, in Donetsk, there had been, there was this political party called Ruski Block, like the Russian bloc. And they used to have major protests with the Communist Party to have closer ties to Russia or even to reestablish the Soviet Union. And everyone thought that it was something like that, everyone who I talked to in Danesk, at least. And then, you know, you would see these people in Danesk who would, you know, travel in groups of two or three or three or four. And they would, you know, they would be asking for basic directions that everyone in Dunbos would know. So, for example, the first and only McDonald's for a while in Donbos was in Donetsk. It was downtown. It was next to Linen Square.

And people would come in to Darnetsk. This is friends telling me this anecdote, but people would come into Dernetsk and they would ask, hey, how do you get to Linen Square? And everyone from Donbos knew where Lennon Square was because that's where the McDonald's was because everyone in Dunbos wanted to go to the McDonald's in Dunax after the fall of the Soviet Union. So it had such a different vibe. It felt just almost entirely. artificial. And, you know, it was just like old people reminiscing over the Soviet Union and young

people who didn't seem like they belonged or were actually from there. Can we talk a little bit about the job you were doing while you were there? You worked at UATV, right? What exactly was that? Yeah, yeah. So I spent a little under a year at UATV. This was a little bit after the revolution. That was a TV channel started by the Poroshenko government, and the intent was to be a response to Russia today. That was like the initial idea for the bill that eventually became UATV. And, you know, it was really just a project to try to fight propaganda with truth. You know, I mean, but it, when things like that happen in the post-Soviet space, they're really difficult to get. right because you have to, you know, you have to hire employees and those employees have

backgrounds in, you know, 90s media or Soviet media. A lot of the leadership had training from, you know, Soviet journalism schools or whatever. So, you know, you have to get people to shake what they, like what they perceive as accurate and fair reporting and, you know, actually engage in it. And that's kind of actually where I ended up is now I work at, as you mentioned, the Suspilness Foundation, where, like, you know, we work with journalism students and the whole point of the foundation is to try to reorient the post-Soviet journalism space to be, you know, to follow more principles of freedom of the press of, you know, fair and accurate reporting, getting away from propaganda. I can't tell you how many times I worked with journalists where they genuinely believed

that, you know, if we just have some, like, what they would call pure propaganda, chista propaganda, they, that's okay because we're in the right here. And having to, like, explain to them, well, you know, that's not necessarily how this stuff works. Although, to be clear, again, these are, like, people who's got their start in the Soviet Union who need to, like, readjust. Younger journalism students typically come from a much more Western-oriented journalism background. Well, that's kind of a neat segue into why we're talking today. I mean, obviously we're talking about Ukraine and the Russian threat. But kind of this thing that, you know, I've haven't been having a lot of conversations with friends.

Intelligent people, mostly Americans, who just have a, basically, in my opinion, are only listening to Western sources, don't know anyone that's in Ukraine, don't know, aren't listening to even Russian sources. and kind of have this very narrow and strange view of what's happening. I don't speak Russian and Ukrainian, but I do read, and I try to take the time to seek out different opinions. And it just seems like there's this willful ignorance right now on the part of Americans to look at this issue. And I kind of want to orient this episode in time. So where we are right now, it's like 3 p.m. on Friday, February 11th, yesterday. And after all that, I'm going to be, after all that, I'm going to be, quote, quoting U.S. sources, which I actually think is an important distinction for what I'm about to say.

Yesterday, I believe the U.S. State Department sent on an email to the Americans that it knows are in Ukraine saying, like, hey, this is the last time. This is it. This is the final warning. We are not coming for you. Biden, when asked about it, said, like, we are not, if somebody gets left behind and there's an invasion, we are not sending people in to come for Americans. and then think about an hour ago, there's breaking news that essentially U.S. intelligence has said, like, Russia is going to invade soon. So that's where that's kind of the latest news. And again, from Western source, what do you make generally of this situation, the tensions between Ukraine and Russia, what I would call the back end of an invasion that's been going on for eight years, in my opinion, with what looks like to me, based, on the maps and the information I have is going to be another Russian invasion. Do you think that's accurate? You know, am I completely wrong? What do you see? Well, first of all, thank you so much for positioning it the way that you did because I feel like that often gets lost in the reporting, which is this is a continuation of something that's been going on for eight years. Russia, you know,

when you put it in that context and you say, you know, you know, this is growing out of the war that been happening for the last eight years and then Russia might invade Ukraine, right? Then you're putting that in the appropriate context where you're saying, you know, Russia is going to launch a new military operation within an already ongoing war. Whereas a lot of the reporting that I see tends to either downplay that or overlook it because, you know, it's, I think that it's just being taken for granted that everyone knows that. And I think that that sort of, I know that that that frustrates some Ukrainians, that a lot of Ukrainians will say to me, you know, why are people saying that Russia is about to invade Ukraine? They already invaded us.

Which actually, there was a report a couple weeks ago about tensions between Kiev and D.C. where an unnamed official quoted by CNN said, I don't understand why Zelensky is criticizing us. How can he say that he doesn't believe an invasion is imminent? Yet he's asking us for weapons, to which I really wish I could respond to that person. person and say, you know, like, Ukraine has been asking for weapons for eight years and the war hasn't stopped. So, you know, even if, you know, even if this isn't political posturing and Zelensky genuinely doesn't believe that an invasion is imminent, you know, he's still well within his rights to ask for weapons to continue, you know, arming Ukraine and, and protecting against further aggression. In terms of your

direct question and in terms of the, you know, the most recent news, you know, it, this happens so many times there has happened so many times in this cycle. So the initial report that you're referencing, as far as today goes, is from Nick Schifrin. And, you know, he said the U.S. believes that Russia is about to invade. And then an hour later, he has to slightly contextualize his reporting by saying that Jake Sullivan says the U.S. has not concluded that Putin has given the order to invade, right? which is, you know, an important distinction. I think that, you know, personally, I tend to take the, I tend to take a more pragmatic approach to what benefits Russia might get from a full-scale invasion.

I tend not to think that it's going to be something super full-scale, bloody conflict all the way into Kiev. I could be wrong. I think that's a possibility. I think it's, I think we would be entirely ignorant to ignore the, you know, massive threat that's on the Ukrainian border right now. But at the same time, I think that when we look at Putin and we look at what he's been, you know, trying to do, he tends to do things that are in his political interest. There isn't really an appetite for a war in Ukraine in Russia.

His popularity has been lagging due to his response to COVID. It's, to me, it seems more likely to be just a perfect moment in time to show the West that he's ready to, you know, reassess his aggression towards Ukraine and, like, reignite the flames of that war, which has been, you know, simmering from ceasefire violations every day and not been in, like, a superactive phase in a while. So now, of course, that's just my read on the situation. I'm not in the Kremlin. I don't know. You know, Putin has made miscalculations before a pretty, you know, common theme with Russian policy towards Ukraine is that, you know, the Kremlin tends to misunderstand Ukrainian intentions and misunderstand Ukrainian desires.

So it's entirely possible that they're making a calculation that I would never make in terms of Ukraine. You know, that's how I see it. Although I do, you know, you introduce this episode by mentioning, you know, your, you're, you know, a constantly online socialist friends or your far right. aunts and uncles on Facebook, you know, I think that that takes it a little bit too far saying that, you know, that there's absolutely no reason to think that there would be any kind of invasion and that the U.S. is just drumming all of this up for some nefarious reason. You know,

I think that there is a real possibility of an invasion and that the Kremlin is signaling that and that we would be foolish not to take them seriously. But in terms of whether or not it actually will happen, if it does, I just don't, I personally don't see like a bloody struggle into Kiev. What are Ukrainians saying? Ukrainians are sort of, oh, go ahead. I was going to say not to make them into a monoculture, right? There's a wealth of different opinions, but generally. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, Ukrainians are mixed on this. You know, I think in recent weeks, I've seen more and more reporting in Ukraine that, you know, focuses on this situation, more than

anything else. But, you know, as recently as I think two weeks ago, I was watching a political talk show in Kiev. And the lead story was not the potential of a Russian invasion. It was that Zelensky wants to, wants to have Poroshenko arrested. It was the whole scandal with Portochenko coming back to the country. And, you know, Zelensky couldn't convince a judge to have him arrested. So instead, he's just being monitored. And, you know, it's a, it's an interesting, it's an interesting difference when I see, you know, the New York Times constantly reporting about the threat of a Russian invasion. But when I read Ukrainska Pravda, Ukrainian Pravda, which don't mix that with, you know, Soviet newspaper Pravda. This is a Ukrainian publication

that was launched in, I think early 2000, I think 2000, actually. But when I read that source, a Ukrainian source, you know, that's not always the top story of the day. Like everyone, And just because from a Ukrainian perspective, they've been living in the reality that a full-scale Russian invasion could happen tomorrow for the last eight years. So obviously, this is a different situation where you have, you know, 100,000 troops surrounding your country ready to invade. But at the same time, you know, it's not something that is completely new. I mean, like, in just going back throughout Ukrainian history, you know, if you go into Ukrainian-speaking families, you know, there's a,

there's a lot of pride in the idea of resisting Russian aggression. You know, there was a poll from a pollster based in Kiev a couple of weeks ago or a month ago that found that I think, I want to say like it was like 58% or 60% of Ukrainian men were ready to take up arms to resist a Russian invasion. That to me is a remarkable number. And it sort of speaks to the mindset and mentality of Ukrainians in the face of everything here. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of history that I think we don't recognize and really think about in that area in Eastern Europe, specifically kind of this, all of this land between Germany and Russia has for the last several hundred years been kind of at odds with those two power centers. And a lot of its history is defined in its resistance to those two places, right, all the way up until now.

Also, Germany is a huge player in this conversation that we maybe don't talk about enough in the West. But that's a whole, maybe a whole other podcast. Yeah. Do you think, so it's weird to see to watch like Tucker Carlson or to see, again, your leftist friends online, repeating what feels like Russian propaganda. Do you think that that is actually happening? Are we just, are some of us just falling for that? And how do we kind of guard against it? Or is it even possible? You know, yeah, I mean, it's definitely a thing. It's definitely a problem. I think the biggest problem that I find is that a lot of people, a lot of people in the West especially, tend to contextualize Eastern Europe in terms of the Russian historiographical historiographic narratives. So the Russian historiographic narratives basically suggest that the Slavic world, especially Ukraine, is on a, historic, historiographic narratives. So the Russian historiographic narratives basically suggest that the Slavic world, especially Ukraine, is on a, an arc of history to reunite with Russia. And, you know, when you accept that at face value,

it's really easy to accept the Russian narrative and to fall into Russian propaganda totally innocently, you know, and when speaking about like leftists online, you tend to have this, you know, this legacy of just following what Russia does or, you know, if you don't follow what Russia does, then you know, you're following that, you know, old leftist trope that anything that the U.S. is doing must necessarily be wrong and imperialistic. I was reading the DSA had a statement opposing U.S. militarization and interventionism in Ukraine, which is just like riddled with, I mean, not only like Russian narratives, but just flat out errors, right? Like they have, they have a phrase that talks about public sentiment in Ukraine being contested. And it links to an article. Well, I look at the article. And the

article is by, you know, a well-meaning leftist Ukrainian author who, you know, cites public opinion polling that says Ukrainians are split on whether or not they want to join NATO. Now, he cites a poll from April 2020. And that poll asks Ukrainians, what should Ukraine strive to be? Part of NATO, part of the Russian Security Alliance, or neutral. And, you know, you get mixed results in that kind of poll because you're asking what Ukraine should strive to be. That's a hugely different question than what, you know, is the practical best path for Ukraine. And, you know, four days before this article that they cite was published, two different opinion polls were released in Ukraine, one by the same pollster that the author cites in his article. And what's fascinating is that both of them found that when you isolate for people who would take part in a referendum and who have decided who they're going to vote for or which way they would vote about between 68 and 70, well, one said 68 percent, one said 70 percent of Ukrainians are ready to vote for NATO, for joining NATO.

So this really isn't an issue in Ukraine. Like, I mean, obviously there's political and geographical lines that dictate who's more likely to vote for. which option. But, you know, we don't tend to think that, well, because 70% of, because 70% of, of a country voted for X, well, it's actually a contested result because a lot of that country, a lot of the no vote was concentrated in this one area, right? We tend to think that if you have 70% of a country voting for something, that's probably a pretty good, you know, indication that the country is more or less united. You know, go, I look further in the thing and you get just basic disinformation, like straight up, straight up disinformation. There's a quote that they cite that 70%

of civilian deaths were in non-controlled areas during the conflict, right? They don't give any dates. They just, this is just like a statement about the conflict. So I look at their source. Their source is an OSCE report. The OSCE report doesn't divide deaths by government-controlled areas to non-government-controlled areas. It divides casualties in that manner. And it is true that 70% of casualties happened in the non-government-controlled area. But also, it's important to note that the report is from, from 2017 to 2020, and that casualty does not mean death. Casualty means any serious injury sustained in the conflict of the casualties that the OSC reported on in that time frame 14% were deaths. So like, you just have this basic false narrative, which again, I, you know, I can't sit here and say that this is, you know, directly from. Russia or something, but it's definitely influenced by that mentality. It's definitely influenced by that perception and that acceptance of the Russian historical narrative versus a Ukrainian historical narrative, which sees the history of Ukraine as a struggle to free itself and to

establish its independence. All right, angry planet listeners, we're going to pause there for a break. We'll be right back after this. All right, angry plan and listeners, thank you for sticking around. We are back on talking about Ukraine and the discourse around it with Christopher Atwood. How do we do better? How do we enter into these conversations and talk about Ukraine and learn about Ukraine without, I think the thing that frustrates me is like even even in the, this DSA thing, I think is a really good example of it because it still feels like ignoring Ukrainian sovereignty, ignoring that Ukraine is to a certain extent even part of the story and really centering American, quote unquote, aggression and NATO kind of at the center

of this conflict somehow, right, even though it's stuff that's been going on before America was even founded, right? There's a long history here. How do you think we get to a place where we learn and we, you know, we talk to the people that are in the damn countries? I think it's just about, you know, it's about cultural exchange. It's about, you know, it's about Ukraine being, Ukraine putting itself on the international stage and us accepting Ukraine as its own thing on the international stage. When I was looking at the DSA statement, the thing that struck me the most about it was that before they issued a statement, or maybe no, it was after they issued their statement. So a couple of days after they issued their statement, I got my dates wrong. But a couple of days

after they issued their statement, Ilhan Omar issued a statement. And her statement, although I don't necessarily agree with what she's calling for, her statement is grounded in like, the reality, right? She's coming at this situation, looking at it from the Ukrainian perspective, you know, from liberalism to, you know, most forms of leftism. You want to look at a situation from the perspective of those who are, you know, involved and impacted by that situation. And that's what her statement does. It does. I could nitpick certain parts of it, I'm sure. But, you know, it came off to me as someone who's read up on the situation, who's either spoken to Ukrainians or spoken to people who can represent that Ukrainian perspective so that she doesn't get lost in some kind of Russian narrative about Ukrainian sovereignty. So I think, I think, you know, and she's in a particularly privileged position of being someone who's in D.C. with access to people who know the things that.

she needs to know in order to make that kind of a coherent statement. And I think that in order for all of us to get that, it's just, you know, to me, I think it's a matter of time. You know, we just started spelling Kiev, the Ukrainian way, what, two, three years ago during the impeachment trial, which was, which was fascinating. Like, ironically, in like the, the most cruel sense of, in the most cruel twist of fate, Trump, you know, basically, uh, Trump, um, Trump levered. leveraging weapons for for political ammo turned out to be super helpful to Ukraine, I think, in the long run, in the sense that, you know, just the fact of switching Kiev, the spelling of Kiev, the fact that we had people testifying in an impeachment trial about why we should care about Ukraine. The fact that, you know, Ukraine became a much more household name, right? When I first left the U.S. and I moved. moved to Kiev. I called my bank and I said, hey, I'm moving to Kiev. I'm still going to be using my card. So I just want to notify you. Please let me know if there's anything I need to do

so that you don't block my card while I'm abroad. Like it's not going to get stolen and taken to Eastern Europe. I'm just taking it to Kiev. And they go, that's, that's in Russia, right? And, you know, we've come so far from that that, you know, people know where Kiev is. People know what the Ukrainian spelling of Kiev means. You know, again, 10 years ago, I wrote my grandma that I was in Kiev. I used the Ukrainian spelling and she goes, what's that? And I use the English spelling and she was like, oh, yeah, I know where that is. It's somewhere in Eastern Europe. So, you know, the more that we understand, the more that we learn, the more that we have these exchanges and we listen, the I think the better off will be, although,

you know, obviously there are actors who don't want us to, you know, appreciate or take seriously the Ukrainian historical narrative, which is understandable. So, it's a lot of it. It's an uphill battle. But, you know, I think time and understanding is really the answer here. All right. Do you think there is any truth at all to this kind of narrative that part of what's going on here is that, you know, America has all these military bases and NATO is slowly encroaching. And Russia just wants its border region protected. So my take on this, I don't think, is like the most widely.

accepted take on this. Oh, those are my favorite kinds of takes. Yeah. But my perception actually, and I've talked about this privately with a handful of, you know, educated people on this subject. And, you know, they don't necessarily say you're crazy or you're wrong on this. I tend to think that Russia doesn't care so much about NATO as much as it cares about the EU because EU expansion limits Russian economic potential.

NATO expansion, you know, the Kremlin isn't dumb. The Kremlin knows that NATO doesn't really want a conflict with Russia. I think that part of this, to me at least it seems, again, I don't have any proof for this. This is just my perception of everything. It seems to me that, you know, if I was in the Kremlin and I genuinely didn't believe that NATO expansion is like an existential threat, which again, maybe, maybe, you know, I know that there are people there who do believe that. But even if I didn't believe it, it would be super beneficial to me to leverage that discussion because that's a discussion that's been happening in the States since

the 90s. And what's fascinating is that, you know, a friend of mine looked at the history of this debate recently. And when he looked at the history of the debate, he noticed that a lot of the, a lot of the academic and, you know, professional articles written against the expansion of NATO, you know, took place after we basically decided that that's what we were going to do. So I think that, you know, if I'm in the Kremlin, and I genuinely don't believe that NATO expansion is like this existential threat, I'm still going to act like it is because I know that there are political forces in the U.S. and in the West who, one, view NATO as not necessarily a positive, and two, think that NATO expansion, you know, understood through a realist lens, would

would anger Russia and make Russia act out. So, you know, if you play into that, then you give credence to that perspective, which then helps prevent that. And another important factor here is that, you know, for Eastern Europe and for a lot of people, NATO and the EU go hand in hand. So NATO expansion, you know, looking at this from a slightly different perspective, it could be more that Russia fears NATO expansion because also it fears EU expansion. And again, this sort of comes down to, in the case of Ukraine, if you look historically, right, you know, obviously I think that states tend to act in their self-interest and do things that are politically convenient to them. But if you're looking at this, you know, the history of the region,

right, there's a reason why Putin says that Kiev is the mother of all Russian cities. There's a reason that Putin emphasizes that the Russian people and the Ukrainian people are part of the same greater Russian people, right? There's a reason that these things, you know, get discussed in Russia, and it's because, you know, in part, in order to understand the history of the Russian nation, you kind of have to accept that Ukraine is the origin of that nation. And so if Ukraine splits from Russia and no longer associates with Russia or associates more with the West than with Russia, you have a issue in the Russian understanding of their own national history, which again, that doesn't, you know, that that is a convenient thing that some people try to say to explain everything. I don't think that that explains everything, but I do think that that provides a little bit of additional context to help us understand where, you know, certain actors in Russia are coming from and why certain narratives are coming out of there. Why do you think we're in this place where the conversation about around this has gotten so bizarre?

Why has Binjuries asking the U.S. President not to start World War III? You know, I think, I mean, personally, my perspective online is that people are going increasingly skeptical of the government and of the intentions of the State Department. And when they see war, they're terrified of what that might mean. We've seen, you know, so many botched examples in the history that, you know, like, just speaking to what, to what you mentioned, right? Like, even ignoring the Beninjeri's example, online, you know, a month or two ago, I was seeing conversations, serious conversations about the term lethal aid. And they were saying that, like, NPR and Reuters were just using the term lethal aid. the State Department as a euphemism for weapons, when the reality is that that distinction was made in 2014 because Obama wanted to provide aid to Ukraine but didn't want to escalate tensions. So they

designated certain aid non-lethal aid because, you know, part of non-lethal aid includes weapons, but defense weapons or, you know, I forget, I forget like the exact examples. I had a long conversation with a buddy of mind in the military about this, about how what the military categorizes as weapons can be non-lethal. And so non-lethal aid can include weapons. And lethal aid can include things that we might not necessarily, like a package of lethal aid might include things that we don't necessarily consider weapons. So if you ignore that framing, if you are a publisher in 22 and you're publishing an article and you avoid the term lethal aid or non-lethal aid, then you know, you're providing a confusing addition to the conversations that we're having here.

And so I think that, you know, ultimately this example, the lethal, non-lethal aid example, sort of speaks to the fact that a lot of the people, especially online who are talking about these things, you know, they aren't fully versed in the history of just this conflict, let alone the history of Russia, Ukraine, the history of Eastern Europe, the history of Ukrainian self-identity or Russian self-identity. So, you know, when you're coming at it from a place of ignorance, and I don't mean that in turn, like, I don't mean that as an insult, but just like as like you don't know as much as you maybe should in order to make a public comment on the thing, then you tend to fall into easy narrative traps, including like I said, just criticizing the State Department because if the State Department wants something, it must necessarily be interventionism or imperialism and ignoring the very real imperial history of. Russia and of Eastern Europe. Right. It's really bizarre to to spend a week having what is essentially a semantic conversation. Meanwhile, troops are moving. Fighting continues in the Donbos.

Like, there's still a very real conflict going on in the very real possibility of an increase of that conflict. And we're talking and we're having a conversation about the definition of lethal aid and obsessing over it. It's a good, that's a good way to put it, I think. No, yeah, yeah. And that's sort of where this all, you know, that's sort of where this all comes down to is that, I mean, like I mentioned earlier, I think, I think, you know, for me, this all comes down to the Russian versus the Russian versus, sorry, the Russian versus Ukrainian perspective. You know, the Russian perspective is that Russia and Ukraine are destined to unite. The Ukrainian perspective is that Ukraine has had a long, centuries long struggle for their independence.

You know, the amazing thing is you'll talk to someone who is, or you'll see conversations happen online with involving people who are so convinced in their opinion about Ukraine. And, you know, you can ask them, you know, basic facts about the history of Ukraine or the history of Russian-Ukrainian relations, and they'll just reject them. And or they'll just ignore them or they won't know a lot of the sort of basic, a lot of the sort of basic just historical events or controversies, right? Like, you know, you know, there were treaties signed in the 1700s that still are discussed in intellectual circles in Kiev and Moscow. You know, like, these are serious issues that Russia and Ukraine totally disagree with. You have, there's the, there's the character Ivan Mazapa, who.

Even now, Russia gets angry when Ukraine glorifies Ivan Mazapa. And Ukraine views Ivan Mazepa as this like crusader for Ukrainian independence. Russia views him as a traitor who undermined Russian and Ukrainian unity for the benefit of a foreign power. And so like, you know, from a Ukrainian Russian perspective, you know, this is just part of a longer cycle. These things happen. And from a Russian perspective, the West is constantly trying to intervene in their relationship. with Ukraine. And from the Ukrainian perspective, they're constantly having to offend off Russian aggression and in certain Ukrainian perspectives, Russian occupation.

All right, Christopher Atwood, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through all of this. Really appreciate your time. You can find him on Twitter, and I'm sure you will be back on the show. Would love to come back. That's all for this week, Angry Planet listeners. As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Kevin O'Dell and Jason Fields is created by myself and Jason Fields. If you liked the show, you want to hear it without commercials, you can go to angryplanet. com or angryplanet.substack.com, where for a mere $9 a month, you get commercial-free versions

of the mainline episodes and two bonus episodes a month. If you want to know what the next bonus is, it should be out tomorrow as you're listening to this. It's a more in-depth coverage of the Russian mercenary. operating in Africa that we mentioned up top of this episode. I think you'll enjoy it. We've also got some conversations about what's going on between Russia and China coming up. And we're going to be doing more Ukraine coverage, I think, because it's going to be a new story that's going to be dominating the year, I think.

We'll see. We will be back very soon with more conversations about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.