Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Krystal and Saagar Give EVERYTHING You Need to Know On Ukraine Crisis

Episode Date: February 28, 2022

Krystal and Saagar cover the warfare in Ukraine, beginning of peace talks, economic sanctions, Russian oligarch panic, Putin's nuclear threats, protests around the world, neocon warmongering, Biden's SCOTUS pick, the media's selective empathy, Putin's mistakes, possible endgame scenarios for Russia, and more!To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/Derek Thompson: https://www.theringer.com/plain-english-with-derek-thompson-podcast  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. We have so much to get to this morning. Huge developments. I don't think it's an understatement to say that today is going to be an absolutely critical day. That's right. Militarily, economically and diplomatically, as it goes with Russia and Ukraine. Also, though, before I forget, wanted to remind you guys, because we are very excited about this, we are doing live coverage of Biden's State of the Union tomorrow night. It's going to

be me, Sagar, Marshall Kosloff, and Kyle Kalinsky. I've got this nice little graphic for you. Pre-show is going to start at 8. We will live stream State of the Union. Then we will come back and do a post-show as well. So please join us here on this channel for that coverage. We're going to have a couple of special guests for you as well. But let's get right to everything that is breaking this morning. And I think before we get to the details, let's just say top line, both on the political front, the economic front and the military front, this has gone pretty poorly for Russia. Yeah, that's right. But that actually creates a very dangerous situation. There's a concept called gambling for resurrection, where when we have,

you have someone like this who is backed into a corner, it only raises the stakes of the tactics that they could employ both on the battlefield, also in terms of cyber attacks to hit here. Also, we're going to get to an elevated nuclear threat coming from Putin, which might be the most significant thing to focus on today. But let's start with what we know of what is happening militarily on the ground in Ukraine. Of everything we're going to bring you today, these are the reports that you should be a little bit wary of just because it is very hard to get good information out of the middle of the war. You also have two sides that are interested in propaganda wins. And I would say the Ukrainian and their allied sides have a bit of a propaganda advantage in that the Russians sold this as a peacekeeping mission for their people. So it makes it harder for them to go out and tout battlefield wins when they're supposed to be there just keeping the peace.

All right, let's throw that first tweet there up on the screen. We got some information yesterday from the mayor of Kyiv that Kyiv was surrounded and a siege had begun. That information has now been walked back. However, the best we can tell is there are satellite imagery of Russian forces massing three miles long outside of Kiev, about 30 kilometers, 20 kilometers outside of the city. Those forces have been attempting to advance. So far, the Ukrainian military has been able to push them back. There are also reports that they had sent reconnaissance teams into the city that the Ukrainians were also able to intercept.

Let's go ahead and put this next piece up on the screen. So this is a map of Ukraine that shows where Russian forces are. You have down in the south, I'm sort of starting in the south and going up counterclockwise. Melitopol was taken by the Russians, but progress there to the east, to Mariupol has been halted. There is some reporting that is because of supply line issues. There's reports on the ground of Russians who are basically stranded, who run out of fuel, that they didn't effectively plan in order to make sure that they had their troops supplied and provisioned and gassed up so that they could continue this advance.

You also have reports that Russian forces were expelled from Ukraine's second largest city. That is Kharkiv. But the very latest this morning is that, and this gets to the escalating tactics that you could see here, Russians have escalated in Kharkiv. And there are reports this morning is that, and this gets to the escalating tactics that you could see here, Russians have escalated in Kharkiv and there are reports this morning of massive rocket attacks and potential significant civilian loss of life. And that is part of the story that we're going to be watching here is that Russians, their tactics have been horrific, but they have not thrown everything at this that they could in an attempt to perhaps limit the amount of civilian loss of life. Well, with them stymied on a couple of different fronts militarily in this, having not gone as quickly and as easily as Putin thought, that raises the prospect of more aggressive, more deadly weapons and techniques.

And that is a potential sign of what's happening in Kharkiv right now. Also, if we could put that map back up on the screen, A2, back up for one more minute. With regards to Kyiv, where so far Ukrainians still hold the city, which is a remarkable accomplishment in and of itself. Analysts are saying that Putin expects Kyiv to fall relatively quickly. That has not happened. You can see, though, you've got the forces advancing from the north. You also, though, have forces closing in from the east, which again creates a very dangerous and precarious situation from Kyiv. And just to give you a sense, guys, I mean, it's one thing to look at this on a map. It makes it kind of sanitized.

War is hell. And we have video that we can show you of an apartment building in Kiev being hit by a missile and what this looks like on the ground. Let's go ahead and put this up here. I mean, these are, this is, that's people's homes. You know, this is the place people live. This is where they're raising their children. And to wake up in a war-torn city like this, people hunkered underground, you know, it's just, it is a really horrific situation. Yeah, it's almost like I'm out of a movie. I mean, you look at these things and you see the civilians in Kiev, like, sitting in the subway system, almost like in the Blitz in London from World War II. I mean, there's a million videos we could have shown you. But part of the reason why we always have to be careful, skeptical, and all

that is that a lot of stuff is getting passed around online, misattributed, and all that. So please, I'm making a personal, I'm imploring everyone in order to exercise some restraint, be careful about what you're sharing and all of these things. Because these things will tug at your heartstrings. That video, even we can't even tell you whose it was. None of these things because, you know, these things will tug at your heartstrings. That video, even we can't even tell you whose it was. You know, none of these things are verifiable. But to the broader point, this is the most dangerous part of the war, possibly, because whenever you have a situation where, by all accounts, and Russian state media actually broadcasted that they could take Ukraine in 11 minutes or something like that. They said this only two months ago. Well, now you have several days.

We have no idea how many people are dead. You know, the Ukrainians obviously want to put out an inflated number. They're claiming up to like 4,500 troops. Look, I mean, that's probably not true, but if it is, that's almost as many troops as we lost during the entire war in Iraq. So let's say it's even half.

Well, that's a lot of people. I mean, that is a colossal loss of life in modern warfare. That's not something that we've seen in a long time. And even the Russians did acknowledge that they had had loss of life. That's right. So they're acknowledging, they're never going to tell us the real number. And so in terms of figuring it out, it's going to be very difficult on our end. We can never give you a true death toll. But here is something which I was particularly concerned about, which is that Ramzan Kadyrov, who is the president of Chechnya, came out with a statement urging Putin in order to apply harsher tactics. Now, that matters because famously, Kadyrov and Putin

during the 1999 war in Grozny carpet bombed the entire city, famously massacred civilians. So when they talk about use of harsher tactics, that's what they mean. I've also seen reports in the city of Kharkiv of cluster munitions were actually banned by international law, but were employed during the Syrian civil war and are a well-worn use in the Russian arsenal. Cluster munitions, just so people know, are horrific tools of war. I mean, they just scatter all throughout a city, go off. I mean, they're known for maiming and killing civilians. Yes, they have a quote-unquote military application, but use in urban warfare is barbaric and catastrophic. And that's something that we have seen at least one confirmed report in the

city of Kharkiv just this morning. So this is why it matters. Look, five days, as you said, about the resurrection, the gamble of resurrection, that's only going to increase the pressure on Putin in order to save face, in order to try and bring a swift military victory. And the only way that this now seems possible, given the immense Ukrainian and heroic resistance, I do want to say that, of the soldiers there and also of the president.

I mean, we got this. Unbelievable, right? I mean, I think he's handled himself with great aplomb from the very beginning. I mean, always trying to keep the peace, telling Washington to calm down up until the very last second. But then, I mean, I can't imagine a Western politician standing tall and taking up arms in the capital city. Yeah, we reportedly offered to get him out of there. He said, no, I need guns and ammo. Same with the mayor, Klitschko, also manning a machine gun.

Even Poroshenko, who himself was a Putin tool, is in the streets with a bulletproof vest on and a Kalashnikov rifle. So just goes to show you how foolish of Putin's gambit has united the entire political class in Ukraine in a heroic struggle there. But we can and will see most likely significant more loss of civilian life. And for a lot of people who are cheering this on,

the Ukrainian resistance, listen, I'm with there, but remember this, it took three weeks for America to take over Baghdad. Like, war is not five days. The opening days of a campaign are often messy. They think they're going to be able to get away with something. Now, if they're going to double down and all signs point to that, that means a significant more loss of civilian life. The map that we had showed you previously showed different movements.

The goal currently of Russia is in order to isolate Kiev because that's where the government, the seat of power is, and also to cut the entire country into two, isolating any Western aid, cutting off and encircling the entire Ukrainian military in the east. And well, if those people fight, that'll be a fight to the death. Listen, the big picture is that Russia is vastly militarily superior to Ukraine. I mean, those fundamental dynamics have not changed, even though the military campaign for Putin has not progressed as quickly and as easily as he perhaps thought.

One of the tactical blunders that analysts have been pointing to has been Russia's failure to establish air superiority right out of the gates. And one of the things we're going to bring to you, all the movements that the EU is making, but one of the extraordinary measures that they are taking this is first time ever, is they are actually providing EU fighter jets to Ukraine at Ukraine's request. So that's another factor in all of this. But yes, an extraordinarily dangerous situation. And this all takes place against the backdrop of, you know, their shelling and rocket attacks on Kharkiv and potentially killing massive amounts of Kharkiv civilians as Russia and Ukraine are actually meeting

diplomatically right now. Right. So let's go and move on to the diplomacy because this is really important here. OK, let's go and put put this up there on the screen. Right now, as we speak, Zelensky had agreed to talks with Russia as the Putin invasion continues. It was going to be on the Priyapat River on the Belarusian border. So currently, that is actually happening right at this second. Now, what has happened is that the delegation by Ukraine is Defense Minister Olesky Rendikov and the MP David Arakemiya. I'm very sorry about the pronunciation of the names. He's the leader of the Zelensky party in the Ukrainian parliament. So those are the two chief representatives of the Ukrainian government. That being said, we should not have high hopes for a diplomatic solution at this point. The reason being that

what President Zelensky had said is that, yeah, sure, we can meet, but I demand an immediate withdrawal of Russians from Ukraine and an immediate ceasefire with no preconditions. In effect, saying, no, I'm not going to resign, all of that. The Russians, though, floating a talk with zero preconditions does go to show you that militarily things are not working out. However, they have still continued to demand maximalist political aims, a total subjugation of Ukraine, not only subjugation, but an agreement that they will never host weapons on their soil, that interpretation up to them in terms of what exactly that means. They are looking for a Belarusian client state in the state of Ukraine. And at this point, I don't see how Putin could possibly settle for any political settlement where Zelensky remains in power.

When he's so floated by the West, number one. Two, Zelensky is essentially pledged to fight to the death. He's requested fighters from the European Union. He's getting now lethal aid here from the United States. We're shipping him Stinger missiles. Sweden is apparently providing anti- I mean, to get Sweden to provide you anti-tank missiles is big. You've really messed up then. Yeah, you screwed up. Finland is, you know, is getting involved here. I mean, I have never seen Europe like this in my entire lifetime. I don't think it's existed

at this state since 1940. I mean, it really is one of the most united areas. Putin has accomplished the unbelievable goal of getting the Europeans to stop bickering and to try to do something, which itself is a maximalist political feat. But on the diplomacy side, too, we are watching very closely what's happening with China. China remains basically the only grand strategic ally that Russia has in this fight. So let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. And it's a fascinating look into actually how what's happened now with Russia's invasion of Ukraine is straining relations between Putin and Xi. And Xi, Xi Jinping actually, has gone ahead and urged a diplomatic solution to the

crisis. What's also interesting, Crystal, is that even though China continues to try to do kind of a both-side-ism, which is that we wish to see a cessation of hostilities and a respect of territorial integrity, but that of course is up to debate, they are looking very closely and are not using the same language that they would with respect to Taiwan. And I think that this matters because what the Chinese are implying in their diplomatic statements is that Ukraine was a separate country and it did get invaded by Russia. Now, if they, the way they look at Taiwan is like Taiwan's not a separate country. Taiwan is China.

It just happens to be governed by a rebel government. We're going to bring it home, so to speak. Their way that they would talk about it is you can't invade your own country, right? Whereas Putin is setting it up very differently, questioning the legitimacy of the Ukrainian state, period, but not in the same way. So whenever Xi Jinping is talking this way and the Chinese foreign ministry is putting out those statements, that is a tension. And the too, is that it doesn't take a genius to see that Putin has united not only the entire West, something I want to emphasize before we even get to the economic part here, the Japanese central bank continues to also join the West in cutting Russia has are cars from Japan and South Korea. So those two Asian countries, obviously allied with the West, have now a united block of financial sanctions, not only from their largest trading partners in the West, but also in the East. So that has made it so that you've got an immense amount of political pressure from both sides of the globe on Russia.

This matters for China because they do not want any of these economic consequences coming to their doors. And if they were to continue to float Russia economically, they themselves could then invite sanctions which would cripple their economy. Not necessarily it would be the same ones, but there are all sorts of different ways that we've seen in the past where you can sanction a country which is buying oil from Iran, for example. We could see the same thing if they were purchasing Russian gas, purchasing Russian wheat. China has viewed this very much as, oh my gosh, Putin has invited the backlash of the entire world. We want an immediate end to this. So he does not even have somebody backing him at the foremost in his maximal political goals.

That's right. And this is really significant because the early signs from China were pretty bad. I mean, there was even some speculation that maybe they had kind of a secret deal and they sought immediately to sort of backstop the Russian wheat market, which matters a lot. But you're starting to get these little signs that all is not well in the China-Russia relationship. First of all, China abstained from a vote at the UN Security Council. Rather than voting against the resolution condemning this invasion, they abstained. Be better if they voted for the resolution. That's never going to happen. That's not going to happen. So the fact that they abstained was significant.

And then another little potential sign was it was actually right after Putin had a phone call with Xi Jinping that he agreed to the talks that are going on now. Now, we don't know what was said during that phone call. We don't know if those two things were related. But noteworthy that that phone call happens, and then that's when Russia shifts their positions, agreeing to meet with no preconditions with the Ukrainian delegation.

And as you're pointing to, China really finds themselves in quite a bind here, because number one, I mean, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to just look out at the geopolitical landscape and say, do we really want our sort of sole ally to be what is now becoming a pariah state that is financially collapsing in real time? And we'll get to that in just a minute. But in addition to that, China has leaned heavily on this concept of sovereignty as a core part of their foreign policy, of their economic policy. This is a major part of their routine propaganda to their own population. It's part of the way that they, you know,

this is what they say to the U.S. of, number one, you don't have any moral legitimacy to complain about us when you violated national sovereignty in places like Iraq. Number two, how dare you tell us how to treat our Muslim Uyghur population because we're a sovereign nation and you don't get to meddle in our affairs. So that's been a core piece of their sort of propaganda and their orientation. So now when you have Russia so clearly violating

the sovereignty of Ukraine, it puts them in a very difficult and tricky and uncomfortable position. So that could be why you're seeing some of these little steps away from Russia and not fully backing them up in the way that we initially feared that they would. There's a lot of lessons for China in this. You know, it's interesting. I was just looking at some military analysts who I trust. If you're the People's Liberation Army, you've never fought a general war since the Korean War. The current officers there are not even close to as trained as the Russian military officers who've been engaged in civil war, all of this. If the Russians are meeting this level of resistance in Ukraine, now you can see then, having such catastrophic results, at least in the short term, you can see then that Ukraine

and a committed military population, especially a nation like that, which has backing from the West, can put up a pretty decent fight if given the chance. The PLA, there's no indication that they have even close to the same level of competency and would probably face the same level of backlash in Taiwan if they were to invade. So there's a lot of lessons here for China, which is that, look, yeah, you may not have direct military intervention, but the West, when united on these things, can make your life a living hell, as Russia is about to find out, and we're about to talk about that. And second, which is that if you have a committed adversary, well, you better be willing to fight to the literal death in order to make sure that that political goal can be accomplished, because these people are not going to give up so easy. So, you know,

it's an interesting, there's a lesson here for anytime you try to conquer a small country, it may look like a cakewalk, but you will find out the same lesson that America did in Iraq. You break it, you buy it, and you will lose thousands of people and you can have a massive domestic political civil war for generations to come. Yeah. We're going to have Derek Thompson on later in the show because he's been interviewing fears, one of, I think, a lot of people's fears, is that China would use this as an excuse and would sort of embolden them with regards to Taiwan. And at least the expert that Derek talked to said, on the contrary, I think they may be looking at this and seeing, like, this did not go all that well for Russia. And so they didn't think that this would actually cause China to take bolder steps.

And they also saw it as a possibility of even cooling what has been a love affair between China and Russia most recently. So let's get to what is effectively economic warfare. We're learning more details this morning of just how devastated the Russian economy is in the short term. Let's put this Financial Times tariff sheet up on the screen. This is the most significant new sanctions that have been levied against Russia. West is planning to impose sanctions on Russian central bank and cut some lenders from SWIFT. These two things matter tremendously together. Just so you guys know, I'm sure a lot of you already do,

SWIFT is the messaging system, the global financial messaging system that allows banks around the world to easily do business with each other. So when the US and our allies say, we're cutting Russia's major lenders off of the SWIFT financial system, that makes it very difficult for them to conduct international transactions. Now, they have said apparently they're trying to sort of exempt energy transactions from those sanctions. that you don't want to actually spike energy prices, both because of the impact on our populations, but also because if gas prices go up,

that's actually a benefit to Russia, a petrol state. So they're trying to exempt energy transactions. But one of the things we talked about last week in the talk that you actually raised was the fact that Russia had these huge foreign currency reserves and there was a thinking that they might be sort of sanction proof that they had ways they'd worked out ways and had a rainy day fund to be able to get around the worst of the sanctions and that's where the sanctions on the central bank come into play and effectively cut off some

of their mechanisms for being able to get around these sanctions and this is incredibly extraordinary they quoted in that Financial Times article, they quote an expert that says a G20 central bank has never been sanctioned before. This is not Iran. This is not Venezuela. Our friend Jeff Stein has been doing reporting on exactly what this looks like and what it ultimately means. Let's go ahead and put his tweet up on the screen. Russia has hundreds of billions in foreign-held reserves that it can normally sell, driving demand for rubles up when the Russian currency has plummeted in value. Freezing the reserves means Russia's bank cannot sell assets to stabilize the currency.

And let's put this next piece up on the screen. We're seeing the impact of that in real time. Just look at, this is the rubles per U.S. dollar exchange rate. Yeah, we just pulled this this morning. And yeah, as of this morning, massive deterioration of the ruble. The ruble is just collapsing. We've got new reporting about the Russian central bank has lifted their interest rate to 20 percent. Compare. I mean, that's equivalent to the Fed here. Imagine if they lifted the interest. We talk about quarter of a point in the market freaks down here. They just lifted their rate to 20 percent.

They have banned they closed the Moscow Stock Exchange because the whole thing was completely collapsing. They banned foreigners from buying and trading stocks. Absolutely extraordinary measures. We also have, you know, massive reports of effectively bank runs as Russians saw these sanctions coming and have been lining up to try to get any cash they can out of banks, out of ATMs. Let's take a look at the video that we have of what that looks like. They're just filing down the wall, down the stores, lining up at ATMs all over the place because the economic fallout is so incredibly great. And Sagar, this is another area where, you know, I know that it can feel sort of like, all right, well, let's just throw everything

we have against, let's make life as difficult as possible for Russia. And with regards to the oligarchs, I am 100% on board. But there's two things to remember. Number one, the Russian population didn't do anything wrong. And in fact, significant amounts of them, we're going to show you that later, are opposed to these actions and are, you know, shocked and outraged at what their own leadership has done. But number two, this again gets to when you're pushing Putin into a corner and his back is up against the wall, what is he going to do and what is that going to look like? Because they have cyber attack capabilities. What is his next step going to be there when we are making life economically so difficult for them? This is truly economic

warfare. It is. Well, and the thing is, too, Crystal, it's not just the United States. In fact, the U.S. is almost in the back seat here. You know, I mean, I'll remind, you know, President Biden was basically against the SWIFT, removing Russia from SWIFT. But then what ended up happening is that the EU pressured Germany so hard that they came on board and we were like, oh, okay. I mean, let's go and put this EU tweet up there on the screen just to give you guys an idea about what's happening. We're shutting down the EU airspace for Russian-owned, Russian-registered, or Russian-controlled aircraft. They won't be able to land, take off, or overfly the territory of the European Union. They are banning all Kremlin state-owned media in Europe.

I mean, these are things which we have not seen in a long time. Russia is effectively cut off from the world. They are not allowed to fly in Canadian airspace. They're not allowed to fly in European airspace. So I guess, you know, the Moscow-Beijing thing is the only flight left in town for a lot of those folks. I feel pretty bad for them. But that is what I think we should and continue. We cannot drop about how significant this is.

The other one that really caught my eye was this one. Let's put it up there from Anne-Marie Horden, which is that British Petroleum is exiting its 20% stake in the Kremlin-owned Rosneft. Now, the CEO is resigning from the board, and that's the state Kremlin-controlled oil producer. It was the number one major oil producer of the West to have a presence in Russia. So exiting your 20% stake and basically saying, we're clearing our hands of this. At the same time, I want to go back to what you talked about with the central bank. There are major margin calls all across Europe because Russia's bond values have been cut to the value of zero. And so massive

financial institutions all across Russia had Russian bonds as part of their portfolio. And now they are all having to pony up a lot of cash because a lot of their collateral was based in bonds, which now have zero value. We haven't seen stuff like this since the outbreak of the First World War, the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe. I mean, the amount of backstopping that this had in European economies can't be overstated. So I do think people should prepare, and we're going to talk about this with Derek, but it's not just high gas prices. As we found out in 2008,

there are cascading effects to the global financial system. You have no idea what this is going to impact. So there's not just a bank run for the ordinary Russians who, we have a video of that actually. Let's put this up there. From Moscow, you can see a line there of people waiting to pull cash out of the ATM. I saw journalists, Crystal, talking yesterday about how their hotels were forcing them to settle their bill before Swift came in. Because they're like, we won't be able to charge your card.

We don't know if the cards are going to work. I mean, they are done. In terms of their economy, they better pray that they produce what they need because financially, they're dead. We are about to see massive, massive financial ruin upon the average Russian person and on the oligarchs as well. And we're about to get to that, too, because if there is any sort of backlash coming, it is going to be amongst the moneyed elite class in Russia who Putin has long both controlled but had to see their allies. They're a powerful entity in and of themselves within the Russian state. Yeah, so just to recap, this is what Jeff Stein tweeted this morning with regards to the economic collapse. Value of ruble collapses about 30 percent. Russia suspends stock market, runs on Russia's RTMs, widely reported. Allies

block Putin from much of their 600 billion plus dollar reserves, which are not all held in dollars. It's a mix of currencies. And allies also hit sovereign wealth fund and Russia's foreign ministry. So massive economic consequences. And the other piece, Sagar, here with the EU is it's not just the financial sanctions. We also mentioned before they're sending fighter jets. This is the first time ever that the EU has funded lethal aid in any circumstance. And going all the way in with fighter jets is quite extraordinary. Germany has had, like this, a sea change in how they're thinking about both their military spending and also their energy posture. Chancellor Scholz announced a one-time increase

of 100 billion euros for defense spending in a pledge to spend more than 2% of Germany's economic output annually on defense. He also proposed enshrining that threshold in the country's constitution so that this isn't just a one-off thing. And for those of you who know German history, of course, they've always focused on diplomacy, been very reluctant to increase military spending. They've been the biggest doves on the continent. That's basically my whole model. That's exactly right. So you're going to get more into that. But that is an extraordinary shift in posture here as the EU really faces down and tries to grapple with what to do. In a lot of ways, I mean, they have been leading the charge. Again, I really want to caution that all of these moves are

escalatory tactics, and we should expect that Russia will respond. We should also keep in mind from history that when our sanctions have punished populations, that actually gives authoritarian leaders a propaganda tool to say, you know, to let themselves off the hook and to sort of rally people around. It's the bad guys in the West. It's the U.S. It's the Europeans who are causing your sufferings. It's not my fault. So again, I know there's a lot of energy and a lot of desire to say, like, let's just go as hard as we possibly can. That doesn't always get you the result that you want. In fact, it can create a more intractable and more dangerous situation. And that's an important point. And that is also the question. We were saying this constantly.

And then what? What is the next room? Russia is a proud country. They have a massive nuclear arsenal, which we're going to talk to soon. They have major cyber capabilities. They also backstop a huge part of the Western financial system. I'm not saying they shouldn't be punished. I absolutely think they should. But we need to be very careful and considered in what's happening. Otherwise, we're going to see a general war in Europe. And I don't want to panic people, but this, what we are seeing, is one of the biggest sea changes in European history in a – I mean since the end of the Cold War. I don't think there's another way to describe it. And to see the European Union, Sweden, Finland all arming up, sending missiles, the European Union sending in fighter jets, the United States sending Stinger missiles, the same missiles we sent to Afghan rebels, Mujahideen in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion in order to shoot down aircraft, which we have actually seen successfully used.

You know, some Ukrainian air defense has been working quite well. All of this can and will have consequences. We are at the beginning of a crisis and may not feel that way because we're living through it. But when you read through, I mean, the July crisis of World War I was an entire month before the first gun even started firing. And then even then, really what ended up happening in the First World War, it took like six, seven months before we were like, oh, this is how it's going to look like for the rest of the time. This is going to take time. And that is why when the invasion happened, something you and I emphasized was this changes the picture for decades. I mean, this is a global event that people will go back and, you know, as we're living through history, so it feels real to us, but, you know, we are in the very, very, very,

very infancy of what will be a very long running crisis, I think, for years to come, which is realigning the entire order. I just keep reminding of this actually Russian phrase from Vladimir Lenin. There are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen. That's so true. And the last thing that I'll say about the sanctions and why we have to be very cool-headed and measured in our response is there are some historians who effectively say that Japan before World War II, part of the reason why they hit us at Pearl Harbor is because they were financially struggling. Yeah, we cut them off from oil, which they needed in order to finance their campaigns against the Dutch, East Indies, and all of that. And that's part of the reason that they struck against us.

Yeah, and so this was a desperate move to lash out, and their military planners knew at the time that it could be a disaster, but they sort of didn't know what else to do, and they're backed into a corner, not to justify it at all. They wouldn't have needed the oil if they didn't have to do a genocidal campaign. Indeed, yes, but those are the sort of considerations you have to have is you're dealing with someone who militarily things have not gone as well as he thought they would. He's facing protests from within his own population at some level. There is some significant level of dissent that will show you, not to mention global protests, not to mention the Chinese are kind of, you know, a little bit wary of what's going on

here. And then the economy, this is all out financial warfare on the Russians. So you have to always think of, okay, what is that going to force your adversary? What sort of thinking is that going to cause them to engage in, again, with this idea of gambling for resurrection? And one of the other signs that, you know, there's a little bit of fraying even within the regime saga is the way that a couple of the oligarchs have responded. Yeah. So let's get to this. This is incredibly important. This is going to be the watch. You know, I've been reading over the weekend, trying to look at how internal criminology itself has always been a study and a discipline in Washington. At that time during the Soviet Union, it was to

try to figure out the warring factions, which in the Politburo. Modern Russia is a little bit different. So you have Putin, obviously surrounded by sycophants within the government, but you have an independent economic entity, which is intertwined with the state and subjugated to it, but also incredibly powerful. That's the oligarch class. Oligarch class has an immense amount of interest and power. They have now amassed tens, hundreds of billions of dollars personally. Some of it they owe to Putin, but some of it they've amassed on their own, and they are not happy about what's happening here. So this is something I'm watching very

closely. If there is any movement against Putin within the Russian state, it is completely dead unless these people are on board. So let's put this up there on the screen. The billionaire Mikhail Friedman has called the war in Ukraine, quote, a tragedy and has called on bloodshed to end. So the key thing is that Friedman is from Lvov in Western Ukraine and his parents live there. He's the very first oligarch to go ahead and speak out. But he's not the only one. We saw already that there are major costs that are being incurred by many Russian oligarchs. Abramovich has had to basically divest himself of his stake in Chelsea. Many of their yachts have been seized. Many of their planes are now no longer able to fly

in all of Europe where they own an immense amount of property. A lot of their kids live here. I don't know if anyone's been to Williamsburg, but basically half of Williamsburg, Brooklyn is owned by these Russian oligarchs. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. I mean, all these high-rise towers on the water and stuff. You'd be surprised if you hear English being spoken in those buildings. All these penthouses. What's that disgusting building in the middle of New York, the Time Warner Center? The new one is called the Balance Sheet that has all the architectural. Because it's so ugly, it just goes straight up.

Yeah, it's a straight-up one. Yeah. Yeah, that one is like half-owned by Russia and China. And another one that caught my eye just this morning. I don't have time to go into it, or to make an element. Oleg Deripaska, the aluminum baron, also somebody who was intertwined with Steele Dossier and all of that. He said this morning, quote, a hiked rate, the mandatory sale of foreign currency. This is the first test of who will be responsible for this banquet. Quote, I really want clarifications and intelligible comments on the economic policy of the next three months. Not happy, Mr. Deripaska, in terms of his aluminum empire there

and how it's going to be affected by this entire crisis. So look, if we are to see any movement against Putin, it will come from the oligarch class. I do not want to get people's hopes up. That is not necessarily in the cards. These are just two men. There's hundreds of them. But they are suffering in terms of the financial sanctions from the West. Yes, the ordinary Russians have ATM pulls and all this. But if you want to know some of the people with the sketchiest finances on earth, it's Russian oligarchs. And these people have all sorts of collateralized debt and backstops

and property that they have abroad. Panama Papers revealed quite a bit of this. This is significantly going to have an impact on their ability in order to do business and in order to have just a general lavish lifestyle. The second thing I want to point to is this, which is, I'll try to treat this as sensitively as we can, because again, I do not want to fan the flames of conspiracy theories. This could be a total deep state plot. But Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida, who is the ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been putting out some very cryptic and strange insinuations that Putin is either ill or mentally ill.

So let's put this up there on the screen. He tweeted this, quote, let me stress again. We are not dealing with 2008 Putin. It is a grave error to assume he will make the same calculations and decisions today that he would have made in the past. The old Putin was a cold-blooded but calculating killer. This new Putin is even more dangerous. So insinuating, Crystal, that Putin is either ill or he is, I mean, of more of a paranoid mind, it's very difficult in order to try and suss out

what exactly he's saying. I have asked around in terms of people who might know, none of them would tell me with a straight answer if the man is ill or not, which I don't know, you read into that what you would like. Some things that people have been pointing to, again, is Putin's clear obsession with not getting COVID. At every single meeting, including this morning with his meeting of economic ministers, he's all the way at the far side of the table and his ministers are crammed at the very end of the table. Whenever he met Macron, famously, he was all the way at the other side. You know, another thing which I noticed was, did you notice that, you know, that speech from his desk? Yeah.

He was by himself. Yeah. It doesn't require a large setup with a press conference and reporters who are close by you. So the man is very clearly afraid of getting COVID. That could indicate he's sick and comorbidities. Once again, this is total speculation on my part. I also could be, like I said,

playing into what the ICE might want us to think, which is that, oh, Putin is ill. Maybe he's just a 69-year-old man who wants to secure his legacy. But if it is the case that he's ill, and this is not without precedent, Soviet Premier Brezhnev launched the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 when he was very ill. And there was a lot of questions at the time in the Politburo. Oh, is he, you know, of sound enough mind in order to make these things? So it's not without precedent in modern Russian history. It's an interesting data point. One of the other things that's been floated is that he was very isolated during COVID and really restricted who was able to come and see him. that that has just removed him enough from, you

know, his being connected to his own population that it has caused him to make some serious strategic miscalculations, which I think, you know, anyone would have to acknowledge this has been so far a disaster for Russia. Again, acknowledging that they have a lot more military weaponry that they can certainly deploy. But the economic front is very clear. I mean, Russia is in dire straits economically. So there's been some speculation that that isolation, you know, may be fed into a paranoia or even just disconnected him from the realities on the ground and what public sentiment would be and even what sentiment is within his own sort of circles and what the oligarchs might think and all of that.

And one thing we can say for sure is he is getting older. He probably is thinking about his legacy. And, you know, that can again create a dangerous situation here. And this, I think, is maybe of everything we're going to bring you this morning this next peace saga is the most significant at least if you care

about life continuing to exist life on earth on the planet which is the whole reason that this crisis why we have focused

on it so intently is because Russia is a nuclear superpower and when you have two nuclear superpowers at odds with each other, that is an extraordinarily dangerous situation. That's right. Let's go ahead and move on to the nuclear side. As we found out in 1914, a small isolated military

incident in Eastern Europe can soon become a global conflagration drawing in the entire West. My greatest fear is that we are at that situation. And Putin doing himself and the world absolutely no favors in one of the most reckless statements by a world leader in decades. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. Yesterday, Putin, in response to Western sanctions, issued this threat, quote, Western countries aren't only taking unfriendly economic actions against our country, but leaders of major NATO countries are making aggressive statements about our country. So I order to move Russia's deterrent forces to a special regime of duty. And to be very clear, he also said, quote, The consequences of this will be such as you have never seen in your entire history, meaning that this is an explicit order to Russia's nuclear arsenal to increase their state of readiness, basically to the second highest level that exists in Russia. You know, here in the U.S., we have the DEFCONs,

defense conditions. They are at the equivalent of where we were during the Cuban Missile Crisis, just so people can understand. This is an explicit nuclear threat by the leader who has his finger on the button of the second largest nuclear arsenal in the world. I just checked the stats this morning.

The 90% of the world's nuclear weapons, Crystal, are held by the United States and by Russia. Do not underestimate their nuclear arsenal whatsoever. And there are also several other traveling moves that have happened just in the last 24 hours. So Belarus, which is, of course, the neighboring country of Russia, semi-client state, has actually changed its constitution in a constitutional referendum, revoking its because on the Putin nuclear threat, Russia's military

strategists have long complained about anti-ballistic missile systems near the Russian border, given the Baltic states' inclusion in NATO. They say that this gives the US a first strike winnable capability. So when he's ordering readiness and then also getting Belarus in order to revoke their non-nuclear status, we are talking about marching first-strike capability much closer to the West via Belarus, Crystal. We're talking about hundreds of miles, but that matters whenever it comes down to fractions of a second flight time for intercontinental ballistic missiles. So all of this is terrifying. Now, luckily, here in the U.S., we did not respond with an increase in our nuclear posture.

The Pentagon, all indications are we are de-escalating. We seek no conflict with Russia, no nuclear escalation. But this is saber-rattling. I said decades, but it's probably equivalent with Trump's fire and fury comment in 2017. Incredibly dangerous. And that was against a nation with one ICBM capable of taking over Los Angeles. The Russian nuclear arsenal can destroy the world 10 times over. I think it's also important there with regards to that last tweet we had up on the screen. We told you last week about that Polish, that military installation in Poland that has been a source of anxiety and upset for Putin and for the Russians since it was ultimately put there.

Now, we say this is anti-ballistic missiles, that this is not about you. This is about Iran. But they look at this, and I think we would look at it the same way and say, number one, we have no idea if you're telling us the truth about that. Well, this is what happened in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Exactly right. Exactly right. And number two, even if today it's anti-ballistic missiles, how do we know that you don't change that and reconfigure it so that it represents a direct threat to us? So again, it's always important to remember the larger picture

context here. In the immediate term, this is all 100% because of Putin's aggressive and unjustified war against Ukraine. There are longer term factors here that were exacerbated and created by the U.S. that led us to this extraordinarily dangerous situation, that being one of them. One other piece here on, you know, how you should take this nuclear threat very seriously, even though, and we're going to get to this too, there are voices in the U.S. media who are saying, nuclear threat, don't worry about it. It's just a bluff. Don't take this guy seriously. You should definitely take him seriously. There was a Russian state TV presenter, Dmitry Kislyov, I think, who delivered a monologue in which he posed the question, why do we need a world if Russia's not in it? While he was

considering Putin's announcement that they were putting Russia's nuclear forces on higher alert, quote, in total, our submarines are capable of launching over 500 nuclear warheads, which guarantees the destruction of the U.S. and all NATO countries to boot. That's according to the principle, why do we need a world if Russia's not in it? So this is what the Russian state TV propagandists, this is the type of inflammatory and extraordinarily nihilistic rhetoric that they are using. So make no mistake, this is a just insanely dangerous situation that we are facing down right now. And what did we just tell you? Putin is paranoid. He possibly was surrounded not by rational voices. That's a nightmare scenario for a man with the finger on the button. I mean, you saw there the leader of the, in that screenshot that we showed you all, the head of Russia's nuclear program and their equivalent to the Joint Chiefs of Staff nodding, you know, going along with this order. I actually pulled a quote from Robert McNamara's The Fog of War. I don't know if anybody's seen the documentary. I highly recommend it. And his review of the Cuban Missile Crisis, here's what he said, and this is very important. I want to say, and this is very important, in the end, we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close to

nuclear war at the end, and he holds his fingers up like this. Rational individuals. Kennedy was rational. Khrushchev was rational. Castro was rational. That's from Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Basically declaring was, we lucked out. I mean, if anybody's read the history of the Cuban Missile Crisis,

you know if Kennedy responds to the aggressive telegram and not the conciliatory telegram from Khrushchev, none of us are here right now. The city is gone. And this is something which we cannot, we have to take so incredibly seriously. Because, and these are what these idiots online are saying, people like Luis Mench and Adam Kisinger,

being like, oh, Adam Kisinger, who we'll get to, this moron, says, the breathlessness over nukes is mind-blowing. We used to call his bluff. This is the Soviet Cold War play to make the public fear Russia. Yeah, we should fear Russia, okay? I mean, if the odds of nuclear war are 1%, that's pretty high for the destruction of the entire world. Frankly, I would put it higher than 1% right now. And again, I do not want to scare you. It's not like we have had times in our past where eyeball to eyeball, checkpoint Charlie, the tanks standing next to each other. We're not there, not there yet. It's possible though. And if it's

within that realm of possibility, it is the job of the West, of the leaders and all of us together to ensure that this doesn't happen. I don't think the seriousness of this is sinking in for a lot of people. We've not had to live with the immediate threat of nuclear war in the West for 30-something years, but it's back. Do not underestimate the chances that this thing can go hot. This morning, I was reading a book called The Bomb by Fred Kaplan. Actually, what's very important, I highly recommend the book, by the way, it's a history of nuclear deterrence by the United States, it's very readable. What they point to in the book

is that nuclear annihilation is a core military tenant of both the United States and Russia, not only in terms of deterrence, but it's reflecting the mindset of what you just pointed out there, which is that what's the point of living if we can't exist? And in that state, we are going to annihilate not only Russia but make Europe unlivable.

Again, this is why the fact that Putin is – things aren't going well and he's backed into a corner. His economy is collapsing. He's cut off from the world, the military campaign is not going as quickly as he had thought, even though they maintain vast military superiority. That's why this is all so dangerous. That's why the hawks that are, you know, beating their chests and floating no-fly zones and all of this in total insanity, why we have to very strongly push back against them and why even when it comes to the sanctions, we have to walk very, very carefully because you do not want to create a dangerous escalatory situation. Everyone should be committed to de-escalation,

whatever we can do to de-escalate this conflict. And on that note, some of the most inspiring things that we've seen, images coming out from around the world of anti-war protesters. And of course, the ones that are most heartening and most inspiring are those protesters who have come out in Russia itself. Let's go ahead and put this VO up where you can see. This is just one of many protests across the country in Russia. Keep in mind, I mean, there are reports that over 5,000 people have already been arrested. Of course, there's been

reports of police brutality. This is an extraordinarily courageous thing to do, to come out in Russia, in Moscow, in St. Petersburg and say no to war. And we have seen day after day after day, courageous, regular Russian citizens, some of whom say they've never been to a protest before, coming out to express their upset over what has happened here. And remember, I mean, part of what went wrong for Putin in terms of selling the population on this is that they were not able to fully lay the propaganda groundwork in order to persuade their population that this was truly a just war, that it was necessary that they were, you know, righteously going into Ukraine here. There had been all those reports from the intelligence community that, oh, they're going to stage this big false flag and say that, oh,

we have to go in because there's genocide going on and we have to save the Russian nationals from the Ukrainian uber-nationalists. They weren't really able to pull that off. And so now they've sort of told the population, oh, this is just to pull that off. And so now they've sort of told the population, oh, this is just a peacekeeping mission. And you've got a lot of people who are looking at the same social media videos and things that are coming out that we are, that can see very clearly this is way beyond a peacekeeping mission. And there are deep ties, obviously, between Russia and Ukraine. A lot of the language I heard repeatedly, Sagar, from people was, these are our brothers. You know, people who grew up in Ukraine, who have family that are

living there, who are, you know, in communication with little, you know, cousins and brothers and sisters who were there, who are terrified, who are fearing for their lives. So we have no way of knowing what percent of the population disagrees with this action. But I think because there have been thousands of people coming out in the streets facing very severe consequences for these actions, you can say there is at least a significant chunk of the Russian population that is not on board with this at all. We've also seen Russian celebrities kind of led the way. I mean, they're, you know, doing this from safe locales overseas and unlikely to be arrested in the same way that these individuals are. But this is also really significant. They have families, Crystal. Yeah, this also takes, you know, a lot of courage and can mean a lot and can kind of provide a spark and help to bolster a population in their ability to dissent.

So a tennis star, Andrei Rublev, was at a tournament in Dubai over the weekend. And after his victory, take a look at what he writes on the camera. Two sets, but Rublev said not so fast. And he might just have a message. Andrei Rublev. I think we can get behind that. The Russian.

And I saw Medvedev. He wrote, no more war. He wrote, no more war. Yeah, for those who are listening, writes, no more war on the camera lens there for everyone to see. I saw Dmitry Medvedev also baints of comments saying, you know, as a tennis player and someone who cares about travel, you know, being an international figure, I always want peace. We also had Alexander Ovechkin, who is a hockey player for the Washington Capitals. Let's put this next tweet up on the screen. He wrote on his Instagram, he shared a picture of himself, and the caption says, Please no more war, Alexander Ovechkin.

So these signs of dissent within the Russian population are significant. Again, we don't want to oversell it here that you have a couple of the oligarchs, that you have thousands of people in the streets willing to risk arrest, that you have a significant number of sort of Russian celebrities who are coming out against the war. These are all significant things, but we also don't want to oversell it and make it look like, you know, Putin's about to, his regime is about to topple any day now. Right, yeah. And the important part on that one is that the celebrities themselves,

especially Ovechkin, he was very tight with Putin. Putin, you know, long would take pictures with him and he would, and all of that. It's part of their soft power across the globe. So to have them speak out is incredibly, incredibly significant. And the current numbers are about 5,500 people have been detained at various anti-war protests since the invasion began on Thursday. That is according to an open source information monitor. There is no way to know. We shouldn't oversell it. It's not

like there are hundreds of thousands of people. But these people are very, very brave in order to come out. Given the consequences of what it means to come out and what it means to get arrested, you know, the fact that you even have thousands of people on the streets is pretty extraordinary. Oh, it's completely extraordinary. And we also see protests, all arrests across the world, especially also in Belarus. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen, which is you saw thousands of people gathered here surrounding the defense ministry in Belarus actually chanting glory to Ukraine. Again, these are the real heroic protesters. They face actual jail time.

I just saw this morning a Times of London correspondent who was detained at the protests, took a photo with his friends from the protests in the prison. He's like, I get to leave because I'm a foreign journalist. He's like, not my friends. They're going to be in there for a long time. And they're not the only ones. The important thing is, and we talked about this before, when I was talking about Europe asleep at the wheel, I was like, where are the protests in Berlin? I was like, you people all marched against the war in Iraq. I supported that.

And I'm like, but you're about to have a war on your continent and you're not doing anything. Well, they showed up in a big way. Let's put this up there. Side-by-side images there from Berlin and from Prague. Prague obviously have its own history of being conquered and invaded by the Russians. But those Berlin protests are very significant because they show that the maximal pressure that is now being put on the government is from the population itself. It's not top down. The German people, by all accounts here, very outraged about what's happening in Ukraine. Obviously, the East Germans, anybody with history understands what it's like to live under Soviet occupation.

But what's important to understand is that the groundswell of public opinion in Paris, in London, and in Berlin is all on the sides of definitely the most hawkish positions within Europe. That's what I'm going to be talking a lot about in my monologue. It's part of the reason why what Putin did is so dumb. Yeah. According to media reports, 100,000 people at least came out in Berlin, 70,000 in Prague. I mean, that's amazing. It's really amazing. And this is just a tiny sample of the protest images and video that we could have shown you because they literally were global. I mean, there was not one corner of the video that we could have shown you because they literally were global. I mean, there was not one corner of the globe that did not have some form of anti-war protest. I saw people protesting in Japan.

There were even a few extremely brave souls in China. Yeah, we saw this one guy in China doing it. Bro, I urge you, you're a hero, but stay home, man. You don't need this. Protests in New York. I mean, really all over the world. So, again, I don't know that Putin expected this level of global backlash, including from his own population. No, it really has not. I keep thinking back to there was a – what Putin seems in his 19th century mindset, something he's forgetting is that in the stark age of the internet, when you can see an image of – I'm not saying it's enough to bring the full force to bear.

We all watched what happened in Syria. Look, that situation was complicated, so I'm not saying anything should have been done. But you can have mass genocide as we've seen also campaigns in Yemen, elsewhere. But if enough people catch on care, you will have significant backlash. And that is what I think he has underestimated, which is that in the age of the internet, we found this out too in Iraq in 2003, when there are cameras, and same in Afghanistan, there's a lot of stuff that you just can't get away with that you used to be able to in the 19th century. So that's one of the updates that you have to make in modern warfare.

There's clearly a significant chunk of the Russian population that is not buying this as a peacekeeping. No, and they're about to suffer, like really suffer. I feel so bad. I want to say this too. For these young Russians, because we're about to talk about this, they are a whole generation of people my age and your age. They did not deserve this. They're westernized in many ways, right?

Like they want to be able to travel to the west and they like exchange programs and doing business and having the connections of a global capitalism. That's dead for them. They're going straight back to the days of aut global capitalism, that's dead for them. They're going straight back to the days of autarky in the blink of an eye. Yeah. I feel really bad for them. It is. I mean, they're suffering already. They're suffering when you see the massive crash in the financial situation of Russia that has happened in the blink of an eye. That's right.

Okay. Let's get to the warmongering. This is, look, for all of, we've been talking about Putin and his folly. Don't worry, we've got plenty of neocons here in DC who are calling for some of the most inflammatory actions I've ever seen. And the cavalier attitude that they have towards nuclear war is unbelievable. It's disgusting. Let's go back to Mr. Adam Kisinger, who's now a freaking hero here in D.C. because he stood up to Trump on January 6th. Let's put this up there

on the screen. The fate of Ukraine is being decided tonight, but also the fate of the West. Declare a no-fly zone over Ukraine at the invitation of their sovereign government. Disrupt Russia's air ops. give heroic Ukrainians a fair fight. It's now or later. What he is saying there, when you declare a no-fly zone, this was once Hillary Clinton's policy over Syria, was to shoot down Russian aircraft conducting operations over Ukraine. If we kinetically engage Russia, we are at war with that nation. And as I told you during the nuclear block, any military doctrine of the United States and Russia is that in a confrontation between our countries, it will result in nuclear annihilation.

That is core military doctrine going all the way back to the days of the Soviet Union. It does not end in any way except hundreds of millions of people dead. And by the way, I live like a mile from the Pentagon. So if it happens, I'm gone. So I'm sorry, everybody. I won't be surviving that one. It's important in order to understand just how grave this situation is and just how dangerous these calls that are institutionalized are. Now, look, luckily, the Biden administration has continued to rule out there will be no U.S. troops, all of that. That's great. However, the latter calls, there's been no debate about this. We are shipping Stinger missiles right now to Ukraine. There's a debate to be had about that.

There's apparently a big debate within the NSC, the National Security Council, whether under international law that would make us a co-combatant in what's happening in Ukraine. Now, that's actually pretty up for debate. But as we found out, at least in Afghanistan and all that, there was never any direct retaliation against us, even though there definitely was Soviet support for the North Vietnamese Army. And it did stay in a proxy conflict. But when somebody is crazy and when somebody is unstable, they could use that as a pretext to then target the United States. And it doesn't even have to be militarily, as you said. There can be cyber attacks.

They could take down our grid. They could disrupt our banking system. You could take down the NASDAQ in the stock market and wreak financial havoc. You could take down Germany, I mean, their financial system, and that would cascade over here. There's all sorts of different outcomes through which this can happen. And we continue to see, let's also, I'll put that next one up there I alluded to around nuclear war. Whenever he says the breathlessness over nukes is mind blowing, we used to call this bluff. And Louise Mensch saying very, very, you know, she's so sure about this. Putin's not going to fire a nuke. Can everybody please get real?

If he tries, he will be eliminated. Well, yeah, he will. But so will a lot of other people in Russia and here in Washington. So this again, you cannot speak this way whenever we are talking about hundreds of millions of people dying in thermonuclear war. And we continue to see maximalist calls from a lot of people who are at the top of Russiagate, Crystal. Well, that's exactly—and that's an important point. I mean, let's make it totally clear. Adam Kinziger, resistance hero, is calling for World War III. Yeah, he is calling for World War III.

That's what this amounts to. And so I'm very opposed to cancel culture. People can voice their views, but if you're going to cancel anyone, get this guy off of Twitter and certainly don't book him on your cable news shows so that he can spout this type of absolute insanity. I mean, total insanity here. And to do it so casually, this is not a game. It's not a game.

This is not a joke and this is not a game. We should be looking for every possible way that we can de-escalate this situation. And that's why I'm so nervous about some of the harshness of these sanctions, some of the measures that are being taken, including fighter jets being sent over from the EU and our Stinger missiles, because you are just creating an escalatory ladder rather than trying to find ways to de-escalate the situation. So these people are completely reckless. They are completely insane. And everyone who had a role in helping to elevate them into these figures of esteem with a massive part of the population,

I mean, this is what you get for that. This is who you have elevated. And of course, it goes way beyond adding Adam Kinzinger. But by making it just, hey, if you're against Trump, then we like you. You've put all of these neocons with the worst and most dangerous possible foreign policy views into positions of power with a large portion of the Democratic and liberal base. And the other piece of this is, again, we've sort of been operating today under the assumption that, okay, well, something's going to happen. Ukraine is where the action's at, and that's it. We don't know that. We do not know that, especially, you know, we were people who were very skeptical that Putin would do even what he has done because it was such an insane move ultimately. Who is to say that he stays in Ukraine, that one of the dangerous sort of lashing out moves that he doesn't make is going after, let's say, Moldova or doing something, you know, skirmish on the

border of Poland. Then what? Then what sort of pressure is Biden going to be under to actually directly engage us into this conflict? So these people need to be shamed. They need to be shunned. They need to be called out every single time they make one of these absolutely insane suggestions of, hey, how about we casually get ourselves into World War III? And oh, by the way, don't worry about the nukes. Yeah, that's that's really the biggest, you can't overstate that. And another Russia gator, Crystal, who you found, let's put this up there, Eric Swalwell, let's put it up on the screen, says that we should, quote, kick every Russian student out of universities in retaliation against Vladimir Putin. Look, the oligarchs and their kids, yeah, 100%, get them the hell out of here, okay? In terms of punishing those people.

But like I just said, I mean, these younger Russians, as long as they're not spies or have, you know, like whatever allegiance to the Russian government and are here studying, leave these people alone. Yeah. I mean, and, you know, their lives, their generation and all that is completely getting destroyed domestically. These types of calls are vindictive. It's the type of mindset which led to what the alien and sedition acts in some of the worst periods of our history. That's right. And we should remember that. Our beef is not with the Russian people.

The Russian people did nothing wrong here. And I saw the Swalwell thing kick every Russian student out of universities. I mean, it's just remarkable how sort of casually they go to these extraordinarily xenophobic places after spending a lot of time, you know, decrying that sort of language and behavior from Trump and his allies. I saw someone else on Twitter who was like, seize all their property, you know, kick them out of schools. I mean, just sort of competing. This is what's happening in that segment of the liberal ecosystem is they're competing to show how cruel they can be to the general Russian population. And that also is not a fruitful or productive or moral direction to go in. Yeah, that's right.

All right, guys. It's crazy that this is—this, like, barely made it into the show today considering what massive, huge news this is. Yeah, that's right. And this was someone who sort of was seen as the frontrunner all the way along. But you'll recall there was a big push from Jim Clyburn specifically, but also Lindsey Graham, to get Michelle Childs instead. We detailed here for you what a terrible choice she would have been. She was a management side, labor attorney. That means she fought against workers on any number of fronts. Her firm was sort of classic union busting firm. She also, right before she was nominated by Obama to, I think, the district court, she sentenced a man for a trivial amount

of weed sales to 12 years in prison as this sort of like lock-em-up mentality to try to further her own career. So they did not go with her. So that was good news. Let's go ahead and put the Washington Post tear sheet about this nomination up on the screen inside Biden's pick of Katonji Brown-Jackson for the Supreme Court. There are a few things that are interesting here. I will confess I have not done a thorough review of her record, but there are some indications that are pretty good, especially on issues of labor, which obviously we pay special attention to too. In terms of her record, one thing that people point to is she was a public defender. She also

will be close to, I think she'll be the second youngest member of the court if she is confirmed. She's 51 years old. Obviously that matters in terms of she'll be there for a long time and have a chance to shape the court. One of the things that I liked that they detailed in that piece is that she was in an influential position on the D.C. Court of Appeals during Trump's administration. And there were times when she ruled against Trump and there were times when she ruled for Trump, which she seemed to show a fairness of mind. So she ruled against him on compelling White House counsel Don McGahn to testify, but she ruled with Trump on a dispute over the border wall, actually. She also, and this is on the labor front, she ruled against Trump on an issue regarding federal employee unions who challenged three of the president's executive orders on the collective bargaining rights of federal workers. So she sided with the workers and the unions on that issue.

That seems to be a good sign. In terms of her ability to get confirmed, this is also probably another reason why she was selected. She was confirmed to that appellate judgeship less than a year ago. And when she was confirmed, she did have support from some Republican senators, three in particular, Lindsey Graham, Lisa Murkowski, and Susan Collins. So the fact that they just voted for her less than a year ago makes it more difficult for them to make the case now that suddenly she's terrible, suddenly she's out of bounds. Now, that's no guarantee. Susan Collins so far has issued just like a vague statement. She said, she's an experienced federal judge with impressive academic and legal credentials. I will conduct a thorough vetting of Judge Jackson's nomination and look forward to her public hearing

before the Senate Judiciary Committee and to meeting with her in my office. And the last thing I'll say about her record is that, you know, to me is encouraging, is she represented one of the detainees in Guantanamo Bay and was also, yeah, was also, now I like that. I'm sure there will be Republicans who say, you know, she's defending terrorists, et cetera. But, you know, to me, there's no huge red flags here in terms of her nomination. I actually don't think so in this day and age. You don't think so? I feel like that culture war is long gone. At this point, civil liberties is now over.

I don't know. I can still see it. Yeah, maybe, amongst a few people. I think the key point is, look, she's already gotten 53 votes in the Senate. That's incredibly important because it's going to be hard to justify why you voted against someone here and then voted for someone there. Markowski and Collins have both generally not succumbed to more of the culture war whenever it comes to the Supreme Court view, absent Kavanaugh, of course. And so I think that that's incredibly significant. By and large, it's significant because she's probably going to be the next Supreme Court justice. On the other hand, she's filling a liberal seat.

It doesn't change the balance of the court. It won't fix jurisprudence and our broader problems with the court writ large. So it's important. We did feel the need to bring it to you. Not much else to say, to be honest. Yeah, and it's important that it's

Katonji Brown-Jackson and not Michelle Childs. I think it's apparently Biden called Clyburn before he made the pick public and told him basically, you're going to be disappointed. But, you know, I think that's a small victory. And while it may not matter right now

in terms of the balance of power on the court, down the road, you know, it could make a difference who you have there, especially since she is so young. Yeah, that's right. So I wanted to bring you that. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, there's a couple of clips going viral from news coverage of the war in Ukraine.

And the reason so many people, I think, are watching and reacting to them is because they really seem to give up the game on something really central to the media's coverage of Ukraine. Namely, why are they so deeply concerned for the victims of this particular crisis in contrast to the indifference or outright contempt displayed for the victims of any myriad of other crises around the world? Let's take a look. Now with the Russians marching in, it's changed the calculus entirely. Tens of thousands of people have tried to flee the city. There will be many more. People are hiding out in bomb shelters. But this isn't a place, with all due respect, you know, like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades. You know,

this is a relatively civilized, relatively European, I have to choose those words carefully too, city where you wouldn't expect that or hope that it's going to happen. So it's partly human nature, but they are not in denial. I'm sorry. It's very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blonde hair being killed, children being killed every day with Putin's missiles and his helicopters and his rockets. And so, of course, I understand and respect the emotion. every day with Putin's missiles and his helicopters and his rockets.

And so, of course, I understand and respect the emotion. What you are outlining there is this tension between longer term efforts to apply pressure to Vladimir Putin, such as financial sanctions and the very immediate military threat which you're experiencing. Now the unthinkable has happened to them. And this is not a developing third world nation. This is Europe. This is Europe. Civilized. Blonde haired, blue eyes. In case you didn't get it, not bad in the telegraph. Wants to make it even more clear for you, writing,

quote, they seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. Ukraine is a European country. Its people watch Netflix and have Instagram accounts, vote in free elections and have All just seemingly a bunch of different ways of trying to say, oh my god, they're killing white people. Now, these reporters and analysts clearly expect that the white American and European majorities will care more about the humanity of these particular victims because we share similar levels of melanin. And that is certainly part of what's going on here. After all, you do see some countries right now opening their arms to the white refugees of the Ukraine war while closing their doors to those from Africa and the Middle East. It's easier to otherize people who don't look like you or have different cultural practices or traditions or religions. But melanin solidarity is not actually the real story here. Playing to a shared racial and cultural identity, it's really just a tool.

It's a means to an end that the news media is using to persuade Americans that they should care more about the people in this conflict than in any number of other conflicts that they are not covering whatsoever. This is a classic case of the phenomena Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman describe in Manufacturing Consent, how the media picks worthy and unworthy victims, choosing which stories, protests, wars, famines are worthy of coverage and worthy of displaying the humanity of the people impacted, and which should either be ignored completely or actively demonized. And the deciding factor here is not actually race or culture or which continent the events happen to be unfolding on. The deciding factor is which narratives are most convenient for the U.S. government. Just ask yourself this question. Why was it that for decades of the Afghan war, the Afghan civilians killed by the U.S. state were considered unworthy victims?

Then for a brief period during our withdrawal from Afghanistan, suddenly Afghan civilians were worthy victims. And then the news media cared deeply about the fate of the women and girls who would live under Taliban rule. Then, just as suddenly, now that there is a mass famine caused by our own cruel theft of the Afghan government funds, Afghan civilians are once again unworthy victims. The ethnicity, cultural practices, and level of development of the country did not change. What changed was which narrative was convenient for our state.

In fact, within the very same country, at the very same time, some victims were deemed worthy and covered as such by the media while others were not. So victims of American drone strikes, unworthy. The Afghan girls' robotics team? Worthy. All because of what the U.S. state wanted highlighted and what they wanted suppressed. It's disgraceful how the corporate news media is happy to manipulate Americans' most noble

humanitarian impulses and channel them in directions that are convenient for U.S. power. And you can see this dynamic playing out right now all over the world. In our own country, within liberal media, COVID victims have frequently been given worthy treatment, while victims of drug overdoses have been given unworthy treatment. Looking around the world, Cuban protesters and Hong Kong protesters were given worthy treatment since they were opposing governments that our elites don't like. Chilean protesters and Palestinian protesters were given the unworthy treatment because the U.S. state did not care for their causes. Perhaps the most glaring discrepancy right now is between the way that the Ukrainian

war is being covered and the way that the Saudi war in Yemen is being ignored. In Yemen, the U.S. has been backing our ally Saudi Arabia in a proxy war that has left the Yemeni population starving and completely desperate. In fact, Yemen is currently considered to be the world's worst humanitarian crisis, with millions of children in danger of starving to death. But since the U.S. is complicit in causing this particular war and its attendant mass suffering, you don't hear a whole lot about it.

On the contrary, for all the flaws of the media's coverage of the Ukraine conflict, and there are many, they have gone out of their way to treat the people suffering there with humanity. I've watched beautiful videos and read heart-wrenching stories about refugees grabbing what they can and fleeing by the hundreds of thousands,

about families hunkered down in parking garages, terrified for their lives and the lives of their children, about young men suddenly thrust in the middle of a war with hastily issued government weapon and zero training, the play to tribalism. These blonde-haired people are just like you. They watch Netflix. That is a technique used in the manipulation, an effective manipulation because, yes, of very real problems of racism and tribalism, but it's not actually the root cause of that manipulation. The reason they want you to see

these victims as the fully worthy human beings that they are is because they're opposing one of our most significant global adversaries. Now, some make the opposite mistake of thinking that since the Ukrainian suffering is convenient for the U.S. state, that we should not care about it whatsoever. So let me be totally clear. What's being done to Ukraine by Russia is horrible, and it is heartbreaking, and it deserves to be covered with humanity. I don't want the coverage of Ukraine to have less care and empathy. I want all wars to be given this same treatment. This is also not a call to stop covering the conflict. I believe the stakes for the world

of what happens in Ukraine as we've been laying out here today are very, very high. We are witnessing a global great power realignment in real time, which will shape our world for decades to come. We are also watching in real time as the worst voices in American politics try to draw us into a war with a nuclear power. Those are serious, consequential topics

with global implications, and they deserve thorough consideration. But when the media tries to convince you of the righteousness of a particular cause because of the humanitarian considerations, just remember all of the millions of humanitarian considerations that they care absolutely nothing about, or as in Palestinians, that they go out of their way to be on the wrong side of. This is my plea to you to always remember that while we should care deeply about the humanity of the Ukrainians who are suffering, their lives are not any more worthy than those of Yemenis, Afghans, Syrians, and think it's important here to reflect on... And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com.

All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, I've been thinking a lot over the last several days. Why was I so wrong about Russia's invasion of Ukraine? Of course, I had no faith in the U.S. intelligence community, given their long track record of being flat wrong. But I think fundamentally it was this. I just simply had too much respect for Vladimir Putin. I thought he was paranoid, yes,

but ultimately a mostly rational and logical actor driven by historical Russian concerns in the region. Yes, I saw those 180,000 troops around Ukraine, and I thought, once again, logically, if you want to extract maximum promises from the West regarding Ukrainian membership status in NATO, an incredible threat is then important. But I made the mistake that a lot of people have made throughout history. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. And Putin's invasion of Ukraine is anything but logical. Let me explain. Putin's core beef with the West was that we expanded NATO outward from its original boundaries at the end of the Cold War. I think that's really fair. He drew red lines then in Ukraine and in Georgia. And he said they can never get NATO membership, and has had credible military deterrent after his campaigns in Chechnya, Abkhazia, and Georgia.

Now, after he ignited the immediate crisis with the troop deployments, the president of Ukraine himself said, well, maybe NATO is just a dream. And here in Washington, the whispers were loud, and you heard the private acknowledgement that yes, Ukraine will never be a part of NATO. Putin made it clear it was a red line. If he had held off, I'm actually very certain he could have extracted a promise from Zelensky and the Ukrainian government themselves that NATO membership was off the table 100%. He could literally have gotten everything that he said he wanted. And in here in the US.S., people like myself would have been supportive of giving him that guarantee. But then last week, he decided instead to not just move

into eastern Ukraine. Putin greenlit a full shock and awe campaign against the entire nation from east and west by land, air and sea. And by doing that, Putin has committed one of the most colossal follies in modern memory by a Russian leader. Firstly, this invasion has fulfilled the wildest dreams of the neocons and the war hawks in D.C. U.S. views of Russia are now at 85% unfavorable, spiking to the highest level today than since the end of the Cold War. Public opinion is now on the side of the most maximal actions against Russia, short of war. He has empowered his greatest enemies in the Capitol. Next, Putin has awoken a sleeping giant in Europe.

Donald Trump famously castigated NATO allies for not paying their fair share of 2% GDP defense spending targets. Most Western NATO countries, like France and Germany, have been sitting on their hands funding their expensive welfare states, mooching off of the U.S. nuclear umbrella for almost 30 years. And now, what has Putin done? Well, he has greenlit a massive expansion of military budgets on the European continent. Europe is one-fifth of world GDP. They may be lazy and mostly useless in many normal

times. But when you see a massive invasion just a few hundred miles away, even the laziest people wake up. And that is what has happened. Germany, the country which has been the most reluctant to spend on defense, and has even relied on Russian gas despite warnings from the West not to do so, announced yesterday they will increase GDP defense spending on defense over 2% for the first time in modern history. More so, they will build new LNG terminals in Germany to reduce reliance on Russian gas and purchase it instead from people like the United States. This is a titanic shift in German national security and energy policy that would have been unthinkable two weeks ago. Putin has now accelerated higher defense spending on the continent, even amongst the biggest doves in Europe,

and he has pushed his largest European customer into the hands of the West. Just as reliant as Germany is on Russian gas, it is also true that the Russians are as reliant on German cash. And then finally, and the worst development for peace is this, Putin has now ensured a permanent U.S. and Western deployment to NATO. President Biden sent an additional 7,000 troops to Germany, replacing several thousand troops who were then sent to the furthest east of the NATO alliance. Furthermore, Chancellor Schultz, in his speech pledging more defense spending, also indicated Germany will be sending more troops to the eastern flank of NATO. This is all but now ensured for literally years to come. Furthermore, the U.S. and the West are

providing untold billions of dollars in military aid, not only to Ukraine, but to the eastern countries around it. The current estimate in the immediate term is $10 billion just this month for the immediate crisis. That does not even mention the absolutely massive military budget, which is going to make our current one look tiny in comparison when the next appropriation cycle comes up. So let's all sum this up. Putin, in his goal to fend off NATO and Western reaction, has instead united the Western public against him. He has empowered the foes of Russia in every Western capital, from Washington to Paris to Berlin. He has spurned one of his biggest energy customers, pushed the biggest dove in Europe to spend more on defense. He has ensured now big U.S. Western

military deployments right up to the edge of the Russian border, and he has strengthened the bipartisan consensus against Russia in ways he probably does not even comprehend. Add on top of that, he has now invited the most harsh and strict sanctions against Russia that we have ever seen applied in the West. He ensures financial ruin for many of his citizens, travel bans, a massive hit to the quality of life of Russians, an economic depression the likes of which Russia has not seen in decades, geopolitical isolation, save for a tentative ally in the Chinese. And I have not even mentioned this invasion ain't going so well so that far, given the high death toll amongst his soldiers. This is a colossal mistake.

It's not logical, and I won't lie, a fear for the fate of humanity. This was the action of a person who abandoned rationality, and in his hands is one of the largest nuclear arsenals in the history of mankind. There are few off-ramps from here, given what Putin has done, and the eyeball-to-eyeball days of the Cold War are back. While there is blame in Washington, the majority of it today lies with Putin. And I hope to God we can get out of this one without total annihilation. That's the part I keep coming back to. But the more you continue to look at it, the more you're going to see And if you want to hear my reaction to Cyber's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Derek, it's always great to see you, my friend. Great to see you guys, too.

So for your podcast, Plain English with Derek Thompson, you did two different episodes so far on Ukraine. And we wanted to start with you talked to a bunch of experts about what some of the potentially unpredictable follow on effects of the war in Ukraine could be from a supply chain perspective, from an economic perspective? What were some of the top lines that you found there? Sure. The thesis of that episode on Plain English was that war doesn't just include unintended consequences. War is unintended consequences. I don't think a lot of people assumed when Putin invaded Ukraine that we would see essentially the economic suffocation of the Russian economy. I mean, this is an unprecedented thing that is happening right now and is unfolding by the second. But some of the really interesting ripple effects that I didn't really anticipate until I started reporting out this episode

include the food crisis that we could see. Ukraine and Russia combined for something like 20, 25% of wheat exports to the world. There are 14 countries in the world that rely on Ukraine for more than 10% of their wheat imports. That includes a lot of countries in the Middle East, in Africa, in Southeast Asia. So if you see wheat export disruption because of this war, you could see hunger. You could see potential famines in some countries, I'm worried, in the Middle East, in Africa, in Southeast Asia. What do we know about hunger? It tends to create its own political knock-on effects. It tends to create its own political instability. The Arab Spring, all sorts of revolutions around the world have started because of rising food prices. So the ripple effect there

to pay attention to is what if the trade is disrupted from Russia and Ukraine creates economic problems for countries that already have poverty and political instability. And we see flare-ups of political revolutions outside of Eastern Europe. Yeah, that's something I'm very worried about. Derek, you also called the financial suffocation of Russia terra incognita. This is something I, too, Crystal and I have been trying to wrap our heads around. Can you just describe for us what some of the follow-on economic effects might be? Because the Russian economy is not contained to just Russia. It's a modern Western nation that does business with all sorts of people. That's right. Just a key stat right there.

I think something like 75% of the world's sunflower oil, sunflower seed oil, comes from Russia and Ukraine. So there's all sorts of, I mean, obviously the natural gas and coal, an enormous amount of the energy that's provided to, or that Europe uses comes from Russia. You know, the way that I think about this in the big picture, do you remember when Trump was elected and the comedian John Mulaney said, this is like a horse loose in a hospital. We've never seen anything like this before. You can't say, oh, I saw a bird loose in a hospital once. No, that's not a horse loose in a hospital. No one has seen anything like this before. So don't tell me you know what's going on. I kind of feel like this isn't like the horse loose in the hospital. This is like a rhino loose in the nuclear power plant control room.

You're not just seeing something that's unprecedented. You're seeing something that's unprecedented that is proximate to a relatively unhinged leader in Vladimir Putin who has access to the world's second largest nuclear arsenal. This is a really, really scary moment. You know, the other way that I think about this is that there's sort of two dimensions of this war. On the one hand, there's battlefield number one. That is the ground in Ukraine. It's the land. It's the sea, the air in Ukraine where the literal battle is happening.

What we've seen in the last 48, 72 hours is that there's another layer of this war, Battlefield 2. And that's the contracts and the policies that exist in the world of global finance and economics. And what the world has done essentially is that, all right, if you're going to try to siege Kiev, if you're going to try to besiege the country of Ukraine, we will economically besiege the country of Russia. You cannot trade. You cannot fly to Europe. You cannot offload your assets. Your central bank is essentially shut off. You can't take money out of your ATM. That's why you had all these lines and you had all these all this news about ATMs running out of cash, running out of rubles. The ruble itself has lost me like 30 to 40 percent of its value in the last 24 hours. I mean, this really is turning out to be something like an unprecedented economic crisis for a country the size of Russia. And while, of course, this is not my saying we

shouldn't do this, like it's important to stand up to an auto crowd invading a neighbor to say this is not acceptable. But I think it's worth pointing out that we do not know what the knock on effects are going to be exactly in the next 72 hours, because this is a horse loose in the hospital. This is a rhino loose in the nuclear power plant control room. We don't know what comes next. That's right. Well, and I'm just looking at a new CNN poll that says 83 percent of Americans favor increased economic sanctions against Russia in response to the invasion. So there's huge public sentiment in favor of, you know, essentially throwing the economic playbook at Russia. However,

one of the things that you tease out is that that strategy, not only is it unprecedented under, you know, I mean, against a major G20 power, it also has risks. It's not clear that this ultimately is going to be the way to de-escalate and resolve this situation with the least human suffering. So talk about what those risks actually look like and entail. Sure. The way I think about it is we have Putin in a headlock, but he has a gun to the head of the human race, right? He has the ability to launch hundreds of nuclear weapons that would essentially end life as we know it. I'm not saying that to be scaremongering, and I certainly hope it doesn't do it. I think the odds of it happening are

sub 1%, but these are the facts on the ground. I think it's important to, now that we've shown Putin our economic arsenal, to clearly illuminate an off-ramp. We need to find a way out of this. I talked to a military historian and political science professor, Paul Post, on the second episode that I did for my podcast, Plain English. That episode was called How Putin's War May End. And he made an interesting point. He said there's a term in political science called gambling for resurrection, gambling for resurrection. That is when a military leader is so desperate that he or she does something completely crazy because their back is against the wall. I believe Otto von Bismarck in the 19th century, the German Prussian leader of the late 19th century, called this risking suicide for fear of death or committing suicide for fear of death. If the actor, Putin here, feels like death

is proximate for him or his regime, he might commit the equivalent of geopolitical suicide, which when you have a nuclear arsenal at your disposal is suicide for a lot more than just Putin. I think for all those reasons, it's really clear, it's really important that we be clear about what the off-ramp here is, to tell Putin, tell people around him, if you do this, then these catastrophic sanctions will come down. If you go this far, these catastrophic sanctions will come down. We are willing this far, these catastrophic sanctions will come down. We are willing to work with you so that you can save face, leave Ukraine, save your country, and also, by the way, save a piece of the global financial and trade system because

Russia is a big economy that is at the heart of a lot of supply chains and global networks. Yeah. I mean, I don't think people have really understood. I mean, it's the 11th largest economy on earth. Derek, you talk to these people with end games. At this point, Putin has invaded. He has described, to me, painted himself in a political corner of the current Ukrainian regime is unacceptable. So what does an end game look like, which he can live with and which we can live with? That's a good question. Obviously, the endgame involves Putin getting out of the Kiev area, right? That's the most important. Stop besieging the capital. It would, I hope, involve him de-escalating significantly and moving his troops out of the vast majority of Ukraine. I'm a little bit concerned about the U.S. asking for something

like removal of Russian troops from Crimea. I'm not a military expert here. I'm just saying if you ask for Putin to essentially give back to Ukraine more than it had before the invasion, I worry about that extending the length of the war. I'm not sure what the best move there is. But my thesis here is if we can get back to status quo ante 10 days ago, status quo ante two weeks ago, that would be a win for a lot of people. It would allow Putin to save a certain amount of face. It would certainly save the tens of millions of people who are a part of the Russian economy. It would save an aspect of the global financial system. And it would potentially save Europe from catastrophic escalation in penalties that might or escalation in sanctions that might

include Russia shutting off natural gas to Europe during a cold late February, early March period. So I think that probably has to be on the table for sure. That's well said. What did your military historian say about what he saw Putin's ultimate objectives here being? Because, I mean, obviously he's completely invaded Ukraine by all directions and all methods possible. Is he planning to stay in Ukraine? Is he planning to have a puppet government? Is he planning to occupy Ukraine the way that we did Iraq? What does this ultimate endgame look like? Right. So we talked about five scenarios. I'm not going to walk through all five

scenarios, but I will say that scenario three was what Professor Post called annexation. That basically means the conquest of Ukraine and something like the end of the state, the independent state of Ukraine, Ukraine being folded into an expanded Russian empire. That was the goal of Putin, say, five, six days ago, whenever this war started, what even is time? I think he, Post said that he imagined Putin had likely downscaled his ambition towards setting up a puppet government in Kyiv, conquering Kyiv itself, holding Kyiv with maybe, you know, several tens of thousands of Russian troops and essentially running Ukraine as an extension of the Russian empire without conquering the entire country. At this point, given the bravery of the Ukrainian army, given what seems to be the suffering of Russian forces, I saw a statistic. I don't want to suggest that this is obviously true. I think

it may have come from the Ukrainian government, and they have their own reason to exaggerate the cost to Russia. But it suggested that something like 4,500 Russian soldiers have died in the first four or five days of fighting. That is more than the total number of American deaths in Iraq in the entire 19-year history, 20-year history of that war. I believe only about 250 only, I don't mean to downplay it, 200 to 300 Americans died in the first year of the Iraq war. That means that Russia is essentially losing on a daily or multi-hourly basis as many troops as Americans lost in the entire first year of the war in Iraq. I mean, I think it's important to point out as a piece of context here that this war is not going well for the Russians. And hopefully that pushes them to the bargaining table and we can end this

horrible war and frankly, take off these sanctions and allow the tens of millions of people in the Russian economy to not essentially face the next Great Depression for their nation. I couldn't agree with you more. You know, Derek, I was thinking about it. 15,000 Soviets were killed in the Soviet-Afghan war. And just those 15,000 was enough to spark a domestic backlash in Russia. So if they're on track at some 4,000 or so, roughly, we don't exactly know the number, you multiply that by two, three years, this is a real sea change over there as well. Derek, we can't- Well, you're talking about-

Oh, sorry, go ahead. Just, yeah, very last point. No, no, no, go ahead, go ahead. You're talking about that happening in a matter of four weeks, right? Exactly, yes. You're talking about the equivalent of the matter of four weeks, right? Exactly. You're talking about the equivalent of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan happening every month, right?

So that's 12 Soviet invasions of Afghanistan a year. This may be proving very catastrophic for the Russians. And I very much hope that the appearance of the catastrophic invasion pushes Putin to the bargaining table. Very, very well said. That's what we all- Everybody go subscribe to Derek's podcast.

We're gonna have the links down there in the description. Always appreciate you, man. Thank you for joining us. Great to see you, Derek. Thank you guys so much for watching. I can't appreciate more. I mean, in these times, it's crazy. We both feel like we're like, Oh my God, we have so much information that we have to break down. But look, that's why we do what we do. We can't do it without your support. We have a ton of new partnerships I hope you guys saw James Lee made his debut on the program. We have Matt Stoller. We have the daily poster We got two more coming down the pipeline. So I think or no three more actually So we'll have six active partnerships

All of that is enabled by you and your support for us with the premium membership It gives us the editing power the graphics power and all that to support Content which we love and to bring you as much as we possibly can. You know, we were worrying. We're like, is this too much? But the more we post, the more you guys watch. So look, we will continue to do as you ask.

Yeah, and part of our goal with those partnerships is, you know, it enables us to have really high quality content for you so we're not just putting up stuff to put up stuff. Exactly. I really recommend, if you guys have a chance, if you haven't watched it already, go check out James Lee's piece on the MBA program and the way that it's sort of, you know,

the directions it's pushing our business leaders into, which is hugely significant for all of us. You may need a break from Ukraine coverage, so go and definitely check that out. We're very excited to have James on board. We're also excited about our live stream tomorrow night for State of the Union. Me, Sagar, Marshall, and Kyle

are all gonna be here at this table. The big desk. Yes, at the big desk. We got a couple of surprise guests for you too. So before the State of the Union, after the State of the Union, all of these things are enabled by your support. So thank you, thank you, thank you. We are so incredibly grateful. We hope you have a

wonderful day, and we will see you back here tomorrow. See you tomorrow. This is an iHeart Podcast.