Chapo Trap House - Bonus: Ukrainian Politics Deep Dive feat. Peter Korotaev

Episode Date: April 2, 2025

Felix sits down with writer & journalist Peter Korotaev for a wide ranging conversation on the state of the Russo-Ukranian War in the wake of the Trump administration’s spat with Zelensky & attempts at a peace deal, and loads of context on the politics of Ukraine, Russia, various oligarchs, the Atlantic Council, and other non-state actors that have led to this point. You can find Peter’s writing on Ukraine here: https://substack.com/@eventsinukraine And some other writing of note: For al Jazeera: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/1/23/why-is-ukraine-struggling-to-mobilise-its-citizens-to-fight Jacobin: https://jacobin.com/2022/07/ukraine-neoliberalism-war-russia-eu-imf Canada Files: https://www.thecanadafiles.com/articles?author=645e6f082224bb01e8f3f37c Arena https://arena.org.au/ukraines-borderline-disorder/

Hello, everybody. We have not done one of these in a while. And I think this is one of our only episodes, certainly our first interview expressly about Ukraine. Today we're joined by pretty much the perfect guest for this topic. Peter is joining us today. He's behind the the sub stack events in Ukraine that I'm sure a lot of people who are listening to this read. Peter, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, I'm very excited to talk about Ukraine today. Yeah, no, I've really been looking forward to this and I've been reading your sub stack. I don't think I have quite the mental capacity to follow everything.

It is the most, there are so many fucking people involved. So I'm going to try to, you know, um, from, from my perspective as a mildly impaired adult, we're going to try to get people who are like me and want to understand this better, uh, we're, we're going to try to get people who are like me and want to understand this better. We're going to try to get them on the right track today. So just to get us rolling, I guess, from my outside perspective of everything leading up to 2022 and where we're at now. Something I've always wondered is, it seems like when Zelensky won years back, he had this gigantic mandate. Like he won by a really unbelievable margin. And he was pretty expressly, you know, pro-peace,

like pro-Minsk, enforcing the Minsk Agreement and implementing it candidate, much to the chagrin of like Western institutions, what accounts for his inability to do that? And everything that happened after? You hit me with the most interesting question, Felix. It's super broad. No, no, no. I mean, it's a fascinating question.

It's kind of the most interesting question really. I mean, I was living in Ukraine with my family at that time and getting really interested in politics at that time as well. And lately I've been trying to think about this and write about this because it is this whole kind of very tragic in a sense why didn't it work out but also I mean it was sort of obvious he was I mean looking back you can have the benefit of hindsight I mean I think with Zelensky is is that sure he he banked on this whole popular frustration

with nationalism and this popular desire for peace. But first of all, he was always a very sort of, I guess you can say, naive or politically... He was a comedian, right? I mean, he was an actor. He didn't have experience with politics. And in terms of the content of his pro-peace platform, it was very vague. I mean, he had this famous, sort of the interview that really it became clear that he was being prepared for the presidency in late 2018. This famous interview when he famously said like, I would speak with the devil if that's what is necessary to end the war in Ukraine and meaning like, you know, Putin, Pudla, right? And he also, and he was asked like, so how do you think you're gonna talk with Putin? He said, well it's simple,

I'll just talk with him and tell him what we want and he'll say what they want and we'll come to the middle. That's what he's his famous words back in 2018. And so he didn't really have an understanding of, I guess, the stakes involved. He had this idea, oh you know, we it's come and talk to him and I'll talk with him and with Putin and it'll be fine and that's not really that's not how Russia thinks they have a very particular demand specific demand which is that Ukraine you know removes the part of its Constitution that was put in place after 2014 stating that Ukraine will join NATO. So Ukraine, the Ukrainian government, it put this part of the Constitution that Ukraine must join NATO. This was 2017, 18 or so. And Russia wants this gone, Russia wants there to be

some kind of set guarantees that Ukraine will not join NATO, it won't be militarized, it won't be like an Israel in Europe that's not in NATO but still cooperates militarily and so on. So it wasn't really a matter of coming to the middle, you know what I mean? And so there was that misconception. But otherwise, like that's the one aspect of it. Another aspect of it is that from especially 2020-2021, Zelensky, all of these huge promises of ending the war and of ending corruption and ending poverty, he had all these huge election promises. They obviously didn't work out. And there was COVID, that got people really angry, and his popularity began really falling. And there were these important regional elections at the end of 2020. And his party lost basically all these regional elections to either the so-called pro-Russian opposition party

or the sort of pro-Western nationalists. Well, to them not so much, but generally to some just other parties, not his. He got really worried and it's essentially he then started sanctioning all of the political opposition, both the pro-Russian, although he actually sanctioned them and the US sanctioned them and they got rid of their assets and so on. But he also started going after the pro-Western nationalists, although in a much sort of softer way. But what ended up happening is he had declining popularity domestically in all these polls in 2020 and 2021 showing that it was actually, like his popularity was declining and then you had the party pushing for peace, the so-called pro-Russian party of Medvedchuk, opposition

platform, and they were coming second, third, sometimes even first in these polls and also the pro-Western nationalists going up. So he had lower popularity and he decided to essentially make a bet and also he was pissing off the oligarchs at home and they were doing this big coalition against him, they were tired of him sort of centralizing power and generally just tired of him and he decided to make this bet on the West that you know this is my last hope to stay in power and he started becoming more and more you know aggressive anti-russian, you know, this is my last hope to stay in power, and he started becoming more and more, you know, aggressive, anti-Russian, nationalistic, there were these famous, you know, his statement about maybe Ukraine will have a nuke again and so on, and all these other things,

but this was at the end, 2021, but then the last, these are like these first two factors, then the last interesting factor, which is kind of the sexiest, the most mysterious, is there's a Ukrainian oligarch, Igor Kolomoysky, he's a very famous, I think very appealing figure, just now I sort of deranged he is. I think a lot of Americans have heard of him as well. He's very clued in, like tight with Shabad. He built this huge, I think the biggest Jewish center in Europe or the world in his hometown in Ukraine. He was kind of close with the Trump people through Boris Epstein. Yeah, that, Habbad is like a huge nexus Ukrainian or, um, Russian or like Russian emigre oligarchs, like through,

and you talk about this a lot, through like, sort of like the Eric Prince, uh, UAE nexus. Yeah, yeah, this sort of shit, yeah. And uh, but Kolomoisky was like the most, is kind of the most powerful oligarch in Ukraine, maybe not the richest, but it was also totally unclear how rich he was because his whole empire rested on these incredibly opaque structures, this pyramid of banks and so on. But he was this as a strange guy because I mean, he supported the 2014 Euromaidan, you know, pro-western pro-native revolution, whatever you want to call it, because he was tired of the current president Yanukovych for taking his assets, right?

He didn't like that. But then what happened is, and this is most of the Ukrainian oligarchs did the same thing, even those that had supported Yanukovych, they ended up turning against him because the US was threatening to sanction them and so on, so they turned against Yanukovych in 2014. But then by 2016-2017 you had all of these top Ukrainian oligarchs starting to come out in favor of Rapprush month with Russia again and Kolomoysky was leading the charge. He had this important interview with the New York Times as well, which came out in 2019, but he was

already saying that it was 2016. And even the supposedly pro-Western oligarchs, like Viktor Pinchuk, who's a very sort of ... he's like a Ukrainian Soros. He funds the same things that Soros funds or funded. But he actually came out in support of the Minsk agreements, these peace agreements that would return the separatist territories to Ukraine, but they would have their own political rights and the liberal nationalists, they really, really hated these agreements. We can never implement them because they would result in the strengthening of anti-NATO pro-Russian

political forces in Ukraine and that was not something they wanted and it would make NATO joining NATO joining the EU impossible and so on anyway but Kolomoysky came out supporting this and that's also when he started deciding to push Zelensky because Kolomoysky like Zelensky is Kolomoysky's creation and Zelensky worked at Kolomoyski's TV company for his whole life, 1plus1, and it was Kolomoyski's advertising of Zelensky in 2018 that got him the presidency. This was pretty obvious because Kolomoyski was tired of the existing president taking his assets, kind of a classic story, but very importantly, Kolomoisky was very angry at the West, because basically the West,

even though it sort of used his help in 2014, it quickly turned on him. And it started trying to take away his business empire, the Privat Bank crazy business empire. The IMF would always ask for Ukraine to nationalize this bank because Kolomoisky was in charge. And then the US ended up putting sanctions against him in 2021 But the important thing here is is that this is where really leads into US politics and hopefully I'm not sort of losing the the listeners a bit too much, but is that Kolomoisky played a big role in some anti Biden pro Trump Activity because in the hall there were these important leaks in Ukraine in 2020

about the Burisma stuff. Kolomoisky was in contact with Rudy Giuliani and these were these things about Biden pressuring the Ukrainian president to get rid of the general prosecutor and so on. It was a very big thing in Ukraine. Yeah. And this was this was pertaining to the investigation of Burisma, the country, the company where Hunter Biden was on the board and he was making something like what, like 60 grand a month, I believe, which I always thought like I always thought the thing about that

was so interesting because people were like, no, there's absolutely like nothing going on there. Hunter just really knows a lot about like liquid natural gas. I mean, to me it was just like, aren't these the sort of jobs that like the son, the shitty son of like a vice president has? Absolutely. I mean, like, I think the Hunter thing, I mean, obviously it's obvious nepotism and so on, but it wasn't just the Hunter thing. There were, like, very big issues at stake. I mean, one of them was this thing where Biden pressured ex-president

Poroshenko to fire the general prosecutor of Ukraine because this general prosecutor was looking into the Burisma stuff and Also just because he wasn't compliant enough with the US sort of neoliberal plans and this has been a big thing I mean the US is for a long forever been engaged in this long struggle with the Ukrainian sort of Institutions the court system and so on but I mean there were lots of things Involved in this and not only that but Kolomoysky had this big conflict with the sort of the pro-Western NGOs and so on, that they themselves played a huge role in the Manafort thing. I mean, they fired the original shot in the Manafort thing in 2016, because they released this information supposedly demonstrating

Manafort's, well, his ties with different Russian, you know, old Ukrainian figures and so on and these were the pro-western NGOs that had a big problem with Kolomoisky and then Kolomoisky, Zelensky's first presidency was seen as very dominated by Kolomoisky figures. Like the original part of his presidency. But it was also mixed in with pro-western figures, it was fairly complicated. But they started looking into the illegality of the 2016 Ukrainian participation in the Manafort thing. Because the thing is that Ukrainian courts already in 2018-19 had shown that the Manafort

stuff was essentially fake or unprovable and it was illegal for the Ukrainian organizations should not have dragged Ukraine into US politics. It was very bad for Ukraine to get involved in this. So anyway, so there's that whole thing. Kolomoisky really pissed off Biden. And when Biden came in charge, the Washington Post reported that Biden wanted Zelensky get rid of Kolomoisky. And it was clear that the sort of the the Ukrainian kind of oligarchs, they wanted some kind of dot-hunton with Russia get trade going again They didn't they were scared of war because obviously the war has destroyed their assets totally destroyed them

Kolomoisky is now in jail Zelensky put him in jail in 2023 this huge fall from this meteoric sort of rise and Zelensky centralized his power so much in wartime So it was it's's this very interesting, complicated, there was a significant sort of intrigue, I guess, attempt to come to some sort of agreement with Russia from the Zelensky government, from Kolomoisky. Kolomoisky had his people going to Moscow in 2020, 2019, and the Zelensky government did restart negotiations with Russia in 2019

2020 that previous government had cut off since essentially 2016 2017 so there was there was this attempt and then there was a lot of different I mean the different pro-western NGOs they did lots of protests like they had this 2019 red lines that they released nothing that could harm NATO entry which obviously is the main Russian demand and then the nationalist groups they protested but there is also this kind of subterranean element of like Kulamoyski's own failure in diplomacy and his getting on the wrong side of the US administration.

It's a very interesting question. But I mean, basically it was this NATO question and it went from there. But in terms of the timing and the context, it's a very interesting question. Again, you know, very limited perspective on my part, but like the trajectory of Zelensky's administration and fortunes, it did seem, it seemed like a pretty familiar tale in contemporary electoral politics, right? Where there is an outsider, outsider branded, generally kind of like populist, anti-corruption candidate who their plans are quite vague sounding, but they're generally things that are like, you know, popular positions that

previous administrations or figures did not have like the will or the resources to implement and it's this sort of not have like the will or the resources to implement. And it's this sort of, I hate to be one of these people that compares everything to US politics, but sort of a similar theory to the Bernie theory of 2020, where it's like we're going to activate all the people who didn't vote before, and that will be like our base of support for these incredibly difficult things. be like our base of support for these incredibly difficult things. And usually these things end with their ideas are too vague. They don't really have any plans beyond that. That was certainly what it seemed like happened with Zelinsky. You wrote about the negotiations starting out with prisoner exchanges, but not really

going any farther than that. And when I read those interviews that you quoted from in those articles, yeah, it just seemed like he just had campaign talk. The thing that's weird and I think unique to Ukraine is where it went from there because usually those are like One if they're lucky two-term leaders or you know if they're in a parliamentary system They don't stick around for that long They go on to like write a book and do the think tank circuit depending on their alignment But weirdly enough, you know here he is. He's fucking still around.

I guess, like going from there, because that was a really great explanation of kind of what happened and why, I was wondering if you could give the listeners sort of an accounting of, as you see it, two of the most important factions in Ukrainian politics that you identify as sort of the grant eaters, the Sorosites, and the more hardline nationalists, even though the grant eaters, of course, as you explained, are also nationalists, but the more, I guess, you know, if I were Ezra Klein,

I would say a liberal types compared to the grant eaters. Yeah. I mean, so I mean, these terms, by the way, these are like not really that I didn't make them up. No one can blame me. This is a Ukrainian Russian term, soresights, which sounds like piglets. Funny joke. It sounds really funny in Russian and Ukrainian. Anyway, but I mean these are people that are funded by the, you know, International Renaissance Foundation, Open Society Foundation, George Soros.

I mean, you know, in the US, Soros is a bit of a, you know, it's a bit of a, what's it, a whistle. What's that phrase in English? Like a whistleblower? No, a whistleblower no whistleblower but it's like this guy's a Nazi he says this term you know dog whistle dog whistle that's right but the thing is you know my family they were deep in Soros money right they met with the guy a bunch of times and this is lots of political people in this part of the world this guy played a huge role in the political life of these countries so anyway I mean and these people are funded by these organizations anyway and also obviously yeah yeah sorry to role in the political life of these countries. So anyway, I mean, and these people are funded

by these organizations anyway, and also obviously... Yeah, sorry to interrupt, but like, yeah, that is, God, I remember this sort of like left liberal reporter I knew made this post around like 2020 where he's like, George Soros is this amazing guy and he's spending the twilight of his life being called all these awful things and it's like, yeah, I mean, okay, yeah, he isn't like the more ridiculous things that like right wingers in America have been saying since like the nineties are obviously crazy and saying that he was like a fucking coppo when he was five years old is like incredibly stupid and awful. But I'm sorry, you don't make like 30 billion fucking dollars

as a currency trader and you're just, I just want what's best for everyone. Like he clearly, he's very interested in global politics. He has an articulated idea for what that should look like. And yeah, it's just, it's not dog whistle to point out that it's a documented fact that he is very involved in the politics of like a lot of these countries. And I mean, like these organizations in Ukraine, I mean, they play a huge role. I mean, as I was saying in 2019, right, Zelensky is elected and all the sordid sites, they

hate Zelensky. They think he's a Russian agent. He's going to turn you. He's going to stop Ukraine joining NATO, joining the EU. This is awful. And they put out this big this document, these red lines. So the president cannot cross these red lines. It's like, who are you?

You know, you're a bunch of unelected NGOs funded by foreign governments. Right. I mean, like, who are you? I mean, it's one thing if these organizations exist, sure, and it's still, I mean, in most countries, I mean, not most countries, actually in most countries there are, but in wealthy countries and powerful countries, you don't have many foreign funded organizations running around. And it's one thing if they exist, but if you're putting red lines on the elected president with 70%

of the vote, it's very strange. And I mean, they play a huge role. And they have a very simple, clear politics. It's this hardcore economic neoliberalism, privatize everything, put us in charge of the supervisory councils of these privatized husks of the state-owned enterprises, and will supervise their destruction while getting huge salaries. This is a common career path of many Tsarists, like Sergei Leshchenko, Stalka Naem and so

on. And then we're going to laugh and make fun of the sort of ordinary Ukrainians who we call to be like pro-Russian, BUDLA, which means a cattle, it's a common term by like post-Soviet liberals to refer to, you know, the majority of the population is this idea that's kind of all well, knight, big brother, they're the stupid cattle who follow the communist, you know, general line and they can't be trusted with democracy, right? Anyway, I mean, we can talk about thesauricides, there's lots that can be said about thesauricides, but they're like the most nationalist sector of Ukrainian society.

And I mean, calling them a sector of society is a little bit of a stretch because I mean it's a very small portion, it's like less than 5%, 2% something, very very small group of people, but who have been pumped, a lot of money has been pumped into them over the decades. And then, but they're the most nationalist. And the thing is, like, they don't fight at the front line. And there was this really, they don't fight in the war at all, really. There was a famous law the cabinet put out late last year, which actually exempted

133 NGOs and their employees from mobilization in the war. And obviously, mobilization is a huge issue in Ukraine. You know, latest news yesterday, another person tried to kill himself at the mobilization office, cutting his wrists with a key because he got mobilized and put in this dungeon and sent to the front, right? I mean this happens every day. I have my friends hiding at home for over a year, two years now, not leaving the home

because they'll get mobilized and thrown to the front and they have to, they have no money that he can't go to the dentist. So he's got this awful tooth problem, he can't go to the dentist, you know, this is because if you go to the doctor, it's very common You can get mobilized there. It's an insane awful situation, right? And but then you have these sororitye thought leaders like this guy Vitaly Portnikov and he recently gave this interview saying how We can't mobilize everyone because that's feudalism in feudalism. You had you know, ah Everyone fighting for but in democracy democracy, some kind of bullshit, which...

Yeah, it was... I remember this because it really stuck out to me. He said, if you want the aristocracy to die while fighting in the war, okay, well then we'll have a feudal system, because that's what happens in feudalism. But in democracy, the common man dies, which is like, what happens in feudalism. But in democracy, the common man dies, which is like, what a fucking incredible thing to say. Yeah, yeah. And then you had this thing that exempted them from nobilization, which is kind of a funny inversion of feudalism, because in feudalism, the nobility had to fight. This was kind of their purpose. But now, one Ukrainian politician called it a new nobility, but it's a paradoxical one where they're exempted from fighting. I mean, it's also funny if you look at this list, because it was published, like this list,

and among the organizations exempted is Deloitte. Their employees don't have to fight. There's like ten different Deloitte, forms of Deloitte that are exempted. I wrote a big article about it, that there's a bunch of very Raytheon employees are exempted from fighting. The Key of School of Economics, which is this hyper neoliberal libertarian like group of

Researchers you call them that These weird bio lab companies AFL-CIO American black and Veatch, which is this weird, you know biolab company Anyway, so they're freaks. They're awful. They don't fight in the war and they always have scandals about them avoiding service but they also want the war to continue forever because, you know, without Ukraine being this NATO frontline state, they're not going to get any funding. Right. That's the whole purpose. That's the reason why they get funding and they don't have to face the risks of fighting. And they also have a, you know, know I mean they are very they play very

important roles in the Ukrainian government not they don't play it for important roles but they occupy important posts in the Ukrainian government like Sergey Leshenko who was the guy who published the original stuff about Manafort back in 2016 which led to the whole Manafort saga he's actually Zelensky's top one of his Len's key stop advisors official advisors which is another reason why Trump obviously isn't very well disposed towards Zelensky. This is this, like, Rudy Giuliani really hates this guy, for instance. He had lots of statements like, Lechenko's the worst guy in the world. Anyway, but then you also have the Azov people.

I mean, I wouldn't say that Azov is one of the most, I mean, it's... There's kind of a lot of factions in Ukrainian politics. It's kind of... it's kind of crazy. It's kind of... it's kind of crazy. I mean, lots of countries, I guess, but Ukraine in particular. It's very exciting. Lots of things going on. The Azov guys are definitely powerful and influential, but often they do... I think they may exaggerate. I mean, like, because they're obviously also working with other influential forces in Ukrainian politics. But the Azov guys, these are the classic, you know, Ukrainian nationalists, neo-Nazi, pagan,

they're all in all kinds of freaky stuff, people fighting in the army. And they've become huge in wartime. They've now just announced that they're moving to a corps. They were previously like a battalion of Guguba brigades, but now they've unified into this huge larger structure and they've been recently given a lot more control of the front lines. And they're considered to be the most effective fighters in the army and they always drum this up and they have huge PR support. much, you know, military, like they had the best weapons, the best training and everyone wants to join them.

I mean, if you want to join the army, then you want to join as of and I know people that ended up joining as of that I used to fucking go out and drink with and get fucked up with. But now they're in as of lots of hipsters go there because you know, if you have money, you go there. But they're freaks, right? I mean, they're, you know, they're into real esoteric pagan Nazi shit no yeah that's it that's interesting you said like hipsters showing it yeah is it like is that like is it sort of like a I don't know like a middle-class adventurism or

like it's sort of like a coming-of-. Like it's, I don't know, that is, this is more of like a war on terror thing, but that was a phenomenon that you would see in America. Middle-class drivers enlisting, and not just enlisting or joining as officers, but like trying to join more elite units, like Rangers. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I sort of talked with, or did like interviews with different right-wing

neo-Nazi sort of people back in Ukraine and and almost all of them they're like coders and so and coders is a very it isn't I don't know I think in the US it's not so much of a thing but in Eastern Europe coders are this really important class and society because they earn way more than everyone else and they work for foreign companies and they earn Just huge amounts more than everyone else, but also they're not actually rich enough to actually move to Western Europe, you know Yeah, because Ukrainian wages so much lower and so on and So they have this complicated they simultaneously kind of hate the rest of society They think they're a bunch of ignorant losers and sort of idiots, right? Stupid working class, what's it, cattle, right? But they also, and they want, and they love the West, they want to go to the West, but they kind of can't go

there, they have kind of a bit of identity issue, but in general, yeah, there's this, as obvious, this striving, they're really sexy, you know, they have they've made an anime now They have like some anime guy. Oh my god Anime now in the 20s that they make these really slick as that are like two-minute anime mini movies and stuff and But they just they do have Aram I met this random guy who who joined us. He wasn't a hipster. He was just a random sort of poor countryside guy, but he left because he got freaked out seeing dead people and so on.

So this before the, before 2020, but it is the striving thing. I mean, like, you know, I'm going to talk with this other Nazi coda guy and he was like, you know, many of us are coders. We're trying to find ourselves, realize ourselves in life. I mean, they came out of also like football hooligan scene, which is also this kind of subculturey, I guess, like middle class revolt type thing, you know, very like also anarchist, symbolism that then gets converted like anti-government. But then, like, you know, anyway, it's it's it's it's interesting. I'm sorry. But the last thing about the Azar guys there's just that they more and more are actually coming out in favor of a ceasefire which is quite interesting

because they are worried that because I mean they're also the ones dying and fighting in the war unlike the you know sort of like that people and but they also you know are in the army and they can see that the Ukrainian army is losing territory and they're very worried the Ukrainian army is just going to collapse essentially. Disorganization and or just in the long term that the Russian army will win. And also they worry about the growth of pro-Russian sentiments. I sort of translate lots of this, they like like analytical stuff that I translate on my sub-stack. They worry that this hardcore forever endless war mobilization poverty is just going to is increasing pro-Russian sentiment in Ukrainian society

and then the whole project will fail. So lots of them are calling for a ceasefire and they're very actively criticizing the Saras people, obviously saying the Saras people are like, you know, LGBT, blah, blah, and but just also that you guys are totally irresponsible and you don't, you're dooming our state. So that's an interesting conflict going on and the Azov people are definitely sort of allied with other forces as well. And we can also talk about different sort of intrigues that, well, they're probably trying to talk with the Trump and different other figures in the Ukrainian political world that are definitely talking with Trump. They're also close, but as of so that that's that's definitely a possibility that if they worry that Zelensky and the Soros people who are kind of more and more closer even the just because they both share a need for forever war

Even though they sort of hate each other in many other ways, but in that sense they agree Then the logical sort of replacement would be some sort of coalition of you know, as of patriotic young officers and then some older figures from the political sphere that have also been in contact with Trump and some newer figures. We can talk about that as well. It's happening right now. It's interesting. But anything else? Before we get into that, I really want to get into the deal and what the future looks like. But the last, one of the two things I wanted to talk about before that were the final, I mean, as you said,

there are a billion factions and sub-factions, but one of the most interesting influential factions that you talked about sort of as, you know, going over the main forces, both during Zelens's rise and now, were the oligarchs that in Western media are identified as pro-Russia. And you make this point that it isn't always, or even usually that someone is pro-Russia in Ukraine. It's that they either, you know, by taking a sober look at things or because of their vested interests,

such as these oligarchs that you're talking about, realize that a war would mean obviously hundreds of thousands of dead. For the oligarchs, it would mean that their interests, especially the ones that have interests in, you know, rare metals or metallurgical concerns, that it would be extremely deleterious, their interests. If you could talk a little bit about that and also, and I'm sorry, this is so broad, but the other thing that I found incredibly interesting was you talked a lot about Ukrainian industries

that were, there were sort of vestiges of either old Soviet design bureaus or state-owned companies, the newer ones, that were sort of like ripped apart and like forbidden from doing business with Russia, who would kind of be like their obvious main customer for, you know, military aviation, which was Ukraine had a lot of potential for a pretty big military aviation industry. I was wondering if, I guess like after all this, what would be left? Like what could they do business with and what is left for that oligarch faction that

you talked about now after all this? Yeah, I mean, so the second question is that Ukraine was in a sense like the most highly industrialized part of the Soviet Union and the most advanced technological, like most psychologically advanced parts of the Soviet, you know, supply chain were in Ukraine and eastern Ukraine, particularly in the city of Dnipropetrovsk, which is where Kolomoisky is from and the area where Zelensky is from as well. And you had factories like, yeah, like Motrasich in that area as well, not in that particular city, which was a very important aviation aeronautics factory over 100 years old played a huge role in like

the first Soviet helicopters and the first helicopters in the world as well in World War One. Anyway, incredibly important factory and Russia actually depended on it in the post-Soviet world for its own helicopters and planes, which was sort of a problem for Russia. Russia tried to sort of diversify away from that in the 2000s because they realized that Ukraine was going down this pro-western path and it would not be possible to depend on them for this. But still, Russia was their main partner for this and then the owner of this factory was quite positive, like pro-Russian, positive for trade integration with Russia. But he also had his limits. He also criticized Russia for basically trade competition with him. So it's always with these Ukrainian businessmen, none of them are really ideologically aligned with Russia. And throughout the 2000s period, they actually, even though they were seen as pro-Russian by the pro-Western opposition,

they actually crushed idealistically pro-Russian people in eastern Ukraine that had their own little organizations and so on. They got put down because these oligarchs they they didn't like competition and other reasons as well But and they also just didn't want to become part of Russia because if they're part of Russia then they have to compete with the Russian Businessmen which are bigger than them so they didn't they'd never really wanted that they just wanted to continue trading with Russia right and but then when 2014 the Euromaidan But then when 2014, the Euromaidan moving towards the EU and cutting off trade with Russia, and there's war in the East and so on, because of this, like, Motrasich, like, their sales fell by 40%. And the factory entered this long period of crisis, and then the Chinese tried to get it,

and then the Trump administration blocked that, Eric Prince tried to get it, it's a big story. But in wartime, this factory has been bombed many times by the Russians because obviously it's a military industrial factory, it's kind of what number one target in a war. But just in general, I mean I have these sort of statistics I can read out quickly about sort of Ukraine, it really deindustrialized very significantly I mean throughout the post-soviet period but in particular after 2014 when you know the Euro-Madin one and the whole aim was to sign this

Free trade agreement with the EU which was a very one-sided one kind of you know It's similar kind of NAFTA type stuff. Although, you know, I mean, sort of from a Mexican perspective, but really much worse, because in fact, the free trade agreement that Ukraine signed with the EU, it didn't really allow any industrial exports by Ukraine to the EU, because they had to comply to these very stringent EU, like, you know, health, you know, all these different requirements. And I mean, for military aviation, there's no chance that the fucking EU, like the DeSau or DeSau... I'm never gonna try to pronounce anything ever again. I should be fucking killed.

But yeah, I mean, any of the big Western European existing defense contractors, that was the big thing that I thought, like they're never going to, like, even what's left of Antonov, they would never let that. No, and like the whole factory just collapsed. Antonov factory actually became like an Azov base, which was pretty crazy.

I had like a garage around there, and I'd always run around there. It was real freaky. Yeah, but it was just kind of collapsing this big Azov sign there and stuff. But I mean what happened was that the like for instance like the GDP, the share of the industrial production just kept on falling. It fell by 4% from was it from 2012-2019 and these you know statistics I mean like for instance like aggregate like automobile production it was a third of its 2012 level in 2019 so it fell by three times same with train wagons and you know metallurgical production they all had these huge falls there were all these you know domestic exports of aerospace production

declined by five times over the five-year period in 2013 2019 six-year period train wagons fell by exports fell by 7.5 times you know so these huge falls in the most industrially advanced sections of the Ukrainian economy there are these big car factories and speak the huge car factory in South Asia just collapsed, doesn't exist anymore really. And instead, Ukraine became this agricultural exporter to the EU, but even then, like they couldn't even export that much of, there were these strict quotas in the EU free trade agreement, which meant that beyond the quotas, the terrorists would come back. in the EU free trade agreement, which meant that beyond the quotas, though, the terrorists would come back.

So it was a very like disadvantageous agreement that the EU signed with Ukraine. The Ukrainian government occasionally tried to renegotiate it and it would just always fail. The EU just told them, no, we don't need to. In wartime, the restrictions got loosened, significantly even removed. But obviously, I mean, it's wartime and Ukraine couldn't really produce much at all anyway. And then even then the EU farmers, they had all the big protests against it and it's in the process. Lots of the restrictions were like came back and so on. But like the Zelensky government at the beginning tried to actually introduce some protectionist measures to save industry. But this

was actually vetoed by the Sara site different NGOs also the EU and the US Chamber of Commerce they vetoed it and because I mean Ukraine state purchases 40% of them are from foreign companies which is a huge huge amount compared to like the US the EU where it's two to five percent but then you had these neoliberal NGOs that just blocked it so I guess that's the situation I mean yeah in the future in the future, there's very little to no hope for the industrial complex. And it's one of the ironic things where it's like, you know, Ukraine was positioned as this anti-Russian military sort of spearhead that was going to fight against Russia and

ended up fighting against Russia. But its military industrial base was eroded over this period by the same Western forces that were preparing it for this role. In wartime, they haven't been able to set up, for instance, a shell factory. Lots of the Azov telegrams complain about this a lot, like, why don't we have a single shell factory in Ukraine? They can make drones, but these are small, quite technologically basic items in small little garages and small different other locations around the country.

And they are making quite a few of them, but still, you know, much less than the Russians are making with their drones. And then I think your first question was about the oligarchs, I mean, the oligarchs, right? Like their position. Yeah, the oligarchs that like, you know, they would be labeled as pro-Russia in Western media, but really they were just, they wanted to prevent a war at all costs and wanted the implementation of minks. However politically fractious that environment would be, it would be much better than this. Yeah, I mean like they have all lost billions of dollars according to like, you know, Washington Post. Like Akhmetov, the richest guy in Ukraine, he just lost billions of dollars.

His own fortune was on like 6 million, 6 billion now, it's like 2 or 3 billion. His factories were the key sort of points of the war, like Azovstal in Mari. It was that was his factory one of his biggest assets But anyway, I mean, so they've lost a lot but it is also I mean they did also They were in pretty deep with the Atlanticists as well. I mean Akhmetov and Pinchuk this other big oligarch who also called Pinchuk also called for some kind of Minsk implementation in 2016 For which he was criticized heavily by the NGO people, liberal nationalists. But I mean, they're some of the biggest funders of the Atlantic Council, which is this very

important like ultra-Atlanticist Washington headquartered think tank, which is, you know, we can talk about Atlantic Council as well. It's a pretty interesting topic with its sponsors and so on, but they're like incredibly hawkish and so on about confronting Russia and blah blah. So I mean these guys, Akhmetev and Pinchuk, they were the richest guys in the country, they sort of tried to play both sides and it did seem like possible that maybe the U.S. would force Ukraine to implement Minsk in the pre-2022 period. This was actually even in 2022 in January.

And in late 2021, there was this huge paranoia in Ukraine by the Ukrainian government, by the liberal nationalists that Biden would force Ukraine to implement the Minsk agreements in order to focus on China and like you know come to agree with Russia I mean I hope that would be the case as well but it became clear that was not gonna happen but um so those oligarchs it's their power has been very much eroded in wartime anyway but they still have plenty of plenty of power for sure yeah it's a length is a Lenski group has emerged as this new sort of power vertical. Although I think as well, like the days are fairly numbered.

It's hard to see them. It's having much longer. But Kolomoisky is in jail, but he's still scheming very much. He came out with an announcement like now that Trump's back. He has lots of hopes that he's going to be able to sort of return. announcement, like now that Trump's back, he has lots of hopes that he's going to be able to sort of return. And the thing is that this is also a really important factor in Zelensky being really worried about a ceasefire because, you know, this is, I mean, it's kind of getting into

the current talks and so on. But I mean, what Russia wants and what Trump is also saying that he wants is for there to be elections in Ukraine. Obviously, it sees like an end to military hostilities and some kind of even, you know, long-term peace in Ukraine and elections to replace Zelensky. And the reason that Zelensky really fears this other than, you know, obviously it's nice to be in power, but I mean, as I was saying before, his whole, like in 2021, his popularity fell, but then he relied on the West to be as this sort of anti-Russian warrior and so on, and he was able to continue being president, even though his popularity became very low,

but then in the wartime it became higher at the beginning, but then they're also I mean his legitimacy by the Constitution ended in May of 2024 that was what that was when his second term ended and in the Ukrainian Constitution We can't have more than two terms, but more importantly. He's pissed off Kolomoisky so much I mean like Kolomoisky is a really serious guy I mean like let me let me just read this, this great kind of quote that I found from this other Ukrainian politician who lived in the same city as Kolomoisky. He has this great thing about Kolomoisky.

He says, I don't know how this will end. Kolomoisky has a saying he likes to repeat. Life is like a supermarket. You walk through, pick the most beautiful things, things try them load up your cart and enjoy them But the end of the road is a checkout counter and you have to pay for everything you took That's the color moist key line But then this this guy that new color moist key says I know the color moist He has a personal cemetery in Dnipropetrovsk his home city

Full of people whose businesses were seized by him and who were killed if you gather them all you have an entire graveyard Businesses were seized by him and who were killed if you gathered them all you have an entire graveyard So I mean like he tried to assassinate like the head of the Ukrainian National Bank in 2018 That was a big thing. Oh my god a lot of people this guy This guy has a shock tank. I just want to make this clear This guy will had a shock tank like in his office color Moiskey had this tank with shots I saw how is swimming around it? This is in the New York Post article about him. So this is a really serious guy. He's a very funny guy. He's quite Trumpian in a much more sort of crazy, chaotic, evil way.

He had this great joke, for instance, that it's unconstitutional in Ukraine to have more than one citizenship and he has two. Everyone knows that he has Ukrainian and Israeli. But then he was asked about this by a journalist, and he had this great laugh, and he says, well, look, actually, I have three citizenships. I have Cypriot, Israeli, and Ukrainian, and there's no law against having three citizenships in the Ukrainian constitution. That is a very Trump line.

Exactly. I mean, he's got so many zingers. He's an endless source of entertainment. But he's a very, very, very serious guy. And Zelensky has taken all those businesses, put them in jail, right? It's crazy. And so, and Zelensky in general has really kind of a bit of a, so much extortion in wartime. I mean, this is a a so many businesses are really complaining about how just constant either you pay the rent or you get accused of being supporting

Russia of being a Russian agent. And so I've financing terrorism. Kolomoisky's business partner Bogolyubov, who escaped to the EU, he stated in an interview that the government in Ukraine demanded he pay a hundred million dollars or he go to jail that he managed to escape. So I mean like Zelensky has so many enemies, more enemies than it's possibly imaginable. Already in 2021 all the oligarchs were against him and now they just they just hate him. So he is very worried about his personal safety and this is a big and if if there was democracy you know, he would be in serious, serious danger. So, I guess, I guess, hopefully that answers your question.

I'm going to make my dude in. Yeah. I want to get into the Atlantic Council and just sort of like... Yeah. ...the Western forces as they relate to all these factions. I think that's so interesting to me about this is, you know, initially I made this authentic remark that a lot of Western interplay with Ukrainian factions and industry is sort of, it seems almost like they formalized and codified a lot of, you know, what similar groups did in Russia in the 90s.

But really, like, you know, not to say what happened there was necessarily lesser or okay, but at least when the same Western forces were doing this in the 90s in Russia, they were looting all these companies and looting all these former state concerns, but with the implicit understanding that they would own like a part of an aluminum company or a weapons manufacturer or something. Basically that these things would exist. In Ukraine, it's just anything that could possibly compete with any of these sort of state champion EU companies is just purposely let to rot or taken apart. And anything

that survives is, you know, to be carved up and given to, you know, an Eric Prince type possibly. Yeah, I mean, I guess it's like kind of worse and like more cynical than Russia in the 90s actually. Yeah, I mean, Russia also, you know, deindustrialized massively in that time, but I think that I do agree with you in that what happened in Ukraine is they've been able to sort of get in charge of the state a lot more than in Russia. And this has been a really long-term process, I mean, for decades with the US, Canada, and the EU sponsoring all these different, all these NGOs, a very long project with them marching to the institutions, in cultural cultural institutions but then also in the court system.

This has been ongoing for decades getting all these different court observers, pollsters which then played a huge role in all these different kind of revolutions, quote unquote. But also all these different supervisory councils, ethics committees like for instance of the courts, of the judges. There's this big thing in the past couple years under Zelensky that was put through under huge opposition from Ukraine's court system that put these supervisory council, which has to be minimum half foreigners. And right now there's like a Lithuanian and a Texan guy and some other, I think a Brussels

person or something, who has the deciding vote in choosing Ukrainian judges for the future. And this is huge because I mean often, and these guys, the old Ukrainian court system, which still exists, like these court figures, they'll often kind of do things like declare that the privatization of agricultural land is unconstitutional. That was a big scandal. And the anti, like the Western, pro-western people really angry about that Or they'll declare that like these anti-corruption

Organizations that were set up by the US in Ukraine in 2014 15, but they're unconstitutional Which is true because they have all these these These rights which are not there's no there's no place in the constitution for these weird organizations, anti-corruption institutions that can gather info on any politician and that can send them to jail and can investigate them and so on and so on. They're outside of the purview of the Supreme Court and so on. So anyway, so that's a big thing really where they've been able to really put the state machinery under their control, get their people in really high places and not just people that are like sympathetic to, you know, liberalization or whatever, but people that just straight up were educated in the US

and that will work their whole lives in US-funded NGOs, like that didn't really happen as much in Russia. You had pro-liberalization people like, you know, Gaidar and so on. But these were people from kind of the Soviet, I guess, from the Soviet era, and lots of them ended up cooperating with Putin anyway. Some of them were even still in the Russian government, some of them left at 2022. But then in Ukraine, you have this new class that was created of, you you know so-called sororites and so on that are really and just foreigners that have these important posts in these different yeah in these different countries so I do think it is different for sure and maybe we could talk about Atlantic Council a bit yeah yeah I definitely want to get into that um yeah

could you talk a little bit or however much about how I guess their Ukraine business you would call it got rolling? And I am kind of interested in the future of it. Yeah, I mean like, I guess that there was two, it's like, I guess three interesting sort of little things. The thing I guess to make clear is that this would happen was known a long time ago, right? That there would be this big war and so on. I mean there was this famous declassified, one of the declassified WikiLeaks released

of this 2008 letter from William Burns, who is the US ambassador to Russia at the time, and he stated that, you know, if Ukraine joins NATO, Russia will view this expansion as a military threat. All sections of the Russian establishment agree on this, and there could be war, Russia would have to intervene and so on. And he advised against any sort of moves towards Ukraine joining NATO, which was precisely beginning at that time, 2008. But by, you know, there's the conference and so on in Munich, as they were called.

And, but then you also had like this, another thing that's often brought up, which is quite interesting reading, is this 2019 Rand report called Extending Russia, competing from advantageous ground. And there's this whole chapter there about the main geopolitical measure that they see is providing lethal aid to Ukraine. And I mean, they say some pretty interesting things there. One of the big things they talk about is how it's difficult to separate Europe from Russia and they say that reducing European peacetime

consumption of Russian gas has a median for low likelihood of success. And I think the key word here is peacetime, right? Because in wartime that has been possible, although I mean Europe still consumes quite a lot of Russian gas, but still they got the Europeans to put through sanctions on, to stop using Nord Stream 2 and then also it got destroyed, obviously. And this was also one of the sort of key tensions in 2021 where Nord Stream was finished around that time. And then there was this big thing of how will the US respond?

Are they going to let it exist? It seemed like they just let it exist. But this has been a really long term American key policy goal of, you know, this whole idea of the Eurasian landmass. We can't let Russia and Europe link up. If that happens, then there's no more need. Europe won't need the US anymore. What role will the US have in the world? And you know, and you had in the 80s, you had

you know, Reagan fighting against European Russian gas expansion, right? You also had a strange explosion as well of Russian gas infrastructure that some link to the US government back in the 80s. So, I mean, and this Rand document actually brings this up. They say that the Reagan attempt to stop it. So, like, this policy would require both planning to make sure that it's efficient as possible and cost sharing to make sure that all countries would benefit and would also have an incentive to participate because the problem was that the most important flaw is that new non-Russian gas supplies for Europe would be more expensive than continuing to purchase Russian pipeline gas. But in wartime, the Europeans have been a major, you know, we often, you know, it's often discussion

of like, to what extent has the war in Ukraine been beneficial for the US government, the US sort of state interests. And in this respect, it was successful, right? I mean, it got them to switch to the American gas. It got them to cut off so many ties with Russia and depend on the US so much more. And maybe I think there's this extent to which the American government was just worried that if we let this continue any further, then it's over. Then they'll just be really reintegrating with Russia, just as the Ukrainian business elite wanted to do that.

But they also say in this report that increasing military aid would certainly drive up the Russian cost but doing so could also increase the loss of Ukrainian lives and territory or result in a disadvantage the disadvantageous peace settlement. This would generally be seen as a serious setback for US policy. So I mean it was it was fairly obvious the cost as well and they compared it to Afghanistan how that was great this would be great as well but anyway I mean so that was foreseen quite in many ways and also you look Ukrainian media they were predicting it as well back in 2019 Zelensky's top advisor Aristovich he stated that there would definitely be a war with Russia in 2020 to 2022 unless Ukraine gave up NATO admission so So I mean, this was, it was clear.

Then you have Atlantic Council. We get to Atlantic Council, which is this very influential think tank centered in Washington. Atlantic Council, it was set up in 61 as this obviously, you know, pro-NATO think tank. But in terms of the funders, they publish their funders every year. Their biggest government funder is actually the UK, not the US, which is interesting.

And I think that does point to this whole sort of Atlanticist special, what's it, you know, special agreement, special relationship where the UK is particularly interested in keeping the US involved in European affairs, if I can put it that way, and the UK wants to sort of reclaim this lost kind of imperial power that it had, this whole Russian kind of obsession, and trying to keep the US involved. But some other funders, according to the website, is Ukrainian businessman Renat Akhmetov, Victor Pinchuk, Raytheon, Amazon, FedEx, Lockheed Martin, Open Society Foundation of Albania, also the Open Society Foundation in general, Walmart, Lithuania, Estonia, Australian foreign intelligence, Elbit Systems, Israeli military industrial,

famous Israeli, yeah, Palo Alto Networks, which is this weird sort of tech military industrial thing, Penguin Random House, Omidyar Network, AGC Global Jewish Advocacy, US State Department, Palantir, Google Airbus, Rockefeller Foundation, the UAE, UK Foreign Service, Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil, Department of Defense, American Apple, Tellurian, which is a US LNG company, Natural Gas, which is obviously competing with Russian LNG, Thales, which is this other military industrial company, NATO. My favorite one though is the Romania donated, but it was under a thousand dollars. What's even the point?

Did they buy a coffee in the lobby? Yeah, there's this section because they divide the funding by how much they donated and you know, above a million dollars, below, you know, you know, below 100,000 and then there's the section below a thousand dollars and all of the people here is individuals, right? Like Alex Jones, you know, and then there's Romania, government of Romania, which is the only sort of non-individual in this huge list of anyone. That's so funny. I first sort of, not caught wind of them, but sort of, I don't know, started paying

more attention to them during the Syrian civil war, especially around like 2014, because they were, do you remember this guy, Mike Morell, former CIA director, who was a big, like, Hillary 2016 figure, he's like, you know, a think tank fixture. And he would be on, like, shows like Charlie Rose, pre-cancellation. And he's, obviously, he's done some TV about Ukraine, though Syria is more of his area of interest. But I remember seeing this interview with him in 2014 where he said, we need to directly be killing as many Russians as possible in Syria. And I thought, what a

fucking maniac. And the more I kept digging, the more I kept seeing like, you know, him showing up in Atlantic Council things and lo and behold, like everyone where I would see them saying something just fucking psychotic about Syria. Like a white guy who was born in fucking New Hampshire, who is like, he was raised Catholic and he's agnostic now. And he's saying the most like, vile, like, insane ethno-religious invective against Shia Muslims I've ever heard. Yeah.

They're all, like, Atlantic Council people, like, a really f-cking incredible body of work. They're crazy, I mean, they're crazy. I mean, they have also, they've set up a new China Institute Institute. So they're branching out in that in that respect I mean, they're very influential. I mean, this is interesting sort of I mean one that before the influential bit I also wanted to say that they're huge on disinfo like anti disinfo shit, right? And this is actually on their website They say that our largest government donor is the United Kingdom which supports our work studying and exposing disinformation among other issues So they see it as one of their key goals.

And I mean, this is this whole, you know, 2016 Trump sort of obsession, right? This is a whole nother track that's also very interesting to talk about with all these anti-disinfo organizations that were set up often in Ukraine, and then they spread out to the US and then as I said like these anti-corruption organizations set up in the Ukraine by the US, they were the ones that publicized the Manafort stuff which ended up also being kind of not actually provable in Ukrainian courts. Anyway so that's a whole one of their big tracks. But I mean, they're also really influential. I mean, for instance, James L. Jones was the chairman of the council and he stepped down in 2009 to serve as President Obama's national security adviser. And then, you know, Susan Rice was ambassador to the UN.

She also was a member of the Atlantic Council. Richard Holbrooke, a special representative of Afghanistan, Pakistan, also. Holbrooke is an all star. Yeah. You know, he is he is deep state first team all star. Yeah. And General Eric Shinseki, Anne Marie Slaughter, director of policy planning and State Department at the State Department. Hegel ended up serving as secretary of defense. General Brent Scowcroft served as chairman of the, you know,

and then he ended up being ambassador to China. Wait, Brent Scowcroft? Brett Scowcroft, yeah, so he served as interim chairman of the organization's board of directories until 2014, until former ambassador to China and governor of Utah, John Huntsman was appointed to the position. Sorry. I've always liked Scowcroft as a Bush one figure. So it caught my ear. Yeah, and I mean, there's a huge... And they have lots of also interesting scandals in terms of lobbying. I mean, they produce the report promoting the transatlantic trade investment partnership

between the EU and the US with the financial backing of FedEx that was simultaneously lobbying Congress to decrease tariffs between the US and the EU. They also had this big scandal above Chevron and ExxonMobil, who were both sponsors of Atlantic Council, in terms of undermining the Brazilian legislative proposals to give Petrobras, you know, pre-salt deposits in the Brazilian coast. And also with the Arab world, they're sponsored by this guy, maybe you know this guy, the better Baja Hariri, who's the brother of the beloved Hariri family. Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, no of the of the beloved Hariri family

Yeah, exactly. Yeah and brother brother brother with the world's most kidnapped prime minister Exactly. And I mean there was I mean also a barisma funds land council. This is one of the official They donated a hundred thousand every year for three years of 2016 onwards, but there was this there was this big thing when years, from 2016 onwards. But there was this big thing when, like, basically, Hariri got them to get rid of someone that was too, like, not militaristic enough about the Middle East. Anyways, they're a real piece of work. They're incredibly, obviously, always going for no ceasefire, war forever. They were incredibly pessimistic about Zelensky as well. When Zelensky was running in the elections, they had all these things like, oh my God, Zelensky is a Russian agent and the world.

And in his first, the first period of his time, they were very worried. Like, is he going to reach out to Russia? He's going to start, you know, peace in Ukraine. This can never happen. But then they became more optimistic about him. And now obviously they are quite happy for him to stay in there, but they're very much allied with the sort of the Soros sight wing, Ukrainian politics, lots of these big figures write for them quite often, like Sergei Leyshchenko, other people, NGO circuit.

So yeah, political council. What a piece of work. So you've written extensively about how Zelensky, in sort of his efforts to salvage his presidency and forces that ended up being aligned with Zelensky, they made this calculation that it would be better to align themselves with the Democratic Party at first, now that that is coming back to bite them in a huge way. It's always very interesting to me when people make those calculations

of who they think is inevitable in American politics, or if it's just a gamble. But now, obviously, this was an incredibly poor choice to make. It augurs incredibly poorly for his political future and possibly Ukraine at large. I was wondering if you could give a outline about what may be on the horizon for a settlement administered by Trump who is sort of on deck next

because that would probably be the end of Zelensky and what do things look like after whatever horrible deal we impose on them? Yeah, I mean, well, you know, it's kind of funny because I mean, I find it a little bit depressing about how Trump right now, this is probably the only kind of cool thing he's doing, I'll be honest, right, in terms of trying to end the war in Ukraine in this just really stupid war, right? I mean, Biden from the beginning, he was clear that Ukraine's not going to join NATO. He would say that, oh, Ukraine has to have the door open open but they can't really join right

now because they have some serious corruption issues which was in Ukraine people you pro-western people would point out like you know what about fucking Albania right which is yeah been in in NATO since 2009 this is you know it's not it's not a fucking real country I mean let's be real and it's it's way more unhinged than Ukraine Ukraine's unhinged as well But it was obvious that they just didn't want Ukraine in NATO and they were happy to refuse Russia's demands for a written Refusal or a written closed-doors policy for Ukraine They didn't want to admit to that that would be seen as weakness and so on and they wanted Russia to sort of

Get involved in some kind of what they saw as a weakening exercise for Russia. But they weren't going to let Ukraine join NATO anyways. It was just very obvious leaving Ukraine out to dry and suffer all the consequences, which didn't achieve the goals of destroying the Russian army and so on. And now Trump seems that he wants to end this war, maybe his own ambitions, Nobel and whatever, maybe he wants to pivot to China, who knows. But I just find it just really depressing, right, how in the US,

among the sort of liberal media and lots of, you know, left-wing media, this is framed as, of you know left-wing media this is framed as oh my god Trump this is awful Bernie Sanders we need we need to protest this right this is yeah this is good right like I mean you can you can hate Trump and Trump is obviously this you know all these Elon Trump all these things you know what they want for America of the American society is unenviable and but in terms of Ukraine this is not a bad thing right if elections come to Ukraine if there's an end to the war in Ukraine if my if people in Ukraine can go outside like men I will be able to go outside right

it's a situation where people get shot at the border for trying to escape Ukraine right it's it's crazy yeah it's crazy and if if people if you, there are people in Ukraine that want to fight Russia, right? They want to. But I will note that like when there was the mobilization law in 2024, six million people did not enter their details. Only four million people did, right? To join the army by the deadline. And of those four million, many had medical conditions that would allow them not to serve, although then those medical conditions were, made them viable to serve and now you can have tuberculosis

and HIV and still serve in the army. It's a bit of a big issue. But what I mean is most Ukrainian men do not want to serve in the army. They demonstrated this by not putting the details up to serve, right? But in a just situation, they would be able to leave and the people that wanted to serve in the army, they could stay and they could fight as much as they wanted to, right? But that's not how it is, people get shot and killed on the border for trying to escape or they die in the river, drowning in the river, they die hiking over the mountains, this is a huge genre of, like, YouTube videos.

People explain how to, you know, hike through the Carpathian Mountains to get to Romania while you're being, you know, watched by drones and possibly shot by border guards, by Ukrainian border guards, not by Romanian, by Ukrainian ones, to prevent them from leaving. Anyway, so, I mean, I find it kind of crazy how this is framed as, you know, a bad... Well, I mean, yeah, yeah. I mean, like, with Bernie specifically, it is fucking incredible, after everything I saw him do for the first, like, 15 or 16 months of the Israeli genocide, to, you know, take umbrage with this.

Yeah. But I do think the worry with a lot of people both on the left liberal side and the more explicitly left-wing side is you know a to say the least Trump's foreign policy is Kind of all over the place, right one moment It looks like you know, we'll use Israel for an example. One moment it looks like they are taking this sort of like Bush, what like George H.W. Bush or Reagan

approach where, okay, we're going to treat Israel like any other American ally. And even if that drives them fucking crazy, we're not going to let them dictate these terms, etc. etc. And then whoever is in the admin who has that point of view, Miriam will make a call and they're fucking out of there and then they're doing X, Y, and Z fucking insane thing either on a domestic front as late as Israel or just something with weapon sales or escalating with Ansar al-Azhar. So who knows? I mean, as you pointed out,

things with Russia and Ukraine got shittier under Trump one. And he's, for while doing this, he bragged about being the first guy to give them lethal weapons. And the other thing is too, I mean, people have pointed out that his mineral extraction thing makes no fucking sense as far as the realities of mineral extraction go. But it is, you know, you do generally worry like what other awful thing could be done to them? For sure.

I mean, like, look, from my, in my perspective, I think as long as the borders open and mobilization, this was actually one, you know, Putin's essentially demand now is that he's fine with a ceasefire as long as mobilization ends in Ukraine at that time. And the general Trump Putin thing is they want there to be elections in Ukraine, democratization and so on, and this would put in peril the nationalist, militarist forces, because people are very tired of this, according to every Paul in Ukraine, is that people are very, very tired of the war and of mobilization and they would like an end to that. And so I mean, that's the... And I think that's fine.

You know, I mean, personally, I think if people can lead Ukraine, that's good because I mean, it's awful. And I know people in my family who are very, who are politically well connected that left the country illegally in wartime because of their good political connections. I mean, I'm not me. I'm not a Ukrainian citizen, but in fact, it was actually I left after they'd left. I left Ukraine after the members of my family that were legally meant to stay in Ukraine when the war began, they left early on and I found it quite difficult to leave.

So I mean what's being discussed now is that there was this Zelensky ten days after his big argument with Trump, right? They had the new talks in Saudi Arabia, which Zelensky didn't actually participate in. So it's kind of he went to Saudi Arabia, but he didn't participate in the talks. So I guess he was. He was like Christopher when they went to Italy. That's right. He did too much heroin in the hotel.

That's right. Yeah. In a little cast in his neck or something. Yeah. There's some crazy skyscrapers in Saudi Arabia. Maybe he was sitting in them in Riy neck or something. Yeah. There's some crazy skyscrapers in Saudi Arabia. Maybe he was sitting in them in Riyadh or something instead of contemplating. But yeah, they were long negotiations, eight hours. I translated the thing by one of the diplomats that said that apparently they got really tired during the negotiations and they may have made some big compromises during these negotiations because they got really tired. I guess it happens But yeah, that's on that's genius

I mean I would do I would sell out my country or whoever if you got me tired enough after seven hours Come on guys. We better wrap. Yeah Jesus like I'll do anything. Just let me get out of this fucking thing I want to go outside but uh But I mean mean really I mean I'm not sure what he means by that because really what what happened is that the the end of these negotiations was that the Ukrainian delegation agreed to the idea of a ceasefire right I mean they were open to the idea of a ceasefire but I mean which is a big contrast their previous rhetoric which is that no

ceasefire is possible blah blah but it didn't actually there was no they they weren't they didn't agree to a ceasefire they agreed to the idea of no ceasefire is possible, blah blah blah, but it didn't actually, there was no, they went, they didn't agree to a ceasefire, they agreed to the idea of a ceasefire, and if Russia agrees, then sure, a 30-day ceasefire. And the hope that was voiced by many Ukrainian diplomats and government officials, and everyone in Ukraine essentially, there was a nationalist, you know, freak, was that Russia will decline, they'll say no, we don't want a 30 day ceasefire. We want Ukraine out of, you know, no Ukraine in NATO ever, which is the Russian diplomatic line, which is we don't want a temporary ceasefire. We want a full, full peace agreement that changes the European security landscape and NATO leads Ukraine forever, no more spy bases in Ukraine, which you

know New York Times writes about these that you know CIA's fire base with the head on the border with Russia in Ukraine. Anyway, so they were hoping that Russia would tell Trump fuck you, we're not signing that and then Trump will go ballistic and he'll give Ukraine nukes, right? This is the idea. Yeah. That they're gonna get Trump back on Team Ukraine by giving... getting him to agree to some kind of agreement that Russia would never agree to and then telling him, well, look, Trump, Russia's crazy, you got to support us. But that didn't happen, I mean, Russia replied that, like, yeah, look, we're not...

this is not enough for us but we're open discussing this, but we need to have something more. And there are... This has been the past couple days. And so, it's a little bit of a... You know, I mean, the Marco Rubio and every single Western government official, before they talked with Russia, after these Saudi Arabia talks, they all said like in unison, the ball is now in Russia's park, Russia's court. That's right, lots of balls flooding the Kremlin, but then they threw it back with a curve ball. I guess you can say that, which is the saying that we're fine with this, but we need to have something else. And obviously, the two that have been mentioned so far is no mobilization in Ukraine and something else. But it seems likely that Russia is asking Trump to push on Ukraine more to give these different concessions around NATO, around elections, because Russia is very tired of Zelensky.

They want someone else that they see as being more likely to agree. I think that Zelensky has basically gone a little bit crazy. He's been, he's an actor, he's been told for, you know, how many years now that he's like, you know, literally Napoleon, literally, you know, the Jedi's Luke Skywalker and so on. And he's kind of drunk to Kool-Aid a little bit and he's lost touch with reality. Plus his whole... A true actor. That was always the danger. Is like, yeah, no, I legitimately, I've always felt like there was an earnestness to him, which is not always a good thing.

Yeah, and I mean, the guy, there's lots you can say about Zelensky, very interesting figure, I think, world historically, very postmodern. And the guy had a TV show where he was the main character, where he became the prime, the president of Ukraine. This was 2018, 2017 and so on, which was being produced by Kolomoisky and so on. And that he's this amazing teacher that becomes the president of Ukraine who stocks corruption and so on and so on. And then he became the president and this TV show is really popular and then he became the president after you know it's it's it's incredible when you think about it really it's incredible in the post-soviet world we have this term of like political technology there's this incredible

political technology that that that took place with Zelensky but um so this is the situation at the moment right now there's I mean there's the opposition in you know Trump is in contact with the Ukrainian different political factions this is political has been writing about it and other different Western media has been writing about it in particular with like the pro-west the ex-president Poroshenko who has a quite a large party not that popular he's not that popular at all really according to the Paul's you know the ex-head of the army, Zoluzhny, he's the most popular

according to most Pauls. Zelensky got rid of him at the start of last year because he was getting too popular essentially and also they could blame the sort of the failure of the counter offensive on Zoluzhny and so on. But then apart from those figures, I mean Zaluzhny is also in contact with different, you know, Azov people. They boast of his, their good friendship with him. One of the top Azov guys, Kratyavich, he talked about how he gave Zaluzhny like a rare British

colonial knife. They're really into knives, these guys, like cool knives and knife. Like a Sykes-Picot fighting knife? Some shit like that, yeah. Sykes Picot fighting knife some shit like that yeah Sykes Picot i'm a fucking idiot a Sykes Fairbont knife Sykes the same guy that did the same guy that did that's right yeah Sykes Picot agreement that he was the knife that's right oh my god i have to clarify i have to i need to do pick up at the start of this episode. On any existing subreddits, no one mentioned the Sykes-Picot fighting knife. Maybe it was the knife.

The now the dumbest thing I've ever said. It's the Fairburn Sykes fighting knife I'm thinking of. Maybe it was the knife that Sykes-Picot used to carve up the Middle East, to carve up and give it out, and they carved the map and that's how the knife came out. Thank you. That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense.

But yeah, anyway, so like he meets with Zillowjian, he gave him a knife recently. Zillowjian is the ambassador to the UK now. But I mean, there's also talk that actually Trump is not much of a fan of Zillowjian. Zillowjian recently came out with some anti-US statement how like Trump is abandoning Europe. I don't know, I think everyone's saying that right now. I'm not sure how much Trump would worry about that. But more interestingly, I think is there's this faction of, on the one hand, Budanov, who's the head of the intelligence services in Ukraine, you know, the GUR, which is the directory of intelligence and so on.

He's actually in charge of the Azov Nazi freaks in Ukraine. Budanov is really the main kind of patron of these forces since 2022. And he's been saying stuff that we need to have a ceasefire, otherwise the country will collapse. He said this, he reportedly said this a couple months ago and then he denied it but like not really denied it and anyway basically he said this, that unless we have a ceasefire the Ukrainian state will cease to exist by the end of this year. And that's a line that as I said lots of these Azov guys have been saying as well that like the country is

Heading towards self-destruction unless we have a ceasefire We can use this to sort of amp up the army get things get things in order You know put our guys in charge get rid of this Zelensky idiot and so on and then you have him and then you also Have this interesting guy David Arrhamian. He's a very, very interesting, very strange figure. Who is... he's the head of Zelensky's party in parliament. He's also got this crazy biography. He's actually from Russia. He's like... not like ethnically Russian.

Seems like some kind of Caucasian in terms of like the Georgia area. Anyway, he had a whole, he worked in the US in the 2000s and all these weird tech startup companies which were investigated by the FBI for massive fraud but then they called off the investigation and then there's all these kind of talk of CIA involvement, he's working with Microsoft, all these weird tech startup companies that failed but then emerged from the ashes and so on. And then he went back to Ukraine in 2013, right as the Maidan was taking place. And then he was kind of invisible, but then all of a sudden in 2019 he became like, wrote

mediaeorically Rose de Paolo with Zelensky. No one had really heard of him before. But he's in charge of Zelensky's parliamentary faction in Parliament Which is really important because Zelensky's having lots of trouble with Parliament Parliament's not really passing his laws Or they are there with like a very very only just scraping through the Ukrainian Parliament kind of works with you know You pay off people, you know $100,000 to vote for this or not to vote for this and so on. But at what time the money's not really there and then also these laws are also unpopular

and all these parliamentarians they're thinking about the political future in any elections, like if I vote for this law, you know, giving the mobilization police the right to shoot people, right? Like no one will forget this, everyone will hate me. So they're not voting for stuff. Arahami is kind of in charge of disciplining them, but he's becoming more and more kind of alienated from Zelensky and more importantly from like Zelensky's right-hand man, Yermak, who's kind of like the great cardinal in Ukraine, which in Yermak has like lots of hate for him as this weird like Russian spy, but he's also become so isolated in wartime as like Zelensky's number one man, maybe more powerful than Zelensky, he's kind of micromanaging

the government and so on. And the Soroside people hate this Yermak guy, but basically Yermak and Arkhamiyah are fighting. Arkhamiyah went to Trump's inauguration and he's talking with Trump about some kind of sea spire essentially. And he's allied with Budanov this guy the Secret Service spook guy who's in charge of all the as of right-wing guys Different other weird Nazi groups. So that seems like a fairly that that's kind of what I'm No betting on but that that seems quite legitimate

I think Trump has serious problems with Poroshenko that seems quite legitimate. I think Trump has serious problems with Poroshenko. Poroshenko was the president when Manafort stuff came out and Poroshenko was kind of involved in this Manafort stuff coming out in 2016. Not coming out, kind of being produced essentially as an anti-Trump operation. Poroshenko is a real kind of Democrat party guy. But I think Arahama, this guy is a young,, tech startup freak sort of guy. Sounds very Trumpian. Sounds very Trumpian. And weird sort of spook CIA stuff. So that and weird crazy fraud, like, you know, pyramid.

Yeah, he's like basically a teal guy. Exactly. Exactly. It sounds great. So basically, I mean, this Arahame guy, he has a very important role in the parliament. As I was saying, the parliament is not passing Zelensky's laws, and Ara Khamenei is in contact with Trump over a ceasefire. Budanov is in charge of the neo-Nazi Azov people, and they're all kind of in favor of a ceasefire in which they would sort of purge society of any anti-militarist forces, get their, you know, kill some more sort of fifth columnists

as they call them, and probably try and centralize their power in government. And then you also have the fact that according to the Ukrainian sort of legislation, Zelensky's constitutional two-term limit has run out, and he would have to transfer power unless there if there are no elections He would have to transfer power to the head of Parliament or some kind of parliamentary National unity government which is something that the Poroshenko kind of ex-president liberal nationalist guy has been talking about a lot Because Poroshenko, I mean Poroshenko is not that popular But as part of some kind of national unity government, that would kind of make sense. He would be able to get back sort of close to power in that sense.

And then there's the head of the army, Zoluzhny, who's apparently the most popular guy in Ukraine, according to polls, but I don't know how much you can trust these polls. I think lots of it is just people really tired of Zelensky. If you look at Ukrainian social media, there's loads of hatred towards Zelensky. People are just really, really tired of the current situation where you can't leave and mobilization kind of press gangs are prowling the streets and shoving you into buses and you know, beating you up, beating you to death and all this sort of thing. Tired of the war, they don't want to fight and so on.

So it's a complicated consolation. But unless, I mean there were these talks in Ukrainian media that Zelensky was proposing to Trump that Zelensky becomes sort of what they said was like a Cold War style African or Latin American dictator where the US keeps him in power forever in exchange for which he's like this Cold War frontier state and also he gives the US, you know, natural resource benefits. But that seems like it's not really flown through with Trump and Trump seems to want to exit Ukraine. I think he has

very bad associations with Ukraine through Russiagate and all this stuff and they're really into that like the American you know Republicans and so on which is kind of obvious why because you know you got him impeached right in 2019 and that was also because of this phone call with Zelensky was Zelensky promised that he would look in he would sort of prosecute the People responsible for the Manafort shit, right and Zelensky said in this phone call like yeah The general prosecutor is totally under me He's totally under my control a hundred percent under my control and we're gonna look into it

But they didn't look into it and then these Manafort era Spook people it's guy trip yak that I wrote about they actually got look into it and then these Manafort-era spook people, it's Guy Trepiaque that I wrote about, they actually got back into power in Ukraine and so Zelensky didn't fulfill his promise of looking into this shit. Trump is tired of him. So I do think that Zelensky's time seems to be numbered but then there's definitely plenty of time for some kind of crazy false flag type situations. You know, it was interesting, during the talks in Saudi Arabia, Zelens, like there was a Ukraine's biggest ever drone attack on Moscow in the war,

during the Ukraine-US talks in Saudi Arabia. So there's clearly some kind of idea that, you know, we can get Russia to really oppose these Trump's attempts at peace and this will annoy Trump and then Trump will be on our side again. But at the moment, it doesn't seem like that's gonna happen. At the moment, it seems like Trump is intent on peace in Ukraine, getting rid of Zelensky, some kind of elections, and then you have, I mean, I guess the last thing that I would say is that even though these Azov-type people they want to ceasefire to clean up the country, they are quite worried about elections and there was this interesting interview from a few days ago by this important military commander Kirill Averes, who's this, he's not in Azov, but he's like allied with Azov, he's this commander of this drone unit.

He's very popular in the media and the press and he was talking about how It's impossible to get back to the we can't take any territory. Ukraine's too weak So we need to have some kind of ceasefire and sort of reorganize shit and we're not making enough drones Russia's making way more drones But he also had this really interesting thing that he said which is that if he were Russia He would probably push for a ceasefire in Ukraine because this would mean that Ukrainian politics would become more... But basically, he said there'd be some kind of civil war in Ukraine.

People would start hating military veterans and there'd be some kind of large-scale civil unrest slash civil war in Ukraine if there was no longer this external enemy of Russia to sort of unite society. And he said that in that case, Russia could easily take Ukraine after there's been this kind of civil conflict. So he seems to seeming to imply that like we should not have elections, we should have some kind of military government. He didn't say this explicitly, but this is definitely something that, as of people, like

to talk about. Military government with us in charge. I don't know how likely that is, maybe, but that in general, I mean, like the liberal nationalist people, they're very worried that, like, Russia will use hybrid warfare to destabilize Ukraine during elections, meaning that, meaning that Ukrainians may vote for some kind of pro-Russian candidate and Russian media will sort of encourage this and so on so on. So it's interesting to see where it'll develop from the future from now.

Yeah. Yeah, I guess it is anyone's guess, obviously. When he says they could take Ukraine, what would that actually look like? Does he mean like literally absorb it as territory? Because I don't, I've learned my lesson about making predictions more or less, but like I just I don't think they would do that I guess. Yeah, I mean like I agree in terms of making predictions. It's a very, very dangerous game. But look, I mean, the whole thing before 2022, right,

was this whole Ukrainian society, the whole big question was, will the Minsk agreements be implemented? And like the basic sort of question of that was the Minsk agreements would involve the return of Eastern Ukraine controlled by like pro-russian separatists, however you want to call them, into Ukraine's political world and Importantly elections there would take place before the Ukrainian military takes control of that

This was an important part of the Minsk agreements, which would mean that like pro-russian anti-EU anti-NATO figures would win these elections and then already the Ukrainian electoral field was such that the pro-western parties were not that popular. They got like 20-30% of the vote, at most 50%, but generally less and like the party that the Atlantic Council supports, right? This is the Golos party voice. They get like 5%. They're very unpopular.

This was actually, this is the Fukuyama supportive party actually. They were headed by this singer, Svetoslav Bakarchuk and he actually went to study with Fukuyama in Stanford when he got tired of politics back in like 2019 or so and Fukuyama stated that he wished that Vakarchuk could become the president instead of Zelensky because Zelensky is a Russian agent and but that didn't happen. Vakarchuk is a bit of a freak. He's just like a he's a really shitty sort of like Coldplay style like but imagine that but like nationalist sort of thing quite popular

I guess like His early songs were kind of alright actually, but he played in Russia a lot as well It's like this usual sort of thing. What kind of music was it? I mean, it's so it's it's like imagine Coldplay I guess like that his early songs were of a bit more indie sort of thing and they were kind of, some of them kind of cool. So like, yeah, so like modern arena rock-ish. Yeah, you guys should play one of his songs.

I can send you one of his songs to play. Oh yeah. Like for instance, like the song like, Striljaj, which is like shoot, which was this thing and Azoff kind of used the song, but it's like which is like shoot which was this being and Azoff kind of used the song but it's like a pop but Coldplay style. But he was not that popular. No one really wants this crazy neoliberal nationalism thing. And so then the whole fear was that if we allow these territories to return, people

will vote for like, the electoral balance will be such that we won't even be able to have any influence on Ukrainian politics. We'll have these anti-NATO parties, they'll be in charge. They already have lots of votes anyway, but without these millions of eastern Ukrainian voters. And if they return, then it's over for us. So, I mean, there's this big fear of democracy, ironically, among these liberal nationalist NGO types. There was this quote as well, for instance, I mean, like, there was the head of Internews, which is this media company sponsored by USAID and the Renaissance Foundation, Konstantin Kvurt, and he, like, for instance, last year he was

pushing for a law to outlaw or ban Telegram and regulate social media, and he said, to avoid being accused of obstructing freedom of speech in quotation marks you know all that stuff that leftists love to talk about we need to refer to European practices where they know how to encourage technological platforms to cooperate so they're very like they think freedom of speech sucks it's leftist right I mean they and they before 2022 they I mean there was this large-scale kind of disenfranchisement of Eastern Ukrainians because they were internally displaced and they weren't able to vote in elections.

And this was quite a large chunk of the electoral landscape in Ukraine. But these... I wrote stuff about this, lots of people wrote about this this open democracy and Western media as well, where the most kind of anti-NATO parts of Ukrainian society weren't able to vote. And this was supported by these, you know, Sorosite forces, as they're called in Ukraine. And if there are elections now, there's this fear that, yeah, we'll go back to that and then people will vote for someone that wants, you know, basically to sort of chill. We don't need to join NATO. It's not going to happen anyway. And let's just sort of come to some kind of agreement with Russia. We don't have to like them, but we don't want to fight with them

forever. Something like that. And that's the big fear, basically. I don't know. I guess depending, depending on what I think about that guy's music, I might start a forerunner's campaign to elect him. Though if I don't like it, I mean, I'll just stay, I'll keep on involved. Well, because he was the other option other than Zelensky. Like, in 2018, the Ukrainian oligarchs were, like, trying to figure out who should they get to replace the president, like, because Poroshenko was taking too much shit and getting too powerful. And the pro-Western, Pinchinchuk more pro-western anyway he was trying to prepare Bakarchuk for this role and he was like really glazing him on his media

his TV channels but it just didn't really work out either Bakarchuk didn't want to or he just wasn't popular enough and then Kolomoisky decided well that's a great idea and he started trying to prepare Zelensky, who was already a well-known comedian, for the role of president, you know, and so on. So I mean, maybe Bucket Trigger has a chance, probably not. He's kind of stupid. This is kind of his problem.

He doesn't really have, and he doesn't seem to have that many ambitions, really. I mean, he's into music, and he's into like, I don't know, Fukuyama, I guess, but he's, he doesn't seem that enthusiastic, I guess. The only thing like more temperamental and like horrifying on a personal basis than an actor is a musician. Absolutely.

Like, I am terrified of people who are good at music for the most part. Absolutely. They're so, they're so maladroit at human communication, they have to learn how to do music. Exactly, exactly. Can't you tell me what you think? Why do you have to sing about it? Can't you just tell me what you want in simple words? Like, yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Yeah. I guess to close this out, and this is, I get, yeah, once again, a fairly broad open ended question, but we touched on the Atlantic Council and the Western sponsors of a lot of these forces a lot. I was wondering just from your perspective as someone who's much closer to this on the other end of these Western institutions of the Atlantis designs. Where, I mean, where do you see them going next after this? And I guess how do you, how do you see them characterizing this? Because I am very curious to see how they frame this in coming

years. I think it will, they're going to go for like a stabbed in the back type thing with Trump and kind of bank on Trump continuing to slide in popularity. And I think that they'll try to sort of make anti-interventionism a uniquely Trump thing going forward. Yeah, I think I agree with you. I... right now, you know, you have this whole European thing of saying that we're gonna continue the glorious legacy of atlanticism without the U.S. and we're gonna continue supporting Ukraine, but now, I mean, they keep on saying this, but it's obvious they don't... they're not actually gonna follow through and then they came out

recently and, you know, Macron and Stalmer said, well, we're not going to put troops on the ground in Ukraine after they sort of said they would. And it's clear that they won't. I mean, the UK has one, like one regiment or whatever, right? And all of the tanks don't work. They don't have the capacity to follow through with these promises. So the irony is, is that really, I mean, if Kamala had been elected, it's probably likely she would have been trying to pull out of Ukraine as well, really. I mean, Biden as well, he was never committed to going further to do what it's necessary for Ukraine to win. I mean, even what that would involve, who knows. But he was always limiting the... It was a lot of military aid obviously to Ukraine, but he also

was very clear that the US was not going to get involved directly, that they were not going to... They're gonna keep within certain limits. So it's kind of ironic because I mean I think that what Trump is doing now, it would have probably been done by a democratic administration as well, probably in a more you know, kind of, in a less extravagant, more, I guess maybe hypocritical and like double-speak sort of way, whereas Trump is just saying, saying what it actually, what actually is happening very directly and bluntly.

But I think in the future, yeah, I mean, there's this speculation that it's part of this attempt, well, not speculation, I mean, this is said openly by many by like Marco Rubio and so on that we have to orient towards China. And you know, there's like the Palantir guy that that freak, you know, like that that weird young annoying. What Alex Carp or are you talking about the Weppit Palmer Lucky? Lucky, Palma Lucky. Yeah, yeah. He's like a teal guy and I would be sure that I'm almost certain that Palantir is some sort of business relationship with Anderil. That's

right. Yeah. I hate that guy both because of how he looks and like what he says, but also like I wouldn't call myself like an expert on weapons. I'm interested in them because I played ace combat when I was a kid and still do. But like, his weapons fucking suck. Like, I'm sure you know, they're constantly being jammed by like, by Russia. Russia jams them incredibly easy. He acts like he has cracked the code of loitering munitions. No, you haven't. Fucking everyone who worked for like McDonnell Douglas or fucking whoever 40 years ago made better weapons than you. The first cruise missiles we ever made to

be fired from B-52s are less shitty than what you make now... I f-cking hate, I hate him, I hate his stupid f-cking loitering munitions, I hate his stupid f-cking cruise missiles that, uh, have, like, a 20-pound warhead... Yeah, anyone can make something go 200 f-cking miles if there's nothing in the warhead, you a-shole. Oh, God, f-ck him. Yeah, I mean, there was this interesting interview that, um, from a couple months ago that I wrote a thing about where he was talking about how You know, it's this is this stupid sort of Silicon Valley like genius Like we just need more geniuses to fix the world and then it's gonna be fine He's saying basically we're gonna have these these these epic mega drones

I mean not mega but that will solve the war in Ukraine and the idea being that we need to save money There's too much money being spent on defense and that money needs to go to me and I'm going to make these amazing drones that will be cheaper but will actually be more effective. And it's kind of stupid where it's just, I mean, the way the drone warfare works in Ukraine is that the number of drones is really important. You need to have lots of drones because most of them will get jammed, right, by electronic warfare. So you need to have lots of drones and Russia has been able get jammed, right, by electronic warfare. So you need to have lots of drones and Russia has been able to produce a lot more drones,

as I was saying, this Varez guy, head of the drone, like the most kind of well-known drone guy in Ukraine, one of the most well-known drone guys. I mean, they're all talking about this. Russia has so many more drones and that's why they're sort of winning the drone war. And Ukraine often has this idea where it's like we're going to have these genius high tech drones and they're going to win against the Russian orcs that have like a billion shitty drones made out of like you know shit and like you know sticks. But the reality is that the Russian drones are pretty you know technologically advanced

as well but you need to have more drones and there's this luck Palmer lucky idea I think it's very kind of this Trumpian sort of quick fix sort of shit right whereas we're gonna have some smart ideas some good deals and some you know some some Palmer's amazing you know what's it like 5d porn oculus rift type of situations they're gonna solve they're gonna just solve the war. But obviously, I mean, warfare is a lot more, I mean, like military organization, the sort of larger strategy and also, I mean, you know, manpower. And it's not really just solved by these little amazing toys. But, so I think that's, that's an idea that they have. They can sort of semi-withdraw from Ukraine but still maybe keeping it in their orbit as like a semi-neutral but also pro-American country and this genius technology will help them with that,

which seems unlikely to me but, you know, there are some other that say that Trump is fine with Ukraine just being kind of a neutral, even you know, Russians, or the satellite, who knows? And then, but then with, now that they can focus more on other things, they can focus and pivot towards China, and Palmer Lucky is also talking a lot about China. Not that Palmer Lucky kind of decides things, but I think it's kind of illustrated, I guess, of this. Yeah, he's a good bellwether. maybe yeah it sounds like they're like so I mean that that's and I think it's interesting I'm sure that the Atlantisist type people will be trying to sort of drag the US back into Ukraine through some kind of stunts who knows how maybe but it's in any case I think like the two scenarios

are either Ukraine becomes some kind of neutral chaotic political arena where there are lots of forces pushing towards like detente with Russia but also lots of forces against that like it was before 2022 essentially or there's some kind of large or the war just continues and then I mean the Russia has better chances for a lot of reasons and this could lead to like a much larger scale Ukrainian defeat, collapse, it's hard to say I mean you don't want to make any predictions and the war could go on for a long time as well. But also, I mean, then it's the question of how much will the US be supporting this war

either as well. And I mean, how they'll frame it in the future, I think, yeah, like some sort of the stab in the back narrative. But also, just forget about it. I think they'll just forget about it, honestly. I think that's how they do it, you know, they just say, well, who cares? It was the Ukrainians' fault. They didn't fight well enough. We helped them as much as we could but then it was stupid Trump, stupid Ukrainians.

I think that's how they'll spin it honestly and who cares about them anyway? A bunch of, you know, Slavic subhumans anyway. That's, I think that's how, and that's what kind of fucks me up. I think after supporting this so much and pretending to care so much about this country that they found out about yesterday or whatever I mean, I'm talking especially about the sort of liberal Dem demograph like voters in the US or whatever and But then they'll just forget about it. Just like with every other war. I think that's a totally likely scenario, honestly. Yeah, no, I mean, that is the other thing that I've picked up watching them.

It would be great if people internalized their failures such that they go, okay, we're done with politics, fuck it. We're going to go back to making TV or whatever the fuck we did before. But they unfortunately do not let things get them down and they will move on to the next thing and the next thing after that. I'm sure, I think you're completely right that like those Palmer Lucky and other teal associated types are a very good bellwether for what is next. And yeah, no, I'm sure it'll be China stuff I

don't know what that will look like but I'm sure it will be something similar where you're an asshole and you're a hypocrite and you you know it actually invalidates anything you've said about Israel that you won't stand with Taiwan or whatever the next thing is I I think the Philippines, like in terms of very similar to Ukraine, this kind of very corrupt country that's totally infiltrated by like American military and intelligence services and sort of shaping them up to be this future battlefield. But it's very sad, you know what I mean. If you think about the longer term it's this very kind of this final stage of you know what they called like Vietnamization right where it's like we need we can't be involved

in these wars directly we need to sort of give it over to the to our allies slash proxies and they can do the killing and the dying and so on and we'll be out of it and it's sad really how this is not recognized I think by significant portions of the American left. I mean there's plenty of people that see it how it is as well but also even I guess liberal critics of say like the Vietnam War or whatever or the Iraq War or whatever and but then they and something totally obvious is happening that's also you know incredibly sad waste of human lives for these objectives that are that are just so vague

and so based on I guess you know nationally guess, this fear of appearing weak in the world and of maintaining, I guess, US hegemony in this transforming world where there's not really a need anymore. I mean, not a need, but there's not really the possibility for this to exist. I was thinking about this the other day, how the most overused popular thing to say in

the last few years is this idea of like, nothing ever happens. And that's obviously not true. Things happen all the time. The unfortunate reality is everything is set up, especially with this post-venomization system, nothing ever ends. And even when, you know, someone, it's after someone's time in the sun, so to speak, is done and they lose the privilege of Anglo-American institutions fucking up everything in their country and pushing them further and further towards death and destruction

and it's the next person's turn. The same people will be involved in the same institutions and the same ideas and tactics, but something did happen before that and people died, things, lives were destroyed, countries had their histories forever altered, but none of the people involved will ever f-cking go away. And in fact, they will be in politics until they're 120. Absolutely. I mean, yeah, I was just recently in Vietnam and I was just reading as well about this. And it's just, it's really crazy and it's incredibly sad how people that killed thousands

or hundreds of people just personally, different soldiers or generals and so on, and they just never faced any consequences whatsoever. And that's just how it is and with politicians that will continue to have this whole, you know, self-aggrandizing sort of valiant view of themselves as, you know, saving the world. It's pretty crazy. But I mean, you know, I guess it was in Vietnam, it's nice, the country's doing well, that's cool. It's a bit of an exception really, but it does happen. But you know, sad. Yeah, that's the thing is like they got a conclusion.

Not that they got off light, they experienced some of the worst actions of America during the Cold War, but there was a conclusion there. And unfortunately, that is something that is absent in a lot of the rest of the world now. You know what's fucking sad is one of the only pieces of media where they acknowledge both the idea of American war criminals in Vietnam besides William Kelly, both as something

that existed and something that is directly something you interact with and part of the plot and it is accepted that it's a good idea for them to face justice. It was Metal Gear Solid ground zeroes. It was a fucking video game with like five missions that last like 40 minutes. That's the only fucking piece of media I remember that even has that concept in it. And well, how did they, what, could you sentence them yourself or I haven't played this game, out of the work? You go to like a Romana Clef of Gitmo and you kill them. You can also like, you can also abduct them but like, the guy, your guy who's like on the radio with you wants you to kill them. He's like, no, we need to kill them.

Wow. So you kill the American soldiers responsible for what? Like burning, yeah, but killing and raping a village. Wow. Incredible. I didn't know that. Yeah. No, I definitely agree with you.

Nothing ever ends. And I think with Ukraine, I think it's just going to continue in some, maybe not full-scale war, but as the popular term is, this hybrid war, right? There's this constant threat of a new war erupting. There are so many people that are involved in this, that have fought in the war and become really, I guess, radicalized. Many people in the army want an end to the war as well, actually. Many people in the army are very tired of the war, but there are many as well that have,

their friends have been killed and so on, or relatives of people killed in the war, who also, many of them also want an end to the war, but many of them don't. Many of them, you know, wanted to continue and are very, very committed to this. So I think it's just going to be smoldering and festering away. And you don't really have any groups in Ukraine that have a clear vision of where to take the country and in some sort of progressive sense that would keep people minimally happy and a clear idea as well. The thing with Zelensky, he just didn't have a clear idea and he didn't really know what he was doing. He was kind of reacting to

short-term sort of things. He would try to do something good but then the sort of the the nationalist opposition would protest and they would stop him and then he would back off and you go the other direction and so there's not there's not really any forces with a clear idea. This is the big problem, I think. Yeah, and of course, of those people who, you know, were radicalized and yeah, you make an important distinction that a lot of people, they got set in the other direction of being against this war continuing in any future wars, but they have more weapons than they have ever had at this point. Yeah. Just kicking around.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, yeah, I mean, there's lots of... more weapons than they have ever had at this point. Yeah. Just kicking around. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, yeah, I mean, there's lots of, every other day you'll see some story was like, you know, a guy throws a grenade into a crowd or like into a neighbor's apartment and kills two people, like into, you know, at his girlfriend or whatever and kills her.

Or, you know, I mean, yesterday or the day before, there was an assassination of one of the most well-known Nationalists sort of activists as they're called in Ukraine in Odessa Demyan Renull and he was killed by a military a military man a sergeant who Deserted from the army and he just there's a video of him walking up to this nationalist freak Who's a total total total piece of shit? But he walks up to him and he just shoots him and he's on the ground they just walked up to him again and shoots him in the head just close range no no reaction whatsoever and then just walks away calmly but there's so many people with guns there's

so many there was an interesting story a couple two years ago so back with these guys were smuggling all these ammunition from the US military guys, and then they got in the firefight with the police they killed the policemen They were on the run. They got captured. So I mean yeah, absolutely absolutely Yeah, grim things ahead. Well. I mean that the only positive thing I can say as we close out is I don't know it'll be harder for us to get one over on China. I think It sounds great. Not that we necessarily got one over on Russia, but you know even more difficult to get well harder Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. I agree. I thought you were saying it now It's easier for us to turn to China and now we're gonna fuck them up. No, no, no, no, no, no

Yeah, yeah, I get you. I get you, I get you. Yeah, yeah. Well, it seems like things are pretty chaotic. That's good. You know, things are going very strangely in the halls of power. That can only be good, right? I hope so. Although they have those buttons, those scary buttons.

That's not good. So, who knows? Yeah. Anyway, thanks a lot for having me on, Felix. I really enjoyed my time on here. I hope I didn't talk too much too many names, but uh, no my absolute pleasure. I am really glad we got to do this If people want to read you where can they check you out? And yeah, if you have anything else you want to plug Yeah, I mean I've got my my sub stack events in Ukraine. I definitely Recommend subscribing to that put out two articles a week sometimes three and

Yeah, and I write elsewhere as well, but you can all Main mainly on there. Yeah, all the best Felix. Thank you so much my absolute pleasure. Thank you again And yeah wolf links to all of that. Hopefully we can do this again. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm still alive