It Could Happen Here - A Dispatch from Ukraine

Episode Date: February 23, 2022

Robert talks with a Ukrainian journalist (@VagrantJourno) about the escalating conflict with Russia. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and even occasionally about trying to put them back together. Today, as is too often the case, we're going to be focused more on the falling apart thing, because today we are talking about

the situation in Ukraine. It is, as I type, or not type, because I'm not writing, but you know, you get how I'm used to thinking. As I say this, Russian troops have just moved in to two regions in eastern Ukraine that have been occupied by what are generally called Russian-backed separatists since 2014. and announced his intention to recognize those breakaway sections of the country as independent republics. And the area that he has chosen to recognize includes about 70% territory that is currently occupied and held by the Ukrainian government. So it's a big mess. This is, some have said, like a soft version of the invasion that people were expecting. I think it's probably more accurate to say it's a slow start compared to what is potentially possible and very likely coming in the future. To talk more about this and about being an anarchist kind of trapped in between, you know, NATO and Russia and everything that's flinging around right now uh is ukrainian journalist romeo kukratsky romeo uh welcome to the show thanks a lot thanks for having me been a big fan of yours so it's a honor honor

to be here and you are in you're in kiev right now right yeah correct and and how is everybody keeps asking this all around but how is the mood um as you know to the extent that there's a way of saying that like i've you know have things kind of taken a turn since putin actually made his first big play i mean as much as journalists like to say there is no magic yeah moodometer to check to instantly pull every resident of the city to find out. Yeah. Walk around and talk to everybody. Yeah. Just like all the 4 million or whatever citizens in the city. Let me just, let me just ask them. Um, but like there definitely has been a turning point. Um, like one of the big refrains that, uh, I've seen like personally, and everyone has been

saying, right. Is that Ukrainians are so so calm look at these pictures of them like shopping in malls and like going to school what else are you supposed to do honestly what else are we supposed to do but i mean it is true people have been called but since yesterday, there definitely has been a shift and even casual conversation in Kiev. Like I was sitting to paraphrase a famous columnist's usual framing. I was sitting in a cafe in Kiev and overhearing the waitstaff chat amongst themselves. And obviously the whole conversation is, oh oh is putin gonna push into kiev and anecdotally we're semi anecdotally i guess um apartment prices in western cities like in levive and ushgrod have really spiked up like incredibly oh boy um so people are i wouldn't call that

that's a depressing way to pay attention to that or reason to pay attention to that. Like, I wouldn't call it a mass panic. There are no, like, bank runs. No, like, all the stores are stocked. No one's, like, hoarding. But at the same time, there is a steady trickle of people going west and kind of making plans at this point. Yeah. And so this, to kind of give people a little bit more context before we get into some of the more political dimensions of this, right now, there has not been a massive escalation of violence outside of the areas where there has been fighting for several years. You

know, there has been an escalation on the front line that's existed since 2014. But there has not been like, you know, troops pouring across the border and other areas and stuff. And that's obviously probably the number one worry. It looks like what's about to happen is, or at least, it's hard to say, because Putin has recognized the borders of this breakaway part of Ukraine as significantly larger than the area they actually control. And he has moved troops, Russian active duty troops into that area. Now, Russian troops, from what I've heard, about 3,000 have been in the breakaway areas for years now.

But a significant... Absolutely rotating. Yeah. A significant number have been added now. And obviously, the fear is that because he has recognized the territory of these, quote unquote, in his terms, breakaway republics as being much larger than what they control, that Russian troops are going to participate with the separatists in attacking and taking those territories from the Ukrainian government. That's one concern.

Obviously, the concern attached to that is that it would be not at all inconceivable for a conflict that started that way to spread to a much wider part of Ukraine. This is all coming alongside a speech Putin gave that, unfortunately, is going to be one of those things people hear about in history books. Utterly deranged. Yeah, out of its goddamn mind. Utterly deranged. And it's one of those things. We will talk some more about how the Western left sometimes.

I don't want to be like, because this is also largely the online left, but how the online left talks about Putin sometimes. This was not a I want to return to the Soviet Union speech. This was, I want to return to Tsarist Russia's borders type speech. The guy has the Tsarist imperial crest emblazoned on the gates to his palace. Yeah. So I'm really not sure what people would have expected. Yeah. And unfortunately, he's better at his job than any of the last Tsars were because he's achieved a notable amount of success towards that goal already. And yeah, he – a number of things that were – it's one of those – like one of the things he said, which is a line that folks like him in Russia have been saying for a while is that Ukraine's, the existence of Ukraine as an

independent polity is a mistake. And as an anarchist, you know, there's this like, well, yeah, I don't, I don't like the Ukrainian state. I don't like any state in particular. But if you're, if your only disagreement is with the statehood of Ukraine, and you're fine with the statehood of Russia, you know, then, then perhaps what you actually think is that people in Ukraine should not have any autonomy to disagree with the government in Moscow. And I think that's the case here. There's similarities between how Putin and those like him in Russia treat Ukrainians with how, for example, the Turks treat Kurds in the southern part of the country.

There's this thing you'll hear a lot from Turkey where like there's no Kurds in Turkey. They're mountain Turks who've lost their language. And there's this denial from Putin and the Russians that Ukrainians are a people, that they exist. And this is something that has translated. Most people have heard versions of this in just any of the coverage you've heard of Ukraine. If you've ever heard of it referred to as the Ukraine, what that is is part of a very old line that kind of exists to allow Russians to deny the existence of Ukrainians as a people and make it seem more like it's just kind of a geographic region, which is not the case. And why you wouldn't refer to, you wouldn't call it the Ukraine any more than you would call it the Canada. It just isn't the

way you should say that. But yeah, so I think that's at least enough of a background to get into the real meat of what we want to talk about. And I'm just going to kind of open this up to you to chat about what you'd like to say and what you think needs to be gotten across to the international left because internationalism is something we value a lot here and it has been hard to find in this conflict yeah like growing up in new york in the 90, one of the core values I kind of absorbed, I guess, through osmosis, is the value that every single person I met,

regardless of whatever corner of the world they came from, is the exact same human being as me. And it wasn't, and that kind of realization was one of the things that I guess I wouldn't say pushed, but, um, conspired to, to turnism. The idea that, well, our struggle isn't within the fabricated borders of whatever polity has decided to impose their authority. But internationally, every single worker is the same as every other worker. We're all struggling with the same issues. We're all fighting the same forces.

And generally speaking, we have the same enemies. Now, fast forward to 2022, I go online and what do I see? Well, Ukrainians are all Nazis or Ukraine shouldn't exist. Or how can we support either of those? It's two fascist states fighting each other. And I'm sorry, Ukraine's got a population of 44 million. You want to tell me that every single one of those 44 million are Nazis? Like people didn't even say that about Germany. They were literally the Nazi state. I mean, or the United States for that matter. Yeah, like we had four years of Trump, an openly fascist authoritarian leader.

And no one seems to say, well, I guess the U.S. should be bombed. Well, I guess there are some. Yeah, I mean, there's definitely there's definitely people who say that. But yeah, but generally speaking, that's not exactly the view that people take, right? So it's been a long process of disappointment. Well, I say long. There's always been the kind of, well, what do these people really think about Ukraine? But bereft of such a strong impetus to take a side, I guess, of such a strong impetus to take a side, I guess, it hasn't been in the forefront. And now every day I see people that I would have considered comrades, that I would have considered friends and brothers just kind of turn their back on me because I live here,

right? Any aggression, any action that's taken will literally affect me physically sitting here in Kiev. So it's been really, really immensely disheartening to see that every single value that I thought the left was supposed to value, that I thought the left was built on, be betrayed by people with rose emojis or hammer and sickles in their usernames or whatever the hell it is. And we should probably talk about some of why this is and what the history is here. So the most kind of direct thing that people can point to when they call Ukraine a fascist state or when they talk about this is the existence of the Azov Battalion. The Azov Battalion is a paramilitary organization. That means it's not officially a part of the governmental military structure, but it does receive, it has received arms from the government, and it functions as part of Ukraine's defense forces for the purposes of fighting off the Russian-backed separatists. And the Azov battalion are Nazis. There's been a tremendous amount of reporting on that matter. It's a big

problem and the Ukrainian government deserves a significant amount of criticism for the degree to which Azov has been allowed to continue existing. But there's also a lot that gets left out when people focus on that, including the fact that, for example, the political wing of Azov right sector, which is kind of the – it would be fair to call that the umbrella term for like the far right parties in Ukrainian government, have been pretty effectively siloed away from political power through very active measures to about like, what is it? One percent of like representation.

And so they didn't actually pass the threshold to enter the new parliament. Yeah, they're they're not an entity politically. They're just not popular. Their campaigns fail. Their mottos fail. Their agitation fails. Ukrainians do not want to vote for Nazis. Yeah. And it's it is it is a an ugly situation.

And I remember talking with when I was reporting on the Maidan uprisings, which is when, again, for people who aren't up on recent Ukrainian history, they had a president who tried to do a dictatorship and people rose up and fought him in the streets. It was a very gnarly time. About 200 people were shot by government forces. And eventually the president was forced to flee the country, which is what precipitated everything that's happening now, because that president was pretty closely tied with Putin and the people fighting him. They were not pro-Nato rebels but they were more definitely more supportive of closer ties with western europe than they were with russia um and that again those are kind of the precipitating events for everything that happened that's happening now um and some of the people who were fighting the president's forces were fascists um and it's one of those

things i remember talking with protesters at the time who were like, well, am I supposed to get in fight with them at the same time as I'm trying not to get shot by riot police? Like, what do you expect me to do? And it is a nasty situation. And it's one of those things. I don't know, like, I don't know what to tell people about that because it's ugly and it's uncomfortable and it's messy and that's also Ukrainian history. There's a lot of ugly, uncomfortable, messy things here as there is with every country's history. It doesn't mean that people in Kiev deserve to have their housing blocks pounded by Russian artillery. It doesn't mean that people in Evdivka deserve to have their homes pounded by artillery. And whatever criticisms you want to make about how the Ukrainian government is handled as of, and there are many criticisms to make, that's not really relevant to the people living

in these areas having their homes destroyed on a daily basis by mortar fire. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. base is by Mortarfire. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I just want to make a couple things really clear. The Azoth Medallion is like a thousand guys.

Yeah. Like, max. And the reason, one of the reasons at least, that they rose to such prominence in the beginning wasn't only their ability to mobilize in the early stages of the Russian war against Ukraine. It was also because they had very strong financial backing from the former interior minister, Arsen Ivakov. And Ivakov is no longer in power. and Ivakov is no longer in power uh and one of the things you can see immediately was the like almost nullifying of fascist street marches and fascist demonstrations um in Kiev outside the president's office that all vanished because more like in Ukraine ideology is not very strong and this is something um that I've noticed a lot of people from the US and Europe have trouble understanding about Ukrainian politics.

People here are not really ideological. Our parties don't map aside from a couple of outliers like right sector. It doesn't really map to any left-right access. People typically will always want the same policies. Like, they always want a pension. They always want universal health care to be better. They always want the roads fixed. Generally, policy is something most Ukrainians actually agree on. As a result, most of our elections are purely personality-based. That's one of the reasons Zelenskyensky vladimir zelensky

our current president won was because he was a well-known comedian yeah and people liked his personality and he put out a whole tv show as a pr stunt yeah um before launching his campaign and people voted for that personality based on screen uh and so when there was far-right activity and again i want to stress that that activity even the street activity has almost disappeared it's because the far-right is typically used in ukraine as a political tool by one oligarch or one interest group against another that's why when the money disappeared, they disappeared. Because the leaderships, the leadership of these fascist groups, typically speaking,

were not that ideological themselves, but they did like having USUVs and they did like buying guns and hiring hookers and doing drugs. Like they liked the money and that's why they did it. And they would convince a bunch of teenagers to go out and wave a couple of torches and march or chant. But these guys were really purely in for the money.

And again, you can tell that because when their financial backer disappeared, they're nowhere to be found. Yeah. And it's one of those, one of the things that is very frustrating to me. I can remember one of the earliest projects that I did that was like a, for Bellingcat as we were, there was a pride march in Kiev that got attacked by Nazis. This was a couple of years back. And we were kind of trying to identify the individual fascists who were like beating people in the street. and it's spending hours pouring over that footage it makes it incredibly frustrating that there are people outside of the country boiling

it down to well all of those people are fascists all of those people are part of a fascist state and it's like no some a lot of those people are quite a few ukrainians have fought nazis in the streets you know um that's a reality of the situation and it's it's um and it it's it's ugly in part because if you actually want to look at what's been happening uh with the russian-backed separatists there's a lot of fucking fascists over there um there's a lot of uh paramilitary organizations and like far right groups that have been used by the russian government wagner pmc yeah yeah literally um literally named because they're fascist leader yeah like swagger like many nazis it's it's it's hard to to understand honestly from my perspective um because not only is russian fascism have far more influence on russian policy

than any ukrainian fascist has ever had in ukrainian policy um it's also that the russian project and the narrative they use um there there's this uh joke they call or not really joke a slur they call them that they call ukrainians naz Nazi Banderists. For those who don't know, Bandera was a Ukrainian nationalist leader, a partisan, fought against the Soviets, and

his organization was implicated in quite a few war crimes. Yeah, significant number of war crimes, too many war crimes. So, clearly, Bandera himself, probably not a great crimes. Yeah, significant number of war crimes, too many war crimes. So, clearly, Bender himself, probably not a great guy. Yeah. But, to delegitimize

all Ukrainian kind of independence movements that have propped up over the years, the Soviet government and now the Russian government has always, always insisted that there is no legitimate way for Ukraine to be independent. We're all Nazi Banderists, no matter what.

And that's why you had, there's a picture a couple of days ago of a solidarity march in Kiev with some of Kiev's LGBT community holding up Banderist flags. holding up banderas flags not because they're gay nazis but because it's a way of yeah retaking this slur back from the russians and it's all part of the complicating factor here is that because of how geopolitics worked out in that period of time. There are very uncomfortable but kind of inextricable ties between the basic idea of Ukraine being a nation independent from Russia and anti-communism. And because of what was going on in anti-communism in that period of time, we're talking the 30s and 40s, it means that a decent number of those early Ukrainian nationalists were either directly implicated with the Nazis like Bandera or at least had uncomfortable ties. And that's a messy part of history that shouldn't be shied away from.

But, for example, the same thing is true of Finland. Like you can say the exact same thing about fucking Finnish nationalism, Finnish sovereignty and whatnot. And people don't call Finland a Nazi nation, even though, yeah, the fact that they were stuck between the USSR and Nazi Germany means that there were a lot of Finns in that period of time who made some real fucked up choices. Like, but also, there's a lot that has to be like, you can't adequately discuss why those choices were made if you don't talk about, for example, the Holodomor, you know, which was the starvation genocide of several million Ukrainians by the Soviet government. leftist conditions a little bit if you go back to the civil war itself where um a lot of this started most of the nationalist groups i would say nearly all of them there were one or two monarchist minor monarchist groups in ukraine but the grand majority of them were in fact socialism

or socialist yeah they had like the hammer and sickle and wheat on their currency and everything They had like the hammer and sickle and wheat on their currency and everything, because at the time that was what won votes from the peasantry. But when the Bolsheviks crushed every independent Ukrainian social movement in exchange for bureaucrats that they imported from the empire and just shoved into ukrainian cities uh well then you had ukrainians that wanted to be independent and wanted to have a better life than under the czar well now suddenly they don't even have that support um from the bolsheviks uh and obviously as a ukrainian um i can't talk about this without bringing up nestor makakhnoa, who was an anarchist leader, the leader of the Ukrainian Black Army during the Civil War. And what happened to them? Well, the Bolsheviks betrayed them and killed all of them and, of course, the movement.

And then smeared them all as pedophile rapist cannibals, if I remember correctly. Yeah, yeah. pedophile rapist cannibals, if I remember correctly. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of disinformation you can find about that time. Just like today, you know, only the names have changed. Exactly. So if there is no

other outlet for Ukrainian nationalism and the group that you thought may be an ally in destroying the empire and granting you self-determination, turns out to be a continuation of that exact empire, well, it's pretty logical, maybe not right, but it is pretty logical for people to go to the other extreme.

And it's one of those, one of the things I think that should be noted more, as we talked about earlier, is that one of these stories of Ukrainian politics, particularly in the last, God, close to a decade since the Maidan, is that mainstream Ukrainian political leaders and Ukrainian voters have overwhelmingly rejected that sort of nationalism this time around, and have gone out of their way to silo it out of active political power in a way that one could argue is more successful than has been done in the United States. And absolutely, we didn't elect Trump.

Yeah, no, you get you guys basically elected Jon Stewart. Pretty much. I mean, that was his. Yeah, it was his whole thing thing he put on satirical political sketches that was the entire show um we did basically elect john stewart and you know i have my criticisms of zelensky um as a lot of people do uh and one of the things we love saying in ukraine whenever people are like oh look at all the look at all the Nazis there. We're so not we're so anti-Semitic that we elected a Jewish comedian.

Yeah, that's how that's how anti-Semitic we are, that we have huge menorahs standing in the middle of Kiev during the high holidays. That's how that's how anti-Semitic we are. Yeah. And Zelensky's prime minister is also a jewish man which makes ukraine the second country in the world to have a jewish president and prime minister um yeah like we don't care because it's not it doesn't even come up in campaigns like what even when romney was running you'd see democratic campaigns um painting this a scary mormon Mormon or the ads implying. And you don't even have that level of religious antipathy in Ukraine. It's, it's,

it's just a much more complicated. We're actually talking about the problems of the far right and, and a fascism, you know, in Ukraine, it's a much more complicated story than a lot of people on, you know, social media or whatnot want to give it credit to because it's just easy

to sum things up in one sentence and not have to care about a looming humanitarian catastrophe. But that is what we are looking at. If this invasion, it will be bad if Russia uses active forces in order to take the remainder of those two provinces from the ukrainian government it will be a nightmare of almost unimaginable consequence if the invasion proceeds on the wider scale that is possible at this point um and it is oh sorry go on no no no please yeah um i've been a doomer on this basically since i i first heard about the build-up um because putin has made it very clear over the years what he considers ukraine to be like you mentioned he doesn't think that ukraine should exist as like a polity um and as a result

uh i have pretty much this whole time been pretty sure that he's going to attack you. And now we're coming to a very definite tipping point. Just today, Putin's made a lot of moves. Like you mentioned, he authorized military force to be used in the Donbass. And actually, he's gone further. He's authorized military force to be used abroad, which, mean obviously that means ukraine where else that's where his like the about i think 70 or 80 percent of the entire russian army is currently around ukraine or close enough that they can reinforce um without a lot of yeah or at least of the active duty. Cause the Russian military, there's a smaller,

but actually competent. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. But the professional, the contract soldiers.

Yes. Yeah. Um, and especially on the Northern border, uh, there are a lot of battalion attack groups that are basically sitting and waiting, I guess,

or whatever the order will be eventually um and in belarus and since putin has given this authorization to operate abroad and he stated that he recognizes these puppet authorities as i call them um that he recognizes their borders as uh the entirety of the donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, which again, only a third of those territories are under the de facto control of the public authorities. Two-thirds of both provinces are

still under Ukrainian government control, including the critical port city of Mariupol, and now that Putin has authorized force to be used abroad, well, it's kind of, I mean, at least it is incredibly obvious to me what the next steps are from the Russian perspective if I want to subjugate Ukraine.

Yeah. And I think a big failing here is people in the West, especially the West and the Left, know very little of, for example, the Chechen Wars. Especially the Second Chechen War and what happened to Grozny. During that war and what the Russians

did to subjugate that population. And if anyone thinks that Putin treasures Ukrainian lives any more than he did Chechen lives, then I've got a bridge of the Dnipro to sell them, though you should act now because the valley is going to drop real fast. Yeah. And it's one of those if you as a good leftist have spent a significant amount of time reading about the horrific crimes of imperialist nations in Africa and Southeast Asia and in the Americas.

What the Russian Federation did there is, is on that scale. It's, it's absolutely on that scale. It was a, it was a, a, a titanically ugly war. And any modernly we can look at what they did in Syria.

Yeah. Or what they are doing in Syria. Yeah. What they continue to do in syria um but as it turns out um syrians learned this lesson that i am learning now about big portions of the um western left a long time ago yeah which is that if you can find for example some syrian rebels uh who are shitty and Islamists or whatever, you can tar every single person who ever stood up against Bashar al-Assad as a terrorist, which is really easy,

especially if you're getting paid Kremlin money to advance that line and your name is Ben Norton. Your name is Ben Norton. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This brings us to the place where there really aren't clear answers, which is like, what can be done? And it is one of those things where it's like, well, that's not an easy question, because you do have to when you start grappling with like, all right, well, like what should NATO do?

What should other European non-NATO nations do? Like what is actually capable of like potentially altering or disrupting the courses of action here? Well, we're talking about the Russian state, which has a lot of nukes. We're talking about a situation that could spiral out of control in a way that very few situations globally are

capable of potentially spiraling out of control. And so it is a not a situation where anyone who tells you this is clearly the thing to do that will work is, I think, trying to, is probably full of shit and a little unhinged um because this is a real fucking ugly one um but some of what has been done um we just got

the news today that i think we both found surprising but it's very positive that the germans have canceled uh construction of the nord stream pipeline, which was a gas pipeline from Russia into the EU, that a lot of folks were saying Germany was not going to take any sort of stances, solid stances on Ukraine's behalf because of that pipeline, because of how Germany, along with a lot of Western Europe, is tremendously reliant upon Russian gas exports for just keeping themselves heated in the winter. So that's a positive move. I tend to be critical of the ability of sanctions to do much. And if we're looking historically at sanctions, particularly how they're most often implied, they have a tendency to just harm

regular people more than they have to do. Like we can look at the sanctions in Iraq, right? Which were part of why something like a million people starved. We are talking about different kinds of sanctions in general. And we're talking about the sanctions being imposed by NATO countries against the Russian state right now. They're largely sanctions against members of the Duma. There's a lot. It's not the same as looking at like what was being done to Saddam's Iraq. That said, I'm still very hesitant to say I think that sanctions are going to disrupt Putin's course of action. I'm curious what you think can and should be done here.

Like what is – do you have any kind of clear idea in your own head about what might have a disruptive effect on on what putin is doing learn to teleport and shoot putin in the head with a nine millimeter i mean that would be that'd be great there's there's a had we that teleport had we that teleportation capacity there would be a list you know unfortunately i never put my skill points into that yeah um but realistically speaking the russian state is authoritarian. It doesn't really care what its own citizens think. It definitely doesn't care what other people think.

However, Russia has been, at least in the modern realm, relatively image conscious, which is why I think one thing that could work for example or not could work but would perhaps force the russian state to consider its actions a little bit more carefully and i want to be very clear when i talk about the russian state i'm talking about putin himself yeah the government he has no there's no like other decision makers in Russia and that was actually perfectly encapsulated during his speech the other day where

he just outright like eviscerated the head of his foreign intelligence service on live TV for the whole world to see. He just utterly humiliated the guy for no real reason, just because he can. And you could see that. And we're talking about Russia's top spy. I mean, beyond Putin himself, stammering like a frightened school child when Putin addressed him just with

just a hint of sharpness. Yeah. So when I say the Russian state, I'm referring literally to the body and person of Vladimir Putin. And honestly, yeah, I would love to see people picket Russian embassies and make demonstrations and marches and so on. Do I think that will have a practical real effect? To be honest, no. Same with the sanctions. Um, I'm sure Putin's, uh, pet oligarchs and members of his party and the, uh, the people that in theory keep him in power, um, the oligarchs, the, the parliamentarians, the mafia lords and so on. I'm sure they're going to be

premiffed if their yachts and their multi-million dollar properties in Miami and New York and London and the villas and the French Riviera, when all that gets taken, I'm sure they'll be pretty annoyed. Um, but I don't think Putin cares. I think that he has a really irrational desire to subjugate Kiev specifically. He sees Kiev as what we call in Russian the mother of all Russian cities. Yeah. It's the birthplace of the Kievan Rus. Yeah. The word Russian comes from Kievan Rus, you know.

Exactly. Exactly. kievian ruse yeah the word russian comes from kiev and ruse you know exactly exactly and i just uh don't think that putin is going to turn away from that goal no um because a couple of his buddies are complaining that their mega yachts got taken in by the british authorities or whatever no um nor do i think they're gonna care that you know there are a couple of marchers outside of embassies in new york or something um but that may help spur the world as a whole the international community into taking a harder line stance against because time and time and again um like the guy's a gangster he's he's like a security service thug if you've ever like interacted with like a petty like sergeant police sergeant or something that has just a bit

of authority and pretty much total impunity that that's put into a t um the dude thinks he's overeducated uh and the cleverest man yeah i think but in reality the way he talks and the way he acts he's just a bully he's he's he's got the same basic personality as like Villanueva, you know, the fucking head of the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. He's like not like a beat cop, but like one of the cops who rises to run a union or run a city police department. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. He's good at consolidating power. He's good at exercising or organizing others to exercise violence on his behalf.

But yeah, at the end of the day, he is primarily a bully. And it's one of those, I don't know, like when it comes to arms shipments, that is historically, again, if you look at the history of, let's just say specifically NATO shipping arms places, most of the time that does not improve the situation for people in that country. That has been a historical reality of arms shipments, not just with NATO. As a general rule everywhere, when you ship more guns into an area, that rarely improves quality of life. improves quality of life. But we are not talking about a country that has had any kind of centralized political legitimacy or whatnot, collapsing. We're not talking about a country that is in the middle of tearing itself apart between 30 or 40 different sides.

It's not the same situation as, well, let's ship a bunch of guns to Libya, you know? It just isn't. They're different histories, different political realities on the ground. I don't know that I actually think any amount of armed shipments would dissuade Putin from advancing either. But I don't know what else to do. I certainly am not against the idea of like okay guys have some agtms you know have some wire guided missiles have some javelins um because like what else are you gonna do um i mean we're not going to and i'm certainly not saying we should send u.s troops in um because again we have to consider the nuclear situation too um i don't what do you think is where are your thoughts there um because this is something that i i'm very i'm very mixed on although again i'm broadly fine with yeah i mean

at least give people the ability to fight back yeah it's a difficult one especially like you noted the military industrial complex has very rarely improved any situation in the world anywhere. This might be one of the few exceptions. Because the fact is that Ukraine doesn't really have the tools to defend ourselves. We have, or at least our government claims that we have the strongest army in Europe, which to be honest, with all defense cuts that european countries have made over the years that may be true um at least on a ground sense certainly the most combat experienced army in europe yeah absolutely um but what we lack entirely is air power and air defense yep um and what russia has in spades is air power and air defense. And as we saw when the US invaded Iraq, well, you can destroy

conventional army in a couple of days by just bombing the shit out of it. And the Russians have quite a few missiles aimed straight at Kiev and quite a few planes waiting on standby,

I presume, to bomb the shit out of Kiev. And it would be nice to have some way to defend ourselves against that. But again, there's not much that can be said. Yeah, of course, stingers and javelins and so on. That'll all help raise the cost of the occupation that follows the initial bombardment. But if Putin goes for the strategy that follows the initial bombardment um but if putin goes for the strategy that asad has used in syria which is bomb the living shit out of every civilian um

residential area in the city until the people just submit or are all dead um well there's not really too much we can do about that and that is like there is a lot that individual that that trained and motivated soldiers with small arms and munitions like javelins can do even to resist a country with with overwhelming air power. The corollary to that is that in doing that a lot of stuff, everyone around them dies. The city is turned into a graveyard. I've seen that with my own eyes. And that's, I mean that has to be your main concern is that the potential here is for a tremendous loss of life and also for the creation of millions of refugees um and this is something in another audio clip that you published a bit earlier on twitter you say which is that like if this goes as badly as it can, no matter what your politics are, this will become your problem. 100%. Yeah. I stand behind that. Absolutely. Because there are a lot of Ukrainians and while most of us have no desire to live under the Russian yoke,

the majority of us are not trained fighters. We're just people, just regular people. And I know, um, especially in the U S um, with our like out of control gun culture, uh,

imagining like they're the, the singular guy, you know, they're, they're the macho man, uh, with, with all the guns.

They take down the government all by themselves I'm sorry it's a fantasy, it's a fiction that is not how things work and quite frankly most people are not psychologically suited to combat, that's why armies take so long to break soldiers

down to teach them to murder people because that is not something humans do naturally and the majority of people subjected to that kind of violence will run and again there are 44 million of us and they will run and run and run pretty much everyone in the world you saw this with syria saw this with libya um you've seen this pretty much with every single place that has experienced massive violence in the modern world um that's the reaction yeah and that's when we run we bring all of our biases and problems and cultural predilections to you

and it's yeah i mean that's that's really the note to end on and it it is you get a lot of folks you know who who rightly you know focus on and think a lot about revolutionary struggles in places like Vietnam and in Afghanistan and will point out that like, well, you don't need to have as advanced a military as your opponent to win. And again, just the corollary to that – What form of winning? Yeah. The corollary to that is that like yeah but millions of people die millions of people died in afghanistan millions of people died in vietnam um that's that that is the reality yeah you can resist an imperial power with minimal

technology but you're not gonna leave that fight with a family alive still, you know? Like, that's how it goes. So let's all say a little prayer for, I don't know, peace. I hope the worst doesn't happen. What, you know, has there been kind of mobilization that you've seen within the the the activists the anarchist community in in kiev um to you know any kind of mutual aid stuff like or is it just one of those situations where it hasn't started happening yet and nobody really knows what would even be useful to do if it does i'll say this um it may come as a little bit of a shock but anarchists not typically the best to organize yeah um specifically like a lot of my uh the friends who are active in the anarchist

um movement in ukraine have simply joined the territorial defense battalions or the regular army and will simply fight as soldiers. There has been a very strong. I don't know if you call denial. A colleague of mine used the term doomed optimism, and I really like the sound of that. So let's go with that. Yeah, there's been this really strong doomed optimism amongst Ukrainians that the worst will not happen.

And there's no real reason to prepare for anything because, well, things are going to be fine. And that's what our government tells us as well. Things are going to be fine. They don't see any massive attack groups or I mean, I feel like that's contradicted by the open source intelligence that I've been looking at. Yeah. But I am just one guy.

I obviously don't have intelligence apparatus of a nation state. So, I mean, maybe they're right. But generally speaking, people have just been joining the army, going to tactical trainings. But this is all very basic stuff, like going to the woods, learn how to set up camp, and, you know, clean a rifle kind of things.

Nothing like combat training, because where would you get that except by joining the army and going to the front? Yeah, it's the kind of training that might keep, in the event of a full conflict, one out of ten of those people alive

long enough to learn how to fight. Yeah, and that might be worth it. Yeah, I mean, yeah, if you event of a full conflict, one out of 10 of those people alive long enough to learn how to fight. Yeah, and that might be worth it. Yeah, I mean, yeah, if you're talking about, like, yes. Not to say people shouldn't be doing that because people should do whatever they can. How are you, kind of to close out, like, as this, like, doom scrolling is a thing we all talk about and there's there's plenty i mean just sitting here in portland we just had a mass shooting on a protest this weekend and so there's

a lot of doom scrolling going on in my community but we're not staring down the barrel of 190,000 soldiers you know potentially uh uh hitting us from the air and ground simultaneously how do you how are you like focusing on the stuff that you can do anything about and the stuff that you can productively handle without losing yourself in that? Hopious amounts of cannabis. That's good. I'm glad you guys have decent pod access. Yeah, I actually don't know what I'll do if, um, if my current supplies got out to be quite honest.

Um, but I mean, it's been definitely a struggle. Um, and the past couple of days, especially my mental health has not been, uh, especially great.

Um, but again, I'm one dude, like I'm not in very good shape. I have poor vision. One of my eyes don't work. I'm diabetic. Like I'm not going to go out and grab a rifle and start killing every

Ruski I see, you know? Um, but at the same time, I've got a job to do. I, uh, as an English language journalist in Ukraine,

um, I have, this is your busy season. Yeah. It's my busy season. Like one of my jobs is to counter Russian disinformation and to like, tell people the truth of what is going on here. Um,

and that role will only get more important, uh, if the, the conflict expands, um, from, from the, the scope that it is now. So how am I doing? Well, I'm still alive. Haven't off myself yet.

And I'm still working. So I think as good as I can be under the circumstances. Yeah, yeah. I think as good as I can be under the circumstances. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I hope your weed supply stays stable at the very fucking. Crossing my fingers.

Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Romeo. Do you have anything you want to plug kind of as we go out here? Just if you really want to know about what's going down in Ukraineraine i am co-host of a podcast called ukraine without hype you can find it on any podcast platform um and if you really want to get a look at what's going on in english um with only a tinge of leftist bias um then tune in uh you can follow us on Twitter, Hype Ukraine. And again, on any podcast

platform that you so desire. Awesome. Well, check out Romeo there. Check out his podcast. And, you know, just try to keep your eyes on the situation and don't let yourself be

overwhelmed by what some random person on Twitter tries to sum it up as. You know, people are more complicated than that. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the Flames of Fright. An anthology podcast

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