It Could Happen Here - An Update on Ukraine

Episode Date: April 5, 2022

Robert sits down with researcher Aram Shabanian to ask the important question, 'Hey, what's going on in that giant bloody land war in Europe?'See 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. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons?

Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast,

Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app

or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by

an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.

Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the only podcast where the host asks all listeners and guests to provide their social security number and bank account number, routing number, all that good stuff. This is a podcast about how things aren't always great and maybe are kind of falling apart a little bit. And it has also not been, for the most part, a podcast about the expanded war in Ukraine for a variety of reasons. We have done some coverage of that, but we've focused

specifically on stories of individual people, and that's generally where I feel like our strength is as a program. But people have been repeatedly requesting we do a little bit of a bigger picture look at what's gone on in that conflict, and so I have brought Aram Shambanian into the studio. Aram, how are you doing, buddy? Oh, not too bad, man. How are you doing today? Fine and dandy like sour candy. Now, would you describe kind of who you are and what you do, and why you're someone people should listen to when we're talking about a conflict like this? Because you are one of the people who, when was like there's no way russia will invade was was saying well it might happen yeah i mean um well i think one of the

things that that sets me aside from a lot of other analysts out there is that i never thought i would become an analyst and i never thought that i would do this um i it wasn't set in stone for me from the beginning i thought i was going to be like a high school history teacher. And so I've always studied the world in terms of reading books on different conflicts around the world. And I've tried to keep appraised on where these books have led to, right? So if I read a book about the Second Congo War, it makes sense to then follow current events

that are related to what happened after the Second Congo War. As a result, I followed things going on in Ukraine starting in 2014 with Yerom Aydan and elsewhere in the world. But, but Ukraine has been one that I focused on pretty heavily because there's been a lot of information about Ukraine ever since 2014, because of how late the war happened in terms of human history and in, in terms of recent conflicts,

2014 isn't that long ago. And so I started following it back then. And I think that if you combine modern open source tools, modern technology, some of the stuff that organizations like Bellingcat can do with traditional research and knowledge, some of the stuff that I've done in school, you have a really powerful tool to combat disinformation.

And I think that's one of the best tools we have to combat disinformation is wedding OSINT with traditional research. And yeah, when it comes to open source intelligence, the Ukrainian war is actually kind of one of the, it's not the conflict where that really started to become a thing. It would probably be the Libyan civil war when that began to be something people were talking about in a big way. But the Ukrainian – the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in particular in 2014 is really where open source intelligence kind of came into its own in a really widely known way. That's when Bellingcat's reporting on the downing of MH117 like went out. And that was kind of like

the first really huge international story involving like open source intelligent cracking a case. And now since the expanded invasion of Russia back in February, we've kind of entered. And again, this isn't really where this period started. But this has been kind of, we've seen an explosion of what I think would be fair to call open source intelligence disinformation. Yeah, you want to talk a little bit about kind of some of the stuff that you've seen, because there's there's a number of accounts claiming to be doing OSINT on the Ukrainian war. And boy, howdy, they are not all giving out good information. And it can be difficult for people to tell what they should trust. Because if you're if you're kind of just scanning over it, bad OSINT or even outright fake OSINT can look very similar to good OSINT. Right. And so I would put a lot of the OSINT community into four rough categories. There's OSINT analysts, and those are pretty rare. Those are the kind of people who combine what they're seeing in real time on social media with a background of knowledge in the area. So like a Ukraine regional expert combining that with what they're seeing happen in Ukraine, that's an OSINT analyst. There are some Twitter accounts that are more OSINT aggregators. They don't really have much analysis that they put

into what they're producing, but they spit out a lot of information in real time. And so if you follow the right ones that use the right sources, you can get some pretty decent information from them. Then there's more of the misinformation aggregators, which are accounts that just kind of spread whatever they see without regards to whether it's true or not. They'll sensationalize stories. You know, if there's a rare command and control plane takes off somewhere in America that's known as the Doomsday Plane during the cold war they'll tweet out the doomsday plane is in the air it doesn't mean clear war right and they're not doing it to be hurtful they're doing it for likes and then there's disinformation aggregators who are deliberately out there trying to sow discord and sow problems and those are four categories that i've seen all of them develop in their own ways in the last 10 years um i think

the best best example of that final category there's a an account on twitter called smm syria and if you look at the account it looks almost identical to the osce's special monitoring mission to ukraine it takes the same kind of graphics and it has the same kind of terminology, but it's an Assadist disinformation outlet. But they've woven their way into, if you just took a casual glance at the war in Syria, you might believe that it's a valid source. And that's the kind of more malicious disinformation that I'm talking about, where they know what they're doing and they're trying to confuse people. And it's there's, you know, I think one of the best examples of something that really struck me recently as problematic in the war in Ukraine is you've got a video going around of that purports to show Ukrainian soldiers shooting captured Russian soldiers, which is a war crime. And I think credible people within the OSINT community have said this is something that desperately needs to be investigated more seriously. This like is very,

has a very good chance of being legitimate and people should be looking into this. Whereas you've also seen folks who kind of reflexively jumped to defend Ukraine against these allegations, putting out what I think is fairly shoddy, OSINT claiming to show like issues with the video and stuff. And it's like people circling blurry sections of the video and saying like, this is, you know, looks like it could be edited,

or this doesn't look credible. And it is the kind of thing. I think one reason people get tripped up by that is prior to the invasion of Ukraine, there were some Russian false flag events that involved like cadavers, bodies that had been autops invasion of Ukraine, there were some Russian false flag events that involved like cadavers, bodies that had been autopsied and stuff, which was broken down by people like Elliot Higgins at Bellingcat. And one of the things that again, if you're just kind of looking at the surface level, you can see like, oh, well, that those were videos that were faked. And so these like the OSINT around this people like pointing out different sections of the video looks the same. Some of the differences are are for example um when they were analyzing the bodies

in those those false flag footage they brought in actual you know corpse cutter uppers morticians yes to analyze like the cuts in the in the skulls and whatnot as opposed to again just kind of a guy circling aspects of a video and being like, this doesn't seem right. And it's like, but you can, I can see why people get tripped up by it. And it is important not to get tripped up by that kind of stuff because war crimes are bad, I think is a general attitude that we both share and should be investigated regardless of like whether or not they're being done by the side who's also towing Russian tanks away with tractors that you're on the side of, right? Right. And I think that that's exactly an important distinction to make, because there are certain claims that have come out from the Ukrainian side, certain statements that have come out, that as an OSINT analyst, I could probably look into more and maybe poke holes in.

Stuff like the number of kills that the ghost of key right okay maybe it's not 30 kills or whatever it is that people are yeah maybe he's not real but that's not harmful as much as did these guys shoot people in the legs right right so one of those bears examination just because of the nature of the claim. The other one, maybe we can examine it after the war when it's not. Yeah, it doesn't really matter if there is a Ukrainian ace fighter pilot who's dropped a bunch of a crazy number, like obviously in a military sense of Russian jets are being downed. That does matter. But like from the perspective of people just kind of observing this war as news consumers, it doesn't really matter. Whereas whether or not a country gets away with a war crime absolutely matters. And people are treating it with the same reflexive hand wave as they do when they accept these, the Ghost of Kiev myths, right? They're saying like, well, no, but I want the Ukrainian side to win this war. So we can't even look into any claims of war crimes. And that's just not how

it's supposed to be. Like, no, you condemn the crimes up front. And you investigate and you try to move forward. And that's how we prove that we're better than the opposing side. Like that's, that's been the rule in this war. And it's been the rule in wars past, you know, you, you prove that you're better than your opponents by being more decent. Yeah. And it's, it's, I have seen some really unsettling logic from some people along the lines of like, well, these were artillerymen who have been, you know, shelling civilian areas. So why shouldn't they be be shot in the leg? And the answer is because, like, that's number one, it is a war crime to shoot captured prisoners like that. crime to shoot captured prisoners.

That is a thing that we as a species have attempted to make illegal and ought to be. It is a thing that should not be done. There's actually a wide variety of tactical reasons why it's bad for Ukraine if Russian soldiers believe they will be shot after being captured.

Among other things, it makes soldiers less likely to turn themselves in. One of the wiser decisions that the Ukrainian government has made in this war has been really deliberately pushing the idea that like, hey, Russians, if you surrender, we'll pay you, you can get Ukrainian citizenship, like bring in your tanks, you know, land your planes or whatever, like we'll, you know, we'll make it worth your while, which is a lot, which is potentially a force multiplier. Right. If Russian soldiers think when I get captured, they will shoot me, then they will fight to the death and Ukraine will lose more people in that fight, as opposed to if Russian soldiers think, well, shit, I could actually have a pretty decent life if I just turn myself into these guys and refuse to fight that means less people you have to fight um so it it does it does really matter whether or not this is happening um and it's also just like

on a moral level you you shouldn't accept it and i i see some really i think one of the things that i find so unsettling about that logic like these are uh these are you know artillerymen who have been targeting civilian areas why shouldn't they be shot? It's not that much of a leap to like some other shit we saw people saying in Vietnam. You know, these villages are harboring insurgents. Why shouldn't we treat them like the enemy? You know, like all of this logic leads to people getting murdered who don't deserve to get murdered. And that is bad.

Right. There's the snowball effect, the slippery slope effect with the moral side of it and then like you're saying the tactical side of it i mean if you look at part of the reason members of isis fought so hard in places like mosul oh god yeah it was because once you're in that organization your options are a bullet or like a desert cell if you're lucky they're not going to treat you well and reintegrate you into society. Come on. Like, no, that's not how it works. So you fight like hell. You know, that's a very basic rule that's pretty easy to understand, I would think. Yeah.

So that's why this needs to be looked into. And if it's proven false, if it's proven to not be a correct, true video, that just strengthens the Ukrainian side. But if it is proven to be true, it's something that needs to be investigated. It can't be overlooked. It can't be swept under the rug. Just because we want one side of this war to come out on top doesn't mean that we have to ignore the crimes they're committing. is that there has never been a side in a war who have not committed war crimes. So that should always be on your mind when you're trying to evaluate the reality of a war crime. It doesn't mean every claim of a war crime is true. That would be a very silly way to translate that. But it does mean that when there is a claim that the side you support has been responsible for a war crime,

your default should be, this is not impossible. And I should proceed from the area that this could have happened. And it should be analyzed without reflexively dismissing it. And also without saying that, like, war crimes committed by a group of soldiers in a single part of a theater necessarily mean that the the war itself is being prosecuted in a criminal level by that government. No, because, for example, I mean i i was about to say u.s soldiers committed war crimes in world war ii but actually the prosecution of that war was criminal in a lot of fundamental ways yeah maybe we'll let that one go for a minute but that doesn't mean that like your granddad committed war crimes because other u.s soldiers who were in the field

executed captured german ps, you know? Right. Yeah. Which I think is something people have an easier time understanding when it's not a war. They feel the need to have a series of 280 character or less takes on in Twitter. Yeah. That's the weirdest thing about the social media age and kind of OSINT in general is that while it does make it very accessible and easy for anybody to get involved in investigating these crimes and these events, it also means that everybody thinks they have an opinion that matters on it.

And, uh, and, and in that sense, they, they muddy the waters. They, they, a lot of people can, can imitate the OSINT look pretty well. They can circle things in pictures that look similar. Or as we saw in Syria a lot, they'd take two pictures of two totally different dudes and say, these are the same guy. They're both members of al-Nusra or something like that. And they would compare the eyes and compare the chins and stuff. And it looked kind of like a Bellingcat image, but it wasn't, right? Yeah. the chins and stuff and it looked kind of like a bellingcat image but it wasn't right yeah it is

that's the danger here is that like everybody can can help but everybody can hurt now too yeah yeah and it's one of those things every every aspect of this cuts both ways because like i think people started saying rightfully so after the invasion or the expanded invasion i should say of ukraine by russia, well, now all of these people who were experts in whatever the last big story was are going to become experts on the Ukrainian conflict, right? Which is absolutely a thing that happened. You get all of these people who I think are pretty bad journalists and reporters who suddenly like rushed to have their commentary on this thing that they have ignored for the last eight years. But at the

same time, it's to talk about Bellingcat, the founder of Bellingcat, my old boss, Elliot Higgins, was like literally an unemployed dude sitting on his couch when he started analyzing war footage and is now one of the most respected conflict analysts in the world. And that is a thing the internet has made possible. I think a great example would be the Caliber Obs obscura Twitter, which is just like a dude one that's being made locally in this country. And it's supposed to look like this. And you can tell because, like, that's not a person who caliber did not, like, go to some sort of fancy gun school. They just are.

I mean, it's definitely not right to call them an amateur because, quite frankly, I don't know any people who are working at institutes and better at the thing that caliber does than caliber is right. But they did just start as a person on Twitter, you know? Well, that's the thing about this. This is that you get people who were not kind of born with the idea that they were going to become analysts in this, in this field. And so you have people like both of the both the people you mentioned whom i i know personally i don't know elliot personally but i remember him from

our days our shared days on a comedy website together yes the website that shall remain nameless right um and then and then you know uh kelly burr and i have have talked on twitter a bunch and you know we're friends there. And it's just interesting to see that both of them are very real people behind their professional personality and their expertise. They're also down-to-earth real people, which is rare in this field because a lot of people are kind of elitist and gatekeeper-y. And neither of them are about that. They're both all about getting as many people doing this as possible because more eyes are better. Yeah.

Elliot is, I mean, the whole reason my career with Bellingcat existed is because I emailed him out of the blue one day and said, hey, I've been noticing this weird thing in videos of fascists talking to cops. Can I write a thing for you? And he was just like, okay. And that was, I mean, like, that was how that started. And he's, I've met him since a couple of times. And yeah, is a very, I think is very informed it because of the fact that he did not come from sort of this big institutional background, has it has a humility with which he approaches his investigations that I think, is one of the things you should look for

in trying to decide whether or not open source intelligence that you're seeing on Twitter, whatever is credible, is how conclusive are they stating their claims are? How many times do they offer only a single possibility for what something is? there's a number of things you can do. Welcome, I'm Danny Threl. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, 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. 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. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian, Elian, Elian Gonzalez. Elian, Elian, Elian Gonzalez.

At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives

in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Piece, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez

and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite

has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field,

and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better.

Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. I think at this point we should probably move to a separate area of discussion which is how's the how's this war going who's who's winning well so i i made a statement on uh my facebook page my personal facebook page about three weeks ago and i still feel confident in that statement. And that is that while Ukraine has yet to win this war, Russia's already lost. They've already lost their objectives.

They've already lost what their goals were. And at this point, it's a face-saving venture on the Russian part. But Aram, Russia carried out a cunning feint action to distract while they took the east by burning a fifth of their general staff and all of their armored vehicles. It was a cunning feint. I saw someone on Twitter posit that it was actually a move to use up all of Ukraine's ammunition. Brilliant. Yeah, just a slur. Very Zap Brannigan logic on behalf of vladimir putin

uh ukrainians have a preset kill limit and once they hit 10 generals the army will shut down right exactly um but no the war is not going well for russia um and that's not to say that it's going great for ukraine either but no one needs to do less well to succeed here yes it does it's uh i mean because one of the things that is a black box right i do think because there was a lot of discussion earlier in the war particularly like how credible are these numbers that the ukrainian government is putting out for for dead and for destroyed vehicles and i think the oscent out there like the verified vehicle casualties and stuff that we could verify means that like obviously the

ukrainian government is padding their numbers but not by as much as a lot of people might have like it's not wildly off no i saw their first casualty count i think first casualty count i think it was like 2500 dead yeah okay guys come on like, okay, guys, come on. It was like day two or three. It was like day two or three, right? And then like all of the Western intelligence. Yeah, I was like, actually, yeah. They were like, yeah, it's probably about 2,000. Oh, my God. Wow.

I mean, that perspective for some people who may not, that number may not jump out to them. We lost, you know, just shy of 3,000 soldiers killed during the Iraq War. So 2,000 in a couple days is an extraordinary number of losses. Yeah. And of course, the black box here, we don't have nearly as good an information on, is what kind of casualties has the Ukrainian military suffered and what kind of civilian casualties have been suffered.

And obviously, civilian casualties nearly always take much longer to get to the extent that it's ever. I think we have a better chance of getting objective civilian casualties for this because unlike a lot of other conflicts, these civilians being killed are civilians under the aegis of a government that is a functional state as opposed to Syria, for example, where there's basically the only people with an interest in accurately reporting the death count are a number of different non-governmental organizations because the people are being killed by one government to the other, right? technically under the Iraqi government's, you know, whatever protection seems like the wrong word to say. But I can tell you from my experience there, there was no, we still do not have anything that approaches a credible civilian death count for that conflict, and probably never will. Right. And on that note, on the civilian casualties note, we were talking earlier about how you can identify a credible oscent account versus a one that you probably shouldn't give too much credence to and one of the best ways to do that honestly is is uh look at their their morals i guess yeah if they're ever posting and celebrating

the death of civilians anywhere you should probably disregard them like yeah you'll never see elliot higgins being like yeah suck it people of bello grad like yeah you got hit with a missile like it's not it's you know it's not gonna happen yeah it's not it's the same thing as like i i get why people celebrate uh you know battlefield victories obviously i don't think especially if you're literally a ukrainian living you know in the area affected i don't think there's anything morally wrong with celebrating opposing soldiers being defeated. But I am I continue to be deeply unsettled by footage celebrating things like the destruction of armored personnel carriers full of 19 year old kids, even though a non insignificant number ofificant number of those 19-year-old kids are accessories to war crimes, right? Like, it doesn't mean, like, I'm broadly okay with it.

I do feel a lot better about celebrating losses of special forces units like the VDV that have been heavily involved in war crimes around the world. Like, that I have less kind of an issue with, but... No, and I felt that personally, you know i'm armenian and during the karabakh war in 2020 it was just day every day i would wake up to dozens of videos of armenian conscripts and soldiers being blown up and hunted from the air and people on twitter cheering for it because they were for one reason or another on the azeri side and like i get it you know like you were saying you want to share your battlefield victories and and i understand that from people who live on the

battlefield and live near the battlefield i get it it's happening to you sure people thousands of miles away cheerleading on the internet what the hell is wrong with you yeah maybe don't do that maybe don't do that like you what the hell like you know those are real people in that video that never did anything to you and this is not like a sporting event where like they go home at the end of the day and they've just lost like they're dead even when they do like i've spent a huge amount of my career talking directly face to face with victims of isis right i have been to like eight or nine refugee camps in two countries at this point specifically for that war. In addition to days spent on the refugee trail in between Hungary and Serbia, talking to to Syrians and talking to other people who had like fled the region. But at the same time, I can't help but like I've literally been under fire by ISIS and then had those ISIS guys gotten killed.

And I have celebrated and cheered when that's happened. And I'll never forget. We were embedded with this mortar team and we were under fire from this sniper and the mortar team. I forget you can in the article I wrote on it. I list the exact number of rounds fired, but it was like nine or 10, something like that, where they're gradually walking in mortars until they they get this guy um and obviously we like cheered when they fucking killed this dude because he was shooting at us and i remember like kind of on our way out away from the front my fixer sangar was like how many rounds did they drop before they got him and i was like i don't know i think it was like nine or ten i've got the footage somewhere and he was like, I don't know, I think it was like nine or 10. I've got the footage somewhere. And he was like, I wonder what else they hit.

And Sengar was born and raised in Mosul. And it was one of those things we spent the very next day. We were talking to people fleeing their homes and stuff. And not only did we see some of those people who lost family members to misses, both by Iraqi forces and by coalition aircraft and stuff. But like we came upon this dead ISIS fighter in a fighting position where you could see he had been in there with his wife for days and he had been wounded two or three days before he got killed. And you could see the evidence of the first aid she had done on him. And it was one of those things, I guess I could try to make the case that like, well,

maybe she was a captive and didn't want to do it. But quite frankly, everything I saw in there makes me believe like she cared deeply for him and stayed with him until the bitter end, trying to keep him alive and fighting. And that doesn't mean he's not like a monster and it doesn't mean he shouldn't have been killed because he's a fucking dashi who was in the middle of doing enabling a series of terrible things. fucking dashi who was in the middle of doing enabling a series of terrible things but he's also like you can't you can't ignore the humanity of of somebody when you have seen that element of what what happens in the conflict and that has stayed with me quite a bit ever since yeah and it's it's one of those things you know you, you gotta, you gotta remember that the majority of, of young men of fighting age around the world who join a military or an armed organization or an insurgent group,

whatever it may be, they do so typically because it's whomever is in charge of the area they're growing up in. Yeah. Right. You don't join the Russian army because you weighed all the options and the Brazilian army offers some good aid, you know,

some good healthcare packages. And I looked at the Italian army, but really I want to go with the Russian. No, you go with wherever you were born. Yeah. Whether, and you know, and I was talking to my roommate about this last night, we were watching this footage from the flood of 96 here in Oregon, you know, and it's this national guard helicopter where they're pushing bales of hay out of the back of the helicopter down to cows stranded out near tillamook and so depending on when you join the national guard you either fed cows hay from a helicopter or deployed to iraq yeah that's the luck of the draw right like that's not fair no they don't deserve to die any more than the guys dropping the hay out of the helicopter did right but people get yeah they get carried away with like turning it into a sport

almost and they forget that there's people on the other end and that like well some of them are threats and they may need to be dealt with it's like you know a bear comes at you in the woods you shoot it you don't you don't skin it and make fun of it like yeah you know i go kill its kids you know that's not that's not how it works you know so like yeah yeah don't don't be don't be a piece of shit like don't don't don't don't lose your humanity um because i mean one of the things that makes it easy to lose your humanity is that like videos of shit getting blown up looks dope right like it does it looks cool to watch things get blown up that's in fact I suspect how a lot of people who become very good OSINT investigators, part of what draws them in is just like, I'm sure that was a part of why caliber started obsessively researching

guns is like, they're neat. Guns are neat. You know, weapons are interesting. People are inherently interested in weaponry, which is not a good thing. It just a thing you know it's not a bad thing either it's just like a thing human beings will always be interested in because warfare is as natural to us as eating and fucking right um well you're talking about the mortars right the mortars walking in and there's this video on on youtube of made by an american navy attack squadron um of them dropping bomb after bomb on targets in mosul and and and uh raka places like that yeah and it's set to uh the devil's gonna cut you down and every time there's a beat in the music you see a bomb drop yeah and some of these bombs it's like four bombs dropping at a time dropping an eight-story building and so i'm sure there was a guy inside there with a

weapon but like you want to tell me there wasn't anybody else in that eight story building. And like, okay. Yeah. You're celebrating the death of the combatant there, but like also all those other people are being celebrated indirectly. And so like, you got to remember that,

like these bombs explode and they take out a large area and these fights are happening in cities a lot of the time. Yeah. The weaponry that the United States uses is more precise than something like a barrel bomb, but not by as many orders of magnitude as you would hope. Um, right.

And precision doesn't precision matters. Yes. It's not a non important thing, not an unimportant thing, but ultimately it doesn't matter if your missile went right into that living room full of civilians and blew them all up. Or if you leveled the block and maybe you know killed them indirectly like you got to know what you're hitting the target is what really matters right so it doesn't matter if you can

hit the target you got to make sure it's the right target and that's where we're starting to have issues now it's like we can hit targets really well we just aren't always sure that it's the right yes as opposed i mean and and you are seeing, so let's, let's talk about, we started this chatting about Ukrainian, a potential Ukrainian war crime. What we have absolute documentation of is a tremendous amount of war crimes on behalf of the Russian invaders, including a thing that they have done repeatedly in Syria, which is the targeting of hospitals and medical facilities with facilities with terrible civilian casualties as a result. And this is something that the New York Times actually published an

incredible article based on a mix of OSINT and like, I'm not entirely sure how they got them, but combat flight recorders, like the audio that these Russian fighter pilots were sending back and forth to command as they attacked hospitals in Syria. So we actually have a tremendous amount of detail about like what it looks like inside the cockpit and in like the control room and whatnot as airstrikes are being ordered on medical facilities. I really recommend people check that article out. It's pretty harrowing shit. But yeah, are you are you surprised at all by kind of what you are, what you've seen so far in behalf of the Russian forces in Ukraine? No, no, not even the slightest. Because I followed the war in Syria rather closely.

And I mean, there was a point when they had to stop marking the hospitals with hospital markings because the Russians would target them so consistently. The United Nations had to stop giving the Russians the coordinates of the hospitals in Aleppo because they kept getting targeted. There was an aid convoy that was struck, I believe by Syrian aircraft, but it was the targeting was given to them by Russian aircraft. It was just an aid convoy coming into Aleppo, a United Nations aid convoy, and it was bombed and strafed repeatedly for several hours. aid convoy and it was bombed and strafed repeatedly for you know several hours um things like that that happened so regularly in syria to the relative silence of the rest of the world um that led me to believe that when they go into ukraine they're not going to be any gentler um a lot of people suspected early on that like well they it's harder to demonize people who look like you so they're not going to

have as much of an easy time demonizing ukrainians and i think there has been some degree of difficulty with that at least in terms of some of the conscripts on the russian side but the other thing we're seeing is that like a lot of these a lot of people seem to genuinely believe the mission of denazifying ukraine and so if that's what you believe you're doing then the the bombing doesn't surprise it doesn't become a surprise right if you think that you're going into ukraine to suppress it and occupy it then bombing cities full of russians russians and russian speakers seems like a bad idea but if you believe that they're all nazis then it makes sense that you might just

blow them up because they're all the enemy i'm not saying i'm not condoning it i'm saying no but i mean that is literally what the u.s government and the british government did in world war ii you know right exactly 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. 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.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez.

Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family

separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game.

If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs

and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There have been claims made that what Russia is doing in places like Mariupol amounts to an act of genocide. What is your opinion on that?

Genocide is a big word. It is, it is. There's a ton of letters in it. It's a big word. Yeah. But it has a lot of meaning behind it in the sense that just because somebody is killing large numbers of people and doing so in heinous ways does not make it a genocide. You have to prove it was an attempt to destroy culture and destroy heritage

and things of that nature. As it stands, I would say that it looks likely that there are signs of potential genocide in Mariupol. I am not confident enough to come out and say that I conclusively think it's happening, but the way that it looks like the city is being deliberately targeted to either force the entire population to flee or to radicalize them.

Yeah. One way or the other is it goes beyond military targeting. You know, I think the thing that were, that I, that is the most like troubling potential sign of, of an intention of genocide is the reports that the Russian government has been evacuating civilians that they have cat in parts of Mariupol, they have

captured to places in Russia, which is this is a misconception, you don't have to just be killing people, as you stated, it's an attempt to destroy a culture, which you can do by killing, but you can also do by things like separating people, moving people, like forced migration and whatnot. Like there's aspects of that. Again, look at like the genocide of the Native Americans in the United States. It was not all straight up killing. A lot of it was forced migration, which is an act of genocide as well. And that's the kind of thing where I'm kind of waiting for more reporting on that to hear exactly what's happening and the extent to what's happening. But that really troubles me in terms of potential signs of a genocide.

Yeah. And when they coined the term genocide after World War II, it was with reference to the Holocaust, but what they had in mind was the Armenian genocide when they drafted these words up. And because it was beyond just sheer number of people killed if we're talking sheer number of people killed the nazis also killed six million other people yeah in addition to the six million jews they killed the reason we talk about the jews is one six million is a lot of people and two it was a deliberate attempt to destroy their entire culture yeah make them have never existed. And that's very different and very scary. Dying is also very bad.

But the idea of dying and then all of the people who were like you just don't exist anymore and all your books and your literature are gone, that's monstrous. And that's why there's a difference between genocide and mass killing. Yeah. And that's up the Armenian genocide. We'll talk about this at some point on Behind the Bastards, but you mentioned that that was kind of what the people, when the term genocide was invented, that was what people were looking at, even though it was kind of a direct response to the Holocaust. It's also worth noting that like, when the Nazis planned the Holocaust, they used the Armenian genocide as a model. Hitler's literal statement was when people when he was asked during like, one of his his dinners with a bunch of Nazi officials, like, what, what about kind of the

international reaction to what we're planning to do? He was like, well, who remembers the Armenians? You know, like that was his, that was his attitude is like, we'll get away with it. Cause nobody did anything during this genocide. Right. And,

and, and I think while I would hesitate to call the entire war in Ukraine, a genocide. Yes. As of yet, I would say that there's a similarity between the Armenian genocide and the, and how that led to the Holocaust. There's a similarity between the Armenian genocide and how that led to the Holocaust. There's a similarity between the Russian war crimes committed in Syria and how that led to the war crimes being committed in Ukraine in the sense that if the world had stood up earlier, we would not be seeing this now.

Yeah. The problem is the world looked the other way when the Russians bombed hospitals in Syria, when they repeatedly bombed hospitals. In fact, the world didn't just look away. A lot of people in the West mocked it. I'm sure you've heard it as often as I have, the last hospital in Aleppo joke, right? Where they're, oh, they're bombing the last hospital in Aleppo again. Well, the reason that happened is because when you bomb the hospital, they build a new one and then it gets bombed again three days later. So they've bombed the last one again. So it wasn't a joke.

It was just a tragedy that kept playing out that people couldn't really fathom, so they mocked. And so when that's the attitude of a lot of the world, it's no surprise that what's happened in Ukraine has run out of control. Where do you think we go from here? What are you expecting to kind of see next within this conflict? You know, the most recent kind of reporting is that Russia's pulling, Russia's framing it as they're pulling back from Kiev to focus on other fronts. The Ukrainian side is saying like, well, they've been defeated around Kiev and they're pulling back. What do you think kind of we're seeing next? What is your opinion on kind of the next stages here? So I think it really depends on Vladimir Putin's power and how long he remains in a position of unchecked power. I'm not saying necessarily he will fall from power.

I'm saying that how long can he go as the only guy calling the shots? Because as it stands right now, it doesn't look like he's the same Vladimir Putin that we were used to dealing with. It seems like something may have changed with him. And that's a wild card because if Vladimir Putin wants to continue to escalate here, he can continue to do so because he may not be getting the same reporting that we are about the condition of his army. He may think his army is doing better than they're doing and that they actually are just repositioning.

So if that's the case, there's a chance that he'll escalate against potentially a NATO country. I find that unlikely, but there's still a chance for it. I think what's more likely is that we're going to see the Russian military refocus its efforts in the east, in Donetsk and Luhansk, with an attempt to create a land bridge to Crimea through the area, through Mariupol and Melitopol area. And I think they're going to try to rucify the area as much as possible and remove as many of the ukrainians as possible um one way or the other and i don't know if they'll be successful in that but i think simultaneously while they do that they're going to try to tie down and destroy as much of the ukrainian military as possible which will be difficult because the units in the east are ukraine's best equipped units

so i don't know how this ends i don't see a reasonable end to this insight but that's just because there's too many variables at the moment yeah i do think one thing that's kind of worth looking at this war in an historical context a number of comparisons have been made to both of the world wars here um i think the thing that it most reminds me of is world war, not in that it's a conflagration on that scale, or in that it's a similar war in terms of the combat. But it is an example of the first big war that utilizes a variety of weapons and tactics that have been battlefield tested in a series of smaller wars, right? And I think we are seeing in Ukraine for the first time

the actual, I think one thing that we have seen is that drones, and I'm not talking about the big ones here, you know, they get a lot of the Bayraktar and stuff like that gets a lot of attention, but like small, the kind of drones anyone listening to this could pick up and buy today, right? Those drones, I think, are proving to be a game changer on a tactical level in a similar manner to the machine gun in the turn of the last century. Yeah. The century before the last century.

Yeah. With the drones, I've often, machine guns are a good comparison. I've often thought of it as like the airplane. Yeah. We had airplanes and we even had combat airplanes before World War I. We didn't have very many of them because nobody really realized the utility of them in war. And then as the war got closer and then the war started,

countries started to slowly build up these small fleets of aircraft and then by the end of the war everybody had an air force. I think we're going to see the same thing with these small consumer drones is that like by the end of this war or whatever conflagrations are coming after it every military in the world is going to have little little you know phantom phantom threes

or whatever basically for every infantry squad one of the things that's so wild is that if if you again if you sitting here right now have not an insignificant amount of money, let's say $3,000 to $4,000, and enough mechanical competence to carry out modest repairs on your own car. You could, with things entirely available over the shelf, build a weapons system capable of disabling a variety of armored vehicles at night. of armored vehicles at night. You know, like you, that is a thing that individual people, you could do that and you could have it up and running in a matter of days. I'm imagining the next protest

in unnamed city. Yeah. And a consumer drone flies over the police line and drops a little thing on him that says bang. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Like there's a lot of people,

even as influential and meaningful as they've been on the battlefield in Ukraine, I think people still are kind of slow to understand the extent like there is one of the wildest stories that's come out of it is that the Ukrainian military has a an outfit of civilian drone operators using hacked and home built drones to attack Russian forces at night. And they have been – the documented efficacy of their raids has been significant. And I can remember spending a brief period of time with an Iraqi military unit that was just using DJI Phantoms that they had rigged to drop what were essentially mortar shells with shuttlecocks on them from a height. And they were very effective at killing people, as ISIS drones were effective at sort of spotting mortars for folks. Well, and one of the things I saw ISIS use their drones for, to great effect, wasn't so much to kill large numbers of enemy soldiers. It was to do the same thing that American predator drones

and Reaper drones had done for decades by that point to terror groups, which is let them know you can't gather in large numbers. If you gather in large numbers, you're a target. And so you saw Iraqi soldiers saying no more than two or three in a group. Any more than that will get targeted. And so they flipped the equation, basically. Yep. And don't. I mean, one of the reasons why I have a general policy heavily informed by my time in Mosul that the last place I want to be in a anywhere near a war zone is an armored vehicle. Because that's really unless you are in something that's heavily up armored, like an MRAP, little bombs dropped by drones can do significant damage to something like a Humvee. And that's exactly what you target. You don't target a Toyota Corolla with a drone like that, unless you specifically know an

individuals in that Corolla that you want to kill. But you may just behind the lines, see a target of opportunity in an armored, see an armored, lightly armored vehicle and drop a wet ammunition on it. And that's one of the things this has done. There was a lot of talk prior to the expanded Russian invasion about how immediately Russia was going to get air superiority. And that's obviously a bigger story than just drones. There's a lot of factors in why Russia – it's probably accurate to say they have superiority in a number of parts of the war, but they don't have supremacy. It's not like an absolute matter. And part of that is because it's not really possible to.

matter and part of that is because um it's not really possible to at this moment someday i suspect there will be more effective ways of stopping drones and in at like a theater level um maybe but it certainly hasn't happened yet yeah yeah and and that's the thing you know there's there's the drones and then there's also on the ukrainian side they you know i think they recognize that air force against air force Force, the Russians have a numerical superiority. So you can deny the Russians air supremacy by shooting down their planes with manpads. You don't have to have an Air Force to deny your opponent air supremacy. You just have to deny them the ability to freely operate in your airspace. And this is one of those things. There's been a lot of talk about a no-fly zone, which I tend to think would be a bad idea in the traditional sense, in terms of like the US and NATO sending in planes to down Russian planes over Ukraine. to stop planes from bombing cities is, broadly speaking, one of the most ethical things you can do in terms of shipping munitions around the world.

the other advantage is that man pads i'm sure somebody could turn it into a lethal ground weapon but they're pretty hard to yeah use against ground targets against houses things like that not really what they're designed for so it's not like just handing over you know uh some indiscriminate weapon to the ukrainians to use against russian cities you're giving them a weapon that's specifically used against military aircraft. Most MANPADs can't reach the altitude that airliners are at even. Yep. So I think that's probably what we want to talk about today.

You want to plug your pluggables, tell people where they can find you and your analysis out in the wild? Yeah. So you can follow me on Twitter. My handle is at Shabani and aram and uh i work uh i publish occasionally with the new lines institute uh so you can see my work there as well and i have a website that i seldom update uh the folder gap.com um hasn't been updated in

probably eight months now because i've been tired but um yeah those are the places to find me and uh dms are open on Twitter. So if you ever have questions or anything like that, let me know. I'm happy to talk with anybody who's got questions on these kinds of things. Hell yeah. Well, that's gonna be us. So, you know, enjoy this analysis of the, of the war in Ukraine before we return you to your regularly scheduled multi-part series on Nazi cat girls, the primary focus of this podcast.

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. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of riot. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right.

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. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds

and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into Tex Elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy, Elian Gonzalez, was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home

and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.