Julian Dorey Podcast - 😳 #92 - The Only Reporter Putin BANNED From Russia | David Satter

Episode Date: March 24, 2022

(***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ David Satter is a journalist, author, historian, and foreign policy expert –– who is widely regarded as one of the world’s preeminent experts on Vladimir Putin / Russia. In December 2013, after years of exclusive reporting on Putin’s crimes against humanity, David became the first Western Journalist ever banned from Russia (by their government) in the post-Cold War era.    From 1976 until his banishment in 2013, David spent the majority of his time living in the Soviet Union (which later became Russia) while working as the Moscow Correspondent for the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. He is perhaps best known as the first researcher who claimed that Vladimir Putin and Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) were behind the 1999 Russian Apartment Bombings, the 2002 Nord-Ost Siege, and the 2004 Beslan School Attack.   Over the past 2 decades, David has authored 5 books on Russia / The Soviet Union. Furthermore, he is also a Senior Fellow at both the Foreign Policy Research Institute & The Hudson Institute –– as well as a Visiting Scholar at Johns Hopkins. ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - Intro; The story behind Putin’s government banning David from Russia in 2013; David’s backstory working as a Moscow correspondent; Recounting the fallout of post-Soviet Russia 16:19 - David was the first reporter to blow the whistle on Putin; the 1999 Russian Apartment Bombings; The Boris Yeltsin years in Russia; Chechnya Background and the First Chechen War; Putin’s rise to the Russian Presidency 36:04 - David breaks down the timeline and full details of the 1999 Russian Apartment Bombings; “Soldiers Guarding Sugar”; The Chechen Dagestan Invasion Inside Job; Putin’s popularity ratings post-bombing and 2000 Election; Does Putin look at himself as a Soviet?; David talks about his earliest suspicions on the bombing 59:13 - The brutal story behind the 2002 Nord-Ost Siege (Moscow Theater Hostage Crisis); The 2004 Beslan School Massacre; Putin to stay in power for life? 1:09:56 - What happened in Ukraine in 2014 (Maidan and Putin’s annexation of Crimea); Malaysia Airlines Flight 17; Did David see the Ukraine Invasion coming?; Russian Government Murders: Boris Nemtsov, Alexander Litvinenko (in London), Ana Politkovskaya; Bill Browder’s book, Red Notice 1:24:03 - Barack Obama’s Reset Policy with Russia; David recalls a meeting he and Boris Nemtsov had with the Obama administration; What the US strategy towards Putin should be; The Julian Assange CIA report from Yahoo; The murder of Ana Politkovskaya’s Chechen source 1:41:46 - David and Julian discuss the public comparisons between Putin and the most notorious leader of all time; Back to the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 aftermath; The Ukraine Invasion’s Effects on NATO; Many Russian people are victims of the regime 2:02:34 - Discussing the ominous calls in the media for a “No Fly Zone” in Ukraine (which could effectively cause WWIII); We need to find ways to get proper information to the Russian people 2:12:29 - David lays out the history of Propaganda in Russia; Analyzing the psychology of the Russian peopl... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

the government effectively blamed it on the Chechens yes so then you get to start the second war and they began a new war with Putin in charge of the war this is your typical when you look at the definition of like false flag I mean that you might as well have a picture of this well yeah indeed but the thing is that it was they would have gotten away with it had it not been for the fact that they made one mistake. And what was that? They tried to blow up a fifth building. What's cooking, everybody? If you are on YouTube right now, please hit that subscribe button, hit that like button on the video.

And as always, if you have a second, would love to see you drop a comment down in the video comment section as well. I do want to say to everyone who has been sharing the links to these episodes with friends, thank you so much. That is not only big for the YouTube algorithm algorithm it is also huge for word of mouth which is the best possible thing this show can get and even the links on spotify and apple by the way same deal when you're sharing around the show with other friends who you think might enjoy a particular episode or might enjoy the show as a whole it doesn't get any better than that that's how we build the audience and and that's really all thanks to you guys spreading the word so thank you to everyone who's been doing that and when we have a special guest like this in

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and leave a five-star review if you have a second and I look forward to seeing you guys again for future episodes now i am joined in the bunker today privileged to be joined in the bunker today by mr david satyr i was going to do a longer intro and provide some context for the things we talked about but i just decided against it i recorded one i'm like no let's just get right into this thing what I will say for now is that David Satter is perhaps the preeminent psychological analyst and evaluator of Vladimir Putin in the Western world he has had the story on Vladimir Putin for 25 years he has been trying to tell everyone just how bad this guy is, specifically with things that he's capable of.

You will hear all about that today, especially the background of it in the first hour. But I don't know how he doesn't punch air every day in anger at the fact that people seemingly never listened. I don't know how he's such a nice, happy-go-lucky guy, and credit to him for being that, because you will hear him speak today, and this is a very scholarly, calm, informational, deliberate guy, a very thoughtful thinker, and he keeps things even-keeled

while talking about very, very difficult topics. So it was an honor to have him in here. He splits his time between D.C. and paris so he had just come back from paris and had done events up in new york came down here spent the day with me talking me off camera for a long time just a great great guy you can check out any of i believe it's his six books on the ussr and russia they're terrific i read one right before he came in here, one of the recent ones, and it was absolutely phenomenal. So I hope you guys enjoy everything he has to say.

I hope you enjoy the very nuanced conversations that had to be have on this issue and what's going on. If you want some details on the list of things we got to, check out the timestamps in the description. It fills out a lot of the stuff that was in there but all in all really really appreciate david doing this and i hope you guys enjoy the episode so that said you know what it is i'm julian dory and this is this is one of the great questions in our culture

where's the news you're giving opinions and calling them facts This is one of the great questions in our culture. Where is the nuance? You're giving opinions and calling them facts. You feel me? Everyone understands this, but few seem to do it. If you don't like the status quo, start asking questions. So December 25th, 2013. You are headed over to the Russian embassy in kiev ukraine to get your visa updated so that you could go live in moscow yet again i guess for what like

a few years well i was actually living in moscow at that time i i had an apartment there i had all my things in moscow oh you already had oh yeah i had already been in moscow for uh for a number of months uh i i had uh uh basically organized my life there and uh yeah absolutely and uh all my you know my personal things were all in moscow my apartment and uh i had the only reason i left Moscow was to revalidate the visa, and I had the necessary documents to do that. So you show up at the embassy, you hand them the documents, you're expecting to go to Moscow, and then they tell you what? Well, what happened is they said that there was no telex from the foreign ministry authorizing the issuance of a visa. What's a telex? Telex is the way we used to communicate years ago.

It's a kind of a machine which you print out messages on. Oh, is that a telegram? Yeah. That's what it is? Basically a telegram, yeah. But it's a machine for receiving telegrams, let's put it that way. And that's what they were still using at the embassy at that time. And in any case, they said that they didn't have any authorization from Moscow to issue a visa.

This was actually December 24th. It was Christmas Eve. And since Ukraine is an Orthodox country, the 25th is not celebrated as Christmas. The Orthodox Christmas is a little later. And as a result, the embassy was open on the 25th. But on the 24th, the diplomat in charge in the Russian consulate said that we just don't have an authorization here. And I said, but look, I've got the necessary documents on me. And he said, I can't explain it. I said, have you ever had a situation in which someone who had been given the necessary documents did not get a...

It won't take long to tell you Neutral's ingredients. Vodka, soda, natural flavors. So, what should we talk about? No sugar added? Neutral. Refreshingly simple. An authorization from Moscow. This is the first time it's ever happened.

And then I called. He advised me to call the foreign ministry. And I did call the Russian foreign ministry. And they said that I should contact a diplomat by the name of Mr. Gruby. I remember his last name. Alex. Alex Gruby. Yeah.

And in any case, I called him the next day. And he says, I've got something to read to you. And that was a bad sign. And he said that the competent authorities, which is the term they use for the intelligence services. Is that the FSB? Yeah, the FSB, the Federal Security Agency, has decided that your presence on the territory of the Russian Federation is undesirable. And you're banned from entering the country. Now, of course, all of my personal belongings were already entering the country now of course every I all of my my personal belongings were already in the country but that meant I couldn't go

back to get them in the end my son went and cleared out the apartment oh they let your son in well yeah I mean they didn't have any any any objection to him coming in and just taking his first personal articles which is what they what he did but i couldn't come back in and i haven't been allowed back in since and what's notable about this is you were not just any other guy you had been effectively a journalist covering the ussr and later russia for almost four decades at that point correct absolutely and uh i was the first uh american journalist to be expelled from russia to be banned from russia uh since the cold war and i still hold that distinction there hasn't been another one and weren't you also the last guy to be let back in after the Cold War too or something like that?

When I was the last person to be given permission to enter the country after – and to be accredited after the Gorbachev reforms had already completely transformed Russia. And taken it from the U.S. as well. And they had opened up the country to virtually everyone, except for a small number of people, and I was the last one on that list. So I can claim to have been both the last person to be let in and the first person to be expelled. When was the first time you were banned, 82? What happened was I left.

There was actually an attempt to expel me in 1979. At that time, I was accused of hooliganism. Hooliganism. Yeah, and my visa was my accreditation – I'm sorry. I was given temporary accreditation and then that was withdrawn. And what happened was both the American embassy and the British embassy – I was an American citizen but working for an English newspaper, the Financial Times of London. Is that the only, I'm sorry, is that the only paper you work for? I thought you work for a couple though. Well, Wall Street Journal too? Wall Street Journal came later. Okay, got it.

But when I was in the Soviet Union, I was the accredited correspondent to the London Financial Times. And it was unusual in those years. Now, of course, it's quite common. A lot of Americans work for the Financial Times, the Economist. A lot of Brits work for American publications, Australians, and so on. But in those days, it was quite unusual for an American to be the correspondent in Moscow of the Financial Times. It's the height of the Cold War.

Yeah, it's the height of the Cold War and the Russians, or the Soviets, assumed that neither the British nor the Americans would really defend me under those conditions. But they both did. And both the British and the Americans threatened to expel Soviet correspondents if I was not allowed to stay in Moscow. And they backed down in the end. And I was able to stay in the Soviet Union until 1982 when I finally left. But after that, I was not able to come back. I was banned from entering the country until 1989, 1990, when the Gorbachev reforms had reached such a point that banning an American correspondent made no sense at all

because they were dismantling the Soviet legacy and dismantling the Soviet Union. Whether they realized it or not is another question. So there was, as I was informed, there was a list of correspondence they didn't want back, but they whittled that down and they finally allowed me back. At that point, I had a relationship with Reader's Digest to write pieces for them. And they wanted Reader's Digest to open up a Russian edition. And Reader's Digest said, unless I was allowed back in

and given accreditation, they were going to cancel plans for the Russian edition. And the Russians gave in at that point and said, okay, you can just come back. It's got to be such a weird time too, though, because it was such a flip of the switch. I mean, I guess in a way throughout the 80s and you'd know a lot more than me you could see it cooling off as far as like the stringent nature

of the ussr and what it was built to be but you know i wasn't alive when it fell i talked to people who were and they were just like yo one day one day it was this country and another day it was this whole other thing. And the shock of that from like an organizational standpoint, like if you're running the new government or working in the new system or a holdover from the old government and now you have a new set of rules that you follow, I can only imagine the number of cultural shifts that are occurring all at once and the frankly little decisions like this like oh do we let this person in do we let that person in it's like it's got to be crazy oh it was uh you know people people uh who believed in communism suddenly found that their their faith was shattered uh you have to remember that the soviet union was based on lies and on the suppression of truthful information and a false version of history.

All of this was fed to people generation after generation, and it was obligatory. So when Gorbachev began his policy of what was called glasnost. It was a kind of revolution because they, for the first time, started telling the truth about a lot of what had been hidden. And this created a psychological crisis for millions of people. I mean, people wrote letters to the newspapers saying, it looks like everything I believed in was false. My life has no meaning. The ideals that I thought were important were based on nothing but lies.

And it was a real psychological crisis for a lot of people. And a lot of people, in a way, didn't survive it. What do you mean? Because once the Soviet Union fell, and the whole economic system was transformed, people who had been programmed to fit into the old way of life, and who had justified that with a lot of false beliefs were faced with the necessity to adapt to something that nothing in their previous experience had prepared them for. And not everyone, you know, there are some people who are adaptable, but a lot of people are very rigid, especially in a system like that.

And they became severely alcoholic. They became ill. There was a rise in suicides. There were murders. There was accidents. Accidents that should not have happened and the would not have happened if the person had not been in a state of great distress well what you're getting at starting to get out there is obviously what we then saw transpire in the 90s and I would love to talk about that at some point today because I thinkussian history in the 90s is to say it's an overlooked topic at least in america would be an understatement and i have to

say i'm i'm very very excited to have you in here because for people listening right now i was literally embarrassed that i didn't know who you were about three weeks ago until a few people pointed you out because in my opinion obviously now with everything going on over there for sure but even before that you're someone who your name should be known by everyone and you're known obviously in all the international reporting circles and and things like that because you've been doing this a long time but you are the guy from western media who blew the whistle on putin and someone who i trust a lot with their opinion said of you, this guy knows Putin better than Putin. If you want to know about Putin, you talk to David Satter.

And I was like, say no more. But what really blew me away was the recounting of the case that you first were on to Putin with. And so I read your book and I always the age of delirium is the one that I remember right away but I can't get this title right so I literally still the less you know the better you sleep that's it I had it written right here because I kept on doing like the Luca Brasi line from the doctors this sleeper from the godfather the sleep with the fishes but yeah the less you know the better you sleep brilliant book and you outline in there you rehash some of your reporting that you had in 1999 on vladimir putin's rise and what

left me speechless is i had read up on it before i read the book but then actually reading the evidence that you uncovered and how this all came to be and And like I said, we'll go back to the 90s. But it is insane to me that given especially the nature of how we're talking about Putin in the media right now, which righteously so is negative. It is amazing to me that people do not know this story. So for everyone listening or most people listening who are not aware of this, can you explain what happened in 1999 and how Putin then became president in early 2000? Yeah, I'll be glad to do that. And I certainly agree that this is an episode that is so important. I mean, I personally regard it as the greatest political provocation since the burning of the Reichstag. And what happened? Well, just as background, the economic system in Russia after the fall of communism began to be transformed. You have to remember that under communism everything was state-owned and the so-called young reformers set about creating a market-based economy

with private ownership. And they didn't particularly care who the private owners were. The idea was to distribute state property and put it in private hands as quickly as possible. Were they trying to move to capitalism, per se? Absolutely. They were trying to, but they didn't understand that capitalism requires the rule of law. So it didn't matter if there were criminals who received the property. It didn't matter if there were criminals who received the property it didn't matter if the

process was totally corrupt it didn't matter if it's a beautiful thing watching more and more of you invest in an eight sleep pod pro cover every week and therefore invest in yourself and your sleep the eight sleep pod pro cover comes in queen or king sizes it goes right on top of your current mattress and it ties directly into eight sleeps proprietary app which measures your sleep stages throughout the night your body temperature and a whole bunch of other scientific things that affect your sleep so that you get the deepest sleep possible and as i like to say you'll wake up in the morning after sleeping six hours and feel like you slept eight so if you use the link in my description,

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but they put it in the hands of a criminal group, all of which had connections to those in power. And this group was mostly concerned with pillaging the economy. The national income in Russia fell by half. That didn't happen even under Nazi occupation. But perhaps the most important thing is the death rate in Russia soared. It rose vertically. And if you take that period, the 1990s, when these so-called reforms were being implemented, it's estimated that there were six million surplus deaths. Now... What do you mean surplus deaths? I want to try to explain this. This is a demographers,

it's called surplus mortality or surplus deaths. Demographers make certain projections about what the population of a country is going to be, you know, after a certain number of years. And they do it by extrapolating from existing trends. So if the death rate is pretty much what they predicted, then they consider that the model is correct. But if there's a discrepancy, as there was in Russia, with many, many more people dying than they could have anticipated as a result of the analysis of existing factors. They refer to that as surplus mortality or surplus deaths. Well, that figure in the 1990s was 6 million people.

And how big was the population approximately? I mean, you see there was also migration from the former Soviet republics. There were other factors. There were people who left. But the population was roughly in the high 140 million, so say 146, 147. And then there were also, you know, there were also births, but that high death rate in Russia was not duplicated in any industrial country. The only place you could find a death rate like that was in African countries that were at war like Somalia. Right. I see what you're doing here, by the way. So I should have known this. This makes more sense. You are going through some of the 90s. So just to to make is that with this high death worthless, that it was pointless to struggle.

The economic situation was grim. It was hard to get decent medical care. This, plus, of course, the poverty, created, of course, an extreme reaction against Yeltsin. And Boris Yeltsin was the guy. Yeah, Boris Yeltsin was the first Russian, the first president of post-Soviet Russia. And his popularity ratings fell to virtually zero. I mean, officially officially it was two percent in any survey they say that six percent don't understand the question so we can we can we can guess that maybe no one in russia supported yeltsin or at least very few people and this And this was the setting for the events that took place in the summer of 1999.

Now, I was in Moscow at that time. Were you there for much of the 90s or were you kind of back and forth? Yes, yeah, I was going back and forth, yeah. Okay. I was going and spending, but going back and forth, but spending very long periods of time in in in russia so you're saying you're that's important because you're seeing this up close yeah you're you're in the community you speak russian you talk with the people you can see for yourself you can see the changes it's got to be that point you made early on there and and when you were

talking about the lack of information that's a crazy thing especially in america to think about but especially today given the internet you know everything's a click away but these people effectively for 70 years whatever it was were fed one form of news in huge air quotes there you know they were they were read one this is the way it is it's like animal farm like you work and you like it and that's it and now suddenly you're like oh there's there's brands out there we're gonna let them in oh there's there's a whole economy out there that works an entirely different way we're we're gonna do that too and i'm just trying to imagine like being i don't know like a 40 year old person with a couple kids and suddenly being

like what it's it's a it's it's impossible to imagine it well it it was a mental crisis for a lot of people uh who and many people could not adapt uh one of the indications was the you know the suicide rate which went way up yeah that was one one among many. But the point is we get to 99, we get to the summer of 99, and after this period of grinding poverty for most of the people and premature death for many of them, the question is who's going to be the successor to Boris Yeltsin? Will it be someone that he appoints or that he anoints? Will it be someone who repudiates the harm that he's done to the country? And it was at this point that Vladimir Putin became prime minister.

He had been the head of the FSB, the intelligence service. Which was the KGB before that, right? Yeah, yeah. In Soviet? This is the successor organization. Got it. Then he became the prime minister. And in a telephone call with Bill Clinton, Yeltsin said that the next president of Russia is going to be Vladimir Putin.

He's a good man. You'll have no problem working with him, et cetera, et cetera. How Yeltsin could have been so sure that Putin would be the next president when he himself had a popularity rating of 2% and when Putin, in the only opinion poll that was taken at the time had a a popularity rating of two percent uh what what is is a question that bothered a a number of people at the time but the next day uh apartment buildings began to be blown up in the middle of the night in Moscow.

And this is the story you broke. Yeah, and this was the provocation, this was the crime that brought Putin to power. And what happened was that four apartment buildings were blown up in the middle of the night. The targets were apartment buildings in working class areas, just ordinary Russian citizens, not government buildings, not the homes of the oligarchs or of the super rich. In Moscow and...

Moscow and two other cities, Buynaksk and Volgodonsk. And there was nationwide panic. How many people died? 300. And the authorities accused Chechen rebels. Now, Chechnya is a region in Russia in the North Caucasus, which had achieved its independence as a result of a war of independence that was fought in the early 1990s.

That was the first Chechen war? The first Chechen war. And they were accused of blowing up these buildings, and that became the justification for a second Chechen War. And that second Chechen War was pursued successfully in part because the Russians had prepared for it well in advance they were using banned weapons cluster bombs for example and uh thermobaric weapons that are banned for for uh use against civilians but they use them and they they made progress in the war they bomb they bombed the grozny market uh they Grozny is the capital city of of the main city of Chechnya and Chechnya just to be clear on that it is it's a Muslim stronghold of I guess like Caucasian what are supposed to be Russians but they were they were when the Soviet Union was around, they were a part

of the Soviet Union, right? Yeah, no, Chechnya is a region that was part of the Soviet Union, and it's inhabited by a nationality that is Muslim but rather tolerant in terms of its religious attitudes. Now there have become more extreme Muslims in Chechnya, in part because that's been cultivated. But the culture of the place was always religiously tolerant. And how many, like approximately how many people are in Chechnya? Only about a million. It's not huge.

No, and the territory is the size of the state of Connecticut. like approximately how many people only about a million only it's not huge no and this the the territory is the size of the state of connecticut it's not even as big as new jersey wow um so it's a really small territory compared to the vast territory of the russian federation so they had had the first chechen war in like maybe 94 to 96 where they then as you said declared their independence yeah the the the Chechens because they defeated the Russians had created you know were you know created a separate state and the Russians agreed to it they were defeated in the first Chechen war, but they never really gave up because in 1999, as we were saying, when the buildings were blown up, the Chechens were accused and the Russians launched a new war. Which they won. Ultimately, they won, yeah.

They were able to pacify Chechen, but – And did they take it in as a part of Russia? Yeah, it's now a constituent part of Russia, at least officially. Everything would have worked out. And then, well, as a result of the success of the war, Putin, who had been put in charge of the war, became popular overnight. This is a person no one had ever heard of. When he was nominated to be prime minister, the nomination was ridiculed in the press as something ridiculous for such for such uh an unknown person without political experience to be named prime minister it struck people as strange he wasn't the this was a

question i had from your book i i don't know if if this was cleared up so i did not realize yeltsin named another guy as the prime minister and it sounded like maybe I read it wrong but it was only for a few months or something then he fired him and then brought in Putin. Yeah I mean Putin was the fifth person to occupy that post in a year and a half. Oh wow a lot. And so all of the candidates were carefully vetted to see if they would do what Yeltsin wanted them to do, which was to protect his family, which was massively corrupt. Because he thought if he lost power because of his low approval... Well, he thought that anybody who took power after him would immediately begin to investigate his family's corruption,

plus the corruption that accompanied the whole privatization of state property. Which we'll come back to. That's the oligarch thing. Yeah. But what is the, just for people out there to understand, because I don't, what is the key differences back then between the presidency and the prime ministership when it comes to powers that they have?

Well, at that time, the president really was all-powerful. I mean, not all-powerful, but his power could not be checked by the government or by the legislative branch. This was the result of the Constitution that was adopted in 1993. But we can come to that. But what I think we ought to look at now is how then in this situation where Yeltsin had zero popularity practically, he took this unknown and uncharismatic person, Vladimir Putin, and first of all predicted he would be president and then saw that his prediction was fulfilled. fulfilled because the bombings traumatized the country and redirected the people's attention away from the corruption that had flourished under Putin and toward the Chechens who became a convenient enemy. And the war against the Chechens resembled a holy crusade against malicious terrorists who murdered innocent Russian people in their beds.

Can we go back to that bombing? Just so that, because you said the high-level details. There was three different cities, Moscow and then the other two, you said the high level details there was three different cities moscow and then the other two you said and it was over maybe like 12 days or something like that yeah yeah i think it's 12 days actually and as you said over 300 russians died you know the government effectively blamed it on the chechens yes so then you get to start the second war. And they began a new war with Putin in charge of the war. And so this is your typical – when you look at the definition of like false flag, I mean you might as well have a picture of this. Well, yeah, indeed.

But the thing is that they would have gotten away with it had it not been for the fact that they made one mistake. And what was that? They tried to blow up a fifth building. But by this time, the population was very vigilant. And someone saw them putting a bomb or putting sacks of some strange substance in the basement of a building in Ryazan, a city southeast of Moscow, called the police. The police came, went down into the basement, saw the sacks with a detonator and timers attached, ran up in panic, called the local bomb squad.

They tested it, tested positive for hexagon. Now, hexagon is the high explosive that was used in the other four bombings. Same bomb. Yeah, it was the same bomb. And they deactivated the bomb, but the entire area was evacuated. The building was evacuated. And there was a dragnet in the city. The whole city was cordoned off.

And they arrested three people who had put the bomb in the building. That were seen outside. Yeah. And they turned out not to be Chechen terrorists. Who were they? They were agents of the FSB. The Russian FSB. Yes, the Russian FSB.

So how did they explain that away? They said, well, this was all part of a training exercise to test the level of vigilance of the population. And they said that the population had done very well, congratulated them and in fact a telephone operator who had intercepted a call between the FSB agents who planted the bomb and FSB headquarters and reported it to the local police was given a color television as a word for for her vigilance and the public bought this that's what really blew my mind well not only the

russian public but the american public uh did they even know about it though in america like i feel like they didn't report your reporting uh there was some reporting but nobody picked up on it uh the the journalists except well i did I mean, the journalists who should have been, whose job it was to cover this and to raise questions did not. The State Department, whose job it was to raise questions, did not. And as a result, it was treated, the most important event in post-Soviet Russian history was treated as a non-event, something you can't talk about, but which everybody knows about, at least everybody in the circles that should know. In any case, under these circumstances,

the true nature of the Putin regime was on the one hand revealed by the arrests and on the other hand concealed by those who refused to face the obvious truth. I mean, there were other incidents besides the Ryazan incident. For example, Gennady Seleznyov, who was the speaker of the State Duma, which is the parliament, announced on September 13th that a building had been blown up in Volgodonsk. Well, the building had been blown up in Moscow on Koshirskaya Chasse. He simply got the order of the bombings wrong.

Three days later, the building in Volgodonsk was blown up. Well, there's no way to know that a building is going to be blown up in a city, you know, a small, a medium-sized city somewhere in the middle of Russia, unless there's a pre-existing plan and that it's been shared with high officials. See, I got angry when I read that because, and obviously you've already talked about this today, but I know this is something that you're always hitting on because you're always reminding people of this story and how it needs attention, but that was the smoking gun to end all smoking guns the guy was three days ahead of a bombing that hadn't happened and no one raised that as an issue it's like to me

that's like that's like having the guy on tape saying he murdered his wife four days before it happened it's just of course yeah i mean no question And that plus the fact that KGB or FSB agents were caught putting a bomb in an apartment building. And the claim that this was a training exercise is so absurd that only some of our American careerists could believe it. It was, first of all, absurd because in the case of any civil defense exercise in Russia, all the local authorities have to be alerted. And none of them knew that any such exercise was planned or was taking place. So that's like regular police and all that? Yeah, yeah. And more to the, but that's why they arrested these guys.

They thought they were Chechen terrorists. On the other hand, it's also true that the car in which they were driving was a stolen car. Well, if you're carrying out a legitimate training exercise, you don't need to use a stolen car. And similarly, I talked to someone who was in the Riazan police force at the time, and he told me the atmosphere there was not the atmosphere of a civil defense operation or civil defense exercise. He said it was as if an atomic bomb had gone off, given the panic not just in the city

but in the police force of which he was a part. He said there was no question that this was a real attempt to blow up a building. And there were 400 people in that building. If it had been blown up, it was at the top of a hill. The debris would have hit the neighboring building, which also had 400 people, with the force of an avalanche. And it would have destroyed that building, too. So 800 people would have lost their lives that night. So of all the bombings they did, which was supposed to be four, but instead it was three, the biggest one of all is the one that luckily was the one they messed up, it sounds like. The potentially biggest one was the one that they messed up.

There was another thing you had in there, though. I don't know if this was something that you got, a story that you got, or if it was another reporter who had it. But it was even more comical where it's called Hexagon. Is that right? Hexagon is the explosive. Right. So there was a report that a couple, I guess, like Russian soldiers or FSB members were told to watch over these items or something for a night, and it was... Oh, yeah. Well, this hexagon was stored in a warehouse outside of Ryazan, and a couple of soldiers were told to keep guard over it.

And one of them thought it was sugar, punctured the bag, and tried to make tea with it. And then before he just tasted it and realized this is not not sugar uh and why would you be guarding sugar and why would you be guarding sugar yeah and I don't that's what they were told they were guarding sugar I don't know if this was another thing but it was also therefore traceable as in some of the concoction that was made in the bomb, whether it was the hexagon or some other things in it, it was provable that Chechnyans didn't even have that, I think. Well, yeah, because hexagon is only produced in one factory in Russia, which is under tight

FSB control. The Chechens, I mean, there was a massive evidence of circumstantial evidence, but there's also direct evidence. The Chechens just didn't have access to hexagon. Only the FSB had access. The other really bizarre thing here, I almost forgot about this, was how they also took the time to create a motive as well so there and maybe I misunderstood some of this it was a little weird to me how it went down but they tried to when the Russians were saying well why did this happen it was it had something to do with the 1200 Chechny ins had invaded Dagestan yeah for like five minutes and

then it big kick was more than five minutes, but still, yeah, there was a group of Chechens who had invaded Dagestan. And what is Dagestan? Dagestan is also a region of Russia in the North Caucasus, also inhabited by a mixed but largely Muslim population but that had not declared its independence of the Russian so-called federation whereas Chechnya had. But this movement into Dagestan by Chechen fighters was by all appearances a provocation. They were lured into attempting this with false information and they then the you know the and in fact the the Russians

made no attempt to stop them they pulled the border guards and when they withdrew from Dagestan they were not fired upon so it it it resembles a situation in which they were allowed to enter Dagestan to give the appearance that the apartment bombings, which were already planned, were taken in revenge for a defeat in Dagestan. And that was something I was confused on. Why would, was this a particular set of Chechens who had other motives and so they were okay basically like playing the role in this I think that they the the rumor that was or the they were told that if if they invaded Dagestan that this would lead to the overthrow of Yeltsin and that the new people who would take his place would agree to Chechen independence.

Got it. So was this... And then, so they went there with that expectation, but they were really being used to prepare the way for the subsequent bombings. And that was in approximately august something like that okay there was a little piece of reporting in there that you mentioned and then it was nothing else so maybe this is tying it together now it's making sense to me but did i understand it correctly that there was some sort of secret meeting between representatives from Russia and representatives

of this sect of the Chechens arranged at Adnan Khashoggi's house in Monaco or Nice or something like that? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, in southern France. I think it was Cap d'Antibes, if I'm not wrong, but I don't know. We can check that. So it could have been an inside job right there. Oh, yeah. It was an inside job. They were. Boris Berezovsky, who was the leading oligarch at the time, was the big organizer of all this.

And I think it was his clever idea to bomb the buildings. It was just bizarre to me, a little creepy, that that kashogi was in the middle of it because well we don't know if he was or wasn't to what degree he knew about you know what was being hatched that's a whole different conversation yeah we don't have to go down that but for people out there kashogi is a guy who other things, he was an international arms dealer, alleged sex trafficker, and somebody who is viewed as a mentor of Jeffrey Epstein. Very – I mean you talk to anyone in government who worked in FBI, CIA, something like that. You say the name Adnan Khashoggi, they all know it. So you guys can go Google him. But I want to stay on what you're talking about so the bottom line is there's some sort of

there's some sort of inside provocation that happens where they get the motivated chechens to agree to do it and then this bombing happens in september which which they then blame on the chechens and say that it was revenge for their defeat in destan. So now you have, this is September 1999, the presidential election is supposed to be June 2000 at the time, I think? April. Didn't he move it up though? No, late March, late March it was. But didn't he move it up? Oh yeah, yeah, by statute it would have been in June, but by resigning early... Yeltsin.

Yeltsin. And when did he resign? He resigned on December 31st, 1999, and that gave him the opportunity to appoint Putin acting president and to move the date of the election up by three months. So that's three months after the bombing, approximately, that Putin gets in there as acting president. Three, three and a half months. Yeah. So Putin is now in there for, call it, 90 days ahead of an election. And because they've started the second Chechen war, you now have nationalism going on in Russia, who's happy that we're getting back at the Chechens for doing this and they see this guy as the leader so that two percent approval rating

you talked about just flips on a dime of course it does yeah it gyrated uh and and uh Putin Putin quickly became the leading candidate just as they figured he would, because he was no longer identified as just a colorless stooge of Yeltsin. Now he was the leader of the nation, consolidating the country behind a holy war to punish those terrorists who had murdered Russians in their beds. And the Russians, I mean, it shows the total contempt for the ordinary Russian person that they would pull something like this. the lack of value on human life and how russia what the russian leadership under putin and yeltsin before him has shown is an ability to sacrifice their own at a whim strictly to maintain slash grow power and that that's a scary scary thing for well that's why that's why putin is so dangerous that uh there's no human

feeling there the whatever this are is in the interest of the state is justified and the interests of the state uh are identified with his personal interest now when did you get a hold of this story though like were you investigating this immediately after it happened and reporting on it ahead of that election? Yeah. Wow. Because it was too convenient. It was obvious to me that something was wrong, that Yeltsin and anyone connected with him were headed for defeat, that privatization was going to be reevaluated.

And then we have these explosions and suddenly everything looks different. The whole national conversation is transformed from a discussion of corruption and abuse of power under privatization to how can we punish the Chechens. And you decide to come out with a book shortly after. Well, I actually began writing articles about it, but then the book came out. Amalgamated all of it. it, but then the book came out. Amalgamated all of it. Yeah, but I had written earlier.

The first article I wrote was in the Washington Times, an op-ed entitled Anatomy of a Massacre. And that was published within weeks after the bombings, in which I first raised doubts about their authorship. And that didn't get attention? No. Anatomy of a Massacre. Yeah. It's a great title. Well.

That's just, it's just, it's a blank spot in history to me because I just, I really knew nothing about it. And you would think in the media right now they would be jumping on something like this you know like rewrite their own history of oh sorry we didn't cover this but look what he did you know just to gain power but it was what's amazing is that you also could have seen it coming because they did this in 1993. Yeah, I mean, the use of provocation to achieve political goals is characteristic of a communist country. And it's not supposed to be communist at this point. Yeah, but it's communist mentality.

These are people who grew up in the communist system. Right. These are people who grew up in the communist system. And they, you know, my friend, the late writer Vladimir Vinovich said, the only thing left of the Soviet Union is the Soviet man. Wow. that putin looks like privately looks at himself as a soviet or does he separate and look at himself as the leader of an entirely different political system that is now russia i think that he doesn't acknowledge the extent to which he was formed by the soviet union although he does, you know, his personal psychology, although he's perfectly willing to talk about, you know, the grandeur of the Soviet Union and that its collapse was a geopolitical tragedy, as he puts it.

Because, effectively, they lost their power. Well, they lost their colonies. They lost the countries that they lost their colonies they lost the the countries that they they they they were able to control and the most important of those was ukraine and why was ukraine the most important because they had a lot well because it's a big country and it's a populous country and it's a country that together with Russia you know creates a kind of really massive state it's not the case that Russia can reclaim former glory if it if it unites with Belarus which has population of 10 million, they would need a substantial bit of territory.

Doesn't Ukraine have pretty solid resources too? Yeah, it does. I mean, it's a great agricultural area. Has some oil, but mostly that comes from Russia, the oil and gas. Got it. So let's fast forward for a minute and talk about where we're at because you at the very beginning obviously mentioned you got expelled from from Russia you weren't allowed back but that was the the crazy thing is that that was 14 years after

this bombing or yeah roughly 14 years after this bombing. Yeah, roughly 14 years after this bombing. And you were reporting on this, writing books, writing The Age of Delirium in 2001, and living throughout a lot of that time in Moscow, and you were never kicked out before then. Well, they decided early on that the proper strategy was just to ignore what I was writing. They saw that nobody else was paying attention to it either. And, I mean, I think they were bothered by it. But even though I had some high-level outlets like the Wall Street Journal. Nonetheless, you know, these obviously damning facts never,

you know, influenced American policy. Do you think that's because there were distractions? Like we were more, the Cold War was over, you know, then 9-11 happens, we're in the Middle East, and you start to talk about Russia and people are like, what is this, 1985? Yeah. I mean, I think that part of it is that they felt the world was not paying attention, and they didn't want to create attention. After all, I'd been writing about Russia for a long time. And if I had been expelled or if something had happened to me, it would have, you know, the gain for them was always much less than the potential loss. And as a result, they just allowed me to continue to work in Russia.

And, of course, I wrote about other things, not just about the apartment bombings. Yeah, let's talk about some of those things, because these are more events I knew nothing about. But one of them was, I think it was the Moscow Theater. Was that it? Yeah. So that was 2002. And what happened there? Well, an army, a literal army of Chechen rebels took over a theater in the center of Moscow. They were showing a musical called Nord Ost, which in English is northeast, about the settling of the northeast of the country. And it was a know a very very popular musical and the hall held a thousand people and this these terrorists

took the entire hall hostage and demanded made started making demands I thinking including for an end of the war in Chechnya. And they were actually Chechens in this case. In this case, they were. Okay. But there were very strange aspects of this. They trained openly in Moscow practically for months. Why weren't they stopped? And they also collaborated on weapons production.

What do you mean by that? Well, they were trained, I guess I would say. And also they produced up to a point certain weapons with the help of an instructor from the GRU. That's the Russian military intelligence. So why was that happening? They were training. The GRU was training Chechens. The Chechen terrorists were being prepared by the GRU.

Did they know it was a GRU person or were they undercover? I'm not sure what the terrorists knew, but the GRU definitely knew that the terrorists were planning a terrorist act. And they let it happen is the implication. Not only let it happen, but apparently facilitated it. And as a result, the terrorists were able to take control over the theater, and they were only defeated when the theater was attacked with poison gas, which of course killed many of the hostages. was a wild scene in your book reading about this and inhumanity of it but allegedly the gas had had some strain of like fentanyl in it or something appears that way the judge of the Russians have never identified the the makeup of they've never revealed what exactly the gas consisted of but but people people died as a

result and a lot of them the the death rate was very high and it kept on adding up because people were dying a year later yeah with the after effects yeah so they it was kind of bizarre because the way you were explaining it is that there was some sort of like negotiation allegedly going back and forth, but it was never really a negotiation. The terrorists just thought it was. And so the hostages – the terrorists were saying to them, we really don't want to hurt you, so I think it's going to be okay. The hostages were like, okay, great. And then suddenly a couple days in they put the gas. Well, then the gas – days in they put the gas then

the the hall where the the theaters flooded with gas and then the russians stormed the place and uh uh shot the terrorists who had all were also knocked out by the gas uh now those terrorists were potentially very valuable sources of information why shoot them especially if they're not resisting and how many were there approximately how many of them i think uh if if memory serves 40 45 jeez and they killed all of them yeah apparently apparently but those those terrorists would have given a lot of information about who recruited them if they'd been allowed to live. But the Russian authorities apparently didn't want to take that chance. And then they're taking all these people out of there.

The scene was just absurd to me. There was no preparation for evac evacuating people no regard for human life at all they didn't tell the the hospitals what the gas was so people were weren't getting treated because they were trying to figure out what was even in them they yeah they didn't know what and what would work as an antidote but so they they guessed People were crushed in the vehicles as they were being transported in non-emergency vehicles to the hospitals. It was a chaotic scene, of course. And so that's right there, hundreds of people, another wild event, 2002. But then 2004, in a different different way there's another one and I

think it's Beslan the the school yeah the Beslan school massacre because the school was on September 1st the first day of school a mixed group of terrorists including Chechens English and other nationalities, including Ukrainian converts or Russian, no, I'm sorry, not Ukrainian, Russian converts to Islam. And they seized the school, and the terrorists herded the parents and teachers into a gymnasium, which was then attacked by the Russians with flamethrowers and grenade launchers. Where people were dying left and right, like hostages. Of course. In fact, they set the roof of the gym on fire where the hostages were being held.

It collapsed on top of the hostages and people were burned alive. What was the motive, though, on this one? I think in the case of both the theater siege and the Beslan siege, the motive was to discredit any movement toward negotiations. And this is also explained by the fact, this also explains why it was that many of the terrorists had just been released days before from Russian prisons, and many of them had been obviously protected by the Russian security services,

including a convert to Islam who was one of the leaders of the group of terrorists who was ethnically Russian. I just don't know why they would especially after the the nordost the nordost one in in moscow is that how you say it yeah especially after that i don't know why terrorists would agree to do something like that like if their implication is they're let out of prison so they can go do an attack because they see what happened in Alaska is they just all get executed. And then it happened again. Yeah, well, they should have been more wary. The Russians were allowing the terrorists to train with the idea that they would attack a local government building, take some hostages, and create an excuse for the Russians to go in and destroy them. Chechens who had been trained under these circumstances decided to change the rules.

And instead of going to, first of all, they had been well informed that by a double agent that the Russians were planning something. And they decided simply to change the rules and redirect the attack toward a school. And then the Russians, I mean, it was just diabolical how they did it. They set up at another school like a mile away or something and did a test run of what was surely going to kill a ton of the hostages. Yeah, yeah, indeed they did. And, I mean, there's no question that they were well prepared for this confrontation. It was prepared well in advance. And that the manpower for the terrorist attack consisted of people who had just been let out of prison. Yeah. was consisted of people who had just been let out of prison yeah now you're reporting on all this stuff throughout the 2000s and as you've said starting with the bombings going through this

it just it didn't get a ton of attention because russia wasn't the story but you're seeing it you're there you see what's happening here you watch the disaster that was the 90s now you see this guy taking an ironclad control of the country and hiding it also behind an improved economy in air quotes there and we come up on 2008 did you look at it like oh well at least he's going to be gone now or did you think and this is where he medvedev became president and putin had to step aside and be prime minister did did you see the whole way that he was just going to step back in and be president well i i assumed he would never never surrender power and that however they decided to do it that this medvedev presidency was just a you know it was just a masquerade that real power resided with putin and you still hold

that same opinion today that he wants to be president forever yeah well and indeed and i think that's one of the things and now he's got another problem which is that he could lose this war, and that would have very severe consequences for him. So you've always been picky about your produce, but now you find yourself checking every label to make sure it's Canadian. So be it. At Sobeys, we always pick guaranteed fresh Canadian produce first. Restrictions apply.

See in-store or online for details. So he goes into Ukraine recently. Yeah. And now it's got a ton of attention. But you were also like around there because you were in Ukraine when you got kicked out of Russia in December 2013. You were in Kiev when the whole Maidan thing was going down back in 2013 2014 so some people do know about this which i'm happy to hear i feel like a lot of people kind of missed that and what what went on where it ended with putin taking crimea in ukraine so Crimea in Ukraine. So, would you mind just walking us through how, like, what happened with Maidan, and then what it meant when Putin decided to come in and annex Crimea? Like, what that should have

said about where we are today? Well, the thing is that there was a very corrupt ruler in Ukraine, and he was increasingly unpopular. This is Viktor Yanukovych. One of the things that he had said was that he wanted to take Ukraine into the European Union. And then he abruptly announced that that was not going to happen there were protests the protesters were beaten up and massive demonstrations were launched in Ukraine against the Yanukovych government and

they resulted in him being ultimately overthrown. In 2014. Yeah. Yeah, that was in 2014. And the overthrow of Yanukovych set off alarm bells in Russia because the system that had been created in Russia was pretty impregnable. I mean, Putin controlled all the main levers of power in the society. Like media. Well, media in particular, but also business, financial flows, the courts. That's a big one.

Yeah. The prosecutor. the courts that's a big one yeah the prosecutor so if he was going to be overthrown overthrown it had to be as a result of a popular revolt of the kind that took place in ukraine oh so he saw it so he saw it as a threat because he didn't want the Russians to imitate the Ukrainians. So once again, he then uses a distraction, a show of force in this case, going to take Crimea to get the Russian people behind Russian power in the world. Well, sure. I mean, the thing is that he wanted to distract the attention of the Russian people from the obvious lessons of Euromaidan, which is that the people, if they engage in peaceful protests on a mass scale, can change their government. Well, that's a lesson he didn't want them to assimilate. So he distracted their attention with this war, with the seizure of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine. was a bulletless takeover. They just went in and took some of the main buildings, Russia did,

and then they had that portion. It was the Donetsk and, is it Lutonsk? Am I saying that right? Lugansk. Lugansk. It was those two regions where there was violence. That's where the fighting broke out, yeah. And they didn't, if I understood this correctly,

like when we're listening to the news now, those are the two regions for people out there following along, like those are the two that are often cited as heavy Russian-speaking independent states. Yes, and those are the two that Putin wants, whose independence Putin recognized and why is he is it all just fake news when he comes in and says like oh we're denazifying those areas because they want to kill Russians yeah that's yeah that's that's ridiculous black black PR but it's not it's obviously because there was fighting there when this all went down there's resistance and people died so it's not just like it's 100% Russian stronghold like the people living there. No, not at all. I mean, the death toll is 14,000. Wow.

And 3,000 civilians. And this is where that flight got shot down too, right? Well, the flight was shot down in the area too. Not exactly over the rebel-held areas, but nonetheless in the area of Donbass, which is what they're fighting for. And that's Malaysia Flight 17 that killed like 300 people? 298, yeah. Wow. So that was – was that because of like some sort of no-fly zone that they were enacting? No, no. I mean, they moved in an anti-aircraft battery under the international air corridor.

And they just shot down a plane in order to intimidate the rest of the world but they didn't admit it no they never admitted it no they never have but i mean it'll it it's capable of being established sure i mean it's it's another example of the callousness with which these guys do things in broad daylight. And I don't want to say like, oh, they completely got away with that one. But a lot of these they just completely get away with. Yeah, they do things in broad daylight and they give an idiotic excuse or explanation and we swallow it. I don't know why we're still doing that, though. Well, we've been doing it. like well we've been doing it and uh

and if we hadn't done it we could have prevented this war did you i mean that was what seven eight years ago then when he did that so as you've already highlighted putin always was thinking about ukraine because of the natural power it would add to russia bringing it back in the fold and restoring russia to its glory but like did you see this coming with this recent invasion maybe uh not so much the invasion as some type of aggressive action some type of danger oh you know not maybe not specifically an invasion of Ukraine but nonetheless aggressive and destabilizing behavior on the part of the Russian leaders what would the difference be though I mean how do you even create destabilizing behavior without some sort of

show of force? Well, you can carry out terrorist acts. You can hold them responsible when crimes are committed. For example, the murder of Boris Nemtsov, who was killed right next to the Kremlin wall as he crossed the Moskvoretskaya River in the center of Moscow. Who was he again? Nemtsov was an opposition political leader in Russia. At a time, he was one of the few leaders there who had the opportunity and the capacity to call out a crowd. The other is Alexei Navalny. He could rally people. He's in jail now.

Navalny's in jail, but Nemtsov was murdered. Right. And he was murdered literally in the shadow of the Kremlin wall. Where there is 24-7 cameras and people there. Yeah, where there's intense surveillance. It could only have been carried out by the Russian authorities. Nobody else could have organized something like that. And in every case where these crimes are committed, we accepted, I mean the United States and as a result of our acceptance, other countries too, we accepted the explanation that was

offered by the Russian authorities. And it didn't matter how weird or absurd that explanation was. They offered the explanation. We repeated it. They said they didn't do it. You know, they're not responsible. And that was the end of the conversation. And we also didn't draw any lessons either. You know, the murder of Boris Nemtsov, the annexation of Crimea, the shooting down of the civilian airliner, the MH17, all of these things should have taught us that this is a very dangerous situation, even if we hadn't gotten the message up until that time. They're willing to do anything yeah this is this

is a regime which is and and these are people who are and there are reasons for that uh who who who don't have any moral limits i read a book back in 2015 by a guy i'm i haven't asked you yet but i'm sure you're familiar with this guy bill browderowder. Oh, sure. Of course. Right. So he wrote a phenomenal book. I think it was called Red Notice. Red Notice about his. Yeah. So he, to me, that was my big alarm bell on how callous this organization that runs the Kremlin is. Because all those things you just mentioned mentioned like nemsov being killed in

broad daylight yeah in russia right the the other things happening in ukraine which is like an ongoing struggle they're doing this stuff though like around the world as well they're who was the one guy well alexander litvinenko who was murdered in london with radioactive isotope now here's an interesting thing if we get back to the question of the u.S. and the U.S. involvement in all this, or the U.S., more to the point, the U.S. reaction to all this, Litvinenko had to have been murdered on orders of Putin. Nobody else can get their hands on Polonium. Who was he, Litvinenko?

Litvinenko was a former KGB agent, then became an FSB agent, who turned against the regime. And he wrote about the apartment bombings, by the way. Oh, really? Yeah, he was one of those who exposed the apartment, one of the early people who exposed the apartment bombings and claimed that this was carried out by the FSB. Did he have, he was in the FSB, but did he have direct knowledge of it? He didn't have direct knowledge, but using his experience as an FSB agent, he analyzed what had happened and with the information that was known.

I approached it from a somewhat different angle because I actually went to Riazon and talked to the people. But he was also writing about it and he also contributed. was his book was the first book that came out in which these charges were made that it was an FSB provocation my book darkness at dawn came out slightly later but darkness at dawn can you know was an history of the entire period which one did you put age of delirium or darkness of dawn which was first age of delirium was my first book it was the story of the the the basically the decline and fall of the soviet union so you didn't talk about the apartment bombings yet because that was no it hadn't happened it hadn't happened at that point uh the age of uh um

darkness at dawn which darkness dawned the rise of the r Dawn, which Darkness at Dawn, The Rise of the Russian Criminal State, which at the time was considered to be an extreme title, but now no one would argue with it. In that book, I had written about the apartment bombings in various articles and so on, but by the time I got the book done it it came out somewhat after Litvinenko's book Litvinenko did you know him I we knew of each other we knew of each other and I know his widow marina and I have contact with her in London well and just it just to be clear by the way the reason I brought up Bill Browder is because, like Litvinenko, he's an American, but he's been living in London for a long time. Yeah.

And there was a huge threat on his life from Putin because of a disagreement he had with the regime. I'm not sure if his life was actually threatened. The lawyer who workedvinenko was murdered, it was 2006. It came at the same time as Anna Polakovskaya, the leading investigative journalist in Russia, was also murdered. She was shot in the entryway to her apartment in Moscow, someone also I knew quite well. Wow. And then the Russians invaded Georgia. The country, obviously.

Yeah, the country, Georgia, not our state. Not our state. You've got to say it for the people out there. Not our state, not our state. But in any case, what happened was Obama became president, and instead of taking seriously these events, he announced the reset policy. Now, the thrust of the reset policy was that the worsening of relations between the U.S. and Russia was the fault of George W. Bush. In his early years, Obama basically blamed everything wrong in either foreign or domestic policy on his predecessor. Well, that's okay.

But it kind of wears a little thin and the idea that Putin himself had nothing to do with the worsening of relations is one of the reasons why we initiated this reset policy we were going to reset the policy well why should we reset the policy if we aren't doing anything wrong obviously it's a kind of implicit acknowledgement that relations should be good, we should be smiling at each other, and the reason that we're not is because George W. Bush messed everything up or he did everything wrong. Do you think he looked at it because obama and medvedev were quote-unquote coming into power at around the same time do you think

and i think that was part of it and they thought they were going to be great pals and forge a great relationship against all the evidence i mean they didn't understand a system in which medvedev could be a simply a marionette who had been put into place as a kind of placeholder for Putin. So, I had a conversation with one of the officials who was going to be an architect of this reset policy. Boris Nemtsov and I were together. We met him in Washington. Boris Nemtsov? No, who had been murdered, who was subsequently murdered by the Kremlin wall. Oh, he's the one that was over there.

Yeah, he was. But this is now, listen, this is seven years earlier. So you knew him well. Oh, of course, yeah. Wow. Yeah. And Boris and I talked to this person, and we said that we tried to make a simple point that we didn't need any kind of reset, that the problem in U.S. relations with Russia was not the fault of the U.S., that Putin was dangerous, and that we needed to deter him not to enter into any kind of partnership.

Well, this fell on deaf ears, of course. And when you think about it, here's a guy who wanted to become part of the Obama administration. Obama made it clear that everything wrong in foreign policy, all the problems in the world were created by George W. Bush. And he was going to correct them. If he were to tell Obama, actually, there are people besides George W. Bush who create problems, including Vladimir Putin, his chances of becoming an architect of policy would have been greatly diminished. residents oftentimes who come in and they overestimate their knowledge and they think that they can deal with the Russian leader and charm him. And since he controls everything, if they charm the leader, then they'll establish a good relationship with the country as a whole. They don't realize the fact that since he controls everything, you're not going to be able to establish a good relationship with the Russian leader, except on his terms.

Do you think, though, it's kind of a weird spot, because you're talking about a nuclear power. There was a 40-year Cold War that we got over, and at the end of the day your president your number one focus is gonna be on your own people right as not to be callous, but like You care about other people around the world. They gotta worry about your people at home first. So do you think part of it is Obama looking at it going First of all, like yeah push foreign policy in the Middle East was a disaster, and that's where all the problems were. And so he might have been looking at Russia going, all right, not the greatest guys right there, but let's be cordial with them because who knows?

We may need a couple favors and fuck it. What they do to their people is their problem. Yeah, well, this is how they thought. But they also didn't know and didn't want to know the details of what they're doing to their own people. And there should have been certain very, very obvious red flags. I mean, if Putin is organizing an assassination in London, British soil, of someone who has received British citizenship using such sadistic and unusual means as a radioactive isotope, transporated across international borders, capable of irradiating innocent people, that this is not your standard leader and not someone who you want to have a trusting relationship with and it's not someone you want to rely on for favors

similarly if he is organizing the murder of the country's leading investigative reporter yeah and she's shot down in the entry to her own apartment that's also a bad sign yeah not to mention the fact that he's invading a neighboring country, which is Georgia. Georgia the country, not the state. Right. So we don't have him invading the- You always have to say that. That's true.

So, I mean, those are- now, you don't even have to know about the apartment bombings. You don't have to know about Beslan. You don't have to know about the theater on Dubrovka in 2002 the theater siege but look at what has just happened you know literally months before you came into office this is a really cynical way for me to look at it but let me toss it out there sure as a key difference here is a let's look at anna how do you say her last name i'm used to like teddy kgb talking about cards that's all right you're doing pretty good but that's a brazen murder of a reporter that it's clear they did that that's a huge huge like that's crossing

over the whole free speech thing into government tyranny territory then with litivanco litvanenko litvanenko okay fuck that up sorry but with litvanenko like you said they're they did it in a savage way they used it they used an awful agent that was like a torturous death. They used it in a place office, I think he was doing an interview with somebody, some TV network. And I think the topic was Putin. Whoever was interviewing him said, you know, Vladimir Putin's a killer. And Trump looked right back at at him i don't think he knew what the fuck he was saying but he's like well we have a lot of killers too we have a lot of killers you don't think our people do it too and it's a wild thing when you first hear it because you're like well we're america we don't do that but some of these things maybe there's not ridiculous agent poisonous agents going out there that are being used by your own cia agents or something to kill people maybe there is i don't know part of it could be behind the scenes a president knows

like well we do some too well here's the thing i mean we we uh we take out terrorists who uh and uh under obama that that policy was was very uh with drone attacks and so on who are threatening the United States. But we don't kill our own citizens for their expressing their truth, for conveying truthful information. Trump made that remark. That was really probably the absolute low point in his rhetoric vis-a-vis Russia and I wrote about it in fact at the time but the the reality is that many people in the in the US and in any country have a difficult time keeping criteria straight. What do you mean?

They don't understand that there's a distinction between, you know, taking out a terrorist who is threatening the United States on the one hand which we do do and murdering your own citizens because they express uh uh you know their opinion or they convey truthful information which we do not do i i agree with the distinction completely and again again, I also... And Trump should have been aware of that. Well, I also think that the veracity and commonality, I don't know if that's a word, but I'm going to use it, with which Vladimir Putin does it is unique. I'm not comparing the two. And I don't want to make a false equivalency here, so I don't want people mishearing me because I think this guy is way, way worse. It's not even close but yeah you know for example there's some credible reporting now that we were trying to take out julian assange on foreign soil on on an ally's

foreign soil on a on a diplomatic zone on the ecuadorian embassy which if true... I mean, I'm unaware of that. I'm unaware of... I mean, I understand that there's efforts to bring Julian Assange back to the United States for trial. The report was from... I'll pull it up. It was from Yahoo back in September. It was a long report.

It was thousands and thousands of words, And it cited sources in the government at the CIA that said that there was a mission that was – I believe they even had people on the ground and they were never able to go through with it. But they wanted to assassinate Julian Assange for basically dangerous rhetoric against america now the question there might be that oh why does julian assange of wikileaks share so much information about america and not other people it's a counterpoint but the bottom line is the information he did share in reporting capacity was true you know so that to me when I said that is something that in my head as an American just grown up you know taking my I would like to I mean I I'm not familiar with the report that appeared in Yahoo News, first of all. I'd like to see it. From what I know of the CIA's practices and what I know of the limitations on this type of operation, Assange is an Australian citizen. He was sheltering in the Ecuadorian embassy.

Right. In the UK. There were a series of false reports, I'm not sure about this one, concerning his status there and concerning various attempts to deal with him. Without just, you know, without knowing the report, without seeing it, but it, to me, is so inconsistent with the way in which the CIA operates, as I've seen it over many decades, that I would assume it's a false report. They don't, I take it it's based on anonymous sources. Always is. And in fairness, you got to say that about any of these reports because, yeah, there's definitely some of them that aren't real. I do see that the distinction seems to be blurred lines sometimes, though. You know, I'll agree with you that when, for example, like you obama killing terrorists with drones i understand where

he's coming from and i'm not saying oh don't do that what about all the times we hit a drone and it's like oh shit he wasn't there oh sorry you know oh we we you know the the drone attacks were uh they aspire to be surgical we're getting it course, in an area now that's a little bit far removed from Russia, but in any case, we can make administration was very interested in low-cost solutions, and this was a low-cost solution. We can – it's a whole separate area how we deal with terrorists and how we deal with those who represent a physical threat to American citizens. That's a different category than how we deal with people who dissent. uh we we we don't kill people for expressing their opinion and we don't kill them for uh releasing truthful information i know of no such case i think and i and i will say this i think quite obviously you can go online by and large you're a thousand percent right about that it's still when you see anything questionable you know i want to i want to hold us to the best standard i don't ever want to be russia

i agree and i agree but when we deal with russia we have to understand what their standards are so if we talk about anna polakovskaya for example this is a woman who reported about, no one knew better than she about the human rights abuses in Chechnya during the Second Chechen War. Like what? Well, you know, the massacres and the torture of prisoners, the mass abductions, the disappearances. She in turn was, her chief source of information was a woman named Natalia Stamirova, who was taken out, just taken out in the middle of the day and murdered.

Who was she? She was a half-Chechen woman, half-Chechen, half-Russian. She lived in Grozny. And she was, you know, Anna's, one of Anna's most important sources about the human rights violations that were taking place in Chechnya. I mean, Anna had her own sources, not just Natalia. But one day a gang came to her home, dragged her out of her house, and almost certainly under Kadyrov's. Ramzan Kadyrov is the head of Chechnya. He's the Russian-supported head of Chechnya today.

And they took her out and just shot her and murdered her. So this is not the kind of thing that goes on in the U.S. No, no. And I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear. No, no, but we want to – so if we get back to the Obama administration – and by the way, it's not just the Obama administration. No, it's all of them. It's every – in one way or another,

every American president has misread Russia. And that's one of the reasons that we have this invasion today. That's one of the reasons we have this kind of death toll. It's easy, it's easier, much easier once the die is cast and we see, you know, the kind of criminal that we're dealing with. It's harder in the run-up. It was the same thing with Hitler. In the 1930s, it was still possible to stop him.

Once everything became clear, you didn't need a lot of analytical ability to figure out what was going on. I get a little nervous about tossing around that comparison, though. And I do not – it's very clear that Putin is a gangster and a very bad guy. And the only problem is, like, if you take them out, I feel like just the same guy would take place. But maybe that wouldn't be the case. And it would be a good thing if you know, he were whacked or something like that. But I get a little nervous when we start just throwing around the Hitler term, because what I don't want to do is... If you are looking to search the web privately and not have all these websites track you when you leave,

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I think right now people turning on their TVs see what's happening in Ukraine. I mean it's an awful awful it's disgusting to look at you see buildings of innocent people just being bombed and i was telling you before this i i was on a video call with a fan of the show who's in keith and he laid it out for me it was like showing me and everything and and the resolve of these people is incredible, but the ugliness that they have to endure is inhumane, doesn't begin to describe it. So it's easy to look at that from the outside, especially a sovereign free nation like America who likes the world to have freedom, that whole bit. That's what we're supposed to stand for. It's easy to look at that and say, this guy's Hitler.

We all need to go in there. No, we weren't saying that. I mean, the thing is that what I was, the point I was trying to make is that once a situation is defined, once in the case of Hitler, once he received the Sudetenland, you know, which is what he was demanding in the Munich conference he then went on to seize the rest of Czechoslovakia right and then it was clear that that there was no no negotiating with him but that should have been clear much earlier in right after he took power uh he massacred the head the leaders of the essay

those was the night of the long knives in the night of the long knives and the british papers at that time said hitler uh suppresses a mutiny like a gangster but But then that image of Hitler as a gangster was quickly forgotten, and during all the 1930s, people tried to negotiate with him. And it culminated in the Munich Agreement, in which Britain and France agreed that they would not defend Czechoslovakia. Now, after the Munich agreement when Hitler made it clear that he was not going to abide by any agreement with the Western powers, it was obvious that we had a fight on our hands or the world had a fight on its hands. But that could have been, the art and the responsibility is to understand that before the situation becomes obvious.

When it's still possible to do something, when you don't have to resort to violence. Same thing here in the case of Putin. There were many, many indications along the way that this was a person that needed to be deterred. Now he's already declared war. He hasn't declared war, but he's already launched a war. He's already invaded a neighboring country. So now it's obvious. But what about the years when he gave many signs that he was capable of such a thing? This is the comparison. So just as the British, for example, pursued a policy of appeasement with Hitler on the assumption that he could be dealt with.

In order to do that, they had to, the Night of the Long Knives, the seizure of the Rhineland. There were many things. And at every point, they decided not to make an issue, not to look at it, to try to find a peaceful solution. You can understand this. This is, you know, peaceful people in democratic states think that way. But sometimes you have to be able to read the signs.

Yeah. You have to be able to. And this was, if we talk about Putin now, I mean, the Hitler example is the classic historical example of being blind to signs that you were dealing with a very dangerous person. But if you take that and apply it to the Putin period, you don't have to say that Putin is Hitler because the scale, of course, is completely different. But nonetheless, if you look at his career, beginning with the apartment bombings, you have to face the reality that time after time, we ignored obvious indications that this was a dangerous person, and this was someone to whom we had to react. After the shooting down of MH17, the Malaysian airliner, that was in 2014, I wrote a piece

in the Wall Street Journal in which I said that we had to close Western airports to Russian aircraft. We had to react to such an obvious act of mass murder. But nothing was done, and there was no reaction. On the contrary, we accepted the absurd Russian explanation that it was, well, in fact, there were about 60 different Russian explanations, all of which contradicted each other. But we accepted the idea that someone other than the Russians was involved in shooting down that plane, even though all evidence showed. Did they really accept that in the government? Or do you think they kind of like just about-faced it and the public kind of accepted that? They didn't pursue it. They didn't pursue it.

They didn't. They didn't. There were no – there was no retaliation. There was an American on the plane. I – everything you're saying to be careful because what I do not want to do is under-explain what Vladimir Putin is capable of and what a bad guy he is. I don't ever want to be misheard on that. I just – it is very hard sitting in this seat where you don't want to ramp it up but then you hear the way you're explaining it and it's like anything else it's a slippery slope they take this then they take that

then they take it's never enough and then eventually you're like oh shit we got world war three so maybe maybe i'm looking at it with the right intentions and the law the wrong way because i'm so trying to avoid World War III right now that I'm just putting it off. Well, I think we can avoid World War III and I hope we can. Certainly, that's the last thing that anybody wants. How does that happen? How do we avoid it?

Just to backtrack for a second and then to come back to that, I mean, let's say we had taken the steps that and that would have forced the kind of realignment that we're seeing now. We didn't make an issue of it. We could have made an issue out of out of out of the annexation of Crimea which was a violation of the entire post-war international order which is based on the idea that you don't just tear off pieces of neighboring countries well we did sanction them but you're saying those sanctions were minimal yeah minimal and easily overcome though and and by their very by their very hesitant nature they they they almost encouraged further aggression hmm we didn't we didn't we could have given and this was again the

Obama administration refused up until the end, and it's important because Biden was the vice president, to provide the Javelin anti-tank weapons, which are now being used withs, which broke through their lines. And we didn't want to provoke of blackmail at the present time. Because one of the things that the Russians did was to establish these two pseudo-states, the Donetsk so-called People's Republic and the Lugetsk so-called people's republic of the lugansk so-called people's republic which they're now now demanding for which they're now dependent demanding recognition meaning as a part of russia now or no as independent into as supposedly independent states but clearly controlled by russia and capable of creating problems for Ukraine.

So we have a situation really in which by not taking action for as long as we did, not reacting to things to which we should have reacted. We now face a full-scale war. I mean, and that's what we should have avoided. I mean, if we go back just for another minute to the appeasement and the Hitler period, Churchill said repeatedly during the 1930s, this was an avoidable war. This war was avoidable. And the Czechs were very well armed, and particularly in those areas where the Sudeten Germans lived in the mountains, which faced the German border.

In any case, I think we can say something similar about the war that's going on now. This was avoidable. It was avoidable in the sense that we had the means early on to deter further aggressive action by Putin. And what you're getting at is we really could have done that in 2014, 2015. We could have done it in 2000 after the Brownings. We could have done it in 2008 after the invasion of Georgia. We could have done it after the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. I mean, it's difficult to stand on principle. I mean, honestly, we got a bad record with that kind of thing, though.

Because, I mean, you look at what we did in 2018. Jamal Khashoggi clearly murdered, probably with Ben Salman of Saudi arabia literally on the screen watching it there's evidence to to show that that happened but they have the full evidence that he was actually murdered in there on orders of the saudi government and we we appeased him we didn't stop anything we're doing business like crazy with saudi in fact once this whole russia thing hits biden's trying to get bin salman on the phone now you know but like i think trump's thought was like oh well they're good for israel you can't in my opinion the saudis yeah you can't i agree with your point in this you can't treat gangsters like partners period i'm with you there and well i mean we have

you know here's the irony of the situation I mean I Saudi Arabia is in a different relationship to the US than than Russia I mean Saudi Arabia is not capable of launching a all-out nuclear war against the US. But you're quite right. I mean, the difficulty of enforcing standards in our relations with any country comes up against the way in which we interpret the national interest. Yeah. In the case of Russia, that interpretation was faulty for the simple reason that we didn't

recognize that whatever, you know, Saudi Arabia deals with, the Saudi Arabian leadership deals with its opponents like gangsters and criminals. That's true. So this type of behavior. But what Russia threatens is the international order. We have a situation in which the unilateral attack on an imperfect but nonetheless democratic country, which is what we're talking about in Ukraine. 45 million people can easily set the stage for intimidation against the more vulnerable members of the NATO alliance. If the NATO alliance is not able to defend its most vulnerable members, for example, Estonia with a population of one million or Latvia with a slightly larger population or lithuania uh it then it ceases to

be viable as an alliance and if it's not viable as an alliance that means that each of the component countries will make their own deals with a potential aggressor and his influence will extend far beyond his own borders i was talking with a friend of mine who i think he's eventually going to come on the show but we'll say he was a he's a well-placed pretty high up military guy and one of the things that he said right away when this happened is first of all he shared your opinions on putin he thought we should have dealt with him a lot sooner and it sounded like i didn't get into it with him but it sounded like through actual serious economic sanctions similarly to what you said but he thought that nato also got really careless and perhaps we got careless as one of the leaders of NATO in that case, leading this whole thing, in that we put troops – or NATO put troops on all these borders surrounding Putin and then didn't – also didn't unilaterally say, hey, Ukraine is not going to be a part of NATO which selfishly I mean before any of

this happened I was thinking you know Ukraine's in Europe why shouldn't they be a part of NATO and I still kind of want to think that today I and especially in light of what's happening right now well that would have that would have protected them but it could have could have it would have definitely, particularly in the transitional period, have provoked an exceptionally threatening reaction from Russia, which they may not have been able to act on, but they would have certainly disoriented people in the US and disor... Our government, a country like Russia which doesn't care about its citizens and it doesn't care about their lives, is at a huge advantage in dealing with a country like the US which protects its citizens and is responsive to their will. We have to, we cannot just squander the lives of American citizens the way the young Russian boys are being squandered right now.

Their lives are being squandered right now. It's not their fault either. No, of course not. Well, many of them have been thrown into a conflict that they weren't prepared for, that they don't understand, and with inadequate training. Yeah. So, we, but we have a lot of means. I mean, if we're talking about the run-up to this war between Russia and Ukraine, there were many non-military means that could have been deployed uh denying

landing rights we're now denying landing rights why didn't we do it sooner what does that mean that means that a russian aircraft can't land at a western airport right okay yeah you know that that the ports and airports are closed to you because you shot down a civilian airliner and that would have been entirely appropriate oh you're saying you're saying that's what they should have done back then well that's what I called for myself at that time but what now that's not a declaration of war but it's a very effective way of of limiting a potential adversary if they can't fly i mean that will cripple you know uh the the the the the boycott you know the embargo on spare parts they use boeings and air buses on their internal routes as well as their external routes they're going to you know

it's not going to be safe to fly so maybe if they had i'm just thinking out loud here maybe if we had taken action a month before they invaded when it was starting to look like oh shit well then that was the time to to declare a no-fly zone oh before they had but course, a no-fly zone has its risks, even under those circumstances. But it would have forced the Russians to strike first. You would have – but you would have – even then you would have declared that. The thing about the no-fly zone is that you have to enforce it. And right now – I don't know.

Are you familiar with breaking points crystal and saga no it's a great it's a great show i'll show you after but they they do as great a job of reporting the news because crystal leans a little left saga leans a little right and they kind of come at it in in a really from a really good overall perspective and their coverage on the whole ukraine thing has been phenomenal would highly recommend people to go watch it and listen to it but they have been repeatedly hitting at the problem with declaring a no-fly zone which again is not to say like oh shit we shouldn't be in this situation we could have done other things but

we're here now and if you declare a no-fly, which a lot of people are just saying on TV left and right, you have to enforce it. So now if a Russian plane flies over Ukraine, somebody's got to shoot it down. And a guy like Putin, again, as we've hit a million times today, this is not a reasonable person. You do that, that's an act of war yeah that's under existing circumstances but before there were no russian planes over uh uh no russian war planes over ukraine and if it had been declared before the conflict began but when they were massing troops saying you just you know that would have been that that i mean it would have been a high-risk way of preventing a war but it's it would have created a situation which the Russians would have

to strike first we had that and during the Cuban Missile Crisis that's what Kennedy did also he he he imposed a quarantine around uh cuba and said where you know you you can't you can't you can't enter this area this is we're declaring this and there are planes what like planes and stuff no this was uh that was uh ships declare you know delivering missiles anything yeah well no it was ships but they were uh you Well, no, it was ships. But they were delivering missiles to Cuba, and the Russians turned around. They didn't, you know, they, he gave them the option of either attacking or turning around, and they turned around. Now, in the case, had the U.S. imposed a no-fly zone and just very peacefully, no one's up in the air,

no one's being shot down because there are no planes in the air. Just declare a no-fly zone at a moment when the Russians are massing troops and it appears that they might be thinking of invading and they're saying publicly that they're not going to invade uh then uh it would be uh really up to the russians to you know to make the decision to attack nato see i haven't thought about this is interesting that you bring i haven't thought about this well This is interesting that you bring that up. I haven't thought about this. Well, this is, you know, we're getting into what might have been. Yeah. We're talking, I mean, and this is, it's only useful to review all this because if some, once we get out of this, we would love to not to repeat some of the same mistakes. But right now, this is

not something that can help us with the present situation, alas. I mean, I'm not saying it's not worthwhile. It is that we should be discussing it. We should be thinking about it. But we have another and more pressing problem on our hands, which is what do we do now with the situation which we have and which we can't? I mean, under the existing circumstances, to impose a no-fly zone would definitely take us – and we would have to take out Russian anti-aircraft on Russian territory. But given the existing situation, we have to look for every possibility to aid the Ukrainians, and there are some options that we should be considering. It's up to military specialists to decide, and various specialists have spoken out on this subject

and said that there are alternative ways of reinforcing Ukrainians. Now, we, not being experienced military planners and specialists, have to rely on those who have devoted their lives to the study of these issues to give us the right advice. But the general principle is something I think we can all agree on, which is that this is a nation that's got to be helped. And okay, we didn't do everything we could have done and maybe everything we should have done up until the moment when the war broke out. But that's ancient history now. And we have to give them our support. And, I mean, we have to give them our military support.

And also, there's a psychological element in all this. And we need to take the psychological war to the Russian people because they're the ones who can remove Putin. They're the ones who can end the war. And they are innocent victims in many respects because this is a regime which doesn't care about their lives any more than it cares about the lives of the Ukrainians. And this gets back to the truth about the apartment bombings, the truth about the atrocities, the truth about the kleptocracy. These are all important truths. They have to be brought home, especially now.

The fact, I mean, nothing illustrates better than the means that Putin used in order to come to power. Nothing illustrates better his true attitude toward the Russian people. They was ready to murder hundreds of randomly chosen, absolutely innocent people who had nothing against him and imposed no threat to him, but just to use their lives that way.

That's something, that's a message that we need to convey. And some people will say, well, the Russian people are passive, that the Russian people will not react no matter what you tell them. Well, that's a very pessimistic view, and I don't think it's 100% justified. But I would say this, that that information can have an effect on those circles in the Russian government, in the military, in the intelligence apparatus who are capable of removing Putin. We've seen it. We've seen the warnings that were issued before the war was launched from retired generals, Russian generals, who said this would be a total disaster and it'll be the destruction of Russia. There

are some bad people in the Russian security services, but they're not all bad. There are also people who genuinely care about their country and genuinely are worried about the future and generally don't sympathize with the idea that people come to power by murdering innocent people and blowing them up in their beds they need to be reminded because those are the people who can who can bring this to an end before i get into what you just said because this this is a critical topic the psychology of the russian people that i think a lot of us have questions on i think you obviously know a lot about but before i I get into that, I do want to make a comment about the things you said early in there about the no-fly zone. First of all, I really appreciate your taking seriously that situation because now, given where we're at, now it's a war problem because the planes are already in the sky. I will admit I hadn't totally thought about if they had done it preemptively. And that is something I'm going to be thinking about after this episode. One thing in there though is that you mentioned the military people who this is their job and they're the professionals and all that.

And I, on the surface, agree. I do worry about the almost like – you throw around the term, but the military-industrial complex because you see some of these guys so carelessly going on tv and just now floating like oh no fly zone like it's military guys like it's nothing and it is a different now it's unfortunately we didn't do enough so now it's a different situation and i think that's um i think that's that's certainly problematic but um you you were getting towards the i think your phrase was like we need to fight back by providing the russian you said something like providing the russian people with information and it goes into the middle of the whole propaganda piece which you've touched on a bunch today as far as after the Soviet Union this the the lack of information the control of it has still very much run through the Kremlin and so

the people see what they're told to see and I think a major question that people in the West and you know America and just regular people looking at this like me have is what is the actual support based on the propaganda for Putin in Russia like I mean I assume any number of popularity I see out of there is probably cooked meaning it's way higher than it actually is but are we talking one out of two Russians supports Putin and supports this war or what do you think it is I think it's a very difficult question to answer for the simple reason that at any one moment, those figures can vary quite substantially. If we take the United States just as a point of comparison, public opinion doesn't gyrate uh dramatically uh it it you know it it evolves over time it can react

to very dramatic events for example uh the september 11th attacks uh which uh george bush handled very well uh you know in the aftermath at least and and his popularity rose enormously. But generally speaking, there's a kind of stability to American public opinion that you don't have in Russia. Why is that? The ability of a mood to kind of take hold of the population is extraordinary because the people have a tradition of being propagandized. Throughout their history, moods, particularly political moods, were manufactured. They endured one campaign after another. During the Stalin period, there were campaigns against wreckers, against counter-revolutionaries.

There was the doctor's plot which was an anti-semitic campaign I don't know anything about that yeah well this was the in the last years of Stalin's reign he accused the many Kremlin doctors

for the most part Jewish doctors of trying to poison the Soviet leadership. And they were arrested, and they were in danger of being killed. Some of them, of course, were killed. And it was to be followed by the mass exile of the Jewish population of Moscow. Really? I didn't know anything about this.

Yeah, this was a campaign against religion under Nikita Khrushchev, for example. There were anti-Western campaigns. There were campaigns on behalf of the Arab countries who had suffered as a result of the aggression of Israel. There were campaigns on behalf of the Vietnamese who were fighting against the United States. So, Russian people are accustomed to campaigns, to manufactured opinions, to mass propaganda, and as a result, their view of a given situation can change rather dramatically depending on the circumstances because this has been their history and they don't have the kind of stabilizing factors that we have

in this country independent centers of power and influence which which can mediate against an official point of view even though in reality the official point of view, even though in reality, the official point of view, which is, we could say provisionally is expressed at White House press conferences, is hardly imposed on people, but it's nonetheless offered. So as a result of this, we have to be very careful in making assumptions about how much support putin has we know that according to public opinion polls after the annexation of crimea his popular support went up 60 to 80 percent according to polls do that? Well, that may well have been what people answered. That may well have been an accurate depiction of how people filled out forms or answered on the telephone. But here's another feature of Russian life that you have to bear in mind, which is that people don't trust the authorities.

I wonder why. And the public opinion polls often reflect what the Russian respondent thinks that the poll taker wants to hear. So those figures, I think, I'm willing to accept the idea that Putin's popularity went up dramatically after the annexation of Crimea. Whether it reached 80% or not, I think that's very dubious because I think that many of the people answering the question were anxious to give the required answer. And also, the whole history of Russia... The required answer?

Well, the expected answer. I know what you mean. I would say the expected answer would be a better way of putting it. The whole history of Russia, unfortunately, reflects the fact that people believe their opinion doesn't matter and that what they think doesn't. You can even hear Russians say something that, you know, they have various expressions that you would never hear in the United States. For example, this is especially among Russian women, you'll hear them say, maybe I'm speaking stupidity, which this is a common expression. I'm just saying, you don't hear that among American women or among Americans generally. Russian women I know, I don't know anything, but, or another expression that Russians sometimes use is the, actually, I have to remember it now. It'll come to me in a minute, but let me.

I understand what you're getting at. Yeah. But, oh, yeah, no, another Russian expression is, you know, you don't have all the information. Oh, boy. Only the government has all the information. Now, that's another example of expressions like this that indicate that our reflection of the fact that many Russians have been convinced that everything should be taken care of by the government, that only the government is really qualified to have an opinion, that their opinion doesn't amount to much. And so if there's a campaign, for example, on behalf of a war against Ukraine, and this is what is being broadcast on the state television, which is the principal source of information, and it's packaged in a way that will appeal to Russians' prejudices,

they're very likely to repeat that. However- The same people who don't inherently don't trust authority though that's the that's the great paradox here i don't understand they don't trust uh authority but they defer to it wow and they and they accede to it and they identify with it they may understand i mean i'll give you another example uh of the one russian woman i knew uh and who was very very pro-putin very patriotic on the one hand or patriotic in her terms and very pro-putin on on the one hand and then the other hand would say that you know spoke about certain people and say they were part of Putin's assassination squads.

They worked in one of Putin's assassination squads. Well, how can the same person hold two such apparently incompatible views, that Putin is wonderful and then the other hand that he has people who carry out assassinations. But yet that's rather common. And this is why it is so difficult to be sure about what Russian public opinion is at any one moment and what the effect would be of an alternative point of view, of alternative information. We saw during the perestroika years that people who had appeared to be 100% communist turned around and became 100% anti-communist.

Perestroika was the whole thing where the USSR... The last years of the USSR, the reform period. Wasn't Yeltsin, he was a communist leader? Yeah, perfect example. I mean, Yeltsin was responsible. Well, he was from the town of Sverdlovsk. He was the party boss. Sverdlovsk has since been renamed, given back its old name of Yekaterinburg

But that's in the Urals In the Ural Mountains It's a city, you know, a Russian city I'll stick a map in the corner of the screen while you're talking Yeah, in any case The Tsar and his family were murdered In Yekaterinburg. Back in 1917.

By the Bolsheviks, yeah. And the house in which they were murdered, they were taken to the basement and murdered, the house in which that occurred became, in the late Soviet period, a place of pilgrimage for people who would go there and silently sort of hold a vigil in memory of the czar and in the memory of his family and the communists got information about this and they uh they decided that that house had to be demolished so as not to give these Tsarist sympathizers a place to go and hold

a commemoration. And the party leaders at the time in Yekaterinburg, then it was called Sverdlovsk, I'm sorry, in Sverdlovsk, they resisted. They said that would be destroying a monument of history. But Yeltsin became, they were replaced by Yeltsin. He became the new party leader, and he carried it out with no problem. Immediately just destroyed the building. Later said he regretted it when that was advantageous for him to say. So the thing is that, and then, of course, Yeltsin became a violently anti-communist after being violently communist.

You know what? On this topic, though, I didn't, I should have known that you would, it was this way because it's on paper who Yeltsin was for example and he was the president but it's a prime example of the fact that like when you look at communism which is like far left wing you look at fascism which is far right wing the circle of politics onto the extremes becomes the same absolutely you know stalin and hitler hated each other hitler was a fascist stalin was a communist go look at their actions and what they did they did maybe there were a few things carried out slightly differently but the end results of who they were as people and

what they did they were the same person that's why the whole thing is the the abandonment of any kind of moral values and the and any kind of framework of law and any kind of restraint and the creation of a totalitarian regime. It'll always look the same. You know, just the decorations will be a little different. Right. And so, but to get back to the question of what do the Russian people believe? Well, they believe for the moment what they're being told, many of them.

I would say the conscious part of the Russian population is about 15%. That's my guess. Yeah, I would say those who really are thoughtful and critical and can think and are not influenced by propaganda. But that 15% is capable, as they showed during the perestroika period, of taking the rest of the country with them under the right circumstances. That's why we can't give up on these people. It doesn't mean, and by the way, it doesn't mean that they're evil in any way.

No, no. They're naive to a certain extent. They're suggestible. They are capable of being manipulated, but many of them have good intentions sure it's it's not we have to make i'm glad you did that we have to make that distinction like the russian people are only as good as as the information they have and it would be the same way here or anywhere else and so you know if there are people who support what's going on because they only know some of the propaganda they're seeing, that doesn't, in my opinion, make them a bad person. Well, we can criticize.

I mean, there are certain criticisms that can be made that, in fact, they're not. These are people who are not open-minded. They're not making an effort. They're not. But let's be realistic. I mean, people are people. And how many people, even in a free society, are willing to make an effort? Right.

And it's also like you got to remember, I think we might have said this in something earlier, like think about all these 18 19 year old kids who are invading ukraine you know they don't even know what they're doing half of them you know it's not like well there's lots of lots of evidence to that effect i mean here's the thing the the call up for the draft for the russian army there is june and december And they're sending draftees from the December call-up into a war zone. Right now. Yeah. Now, some of them are practically without training. Well, they have some training, but this is not – is it any wonder that they're being killed in such numbers?

And that's a tragedy. They are as much victims of Putin as the Ukrainians. Yeah, agreed. I don't think that should, and, you know, there's a lot of rhetoric out there, but you've got to say that. We need to be able to speak to the Russian people. Unfortunately, you know, the kind of, you know, appeal that our presidents, and I'm not saying either one president or another, that they're all guilty of this. I mean, the kind of post-Soviet presidents of the U.S. They're focused on what matters to their constituency and maybe the American people, maybe in a broader sense, in the best sense, but not always.

But the ability to enunciate universal principles that can inspire everyone. Well, Abraham Lincoln had that. Ronald Reagan had it, Franklin Roosevelt. But we don't, I mean, we haven't had anyone like that in a long time. And we don't seek it, I'm sorry to say. But if we say that we are going to defend to the death countries that are in NATO and leave democratic countries outside of NATO to be destroyed, is that what we're saying? Yeah, it's tough. It's so hard. Is that what we're saying?

Are we saying that we don't what what we defend our bureaucratic arrangements rather than principles and that's that's a tough question we really expect that the people on the other side are going to be inspired by that now i don't even mean the uh the ukrainians who are deliberately left out but but russians who might be our potential allies you got to remember and i'm speaking for a lot of people in my generation i think i'm speaking for a lot of people across generations too but on here i can technically only speak for myself so some people will listen and agree and maybe some other people won't but you know growing up in the era of the iraq war and afghanistan and stuff and what went on, the concept of endless wars and being the world's police, it's a loaded thing because the downsides of that are tremendous.

And at the same time, nobody likes – forget likes. It's horrible to see some of the things that go on around the world but not to take anything away from ukraine i just really wonder why you know oh we're all so into what's happening in ukraine right now totally get that agree we should be but like what about all the brown kids every day in the middle east who have been having this happen for 40 years 50 years we don't show the same energy for that and in reality it's like some of that we're in the middle of you know like i would argue that like we just for a little bit of context for you like we should have gone into afghanistan after 9 11

but then we went to iraq that had nothing to do saddam hussein was an awful guy don't get me wrong awful dude tortured his people the whole nine but like he had nothing to do, Saddam Hussein was an awful guy, don't get me wrong, awful dude. Tortured his people, the whole nine. But like, he had nothing to do with 9-11 and they went in there under what ended up being false pretenses. And then created this whole vacuum. And really just, forget destabilizing the area. It's like, you have created that attitude that I just projected. We don't want to see this. Theaq war had long long standing psychological uh and political consequences uh i think that look you know with the benefit of hindsight you know

hindsight is always 2020 yes um we forget the circumstances that led us into that war. This was a massive intelligence failure, and we have a result. We have a right to hold the intelligence agencies responsible. But we also have to bear in mind that every other intelligence agency came to the same conclusion. Russian intelligence, Israeli intelligence. That Iraq had WMDs? Yeah. Yeah. intelligence agency came to the same conclusion russian intelligence israeli intelligence that iraq had wmds yeah yeah and it was we were not we were not alone we were not alone now people say well you know it was falsified yeah you know i can tell you from my experience in a totalitarian state that you never have 100% information. The intelligence work is a little bit, has been compared even to the work of a doctor

who's trying to diagnose an extremely elusive condition and trying to understand what's going on, trying to put together all the information that he has and reach a conclusion. And if he doesn't reach a conclusion, he can't do anything. In the case of, you know, when I was in the Soviet Union, I had to try to sense who I could trust, who was not trustworthy, what information really mattered, and then decide whether I would publish a story, for example, on something. I mean, I got a report that there had been a strike, which in the Soviet Union was really a huge event, in the Kamaz truck factory, which was one of their biggest factories in the Soviet Union. And I had to judge, is this information reliable can i you know i mean i who struck it the workers the workers oh oh i'm sorry i misunderstood it was an actual strike it

wasn't yeah it wasn't like an airstrike no no no no it was the the workers went on straight and um i published it and turned out to be accurate. But the intelligence analysts are very much in this situation. That's why they oftentimes say, well, I believe this with a great degree of certainty, with a lesser degree of certainty. Because if you had 100% certainty because you know if you had a hundred percent certainty you wouldn't need an intelligence analyst and therefore failing to act is also an action we had even Saddam Hussein's generals believed he had weapons of mass destruction. So the United States had just been attacked on September 11th,

and people today don't like to be reminded of their support for the invasion of Iraq. Sure. And we forget the high degree of unanimity that existed at that time. Of course, after the fact, everybody is wise. But they also knew. I mean, let's be objective on this situation with information. The point you make about degrees of confidence, of course, you're 1,000 percent right. Like you're – to be 100 percent on things, you have to have quite literally the smoking gun, and that is not the case with a lot of intelligence.

But there is more than reasonable evidence to show that they cooked this and that it was not there was you want to talk about no degrees it got they had a very low degree of confidence that it was there and again you say hindsight 2020 to an extent i'll agree with that but not when you look at like for example what they did sending colin powell in there to sell this thing to the un when they knew it was low chance and then when you look at like dick cheney's one percent doctrine i mean whatever the hell it was called like that was preying upon the ultimate fear and it even dates back to you know i think the guy's dick clark he was the national security something something william clark yeah yeah william clark he William Clark. it's very hard not to see that they saw a situation happen it was horrific and they're like holy shit what do we do to respond but they also then saw an opportunity like oh we can go finish what big

bush tried to do 10 years ago and take this guy out and that i mean that's the way i have to look more into like what is real in russia what their intelligence services think i maybe i've looked at that before and i can't remember but but I don't want to say right now. No, they came to the same conclusion. But it wasn't that there was some sort of conspiracy on the part of the CIA or anybody. But you get five different people, okay? And you'll have five opinions on what constitutes enough proof in a situation like that. But to get back to the duration of our commitment, but rather the necessity of it.

If we had created a different way of life for millions of people in Afghanistan. And we, shortly after our withdrawal, a conservative member of the British Parliament was murdered. You may have read about this by a knife-wielding Somali Muslim extremist who went, you know, he was meeting his constituents, he went up and he scheduled an appointment, went up to him, took out a butcher knife and just, you know, hacked him to death. So you might ask, well, what's the connection between the Afghan war and the murder of this guy in a northern English town. And it's a fanatical ideology. And how do you defeat a fanatical ideology which is international, which is not amenable to a violent solution.

Because no matter how many you kill, there are always people who will accept the idea and become new recruits. You defeat an ideology by discrediting it. How do you discredit it? Yeah, it's a big how. You discredit it by showing that it's, that in fact it's not historically inevitable, as its proponents claim,

that it can be defeated, and that those who oppose it have the will to resist it. In the case of, and in reality, this is how communism was defeated yeah i think there's a huge distinction though here and that is like you look at communism it was the iron curtain right and there were a lot of countries who were sucked into that as we know you know the ussr brought in a bunch of places. But the Cold War ended up being the war without a bullet. It was the one where there were things in spycraft that happened behind the scenes, but ultimately, thank God, the nuclear incident didn't come to fruition. Well, the Cold War had – there was the Korean War.

There was the war in Vietnam. I'm talking about – you're correct. I'm saying specifically, though – Between East and West. Yes, between Russia, the USSR, and the United States. vietnam i'm talking about specific you're correct i'm saying specifically though between east and west yes between russia the ussr and the united states and communism and you know vietnam's a whole another question but like communism ended up falling in on itself because as you pointed out that 15 or so of the country was able to get whatever little information they needed to be like this ain't it all right let's do something here and it was a peaceful overthrow as it turned out even if it didn't end up turning

out the best like they at least got rid of the ussr when you're talking about like radical islam in in the middle east yes of course it exists yes it's not great but what are these things caused by they're caused by creating vacuums, creating situations where people are born into war zones. I mean, Osama bin Laden was fighting in the hills against the Russians to get his higher calling to run the jihad you know what i mean so you look at a situation like afghanistan once we took our eye off the ball there and started focusing on iraq we the progress we had made in a year in afghanistan went out the window over the next 19 years as we now have seen through proof and we created another area of focus in iraq where all these other people now were born into a constant war zone and there's a fight between the ideologies because this is where my point is this is where you can give the room to radicals who trade on on psychological

manipulation to say look at who the oppressor is they're here they have guns they have bases they tell you what you can do. You see how they just struck a drone down and 100 people died and it was a bunch of women and children? I don't think that's, I mean, yeah, they see that, of course. But when you deal with an idea, the idea makes certain claims about reality. And those claims are widely accepted by the adherents of the idea,

those who believe in the idea. In the case of radical Islam, of course, it's the inevitable triumph of Islam and in its most radical and orthodox interpretation and the implementation of Sharia law. Now Sharia law and radical Islam were ensconced in Afghanistan at the time that they allowed the Al-Qaeda free reign to attack the United States. The result was, of course, that the Islamic regime was overthrown.

So there's enormous symbolism in the fact that it's now been reestablished. Yes. What, in the long run, radical Islam, the situation is a little different than the conflict with communism, in which information could play a real role. You won't be able to disillusion radical Islamists by making logical arguments because they they don't operate on in a on the basis of logic but rather on the basis of faith but their faith can be undermined if they see that the everything that they that that their that their ideology and it is an ideology actually, or their interpretation of their religion prescribes,

is simply not coming true. And that means basically that we have to hold the line against it. If we establish a government, a society in Afghanistan, which is for all of its faults, nonetheless not barbaric and not directed against the most fundamental principles of humanity. And then we're obliged to protect those people who've put their faith in us. And if we don't recognize that obligation, then aggressors all over the world will assume that we won't recognize any other obligations either. And by the way, commitment to the NATO, the defense of NATO is not an exception. When you're dealing with, you know, what is it that this young Somali murderer who attacked the British parliamentarian,

or in another case, the young Chechen teenager who beheaded a French teacher who had shown a sketch of Muhammad, what they have in common is that they are motivated by this radical idea. The radical idea is discredited by a situation in which the United States and the other Western powers show that it can be defeated and that its defeat can be permanent. You still have – no matter where you are though, I mean even in America. I mean there's neo-Nazis who live here. There's not a ton of them but there are. You always – there's never going to be all good.

So where I worry is that where we might cherry pick some things to make them out to be far worse than they are. This is how you get things like the Patriot Act to happen and then behind the scenes stellar wind. And you start to roll down that slippery slope of the same things that you've spent your life's work being concerned about that exist in Russia. And then you could see it here because not on that level but it has to start somewhere right so you know you you lose your rights one by one well i think just to go back to the to the just for a second anyway to the to the afghanistan question because that is uh you have to ask yourself we have to ask ourselves, and this is very important, why did Putin decide to attack Ukraine now? There was no obvious answer to that question.

The line of contact in eastern Ukraine, yes, there were occasional exchanges of fire. Yes, there were occasional casualties, but it was nothing compared to what it was. Ukraine clearly was not in a position to retake the Crimean Peninsula by force. There was no move to accept Ukraine into NATO. In other words, everything that he was demanding, in fact, was already the status quo. But what did change was the American withdrawal from Afghanistan. And people may not understand this, but Afghanistan had the status, you know, some countries like Estonia, for example, or Poland, they have the status of NATO allies.

They are members of NATO. We are committed to defend them. But there's another status, you know, sort of most valued allies. And that status belonged, you belonged, Afghanistan had that status. And it's ironic, but during the years, up until the withdrawal, almost up until the withdrawal, Ukraine was aspiring to get the same status as Afghanistan. When they saw how little it mattered, they withdrew. They ceased to be interested, of course. But the point is that by not doing the minimum that was required

of us in Afghanistan and not being able to explain it to our people, We created a situation that Putin was very anxious to, obviously anxious to exploit. He had no real reason for an attack on Ukraine. There was no, nothing threatened him. There was no, he talked about missiles being nato missiles being stationed in in ukraine but ukraine was not a member of nato there was no there were no missiles no not being a member of nato obviously there were no nato missiles do you think there was a potential and i use that word even lightly there like a potential that things were moving in a direction where ukraine would be a member of nato and i'm talking about from putin's perspective do you think he legitimately felt like that was a real possibility and therefore

oh i'm gonna invade now i doubt it i i i think that he might have thought that maybe ultimately that issue would be raised, but there was no sign of it. And we can't, you know, we can't. It's like a woman, for example, who suspects her husband is cheating. And in fact, there's no sign really that he is cheating, but he might cheat. Well, how do you convince her? I mean, you know, there's – or vice versa. It could be – Once you get it in your head, it's hard to – a man is suspecting his wife.

I mean, it's just once you get an idea in your head. The real reason was that Putin wanted to reproduce the Crimean effect. This is a corrupt regime. It's a lawless regime. It's a regime that inflicts a lot of injustice on people. And we talk about the attitudes of the Russian people. They could turn on a dime against this regime under the right circumstances and that's why you want to see information that's one of the pushed in there that's why I think it's so important and but and Putin is resorted to the tried-and-true method of Russian leaders you know

start a war in order to rally support around a corrupt regime in, Yeltsin did the same thing. He said, we need a war in Chechnya. His national security advisor, a guy named Oleg Lobov, said that we need a short victorious war in order to boost the president's rating. Well, the war was neither short nor victorious. Never works out that way. War is unpredictable. And the second Chechen War, in that case, they had planned well in

advance and they succeeded in their objective, which was to put Putin into the presidency. Of course, they preceded it with a terrorist act against their own people. And then, of course, we had the experience of, as we've said, Crimea and the fighting in eastern Ukraine and now the invasion here. In all cases, this is an attempt to strengthen the hold of a corrupt ruling group. Well, I like that you said that right there. We have touched around the issue of the giant sucking sound that happened in the 90s where privatization was put in the hands of very few who became the oligarchs. But we haven't really talked about them today. The focus has been a lot on Putin, as it should be in a lot of ways. But the way that a lot of people now are learning

the Russian economy works and has worked is that this group of 100 to 200 individuals who are all billionaires, these oligarchs, are the individuals who were right place, right time. Basically, we don't have time to go into the entire thing i'd love to do that on another podcast with you but in the 90s they were handed the keys to various things that the government had controlled be it you know like the nickel market oil whatever and they made all this money and therefore they took the you want to talk about wealth gap they took the substantial amount of wealth available in the land and then therefore had all the rest of the Russian people living in poverty or not really having an opportunity and creating this enormous vacuum that – and you've also hinted at this – blurred the lines between crime and law right and you know you could get into the whole like gangster aspect which is a whole nother thing but one of the major focuses of these quote-unquote sanctions that we're seeing is these

various western governments including the united states trying to go after these oligarchs who by and large while they may hold real estate and spend some time in russia seem to also live in a lot of other places or spend the majority of their time in other places and therefore have money outside the country. The thing about Putin that I think not enough of us point to is that he came in to power as a KGB politician guy and became an oligarch because he took percentages of all these different companies around the country. And it's estimated that he may be the richest man in the world. You know, we don't know what it is for sure, but it's probably in the hundreds of billions.

And so why is it important that these other guys who seem to have to do what he says, they don't really seem to have control. Why is it important for us to sanction them? It seems like an obvious answer but i i don't know if i'm missing some some variables here that that maybe you you you could clear up well when we sanction russian oligarchs um we're hopefully striking at uh these the i mean they aren't they they have assets, but they also run enterprises in Russia. They employ a lot of people. When we seize their overseas assets, we also affect their ability to raise capital.

And we affect their ability to attract investment. We undercut their loyalty to the regime and, in fact, create a situation in which they may become even our potential allies in getting rid of Putin. So there are a lot of aspects. And we also do something that would appeal, generally speaking, to the Russian people because they don't like the oligarchs well of course not I mean they they don't like those corrupt elements who've who've

who've robbed the country blind and are living you know these you know these enormous ocean-going yachts they're those that's all purchased with with public money one way or the other hmm or the consequences thereof and they were of corruption they would also as you explained it they relied on what became like the Russian mafia like organized crime to work hand-in-hand with them they worked hand-in-hand with criminal elements they were in many cases, some cases, criminals themselves. The distinction between oligarch and criminal was oftentimes not very clear because oligarchs enforced their will with the help of criminals. Criminals went into business with the help of oligarchs right and they paid off the whole government government was all paid off yeah so because that's the obvious answer it seems like is you're gonna piss these guys enough of them off and they

all with their billions of dollars put together have a lot of sway and so they may be like they have less sway than you would think yeah but they but but it does destabilize the country because these people control you know they control economic empires yeah and they control those empire and you know they control a lot of economic assets within the country as well and And it also creates a situation in which aspiring oligarchs or aspiring thieves understand that their wealth is not safe anywhere. They knew it was not safe in Russia because they could be seized by their competitors. That's why they put it overseas and offshore. But now it turns out it's not safe there either.

Yeah, and it's getting even crazy because it has weird down culture effects. The guy Roman Abramovich owns Chelsea in the UK, which is outside of Manchester United, the most important football team over there, soccer in American terms. And they can't even pay their players right now, because he's sanctioned. You know, so it, you know... And they can't get access to their bank funds. Right. No, they're, it's causing a lot of disruption. And disruption and you know we can't trace precisely all the economic consequences but these people are are are are certainly in very much involved in he can in the economic life of the country having you know despite their propensity for stealing and corruption. What do you think happens next year? How does this take me through the next year?

Well, I wish if I had a crystal ball, I would be in a different category. I think that it reminds me of what Yogi Berra said, you know. He said predictions are difficult, especially about the future. But in any case, I mean, you know, there are a lot of press reports that negotiations are making progress just recently. With Ukraine and Russia? Yeah. I mean, I don't know what kind of, you know, any negotiations would have from the Russian point of view

their first priority preserving Putin in power. I'm not sure after this kind of horrendous loss of life that, you know, a solution acceptable to Ukraine would preserve his hold on power. At the same time, any kind of compromises that Ukraine or that Zelensky makes would probably be resisted by large sections of the Ukrainian population. So for these reasons, I'm not as optimistic about these negotiations as I would like to be. I mean, of course, both sides have a reason to avoid further bloodshed, but we'll see. if there is no negotiated solution there could be maybe a stalemate of some sort but that would i'm not sure that the russians could sustain that because the russian took

ukrainians could go on the counter-offensive yeah oh i don't know i mean i don't know how much the ukrainians like do you think they would want to do that, though? Because at the end of the day, Russia is a big country. Like, it's a different ballgame when they're going into Russia. Well, no, counter-offensive doesn't mean attacking Russia. It means attacking the Russians on Ukrainian territory. Now, on the other hand, we have a situation with, I mean, the real question is, is Putin willing to do to Kiev what the Russians did to Aleppo and Grozny? And how would the West react?

I mean, those are the questions that hang over all this. If no negotiated settlement can be reached, if no ceasefire can be achieved, then it's a question. If they are not willing to use those tactics, then they may have to face defeat because if they do use those tactics, I'm not saying the west will would go into the war but it would be an excruciating situation for the west and at that point uh the transition takes place to guerrilla war which would go on could go on for a decade and involve yeah that could get a lot of people it would be so bad and it's tough because putin is a guy, you know, he's all about looks. He's, you know, he's your narcissistic tyrant 101. You don't want to show defeat. It's all about the message and holding on to power.

And so. Well, that's where he went into this, you know, to strengthen his power. And that was one of the reasons I thought that in the final analysis he wouldn't do it. Simply because I thought that he would understand that this would be a danger to him. Yeah, you said that. You knew that this would not be a two-day thing. You were very adamant about that. You were right. Oh, no. So, who knows? I mean, it's a tragedy. It's a terrible tragedy, because both countries deserve better. Yeah. One last question on on him because we're coming up on the end here this has been a great conversation once again i really appreciate you doing this but

i'm very glad to be here and again i i think we should have you back at some point because there's a lot we're not getting to today but there's been a lot of talk around putin's mental state particularly now right we've seen a lot of paranoia with I mean there was like a picture at the beginning of covet of him in like a hazmat suit he's sitting I'll put the picture in the corner of that and I'll put a picture of him and Macron meeting maybe like a month month and a half ago where they're sitting at a table no no that was 50 feet apart there's another I believe it's a video this one I haven't checked the verification on so take this one with a grain of salt and please look it up yourself but I believe there was even a video I saw quickly a

couple days ago where he was talking into one of those mics and when his hand went to make a gesture it went through the mic so the mic wasn't even real he was using a digital mic meaning he's like so I'll show you this afterwards but he's so well that wouldn't be surprised none of this is surprising so do you think he's in some way gone off a even a deep end for him at this point is there reason to believe that and have like credence there's reason to believe it because uh in the past he was much more calculating uh But, you know, this invasion does reflect some departure from his previous pattern of behavior. In the past, he restricted himself to attacking weak enemies. Including Ukraine itself back in 2014, because at that time they only had 6,000 battle-ready troops. He also only took a very opportunistic place.

Yeah. He wasn't going into Kiev. Right, right, right. So in that sense, yes. In other respects, his behavior is consistent with, you know, for disregard of human life, for sure. He's shown that beginning with the apartment bombings. The, you know, the kind of attempt to use Russian nationalism to shore up the regime, well, that's consistent. So, I mean, I think there's also a danger if we exaggerate his mental instability

that that will make us even more cautious. I mean, we aren't doctors, and we can't really diagnose him. So we have to assume, I think, at least for the moment, without, in the absence of further evidence, that he's behaving very erratically and he's taken a very grave risk, probably compounded by a lot of false information. I mean, the fact that they put two heads of the intelligence services under house arrest, that's an indication of the fact that they, who was the Minister of Defense, said that we can take Grozny with one parachute regiment in two hours. So the Russians have this history of severely underestimating.

And they don't want to disappoint, you know, somebody who doesn't want to hear the hard truth. Well, that was it. I mean, so that would suggest that it's not mental disability, but rather, you know, the kind of information flow that Putin is getting or has been getting over the years. But I think we have to just assume that for the moment that he's a rational actor and can be reached through rational means. Otherwise, what choices do we have if we're dealing with a crazy person?

But on the other hand, we have to be vigilant for signs of that. Sure. But on the other hand, we have to be vigilant for signs of that. Well, when you got in the car today, when I picked you up, very quickly, I forget how we got there, but it was almost right away, you mentioned that you were just hoping to use this opportunity to remind the world of the things that they didn't pay attention to about who this guy has always been. He's always been yeah with the bombings and with you know his false flag things he did to his own people and how callous he is and i'm glad we can give this a platform to be able to get that word out and and i hope to clip this up and and continue to to spread that because look now's the time everyone on tv as they should be is very negative on like ultra negative on putin and you know i i think it's time for people to understand the atrocity that as as his own in his own gangster terrorist ways he is capable of and you know to have the guy in here

who's been on this since day one of it is is a great honor so i very much appreciate you coming through well i'm very glad to be here. All right. Well, we will do it again at some point. Definitely, definitely. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to it.

Peace.