Kitbag Conversations - Kitbag Conversations Episode 3: Russia for Idiots (part 1)

Episode Date: March 16, 2023

So guys and gals, we were going to do just a one-hour basic episode on Russia but it was getting really long so we decided mid-way to make it a 2 part podcast. Enjoy the tease, You can find part 2 on the Patreon! 

Ah, do be met, requistat, bin, avatze, ah, primus din, ten, ah, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, er, ermäßig we'll come back to the kid bag conversations bonus episode this is episode two we're talking Russia a lot of it Cody what's up man we've been we've been we've been just shit gaggling for like 30 minutes now talking about where to even start this thing but like dude we gotta start do we start with anesthesia eating a pps 41 just like getting shot by a mozen like the Romanov family dying like how do you explain modern Russia like it's just suffering right like it's oh yeah it's it's it's the most bizarre hybrid of ideologies symbolism iconography

belief systems ethnic groups there's like a hundred and five ethnic groups inside Russia there's so yet that's like America's like what seven yeah like it's it's it's pretty intense but it's like if you look at because it's not supposed to work in theory where waving Soviet iconography when the Soviet Union is supposed to be gone but then your political ideology it's kind of leaning very center to like Italy in the 20s where it's like hey you know there's morally moral justification in terms of the state runs everything because the people need to give back to the state and in order to be a citizen whatever it's very reminiscent of that but then when the Italians and the Germans didn't believe in religion the Russians do

so they bring in the Orthodox Church which if you go all the way back to when concept to noble fell at 1453 I think it's like oh the new holy sea went instead of like Rome with everything they went to Moscow so then they are like the incarnate of the holy the new Roman Empire and so it's this bizarre mix of uh Christian fascism hyperinflated Christian fascism with Soviet communist atheistic iconography which isn't supposed to work but it does yeah and it and it's and it's so crazy because like people don't understand like they're just in the comments and they're just on fucking all social media like oh Ukraine is gonna win Ukraine is gonna win and then like expert

political scientists and intelligent agencies have been like yeah Russia only loses when they've lost half a million guys or their overlord and the political the entire political party is defeated so not just like Putin has to die but like all of his lieutenants or you have to kill a half million Russians and so not only does it work it is just a society of hard suffering not hard and people they just are used to suffering and dying and it's like the Russians and everything essentially east of Poland did not develop the same way in Western Europe did where they had feudalism where they had you know the lord and then under the lord you had the peasants but then above the lord you had like the king and so the king gave the decree of everything but it was a

regulated system it was a top-down approach and Russia was the king and everyone else there was no there was no middle class and so in like mercantilism which started like expanding during like the the renaissance age and age of exploration the colonies when the western European power started to shoot off into the new world and whatnot colonize everything the Russians didn't have that they were like yeah i give you the week and you don't let me starve you don't kill me because i don't give you the week and so they were a feudal society up until about 1914 there was a big old war that happened and then the Russians went oh actually i don't want to listen to someone tell me what to do so then they said everyone should have a say what to do but then it was like

that's when the communists went into it but then but also on top of that it's the Russian people like as a people that their collective identity really hold on to like or back in the day rather they really held on to the communist manifesto is like a 100% fact zero fallibility as a document but held on to the religious standpoint of like well Christianity we are Orthodox Christianity is the number one a lot of them renounced it the high party officials and a lot of the priests were killed but a lot of the high party officials renounced religion and everything they were like yeah the state this is it but then they really didn't touch on the fact that like Jews had to go they were like oh yeah because like Marx was the first one that came up and said

oh yeah these guys they own the banks are the reason so he was the one that created that typical not created but really like popularized the whole stereotype of oh yeah the the Jews they're a pest in everything it's like where do you think Hitler got the idea he just watched Stalin do it and went yeah I'll just do that but then if you go all the way up to today we're in the 90s under the Yeltsin era communism failed everything they were kind of stuck in a rut they went all right let's try out the middle class but then they didn't know what the middle class is they don't know what to do when they have money so they were calling the champion back the old Soviet days and the Soviets were championing back the Russian Empire days and before that they were

it's just it was like they were dropped on their head immediately as a child and they were like figure it out when I looked at when I was on the head in a shallow pool they were like all right when I have my money when I on the streets like fucking I got two foes dude and what's the so yeah you've got like you're saying from like a psychology point of view and like the symbolism and all of that it's like there's like this divide of like yeah we're atheistic communists but we also are the holy Roman Empire and then on top of that you've also got a culture that is you know brave and strong and honorable but at the same time they created one the largest groups the Vori the Russian mafia like their entire existence they've had those guys

existing and it's like yeah it's like it's just this dual personality and then on top of that when it goes back to like the origins of like Ivan Len the guy that Putin always cites is like the perfect model citizen of what a Russian should be yeah he's like uh there are Slavs and there are Russian Slavs and Ukrainians are a part of Russian Slavs they just have to have their flavor almost like the text in Americans his own flavor and so that's where uh when Putin wrote his essay and was it 2020 like on the strategic reliability he wrote it he wrote it yeah we can wait on that one but this is like yeah I don't think Putin's ever wrote a book or read a book and then cited it in his sources when he wrote a paper but when he comes down says like oh yeah

Ukrainians Belarusians Serbians everyone under the Slavic sun are one people it's like if he's basing his political theory on Ivan Len he's like he's not wrong because Ivan Len came out and he was like well yes but technically if you looked out of the Slavic people it goes all the way up to the Danube river because that's what the Romans didn't take over and so every it's it's mental gymnastics to us the like the heightened degree and so with that logic you're like well then the Russians were justified of occupying eastern Germany until the 90s but it's crazy because like he may like there is if you read uh the news are whatever the book about Putin and his life it's like he may or may not have written it but he believes that shit right like he actually legit believes

that he is the next Russian emperor or whatever and he's gonna reunify the empire but it's crazy because Jordan Peterson was like I don't know why this is like a surprise when I tell people like no Putin's been very clear about what he wants like he wants to unite all Slavic people he's gonna stick his face in NATO and tell him to fuck off and everyone's like but he's so mysterious like no mother fucker he's telling you he's gonna murder like it's like I mean we talked about before like did we over resummit the Russians you're like it's a military capability yes and no but in terms of like geopolitics you're like dog they told us what they wanted and if you go back to when the Russian Empire was starting to expand when they were branching out of

the Nipro River and everything like that they went down to Moldova they're like hey you guys are orthodox we're orthodox we're kind of the same people yeah I know you have the Latin alphabet not Cyrillic but yeah we could be friends and so when in the 90s after the Soviet Union broke up and Moldova declared they're independent so they're like oh by the way uh 25 percent of your population's ethnic Russians and they want to be Russian so we're just gonna keep Transnistria and then I forgot the actual term for it but it's that ideological base of like oh yeah this is ours because we're justified yeah but then if you look at someone like Putin there's always those arguments of like is Putin actually a Christian does he believe what he's

saying I'm thinking yes he actually believes in it because he's like iconography is huge if you ever watched that video of him doing breaststroke in a pool he's praying the whole time he's doing the up down right left you know not left right because the orthodox do it backwards and then apparently it was a great pain when him and his wife got divorced but then he got divorced because she didn't give him any sons it's like that's it that's in his book uh he got his like zinc or silver it's not gold but it's like zinc or silver cross that he's had since he was like in the KGB like his mother or somebody gave him it as a gift when he became a KGB agent so he's always had like a cross like he's always had it and even even when he was like the I think something

like his his mother was a committed orthodox Christian but his father was a communist party official like he was in st. Petersburg yeah his grandfather was at uh Leningrad like where they were eating sawdust in their bread his dad was the in his book first citizen that came out in like 2000 when he sat down with the journalists they were like oh tell us about your life and he was like did I tell you that my grandfather survived the purges of Stalin they're like okay yeah and then he was like did I tell you that my father was the only member of an anti-tank platoon that fought Leningrad they're like cool thanks but yeah it was his father yeah it was his father not his grandfather my bad but no and what's even crazier is like uh and I think this was a huge defining moment that

like a lot of people if they don't know this like they need to fucking go read a book uh that part in his life where he was with the stasi in east Germany when communism fell and he was the desk officer in charge of the compound and communism fell he's got this crowd of people looking for their missing relatives coming up to the gate and they've all got pitchforks knives and torches and all he's got is like a mackerel and seven shots on a dream and he calls up the communist party and he's like hey what the fuck am I supposed to do and they're like we don't know we don't exist anymore and they like hung up the phone on him and Putin had to deal with this crowd it was like did you burn all of the like he single handedly purged the entire building yeah he did he burned

the whole goddamn thing but uh it is it's like I mean imagine being at like a fucking uh embassy out in like fucking Germany or yeah yeah exactly that's a perfect example example like imagine if you were the cia chief in afghanistan and you just got word like one day like hey afghanistan doesn't exist as a country anymore america's gone we're trying to figure it all out and like the taliban are right there at the door like of course you're gonna become a fucking like you're gonna go way out there you're gonna become someone who just like you're gonna become what we in the americans call extremist because you were pretty much left to die he was pretty much left to die in my opinion 100% and so you take you take that whole just mental image of him yeah like because

you know he absolutely places up in politics where he's like I was left to die and I you know whatever would ever escape but then you take that and then he goes back to st. Petersburg he's like might as well get into politics and he meets this individual Anatoly Subchak who was at the time the acting um the mayor of st. Petersburg but was also the co-author of the russian constitution and he was like hey if you ever want to get in charge of russia this is how you do it so he grabbed him in medvedev and wrote a book uh it was something like it was essentially a blueprint on how to run russia after yeltsin was out of office and he was like this is how you do it this is what you got to do and then you and I have talked about it before where Putin jokingly calls

um uh murder wetwork and you're like okay so he's definitely propped up by those guys wetwork is like uh it's a vory term like a russian mafia term to uh for for murder and he called it wetwork in russian and I was like oh shit he's done the deed uh and he's is a spy too so no shit but I mean it's like that's kind of like the thing nobody understands is that like you're saying like they wrote the the playbook and they did it like the fucking and it's it's wild to me because people you know you you sit there and you put your american western values on them and you're like this is wrong but I mean take that guy who is left to die in east germany who's also a judo guy like he used to do judo all the time which is if you've ever done it not western judo

russian judo is hard I have done it my former coach was a georgian from the USSR hazing isn't appropriate for the term beating children is what it was like it's it's unreal but anyway uh so you come back to russia and like you have all this spy training you're used to shooting people in the back of the head you have a bunch of friends who love getting in fist fights and throwing people on a concrete and giving them fucking brain trauma like dude you run that town and then you meet the like you said you you write the playbook and then he becomes the deputy mayor of what was it st peter burg St. Petersburg yeah and it's at that point because after putin became acting president and like after yeltsin resigned uh 1999 and then he became president he

was elected he immediately re-wrote the constitution so it's almost like his mentor was like i'm gonna leave this very weak so you show up and so it's like uh like I want to say that aina totally got more of a hero's funeral when he died than yeltsin because like yeltsin was a drunk he was an embarrassment to the rest of the people because I mean like I want to say there's a plaque in DC where him and bill clinton got hammered and flagged down taxis to eat mcdonnell's life yeah they did that's two story uh two days oh man the 90s were awesome dead that 90s was the last great bastion of like hey america might be good and friendly and then you know 9 11 but whatever like I mean that was the russians the soviets quit 32 years ago and uh if you look at pictures of east europe in the 90s

hey there was ethnic cleansing between ethnic serbs and muslims and the yugoslav wars and uh guess who was there to help the serbs out the russians guess who helped shoot down our ship when we when we went in for a peacekeeping force the russians so like yeah it's like that first gen five aircraft that showed up and then it got shot down they're like oh it actually wasn't gen five but and and then owen wilson had to run away from a dude in an adidas track suit that's true but then you know jenice quaid had to shoot a bunch of kids because his wife was killed by muslims and the movie soldier they're a savior savior he's got a goat this is fucking come down for analysts everyone's gonna be like owen wilson was in Serbia yeah

yeah like yeah he threw a football at the enterprise I think I hate this I hate this so funny but I mean on top of that it's like all right well why is someone like lukashenko still in office because in the 90s when the Soviet Union was collapsing he was the only one that voted against the session so putin told him up he's like hey he's like hey bitch he was like you're not going anywhere and then I've probably said it before in the regular episodes but in the in the book for citizen there's this joke that it's not really a joke it's a real thing that happened where once the soviet unit was falling apart putin made phone calls with all of those kgb friends he's like you go to our media you go to kazakhstan you go to

turk menistan and they became in charge and they had other oligarchs going back to like that feudal society was the oligarchs that kind of worked side by side in competition with each other by exploiting the working class which is like gave the fuel to the soviet's ideology and everything and but then he was like all right no middle class we're going to take that platform we're bringing it back and then on top of that you become the president of kazakhstan you have all your oligarchs control the entire area the soviet union is gone it's not really gone and so i want to say when he became president he rallied all of his other leaders in the confederation of independent states or whatever it's called and they went to the old kgb building and he walked

in he was like step one secure the keys like reciting the old steps of toppling governments and they also were laughing and it was like whoa yeah and he did the same thing but i mean like you're talking like internationally internally he was doing it with his old like because he was he had to work his way up to the presidency right so he did that with his old like so all his kgb buddies are in the other countries doing the shit in the 90s but he's in russia and he's got his old judo partners who are like thugs because he went to the kgb but they became like lori and thugs and shit and were conscripted and so he started giving them money and access to systems like oh the old state concrete businesses for sale well for my buddy tim it's only a thousand dollars

but for you it's ten grand and so obviously tim got the concrete business or this guy got that and so all his buddies ran all the the companies even the gas companies he he took part in like gas prompt like standing that up and selling off bits of it to his friends and so like he personally like people like sit there and they say like oh putin doesn't own any businesses he personally does it but the guys he put into power his like day zero ride or die fucking og friends since like he was a kid are running those businesses and if so he's got like a mega billion mansion and he owns like a peninsula in russia and so well like you said all this shit's going around internationally he's internally propping himself up on this pyramid and i mean

we talked about it between you and i but like the afghan war all those dudes came home and the russians the khaziks the usbeks they they hated them they hated the fucking veterans so where did those guys go well they went to the fucking mafia and who was in charge of the mafia putin and his fucking friends because nothing fucking happened without putin saying mental of taking care of the veterans that's why the russian soldiers because yeah a lot for a long time there were conscripts yeah like there's all the oh is that joke and so they didn't really get away from the conscript conscript system entirely until like the oh wait war of georgia they're like hey actually i don't think these guys do a good job but it's like hey you have all these you know

limbless veterans from the afghan war that no one wants or like we should take care of those guys because if we ever get invaded they're going to be the ones helping to fight the resistance like it's yep it's like hey you gotta use the tools you have and so if you're looking at it from like a 1990s the economy's over you're getting paid in vodka and oranges your people are leaving the brain drains happening you know your largest population center outside of russia itself is ukraine and that breaks away they have their own struggle and really funny ukraine and russian were on the same side in the mold dove and civil war back in the 90s well yeah i remember we were talking about this and here comes the but hurt but i don't care look up who sold the s 300 systems

to iraq or was looking to sell the air defense artillery to iraq in the early 2000s before we invaded it was fucking ukraine and they were gonna train in bella ruse i remember we're on the same page until like 2014 and then i mean also on top of that i mean you could just go so much more into the weeds of like russian thinking where there you go it's just ah man the psychologist what breaks my brain it's like because it they genuinely break my brain it's it doesn't make any sense trying to understand these people it's like yeah it's like military intelligence it's an oxymoron yeah marine core intelligence but if you look at just the language system there's 1 million words in english in russian there's 200 000 so you have a lot of words i mean the same

thing rusky mere russian world russian peace it means the same thing so it's like the ranger change of go figure right but if you just going down a lake the ukranians and russians being on the same side in the 90s because that was an ideological war because even though the soviet union was breaking up that goes back to like oh well we're actually uh orthodox christians we're all on the same side we got to fight everything that's not orthodox christianity because whatever and so that just lunges right back to before the soviets in like 1917 time frame but then on top of that in terms of like military capabilities like hey they just use the military to like dry run things like in oh wait and they invaded georgia but

i really want to focus on chechnya because they understand that that's a good night because we're still in the 90s that's like the yeah oh crisp crisp fucking shit right there like the russian chetchen war those are oh man and the russians lost 9 000 k i a officially which means it's probably like 50 000 soldiers and those were guys that were ex-soviets that were just stuck they're like oh we don't have a country anymore yeah so told to hold on to it and so it's but they understood going this is old thinking it's old way of thinking where they went hey the caucus has always been a problem we got to kill every single male there because they're going to be a problem and so i mean of course they remember afghanistan and

everything that happened there but in their eyes even today against ukraine or something like that they're it's a holy war so every war that the russians fight ideological based is holy in some nature because going back to the idea that they're a christian nation and infallible of any justification for reasoning to go into war hey that's that goes that's game man it's game over it's you are right though the chetchens claim a loss of 3100 and the russians lost 15 700 at most it's fucking wild and that's claimed by the kremlin the russians still claim only like 5000 k i a yeah yeah again wait yeah that was it what a vibe like there's no way to explain the chetchen war other than a vibe because it's like you said it is a holy war and it it pains putin i mean this is

like a thing in putin's asshole for like all the way i want to say into like the late bush era because people don't know this but like the fsb was in afghanistan helping us chase down chetchen warlords and trainers who were helping the taliban and alchemy they didn't care if we won they just needed those guys it did yeah like uh what it's called one soldier's war but also uh the last czar and i'm pretty sure it's in the other book that you read too it's like there were helicopters communism yeah as well yeah they got they lost helicopters with reporters and uh government officials there was the old spetsnaz versus the chetchens in the movie theater where they gassed everybody in the movie theater um it's wild they took the airport hostage and then putin

was just like just kill the hostages yeah but like dude how do we because we're still in the 90s but i don't know how to like because this is like the a good good like launching point to like the early 2000s is the sinking of the kursk because that was the first naval display that the russians had after the soviets it was the first large-scale naval display uh like show of force in the uh barren sea up in finland and uh their flagship exploded in sank so immediately but putin was like on vacation or something in kremia oh that's right i remember this oh it's like on vacation kremlin was like fuck fuck fuck we lost contact with this thing and so it was only a few few meters deep it wasn't too deep they could hear these guys knocking because i want to say

there was something like 126 guys in this little uh nuclear power tort submarine it exploded something like 26 guys were so alive inside like the back of the ship but the russian technology wasn't capable of going down to get them like they were trying but it wasn't strong enough so the nato which was simultaneously doing exercise in that area mostly to watch the russians yeah hey we can help you so once putin got notified he came to the kremlin and went like the americans sank this exactly they correctly attacked it he's like nato attacked us we wanted to be friends with them in the yeltsin era we can't be friends with them we've tried for the last 10 years the americans don't want us and the americans were like who gives a shit let's save these guys and putin's like let them sink

so lost everyone they all got hero of the soviet or the russian federation medals and buried in kursk where is that bella rusa they were buried in like their hometown but it was like erected in bella rusa and then at that point 9 11 happens and then you have all these cheshan war criminals running around with the f the taliban in afghanistan and uh guess what happens george bush calls his dad he was like can i go on a fishing trip with putin i know you guys try to like track each other back when you were a cia guy but yeah can we go hang out and so yeah him and bush were on the same page for a while and it's it is remarkable to see in the nine or not the late 90s early 2000s till like 2008 when he stopped being president air quotes that european leaders had nothing but good

things to say about they're like he's a good guy he's like he's he's good he knows what's good for his people he gotta respect it like he's they would say like he's a spy we understand his background he believes in his country he's he's what the country needs right now and then after 08 they were like well putin's no longer president it's meditative it's his like number two guy but he was prime minister at the time everyone just kind of forget that they have two presidents yeah yeah and so everyone hated him after he came back in changed the constitutional laws from two success two terms at four years to two terms at five years and then deleted term limits so he's like president for life essentially yeah but then that's when he annexed

Crimea and everyone's like actually putin's a bad guy it's like did you not just watch him kill his own guys and blame it on you and it's it's weird and the russians believe it they're like yeah americans are enemy and then he painted it as we wanted to be friends it's not working yeah it's a bad really it was a toxic relationship it's she wasn't it's not you it's me and it's it's but like we're going like a hundred miles a minute and it's kind of hard because i'm sure really is because it's this it's just up in my brain and i was like oh shit i got to get so we're doing so good we're doing so good um it's been 25 minutes yeah we're but um it's weird because we're saying like oh the first Chechen war the second Chechen war

putin in these fucking Chechens and then you fast forward to 2021 and the Kadyrovites the Chechens are like the spearhead of the ukrainian south and so the whole time i i guess we have to like explain this is like in the 90s the russians realized that like a real big full scale war with conscripts and all this junk from the soviet union wasn't gonna work so what they did is they pulled out and they used like spetsnaz and fsb guys like the war never really kind of stopped it just got like really war crimey and so what they did is they bought off a group called uh led by akhmad Kadyrov he's the great or he's the grandfather of Ramzan at the current leader of Chechnya and so what they did is they said okay fuck this what we're gonna do is we're gonna put akhmad

the Kadyrov in power we're gonna back him we're gonna give him a ton of fucking guns a ton of fucking money and weapons and we're gonna use the spetsnaz with him and they're gonna kill all these Chechens and it was working and so the Chechens are like fuck fuck fuck where do we go like where do we hide to get away from Russia and Afghanistan which is just you know in the 90s they had just beaten the russians and now it's like all these warlords are fighting but these Chechens are hard motherfuckers these 19 30 original Chechens are really really good at what they do and so they flee to Afghanistan and they side with the Taliban and start training the Taliban on how to conduct fighting and so when we pull up in 2001 you know they fucking Al Qaeda brought

down the towers and the Taliban said you can't have Al Qaeda they're our guests and we said well we'll punch through you motherfucker which is you know just very short sighted thinking in our park is yeah right like 20 years later but just in terms of like we talked about it before but Americans just not understanding culture so like hey if you're a guest in a muslim's house they don't care if your enemy's like oh you're a guest in my house so their terms are like I have to protect you and anyways that's just no it's true right like people don't fucking realize that like we weren't even there to fight the Taliban we were there to kill Osama bin Laden and we killed them in like keeping occupation yeah we killed yeah we killed them in like 2012 and then they're looking at the

fucking army and Marines like like now give women the right to vote like how the fuck are we gonna do that like the men can't even read like fucking and so uh it's with black stamps on their thumbs yeah the iraqi purple thumbs like let's let's make a mark so that we know who's already voted and then all the insurgents are like let's find the people with a purple thumb and cut that fucking thumb off but you stole something anyways yeah and so but like so like in 2001 we're like what the fuck is going on like we're killing the Taliban and capturing dudes and there's these hardcore motherfuckers who don't want to give up and they speak russian what are these we're dumb americans we don't understand culture and so they reach out and like throwing a blu-ray copy of rambo three

they're like what's going on we need to learn and yeah right and so it's fucking wild because then like these former borsal pat countries and kgb agents are like no those are Chechens and we're like what the fuck is a Chechen like it sounds like a chicken is that it i get that at burger king with mayo and lettuce like the chicken sandwich uh fucking so the russians are like hey this is this is good like in 01 they're like this is cool like we have something we can like george but like you said george bush reaches out to fucking putin like hey bro we can use your help and he's like war crimes Chechens send me up like religion war and jihad hell yeah and so yeah there's pictures of like spetsnaz and like 2002 2003 and like old borsal packed helicopters helping americans

like fight Chechens it's wild something i want to like mention on top of that just the afghan question because the soviets went to afghanistan because big history lesson for everyone uh the chinese and the soviets didn't like each other and after like 1965 or something they actually had a war and the chinese wanted an island and the russian said no so the chinese sent people and the russian sent tanks and ran them over and they're like oh but anyways the russians don't have a deep water port and that's always been their strategic problem they have servicable in kremia which you know why they want it they have a archangel which we invaded in 1917 to fight the the red russians and they have vladivostok on the other side of the planet and so they're like we need a warm water

port so they invaded afghanistan propped up the communist government they wanted to shoot down pakistan and open up a relationship there open up a deep water port or warm water port go from there just like they did in syria with tartar or tartar but anyways historically every time because once like the russian and slavic people started expanding they were like well we have to understand our strategic borders because what's the greatest land math land border a mountain range and so they would just build these borders based on mountain ranges to keep out invaders and they understand that like hey the mongol horde was a real thing we got to make sure that never happens again but then what by the time they got to central

asia they're like yeah these guys are like the senate's of the cons and a whole thing but they're not really um they're not really as strong anymore but every time that they would have a russian garrison show up they would get massacred by the local people and so that's when they understood they were like back in like they would yo-yo different ideas are like well how do we treat muslims because we're christians and we don't really believe these guys are on the same page we can't we yeah we have similar you know theology but it's not it's not valid in their eyes and so from there they went they would yo-yo between like let's have a garrison inside albat oh the the khazaks killed them they're like all right let's just have a local leader that is swerves allegiance

to the kremlin we give him money and he keeps his people in line and every time that there's an unrest that he has to put them down but we give them bad weapons just in case revolt on us cool and so that's what they would do so it's like peter the great was like we need a modernized russian so we went to that great expedition into the west came back and found out that his aunt overthrew and he was like god damn it but his aunt was like fuck the muslims they need to be russian it's russian or nothing and so they had this little war between local warlords just like in afghanistan when they showed up and they're like yeah the people just didn't want them like the two ideologies are incompatible with one another and so after the so unisorts collapsed

poots are sending its friends inside central asia and the caucus and he was like hey you go to georgia you go to armenia you his good friends went to the place where he knew that if there was a a resistance or a word that would threaten the kremlin he would have someone on the other side kind of to balance it out in the middle but then 20 30 years later america leaves afghanistan that same muslim question comes up he was like fuck the taliban now controls central asia there's a power vacuum and guess what happens within six months of us leaving afghanistan oh there's a revolution in kazakhstan and so he sends the two divisions into kazakhstan to secure every single major airport and he was like you guys are not leaving so it's just going back to

like securing historic borders and as putin comes out and says something like yeah i want a buffer state between me and the other west yeah it's it that it's just a simple answer like he wants a buffer state and that term buffer state is an old term like the romans use it with barbarians back in when they were uh direct expeditions in the gall and whatnot in daisia but it's just i've been so artistically hyper focused on like essential asian question no it's but it's good though because it's like this is what peter zion if you don't i've been creeping about him but he brought this up and like you're bringing it up from like a mongol horde standpoint he brings it up from like a demographic and military standpoint is like that's how russia thinks like

as a defensive thing like he has a speech about it like those mountain passes in georgia in western ukraine the deniper up there with the baltic triplets latvia estonia and lithuania like those mountain passes are super important because literally all they have to do the russians is hold those mountain passes because all of their fucking roads and they don't have good air support so what they do is they use trains so they hold those mountain passes and then they train in all these dudes from eastern syberia it was bekistan jeekistan georgia chechnya dagistan they're bringing all these conscripted males like this huge russian red wave up to those mountain passes and then they push in in the 90s uh there was the fold the gap which is in germany and it was like

that was one of those passes and the cavalry there uh they were told like your fucking whole job and god's green earth is to radio in the russians are coming and then die like you you you are not even a speed bump you are a the light goes on and it's cold war hot turn hot war and so like you're not that central asian question is what's always on putin's mind and you mentioned it like he's got all his buddies in all these fucking countries and even they were good and if you don't think they were good look it up there was a special forces green beret officer who was bought by putin before the 2000 because we should go from this to the 2008 war in georgia but like yeah this is that's why they're important but there was i i want to come back to the uh

central asian split no but like it it like putin was good like he bought a special forces major and when they invaded it before they even invaded in georgia they knew where every single fucking uh georgian army position was down to the t down to the company level they knew where the georgians and so like when you say like yeah he had dudes all over central asia and all in these former ussr countries like they weren't just there they were kicking ass and taking fucking names like they were inter they were entering r soft and so it's it's wild to think that like people don't understand like oh you overestimated the russians like they were really fucking good for a while there just looking at russian russian military doctrine in general where we talked

about it before that's like oh the fsd was usually like the standard like oh look at the soviet model and go forward but then looking at oh wait they were like okay we got fucking eight up in chechnya twice they lost thousands of people and they're like we don't need that again so then using an x american sf guy who likely worked with the georgians walked in it was like yeah i know what to do so then train those guys you go in there you test run your current military doctrine you're like hey that didn't really work we took what we needed in what eight days or something like that that's probably why they went from like oh yeah so they could probably take ukraine in three days if they spent the last 10 years working on it for 15 years but

if you just take that model and just go from there you're like yeah i mean they were slowly building it's like they took Crimea with no problem the annex the damn thing yeah like like a direct goresmo the guy who wrote up the current doctrine where he was like little green men just keep just have your because the russians no one wants to actually live there they're not having kids so like all right cool if you're uh 18 year old moved to moldova and then get involved in the government and so in 10 years you could say like hey i actually want to be i want to be russian and that's what they do in transnistra where they go like hey like that was the industrialized hub inside little or moldova it breaks away it's an de facto independent state it's not recognized by

anyone out even the russians but the russians still have their old soviet garrison there they're like yeah if these guys want to go cold to hot it's a country by itself it has no allies or anything it applied for EU membership but they can't get in because it has the territorial dispute it's the same thing in donbass or before the war but it's like the way that the russians were doing things was so smart yeah for so long because they were taking our doctrine and then going back to like that that christian fascism where the germans were like oh well actually austrians speak german they were the same people yeah right like by the time by the time hitler invades fucking poland he's already got five countries and he's like everything but even

the italians were doing that in africa they were like you know actually you know this used to be a roman they were trying to be the new roman empire but it's like the italians didn't have that's a whole topic but why they went to ethiopia about i don't know dude i don't know what the hell's there but anyways that's crushed nice oh man how do you have an army of tanks and lose the guys with sticks i'm still trying to figure that out on hoi four all right i'm still trying to figure it out um are we putting the first this first part on on spotify and then make it everybody go over to the patreon because i would really like to blue ball everybody because we're really about to get into 2014 ukraine and i have a i have a juicy heart on for the little green men because that was

so fucking well done like that was it's even we should ease it i get we could just go to the patreon 14 go to the page we've only been on for 40 minutes we have 20 minutes left so that the fuck them they got they get 40 minutes and then they got to go to the patreon for the good stuff that's right baby okay everyone go to the patreon talk to you soon links in the bio