Pod Save the World - Russian War Crimes and a Coup in Niger

Episode Date: August 2, 2023

Tommy and Ben talk about a coup in Niger, progress on the Ukrainian counteroffensive, drone attacks on Moscow, Yevgeny Prigozhin attends a summit of African leaders in Russia, prospects for a US-Saudi Arabia-Israel diplomatic deal, the eroding democratic process in Thailand, and an ISIS attack in Pakistan. They also discuss how to inspire action on climate change. Then Tommy talks to Ambassador-At-Large For Global Criminal Justice Beth Van Schaack about prosecuting Russian war crimes. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome back to POTA of the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben and I are sitting here in the studio awaiting a third, fourth, fifth, 20th from indictment. Sounds like it's happening though. It feels like the wheels are in motion. The wheels of justice, Thomas. The wheels of Jack Smith. The wheels of Jack Smith. On that bus. Interesting. We'll see how it goes.

But we have a great show for you guys today. We're going to cover this military coup and Niger and why it could have wide reaching massive implications. The latest news from Ukraine reports about a potential U.S.-Israel, Saudi diplomatic deal, a terror attack in Pakistan, democracy in Southeast Asia, and how to convince the world to take action on climate change as we live through potentially the hottest year in recorded history. It's hot out there. It's a fun one to say you were a part of. Yeah. It's not like an undefeated NFL team.

Well, at least it's a record that you know we'll be broken. That's right. That's right, Ben. And then I talk with the U.S. Ambassador at large for global criminal justice, Beth Van Skok about prosecuting Russian war crimes. Ben and I were just chatting before we went. It's like one of the best parts about working in government is you won't really have had a lot of meetings about, say, war crimes, and then you'll go in and you'll meet the expert on the NSE or a state or something, and it's the smartest subject matter expert maybe in the world on that matter,

and that's kind of what the conversation I just had felt like. That's the kind of person that we want to bring to you on this podcast, you know? Yeah, exactly, exactly. Ben, I know the news you've really been waiting for is this. which is that Mobility, the first novel from Crooked Media reads, is finally out. It is a beautifully written, stunningly smart novel. I read it. It's hilarious and fun and funny with the backdrop of all the things the world does care about.

You got Foreign Service, people living in Baku, you got the energy industry, climate change. Get your copy at Crooked.com slash Mobility or wherever books are sold today. I got one for you on my desk. Oh, nice. Yeah. Good title, too. Hardcover.

Yeah. Great title. She said, I did a book event with Lydia. Kiesling, who's just great, by the way, super fun and nice. She said she had a bunch of terrible titles in her head, and it was driving her crazy, and actually her agent recommended mobility. I always need help with titles, so... Shorter the better?

Maybe I'll reach out to her agent. Yeah, the funny thing about writing nonfiction books like I do, I'm on my third, more to come on that, but is like the subtitles can be incredibly long, you know, like the one-word title, and then it's like, the inside story. of the astonishing, you won't believe it, you know, tale of somebody who stole, you know, like the whole book has to be in the subtitle. That seems like a pain in the ass. Yeah.

Yeah, why is it just a giant run on? Isn't that what a blurb is for or a description? It's what a blurb is for, I think. Okay, well, enough about this. Should we turn to Niger? We should turn to Niger. Okay. So Western Africa, the military Niger has staged a coup and deposed President

Mohammed Bazum. In fact, I believe it was his own presidential guard who did this to him. Yeah, he was a bit of. about to can the guy who ran the presidential guard, which is usually something that can lead to coups. Yeah, don't let that leak. But now the presidential guard, the military is holding him captive. Buzum was the first elected leader in Niger to succeed another elected leader since the country gained independent in 1960. So this is a huge stepback for the 25 million people in the country and democracy in the region. Generally, and there aren't a lot of bright spots for

democracy in the Sahel. So in response, Eka-Wass, which the union, of 15 West African states. They initially sent a delegation to try to mediate and resolve the crisis diplomatically. That didn't work. So they announced sanctions in a no-fly zone over Niger and issued an ultimatum to the coup leaders, saying you have one week to reinstate President Bazoum, or else ECOWAS will, quote, take all measures necessary to restore constitutional order in the Republic of Niger. Such measures may include the use of force.

In response to that statement, the leaders of other coups, who now run Mali and Burkina Faso, said they would view any ECOWAS intervention in Niger as a declaration of war against them as well. So this quickly went from a coup in one country to potentially a regional conflict and one that would be another de facto proxy war between the U.S. in the EU and the Russians and the Wagner group who are backing the coup leaders. Meanwhile, like the levels of food insecurity and child malnutrition in West Africa are rising. it's difficult to get assistance in because the Sahel region is plagued by a growing Islamic extremist threat, including al-Qaeda and ISIS offshoots. According to the global terrorism index, the Sahel region is now the epicenter of jihadist violence. In 2022, there were more deaths from terrorism in the Sahel than in South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa combined then. 15 years ago, the region accounted for 1% of deaths from terrorism.

So these coups are part of the problem. They lead instability and economic hardship and the conditions that lead to terrorism. and also the coup leaders push out counterterrorism forces from places like France. They welcome in the Wagner Group. The Wagner Group doesn't give a shit about terrorism. They care about protecting the person they're propping up who's in charge and, you know, their mineral interests, their gold mines, et cetera, that they kind of end up controlling. Nizier had become one of the last places where the U.S., the French, the EU were allowed to have counterterrorism forces.

Now that partnership is at risk. So, Ben, obviously, like, you know, we talked about it. way too many coups in Western Africa on the show. Unfortunately, they're very bad every time. But this idea of a regional fight between ECOWAS and the couped countries is very scary. It is. There's a lot going on here. I mean, first of all, this is just yet another strike against democracy, rule of law in this part of West Africa. We've seen this string of coups, which again for people that may be somewhat flabbergasted by this you know i remember talking to somebody in molly who surprised me because they were kind of you know small d-democrat civil

society type person but they actually worked for a time for the coup leader after the coup and and this guy's point to me was hey look you know we're sick of corruption we're sick of the french like jerking us around. Generational, these coup leaders are, you know, not this guy, but like some of these coup leaders are younger. Yeah, a lot of them in their 30s. Yeah, a lot of them in the 30s. The guy in Burkina Faso is 35, I think.

So just so people understand, like there's some, for some of these coups, there's some kind of broader rationale. I still think it's obviously wrong. This one is a little different because it was more like this guy's about to get canned and just made his move, you know. But it does speak to just. to kind of collapse of governance in this part of Africa. Another point is like the French, French farm policy, not exactly having a banner

time in West Africa. Most of these are former French colonies where the French have a big military presence or a big development presence. And there's a kind of very clear through line of fuck you to the French on this stuff. And understandably. Yeah, which again is, you know, Macron needs to be taken a look at what his Africa policy has been because some of this is built up over decades, so it's not just on McCrone, but like that's another notable piece of this. But I mean, you honed in on like the key point here,

which is I do not remember, you know, there being this kind of threat of interstate conflict in West Africa like this at all, you know. And to see, you know, the leader of Molly, I saw, you know, he went out and made a statement in which you repeated himself three times. Any military intervention against Niger is tantamount to a declaration of war against Burkina Faso and Mali. So there's this like coup axis like you mentioned. And that's, you know, one, it's clearly splitting ECOWAS, which was one of the, used to be one of the better functioning regional blocks. In fact, ECHOAS, I remember back in the Obama years, was essential to preventing a coup in Cote d'Ivar when this guy, Bogbo, this guy tried to hold on the power. But, you know, here we have a

real risk of conflict between states with kind of an avowed agenda of undermining democracy by one of the groups of countries involved. And again, to bring back a segment we haven't had in a few weeks, the World War Watch, you know, when there are superpower conflicts, you know, they can spread to all parts of the world because superpowers have interest in all parts of the world. You know, that's obviously what happened in the previous world wars. And here we've got already a Russia-U-S or Russia-West conflict in Ukraine, but we also see that informing the flashpoint in Iran. And now we very much see this in West Africa because, you know, the Russia is not behind this coup, but they're very opportunistic. And, you know, when we were looking at the Wagner group and we're

cruising towards a special episode before Brugosian delivered our special episode through his mutiny. I was calling around talking to some Africa analyst about how to think about what Wagner does in Africa and their point was, well, they're opportunistic. And so if there's like an

opening and a Mali, they'll try to get a foothold there so that they can then use that as a base to spread to a neighboring country like a Niger, right? And so we very much see that here where Russia via Wagner likely to be coming in trying to gain more influence.

If the U.S., which has a bunch of troops in Niger, you know, suspends its military assistance, Wagner will be right there saying, hey, no strings attached with the Russian military assistance. We're more than happy to help your coup. And it doesn't take like billions and billions of dollars in military aid to be helpful to people like this. You know, it can be guns. It can be disinformation campaigns. It can be special forces capabilities. Russia has less of that because a lot of it's in Ukraine.

but a little bit could go a long way for somebody who's, you know, running a coup in Niger. There's a big piece in the New Yorker this week about Progogian and the mutiny insurrection, whatever you want to call it. And it's really comprehensive in the way it sort of details the rise of Wagner sort of being through Africa. They got to Sudan in 2017, the Central African Republic in 2018. Wagner forces fought in Libya with Haftar, this warlord. They fought in Mali. they fought in Syria. And the sort of game plan here is you get around the leader, you protect him, you train security forces, and then you take control of, say, in Syria, they would attack oil and gas sites controlled by ISIS, defeat ISIS, and then Wagner would take the revenue from the oil and gas. So it was a win-win for Bashar al-Assad because ISIS would kicked out of some, you know, part of the country, but also a huge boon for Wagner economically.

Yeah, yeah. And they can they can generate their own revenue through corruption or through natural resources. Niger has these huge stocks of like uranium. That's not something. Seven percent of global uranium. Yeah, it's not great when that goes missing. Some people could like rightly point out that the intervention in Libya and the removal of Gaddafi and the kind of chaos that ensued in Libya contributed to some of this rise of the flow of people across borders and the advance of. extremism jihadists. I guess I would also say, though, that, you know, Libya was unraveling before the intervention. I mean, there was kind of a civil war there, but also what you see here, too, is, you know, the lack of any governance and the exploding youth populations in places like this also attract extremism as well. So there's a lot of factors that have contributed to this persistent threat of violent extremist groups operating across the Sahel. But nonetheless, opening for Wagner and a huge contagion around democracy going the wrong direction.

Yeah, and this becomes a really hard question for the Biden administration. I mean, it already is about whether they will call what happened in Niger a coup. It obviously was, but once you say that, it forces the U.S. government to cut off certain types of assistance, especially military assistance. And as you mentioned, the U.S. opened a drone base in Niger in 2019. It cost $100 million, $30 million a year to maintain. And it's become kind of like the last beachhead for counter extremists work in the region. And I'm not suggesting that the Biden administration should not call it a coup, but there will be these balancing of interest that will lead to tortured press briefings like we saw during the Obama administration about whether to call the

coup in Egypt, the coup. Yeah. I'm always in favor of calling things a coup. I was back then. I am now. I mean, it is a coup. I don't think we should be giving military assistance to armies that carry out coups, it sends kind of the worst possible message. I'm not trying to diminish the, you know, the competing interest of not just having a counterterrorism interest, but, you know, the idea that if we pull out, you know, the Russians move in and all the rest of that. But at the end of the day, I mean, you've got to kind of stand for something. And, you know, a coup like this, you know, is not a close call, you know, in terms of what happened. Couldn't be more obvious what happened.

Ben, let's talk about the other sort of U.S. Russia proxy war that's happening in Ukraine. So the latest news is that President Biden has agreed to give evidence about Russian war crimes to the ICC, the International Criminal Court. I'll get into that in more detail in the interview. But in terms of the counteroffensive, President Zelensky announced that the Ukrainian military had recaptured a small village in southeastern Ukraine called Starrymoyarsk. It took about 10 days of really brutal combat to do it. But the Ukrainians believe this could lead to larger breakthroughs, even if they're taking huge losses.

Meanwhile, Ukraine is continuing to use drones to attack inside Russia. Drones hit a skyscraper in Moscow that houses Russia's Ministry of Economic Development twice in two days. It's pretty remarkable. And Russia said that Ukraine was targeting their ships in the Black Sea with sea drones. The New York Times actually did a big spread on Ukrainian drone capability that was interesting and interestingly timed. But one thing it said was the UJ22 drone can fly 500 miles. So it's like very much puts Moscow in their cross airs. And Zelenskyy all but confirmed that they were behind these strikes.

Usually they play kind of coy. But now he's saying things like attacks on Russian territory, quote, inevitable, natural, and absolutely fair. So, you know, Ben, last week we also talked about the withdrawal, Russia's withdrawal from a deal that allowed Ukraine to export grain through the Black Sea. Ukraine is now going to try to export that grain via Croatia, hopefully that were. Saudi Arabia is hosting peace talks about Ukraine later this week. Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, is going to go along with, I think, officials from Europe, China, Brazil, and India, but not the Russians maybe. So we'll see. And then again, you know, we talked about Progogian and Wagner and the mutiny.

Wagner was supposed to be, a lot of people thought he'd be dead by now, but he's supposed to be in Belarus. But instead, he was spotted at Russia's summit with African leaders last week in St. Petersburg. There was a picture going around with him and someone from the propaganda. Protocol and propaganda probably. Right, exactly. The Central African Republic. So a lot going on there. Anything else do you want to flag? And do you have any hope for these Saudi peace talks? Well, first of all, the Progosaun thing is interesting in light of what we were just talking about because why is he alive? Well, one reason we've talked about is that Putin wants to integrate Wagner fighters into the Russian effort in Ukraine.

But another reason is that Pergosin knows where all the operations are in Africa. He's got all the books. He knows who's on the payroll. He knows where, you know, the mining interests are, all the rest of it. And it may be that if Putin wants to have this kind of influence into Africa, and he clearly does. He's summoned this summit in Russia that a bunch African countries are at right now, and he needs them to kind of run interference and in rational votes and to continue to kind of be a foothold for Russian's narrative in the global South. Like, progosin is important to that effort. And so the fact that he's hanging out at summits that are hosted by the Russian government speaks to kind of the fact that, you know, he could get away with literally murder. I mean, they were shooting down Russian army helicopters.

I think that we've mentioned this before, like not just saying this to point out that we were predicting this, but the fact that as the counteroffensive stalls, the Ukrainian willingness and interest in striking deeper into Russia, Russia seems to go up is a real trend to watch because your point about Zelensky is an important one. It used to be like something would blow up in Russia and there'd be like a weird statement from like the presidential office. It was like, you know. Things at times go boom. Yeah. When dogs lie down with fleas, they sometimes get sick or like this. Yeah, some weird stuff.

The fact that they're just now like owning it, I mean, it does speak to this point that the longer this goes on, the more things could escalate inside of Russia. and frankly, the idea that no Western, already we've seen reports that the Western supplied weapons have been used in cross-border attacks. Frankly, if the U.S. is providing weapons and the Ukrainians are using those weapons inside Ukraine and other weapons inside of Russia, I'm not sure that's much of a distinction anyway. So some of these escalation guardrails are already kind of collapsing a bit, you know? And the question is, you know, does that normalize? and Russia just has to absorb that cost of war.

I'm sure what the Ukrainians are trying to do is make the cost evident to ordinary Russians and create a climate of fear there, also to just get revenge what's happening in their country. But what happens if, you know, something kills a bunch of civilians and, you know, this could get murky pretty quickly? So that's something that I definitely watch at the Saudi Peace Conference. I don't hold up a lot of hope that that's going to produce a peace deal. No. It feels a little bit more to me like Saudi. public relations accompanying their, you know, massive asking price for the normalization deal that

we'll talk about here. So I'm not sure that there's going to be peace in our time because of Muhammad bin Salman. Yeah. It's worth pointing, I think, that at this summit of African countries in Russia, Putin pledged to ship them free grain for over the next four months. So he's trying to do some cleanup work about the Black Sea grain initiative PR challenges and the cost of food. two other reports, just if folks want to read more, the New York Times had a pretty depressing story about how bad of a job the UK is doing when it comes to sanctions enforcement against pro-Kremlin oligarchs. And they also had an interesting piece about Russia's efforts to improve ties in Asia, got Putin going to a conference in China in October. And then Sergei Shogu, the much maligned defense minister of Russia, had the red carpet rolled out for him in North Korea last week.

So fun crew. Yeah. Well, the crazy thing about that it's, it's really. worth like Googling the Shor you visit North Korea because one thing Kim Jong-un did is he put up like pictures of Putin everywhere like on the same skill as him. Yeah. So it's a super creepy weird stalker shit cult of personality around, you know, the strong man Kim, the strong man Putin. But I mean, it is a bit of a window into global politics in 2023 that that's, it's not that outside of the mainstream, like that kind of strong man worship, you know, thing.

So I guess the one thing to watch there, though, is that the Russians need all the weapons they can get. The North Greens do have a lot of these kind of small arms and artillery and stuff. So, like, they could actually be, you know, it's funny, they've been the recipient of all this Russian support over the decades. Like, they could actually be a source for the Russians now. The North Greens need cash and the Russians need artillery. And, you know, it's pretty straightforward deal. Match made in hell. So you mentioned this normalization.

So Jake Sullivan, the other part of his trip, presumably is to talk to MBS or others about this normalization agreement potentially between Saudi Arabia in Israel. Tom Friedman from the New York Times wrote a big piece about this potential deal last week that triggered me into the stratosphere, Ben. So the gist was, Friedman says Biden is deciding whether to pursue a deal where the U.S. give Saudi Arabia a NATO-like security guarantee where the U.S. agrees to defend Saudi Arabia if there's a deal. attacked, a civilian nuclear program, and much more advanced U.S. weapons systems. In return, the Saudis would have to normalize relations with Israel and the war in Yemen, give more support to Palestinian institutions in the West Bank, I assume just cash, and stop budding up with China. The Israelis basically give up nothing. They have to agree not to annex the West Bank, and they have to agree to preserve talks with the Palestinians in a sort of a process around a two-state

solution. The Palestinian Authority just has to bless the normalization deal. Here are the reasons I think this is a bad idea. First, as we talked about before, you're giving Netanyahu a huge win in the middle of this effort to gut the courts. Second, I don't know, Mahav bin Salman seems like a kind of a homicidal dictator. Maybe don't give him a nuclear program or like thad missile defense systems. And then he's, you know, he likes to butcher journalists. We should probably factor that in. And then again, with the Saudis, like we could end the war in Yemen by just cutting off military support there, right? So there's pressure. And they want it. The Saudis won't end the war in Yemen. This is not a real. concession. They went out of that war anyway. It's not going anywhere for them. Yeah. And then, you know, judging by where you cringed in sort of the laydown there, I imagine this is your biggest beef with it like me. Well, let's not rank our beefs.

Yeah. So like all these Abraham Accord deals, they completely leave out the Palestinians. Yeah. If this deal created a Palestinian state, I'd be like, oh, interesting, but it doesn't. It just normalizes like the process of pretending to talk. So it also, like the column, I don't mean to be hard on Tom Friedman. He's a nice guy and a smart guy, but the column... No, no, he deserves it in this case. It epitomizes... And he's a nice guy, but this column is crazy.

Okay, fair. It epitomizes like treating this Israeli government as normal. Here's one passage. As if it's like 19... As if this is happening like the year after Oslo. Yeah. So it says Net Yaya's ruling coalition of Jewish supremacists and religious extremists would have to answer this question.

You can annex the West Bank or you can have peace with Saudi Arabia and the whole Muslim world, but you can't have both, so which will it be? Tom, buddy, you answered your your, your hypothetical. in there. They're religious extremists. Yeah. Yeah. And the answer, too, is both. You know, like, so there's so many things in this column to unpack. I mean, I won't double dip on what you talked about. First of all, there's a Friedman part, which is like his conditions that he talked about for the Palestinians were like that the Israeli government promises

to never annex a West Bank. First of all, what is that promise worth? You know, like, seriously, like, Like, they could, sure, they could say that out loud, but does anybody believe that they're going to keep that promise as they continue to build settlements, has continued to dislodge Palestinians? Then there was stuff about, like, moving more parts of area C in the West Bank. You're giving the Palestinians more control. Which sounds like that every single peace process that has always talked about, it never really happens. If you're still under military occupation, you know, giving a little bit more, you know, it's just such a weird, outdated frame of reference. And then this idea of Saudi payment, you know, like a huge Saudi assistance program, let me tell you where that's going to go. That's going to line the pockets of a bunch of Palestinian Authority types who have bank accounts in the fucking Emirates, you know?

Like it's just going to boomering back to the Gulf, you know. And nobody actually believes that that money is going to build like, you know, roads and schools and hospitals in the West Bank. And so this is such a tired formula. Like it is nothing about a final status issue. It is nothing about the creation of Palestinian state. It's like promise to not annex it and, you know, some money changes hands. And we act like we're doing something about the Palestinians when, in fact, we're like rolling the bus back over them. Right.

So nothing in that column, to me, suggests anything like a real substance that the Palestinians are getting, right? That's one thing. Then it's like the mutual defense pact, you know, that we can come back to this if this deal gets signed and really. break this down, but like the questions I have are, are you really going to tie a U.S. president to being compelled to come to the aid of Saudi Arabia like a NATO member state, not just now, 10 years from now, 20 years to now, 30, is this like a permanent, like, what on earth is Saudi Arabia going to be like in 20 years? Like, what if the world family becomes more autocratic and there's an internal uprising?

What if they go and pick a fight with Iran and then ask us to come to their aid? We don't even have a mutual defense treaty with Israel. And we're giving this Saudi Arabia, never mind it to be a totally non-democratic mutual defense pack. By the way, what are we getting out of that? Like, is Saudi Arabia going to come to our defense in Taiwan contingency? Like, it just, it's... Well, you mentioned Taiwan. It does seem like, you know, concerned in the White House that Saudi Arabia is increasingly, you know,

budding up to China seems like it might be driving most of this. So this is, so the big question that I've always had about this is what's in it for the U.S. Because we know what's in it for Israel. They get normalization. B.B. gets this huge political win. MBS gets a nuclear program. We know it's in for Saudi Arabia. They get a nuclear program and a mutual defense pact and weapons and all.

I mean, their price is insanely high on this thing. And so what's in for the U.S.? I believe, if you read the fine print, that what the U.S. is really concerned about is a geopolitical reorientation of Saudi Arabia to China. And so if they can somehow kind of lock Saudi Arabia out of that, you know, enlist them in our export controls so they're not investing money in Chinese technology at a time of AI arms race, okay, that's actually more substantive and I'd want to see what that is. The question I have on that is how binding can that be? Because again, MBS could say all the right things today about, sure, I'll go along with your export controls. but then, you know, five years from now, 10 years from now, he could just change his mind. He's got trillions of dollars.

You know, are Saudi Arabia bound to something? Like, we are going to be bound to this mutual defense pact if this happens? What are they actually bound to something that if they violate it, they no longer get that mutual defense package, for instance. The nuclear program, I don't know why we have to give that to them. They can buy nuclear energy, you know, like, I guess. So it's just, there's a lot to this. The last thing I want to say is just some people are like, why on earth were the Saudis and the Israelis do this, you know, they clearly want Trump to win. Why wouldn't they just wait?

And the reason for that is that the Saudis know that if Trump is president, let's say, and they make this deal, the U.S. Senate would have to ratify mutual defense treaty. Which is wrong for Biden, too, by the way. Yeah. There's no chance that any Democrat would ever vote for that fucking thing if Trump made the deal. So I think they're like, well, maybe we can bank this, you know, with Biden whipping the Democrat. and the Republicans voting with us because of APEC and the Israelis, which is a pretty cynical, you know, thing. Yeah.

I don't know. Like, what do you think about the communication strategy of kind of, there's been a lot of reporting on this, but like really like rolling this out to Tom Friedman. Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think like you probably assume he is someone who's been thinking about writing about the Middle East peace process for a long time. It's long been conventional with.

that solving that problem would unlock this broader reproachment within the U.S. and the Muslim world. Again, I don't think, as you've said, that this deal is offering that outcome, but he seems to think that it could be some gain changer in terms of Israeli relations with the broader Muslim world or U.S. relations with the broader Muslim world. Forgetting that, often leaders of autocratic countries don't really reflect the views of the population. Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. I mean, this kind of presumes a certain legitimacy in MBS to speak for the entire Muslim world. I thought it was like clearly that they, Biden seemed to want to do that.

Like, why else would you have Tom Friedman in and kind of, you know. That's a good question. I mean, there could be that. There also could be the part. Trial balloon or what? Well, they call in Friedman to push back on BB and then it's Biden. So it ends up being an hour and a half. Yeah, that's true.

I mean, I didn't know where there was a trial balloon for like elite opinion, right? because Tom Freeman is a good mainline into a certain vein of elite opinion in the foreign policy and business world. And Freeman gave the best possible spin on this thing, right? I just still don't think Americans are tracking like, you know, the mutual defense thing would be a fascinating debate to watch play out in Congress because I do think that a lot of Democrats would have real concerns about voting to permanently have a defense pact with Saudi Arabia. On the other hand, they'd have some trouble voting down a president or party heading into election year. It's a complicated piece of business politically. And I worry that it, just because it's being socialized in an elite opinion, like I don't know

what, you know, probably 99% of people have no idea of this is happening, right? Yeah, the sort of reductive political calculus is like, oh, yeah, you like Trump's Abraham Accords? Well, I got an even bigger Abraham Accord with the Saudis, but that that kind of ignores the reality that we're giving a lot more with the mutual defense packs. Yeah. And I just don't think the Abraham Accords is like an entire Middle East policy. It's a policy for autocrats and BB. Like, I just, I don't know. I don't like it either.

Also, the U.S. media is addicted to doing softball interviews with Bibi Ninjahou. He was on Wolf Blitzer the other day. I was like, God damn it. He was on like NPR too, I think I heard. Yeah, well, the Israeli press gets obfews. pissed because he goes around them by doing U.S. media interviews and gets, is able to reach his base without getting any of the tough like subject matter experts. Getting much easier questions and he would have gotten with the Israeli press. Yeah. It's inferiority. Yeah. All right. Let's take a quick

break. We come back. We've got a lot more show. With Trex, you get the most of everything. The most wood inspired. The most eco-friendly. The most decking and railing designs. The most trusted. Trex. Performance engineered for your life outdoors. Visit Trex.com today. So, Ben, the trajectory for democracy in Southeast Asia is not looking great. There's Cambodia where Hunsen, the prime minister slash dictator since 1985, one illegitimate, let's say, let's call them the other illegitimate parliamentary elections, that he locked out in the opposition. And then he said three days after he won that he's going to hand power over to his son.

Yeah. So that's not great. In Thailand, there was hope that Peter Linger-Ronrat and the Movement Forward Party would take power. But that hope is fading after he was blocked by the military-run Senate and he was suspended from Parliament. Remember, we talked about PETA and moved forward party a while back. In May, they won the most seats in the election. He then cobbled together this multi-party parliamentary coalition, but ultimately couldn't get installed as prime minister because the process is just rigged by the military in their favor. One third of parliament is appointed by the military.

So now the former prime minister says he's going to return to Thailand from exile. on August 10th in hopes of breaking this deadlock, Ben, any hope here that the democratic process could wrestle away power from the Thai military? Well, I mean, first of all, the Huntson thing is, like, that guy is one of the creeper guys I was in a room with a room with in a room with a lot of creepy people, but this guy is like an old aging autocrat, corrupt guy, not even making bones about just like handing it off to his son, like as if this is like a familial dynasty, like North Korea or some shit. You know, like that's not, that's not great.

I guess what I'll say in terms of the hopeful side is if you look at if you look at Thailand, the elections, you know, were a resounding rebuke of the established kind of military royalist, you know, soft autocracy that has evolved there. This move forward party like more progressive, small D Democrats, younger political leadership, drew a ton of support. And I guess like if there's a silver lining across the region, I'll come back to Thailand a second, And it's that there really are like these movements. Like in Cambodia, there's actually a pretty healthy opposition despite efforts to quash, you know, civil society and independent journalism over the years.

There's this kind of milk-tee alliance across the Asia Pacific where younger people are finding solidarity with democratic movements in different countries. In Myanmar, we have like a brutal military government. You still have really like both a peaceful and an armed resistance to that. As the government bombs and burns civilian villages. Yeah, just indiscriminately. So what's weird about Southeast Asia is, yeah, the trends are not good, yet the resilience of democratic movements continues. And with Thaks and the former prime minister coming now, what's interesting here is that he is

this billionaire who weirdly draws a ton of populist support. And anytime he's been able to run an election, he's won. He's been exiled from the country for a long time. Even after he was exiled, his sister was elected prime minister, like back in the Obama of years, then she got kind of kicked out. But he tends to draw a lot of support. And presumably when he goes back, they'll arrest him. But he's stepping into this political impasse. And I think what he's trying to do is, look, like the majority of people in Thailand do not like this government. And they either like the move forward party, they like Thaksin. And I think the potential for there to be a real

rift in Thai society. And there already is. But like, it gets more pronounced in the aftermath of this election is very real. And there could be bigger democracy. protest. And this will come back to the U.S. too, because guess what, they're a mutual defense treaty ally of ours, too. And we've had the tortured conversation about whether they call things coups there. I think that the U.S. should be trying to get much more involved here in support of Thai democracy, which may cut against our like, you know, Indo-Pacific anti-China strategy, but like this is not stable in Thailand. Like, this is not a recipe for stability to be backing people with diminishing support while they're these growing democracy movements.

Yeah, to your point, look what happened in Myanmar. Horrible news out of Pakistan Ben, where there was a suicide bomber who detonated a bomb at a political rally in northwest Pakistan that killed 55 people and wounded well over 100 more. This rally was for an ultra-conservative Islamist party that is part of the current Pakistani government coalition and known-dap ties with the Afghan Taliban. The ISIS affiliate in Afghanistan took credit for this attack. ISIS, thinks that the Afghan Taliban are conservative enough, then they're not implementing a conservative enough vision of Islamic law. Jesus.

It's probably just a power struggle too. Pakistan is scheduled to have a general election in October, so there's real concern about what this does to the political process. The area where this attack happened, the KP province has dealt with near-weekly terrorist attacks from both the Pakistani Taliban or TPP and ISIS both want to take over and establish Sharia law. Things have basically gotten.

steadily worse in Pakistan, the security situation since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. At the time political leaders in Pakistan were celebrating the Taliban takeover, you know, they sort of like removing the yoke of oppressors, understandably so. But now the Afghan Taliban is providing a safe haven for the TTP, much like Pakistan once provided safe havens for extremist groups fighting U.S. forces in Afghanistan. So it's just an ugly circle. Compounding the problem is the fact that 5,000 TN. TTP fighters were brought back to Pakistan from Afghanistan as part of a rehabilitation program that has just completely failed. So a lot of those guys are now back in the fight, killing people.

So pretty bleak picture here. The only sort of hopeful news I heard out of the area is that U.S. officials are holding their first talks with the Taliban government for the first time since the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021. I think they're happening in Qatar. So maybe they'll find some kind of path forward. Yeah. I mean, on Afghanistan, I would hope that that can lead to some opening and the sanctions

to just reduce the humanitarian suffering in Afghanistan. I think on Pakistan, the two things I'd just say are the first thing is that like this proves how short-sighted and self-defeating the Pakistan policy has been for so long. I mean, the, you know, the ISI, the intelligence services there, elements of the military, obviously provided safe haven for the Taliban. A lot of my Afghan friends, you know, would call it a de facto Pakistan invasion, right, in terms of what happened with the Taliban taking over. Never mind that they also supported some extremist groups inside of Pakistan and places like Kashmir, like Laskar al-Taiba. Like this is the dog that caught the car. If you lay in bed with extremists for decades,

and look, the U.S. was a part of that way back in the 80s. obviously funding some of this stuff in Pakistan to fight the Soviets. But like, this is going to happen if you create a safe haven for extremists. They're going to boomerang back on you because you're never going to be, you know, transactually enough for them. The other thing to watch, I think just going forward is that there's this political and civilian in Pakistan since Imran Khan was essentially ousted as prime minister. We've talked about that. But there's supposed to be an election later this year, this fall. So you're going to have this period of time. usually in the past we've seen election seasons in Pakistan be accompanied by more terrorist attacks.

And so the thing to look at is do both ISIS K this off-shed of ISIS and the Pakistani Taliban, do they launch more attacks in the run after that election? I think the answer to that is probably yes. Probably yes, yeah. So, Ben, changing gears here. We're recording this on August 1st. July seems to have been the hottest month in recorded history. 2023 will likely end up being the hottest year.

It's clear that global warming is a huge driver of these temperature increases. We are seeing the impact all over the world. A study published in the journal Nature estimates that the heat wave in Europe in 2022 killed more than 61,000 people. These heat wave disproportionately impact vulnerable, isolated, marginalized groups. This one in particular killed more women than men, oddly. Again, you flagged a story about how Iraq is about to be uninhabitable because of climate change and scarce water resources. We're likely to see more conflicts because of those scarce resources soon. But what's, I think, for depressing, is that this hasn't led to a surge in action or sort of like urgency.

In fact, you're sort of seeing the opposite in a lot of places. Yes. The UK, British Conservatives just hung on to a seat in Parliament by making the election about demagoguing an anti-pollution law. And now it seems like labor is going soft on a lot of their climate commitments. President Macron to France called for a pause in the EU's climate agenda. The German government nearly collapsed over heating system regulations. Now, a lot of this obviously is like dealing with energy scarcity because of the Russian invasion

of Ukraine. But you're hearing the term green lash get back. thrown around about what's happening. And so... Pretty dumb fucking time for a green line. Yeah. Yeah. And so what's clear is like these extreme weather events and the predictions that they're

going to get worse aren't waking people up. And I was reading Lydia Keesling's novel mobility. And it made me wonder if there are, if we just need to find a new way to reach people. You know, maybe it is fiction. Maybe that's the way to get people to empathize with the impact or to envision the future and what things could be like if we truly, you know, get past the point in a return in terms of emissions. Because, like, people are getting third-degree burns from sidewalks in Phoenix. And it's not leading to some massive rethink of all of our climate policy.

And there probably should be. Yeah, I mean, to your point, you know, it's pretty evident that the more dire predictions of climate scientists are coming true. And that it's going to be unpredictable. It's just going to – it's going to be the worst-case scenarios. that we've, what we've got enough data now to understand is, like, the, the more benign predictions are not happening, the more aggressive ones are proving right. The Iraq thing, you know, what's interesting about that is like because of extreme heat and the nature of the geography, like parts, a huge swath of this country are kind of uninhabitable. But part of what

this story also highlighted to me is that the geopolitics of this are going to become more and more complicated because essentially part of the reason Iraq is so screwed is that, you know, Iran, Turkey, and other countries, like, they need water too, and Turkey controls some flow of this water. And they're upstream, yeah, and they're upstream. And what you realize is that geopolitics, and this gets to your question, like, geopolitics is usually amoral already. I mean, something I've been like battling against in my own life, you know, but like countries tend not to do the right thing. And so if there are bigger countries that have access points to water and will be able to screw poorer countries to solve their own water problems, they're probably going to do that.

And so I think what that Iraq story highlighted is the extent to which we're going to continue to see marginalized countries get screwed, you know, as bigger countries kind of like, you know, swallow up the water resources. And then within countries, as you say, marginalized populations getting screwed. and that the political incentives, even in democracies, where you'd think public opinion would be putting pressure on politicians to show Will is not there. Like, credit to Sadiq Khan, by the way, in the UK, because, like, it was his efforts to kind of reduce emissions that can be. Building got a Boris Johnson idea, I believe, or program amazingly.

Yeah, and he doubled down on it. And he's right. Like, he's going to be proven right by history. Of course. Now, what does it mean? I think you're right. There need to be other conversations to get people culturally invested in this because that can lead to other kinds of pressures, right? Like the pressures on fossil fuel companies around things like divestment, around things like denying, you know, companies providing their services to fossil fuel companies. Like there has to be kind of an all hands on deck pressure point to make this transition to cleaner energy that is going to have to go beyond sitting around and waiting for. for like the Overton window to change on politics. We're past that. It's too late for that.

You know, we need to be throwing everything at this. Yeah, it's just like you got UNESCO recommending that Venice, the city in Italy, be put on a list of endangered world heritage sites because the seas are rising and they can't control it in part two to climate change. And you've got Italy electing these like far right Georgia Maloney, you know, parties and politicians. And we're already like, it's funny. that like this is our age, right, Tommy? But do you remember like when we were getting involved in politics, you know, leading up to 2008 and then there would be these 20-30 predictions that seemed like far away? Well, now, no, like we're here.

We're at points where in the next couple of years, like the government's getting elected in places like Italy are going to be in office, you know, up. And like we're in the window. So this is what I mean about like we can't wait for like, sometimes people even tell me in the United States like, well, the Republicans are beginning to be open to certain types of environmental legislation. No, no, like, that's where we needed to be like 15 years ago. Like, we, this, this can't wait for that anymore. And that means, unfortunately, it's going to have to be an effort that is principally happening outside of government. That doesn't mean we shouldn't

put all the pressure we can on governments, too, but it means that we have to be doing everything. Yeah, and a lot of mitigation. Anyway, read Mobility. It's a great book. It made me think about a lot of this stuff differently. A couple more things before the interview. So, Ben, we talked about Tommy Tupperville a few times. He's a former football coach. Racist Assel. U.S. Senator from Alabama, full-time. Foll time.

Bud Kilmer, I think, is the coach I was thinking of from Barcity Blues. So he's been holding up all U.S. military promotions, Beazzy's Mad, the Pentagon, provides support for U.S. service members and their families who need to travel to receive abortion services separately. In 2019, you might recall that President Trump created the U.S. Space Force. Initially, Space Force was headquartered in Colorado, albeit temporarily, the Air Force recommended that we keep it there. But in the last days of the Trump administration, Trump decided to move Space Force command to Alabama and later said, I personally moved it to a red state.

He's like taking credit for it. President Biden has been reviewing that decision. And on Monday, announce that no, sorry, Tommy T. Space Force is going to remain in Colorado. The Pentagon says this is the least disruptive option. All the service chiefs support this. So, Ben, I'm not saying that politics had anything to do with this decision because truly how would I know. But Tommy Tuberville is pretty goddamn stupid if he thought that picking a massive destructive fight with the military in the middle of this relocation conversation was going to help his cause. Yeah, Tommy T. taking on the entire United States military and fucking with their promotions, probably not a good way to get the Joint Chiefs of Staff review to find in your favor to move the Space Force to Huntsville, Alabama, buddy.

Well played Tommy Tuberville. This is the biggest fucking self-owned I can remember in recent years. Like he's giving Joe Biden like a perfect campaign issue. He's screwing over his own constituents. Honestly, I do wonder like if Doug Jones is in the Senate whether this outcome is different. And by the way, I'm just going to come out and say, I'm sure that like, and there are, I'm sure there are military reasons out of this in Colorado. Like the Air Force has a ton of stuff there. Like why move this on Alabama?

But, but if it was politics, good. Like, like this is the kind of politics that Democrats should do. Absolutely. Like the Republicans are constantly screwing over blue states and, you know, like prioritizing their people and pumping all this money in places like Huntsville, Alabama. Like, you know what? Like there should be politics. And if you elect like a racist lunatic who like wages war in the military from his United States Senate office, you shouldn't get the Space Force. Sorry about it.

Sorry, pal. Space Force could be in Colorado. Them's the brakes. You have to be good at human interactions. Yeah. They should change it to like the Bidonomics force too. or something, you know? Two quick dumb things before we go to the interview.

That have you seen this debate about whether there is a fake bear at a zoo in China? No. So, okay. So there's a bear like object at a zoo in eastern China. There's a video of it standing on its hind legs that went viral because people who saw it were like, that is 100% a dude in a bear suit. That's the photo. No way.

No. So for people can see it, this is a dude and a bear suit has to be. It looks like the suit is like creased up around his butt and it's standing on its high legs. So apparently it's called a sun bear that's native to Southeast Asia. It's relatively small. It's about the size of a big dog. I saw a video of the bear actually then sit down and walk around normally on all four

us. And all of a sudden, I'm like, okay, that's probably a real bear. The darker version of this is there's some concern that. Maybe it's being, like, now treated, and that's why it's standing up and acting weird. But this CBS News report on this little mini online scandal said that in 2013, a different zoo in China got in trouble for trying to pass a dog off as a lion. They had a dog in an exhibit, and then the dog, sorry, the lion started barking. People were like, that's not a fucking lion. And then another zoo put a bunch of balloons in a pool and said that they were penguins.

make that work. So it's just like a really hilarious story. And then finally, Ben, Hannah, my wife flagged this one for me. There's a meme going around that says, life is very funny for French speakers right now. Because phonetically, chat GPT sounds just like cat, I farted in French. Now, we're going to play this for you. And you can see if you agree.

This is via Google. Cat, I farted. Cha, GPT Cha, GPT Cat, I farted, Cha, GPT. So the memes

as the French people keep hearing people say things like will cat I farted achieve superintelligence will cat I farted take my job. I sent this to a

French friend who said, you know, technically it's correct but he hadn't thought of it that way, but I like the story. Well, Google Translate could be accentuating this because

Chad GPT is open AI, which is a, you know, good point. But the singularity. I want to come back to, I mean, that's excellent content that was just created here. I do want to come back to the bear for a second.

One, could this be the foreign minister? Missing farm minister dressed up as a bear, right? We haven't seen this guy. I think he's still missing, right? That's important. Or second, like, you know, if you're an animal in the zoo for a while and you're observing all these people observing you, maybe you just become more like people. This could be a good premise for like a kind of bee horror movie where at some zoo,

all the animals become like people and just start walking around. And then they, you know, there's an uprising or something. It's learning. Yeah, it's like AI like for animals, you know. In fact, that would be interesting as if the AI. Look at this thing. The bear's standing. It's like waving with its arms.

Now it sort of sits down and that's when we go into. I'd love to see that. I mean. So now it looks like a bear, right? Like the way its head goes like all the way down to its stomach. But I just like what if the, what if the doomsday scenarios that the AI somehow figures out of like train the animals to attack the humans or the birds or something? It's a problem. We can't let these, we can't let these stories interact.

Yeah. Well, the Australian, as you pointed out, they did solve the mystery of the large metal object. It was was a satellite debris. Yeah, it was an Indian satellite. Yeah. I feel like, yeah, that, you know. It felt like too convenient excuse. Maybe it was a Mussolini's alien.

Or this dude, this UFO hearing guy, yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's the same dude who said that Mussolini had the aliens, right? And the Pope called us or something. Yeah. Yeah, the UFO's hearing kind of went off the rails a little bit off the rails. Anyway, much like this episode. Okay, we are going to take a quick break, and when you come back, you'll hear my interview with Ambassador at Large for Global Criminal Justice, Beth Van Schock.

We're going to talk about efforts to gather and preserve evidence of Russian war crimes. in Ukraine so we could prosecute people like Vladimir Putin at the International Criminal Court. So stick around for that. Fascinating conversation. I'm thrilled to welcome to the show, the Ambassador at Large for Global Criminal Justice, Beth Van Schock. It's great to have you on. Great to be here. Thank you. I consider myself a friend of the pod. Oh, excellent. Well, we really appreciate it. And listen, you know, the global criminal justice ambassador is a good person to know if you're in a pinch. So this is important for me for a future.

If you've ever been the victim of genocide, give me a ring. if I ever need someone to call Interpol for me. Yeah. So last week, it was reported that President Biden ordered the U.S. government to begin sharing evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine with the international criminal court at the Hague. Can you help us understand what that means in practice? Sure. Maybe just a little bit of background.

So the court received an unprecedented referral by over 40 states of the situation in Ukraine, and that enabled the prosecutor to open his investigation immediately. Ukraine has not ratified the Rome Statute, which is the treaty that created the court, but it has consented to jurisdiction. And so what that means is that anything that happens on the territory of Ukraine falls within ICC jurisdiction. The concern here was that Russia is a non-party state, and so would be held responsible potentially, and of course we assume that Russian figures will be the primary targets here since most of the allegations, in fact, the vast majority of allegations have been against Russian actors on the ground, both direct perpetrators and then up

the chain of command. And there were concerns within the Pentagon that if we supported this investigation, we would be potentially undermining a longstanding objection to sharing and cooperating with the court on matters that involve the nationals of non-state parties. So parties that haven't joined the treaty. And of course, that is how we are situated. And we felt some degree of vulnerability when the court had an open investigation in Afghanistan that might have involved a consideration of international forces, including our own personnel, for violations that happened on Afghan territory because Afghanistan had ratified the Rome statute, you know, early after the Rome statute was finalized. So we had reached a policy impasse as to whether or not we should provide

concrete assistance to the prosecutor as he proceeded on this investigation. We had expressed support rhetorically for the investigation but had not yet been in a position to be able to actually share information or otherwise provide concrete assistance. So now we have the green light from the president who has indicated that it should be the policy of the United States to do this. And so now we are in a position to entertain any request for assistance that might come from either the prosecutor or the court itself. Then we still make a policy determination as to whether or not we want to provide the assistance that's requested. And then we have the difficult question of, like, do we have anything that's actually responsive? And in which case we do, then we're in a

position to be able to provide that sort of concrete assistance. You raise sort of the interesting hybrid space the U.S. is in here. So we're not a party, the room statute. The U.S. doesn't recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC. Do you think that that, as a general matter, hurts U.S. credibility when it comes to prosecuting war crimes? for who's for who's prosecuting war crimes for our prosecute them in our own courts or for our support for an institution that we haven't ratified the underlying treaty for? I mean, I think upholding the principle of, you know, holding someone like Vladimir Putin accountable for his actions in Ukraine. I mean, listen, you'll remember this from your own time in government. There are many international institutions that we support, but that we don't fully join or subject ourselves to jurisdiction.

And a great metaphor that I heard from a former international law professor was that we're often a buttress on the outside of the institution rather than a pillar holding up the institution on the inside. And that's very much been over the years our sort of posture towards the international criminal court. It's very difficult for us to ratify treaties. We are uncomfortable subjecting ourselves to extraterritorial or international jurisdiction. And so that's where we have landed politically. all that said, we have still, over the years, and this is really sort of crossed administrations. This is not just a Obama or a Democratic party sort of a stance, but we saw this with the Bush administration as well, recognizing that the ICC plays a role in a larger ecosystem of

international justice. And there are certain circumstances where it is appropriate and indeed welcome for the ICC to be operating, where there are no other justice options available, widespread impunity, extremely serious offenses, victims being ravaged across a conflict zone or by an authoritarian regime, and the United States should play a leadership role vis-a-vis those prosecutions, even if we haven't at the same time subjected ourselves to the same degree of jurisdiction. Yeah, probably worth pointing out that during the Trump administration, I think they, at one point, we're trying to target the ICC with sanctions after the ICC opened to war crimes investigation, presumably to pressure them into stopping?

Indeed. That was a nadir in our relationship. In one, a relationship that has been one that has been in flux and has waxed and waned over the years. The Trump administration did sanction two individuals, the chief prosecutor herself and one of her key aids. One of the first moves that Secretary Blinken did when taking office was to order a sort of review of USIC policy. And one of the first concrete steps was to immediately take them. those stanchions and announced publicly that they should never have been brought. We also know from a more practical perspective that they were completely self-defeating. They alienated many of our friends and allies who are members of the court, who care deeply about the court. They were extremely upset with us

and made that very well known. And also, it's not clear that it did anything effective here. In fact, if anything, it sort of girded the court against the United States. And so in the end, they were not only morally wrong, but also really counterproductive from a strategic perspective. So those came down immediately and a decision was made that in fact we should re-engage and return to a policy of sort of constructive involvement with respect to the court and any requests that might come in for our assistance. Yeah. And listen to should know, this has been a challenging debate since the Clinton administration with lots of pushback, usually from the U.S. military. I remember after President Obama was elected during the transition period, George Will, a conservative columnist at the Washington Post,

had invited him to come over for dinner. And we said yes in sort of the spirit of bipartisanship. And for some reason, they had me staff it. I was like 12 years old. And I walk in the door. And the first question Obama gets is from George Will's like high school or teenage son about why the U.S. wasn't a party to the Rome statute in the ICC. And I was like, oh, my God, if this is what the press corps is kids questions are like,

God help us when we get to the real thing. But anyway, everything about the Russian conduct in Ukraine has been awful. But one of the stories that I think really shook me to my core, and a lot of people felt the same way, I wore these stories about the systematic deportation of Ukrainian children from Ukraine to territories either occupied by Russia or to Russia proper. In many cases, they were then put up for adoption, despite the fact that they had relatives back home or even parents back home who wanted them. Can you talk about what's being done to hold officials responsible for what is essentially kidnapping Ukrainian children? Yeah, it's really a horrific element of a vast crime base that we're seeing in Ukraine, literally everywhere that Russia's forces have been deployed. We have seen patterns of war crimes, crimes against humanity and other atrocities against civilians, against prisoners of war, protected items, cultural property, all of it.

There seems to be very few limiting norms here. And I think it's a combination of orders, everything on down to just very undisciplined troops. But this, we know, is a very organized system. And in fact, the conflict observatory, which was funded by the United States State Department, has done some research demonstrating that some of the filtration operation system, the infrastructure, was actually put in place before February of 24th, 2020. So there was already a plan to do filtration, and the children have been a component of that. The Ukrainian Prosecutor General has estimated that about 19,000 children have been subjected to this abduction.

And it's an interesting combination of children being literally abducted from Ukraine and taken to Russia versus children who have been invited to summer camps, but then retained there. Their phones taken away from them, not able to be in touch with their loved ones or their guardians, whole institutions that have been emptied of children, orphanages, etc. And then we also know that in Russia, there are systems of foster care and even adoptions. And there have been websites that have gone up and then they've been taken down once, I think they realized that was maybe not a great idea to be advertising this, that they were putting these children up for adoptions. So what to do about this, we are funding within the State Department a whole range of civil society actors that are trying to engage in tracing and the return of children in a quiet

sort of humanitarian way. that being, of course, the first priority is to get those kids back to their loved ones. And there are passageways that have been used, and I think upwards of about 500 kids have been now brought back. Some parents are taking matters into their own hand, and it's often women and grandmothers because men are not able to leave Ukraine. And so women and grandmothers are having to cross international borders into occupation territory and even into Russia to try and retrieve their children. But then this has been the subject of the first set of arrest warrants that have been issued by the International Criminal Court. So both President Putin himself and his children's rights commissioner, Maria Lovobovovo, have now been essentially indicted for the war crime of the forcible transfer and deportation of the civilian population in particular of children. So it's really a strong focus of the ICC.

We also know that all the other pathways to justice that exist, so cases in Ukrainian, courts, cases in third state courts, for example, in Europe, they're all very focused on this because it is so horrific. It's such a clear violation of international law. And we have words literally coming out of the mouths of potential defendants extolling this wonderful humanitarian gesture that Russia is engaged in. So it's actually quite an easy case to a certain degree because we have statements against interest by the very individuals who are implementing this horrific policy. Yeah, I mean, if listeners want to learn. more about this. Vice News, a really great reporter named Isabel Young, did sort of a documentary

length, like 25-minute length piece on one of these camps where these kids had been taking. And they actually allowed her in and they let her start to interview these kids. When the kids said the wrong thing, these Russian minders would dart forward and silence them and eventually kicked her out. I mean, it's just, it's shocking that they think the Russian officials think they can kind of, I don't know, propaganda or spin their way out of what they're doing. Yeah. I mean, they're presenting this as a quote unquote humanitarian gesture, but there's so much wrong about this. I mean, if they are in fact the rescuers of these children, they would not be holding them essentially in communicato. They would not be taking their phones. They would not be taking them sometimes

thousands of miles away from Ukraine. They would be returning them as soon as it's possible. They would have a tracing system or they would be keeping track of these children. None of this policy is in place. And more fundamentally, if these kids were in fact in any risk, it was precisely because of the invasion of Russia in the first place. So you can't create the problem and then offer the solution by virtue of abducting these children. Yeah, I would ask you about, you know, how technology has changed the way people like you do your job. I mean, in previous instances of genocides or, you know, war crimes, you know, you're trying to find like scarce access to satellite technology, for example, to take pictures of mass graves, to use that as evidence. Now, you know,

the war in Ukraine and many other wars are kind of pulling. playing out on social media in these unprecedented ways. Can you talk about how folks like you, the ICC, are using social media and help document and ultimately prosecute these crimes? Yeah, indeed. It's really the prevalence of digital media and social media has revolutionized the system of international justice. I started my career after law school at the Yugoslavia War Crimes Tribunal.

And we did have some satellite imagery. In fact, much of it came from the United States very helpfully in order to show, you know, the movement of people or mass graves or the movement of true. troops, et cetera. But that was kind of all we had. Now, ordinary Ukrainians are documentarians. They have their phone. There's CCTV in many of these towns that are recording events in real time as it's happening. All of this can be made available to investigators and prosecutors. So in some respects, we actually paradoxically have an opposite problem where there's almost too much information. Ukraine is probably now the most documented crime base in human history. I used to say that about

Syria, but Ukraine war is now going on so long. And there's been such penetration. of digital tools of cell phones and smartphones within Ukraine, plus all of the other imagery. There's private drones that have been given to the prosecutor general to be able to collect war crimes. You just announced on your last pod that the USAID was sending some Skydeo drones. We just met with Skydeo this week to learn more about how

that technology can be deployed to assist in the accountability space. So there's lots of digital imagery. The conflict observatory was stood up, precisely to scrape social media sites and do so quickly before individuals to post, for example, trophy videos, or even videos that have geolocation codes within their metadata, realize, oops,

I just put very valuable evidence online, scrape all of that, aggregated, subjected to analysis, and then produce a very refined report out of it. And so another place, if your listeners are interested, is the conflict observatory. It's based out of Yale. A number of different implementing partners are involved. They've put out a number of reports drawing upon what they can see from combining satellite imagery with social media collections and have been able to identify a lot of patterns in terms of attacking cultural property, the abduction of children, the filtration system, attacking grain, energy infrastructure.

All of this will be incredibly valuable to war crimes, prosecutors, and investigators around the world. Yeah, I imagine. And I remember reading some stories over the past years about social media platforms taking down some of these. videos, presumably because they're gruesome. They violate certain terms of service. Is that, and, you know, investigators saying they're taking away evidence, their stymia work? Is that something that's been worked out with some of these platforms? Indeed. It is definitely an open issue. And there actually, I have to be cautious here what I can say because there was a lawsuit by a state against the Biden administration for intervening

in content moderation questions. determinations that social media platforms are making. That has been stayed. So technically, we're not under an injunction to talk about this, but a very interesting question. It had nothing to do with the war crimes space. It was mostly sort of anti-vaxxers, et cetera, and encouragement to remove some of that because of the public health concerns. Nonetheless, there's no question that there have been issues with social media platforms, reviewing their terms of service, et cetera, and realizing that some of this imagery is violent or potentially shows criminal conduct. conduct and so they would take it down. There have been now efforts afoot, Berkeley Human Rights

Center in the lead here to encourage social media companies to create evidentiary vaults and just put that stuff there and save it. They don't have to have it available, but don't delete it permanently, such that if they do get a request from a prosecutorial authority, whether by way of a subpoena or a voluntary request for assistance, they haven't, they can make the policy decision as to whether or not they can share that or they can respond legal if order to do so and have that information available. It is critical. Fortunately, there are a number of outfits out there like Bellingcat and others

that are constantly searching for this stuff themselves and are able to preserve it under their own preservation protocols to then make it more available in the event that it does, in fact, show criminal conduct and the case is moving forward somewhere. The ability of organizations like Bellingcat and other, you know, non-governmental open source intelligence firms to not only preserve this stuff, but geolocate images based on shadows and, you know, some, I don't know, building in the background is just astounding to me. It's truly, I don't understand that they do what they do.

It's incredible, isn't it? And they have these scores of students working in law schools and universities around the country doing these sort of open source evaluations where they're being taught these techniques and then they're able to take an image, harvest the metadata, confirm that it hasn't been tampered with. It's not some sort of a deep fake, et cetera, that, you know, if there's watermarks, et cetera, you know, who added those, et cetera, all of that. And then be able to verify the content. We're also seeing this ability to do what's called hashing, which is as soon as a digital image is created, it's given a unique hash. And if it's ever been tampered with, the hash number will essentially change.

It's like a fingerprint, essentially. And so that has been able to assure courts that, in fact, the image is what it purports to be, that there's authenticity to it and all of that metadata that geolocates, et cetera, time, date, stamp. All of that is accurate to when that photograph was taken. We've seen a number of cases in Europe, particularly arising out of the Syrian conflict, in which courts are being presented with this evidence, and they're frankly being quite sophisticated about how they're evaluating it and then ultimately accepting it into evidence.

So trophy videos, et cetera, that defendants have posted. Those have all been used against them in order to find their responsibility for committing war crimes and other atrocities. Well, it's fascinating. Final question for you, and thank you again for your time. I mean, what do you say to people who might feel like or question whether it's worth the time and effort to build these cases because in the past, you know, prosecutions can be very slow. You've mentioned Syria a couple of times, you know, Assad is essentially being welcomed back into the fold by a lot of his neighbors. And they feel like, you know, the odds of someone like Vladimir Putin getting turned over to the Hague for prosecution seems very low. Maybe we should focus on, you

know, some other element of the war planning. What would you say to those folks? I mean, I see my job in this role as working to strengthen the system of international justice so that on the one hand, it is able to exert a stronger deterrent effect so that future perpetrators, maybe not megalomaniacs like President Putin himself, but those in his inner circle who maybe don't want to go down with a sinking ship will think twice before they will be willing to pass along orders, et cetera. We've seen massive defections from some of these authoritarian regimes where individuals have done their own private calculus.

And they thought, I want to leave, I don't want to be a part of this and risk spending the rest of my life in jail or being hunted as a fugitive around the world. And we know that the long arm of justice is patient. And so we have seen even decades later individuals being finally brought to justice. And each one of these cases is strengthening the larger system. and then that system will be stronger and better and more able to work. The Syria conflict, and the one hand is, and I wrote my PhD on this, on the one hand is a sad story, right?

We haven't seen a global response. The ICC referral failed because Russia was able to veto it in the Security Council. No ad hoc international tribunal was created. On the other hand, there are these incredible efforts of justice in Europe where the war crimes units within prosecutorial authorities are gearing up and they're taking on the obligation and the responsibility to do these cases in national courts. And for each one of these cases, it gives victims hope. It lets them know that they haven't been forgotten. And they can live, even if it's not their case per se, you talk to these survivor groups

and they are living vicariously through these cases. So even a single case against a Gazidi in Germany that recently found that the perpetrator that was an ISIS member had committed genocide, That has broad reverberations within survivor communities. We've now seen the UK making a genocide determination vis-a-vis ISIS. All of this is because these cases are moving forward and we're strengthening the whole ecosystem. National courts, regional courts, hybrid courts, and international courts. And my goal is to make sure that the United States is a strong partner, an ally and a source of assistance, whether it's financial, information sharing, or diplomatic support.

Well, Ambassador Van Schock, thank you for the work you're doing. Thanks for joining the show. Truly appreciate it. And best of luck to you. This is very important stuff with, as you point out, I think it may pay off over the course of decades. But when it does, someone like Omar Bashir gets arrested, it's pretty meaningful to a lot of people. So thanks. Indeed.

We're all playing a long game here. Thanks so much for having me on the show. I really appreciate it. It was a lot of fun. Thanks again to Ambassador Van Schock for joining the show. I bet she's never been on any program following Cat I Farted discussion. Yeah, yeah. That's what we do here.

Yeah. It's kind of how we vary, you know, we varied up. It's a nice combo of smart and stupid. Yeah. You hear of POTSave the World. That's what we're here to do. It's doing our best. Someone's got to do it.

All right, let's go read some indictment news. Yeah, let's check it out. Pod Save the World is a Cricket Media production. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor, Ben Rhodes, and Michael Martinez. Our producer is Haley Muse. Our associate producer is Ashley Mizzuo. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick, Kyle Seaglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vesilius Futopoulos are our sound engineers.

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