Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 10/2/26 Gordon Hahn on the Rise of Azov and Other Obstacles to Peace in Ukraine

Episode Date: October 5, 2026

Gordon Hahn returns to the show to talk about the notable rise of Azov’s Andriy Biletsky. He and Scott also discuss the obstacles to peace that are keeping this war going and some potential flashpoints for further escalation. Discussed on the show: Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West and the “New Cold War” by Gordon Hahn “The Rise of Azov’s Gen. Andriy Biletskiy” (Substack) Gordon M. Hahn is an expert for Corr Analytics and a senior researcher for the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies, Akribus Group. He is the author of Ukraine Over the Edge. Subscribe to his Substack.  Sign up for the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom at scotthortonacademy.com For more on Scott's work: Check out The Libertarian Institute: https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott's other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott's books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/43D82oY (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/4eMQblu Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/4a5fKvx Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott’s full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tax Attorney Matt Sercely https://agoristtaxadvice.com; Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.com; and Crowdhealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/ (use promocode Horton) You can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/ or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Audio cleaned up with the Podsworth app: https://podsworth.com Use code HORTON50 for 50% off your first order at Podsworth.com to clean up your voice recordings, sound like a pro, and also support the Scott Horton Show! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yes, sir, it's the Scott Horton show brought to you by expat money. That's expatmoney.com slash Scott. Ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest. Reporting to the American people, what's going on in this country? Because the babies I'm anxious. We're dealing with Hitler revisited. This is the Scott Horton show. Libertarian foreign policy, mostly.

When the president visit, that means that it is not only... We're going to take out seven countries in five years. They don't know what the fuck they're doing. Negotiate now. End this war. And now, here's your host, Scott Horton. All right, you guys, introducing once again, Gordon M. Hahn. He is, I never remember to do this before we go on.

He is a writer on Substack, Gordon Hahn considering Russia and Eurasia. and he is crucially the author of this book, Ukraine Over the Edge, Russia, the West, and the New Cold War, which those of you loyal readers and followers of mine recognized from my footnotes in Provoked, where I cite it quite heavily. Welcome back to the show, Gordon, how are you? Great to be here with you, Scott.

Thanks very much for the invitation. Absolutely, happy to have you here. So you have a Google Alert for Andrew. And you're always writing about him. I think you say he's voted in high school most likely to do a coup d'etat sometime soon here. If Zelensky ain't going to hold an election, maybe power will just end up getting seized right out from under him. But I don't know.

Anyway, so tell us who is Andrew Beledsky and why would any American care about this one particular Ukrainian military officer and what difference it all makes, sir? Well, Andrew Beliatsky is, first of all, he's a brigade general. And in the most recent meeting at the front, with Zelensky of the top military command, there were only five generals. Two of them were from Ozzov, Belytsky and his counterpart from the other Ozzov unit that's in the National Guard, not the Army, Dennis Bocopenko. So he's an important figure.

in opinion polls, he figures around the fifth or six most popular politician in Ukraine. And he really is in many ways. We have this idea in America of the political general. Well, he's certainly a political general. And no, it's not clear whether his military service is in service of Ukraine or in service of his coming to power and then transforming Ukraine into a fully, neo-fascist state by way of a revolution from above. He started out, you know, as a sort of typical

low, you know, street level Russian, Ukrainian nationalist during the early post-Soviet era, and he created a couple of organizations called the Black Corps, the Social National Assembly, you know, name is modeled on the Social National Socialist Party of Hitler. and another organization called Patriots of Ukraine. And, you know, I don't want to get too much into the bug down on the history unless you're okay with that.

Oh, hell yeah. Go for it. Okay. Please do. In February 14, that is, during the Maidan revolt, the Black Corps, was at the time the most immediate predecessor to what would become Azov, and Bledsky was its leader, and they were involved in the, Maidan, though, they were not as, they didn't play essential a role, as the other neo-fascist group,

a major neo-fascist group at the time, the right sector. In March 14th, around, in March 1914, after a month after the Maidan takeover, the Black Corps fought an anti-Maidan demonstration or protesters in Harcayev, and they did the same in Mariupil. And Mariupil, of course, would become crucial in the history of Lazov and the Ukrainian NATO-Russia-Ukrainian War, later on.

So in April, you have the declaration of the anti-terrorist operation by the new oligarch neo-fascist's mighton regime. It's a hybrid regime, really, at the time. Maybe neo-fascists is a bit over-wrought at the time. They were, neo-fascists were, you know, part of a nationalist front, you could say, within the regime, including modern nationalists, ultra-nationalists, and then neo-fascists. outright neophascist like Willetsky and Dimitra Yaros and his rights sector group. So in May 2014, during the declaration, after the new regime declared an anti-terrorist operation

against those who had reacted against the Maidan quite badly in the Donbos, they didn't want to live under the new order as they perceived it. Remember that at the time, the first act of the new Maidan regime was to adopt a law banning the Russian language, which they were forced to repeal under international pressure. So at this time, you have different areas in Donbos and in southern Ukraine, even in Kharkiv, and other places where people are not happy and they're protesting against the Maidan regime, and there's sometimes violence between pro-Maidan and anti-Maidan groups. So in one of these places in Berdianz, Berdianz, Berth, Bielski rebranded his, his patrons of Ukraine, his black corps, into the Azov Battalion.

So in other words, the implication here is the battalion, so they're going to participate in this anti-terrorist operation against the anti-Mydon elements. Azo played a key role in putting down an anti-Maidon protest in Mariupil. in June 2014 and went around the city, basically squashing protests. There's a famous video of a tank controlled by Ozlov and also by our former commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, General Searski, who was recently fired and replaced by Drapati. And he was commanding the tank, the tank. It's not sure. Every time I read the report, it's not clear from the wording. But this tank goes ripping through a barricade built by protesters,

and people, standbiers are just shocked. And eventually they attacked a police station, a police station that was becoming anti-Maidan, and they killed some police officers, and eventually they put down the anti-Maidan movement in Mariupo. And Mariupil, which is on the Azov Sea, which the Azo Battalion is named after, became sort of the headquarters, the capital,

of the Azov Battalion and the Azov Movement. At the time, it was funded by oligarchs and local administrations, and as the anti-terrorist operation continued through 14 and through 15, it, the Azo Battalion, and other neo-fascist organizations were incorporated nominally into the National Guard, which was under the control of the internal, Fares Ministry. This is basically through 2014, maybe early 15. In November 2014, the battalion was expanded into the Azov Regiment in the National Guard.

And at this time, there was the battle, excuse me, at this time they were supplied with weapons. Some of those weapons came from the West. In February, in 2015, the regiment carried out another offensive in Mariupil against separatist and some Russian forces and carried out battles in other places. And by February 22, when the special upper military operation begins, Oswe has already been incorporated into the Ukrainian armed forces. When the war begins, one of the first major battles was in Mariupil. and the Azov group was pushed back into the Azov Stahl, the Azov Steel, in Russian the Azov Stahl,

in English Yazov Steel factory, in an enormous factory, and pushed underground, as you may recall, and some of your readers may recall, and they ended up surrendering. They were allowed to go to Turkey and not be sent to Russia on the condition that they would not return to fight. that agreement was broken by the Turks and in various prisoner exchanges as well. The Russians actually let some Azov members return, and so it was able to reform itself. But by this time, there was a debate within the movement about what actually had happened at Mariupo in that Welski appears to have not been there. And Prokopenko, the other leader who I mentioned before the two new corps, the National Guard

Corps led by Prokopenko, National Guard Azov Corps, and then the Army, as of course, third core, are led by separately by Bledsky and Pocopemko. Pocopenko was definitely in Mariupo. In fact, he was one of the people who was captured, and then he was sent to Turkey, and then he was released and sent back. Boleski hadn't been, so in some ways, Pocopenko had more stature because he had actually been a prisoner of the Russians and Turkey and so forth. I played a major role in the defense of Mario Pold, and it wasn't clear that Pelletsky had.

So he returned, and when he returned, Boleski formed his own Azov. So there were now basically two Azov organizations, the one under the National Guard, which now has become the first corps of the National Guard, Azov, and then the third Army Corps, which is in the military, and that's led by Beletsky. So Balezky, there was a schism. As I mentioned, there has been some violence between Procopenko's first National Guard Corps and the Bledski's First Army Corps and

accusation, mutual accusations of corruption and so forth. Both sides are probably correct in this. In August this year, the Azo of Battalians in both received their upgrade to become Corps. Each has about potentially 50,000 members, so you have about potentially 100,000 armed, Ozov people, 50,000 in the National Guard, 50,000 in military.

Chances are both units are highly undermanned. And it's not a guarantee hardly that all of these people are hard-bitten neonationalists, though Azov is working hard to propagandize them and they have their own school and carry out special programs to spread their ideology amongst the core and beyond the core and beyond the state apparatus even into society. I'll talk about that in a second. So basically, you have a state within a state. The Azo Corps was to demonstrate that the Azov Corps has been the only, both Azov Corps,

have been the only units in the Ukrainian army that have been allowed to disobey the high command with impunity, which apparently they do fairly regularly. They withdraw from dangerous situations without permission, and sometimes they begin operation. without permission. The virtual empire or state within the state includes its own military technology and other training programs, its own educational institute. As you know, educational programs in schools, an array of social media, bookstores, consumer products, they sell t-shirts and so forth, and Ozov and Ukrainian flags on the internet. Moreover, the director of the very important Ukrainian State Institute for National Memory.

is an Azov member. He went directly from Azov in 2025 to become director of the Institute of National Memory. His name is Alexander Alfiorov. And why is this institute important? Because this institute basically defines the history of Ukraine and puts it in a neo-fascist light. It whitewashes the organization of Ukrainian nationalists and the Ukrainian partisan army that fought along with the and the side the Nazis in World War II and carried out atrocities in Babayar and killed tens of thousands of Poles, Jews, and communists, and so forth. So it's very busy with falsifying history to reshape the historiography

on the textbooks and the academic literature that comes out on Ukrainian history and on Russian history, by the way, to change the political culture and to distribute the bandarist ideology the inside the intellectuals, the intelligentsia, and also in society through the schools. And this has led to Zelensky actually whitewashing the movement. So recently he gave a talk, I think it was two or three days ago.

There was the anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre. And Zelensky mentioned as the victims, the Ukrainian nationalists. Not the only victims, but among the Jews, and I think the Ukrainian nationalists. were listed second. So rather than being listed, remember, Baviyar was carried out by the O-U-N and Upa forces on behalf of the Nazis. So they killed tens of thousands of Jews in the name of the Nazis,

and he's calling them the Ukrainian nationalist victims and not a word about the fact that they carried out this atrocity. This is Zelensky, who's a Jew, who's always put in light of being a Jew, and therefore there can't be any anti-Semitism in Ukraine. On that point, by a slight aside, anti-Semitism in Ukraine exists, and it's more pronounced, say, it is in Russia or say in the United States, but it's not as great as you might expect, and the main reason for that is that the main target of Ukrainian national today is not the Jews, but the Russians. Should the situation change with Russians, then my guess is that these type of people would refocus their eye around the Jews. So, again, Zelensky is promoting this group, helping them promote their ideology.

And this is a very dangerous situation. And most recently, this has come to the fore in this so-called Lyman offensive that's being led by the Azov Third Army Corps. And I think the First National Guard Corps is also involved. And there was a video, Zelensky went to the front a few days ago. And there was a video of Boleski ushering you into the headquarters of the, the command center on this front where the offensive is being taken over. The place is just filled with Azov colors and so forth and so on. Zelensky gives out medals to Azov Warriors, as he calls them.

There's this promotional video without showing all this. This is not just some television report or some cheap video. It's a professionally done propaganda promotional campaign. And Azov, we don't see the word Azov, but we see, but we see, Belensky and Prokopenko very obviously in the forefront of everything. So Zelensky, again, this offensive is providing a platform for Azov to promote itself. And Zelensky is going right along with no problem promoting this group. So that's basically who he has.

I should mention your book. Basically, his most famous statement to demonstrate his ideology is that he believes the white race should come to rule the world. So this is made made earlier, and now he's more of it just as you are Ukrainian nationals, not so much concerned about the entire white race. Man, it's so cool. I own Liberty Stickers again. Liberty Stickers.com. Everyone else's stickers suck.

But these ones are really good, like, for example, this one I made back years ago. So what if they never tell the truth about the Oklahoma City bombing? I mean, who cares, right? It's supposed to be ironic and sarcastic. You get it? And then here's one. Join the CIA, creating tomorrow's enemies today. That kind of thing, you know,

so you can put them on the back of your truck and tell everybody else how stupid their politics are. LibertyStickers.com. Mmm, Moondos artisan coffees. Explicitly Scott Horton Show flavored coffee. From Moondos Artisan coffees, get it, they hate Starbucks because Starbucks supports the war party. But Moondos Artisan coffees, they support peace.

and so here you go. Scott Horton's show flavored coffee. It's part Sumatran and part Ethiopian, all mixed together and tastes so good in the morning and also in the mid-afternoon if you start getting sleepy. Scott Horton.org slash coffee. Get you some. Well, now, so that's what they say.

They say he's come to Jesus and he's not a Nazi anymore. That was a long time ago. And same for all of his Nazis too. He's still a Nazi. It's just that the white race isn't his entire. Same thing with the Germans, right? The Germans were not particularly worried about the entire white race on the planet. They were German ultra-nationalists and neo-fascists, right?

They saw the Slavs as being intermentioned along with the Jews. So same thing here. Yeah. National socialism. Right. Yeah. Yeah, it was, you know, in the meantime between the coup and the outbreak of the worst part of the war during the Civil War years, there's a huge Azov movement

where they brought in, you know, I have a section in the book where I'm kind of joking around the international Nazi where it's all about these national socialists from all around the world all coming to fight in Ukraine,

but then also just spreading their ideology and just doing death metal concerts and MMA fights, just whatever to build the culture and to help, you know, bolster white supremacist movements around Europe and even, you know, in South America and the United States

and wherever. And then the FBI, of course, loves to trumpet the threat of right-wing extremist violence in the United States, but then our government is shipping these guys off or at least creating a battlefield where they all went to, or many of them,

went to go and get some battlefield experience. You know what I mean? And they're helping to radicalize those kind of movements all around the world. Although, you know, and you kind of alluded to this in one of your recent pieces here and I forget if you just said something about it too,

that there's sort of a double-edged thing going on here with Zelenskyy sending the Third Army Corps and the First National Guard Corps to the front in Donetsk right now, which is that they're the ones who don't mind dying, or they're the ones who are at least risk-averse to fighting and, you know, are happy to do it. They actually spend their money on weapons

instead of Lamborghinis and stuff, you know. But also, by, sending them to the front and getting more and more of them killed, that weakens, Beletsky, you know, or his counterparts positioned there, Protopenko's position to be able to eventually overthrow the regime. And, you know, you got to wonder, for all those years, all those Nazis that were trained in those, you know, summer camps and all of those things that they did in the intervening years,

how many of those people are even alive still, you know? Well, perhaps they feel they're reproducing enough that, through their various educational propaganda programs that they can afford to lose them because they're replacing them. And everything that you mentioned earlier about the internationalization of Azov continues and I would say it's probably more pronounced

than it was during the Civil War. You know, there are more international fighters, not necessarily in Azov itself, but in the Ukrainian army. Azov organizes all sorts of international conferences in Kiev and then they attend international conferences

of neo-fascists abroad. So all this continues apace with the added romanticism of an actual war going on. So nothing is changed in that regard. And I forget, now, you know, you mentioned this, so it may well have been your blog

that I was reading about this. About, something tells me it was something else. Maybe it was just something that you had linked to that I read more about it. but about sort of the independence of the Third Army Corps, Bledsky's group where they have sort of this separate chain of command

from the rest of the military and even these direct links back to the Western powers in Germany helping to organize the war there and separate access to munitions and stuff. That was sort of what I was alluding to there about this, you know, they're not corrupt in the sense they, you know, if you give them a bunch of money to buy weapons with, they buy weapons with them and use the weapons to fight with instead of just, you know, buying properties and Coke and whores and whatever, like the guys in Kiev.

And so then the Americans are like, we like these guys. These guys like to fight. So they sort of set them up a separate chain of command, which, you know, as you call it kind of a state within a state, I mean, it seems really dangerous. If Beletsky doesn't die in this thing, the rest of the government's going to have to deal with him. And, oh, by the way, one of the last thing there was when he talked about his ambitions, just a few weeks ago, someone asked him, do you want to be the president? And he said, the answer's not no.

Double negative. Produces a positive. Yeah, positive answer. Yeah, I mean, he has, there's no doubt he has political ambitions. I mean, Oslo carries out, you know, constant propaganda that they are the most effective. I'm talking here about the Third Army Corps, that they're the most effective fighting. unit in the Ukrainian army. And this gets repeated in throughout the Ukrainian media.

And even in Western media, I've seen it. I've seen this mentioned or alluded to in some form or another. So, yeah, he's definitely got political ambitions. And, you know, the situation basically lends itself because Zelensky's playing into his hands by putting them at the forefront of the final defense of the Donald. the last regions of the Donbos, Donetsk, southwest, that Ukrainian forces still hold, among everything other, else I said about the state within the state. So, yeah, he's in a very good position.

And the question is, what happens, you know, when things start to really melt down, you know, assuming he still got, say, 20 or 30,000 fighters left, and Pokopenko is willing to cooperate with him. and he's got another 20 or 30,000 fighters. So you have, say, a 50,000 total group of, as of warriors, as they call them. And the front begins to collapse. There's a danger of encirclement.

There's already, you know, the reputation of the Zelensky order is completely darkened by all these corruption scandals. Wouldn't it make logic? it wouldn't be logical for the army to take cover in Kiev and simultaneously overthrow the Zelensky order or even before things get really bad to do that. One key point may be that at some point,

there may be an attempt, there may be an encirclement of, in fact, there is an encirclement in Dopropelia right now, probably what are Azo forces, but what happens if a very large arm, Azof forces encircled by the Russian army, And Zelensky refuses to let them withdraw. And in addition, doesn't allow other part units of the Ukrainian army to break through the encirclement to let them escape.

And, you know, 10,000 or 5,000 Azov warriors are slaughtered because of Zelensky, that could also create a problem. We've seen that sort of thing happen already in Ukraine to some extent. We also saw that actually happened in the Russian army with Bregosian, if you recall, right? The high casualties that Bregosian suffered might have been one of the things that sparked his seemingly attempted coup d'etat against Putin. So this is the risk of war, you know, chaos and all the kinds of different political actors, especially the most extremist ones, playing their own games and using the fluidity of the situation to perhaps take power. Yeah, as you said, and this is always the kind of idiotic propaganda rejoinder from the other side is, the supermajority population of Ukraine does not have a consensus behind Hitlerian national socialism. And so these guys don't win elections and all of these things.

But the thing is, actually, they do win elections. They just don't run under their Nazi parties. When they run under the Fatherland Party or what have you, they absolutely do. Boleski was in the Rada. And so was, Andre Perubi was the Speaker of the Parliament for eight years or something like that. And thankfully, somebody, you know, walked up behind him and put him out of his misery earlier this year. So thank goodness for that. And then people would have to, who make that argument, would have to also explain why Letsky has become the fifth or six most popular politician in Ukraine

and why he has the lowest, he has the lowest, the negatives of any of the, any of the, the first six, seven, eight politicians. That includes Zelensky. So he, apparently the ideology does not bother a lot of people in Ukraine. And again, the fact that you have these, all these ideology-related institutions under as of control means that gradually they can begin to re-educate the younger generation will be more susceptible to, more,

better inclined to to demonstrate some allegiance to this ideology. So it's, you know, it's not a very good argument. And again, you have to ask, why are there than 50,000 soldiers in two different Arzov units if this is not a popular movement? Incidentally, there was also a demonstration

that was supposed to be held tomorrow. In Kiev, Some people were calling it the third Maidan, and it was apparently an Azov-led operation, but the SBA, which is loyal, SPUs, which is very loyal to Zelensky, arrested the guy who was organizing it, and I haven't heard much talk about it anymore. I don't know whether it's going to happen or whether it's going to spontaneously occur, but there's a potential for something to happen in Kiev tomorrow involving Azov. either fights breaking out between Osloff members and the police and so forth.

So, again, that's a demonstration of the political ambitions and the gap between, the real gap between Zelensky and Boleski. I don't see Boleski as being loyal to Zelensky at all. He's playing the game. He's pretending he's loyal. But I think deep down inside, he's waiting for his moment. And by the way, as far as this ideology, I mean, times do change, except that if you go back to 2007,

and you can find this from the Wayback Machine, the Azov website, but I reprinted the whole speech on the blog at anti-war.com. It's called Ukrainian racial social nationalism by Andri Baletsky. And it's just the ravings of a Nazi. It's all it is. It's all the Aryan values of the Ukrainian state as the single organism and every sperm

and every egg belongs to the state to build the Ukrainian Superman. And it's just... what a Nazi would say, as all it is. For since then, you know, he said repeatedly that like, no, my ideology has not changed at all. We stand firm by the principles of Azov and the rest and all that. And he's been confronted with this question over and over.

They say you've come to Jesus. Is that right? And he goes, no, I sure as hell have not. It's me and Hitler until the end. Like, okay, well, all right. As long you're making yourself very clear here. Thank you very much. And by the way, you know, I did some research because I thought, you know, whatever

happened to Oleg Tennebach. He was one of the Nazis that held over the government there, and he and his son are fighting on the front lines in the National Guard. And then I looked up Dimitri Aras, and he's still leading the rights sector, fighting, you know, somewhere, I don't know. And then

Yavin Karras from C-14, he's fighting in Kurson. And so you look at all the most prominent Nazis, other than Andrew Perubi, are all at war right now. Right, right. I don't think Yarrush is head of the right sector officially because they have like a coordinator and I forget

the name of the guy who's actually the coordinator. But he works with them and he's the, he's the real, you know, figurehead and the person who founded the right sector most importantly. So, and he, he spends a lot of his time allegedly helping wounded the soldiers and that sort of thing. That's, that's his stick at least on Facebook and so forth. So, I don't know how much time he's actively. And you don't hear that much about right sector anymore as compared to Azo. Azov is clearly outpaced the right sector

in the informational space and is, as far as I can tell, far more popular than right sector. Yeah. Yeah, it seems like, you know, a militia like that that they kept off the books is more useful for murders and assassinations and kidnapping.

and disappearances and stuff rather than fighting on the front line the way Azov has really been made into a true military battalion. Yeah. And the fact that there's violence between the two Azov groups demonstrates what they're doing outside

against out groups that are outside. And now, so one thing that I think goes mostly unremark in, you know, well, whatever, they never talk about any of this stuff really, but whatever. One of the things that they also don't talk, about is the fact that these guys have threatened to murder, particularly Boleski and Yorash,

have threatened to murder the president, Zelensky, and his predecessor, Poroshenko, before him, if they would even consider negotiating a peace with the Russians. So they've got, you know, a real rock and a hard place. I was joking before someone asked me, what's going to happen to Zelensky? I said, a bullet or the Brookings institution, but he ain't going to be able to just retire to the outskirts of Kiev. No, that's highly, not if he's, not if he's walked intensely.

He just made a statement recently saying, one of his goals is to be able to walk around Kiev, you know, and not to have bodyguards, you know, and I think some comment there, I think it was Martha Havarichko said, yeah, good luck with that.

You know, yeah, I don't think, again, yeah, that's the main obstacle probably to Zelensky moving towards the peace agreement. assuming that he actually wants to. I mean, there are other obstacles, too. Perhaps a lot of the oligarchs may not want to do that.

And once he does that, he becomes sort of expendable, right? I mean, his stick has always been, you know, he's the leader. He's the new Churchill, and he's fighting the Russians, and suddenly he gives up the game and decides to negotiate. Seriously, there are a lot of people who are going to be disaffected, not just the Azo people. The differences that the Azo people have the gun. That's it.

That's the problem. Yeah. Hey guys, me here for crowd health at join crowdhealth.com slash Horton. And what it is is it's a replacement for insurance. It's not insurance. It's crowdsourcing instead. And who could possibly afford insurance at these prices in this day and age? It makes no sense.

But what this is is it's crowdsourcing. You help pay for other people's medical bills and they help pay for yours. And it really works. You pay the first 500 of whatever you're doing. upfront in cash and anything over that you bill it to the group and they help you pay and then when it's somebody else's turn you chip in a fair amount to pay for them and it's all for a low monthly subscription fee and it's totally a great deal and i highly encourage you to check it out at join crowdhealth.com slash horton hey guys if you sign up for my substack at scotthorton show

dot com, then you get all the shows a day early and without ads. Pretty good, right? Scott Horton Show.com. Hey, look, guys, Scott Horton Show and Scott Horton Academy, swag. Just look at the YouTube channel there and under every video, there's links to all the stuff. Now, I guess there's been reports like this for about a year or something that I first saw in the Wall Street Journal, and I know it's not necessarily that credible, but they were

saying the sources were Russian sources. They weren't getting this from Washington. And then I guess Jared Kushner, I only have the second hand, but someone I interviewed brought this up the other day, that Kushner had said that essentially there's a pretty easy deal on the table, which is essentially that Ukraine give up the very last little bit of Donetsk and the Russians might be willing to call it quits there. Well, the Russians only have about one-fifth of Donetsk left to take at this point. And I think it's obviously for reasons we just discussed and others, it's completely politically impossible for Zelensky to order the withdrawal of soldiers from Donetsk on land where they still stand. However, my question is, after they're done losing it and the Russians

are simply standing there, do you think that Putin might just call an end to the war then and let the lines stay where they are in Ziproja and Kursan? Because that was the offer that they said that they were willing to negotiate. And this was a little bit vague, but it seemed like the heavy implication was that, forget the other third of Kerson. It's on the far side of the river. And Ziproja, you know, what the hell?

We got the Azov coast and our land bridge to Crimea, safe and sound here. The Ukrainians can't threaten it. And so maybe they can stop short of the line there and not have to wage a massive battle for the city of Ziproja. and all that. So I wonder whether you think that that would be a possibility

at some point where Putin would just hold the negotiation with himself and say, okay, I got the Don Bass and I've got all I need on the Azov coast and I'm calling it quits here.

That might be possible if Zelensky would agree to everything else. That is, no connection to NATO whatsoever, not just neutrality, but no NATO training of Ukrainian forces,

no NATO troops training Ukrainians on Ukrainian territory, no Ukrainian, no NATO weapons, going to Ukraine, anti-defascisization of Ukraine, which they might be able to forego to some extent, to some extent, they probably would like to see a de-idilogization of the Institute of National Memory and that sort of thing. They may demand, for example, the arrest of people like Veleski and Yaros and these kinds of, of people who are at least a ban on them and participating in in elections and so forth.

The other thing is deep militarization. The Ukrainians would have to agree on limits to the size of the army. The Ukrainians would have to agree on autonomy for Donbos, according, not for Donbos, for any regions where the Russians have control, don't have control of troops,

but there are large Russian ethnic or Russian-speaking populations. they would have to give Russians guarantee their language rights, perhaps required to make Russian the second language of the Ukrainian state. If all those things were agreed to, then I think Putin would be willing to say, yeah, we can forego half of Erson and half of Zaporozia. The problem is, the time is running short.

I mean, by early, by next year, by spring next year, the Russians may be preparing an assault on Zaporosia. So time is running out. By then, Donbos may be entirely taken. And the neo-fascists are still there, you know, refusing any sort of compromise. So there doesn't seem to be a solution even if Putin were to make that kind of offer. And again, I think they would have to agree to everything else, almost everything else that the Russians want in order for the Russians to give up half of Harrison and half of Zaporosia. And even then at this point, the other issue is that the Russians have taken lots of territories, territory outside in other regions that they don't claim in their constitution. territories in Harkiv, in Sumi, in Chernigu, in Nepal.

So what do you do with that? If the Russians are going to withdraw from those areas, shouldn't they get something in return? And since they've already made the claim, and it's already written in the Russian Constitution that all of the oblast of Harrison in Ukraine and all of the Zaporosia oblast in Ukraine are part of Russia, that's in the Constitution. It doesn't just mention Danes, Herzlón, and Zaporosia. It mentions that the entire territory of those two regions are inside, are part of Russian territory. So you have to resolve that problem.

I mean, I can't see the Russians withdrawing from other areas and then also withdrawing from those areas. It's a lot of withdrawal for, you know, all the, in exchange for other things. and given the tenor and given the lay of the land on the battlefield. So hard to say. I don't think an agreement like that at this point is very unlikely. My worst fear is that there is no agreement, and the continuation of the war just leads to chaos in Ukraine, and that forces the Russians to go all the way to the Polish border.

And then you would have a situation where basically you would have a new Ukrainian partisan army being provided weapons for terrorist attacks and guerrilla attacks, the sort of thing that was going on in North Caucasus occurring in Western Ukraine. See, that's what I'm saying. I agree with you completely about that. And I'm a broken record on this because I don't know what else to say. I don't know. But I said this in a speech that I gave on March the 4th, 22, right after the war began.

I says, you know, war is a self-licking ice cream cone. It's a government program. All they're going to do is make things worse and then make things worse. That's not just for the Pentagon. That's for the Kremlin's Pentagon, too. And so the first thing they do when they take the Dombas is they take everyone in Ukraine who actually likes them and makes them Russians. Well, the Russian leaning guy used to win elections. That's why we had to overthrow the government there twice in 10 years.

Now they're never going to win again. Now, Balitsky is the fifth most popular guy to lead the country because everyone who leans Russia is a Russian now, or at least most of them. And then you have all this territory between the river and the Donbass, Sumi, Harkiv, Denepro Petrovask, and Zabrosha, and Kyrgyzana, of course, where it's sort of a great scale as far as ethnicity, but they're almost all Russian speakers. And so from the point of view of Moscow, oh, geez, now we're leaving all these poor Russian speakers to be persecuted as a much smaller,

weaker minority than Ukrainian nationalist dominated state. So now we've got to protect them too. So then we've got to go all the way to the river. Now they go all the way

to the river. Well, Kiev's right there. Kiev's bisected by the river. So they take half of Kiev. Now they got the other half right there. There's a permanent conflict. They're going to have to go ahead and conquer the other half of the capital

and run them out of there. By this point, the Ukrainian military's got to be broken to allow that much to have happened. And so at that point, go back to, the Democrats' original plan, which was to back a Nazi-led insurgency from the west of the country.

Because they assumed that this is what was going to happen in the very first month of the war, is that the Russians would smash the Ukrainian military, and then they be backing Balitsky and Yaraesh, fighting as militia forces, as, you know, Mujahideen, basically, from the west. And then, of course, that's where the swamps

and the forests and the Carpathian Mountains are, and where the CIA already backed these Nazis after World War II up until, the late 50s, and they can just do that again. And then government programs, still flicking ice cream cone. What does the Kremlin do now? Now, as you said, fast forwarding to the end, now they got to march all the way up to NATO's line.

The thing that they were trying to prevent from coming to them, now they're coming to it because they've given themselves no choice after making this idiot mistake in invading Ukraine. Right. And then they can claim, you know, that, well, at a minimum, Maybe we haven't gained a strategic victory over Russia, but we certainly given them a nice little quagmire. And they keep that quagmire going for a couple of decades. And then there the danger is, of course, that the Russians will, quote, unquote, overreact.

And then we're in the same position, right? We're still under the threat of having a direct, open NATO-Russia war that could, in theory, go nuclear, right? So it's an extremely dangerous situation. And the best case scenario would be either for an agreement. And I'm sure Putin is aware of this risk. You don't hear them talk about, you don't hear anybody talk about this in Russia. Even on the talk shows, I haven't heard anybody mention this potential problem of a quagmire with insurgents being funded from the West and so forth in Western Ukraine.

So, but they have to be aware of this danger. And that's, I suppose, one incentive. one potential incentive to come to come to an agreement. But, but hatching out all these details is going to be extremely difficult. And probably the only thing that the saving, the saving grace would be if the Russians are in such a commanding position on the battlefield that the Ukrainians basically have no choice.

But then we come back to the same problem. If the neo-fascists are still powerful, they're not going to want to come to an agreement. And then you have maybe a coup in Kiev, Maybe you have the country dividing up into warlords, warlords, different fiefdoms with different warlords. You know, Azov in one place, right sector, and another place, oligarchs under the control of one region. You know, Sarasati, as they call them, people under control of Saros and the globalists and the European Union and the deep state control another area. And you have, you know, a mix of civil war and war with Russia going on simultaneously.

something like, you know, 1917. Well, look, I mean, yeah, go back to, in the 50s, it took Stalin and Khrushchev ultraviolence and mass deportations to end the insurrection based out of the Carpathian Mountains, the CIA back insurrection there. It took the commies doing as commies do in order to crush that thing.

I mean, it was the worst, you know? So we're facing, we're beginning to move into that disaster. It was a pastor's territory, unfortunately. Yeah, I wrote the book Provoked, but the book ain't called justified. I say the war is only 49% Joe Biden's fault. It's still 51% Putin's, and I think it was a terrible decision. You know, Eric Margulies is quoting Talleyrand about Napoleon when he assassinated some guy,

which led to all these terrible political consequences, and Talley Rand said it was worse than a crime. if it was a mistake. And I think that's absolutely going to be the case here. The Russians are going to win the war, but they're going to wish they had. And it's going to be a Pyrrhic victory and a tar baby, you know, crisis for them forever now. I may be a little bit pushed back on that. I don't see, you know, I don't see where Putin had much of an alternative other than, say, you know,

because the West did not want to negotiate on anything. They didn't want to negotiate on anything. I agree with that. Like, well, I should say it. They didn't want to negotiate on Ukraine. Yeah. I agree with you that the Democrats were being absolutely intransigent, but I think that he still had some options.

Yeah, the only option I try I can think of is maybe, you know, maybe going to the UN, you know, and doing kind of McCrushchev sort of thing and threatening war before he actually invaded. Yes, he basically did. He basically did. He basically on the list. Huh? I absolutely agree.

That's, that's on the list. because what did he do in the run up to the war? Is he sat there playing coy and saying, no, I'm not going to invade. I'm just, I got my forces lined up and I want you to sign my treaty, but no, I'm not going to do anything about it if you don't, which I joked in my book.

I says, well, maybe military necessity required this diplomatic incompetence that his generals were saying, look, you can't just give away the whole game, only most of it or something. But what he should have said was, you're goddamn right I'm going to invade. It's going to be the worst thing

that ever happened in a long time if you don't do what I say, come and sign this treaty and world bear witness. These terms are reasonable. And so, you know what I mean? But instead he had to play Goetzy and it didn't work. And then another couple of things he could have done is he could have just said, I am hereby grinding all UN Security Council business to a halt. I'm vetoing everything until I get my right.

And he could have shut off all. He could have turned off his own Nord Stream 1 and 2 and said, you want to play economic war? How about I'll just shut off all hydrocarbon sales to Europe right now in the winter of 21-22. And you guys can decide whether this is the price you're really willing to pay. And then, you know, David Swanson, I admit he's kind of a leftist and a pacifist. But he said, look, this is actually within the realm of possibility. He could have flooded the entire area with unarmed peacekeepers.

He could have, you know what I mean? sent in, he could have put blue helmets on all of his guys and sent them in with handguns only or I don't know, whatever, buck knives and just send them in there and just to completely flood the zone and make the civil war, you know, no longer possible from the Ukrainian side politically that now he has to show unarmed men, whatever it is. He could have played a lot of different, you know, cunning sort of games in order to prove his point before mating. And I think the proof of it is just that he didn't invade on the 21st, and so he didn't have to invade on the 22nd. You know what I mean?

Well, here's my, my view is that basically he was pushed into a corner. And I think the other things you mentioned, I don't think would have worked for various reasons. I mean, we can go down the list and discuss it. But the big thing here is in the context of this discussion is to remember that the operation was begun at basically a coercive exercise in coercive diplomacy. That's why it was called a special military operation. That's why I didn't

bomb the hell out of Kiev. You know, a surprise bombing, suddenly attacking all of central Kiev. That's why they didn't bomb the bridges along the NEPA on the first days of the war. That's why there was no mass bombing, essentially. They just moved troops in the direction of Kiev. And that was because

they wanted the force the Ukrainians to negotiate negotiating table. And that actually worked. And the first, and the first day, the Russians offered negotiations, and the first day the Ukrainians accepted. And they had an agreement. And the agreement was scuttled again by the West. So every measure, I think if he had mixed it with a warning, you know, in other words, prior to doing the aggressive, coercive, coercive diplomacy, special military operation, if he had gone to the UN, said, here are my troops, here's the dislocation of my troops, we got 200,000

along the Ukrainian border. The West is meddling. We want the Ukrainians to pull all their troops back. We want the West and NATO out of Ukraine. And we want protections for the minority in Donbos. And that doesn't happen within a month. We're going in. Now, the only argument against that is, well,

then there's no element of surprise, right? I mean, one of the reasons the Russians, I think, were denying all along that they were going to do anything is because they wanted to maintain the element of surprise. And if you recall, even Zelensky was saying, saying there was going to be no evasion, like, invasion, like I think it was a week or even a couple of days before the invasion. He was saying, no, they're not going to invade.

In the West, all these people, you know, in the press, they were saying, the CIA is warning. It's going to be. And Zelensky denied it. So that might be one reason. You know, it's again, it's a very complicated. You reminded me, you reminded me actually of one more thing that he could have tried to do, which is something that he kind of tried, but not really hard enough in 2018, which was to get a third country's blue helmet peacekeepers in there under UN offices.

But that happened. It was in 2018 at the height of Russia gate. And Trump was just completely bogged down from doing anything that could have been seen as beneficial to the Russians in any way. And it just kind of, it didn't make much of a political headline. It didn't really go anywhere. But in the controversy in the run up to the war, he could have absolutely demanded that and said, look, they can be y'all's friends. How about the South Koreans? We put South Korean force there on the gray line or whatever they called it,

the so-called man's land between. You know what I mean? He could have been more intensive. And he certainly, I think, should have tried it. And in fact, you know, I have the quote in the book where McCrone is telling him, don't give in to provocations. They're trying to get you to do something stupid, man. Don't do it.

And then I have a quote from him from a press conference where Putin himself says, I think they're trying to trap me into this war. But then he said, but I might have to do it anyway. They might give me no choice but to follow through because it's either now or later, you know, that kind of thing. But so I think he knew better and did it anyway and probably will regret it if he doesn't already, you know. Yeah, he probably too.

Well, he basically took a half measure, right? By trying to do the coercive diplomacy and but still using the military force and violating Ukraine's territorial sovereignty. But then again, like we're talking about, even if he'd gone full force and smashed their military right away, he still would have been facing a bunch of neo-Nazis fighting from the West. So he didn't, that was a plan.

Far fewer and not quite well-armed and well-trained in battle combat. Well, that's true. Yes. As they are now. Yeah, certainly not like facing a state army. But, yeah, it would have been. And in fact, the way I look at it is, since that was really, you know, well, Plan A was telling him, don't you do it,

but Plan B was we're going to back the Nazi-style insurgency against him. And then now we're only on like Plan B-1, which is, oh, great, the military stood. And we've been able to back an actual state army at war against them this whole time for four and a half years now. But then if that changes and the Ukrainian military really does break, then we just go back to Plan B again, which is backing the insurgency, which could, you know, as we talked to, about that could go on for years and years. And if the Russians feel like they must take the West of the country to crush that insurgency, then you're talking about a whole other level of combat and years more of fighting

before they get all the women to Poland. Absolutely. Absolutely. So it's, yeah. Yeah, he has walked in. I mean, but again, I think the most of the blame goes with the West. I don't think they gave him very many options. I mean, the options of, you know, engaging in coercive,

diplomacy, which again, they immediately are subverted, right? So there's nothing to say that if he had gone to the UN and there had been negotiations, there's no guarantee that in the last minute they would have subverted them again. I mean, so in the end, I think he had really very little

choice. And the people who put this on his agenda, put this choice, on his agenda, was the West entirely. It didn't have to happen this way. He didn't have to be put in this corner.

And when you put up a great power, back of them into a corner with, you know, little powers being sort of your, the wall that's protecting you, well, they're just going to get eaten up. They're just going to get eaten up. And if you're not willing to go in and save them, and it's just a disaster. You know, we basically treated Ukraine like the sacrificial lamb to NATO expansion, you know, just keep pushing them forward, pushing them forward. radicalizing them, drawing them in closer and closer into our sphere of influence and power

and all different interrelated structures, integration into our various structures, military, economic, everything, and promised them all sorts of military systems that a democracy cannot promise in perpetuity. Just can't do it. But we did. And this is the result. Yeah.

All right, you guys, me here for XPATs, It's atmoney.com slash Scott. And what it is is this great guy, Mikkel Thorup, and he's a world traveler and a real expert in what you can do to buy property and invest in property overseas, protect your assets, and look into even living overseas if that is your interest. And if you just go to expatmoney.com slash Scott, you can get this free handy booklet, plan B, residencies, and instant citizenships. That's expatmoney.com slash Scott.

Scott Horton Show is brought to you by Matt Sersely tax attorney. Let's say you run a small business or you're a high salary professional and you're looking to protect your revenue from the revenues who would rather take it and spend it on helping foreign countries kill people or something like that. Well, what you do is you contact Matt Sersley and he's an attorney not a CPA and so you can discuss all of your business. with him in complete confidentiality. And he will help you construct your taxes in such a way where you pay the absolute minimum. That's agoristtaxadvice.com for Matt Sersley, agoristtaxadvice.com. Yeah, no question about that.

I guess we only differ in just our analogy. In my mind, the Americans had Putin's back up against a wall, not quite all the way in a corner yet. But then what happens when you put a guy's back up against the wall, he might. might not wait until you got him all the way in the corner. He might go ahead and stab you right now. And look at who you're dealing with. This guy is a serious character.

You know what I mean? It's not like he's just going to let you push him around. So back to the wall is just a couple of steps from the corner and completely unreasonable. I mean, you can see the book behind me. I'm going to mail you one. The book behind me, it's a thousand page book on how this is All-American. So, yeah, definitely an agreement there. I want to see this for a quick here, Gordon, before I let you go, a last question.

This is a map of the Baltic states here for the people who can see this on video. And right here beneath Lithuania, on the Baltic Sea, we see this little bit called Russia here on this map. It's labeled Russia. And that's clean and broad. Right. North of Poland, south and west of Lithuania, landlocked away from Belarus, Russia's ally. Well, first of all, landlocked away from Russia by Belarus. and then locked away from Belarus by Lithuania.

But we have what's called the Swaki corridor that cuts across right here at the southern part of Lithuania that allows the Russians, it's a railway, I take it. It allows the Russians to get their supplies back and forth across Lithuania from Belarus to Kaliningrad and back. And I know that at the start of the war, the Lithuanians actually close the Swaki corridor and try to prevent the Russians from coming through there.

and Putin threatened severe consequences. I don't know if he was much more specific than that. And the Europeans got the Lithuanians to back down. And there was even a quote from the Lithuanian, a defense official, I guess ahead of their defense committee and their parliament told the New York Times, oh, yeah, we wouldn't dream it doing something like this to the Russians if we didn't have America standing out our back.

But it's a great moral hazard. Bring it on. We can take them, Uncle Scooby. So there's an obvious flashpoint there. I like to quote Pat Buchanan from 1999, saying, if they bring the Baltic states into NATO, as many are proposing to do, which did in 2004, then from Russia's point of view,

we are leaving Kaliningrad stranded behind NATO lines. Right. This is insane. Why in the world would we do this and put the Lithuanians in this position, put ourselves in this position, where we have to go to war with these countries where we're actually the ones creating the controversy

to make any of this worth fighting about. Again, the Lithuanian guy says, hey, if we weren't in NATO, we wouldn't dream of trying to cross the Russians this way, you know? So here we are, and now the headline yesterday was, and I'm sorry because my question is embedded in this part. I saw where the Russians said, boy, nobody ever better try to close the Swaki corridor

and cut us off from Leningrad, or we would even consider resorting to nuclear. weapons if necessary in order to have our way again. And the parallels to Danzig, again, the beginning of World War II are pretty obvious here, too. But I miss whatever had provoked them into saying that, whether the Lithuanians were bringing this up, this had been a renewed controversy of any kind, or if they are just kind of blowing smoke because they like to threaten to use nuclear weapons every once in a while, or what was going on with that?

And do you see that as a real problem? Well, there were several articles in the Western media, and there were one going way back I can't remember, maybe it was in midsummer, maybe early summer, where a NATO general said, you know, if we could take Kaliningrad, you know, in 30 hours or something like this. So, and there have been a series of articles more recently, but I think what's really, is the confluence of these articles, the fact that there are now maneuvers in all the Baltic states with additional troops sent from the West to participate. So there may be a fear in parts of the defense general staff or Kremlin or wherever that they are using this series of exercises as a cover for trying to take some kind of step against the Swaki Corrid, for example. So that I think is the main issue. It's this confluence of tough talk on Kalanagrad and then these large. numbers of maneuvers and also

these also we had the last couple of months these episodes of drones, Ukrainian drones landing in Baltic states and the Ukrainians and the Ukrainians and the Westerners saying that they were

drone hijacked by the Russians and redirected towards the Baltics and the Russians are saying no I tend to doubt that that occurred because there's no I just don't don't see any gain to that. What do you get out of that? I mean, it's kind of silly.

You know, if you're going to do something, do something. But these kind of little pinpricks, I don't think the Russians are particularly interested in them. So I think that was the genesis of Putin's threat there. All right. Everybody is, Gordon Hunt, you got to read this book, those of you who are really interesting. Wait, Matt, one more point to that. He may have some intel. He may have some intel on it also. Right? Yeah. All right. Gordon Hahn, Ukraine over the edge. Russia at the West and the New Cold War is a fantastic book. I highly recommend that you guys read it and sign up for his great substack, considering Russia and Eurasia. And he's keeping a very sharp eye on Belisky and the neo-Nazis for you there. Thank you very much for your time on the show again, Gordon. Thank you very much for your invitation, Scott. Good to see him. The Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom, Roberts & Roberts, Brokerage, Inc., Moondos, Artisan Coffee, Tom Woods, Liberty Classroom, and APS Radio News. Subscribe in all the usual places, and check out my books, fools errand, enough already, and my latest, Provote, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine.

Find all of the above at Scotthorton.org, and I'm serializing the audiobook of Provote at Scott Horton Show.com and patreon.com slash Scott Horton show. Bumpers by Josh Langford Music, intro and outro videos by dissident media. Audio mastering by Potsworth Media. See y'all next time.