Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 4/10/25 Ted Snider on American Operations in Ukraine and the Current State of the War

Episode Date: April 11, 2025

Scott interviews Ted Snider about some articles he wrote recently about the war in Ukraine. First they look at an article published recently in The New York Times that detailed the length the US was going to, on the ground, to help Ukraine fight the Russians. Scott and Snider discuss the significance of the article before finishing with a look at where things stand on the front right now.   Discussed on the show: “New York Times Blockbuster Article Prepares Americans for Defeat in Ukraine” (Antiwar.com) “The Secret History of the War in Ukraine” (The New York Times) “No Quick End to the War in Ukraine” (Antiwar.com) Ted Snider has a graduate degree in philosophy and writes on analyzing patterns in U.S. foreign policy and history. He is a regular writer for Truthout, MondoWeiss and antiwar.com. To support Ted’s work, you can make a PayPal contribution at [e-mail]. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, and author of Provote, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. Sign up for the podcast feed at Scotthorton.org or Scott Horton Show.com. I've got more than 6,000 interviews in the archives. for you there going back to 2003 and follow me on all the video sites and X at Scott Horton show all right you guys on the line I've got our friend Ted Snyder he writes for us at antiwar dot com and at the institute and um it's time we catch up on the Ukraine war welcome back

to the show Ted how you doing I'm doing good Scott thanks showing me back on the show uh very happy to have you here and um got a couple of important articles here to talk about and Really, this one is about another important article, a New York Times blockbuster, you call it, that was recently published. In fact, I should have already had the tab open and the title for you. Oh, one more step. I just have to clip this captcha. It's Adam Entouse in the New York Times. Is that how you say it? I don't know.

Yeah, Adam Entus. Adam Hentous. I'm not sure how to say his name. the secret history of America's involvement in the Ukraine war. So, as you say in your article, they already had articles like this in the New York Times. As I read it, the first thing that I thought was, hey, I already knew all this from the New York Times itself and from other places and have this all in my book already, almost all of it. I mean, they have sort of anecdotes about some officers were in town and, you know, went from here to there, gave somebody a ride here to there, this and that kind of thing. But almost all of this is in provoked already as far as the depth of America's involvement in the war and even the parts about how everything that's gone wrong is all their fault and all of that is in there too. So, and you say the same in your article that we already knew most of this.

So the question is, what's new? Yeah, I mean, anybody who's read your book, anybody who's followed the news, they already knew that the U.S. was not only provided. well, the U.S. and the West were not only providing Ukraine with the weapons, but also with the training on the weapons and the targeting for the weapons and the wargaming and planning and intelligence that, you know, they were providing everything except the bodies that pushed the button and the bodies that got killed. That's not news. I mean, the article does provide, you know, some important details and some important names, but that's not new.

But I think the article was important for the stuff that was important that he didn't mean to say it was important. It was the stuff that was the nuggets that were kind of hidden into it. And Scott, I think one of the main things was the timing of it, because as you already alluded to, what really struck me about this article was that it was really written as, I think, the first sort of major piece in the mainstream media to prepare the American public for a defeat in Ukraine. It really flips the script, which I want to talk about more after, but it really kind of reads to me like a preparation, for don't blame us we really did everything we could we have to negotiate now and it's the

ukrainians fault um but before i mean before we get to that there were other things in it that again we're maybe not entirely not known if you followed the media closely but a lot of people don't and and what was kind of was striking about it to me was how clearly this article admits that the U.S. really frequently approached Russian red lines that, despite what they were telling us, the Americans genuinely feared could lead to World War III and nuclear war. We get told stories about the CIA being authorized for what they say, what N2 calls the CIA was authorized officers in Kharkiv to assist Ukrainians with operations inside the box. And inside the box is code for inside Russia. And it means, as the Times article says, that the United States

was now woven into the killing of Russian soldiers on sovereign Russian soil. So this is Americans helping attacks in Russia. They know that the Russian nuclear doctrine says that Russia could hypothetically use nuclear weapons if the very existence of the state is threatened. And they were threatening the very existence of the state. And they had this operation that they codenamed lunar hail. And you know, I'm not sure if he misstates that or not or he kind of left out. But the Russians had even announced their new doctrine was a threat to the territorial integrity of the state. So not even its existence, but just any significant part of it. So. Yeah. And when you When you rightly add that, Scott, it's important to include that the Russians consider Crimea

to be part of that territorial integrity. Absolutely. And with Operation Lunar Hale, the Biden administration had authorized Ukraine to strike inside Crimea with long-range missiles. And they weren't just authorizing Ukraine to strike inside Crimea with long-range missiles. Those long-range missiles were U.S. supplied. Those long-range missiles required U.S. satellite data to target them they couldn't be used the u.s. were these the same strikes that killed the people on the beach i think the way it was the way i remember it was yeah and then once they finally got

permission to hit crimea the first thing they did was kill a bunch of civilians and then say well it's their fault for trying to vacation in the middle of war yeah i remember that story too and i can't remember the particular event and there were i mean there were there were there were rounds of escalating long range missiles where the the range got longer and longer and And so what you have is that you've got the U.S. assisting with targeting in Crimea and eventually deep inside Russia itself, knowing full well, and they'd heard Russian officials and Russian generals talking about, you know, how crossing these distances, these longer and longer and longer distances that missiles could fly, crossing Russian red lines. And there's just this astonishing part in the Times article when they say that they were generally concerned about World War III and even nuclear war. And there's this moment in the Times article when they talk about the longer-range missiles being introduced and Russian generals talking about weapons that fire that far could trigger the use of tactical nuclear weapons. And remember, Scott, like there was a lot of talk about Putin threatening nuclear war and all this.

stuff. But the media kept telling us that the Biden administration was calculating this carefully. They were, you know, escalating in measured ways that wouldn't, you know, lead to nuclear war, that they were determined not to lead to World War III or nuclear war. And then the article tells us that when they introduced the next round of long-range weapons, that they estimated that would raise, and this is a quote from the article, Scott, quote, the chance of Russia using nuclear weapons in Ukraine to 50%. So there was a 50-50 chance that their decision to authorize this operation, Lunar Hale, striking in Crimea, a 50-50 chance that would lead to nuclear war,

and they authorized it anyway. So in hindsight, that's terrifying, right? At the same time, they're telling us... 50 chance of nuclear war, and they authorized it. And they're telling us that the only reason this is happening is because Putin has gone psychopath and this is the most unstable ruthless dictator in the world and at the same time

they're clearly betting on the fact that he doesn't drink at all and he doesn't get emotional at all thank God he's such a cold calculating sociopath and not the kind of guy who gets really upset because what if he did? Yeah what if he did because we're told it's

Putin big you know threatening the nuclear stuff and here's the states taking actions that they know is a 50-50 chances of leading to nuclear war and did i did i read this right and do you know if this is true two-parter there that they say that once a russian it don't even have us right it says in the article somewhere right that some russian general who started talking about using nukes got fired i don't remember if it got fired the general you're talking about is um srovkin i think and he he said that um they said that they overheard him talking about him talking about

using tactical nuclear weapons if the Ukrainians made a beeline for Crimea I don't even know if that's true but that's what the Americans said. They heard him talking about that. But there was nothing about how he got demoted or anything for that? I can't remember. I'm trying to remember if he did get

demoted or not. I'm sorry to interrupt you with my half-based thing. But Scott, what really strikes me is what your earlier comment about about who was being cautious and who was being risky because when the Americans are doing these actions that they know could lead to nuclear war, they also know the Russians know that. The Russians know that the Americans are providing the targeting information for the long-range missiles. Putin said that on the public media. He said, we know these missiles can't be fired without U.S. satellites directing them. So it's really the Americans that are being cavalier. And Putin, thank goodness,

This is actually the one that's being unbelievably cautious, right? It's Putin's restraint, not the Americans, it's Putin's restraint that prevented this war from escalating to what we now know in hindsight were terrifying odds that it could escalate. So I thought that was an interesting part of the article that even though we knew that, and I think all of this is in your book and we knew that, I'm not sure I've ever seen the mainstream media so clearly set out how close we came. to provoking a wider war, possibly even a nuclear war. So that I thought was huge. That's not what the author meant to be huge. He meant to do this great reveal of how woven the U.S. was into the killing machine. And, you know, that's interesting Scott.

But as others have pointed out, this is interesting information, but it's all information that was provided to the New York Times by military. military sources, American military sources, who knew this stuff was top, top secret, but they chose to reveal it to him anyway, right? So they chose to reveal very specific bits of top secret information because they wanted this to get out. And I think the thing that's most interesting, Scott, and it's getting out, is that, and this is what I talk about in my article, is that this really reads like a flipping of the script to me. The script up to now had been the U.S. promised Zelensky that if he leaves the path of diplomacy, you know, in Istanbul, the beginning of the war, that they will give him everything he needs for as long as he needs it.

Then Zelensky can say, with his Ukraine victory plan, to basically ask for everything I need for as long as I need it, that, you know, I begged the states, they abandoned me, they didn't give us the weapons that we need, they've left us on our own, we have no choice now. but to negotiate. In other words, what Zelensky was going to do, I think, is blame the Americans. We did everything right. They didn't do it. They were supposed to do. So we have no choice to negotiate. And the New York Times article very cleverly flips the script and says that the U.S. can say, we did everything we were supposed to do, that the Ukrainians let us down, and now we have no choice to negotiate. It's a remarkable thing in this war that the Russians are clearly winning, how the, according to the Times article, the American-Ukrainian partnership, they openly call it, has triumph after triumph and victory after victory. And clearly, according to this article,

we really could have beat the Russians and we really would have beat the Russians, had the Ukrainians not let us down so much. And they talk constantly about, there's just one quote that stood out to me where it says the Americans sometimes couldn't understand why the Ukrainian didn't simply accept good advice, that, you know, we mapped it all out. They didn't take the advice that every victory is prevented as a Ukrainian victory. Every loss is, sorry, every victory is presented as an American victory. Every loss is presented as Ukrainian loss. The Russians aren't even in the narrative, right? There's never a Russian victory because the Russians have a victory. Any Russian victories just because the Ukrainians didn't listen to the states and made a

mistake and Russia slipped in. Like, there's no Russia in this story. at all. And we're told time and again that missions failed simply because the Ukrainians either didn't listen to American plans and changed them, or they hesitated, or they wavered, or they wouldn't budge. The counteroffensive would have worked if it started on time, except the Ukrainians wouldn't commit. We know that's not true. We know from other reporting that the Pentagon really didn't think the counterference of was going to succeed, but here we're told it was beautifully planned. It would have succeeded, but the Ukrainians just blew it and wouldn't succeed. So it's a fascinating article to me, not because, as you said,

it revealed anything that you haven't already revealed and others haven't already revealed. It's interesting to me for the timing and for what top secret things were told to the times and the way the Times frames it and flips the media. And I really think this is a psychological operation to prepare the public to not complain about the billions of dollars spent and the thousands of lives lost. It was worth it. We did the right thing.

We did it well. It's not our fault. The Ukrainians let us down. So now the best thing to do is negotiate. We have to. And that's what really struck me about the article. Now, so what do you think is the purpose of them putting in so many points about just how dangerous it was and how far they pushed us towards war, killing Russians inside the box in Kursk, the CIA helping lead that on the ground, they said, I think, there. And then, of course, contractors and special operations guys helping with the targeting and all that.

Yeah, it's a great question. 50 chance of nuclear war. I honestly believe that the New York Times reporter reveals his most interesting journalism when he doesn't intend it to be the journalism, but to be the anecdotes or the evidence behind the journalism. It's the really interesting stuff that comes out of the stuff that he didn't mean to be the interesting stuff. I think that material is provided just to show how far America really went to help Ukraine. so that no one can say later, because this is the claim Ukraine will make, right? No one can say later, Ukraine lost the war because the states held back.

They wouldn't give us what they need. They wouldn't give us permission to fire, you know, long distance. They wouldn't give us the missiles. And I think he's laying the case that we gave them everything. Yeah, we went right up to the edge of nuclear war for you even, but they don't. Exactly. Not recognizing that. We're going to be horrified when we read that, not pleased.

I think that's exactly right. I think it's like accidental. I think it's laying the defense of groundwork so that when Ukraine says you didn't do what you promised, we lost because you didn't give us, you held back on the arms, you wouldn't let us fire deep into Russia. This article is saying we gave you everything. We only let you fire into Russia. We helped you fire into Russia. We did everything.

As you said, we even went to the brink of nuclear war for you. We have to negotiate now because you let us down. Ukraine let us down, that, you know, you hesitated, you didn't trust, you, you, you know, you wavered, you blew it. I think that the most interesting information comes out just in laying down the defense for the flipping of the script that America did everything. Ukraine didn't keep its end of the deal, and so now I have to negotiate. When you know the truth is whether whatever you believe should have happened or shouldn't have happened, The Americans did promise Zelensky that if he left negotiations and fought Russia to advance American foreign policy interests, that they would provide everything he needs for as long as he needs it. And they didn't.

And this is, I think, the defense against that accusation. When Zelensky says, I went to you, I told you what I needed, you wouldn't provide it. Now, there's little countries alone against Russia. We can't win. We're going to have to negotiate. This is an anticipatory defense against that claim saying, no, we gave you everything. thing right you blew it because you what you let us down you hesitated yeah hey y'all let me tell you about roberts and roberts brokerage ink nobody trusts the u.s dollar anymore foreign governments

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let me ask you about the war itself we know that the recent news is that the russians retook all of kursk and um but i don't know uh i guess i had read that you know i get a google uh news alert for Andrew Belletsky, the leader of what's now called the Third Corps, the Third, which is, you know, the Azov Battalion, went from a battalion to a brigade to now it's the Third Corps, they call it. And they've been leading a fight even into Lujansk. And so, I don't know if they claim to have retaken a couple small villages here or there, or whatever it is.

So how fluid is the front line? How much momentum? I guess there's the new DNI report. the Tulsi Gabbard threat assessment that said that I'm paraphrasing time is on the Russian side and and they're advancing but are they advancing faster than before is the the situation that dire you know we've been told from anti-war people military experts that the Ukrainians are losing and they're on their last legs and at some point their military is just going to break and fall apart but that sure hasn't happened yet it's been three years and they do have a lot of

of money in western support and weapons as i think the times article explains they killed a lot of russians with those high mars they were able to target them very carefully and killed them in large numbers when they were foolish enough to group together in one big building or what have you so um where exactly is the state of the war and then let's talk about the diplomacy yeah so just off the top you know I'm not a military expert. What I'm reading and what I'm being told, the Kursk effort was a horrific failure. I wrote a piece with Alexander Hill on this for anti-war.

And Alexander Hill is a military expert. And one of the things that Kursk was meant to do was to acquire land for bargaining. It was a disaster. All it did is it took the best Ukraine troops off the line in Ukraine. They not only didn't hold any land, but because of that, they lost more land. And so there's these, you know, attempts to keep trying to break into Russia to acquire land. I think the mistake that the mainstream media makes all the time is measuring this

in terms of territory. You know, despite the claims of, you know, Russians imperial ambitions, Putin says the goal of this war was never about territory. It was about, and this gets this in the next art, actually, but the core interest that led to the war of, you know, Ukraine and NATO on the protection of Russian ethnic Russians in Ukraine. So I don't think this can be measured by how fast is the front moving. This can be measured by how fast is Ukraine running out of Ukrainian soldiers and how fast is Ukraine running out of weapons? I think that the Russian advance has been much faster in 2025 than in 2024, but not super fast. And I think when you hear people saying that the front could collapse and stuff, and it hasn't, it hasn't. Because as you said,

still does have a lot of weapons, a lot of money, they can go on for a while. But the Russians have clearly turned the tide in the war. They've definitely learned from their earlier mistakes. They've adapted. They're fighting a much more methodical, much smarter war. They're fighting a very successful war. I think now the land is slowly coming, but that's not the idea. The idea of these attacks is to keep Ukraine firing the missiles, keep Ukraine soldiers coming in. They're wearing them down. And I think there is a risk that the Ukrainian front collapse and could collapse and we don't know when that will be but the longer the west keeps this war going and europe seems bent on keeping this war going um the the the greater the risk that

the ukrainian front will eventually collapse they're not going to win the war they're not going to gain much land back all keeping this war going does is kill more ukrainians um slowly cost ukraine more land when a ceasefire does happen and it'll probably happen along the lines the ceasefire, even though Putin sometimes talks about keeping more territory. He hasn't said that lately, but when it does come to it, it's going to come down to where the line is and that line's advancing. So nobody's doing any favors by trying to get in the way of negotiations and keep supporting Ukraine and the war. They're not supporting Ukraine and the war. They're supporting their own goals. They're hurting Ukraine in the war. The Ukraine front could collapse eventually, but whether

it collapses or not comes ceasefire time, the longer we push back that ceasefire, the more. Ukraine's are going to die and the more Ukraine land is going to have lost and that's all the West is doing for Ukraine right now is costing them they're not helping them yeah all right now it looks to me like and I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to read your piece on this yet but um I see it's out there no quick end to the war in Ukraine also at antiwar dot com so I think Trump was sincere about wanting to negotiate but the problem is as you just described America, i.e. Ukraine, the West, we're in a position of weakness here. He didn't really have any cards to play. He's like threatening ultimate sanctions against any country that does business

with Russia, this kind of thing. I don't know if he even means that. He'd change his mind after a day or two if history's any guide there. And he can give weapons to the Ukrainians, but Biden already tried that. And the Russians are winning anyway. And I mean, it's, obvious question of whether i mean you're right i'm sure you're right i know daniel davis says that uh the russian's goal here is just chewing up the ukrainian army not just taking territory but it is going to come down if russia wanted that territory they could have taken it years ago whether when the donvass those places asked to be part of russia and putin said no like they could have taken that territory without going to war right this although at this point i mean

they've got four provinces of most almost all of two and parts of the them yeah and super majorities of the other two i guess are you know but then odessa's right there just to hop skip and a ali from primea and then that would complete the so-called land bridge to transnistria and it would ultimately screw the ukrainians out of their ability to export weed out of there it's the jewel of the black sea and it was originally a russian city so was harkeve originally a russian city and so at this point I don't know how to read Putin's mind or how ambitious he is at this point. You drove him this far.

Now what? But plus he has obviously Russian politics to take into account. And I do hear, you know, from time to time from their side that, oh, we're taking Harkivar, right? And this kind of thing. You know what I mean? So I wonder, like, what you think are the chances? The question is, what are the chances that Putin goes ahead and makes? a chump out of Trump and keeps fighting until he does break the Ukrainian army and take that

territory because these people only understand one thing for us, et cetera, et cetera. No, Scott, I think there's a long history going back to the conflict in Georgia and the conflict in the Donbass where Russian hardliners have been really angry with Putin for not going as far as they wanted him to go. When Putin has used the military, it's always been very measured to achieve very certain goals. And I think it's the same this time. I think that Putin's using the military to attain very certain goals. And those goals, he's clearly stated them from the beginning, which is keeping Ukraine out of NATO, keeping NATO weapons out of Ukraine, protecting ethnic Russians in Ukraine. I think if you had a, if you sat down to negotiate and you acknowledge those

realities that Putin's not going to give up at the negotiating table, what he could win on the battlefield, right? If you acknowledge those realities that we need a security structure in Europe that doesn't include Russia being left out of it and the rest of the world moving close and close to their borders, you sit down with Putin and you give him no NATO and Ukraine and protection of ethnic Russians, I don't think he will screw Trump and go on and try to acquire more territory. But the longer we go not offering him that, the longer the Russian military will keep advancing and gaining more of that territory in order to force Ukraine and the West to give those concessions. So if you want to stop the laws of Odessa and more Ukrainian territory, the way to do that is to negotiate a peace.

And the way to negotiate a peace is to face the reality. And the reality is, as I said, Putin's not going to give up at the negotiating table what he knows he can eventually win on the battlefield. and that is once and for all getting a written guarantee that NATO won't encroach upon its borders through Ukraine, and that ethnic Russians who remain in Ukraine and territory will receive language rights, political rights, right? So they have to face those realities and offer that in negotiations. I don't think Putin will say, ah, I was joking all along, I'm going to go take your territory. I think the territory is just being taken as a way to force the West.

to address those, what Putin keeps calling the root causes of the war. It was interesting to me that Russia's foreign ministry said recently that we are serious about negotiations, but we can't accept them as they are because they haven't yet addressed the core demands of the root causes of the conflict. And then it was also really interesting that's gone. I talked about this in the article that he seems to receive support for that from some of the powerful players in the multipolar world, not that they support the invasion. I've never heard Russia. I've never heard China or India come out and say, we approve the invasion. But what they

have said is, interestingly, Xi Jinping is about to go to Moscow, and the Chinese foreign minister has said exactly like the Americans said, you know, I think the start of this, by the way, just should go back for one second. I know we're running out of time. But the thing that started this article for me, the no quick end of the war in Ukraine, was Marco Rubio's statement recently that we're still far from a diplomatic solution. There's no guarantee that will be one. That these promises of a quick, quick solution, although I think sincere, smashed up against the reality that there really are difficult core issues here to solve. And Russia's insistence that the war can't stop until the core issues have been addressed. And the Chinese foreign ministry preparing for a visit with Putin says that exactly the same thing as Rubio, that a diplomatic solution is far away.

And then they say that's because the causes are complex, and we advocate eradicating the causes. This is what Russia's been saying. And India, who paused visits to Russia during the war, has now invited Putin to India for the first time, again, expressing some kind of diplomatic support for Putin's tactics and the negotiations. And when Russia accepted that invitation to India, it was interesting that Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, in thanking them, thanked them for supporting Russia and it's having dialogue for the elimination of the root cause of the conflict. So you get Russia, China, and India all saying negotiations have to address the root causes of the conflict. And here's where I think that the dream of a quick negotiation sort of smashes up against the reality that there are real issues and those real issues are NATO encroaching on Russia and that we need a larger security structure for Europe, like should have happening under Cold War. And when that happens, the war will stop. But Putin's not going to stop the war until he gets that because he's going to get that.

Either at the battlefield, the negotiating table, he's determined to get that. all right i'm sorry we're all out of time thank you ted for years thanks so much scott all right you guys that's ted snider he's at antirewar dot com and at the libertarian institute thanks for listening to scott horton show which can be heard on a ps radio news at scott horton dot org scott horton show dot com and the libertarian institute at libertarian institute org.