Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 4/25/25 Daniel Davis on Why a Ukraine-Russia Peace Deal Is Not Likely in the Near Future

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

Daniel Davis returns to the show to run through all that’s happening right now related to the war in Ukraine. He and Scott start with the state of things on the front, where Davis says things are not going well for Ukrainian forces. They then look at the negotiations, speculate on Trump’s plan and dig into why Davis does not think a peace agreement will happen any time soon.    Discussed on the show: “The Secret History of the War in Ukraine” (The New York Times) “UK intel behind Ukraine’s disastrous Krynky invasion, leaked documents reveal” (The Grayzone) Daniel Davis did multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan during his time in the army. He is a Senior Fellow at Defense Priorities and is the author of the reports “Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leaders’ Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort” and “Go Big or Go Deep: An Analysis of Strategy Options on Afghanistan.” Find him on Twitter @DanielLDavis1and subscribe to his YouTube Channel. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Incorporated; Moon Does Artisan Coffee; 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 archive. for you there going back to 2003 and follow me on all the video sites and X at Scott Horton show hey guys on the line I've got Daniel L davis he used to be a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army and he is an author he wrote a great book about oh what the hell is it called

2020 America thing what is it again 11th hour in 2020 America the 11th hour I don't know how that escaped me other than I'm old and senile The 11th hour in 2020, America, which is a great book. And also, of course, he was the heroic whistleblower on the Afghan war in 2012, as you all know, and fought under Colonel McGregor in Iraq War I and all this stuff. And also, of course, he hosts Daniel Davis Deep Dive, which is, I think, by far the best military and political analysis of Ukraine war that you can find anywhere on the YouTube's. and um and so yeah very happy to have you back on the show how are you you know i'm doing all right

and i'm always grateful to be on your show cool well i for one i'm happy that you didn't get that one job that they're talking about because i get to interview you now and i don't think they'd let you be on my show if you had that job um but listen so i just want to ask you all about what is going on with ukraine and the talks and everything um what a terrible mess first of all Can we start with some military analysis here of the battlefield and the four major oblasts, they call them, I guess provinces or statelets or whatever there, inside Ukraine, that are at issue that is Luhansk, Donetsk, Zeprosia, and Kursan. And how much of them are under the control of the Russians right now? how strong is the Russian army right now in terms of men and material and what about the Ukrainian side? How many divisions do they have left and how many men's in a division anyway?

And what's the status of the war? And then we'll talk all about the talks and all the things. But let me, you know, draw me a picture on the map in my head of what the hell is the deal over there right now. A lot of the details on some of the questions you ask about like how many divisions they have, how many or any chiefs division, those are state secrets so we can only do. divine the best we can observe from the outside, but we do have some general truisms on both sides of the line that we can say. And that is, we'll look at the Ukraine side. First of all, they are losing more men every day than they can replace even with forced mobilization.

They are now looking to have to try and change the law again to allow 18-year-olds to be forced mobilized, which is just the most catastrophic thing you can do because there is no military solution. You can't possibly change the course, you know, in the fourth year of war by adding the last cohort of anybody that you want, people that you're going to need in the future generations when you're already having a massive, massive demographic problem that's going to lead well into the future, decades into the future, it's going to cost in this war as. But that's where they're at because they, it's either that or their front lines are going to collapse. And so that tells you all you need to know about the state of the Ukraine military because they don't have enough ammunition,

they don't have enough weapons, because all these things that were given in the first three years of the war, a great percentage of them have been destroyed in just continuing daily combat, but they're not being replaced anywhere near on a one-to-one basis. So it's a net loss in armor, armor personnel carriers, artillery systems, and of course, manpower. So they're declining in every category you can imagine on the other side of the line you have nearly the opposite russia continues to grow and to get larger uh it's industrial capacity continues to expand and now then they're they're producing more vehicles than they lose or or else they're refurbishing some of the others uh one thing that a lot of people don't really understand is when you hear like a tank was destroyed on the

battlefield that doesn't mean it's like lost forever that means they'll tow it back to their repair shops take the spare parts of refurbished and send it back out there so that that that as usual. There's very few of the absolute catastrophic losses. So even though you've seen a large number of both Russian and Ukrainian vehicles destroyed, the Russian side has the manufacturing capacity to refurbish them in its own country, whereas the Ukraine side doesn't. And sometimes they can ship it off to places like Poland and Romania to where there are NATO workshops and they can get things done. But it's a very slow process. And it's hard for them to even get it off the front lines and drag it all the way back there, whereas Russia has a lot of the

those facilities in the zone of where the fighting is happening. And then, of course, their industrial capacity. Manpower-wise, Russia continues to expand because while the morale and the motivation on the Ukraine side is continuing to dwindle, it's rising dramatically on the Russian side, not surprisingly, because when people see that they are winning and they're succeeding, they're winning on the diplomatic front, economic front and on the literal front lines, et cetera, then it's a lot easier to have guys to recruit because they want to be part of something great, you know, something there that they call World War II the great patriotic war.

And now then this generation is seeing, you know, they're on the cusp of winning something big. And so there's lots of people that are signing up willingly. They don't even have to mobilize anyone. They have enough volunteers each month. And now then they're at about 1.5 million active duty army, which is about half a million more than their armed forces had when they started the war in 2022. that also tells you all you need to know from the Russian side.

So militarily, there is nothing has changed for the better for Ukraine since you and I started talking about this stuff. The balance of power disparity between the two sides has grown in Russia's favor. So that kind of lays the foundation for what you want to talk about next, which is on the diplomatic front. Yeah. Well, now on the war, though, itself, I mean, one thing is, of course, the director of national intelligence put out the threat assessment in February where they said essentially

what you just said only more boiled down but that the Russians are ascendant and they have all the momentum on the battlefield and the Ukrainians are fighting you know defensively but you know there's the big New York Times story which a lot of this had already been reported by the New York Times in fact I have a lot of it in my book about the Americans not just providing intelligence but really running the entire war from Germany and all this kind of thing. But one of the things they really highlight in there, and this has always been part of our discussion going back, is, yeah, the Russians are right next door, and they have a large, you know, obviously it's a bigger country with a bigger economy and already a large manufacturing

type base that can be turned toward war, and they have all these advantages. On the other side, the West has a lot of money in high-tech shit, right? And so that New York Times article said that, hey, those high Mars really did make a difference. Those Russians learned that with American outer space satellite spying down and passing all the exact coordinates around, that the Ukrainians can then reach out and touch them pretty good and did it a lot. And then also they says in the news they gave them the attack thems that are even better in longer range. And what was it that I read, Danny, that said that, hey, hey, you know, that whole new giant domestic drone industry in Ukraine.

The CIA built that, of course. This is a massive project. I forgot where I read that. Was it the Wall Street Journal or the Times that had a giant thing about it? That was the CIA thing. And they're just cranking these things out. Remember, you debated the Warhawk lady. And she said, well, we just got a kajigger a new thing of a jig out there on the battlefield.

And that is what's going to turn the tide. and I'm only very closely paraphrasing her. I forgot the exact quote, but it was something like that. But maybe that's right. Maybe, you know, German and American know-how and silicon wafers and spy satellites are enough to, after all, I mean, we're having this conversation, you know, deep into the third year of the war here. So, or into the fourth year now, right? It's been three years. so maybe the Ukrainians with American military and financial support are tougher than you thought

and maybe and isn't it the case that Trump is still backing them right America's still shipping them weapons and and have they really curtailed all the intelligence sharing and everything or what's the status of that and you know I'm trying to play devil's advocate here but I must have some kind of point the fact that we're even still discussing this really Yeah, there are definitely some caveats to that. So let's try to take that down here. First of all, this claim about Hymars and A-Takman's being effective, when was the last time you heard about a Hymar's attack on Russia being effective? It's been months.

They still launch them periodically. But what the Times doesn't seem to recognize or is willing to acknowledge is that that has been a major, major problem for the United States. because by giving these high Mars and the ATACMs, which have similar guidance systems, is that we have given Russia every opportunity to learn how to defeat our missiles. So they don't merely shoot them down with air defense, which is a good portion of them, but it's electronic warfare signals. They've learned how to defeat our guidance systems. So now then those missiles hardly ever strike the target when they're used,

and very often they don't, the Ukraine side doesn't even use them anymore because it's kind of pointless. So now then, I mean, just kind of as an aside, Now, let's say that we suddenly get into a war with somebody, China, Russia, North Korea, or whatever, and we have to bring those missiles into use for our own defense. And now then the enemy is already going to know how to defeat them. So they're going to be much less powerful than they would have been before, and that the high mars were when they first got used because it took Russia a while to figure them out. And they did make a real pain point for Russia at first, but now that it's virtually meaningless. And you talk about the drones. Yeah, that lady, she was talking about the thing of the jiggers and all that.

But like she did, the New York Times, they don't think about the other half of the equation. Russia has also been continuing to work on their drone industry. They released a new category of the Garen 3, or at least they talked about it in some of the Russian media and their military journals this past week I saw, where they have a new category. It's the Garen 3. It's extremely fast. It's like up to 5 to 600 kilometers per hour. It can loiter for like 21 hours, something like that, has a much higher payload. It can do more than the previous ones.

And so now that they have more of them, they still have the guarantos, which is their second iteration of those things. And they have a lot of those. They're cheaper, they're slower, but they have a lot more of them. Every time you send one of those, you have to knock it down with something. So if you launch up there a $40,000, $50,000 drone, and they have to use a $1 or $2 million missile to knock it down, guess who that plays in the favor of, not our side. So even when Russia loses a lot of those, the cost of the Ukraine side is higher. And then, of course, they follow up with the Kinzo missiles and several of the other cruise missiles Russia has.

And now then there's no more missiles. And we saw that in Kiev this past week where there was just one real graphic image of a Russian missile launching down and striking straight into the capital city of Ukraine and nothing intercepted it. one of the missiles that misfired, one of the interceptor missiles hit an apartment building in Ukraine. So they actually blew themselves up, and we see that on the image. You don't have to take anybody's word for it. You can see the missile missing a target, not hitting anything, or maybe it just malfunctioned, and it landed in Kiev and killed a bunch of people. So those are the things you have to look at in addition to the front line movements, which I continue to talk about, how Russia is taking this methodical, slow grinding pace, which doesn't take much territory. but it does kill a lot of Ukrainian men.

And that's what the people in the West don't understand. Russia's fighting a different kind of war. They're not as focused on the territory. They say this openly, but we never listen to them. They're focused on destroying the Ukrainian armed forces, and they have been for a long time. If they destroy enough of the Ukrainian armed forces and they eventually break somewhere,

then they just get all of the territory. They don't have to fight for every inch of it. They can whittle down the defense until it's weak enough until finally it breaks or they put enough pressure on it, And then they get to literally drive into the interior of the country taking whatever they want. That's what Russia is seeking for. And that big break hasn't happened yet. But that doesn't mean that the thinning out of the Ukraine side isn't continuing on.

Well, it said that they've known that Trump is going to win for a year and that he wants to end the war. He wants to ceasefire. He wants the war to stop. He wants to prove he can stop it as part of proving that he would have prevented it from breaking out. and so if their strategy has not shifted to take as much territory as we can before the ceasefire and the strategy is still nope just keep grinding them up and don't focus so much on the percentage of the four big oblasts taken because it'll all just come in time then that really spells absolute doom for any American peace effort here right point

You asked a minute ago what percentage of those four Oblasts are still under Ukrainian control. And Lohan, sorry, Donetsk, Zaporizia, and Kirstoen in the south are still considerably, there's still large chunks. I mean, hundreds of square miles that are still under Ukrainian control. Right. Dmitri Peskov yesterday answered a question to some reporters in Moscow who said, you know, what about this deal with Trump? Is it going to end the war? And he said, will it will? As long as the Ukrainian army puts down its weapons and completely withdraws from all four of the administrative borders of those places. That is an ask that I don't think anybody that's actually paying attention thinks that Ukraine will agree to. So I think, to your point a second ago, Russia fully expects them to not do that.

Their position is still ungiving and unwavering, the Russian side. They say all of that, or we keep fighting. I interviewed on my show yesterday, Dmitry Polyonska, the Deputy U.N. ambassador for Russia, and I point blank ask him, if you don't get what you're asking for diplomatically, what will the Russians do? And will they fight until those borders or keep going? And he said, nothing has changed in any of this. We have continued to fight. We've said we're going to, and we will either get what we want at the negotiating table or we will take it by force.

And everything you see on the ground validates what he said there. Well, so, I mean, get back to the talks in a minute. But so if they, presuming that they just keep going, it could take them a very long time to finish taking Zaproja and Carson at this rate. And I understand what you're saying that. Well, that rate could accelerate, you know, at some point. Because you can't, you can't talk about that part of it unless you also talk about what Trump has said this week that he's ready to walk. And he's signaled in every way possible with the vice president, the secretary of state, and he himself. that if he doesn't get the deal he wants maybe within days, possibly even this weekend,

then he's ready to walk. Well, and so what difference with that? Now then the whole change on the battlefield gets much worse for Ukraine because not only will they not get anything, but now they've lost a psychological backing of the United States, and I don't think that this thing is going to go on for another year or two. Yeah. Well, I mean, so that's the question is what literal difference would it make?

I understand what you're saying about morale and the whole political equation would change. but what would literally change on the ground if the high Mars and the American intel isn't making a difference for the Ukrainians then what difference would it make if they called it off? There's clearly some in the Ukrainian military want to keep fighting. Yeah, there is still some

because you remember Trump turned it off for a little while but then he turned it back on and when he said turned it back on that just means what was in the pipeline from the Biden administration because you may remember they did this big I think it was like $8 billion surge of promising equipment

that would have to be delivered over a number of months just before they went out of office in the early part of January of this year. So it's going to take a while for that to unwind. But there is nothing new in the pipeline. But if you suddenly cut off even that, then now then Europe is either going to have to substantially increase its amount or physically on the battlefield, they won't even be able to hold the lines. I mean, that's why this has a physical implication. Yeah. All right. So, boy. All right. Now, I guess let's just go through the different positions here let's start with trump's position what exactly is it that he's offered because

a lot of this has been made pretty public about what his stance is what he's willing to agree to what he wants the ukrainians to agree to what he wants the russians to agree to yeah he there was a published uh i guess a couple of days ago uh what's been reported as a seven point uh plan by the trump administration that he has said yes here's my plan and those seven points are one recognition of Crimea is Russian territory, de facto recognition of the other four territories, no NATO, lifting sanctions on Russia that have been opposed since 2014, a resumption of economic relations between Russia and the United States, a minerals deal for the U.S. on the Ukraine, which is nothing but lost for them.

I don't know why they would agree to that. And then a shared control to the Saperesian nuclear power plant. Those are the seven points that apparently are in Trump's plan that he said he's going to release potentially today or tomorrow. We'll see if that happens. Russia would obviously lack a lot of those, but it's not enough for them. And I also asked this of the Deputy UN Ambassador yesterday. I said Putin's has said that demilitarization and denotification are also part of the deal,

which this plan doesn't address. And so the question is, would you all even accept this? And they said, we'll accept that those things on there, more or less, as long as demilitarization and denotification, meaning they'll have to get rid of most of their military so that they don't even have the capacity to threaten Russia in the future, and then they have to actually get rid of what the U-Russian sites is are Nazi elements within their country like the Azov Brigade and some administrators who were part of what the Russians claim were atrocities against the Russian-speaking people of Ukraine earlier in the war during

the Civil War part, et cetera. And again, those are things that it's just almost inconceivable that Ukraine would ever agree to. So everything points to then, yeah, then the war, is going to continue on and Russia is just going to try to get a military victory. Yeah. So, and now is one of the Russian demands that Ukraine and America both recognize their de jure control over the four provinces? No. The U.S. side says de juree control of Crimea we're willing to do, but de facto over the other four provinces. Russia has not spoken on what their requirements are because they say we honestly don't care what you think they're already russian territory it's in our

constitution etc so that doesn't seem to be as big of an issue for the russian side and they haven't addressed it one way or the other that i've seen so that in other words they just want the territory they're saying remove your troops from it will occupy all of it belongs to us but they don't they're not saying it matters whether we or kiev officially recognize it as their territory that's just something that trump is offering from his side that is that is correct okay well but then you know the Russian demand that the Ukrainians have to withdraw from all the territory that they haven't lost yet is obviously if it's not meant to be a poison pill it's just unachievable demand right they're not going to do

that well here's the reality the the reality is if you don't agree to those terms and withdraw from that territory, then you will be compelled to leave that territory and lose much, much more in the process. That's what nobody in the West is willing to come to grips with. Nobody in Kiev that's in charge will come to grips with. They think that it's a poison pill, but if you don't take that poison pill, then you're going to get your arm chainsawed off and you're going to get your leg cut off. It's going to be much, much worse to not take the pill. And Russia appears willing to have the negotiated settlement on terms that are not their maximalists, but if they don't get them, then they will take everything. And that's just the reality that I don't, I just

baffles me why especially the West just won't recognize it. Based on some things that they have sent out as a counterpoint to Trump's seven point plan, I saw it just came out this morning, maybe it came out last night, but I saw it this morning. It's just fantasy land. It's just like, no, we're going to do it with the way we want, we want a ceasefire, we want American security guarantees for Ukraine. We don't want to give over any kind of territory or at least not admit anything and just stuff that Russia is categorically against. So it's just fantasy, meaning that we are still so far apart on the western side, not about the Russian side. That's obvious. But even where Trump is and where the European Union is, after all these rounds in

negotiation, to include London on Wednesday, it just shows that we're miles apart. And so the Russians are going, yeah, if y'all can't even come to an agreement on your side, then we're just going to keep going militarily yeah um hmm and now so what do you know about the russian politics surrounding the question of extending their goals as far as harkeve and odessa there are many in russia that are adamant that they want those that's why they say they don't want ukraine to take this poison pill because they say then that will leave us short of our uh necessary objectives because they say listen there's you know obviously the the the Russian speakers in the four provinces, but there are substantial portions of the population

in the next four provinces over that are also Russian speakers. And they said, we're not going to just let a new line be drawn here and leave all of our other compatriots on the other side of that line, many of which are in Odessa, many of which are in the Karkev area, and Deneper provost, provok, I can't even say that, DeNepro province, some call it. So there's a lot. And so they don't want there to be negotiated settlement because they want to take that by force so that they can protect all of the ethnic Russians up to the Denepper River.

We'll see how it works out because if we don't agree to that, if Ukraine doesn't agree to those four provinces, then I think that they're going to lose all eight of them, maybe even more than that. Yeah. I mean, I did predict that in my speech like three days after the invasion that the Russians, you know, this is just the same as if we're criticizing American foreign policy. or it's the self-licking ice cream cone man one one intervention leads to the next one and leads to the next one

the Russian leaning parties used to win elections that's why America had to overthrow the government over there all the time now the Russians absorbing everybody in the far east and south means that they're leaving a much smaller minority of Russian speakers behind so what's the solution to that keep going to the river you don't expect us to abandon all the poor people of deep denipro And so on they go. And then, you know, you could also see just the, this is the way that

they talk about it. It's their historical claim to Odessa and Harkiv. Those were originally Russian cities and they want them back. And then also it's a great way to screw over what's left of rump Ukraine, which will not be denazified, right? Like what's left of Ukraine is going to be ruled by Nazis. You mentioned the Azov Battalion. Well, they just made the third separate infantry division, which was the Azov Battalion, led by Andrew Beletsky. They just promoted the whole thing for what it means in practical purposes. I don't know exactly, but it's gone now from a battalion to a regiment to the third separate infantry division. It's now called the Third Army Corps. and and so that's a higher level of status and this guy balesky if he survives the war i get a

google alert for all of his exploits and they always trumpeted it really big in the press when him and his guys you know take a small village somewhere or fend off a russian assault somewhere uh mostly fighting in the north and so geez if we're going to be left with a rump Nazi-fied Ukraine in, you know, based out of Galicia and Volina, then we should take Odessa away so that now that they're landlocked and won't pose a threat to the Black Sea and will have to be the Europeans problem and all of that, you know, and so you could see how by their logic, once you invade the Donbass, you got to keep going and going and going. In fact, how long do we expect them to tolerate a Beletsky-led rump Ukraine if we fast forward this story

five years. It's going to be another war anyway. So by the logic of the self-licking ice cream comb, they're just going to have to march all the way to Romania and Poland. Right? Why not? There are elements in Russia that suggest that very thing. They don't want to get a war with NATO if they can avoid it, but they're actually not afraid of it. And they say if Ukraine will never agree to it. And I actually asked that also of the ambassador yesterday, asked it, what if you get all the way through the Denepper and they still don't de-Nazify it like that?

He said, we'll continue the fight until we have achieved all of our objectives. That's how he answered the question, which is to your point, exactly. If you get up to the river and they're still Nazis in charge or as Russia would define them anyway, then they will apparently continue on. And, of course, if you've gotten that far,

then what's left to defend anything in the West? I'm just, we just got to look at this in an ugly practical matter, you know, people say, well, it took them three years to get this 20-something percent, and it'll take another three year. It doesn't work like that. It's not a linear process. And if the one side keeps getting bigger and the other it gets better, there will come a point when it breaks.

And then all of a sudden, it's like a water over the dam. And now that it's, they can just sweep across the whole thing. We saw that happen in France in 1940, exactly. The entire country collapsed once the Anglo-Sodian. Saxon armies got penetrated in the rear. The whole war was over after that point. So there is historical precedence and there is no guarantees in anything. Hang on just one second for me here. You guys, I'm so proud to announce the publication of the Libertarian Institute's 14th book. It's Israel winner of the 2003 Iraq Oil War. Undue influence, Deceptions, and the Neocon

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So if you want to have an insurgency after the Army's broken, that's where to have one. And the Carpathian Mountains and all that, the CIA. Yeah, but man, who wins on that? Why would you want a situation where you have to get into an insurgency in your own country indefinitely, however long Russia would want to pay that price. And then Nazis are romantic types, you know? Look, America

back, the CIA, backed the Nazi insurgency against the Soviet Union through 1959, you know, after the dawn of the Cold War there. And they talked about this at the start of the war. Everybody expected the Ukrainian military to be broken. And this whole thing was going to be a red dawn Mujahideen Rambo 3 type insurgency from the beginning. They all invoked the Afghan model, not our Afghan model, what Osama got us to do to us.

But no, the other Afghan model where America and the CIA and Osama got the Soviets to do that to themselves back in the 1980s. And so that was plan A. Plan B was, oh, great. The Ukrainian army actually isn't broken into little pieces and can continue fighting as a state army for three years. So they could go back to plan A And their whole They said all along And I guess this isn't Trump's policy

But it's probably the joint staff's policy still Is to extend the war To bleed Russia The more they spend money The more they spend money And that's a net loss for them And that's smart by us Huh?

That's 100% the Europeans plan Guaranteed Yeah Well so Geez I don't know Now let's talk about Zalenski because he's obviously in a very difficult position here um i believe boris johnson when boris johnson well i i don't believe the part where he says hey that wasn't my fault i

disagree with that but i think it's pretty clear the journalism about how he helped ruin those peace talks in the early months of the war um but his excuse also was believable which is it was the right way nationalists they refused to accept any kind of negotiation and there's a long history of that going back to Poroshenko as well and it was Demetri Yorosch who threatened to hang Zelensky from a tree on the main dragon in Kiev if he dared to try to

negotiate with the Russians back in 2019 and you know there's a very real threat of violence against him if he would negotiate I think that's clear you know from before the war and after and that was believable by Boris Johnson

and after all they've been fighting for years and lost a hell of a lot of guys and it sucks really bad to lose and especially when you you haven't all the way been defeated yet and so the way that the nazis put it is if you negotiate now then that means that all the guys who've died in the war so far had died in vain so far they haven't died in vain yet but true they they already have died in vain by the way I'm just saying, tell that to the Nazis. That ain't the way they see it, you know?

But I can't stop, but add the next part that they won't, which is, and then you're going to condemn to unnecessary death, thousands and possibly hundreds of thousands of more who are alive right now and would love a chance to live. So you want to condemn them to death, go down that path. Right, which is their thing. Glory to the heroes, man. You know, that's what they say. So, yeah, I hear you. Yeah. So, I mean, that's a major problem. And then I don't know. What other incentives? Because it does seem to be mysterious. I think people in my audience might wonder, why is Zelensky not taking the opportunity to hide behind as much a Trump skirt as he can and get the best deal he can? Seems like possibly they could get some European troops in there, which seems silly to me. They're going to fight in the future for a war that they won't fight now? That doesn't make any sense. But still, like, he doesn't seem to be. doing the best to get what he can get.

It seems more like he's simply being intransigent. Oh, yeah, he's doing the opposite. He's doing everything to sabotage any possibility for a peace negotiation. Well, but I mean, doesn't that mean then he thinks he has other options then? Or what is he think? Either he has other options or I've heard from people in a position to know claim that he doesn't have other options because, as you mentioned there, he could be swinging it from a tree in the Maidan. well from a poll in them I don't I guess because he's he's being threatened by even his own supporters that if you go down this path you won't survive it and out of self-preservation he's going down this path which is a horrendous thing I don't care if it's true or not but for a man to say so that I can live I'm going to keep going down a fictitious road that's going to keep tens of thousands of my countrymen dying every month it's it's he deserves to be condemned I think it's terrible yeah

Yeah, this whole thing represents a real betrayal of the Ukrainian people, especially by the United States, by Joe Biden and his government. But by the Brits, too. Did you see the new thing by Kit Clarenberg? I'm trying to arrange to get him on the show. I don't know if it's going to work out. But Kit has this new thing. We already knew the story. There was a big thing in the New York Times about this about a year ago or so. I have a thing about it in my book. but kit has a new thing about the british role in training the ukrainian marines that they sent in this absolutely horrifically failed adventure to try to cross the nieper river to take the left bank of kurson and then move from there on to svestopol supposedly and you talk about the frankie operation yes i i i'm not sure if i got all the names right but you seem to know better than me on that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was, just... Oh, I do. I do have it right here, what is it called? I do have the article here. It's, um... Um, uh, yes. Would you say cranky? Yeah, cranky.

Yeah, so this has been going on. And so he just goes to show the British, uh, role in the, all the planning and the training, I guess they had the special boat services, uh, you know, train these guys up and whatever. And somebody gave a bunch of documents to Kit Clarenberg. he does great stuff man he gets great articles great documents from the brits especially exposing their nefarious uh role in all of this and essentially what they're talking about essentially is this completely ridiculous plan to just send these guys straight into the dragon's

teeth and and then once it's like some bay of pig stuff where the the plan breaks down but they keep going anyway yes so they don't have their beach head but the whole thing was depending on them getting their beachhead but then they just keep pouring guys in and they just keep dying and dying for months and months they got no air cover they're just getting picked off by drones and artillery and whatever and we already knew what an absolute horror show it was but then here we have the british role in just like the the american democrats just pushing them into this making them keep going even after somebody should have called this whole thing off it's not working that our plan didn't work now it's months later and they're still doing it he talks about guys

who are just left behind no one's coming to evacuate him out of there so they're just blowing their own brains out as they're just sitting there dying on the shore of the river and all this stuff just absolute shit show as baroque obama would call it you know yeah it's i i mean i was noticing that when the operation first started, I'll never forget, there was an article by David Axe in Forbes, which he said, you know, oh, everybody's saying that the 2023 offensive didn't work, but now here Ukraine has scratched out a beachhead on the Russian side of the Denepper River at Crinky, and they're, you know, now putting Russia's whole southern flank at risk.

And I'm like, dude, all you've got to do is look at a map and you see that even if they get across the river then what the same reason there 2023 the entire offensive was utterly destroyed is still in effect down here except you would have to go over a much larger area of open even if you could ferry people across the river which you couldn't and so the whole thing was doomed from the beginning and i was just aghast when i saw the ukraine just continued to but men after men after men into this just hellhole i mean it was it was worse than bachmoud it was worse than the kursk and those were two horrible ones. But that just shows you the generalship on the Ukraine side and the just, just unbelievably

bad generalship and decision by the commander-in-chief of Zelensky, who's always talked about being like a Churchillian figure, but man, he never had any tactical victories other than the, and it wasn't his, of course, but the, the, the, the, the 22 victories in Kirston City, where Ukraine did force the Russians across the river in Kharkiv that era. that's it they never had another one and there's no reason to think they ever will you know the ukrainians i could see how of course from their point of view they're the stars of this movie you know all this revolves around them and what's happening to them and all that but i wonder i surely if they don't get it now they will get it in the near future they will understand what role they played

in the american government's imagination here Where they're like, you know, they remind me of when David Petraeus started passing out $100 bills and bribing the local Sunni chiefs who had already turned on al-Qaeda anyway in Iraq War II. And he said, you know what, we're going to call you the concerned local citizens and the sons of Iraq. And you're going to be the good guys now. And we promise we're going to somehow get Nuri al-Maliki and his Shi'i government to give y'all good jobs or something and then at the end of the war oh yeah all that yeah no we never could figure out how to how to get any of that done good luck you guys and then left and um not that i'm

criticizing the withdrawal but i'm just saying petraeus was in no position to make any promises to them especially since he was the guy who turned the bottle brigade into the iraqi army which is kind of an exclusivist Shiite organization, you understand. And so sons of Iraq, whatever your name is, see you, pal. Like those guys are, if you ask anyone in Washington, D.C., tell us all about the sons of Iraq that you care so much about and make lots of big promises to. They wouldn't even remember what I was talking about anymore, right? Like, they had no idea. They would end the story where Petraeus started it.

Oh, yeah, they turned the tide here and we recognize all this. And then you say, yeah, and then what happened to them? Then you just get this deer in the headlock and look, oh, what do you mean? Yeah, they have no idea, nor do they care. Yep. It's the same thing with the Ukrainians here. I mean, I have example after example in the book of American politicians and pundits and government officials and whoever talking about, we are getting such great bang for our buck in this war.

They all say like that, not all, but many of them. because Russians are getting killed and no Americans are getting killed so it's rad and then a lot of times they won't even mention it all that well you know of course a lot of Ukrainians are dying and that's sad they don't even say that

they don't even say that part and Eric Swalwell the Democrat Congressman is the most recent example I have for just a couple of weeks ago did the exact same thing and I'm just thinking that like they're going to remember that you know Nazis love a good stab in the backstory and they absolutely

are being stabbed in the back by the United States of America here set them up like the Bay of Pigs right like the Shiite uprising in 1991 and then good luck you guys we're not coming for you yeah Mitch McConnell was the other one

on the on the Democrat Republican side that was just screaming that deal especially early in the war made me sick I mean there's going to be trouble from that I'm predicting blowback yeah I think you're I think you're right. It historically hasn't, and why wouldn't it here?

Yeah. I'm especially worried about this Beletsky guy. I think, you know, Dmitri Yorosch, I don't know where Andrew Perubi is right now, laying low somewhere. I don't know about Dimitri Yerash either. Those are two powerful and charismatic Nazis, but Andrew Beletsky, he is the most insane lunatic of them all as far as, like, his speeches about the great Aryan mission of the organism of the Ukrainian state and all his crazed Nazi stuff

and then he is like the big war hero of Harkeve right now and I think has a big political future in front of him if he doesn't take a bullet then he is going to be a major player in Ukrainian politics and I think that's going to be a real problem

you know and hey Andrew Perrube he was the Speaker of the Rada for like six years or something. So I don't think he's gone either. I think a lot of the more radical forces are the ones who fought the war and the ones who didn't come back dead are going to come back, you know, idolized. They're going to have a real problem going forward with that. Yeah, there's just so many problems here. It's just shameful to the West writ large. Yeah. All right. So anyway, I'm going to let you go. But just to recap here, just to make sure I understand, think that Trump can't make a deal here. The Russians are just going to keep going and the Ukrainians are going to lose and probably all the way to the river and then even Odessa and maybe, I guess at that point, if you're taking Odessa, you might as well keep going until you get to the Trans-Denester there, that little strip of Russian-controlled territory on the Moldovan Ukrainian border

and all that. Is that what you're seeing here and Trump's just going to turn us back? I would slightly characterize it differently, not that Trump will fail to get to a negotiated deal, but that the Ukraine and the European side will not agree to a negotiated deal, even though that Trump could probably get some kind of an agreement with Russia, they won't have it. And so he will not succeed, but I think he knows that. And I think he will walk probably before the end of the next week. I think that he'll say, that's it, I'm done. I think he'll really do it.

And then, well, what can Europe really bring to bear? It's easy to scoff, but what the hell? They're first world countries, right? Yeah, we'll see, but I think we will. I think we're going to find out. I think they'll try to figure out something if Trump walks. I think right now that there's many people. I'll never forget, Scott, when Trump had negotiated an end to the Afghanistan War in, I think it was February 2020, and that we were supposed to be out by May of 2021, and that was the deal we had. I think it was called the Doha Accords. When he didn't win the election and Biden came in, there were many people. in the Pentagon that we're telling the Afghans, yeah, don't worry about that. As soon as Biden gets into August, our office, he'll just end that, and he'll get rid of it, and we'll continue on, and they all believed it. But Biden said, yeah, no, we'll just stick with that.

We'll do a terrible job getting out, and we'll change the exit day, but we're going to still get out. It's like the worst of all possibilities. But I see something similar happening here that people are going, yeah, I mean, Trump says that, but he's not going to really do it. do it. At the end of the day, he'll just keep it going and he'll get mad about something that Putin does or something. And I think that they're misreading it. I think that he'll actually walk on this one because otherwise, why would he own something that is a disaster

and embrace it? Because it can't work. Right. I mean, that's the thing. He has no cards to play, right? He already promised to lift sanctions. You said going back to 2014, that's a pretty sweet deal, Vlad. It's huge. Yeah. And yeah, like, it pissed me. off if the Russians didn't say you know taking this opportunity to try to repair our relationship with the United States of America might just

be worth it guys let's do this Trump they're never going to get a better opportunity to fix this than making a deal with Trump right now and then I could see how you know what you're saying that Ukraine and the EU they don't have to go along with that although then again I don't know

like you're saying we'll see what the Maybe they'll collapse. I mean, they're not exactly, you know, ironed backbones and spines and stuff. We'll see what they do. But I fear that they'll try to muddle through it. It'll just get more people killed in Ukraine. Yeah. But on the other side of that, Trump doesn't really have any threats to make, right?

No. He promised something like he's going to put 100% tariff on any country that trades with Russia at all or something like that. He's not going to do that. Right. Like that's how far down the crazy sanctions ladder we are now where that's his last option left is. to make it illegal for any other country to trade with Russia or then they won't be able to trade with us. I mean, that just sounds, I guess he could.

That would hurt us more than them anyway. And if not sanction-proof, they're very sanction-resistant because they've got decades of experience with it. So that would be bad for us, and I don't think Trump will do that. And that could even be like the last straw for America's sanctions regime where just so much of the rest of the world says, fine then. We'll just trade with them and not you.

and we'll happily make that choice at this point. Screw you guys, you know. And nobody wants to make that choice because of the size of our market, but it push comes to shove. I think people are eventually going to do it. Yeah. But so that's all Trump has to offer is carrots and no real sticks. And the Russians, they still have all these incentives to keep going.

And they've got the Europeans. Hell, they could be run by secret Russian agents at this point if it actually is more helpful to the russians to keep the war going and end up taking all of what they want then you know they have the the european and ukrainian intransigence as their excuse to just keep going now even if the world's superpower is seeking a deal yep well we'll unfortunately see pretty soon i think yep all right well thank you man for coming on the show and talking about this stuff with us You bet, Scott. Always a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Really appreciate it. All right, you guys, that is the great Daniel L. Davis. The 11th hour in 2020, America, is the name of his book. See, I remember that after 45 minutes. And you got to watch the Daniel Davis Deep Dive. It's the best show on the YouTube, and I know there's a lot of them. Like and subscribe. Thanks for listening to Scott Horton Show, which can be heard on APS Radio News,

at Scott Horton.org, Scott Horton Show.com, and the Libertarian Institute. at Libertarian Institute.org.