Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 4/4/24 Kyle Anzalone on the Moscow Concert Attack and the Difficulties Facing Ukraine

Episode Date: April 6, 2024

Kyle Anzalone was on Antiwar Radio to talk about the terrorist attack in Moscow and the war in Ukraine. Anzalone lays out what we know about the attack on a concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow. He then provides an update on where things stand in Ukraine, along with the West’s effort to scrape more money together to keep the war going. Kyle Anzalone is news editor of the Libertarian Institute, opinion editor of Antiwar.com and co-host of Conflicts of Interest with Will Porter and Connor Freeman. Follow him on Twitter @KyleAnzalone_ 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

For Pacifica Radio, April the 4th, 2024, I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all welcome the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm editorial director of anti-war.com and author of the book enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism. You can find my full interview archive more than 6,000 of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton show and all your favorite podcast catchers and things out there. Okay, guys, next up on the show is Kyle Anselone. He's our news editor at the Institute and Opinion Editor at Anti-War.com,

and he also is the host of his own show, Conflicts of Interest. Welcome back. Kyle, how you doing? Doing very well, Scott. Thanks for having me back on. And so let's start, if we can, with the latest update on what all we know or don't about the terrorist attack in Moscow there last month. Right. Well, the bad news is over 140 are dead.

Russia captured some of the perpetrators. They've also arrested about a half dozen other people who they said were involved. Russia claims the perpetrators of the terrorists were heading forward. the Ukrainian border when they stopped them. If you look at the map, it's a little unclear. They were definitely headed west. Of course, west of Moscow is both Belarus and Ukraine. And so it's not immediately clear why the Russians think they were definitely going to Ukraine, but that's what the Russians are saying. It's pretty clear the terrorists were tortured pretty severely by the Russians after they were captured. And so I would be highly skeptical of anything they say. I

imagine they're going to say what the Russians want them to say. Russia does claim they have compiled some other evidence, though, to show that there are at least Ukrainian connections to the terrorists who perpetrated the attack, although none of that has been made public as of this time. I guess they're arguing over just how much information the Americans shared with the Russians before this thing. But aside from the tragedy of the whole thing, it goes to show how completely screwed up our foreign policy is when we make enemies out of Gaddafi and Assad and our friends, the Shiites we put in power in Iraq and Iran and Russia, when these are all enemies of our only real enemies, these international terrorist groups, that our government,

of course, created in the first place. Not that I'm saying they control them. From the New York Times reporting, the U.S. gave Russia some, but not all the information that they had. And it's really unclear at this point what that means. It could mean they just told the Russians essentially what they told the public that they were concerned something was going to happen around those dates. And if they pass no other information, you know, I'm sure that's given the Russians part of their concern as why they think the Americans are behind it. But we just don't know all the details yet. But again, it goes to show how screwed up the American's foreign policy is where, you know, we could be working with the Russians against the bin Ladenites. And from a lot of people's perspective, this will be seen as the Americans working with the bin Ladenites against the Russians.

Yeah, seriously. And, you know, I don't advocate by saying that to me, al-Qaeda being the real enemy, I don't think America should be going over there to fight them. I wrote a whole book about how our government isn't up to doing that task correctly. And so to put it politely. and so their mandate, their writ to attempt to do so must be revoked. On the other hand, fighting against their enemies like this is another question altogether. Yeah, I will say, Scott, just a steel man the argument for U.S. or U.K. involvement. I think people are more pointing out that the CIA or M.I.S. would have been aware that this was going on

and continue to support the GRU and the Ukrainian intelligence as it was happening and didn't warn the Russians about it, even though they would have had significant knowledge of it. And that would be more of their culpability rather than directly being involved in hiring those. And I think a lot of people who point and believe there's some kind of American involvement here often forget and don't like to highlight that Russia was largely responsible for the defeat of the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, the Islamic State, well, but mainly, you know, the Al-Jolani Brigade in northern Syria was defeated and bombed out of Aleppo in a lot of other areas by the Russians. And so there is significant hatred for Russia amongst, you know, particular groups of jihadists in the Middle East and Central Asia still. Yeah. Well, and if you go back over the last 20 years, hundreds of Russians have been killed

in various suicide attacks and assaults on schools and God knows hospitals and God knows what. planes brought down the subway system in Moscow bombed repeatedly and you know the bin Laden knights have been at war with them since back when America was alive with the bin Ladenites against them in the battle days of the Cold War under Carter and Reagan so no reason they would have stopped now now all right enough of that so let's talk about the actual battlefield in Ukraine there's two coinciding stories here. One of them is it's all falling apart and the other one is it's all our fault for stabbing them in the back and not giving them all the weapons they needed. Kyle, what do you think about both of those things? Right. So we have some warnings from Ukrainian generals and

commanders that wherever Russia decides to attack when they launch their major offensive, it's going to be successful that the Ukrainians just simply cannot repel them. Now, these are commanders that were under Zalushni, the commander of the Ukrainian armed forces that was relieved earlier this year of duty by Zelensky, and I believe is now ambassador to the United Kingdom. And so there may be some political reasons that they are making these statements, but it does seem that what they are saying is what we are seeing on the battlefield, where right now the Russians are steadily gaining territory. A lot of this is done through these new bombs that Russia is using. Actually, they're old bombs. They're, I believe from the Soviet era, very large, either 1,500 or

2,000-pound bombs, that Russia has designed what I think Americans would call J-DAMs, which are precision-guided kids for these bombs, and they're dropping them in their, the Ukrainians don't have air defenses to repel them, and they're destroying Ukrainian positions along the front lines and allowing the Russians to gain a lot of territory. And so the Ukrainians are losing, And these generals point out that there's really nothing that the Americans could do as far as giving Ukraine weapons at this point. That is essentially lost. But from the official narrative that we are hearing, what it's happening is that the Republicans held out for too long. And now the Ukrainians are losing on the battlefield because of a lack of American support.

And there may be a little bit truth to this, Scott, that the Ukrainians would be doing better if the Americans have followed through with their promises to give Ukrainians, whatever it took for as long as it took. But just like the promises the Americans have made to so many other proxies around the world, maybe most recently the Kurdish forces in Syria and Iraq during the Syrian and Iraq war against ISIS there that we fought, that we were never going to follow through with that pledge. And so the Ukrainians now feel abandoned and maybe somewhat rightfully so, but we weren't going to escalate to full on war with the Russians. And so now the Ukrainians are about to pay a massive price for that. Yeah.

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or discovering your ancestors' name in the UK and Ireland Nursing Register. Don't miss out. Free access ends August 24th. Visit Ancestry.com for more detail. terms apply well and you know I've been reading a lot about this lately and the arguments for more weapons are essentially hollow they go well with more artillery it'd be better but they can account for the fact that the Russians got all the artillery they need and a lot more men and so that's as simple as that and then you had like solution he's saying what we need is a scientific breakthrough that gives us a brand new technology to bring to the battlefield, you know, like this is a movie. Somebody's going to invent a brand new, you know, laser gatling gun or some kind of thing that's going to solve this problem. Total pie in the sky stuff.

And then so where does that leave us then? World War I, but with remote control helicopters, right? I mean, what are we talking about? Well, just the Ukrainians steadily losing territory until they finally realize they have to enter into negotiations. to stop the bleeding or else the Russian offensive is just going to go on and on and on. I would suspect that Russia is really looking to take Odessa before this is over, but we will see how this plays out over the summer. Again, we have the Ukrainian commanders and officers warning that the front lines really could

collapse at any moment here, and the Ukrainians appear, and so do the White House increasingly desperate at this point. We have the French president talking about putting French troops on the ground. The Ukrainians have just dropped the conscription age to 25, and so that's going to allow them to round up, I think, about 200,000 young men and throw them into this meat grinder. And the Biden administration is just completely ignoring all-American law and authorizing weapons shipments to Ukraine without any funding. Right now, the White House apparently has a $10 billion deficit on money they need to purchase weapons to replenish U.S. stoppiles that were sent. from the weapons that were sent to Ukraine over the past two years. And even with that deficit, they claim to save $300 million from the Army budget.

And rather than applying that money to replenish the U.S. stockpiles, they use that money to ship Ukraine another $300 million in weapons. I mean, so we're well past respecting the law at this point. Yeah. And I guess it raises questions about how much more money they can find in the Black budget and in the Pentagon budget, if they want to just continue to do it by executive fiat, there is an election coming up and everything. Right. And they do have one more scheme they're kind of working on here. And this is to have NATO establish a $100 billion fund and then also give command of the

Ukraine security group from the U.S. over to NATO. And this would, what they say, Trump proof, any future aid to Ukraine. So allow them to fight it for another few years. But we'll also do and run around Congress at this point. And Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, still appears willing to hold out for some time on the actual vote to send more aid to Ukraine. But at the same time, he's actually saying he's willing to pass the repo act, which will allow the U.S. to use seized Russian funds to arm Ukraine. And how much are we talking about there?

So there's $300 billion in the Collective West that are held by countries that are members of the G7. I think it's $5 to $6 billion in the American accounts. Most of that money is held in the European Union or Japan who seem less interested in going along with this, understanding that this is a massive breach of international norms and will likely contribute to countries forming financial systems outside of the American and Western orbit. Now, I did see some footage of the Russians making a big mistake and driving an armored column down a road. where they all, I think, six or seven vehicles, were quickly destroyed by, it looked like at least in one case I could see it was just a guy with a shoulder-fired rocket,

although I guess could have been a vehicle firing a rocket at him, but they took these guys out, and so it's really not over yet, although it's hard to quantify. That's sort of looking through us out of one little battle, but you've got to give the Ukrainians credit for fighting with courage when they're clearly overmatched here and they're still out there slogging it out on on the promise that joe biden has their back which is you know that's bravery right there right as i don't support the u.s sending more aid to ukraine at the same time i do realize that the ukrainians

got a bad deal here it was their leadership and the leaders of our country that set them up for this when they could have cut a deal in the early months of the war and this is something that Ted Snyder, who writes for us at the Institute and at anti-war.com, has maybe done the best job of anybody really documenting and highlighting the importance of this, that in March and April of 2022, there was a real agreement on the table where the Ukrainians could have agreed not to join NATO and taken some, you know, demilitarization steps. And in exchange, Russia would withdraw out of the Dombast. They were willing to allow the Dombas to remember. a part of Ukraine just to have Kiev agreed to neutrality and when the Ukrainians were ready

to sign it the Americans and the Brits they went to Kiev and they taught Zelensky out of it and ever since we've been at war and it'll be known as the worst deal in Ukrainian history they'll have lost maybe half of their country because they were unwilling to accept neutrality yep yeah just you wait till my new book is done long after the fact when nobody cares anymore Because I got a really good section on that. Anyway, I'm sorry. All right, you guys, we're out of time, but that is the great Kyle Anzalone. He's our news editor at the Institute and Opinion Editor at Anti-War.com.

Check out his great podcast, Conflicts of Interest. Really appreciate you, Kyle. Thanks. Thank you, Scott. All right, y'all, and that's it for the show. I'm Scott Horton. It's Anti-War Radio. I'm here every Thursday afternoon from 2.30 to 3 on KPFK, 90,000.

4.7 FM in L.A. See you next week.