Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 7/24/26 Ian Proud on Why the Attempt to Sanction Russia Into Submission Failed

Episode Date: July 31, 2026

Scott interviews former British diplomat Ian Proud about how the Cold War with Russia was reignited and why the West’s chosen strategy is destined to fail. Discussed on the show: Ian Proud’s Substack Ian Proud’s YouTube Channel “The ULTIMATE Guide to Why Russia Sanctions Have Failed and a Plan for Their Removal” (The Peacemonger) Ian Proud was a British diplomat for 24 years from 1999 to 2023, working on Russia for the final decade. Subscribe to The Peacemonger, his Substack and YouTube Channel.  Sign up for the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom at scotthortonacademy.com For more on Scott's work: Check out The Libertarian Institute: https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott's other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott's books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/43D82oY (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/4eMQblu Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/4a5fKvx Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott’s full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tax Attorney Matt Sercely https://agoristtaxadvice.com; Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.com; Expat Money https://expatmoney.com/scott; and Crowdhealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/ (use promocode Horton) You can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/https://scotthortonshow.com or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Audio cleaned up with the Podsworth app: https://podsworth.com Use code HORTON50 for 50% off your first order at Podsworth.com to clean up your voice recordings, sound like a pro, and also support the Scott Horton Show! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We're going to take out seven countries. They don't know what the fuck. Stand doing. Negotiate now. End this war. And now here's your host, Scott Horton. All right, guys. Next up today is Ian Proud, and he is the peacemonger.

What a great name for a substack. The Peacemonger, and oh, here, he's got a new novel out, although we're not going to be covering that today. But you can see it there. This interview is sponsored by that. But he's a former British diplomat and a real great analyst and critic of Western policy toward the Ukraine and all. And I was on his show and had a good old time. And I watch your show all the time. Ian, and thank you for joining us today. How are you doing? Yeah, good. Thanks.

It's nice to see you again. Yeah, thank you very much. So listen, before we get into the substance of a couple of articles of years I'd like to talk about. I'd like to ask you a little bit about your background because if I remember right, you were in Moscow serving your country and your foreign service there right during the Maidan Revolution and the outbreak of the Civil War and all of that stuff. So first of all, do I have that right? And second of all, do tell everything that we need to know that you know that we don't know about all that. Well, you've got it almost right, Scott. When the Maidan was happening, I was actually still studying Russian.

I didn't get out until the July. So about five months after the coup in Kiev. But I've been reading into the reporting in London from the London end. But you basically have to wait for about nine or ten months for a diplomatic visa because the relationship was so bad. But anyway, so July, I arrived on the day that the harshest sanctions at that time were imposed the 31st of July 2014 and I'll Zaire through February

2019 so I was there all the way through the MH17 I was there through the Soulsby nerve agent incident in the UK in March of 2018 and the big tip for Tash expulsion of diplomats so I mean the main two messages I suppose

from that time first Britain really entrenched from about July or June of July 2014 onwards this drashy of actually not talking to Russia. Rather than as diplomats, you know, diplomats you talk to people,

particularly when you disagree. I mean, diplomacy, contrary to what people think, isn't actually about friendship. Friendship's a benefit if you can get it. But it's fundamentally about talking to people with whom you disagree and trying to find ways to figure things out so you don't end up killing each other, right?

But actually, Britain decided that we just weren't going to talk to Russia. And so we still progressively the relationship start to go downhill from there. onwards. And actually that strategy of not talking to Russia, which remains in place to this day, you know, 12 years later, has now been fully adopted and embedded within the European system as well. So there's that gradual collapse in relationships. Well, the other striking observation from that time was that actually Russia throughout was desperate to have a normal relationship with us, recognizing the difficulties because of the situation in Ukraine. They weren't going

hard in Ukraine. They'd taken Crimea. They obviously weren't going to give that back. But it was clear that they wanted some sort of arrangement in the Dombas where the septists could, you know, figure something out with the Kiev regime and have some devolved autonomous relationship where they still be part of Ukraine. You know, the Russians were fully, fully brought into that. And with that process going along, you know, they just wanted to have normal people to people, commercial, kind of social links with the rest of the world, particularly with the Earth, which at that time was a big trading partner, and we just weren't interested.

So, you know, this idea that actually Russia is fundamentally hostile to the West, I think is actually a myth. Now, as a British diplomat working in Russia, it's not the easiest gig in the world. You know, we've now become public enemy number one. It used to be you guys, but since Trump's come to power, that's flipped a little bit, not that much, but a little bit. now we're public enemy number one.

But actually they just wanted to have a normal relationship. They see themselves as a Eurasians with largely European people. They don't want to have our political system. They don't adopt our values, woke ideology and that sort of thing. But they do want to get along with us. But I mean, the prospects of that have essentially been ruined as we've hitched ourselves onto the kind of mast of this utterly bizarre and failing strategy in Ukraine,

which is never going to go in our favor. All right. Now, what exactly was your job at the time there at the embassy? So I was the Economic Council. I was putting number three in the embassy. It's a big old one of our top three embassies in the world. I was in charge of all the economic stuff, including sanctions. I'm sorry to say, I was Mr. Sanctions.

But I also did a lot of engagement with travel around the country, visiting universities. engaging with businesses, economists there, you know, generally kind of well received despite the sanctions, despite the stuff with the Ukraine, it was far easier to actually get out and engage than you might imagine. It was pretty difficult to, you know, be at a time. So, yeah, that was my job. But I was also in charge of the kind of crisis side.

I've got a whole, you mentioned my novel, I've got a whole background in crisis going out, back to 9-11. I was in Langley, I was in the Pentagon, you know, literally days before 9-11, flew back in the 1990, did the bar. Bali bombing, did the tsunami in Thailand. So I took over the crisis running. So after the Sozboe nerve agent attack happened, I basically had to piece the embassy back together.

Just eight months after I'd been working with the U.S. embassy to help them figure out how to deal with losing 755 staff from the U.S. network after the deceased Lindsey Graham sort of put the Katzer sanctions bill on Donald Trump and he had no choice but to sign in, the big collapse in this relation. So that side of work, too, crisis towards the end in particular, formed a very big part of my job. Hmm.

Man, so, no, now there's a lot of different things I want to ask you, but, um, go ahead. Well, there's even more than I already had in mind. But let's stick with, um, I guess. I have an obvious answer for why the UK government did not want to talk to the Russians after the Civil War broke out in 2014. There's only kind of one big, obvious one

that jumps out at me, but I don't want to prejudice the witness here, Your Honor. I mean, what is your explanation for this? Well, we were knees deep in it, you know, the whole kind of machinations around the overthrow of the Anakovych regime. You know, the Anakovich regime had come in, trying to find a balance between actually living

with Europe and living with Russia. You know, trying to be friends with everybody. And, of course, the Europeans didn't like that. The Americans really didn't like that. And we didn't like that much either. In fact, in the rankings, probably the Americans hated it the most followed by us with the Europeans in a distant third place.

But anyway, so, you know, there was, you'll recall around the time in the Maidan after these people were kind of shot and killed, the very good Canadian academic, Kachanovsky, were responsible for most of those deaths, by the way, but let's not get sidetracked onto that question. The Europeans came in as Sukorsky,

that's a German foreign minister, the French foreign minister, and they brokered an arrangement whereby Yanukovych would leave office after a bidder months. There'd been an amendment to the Constitution, and there'd be a kind of handing over of power after free and fair elections. So at the time, that was a really good result of European diplomacy. Of course, then you get the, excuse my language,

but the Victoria Newlands fuck the EU phone call to Jeffrey Piot, the US ambassador in Kiev at the time. And the next thing we know, Yanukovych is forced out of town. And of course, the Americans and us wiped her hands and said, bye-bye, fella, let Sasha the new guy in who's our mate. And of course, our mate, of course, was Victoria Newton's first pick. Yatsini Yatsini who was the interim prime minister

while presidential elections were held and so they had a US front guy in the job with the British backing them up and just saying hush, hush to the Germans and the French and they said well actually we just did a deal and you guys have totally trampled on it so yes we were knees deep in it

you know obviously our agencies so as you might put it were actively involved in that too. Yeah, but, um, so whatever. I mean, they were going to get a scolding from Sergey Lavrov, right? But the point is that to me, kind of, isn't it right, that what they're showing was they were afraid that if they were talking with the Russian foreign ministry about all this, that they

could solve it. As you just said, and this is, you know, clearly a matter of record, the Russians were not trying to absorb the Dombas in the summer of 2014. And when the separatist leaders asked to join the Russian Federation, Putin told them no. It told them to stop flying the Russian flag and said, you know, we'll help support your keeping Kiev out. But that doesn't mean we're taking you in. And so in other words, there was a pretty easy status quo to be, you know, achieved here, right?

there was a compromise where the conflict could have been resolved, but America and Britain did not want the conflict resolved. They would have preferred to keep the thing going, even on a, you know, post-Minsk to so-called low level, you know, compared to how it was in the first part of the year, you know, in 2014. But that's exactly right, Scott. And the thing is actually the Russian, the Russians actually had a somebody who is present in the European negotiations with Yanukovych about his departure.

So they were in on those negotiations too, which was another really kind of positive sign. But before we get to Minsk too, of course, as you say, there's that kind of that period of time, you know, when the Russians clearly don't want to get involved. Yeah, they're sending weapons to the separatists. That's absolutely clear. We know that. They're sending humanitarian aid, but they're not really involved militarily in the system. And then the Ukrainians, you know, with our kind of bloters, you know,

if you like, launch what they call an anti-terrorist operation. Rather than having negotiations with the separatists, they just immediately label them as terrorists and start shelling their cities. You know, civilians are getting killed. These have been documented even by the OSCE monitoring mission. Anybody can look up the OSCE monitoring mission and look at their daily reports and see reports of civilian casualties and urban centers being shelled, you know, by the Ukrainians. MH17 happens

that was the only time throughout this whole 12 years I've seen Putin looking visibly shaken by what had happened that came completely out of left field and so you know

this this series that the Russians have planned this all along I think has never really kind of stood up to any kind of serious you know excrujini but you know

the Ukrainians are going in hard against the separatists and then after a while the Russians just say well we're not going to let you do this anymore and they start putting their own troops in. So that's in the second half of 2014. So you've had six months where the Ukrainians

are going in hard militarily. They've taken back a lot of the territory actually, by the way, you know, the separatists had seized and the Russians pushed them straight back out again. And that's when you get Minst 2, you know, when the Ukrainians are on the back foot. And of course, that, as you infer, that again was totally torpedoed by the Americans and us, and it's two. It completely was. But I'll pause there in case you have any full-up questions. Well, only just to get your kind of reaction to my conclusion

or just my thought from what you were saying that, really all of the thinking in the Biden government in 2021 about how we're going to go ahead and inflict this strategic defeat on the Russians. I mean, I think they were sincerely warning them. better not. They were obviously not willing to sign a treaty and really work it out. They thought, oh, we'll inflict the Afghan model on them, strategic defeat. They said over and over again. But it sounds like really what you're saying here is, or the indication I'm picking up, is it, well, this is the vice president during Obama. And he was the one who held the Ukraine brief,

as they say, during Obama. He was in charge during the overthrow of the government in 2014. and that's his government picking up after four years of Trump won there and continuing this same policy. But in other words, the policy really goes back to them, that that was the purpose of fomenting the civil war then was to increase costs for Russia, right? Just as they say in 2019 in the RAND study, they say, well, we could increase support for Kiev

and that would increase costs for Russia. And they say, we've got to carefully calibrate the amount of weapons we send because we could provoke them into actually invading the place, which we don't want them to do. But, yeah, they can't calibrate very well, apparently.

But that's been, and in fact, in my book, I have a quote of Putin saying at a press conference, I believe, with different reporters, saying, you know, I think they might be setting a trap for us. but we may have no choice but to go ahead anyway.

In other words, he could understand that they were trying to provoke him by giving him the choice that you better fight now or you better fight later, and later Ukraine's going to be even better armed than they are now. And so if you got no choice, you better hurry up kind of thing. So he understood that and then went ahead anyway,

which was a damn foolish thing to do if you ask me. But he even seemed to think that, oh, I see what you do in here and then go ahead, win ahead. Yeah, I agree. I've always thought that the first move on Crimea was a strategic overreach by Putin. I've always thought that. Now, people disagree with me on that,

but it goes exactly to your point. He was responding to what he saw as a provocation. and you know, CIA MI6 have orchestrated a Kiwi in Kiev, Victoria Newland, Gimnotide, is cheering from the sidelines and all that stuff. It's the same old cast of characters, Jake Sullivan, Blinken, Newland, Dan Freed, Joe Biden, as you say, 2014, 2021, you know, the same folk, but he's bitten on it and he's done something that's way outside of international law. And even if the vast majority of people in Crimea, I think they're Russian and they are,

ethnically Russian, they speak Russian language, that was the thing that's allowed us to continually goad him into further kind of steps, which allows us always to paint him as the aggressor and not us. You see? So I think, and we can never get out of that cycle at either a strategic or the tactical level. Because every time, you know,

there's any sort of missile fight at Kiev, the Russians are a terrorist state, you know, when war started, the Russians always going to do this. They've always wanted to do this. Ever since he took Crimea, we've been in this cycle of blaming everything on Russia because they do respond.

And what I know about Russian people is this. You know, if you invite them to be your friend, you know, they'll be the best friend you ever had. If you invite them out for a fight, they'll take you up on the offer and they'll try and hit you harder than you hit them. That is just a Russian way. And, you know, the question is,

how can you get out of this? this cycle. And a big answer to that question, and maybe you have the answer to it, is actually when will people in the West actually accept that they share a big part of the blame for this whole crap show that's been going on for the past 12 years that is benefiting no-on, except defense contractors? It certainly isn't benefiting Ukraine. Okay, you know who doesn't have a self-evident, unalienable right to live? Flies. You know, they defecate and puke every time they land on everything they touch. So what you should do is get yourself a bug assault gun and then use it to kill them when they're trespassing on your property.

That's what I do. I shoot them dead. And what you do in order to get one of these things is just follow the link in the right hand margin, a very top link in the right hand margin at scotthornton.org. And in fact, what you might consider would be stopping by that link every time you go shopping on Amazon.com. And that way, the Scott Horton. Scott Horton Show gets a little bit of a kickback from Amazon's end of the sale. Your price does not go up one penny. And so check it out at scotthornton.org. My mom always told me you keep drinking that much coffee.

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dot org slash coffee. That's Scott Horton.org slash coffee. They cannot take responsibility ever. And, you know, this is why I wrote the book, so that people just understand that, yeah, they provoked it. It doesn't mean, you know, CIA agents on Putin's staff tricked him into doing this or anything. He's responsible for doing what he did and all of that.

But America did a lot to create the circumstances here where clearly not just Putin, but the Russian national security establishment thought that they had no choice but to go ahead and do this as much as we might disagree with that. But it's never their role. And if they could admit their role

in provoking it at all, that would obviously, the importance of that is that shows the road to compromise then. They're like, okay, you know what, this is a little bit my fault. So let's sit down at the table and we'll figure out how we can find some middle ground. If this is all your fault just because how evil you are

and me and my friends didn't do nothing, then we have nothing to talk about. We're just going to help our righteous friends ward off your evil. Yeah, exactly right. And of course, people talk about their kind of Putin playbook, he has all these things that he's going to do. But you've got to think that actually the West has got its own playbook because everything that happened in 2014 was just a rerun of what happened in 2008.

you know, you keep pushing the NATO button and, you know, push comes to shove, well, Russia's going to do the shoving, as he did in Georgia, you know, which lost Georgia, a significant part of its territory. They knew that actually had, if they kept pushing this agenda,

you know, this threat of NATO, because Europe, if you remember that Maidan started about, you know, Kiev's desire to sort of be closely integrated with Europe. but as soon as it was not just Europe, it wasn't just Ukraine's European aspirations, it was a Euro-Atlantic aspirations. Well, where did the Atlantic come into this?

As soon as Newland and Co. Flip the script from just being closer to Europe to being part of the Euro-Atlantic family, well, there's only one term that flashed up in Putin's mind in response to that, and that was NATO. So it was just a rerun of 2008 all again. and people in the West would have known that he would have responded in the way that he did.

In fact, British intelligence suggested it was so before the Crimea event happened. Well, and we know, right, yeah, the big New York Times story about the CIA's role says, I mean, we already know from the time because Forbes magazine reported it, and USA Today, I think, was the second one, reported that John Brennan is in,

in Kiev. And this is just as soon as the, oh, I'm sorry, this is the weekend that the war is declared, basically. He comes in April the 12th, the war's launched on the 14th. And Forbes says, John Brennan's in town. They're about to launch the war. And then we learned from the big New York Times story that came out later that he was there as soon as Yanukovych fled,

that the director of the CIA went there to tell these people, all right, here's what we're going to do and reorganize their national security staff. around him and his goals. And so, you know, that's before Beletsky even calls the Azadezal battalion to order, right? You got CIA, you know, already running things on the ground from the very beginning there and using that war. So as much as they would always accuse the Russians of backing the so-called rebels there,

they were clearly, you know, behind Kiev from the very beginning. And I would like to reiterate actually something that you said, about how it was clearly Kiev that started the war. At the time that they launched it, the worst thing that the so-called rebels had done was they had occupied the SBU buildings and things like that. But they hadn't killed anyone, and they certainly had not created armored formations

and gone to war with anyone at that point. They were, in fact, engaging in the same kind of protest tactics that the Maidan supporters had just been doing themselves for the last couple of months, occupying government buildings until they get their way. And so that was their only pretext for launching their anti-terrorist operation, which the president said, well, not take months. It'll take hours.

Here we are. So, but yeah, there's American direct responsibility. And wouldn't you know it, John O. Brennan, who's responsible for so many other also horrible things, too. we don't even get me started trying to list them all. But yeah. We don't admit that in in 2023 when they're bragging about it and they're trying to increase support for the thing and say, well, we are kind of responsible.

So we really owe it to the Ukrainians to give them even more weapons. I think was really the thrust of that piece when they finally did put it out. Yeah. You see, the other thing that goes under the radar, I've mentioned it quite a few times, nobody's really picked up on it, that much. is that about two weeks before the war started in 2022,

Dmitro Kaleba, the then-Farmanister of Ukraine, made this statement to Polish radio, saying that the people in the Dombats will never get devolution. So that was the moment at which the Minskid process was formally announced as dead. At a time, you know, when, as you know, Putin was negotiating some sort of treaty on better security architecture for Europe

and that sort of thing, preventing nature expansion, all those kind of things. Well, we weren't listening to him and actually we're encouraging the Ukrainians to say, well, actually, and by the way, Minsk II is now officially dead. It hasn't really been alive since 2015,

but we're now officially killing it, which was again another thing which just added further fuel to the fire, which then led to the war. And I often say that, you know, the day before the war started, it was Defenders of the Fatherland Day in Russia. And, you know, on Russian media, in fact, on some British media, even there's our own state-owned media, the BBC,

there are pictures of military officers in the uniforms, laying lots of flowers at military memorials. I took one look at that and said they're going in tomorrow, and of course they did. It was obvious, but, you know, you just need to have a bit of an understanding the Russians to pick up on these things. Yeah, you know, Biden would always say going back again to we had to send them a message, Russian body bags, you know, like they've learned these people, they always talk about their thinking, they call it calculus and everything, and they act like they're so smart. But then they say the most simpleton type idiot things like, you know, back in the Afghanistan war in the 1980s, when a lot of young guys got killed, well, that disrupted public opinion back home.

and help lead, you know, ultimately to the collapse of the USSR with the financial costs and the morale and public dissension and all of that. And then they go, wow, so we just do that to them over and over again. Except that you see we're like, right, anyone with a critical eye would go, yeah, but you see how Afghanistan doesn't really matter to Russia. It might have mattered peripherally to the USSR. But Ukraine is everything to Russia. This is something that they, actually are willing to die for it. And if you kill their sons over it, they might get madder and they might commit harder.

And instead, they just say, nope, we got to send home body bags, we got to send home coffins, we got to just kill Russians. And trust me, trust me, that will drive dissent in Russia to the degree that then Putin will have to capitulate. And of course, Madeline Albright, before she died, she fantasized, you know, daydream. And then Putin will be so discredited that he'll be removed from office and then they'll elect pro-American people.

You know, all of these things that basically are just based on what they wish would happen. They have no real reason to believe. And based on pure hatred of Russia as well, of course. Yeah, no, it's exactly right. And, you know, lots of people say this, that Ukraine is, like, oh, Kaina, which is like out the borders. That's literally what it means of the Russian Empire. And, you know, it's always been kind of, you know,

about 40% of the population were Russians, you know, before the war started. You think back to John Mearsheimer's a viral 2015 speech where he kind of shows the electoral map and the jagged line, of course. And Russia has also kind of, their whole worldview is kind of steeped in this idea of foreign conquest particularly from the east but also from the west

it's the Mongols and then it's the Swedes and the Lithuanians and then it's the Poles and then it's Napoleon and then it's Hitler you know if you go to Red Square if you've been to Red Square but right next to it there's the state museum to the 1812 to the Napoleonic Wars and you know

you've just got to go to a Victory Day celebration in Moscow go and see the Eternal Regiment where the streets are filled with people carrying black and white photographs of their relatives who killed in World War II, which killed tens of millions of people in the Soviet Union. You know, just an absolutely astonishing

number of people died. You know, people think that actually kind of Russians have lost a large number of people in this war, and of course they have. But that is not going to be enough to kind of shift the dial when all they see, whenever they turn on and hear idiots like Joe Biden

and the late Lindsay Graham and the late John McCain saying it's just a gas station man, you know, pretending to be a country and just insulting them every day of the week. If people think that really works with the Russian people, I'd invite them to meet some Russian people

because, you know, I had a, my economist at the embassy, she's a Russian young woman, very smart, gal ended up working for a big five consulencies in Russia for the war-started She was one of the first to go on to social media saying yeah by near no to war when the war started.

She moved to London to escape the country. She didn't want her husband to get enlisted into the army. She went back. She said she couldn't handle the Russophobia. I mean, she didn't agree with what Putin was doing, but she was still a proud Russian, and she just couldn't stand living in the UK. Check it out, you guys.

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And check it out. I'm in it. Well, first of all, there's a great ad for the Scott Horton Academy. But also, look at this, 100 years of blowback. And it's about the Tuttle Twins. Go down to the skate park and they meet me, Skater Scott. And there I am doing a big slothair. And I teach them all about blowback.

and the costs and consequences of American Empire, and particularly in regards to intervention in Iran. Isn't that cool? Just go to tutletwins.com slash free magazine. That's all you got to do. Totaltwins.com slash free magazine. All right. You guys, me here for tax attorney Matt Sersely at agoristaxadvice.com.

And he is just a real hawk. He serves small businesses and high income professionals who are on the run from the revenues. And his job is making sure. that you don't have to pay those sons of bitches one penny more than you absolutely have to. That's Matt Sersley, your new tax lawyer. He's at agoristtaxadvice.com. I don't really know how all it is in the rest of America or really in England, but I did an Oxford debate and debated actually against Daniel Freed and made fun of them.

I thought we were going to win hands down, so I just spent most of my time bullying Daniel Freed. But it turns out we got our asses handed to us. and the student body at the Oxford Union voted that we prefer war with Russia to losing Ukraine, by which they even mean just the Donbas, right? Which is, of course, completely absurd and especially considering the fact that, as, you know, different speakers pointed out,

Britain has the smallest army that it's had since the days of the Napoleonic War, speaking of Napoleon. and they would have to, if they want to fully militarize, that's fine. You have to give up all your socialist benefits that y'all love so much. And so that's your choice. And you'll all have to go and join the army and fight. And as I said in my speech, and I acknowledge my own government's role in fomenting this crisis, but I says as far as all the hawks in this room, what you really mean is

Americans have to go and fight this war. America is the world empire and the military power. If anyone was going to go to war with Russia and to beat them in some kind of conventional war even have a chance, it's not the UK, as I said in my opening. Great to be here on Air Force One, forward operating air base of the American Empire, but right military outposts of the American Empire,

but that's all you are. Don't pretend like you are going to go liberate the Dom Pass. Get the hell out of here. But the student body completely rejected that. said, yeah, we are too, by which they meant all the poor kids, you know, which even then I don't think they meant that. Because under what, you know, magic wish is the UK Army possibly capable of throwing the Russians out of Ukraine, except for launching their atom bombs?

Well, yeah. I think you've got that in the polionic data point for me, because I've been using equal a lot lately, because I did the numbers. And it's actually 1823 is the last time. that the British army was as small as it is. So what I mean was actually in the debate, they let students get up and give their own speeches in the middle of the thing, which was interesting.

But the kid that got up and gave his speech on our side of the debate, he's the one who pointed that out. And did some quite a lot. There we go. Yeah, but you're right. I mean, it's certainly 3,000 people. I think the current estimate is Russia has 700,000, you know, people in Ukraine alone of a total strength of 1.5 million.

if things keep going south the way they are right now, they're talking about Russia mobilizing, mobilizing another 500,000 people, so Russia could theoretically have, by the end of this year, 2 million people. And if we could fill 10,000, yeah, probably,

if we could fill 20,000, would be lucky, frankly. And, you know, that number of troops in the meat grind of Ukraine probably would have been last two months before they all died. So good luck. with that. It's just idiotic. But, you know, I did a, well, I'm going to basically Durham University. It's like the

northern version of Oxford. I gave a speech there back in June. And I was amazed at how shallow. I mean, these are Oxford, you know, Durham. These are fantastic universities. You know, what you'd call Ivy League over the U.S. I was amazed at how shallow

and idiotic these kids views were on foreign affairs. and how ill-informed they were. And you press them with real data, real analysis. And they say, well, we'll just be giving Putin a big prize if he keeps the Donbass. So we have to keep fighting.

It's okay, well, okay, what happens if they lose even more tragedy? But we just have to keep fighting. I say, okay, how much more do you, are willing to give up before you realize that this just isn't going to work? I mean, the thing is, you know, it's not about, I mean I authorized about half of all the UK sanctions personally authorized but half of all the UK sanctions against Russia

after the war started. I sanctioned the Prime Minister. I sanctioned everybody in the National Security Council. I sanctioned everybody in both their chambers of parliament. That was all me, my signature at the bottom of those forms, right? So you can't exactly, I mean, I've got no bad feelings towards Russian people. I think Russian people are very nice people. I think people in most countries, if you're nice to them, they're nice to you.

that's just how the world works, you know, and so on. But the thing is people aren't looking at, you know, people are looking at an emotional, this through an emotional lens, not through a lens of actually what it's likely to happen. Okay, you want. Yeah, the question is, what did you get out of it? Or what did Britain get out of it? All those sanctions that you put on these people.

And here's this piece that you wrote the other day, the ultimate guide to why Russian sanctions have failed. Yeah, there we know. their removal. And just to take us back a few years now, at the start of the war, they launched a massive economic war. And you have the quote in here. Biden said, ah, the ruble will be rubble, and we're going to completely destroy their economy with our massive economic war against them. And then here we are now, and I don't know whose numbers are whose or which ones to trust, probably none. But certainly we have not gotten the result that the Biden

government promised us in terms of the crushing of the Russian regime under the weight of all the sanctions and all of that. And so, I mean, obviously, you know more than a thing or two about this, Ian. I mean, first of all, you mentioned sanctions on individuals. Can you explain to us the breadth of the sanctions? And then why aren't they working? So there are three kind of, I suppose there's kind of three types of sanctions. By the way, let me reiterate here. This is the peacemonger.substack.com. Okay, go ahead. Thank you very much.

So there are broadly three types of sanctions. There's like you sanction people. You know, you put an asset freeze on them. You say you can't come to my country. La, la, la, la, la, we don't like you. You can't travel here. There's that sanction. There's a you sanction a company.

You know, you say, well, you know, we're going to put you out of business because we don't like you very much. So if they have any assets, you can have free their assets, right? And then there's the whole massive say of what called thematic sanctions where you sanction sections of the economy, right? So when you look at the individual sanctions and also the entity sanctions, you know, the sanctioning companies, the first two, like 92% of the individual sanctions against, you know, the UK imposed,

and I know this, I was looking through this information while deciding off these forms are for people who've never been to the UK, and have never had any assets in the UK. And I can pretty much guarantee you that if you look at the same individual sanctions because we largely sanctioned the same people on the US list, on the European list, you'd find a similar picture.

They were sanctioning all these people. We're striking a blow to Putin's regime. And they've never even visited our countries and don't have much money. That's one. Two, it is we think that because we sanction them, even though sanctions have no impact on them, that's going to make them rush out of their homes.

call up Putin and say, hey, Putin, we don't like this war. You know, we've been sanctioned. Please stop. Well, of course, they're not going to do that. Because the more people you sanction, the less important they become. So, you know, when you start sanctioning the oligarchs, I mean, they lost their power over 20 years ago. When you're sanction some random guy who runs a university in Siberia, it's utterly pointless. So that's that. So on the sectors of the economy, so broadly speaking, we've cut them out of bank.

We've cut them out of access to certain types of components needed for their defense industry. We put limits on their oil production stuff and that sort of thing. We've sanctioned imports of gas. We basically do hardly any trade with them at all now. We're basically trying to choke their economy at large, right? So the financial sector sanctions, all those first sanctions in 2014 when I first arrived, these happen. And it comes out in the article, these happened when actually Russia was also suffering from

a global oil price collapse, you know, 2014. All prices have been about $100 to the barrel, really, since the end of the global financial crisis in 2008, 2009. They stayed like that for about five years. At 2014, they start a slump because of US shell production is picking up. That causes actually bigger problems for the Russian economy than sanctions themselves. There's another big dip at the start of 2016. You know, the Russian economy is on the ropes. You know, it really was struggling. And, you know, Mintz II happened at the time when Russia actually needed a deal. And they would have sailed, you know, with the deal if they got them some sanctions relief because their economy was in trouble. You know, but the problem is, you know, after that three-year

period, like basically from 2014 to 2016 has ended. You know, the Russians have convinced themselves that actually, you know, the Americans and the Brits are just screwing us over these sanctions. They're going to keep sanctions on us come of May after Minsk two got totally sold out in February 2015. So we're just going to rejig our economy to adapt to sanctions and live with sanctions. So screw sanctions, you sanction us as much as you like. We're going to learn to live without them. And a big part of how they decided to learn to live with them was a couple of ways, really.

One, they centralized all their kind of crown jaws of their economy under the state. So that's their oil production, their gas production, they get most of their export money from, their defense industrial complex, big centralization, rationalization sort of going on there. You know, they're going to park any liberal transformation

of their economy for the next decade or so. They're just going to focus on the things that have earned them lots of money in the past and stick with that. And the second, actually arguably more important thing that they did was they said, well, actually, you know,

the West seemed to have a bit of a sort of hard on whenever our variable collapses. and they really do the kind of ruble's rubble you know, Bosch and Millicomeroon as well. So actually what we're going to do is we're going to start to like having a weak ruble. We're going to make having a weak weak ruble a goal. Yeah, up until 2014,

the ruble had been about 35 to the dollar since about 2009. You can look at the numbers, the historical numbers, for a long time. And at the back end of 2014, the slums to about 100 to the dollar. Yeah, that big sort of dropping value. people start having wet dreams about this

and you know, Russia's economy is going to collapse. And it was on the votes for a bit, but they said, well, actually, you know, what happens when the ruble collapses, you know, what happens when the ruble collapses is they earn more money from all sales.

So if you sell a barrel of oil for $100, you know, and say, you know, until about 2014, you're getting about $3,500 rubles per barrel of oil, you know, because the currency rate, you know, if your ruble halfs in value, suddenly you're getting 7,000 rubles for your barrel of oil. So you're getting twice as much money for every barrel of oil.

So we looked at it from that lens. Actually, having a weak ruble was really cool because you could earn lots of money from it. So, you know, let's live with having high inflation. Let's kind of manage having high interest rates. Let's centralize our sort of capital so that we just don't rely on foreign lending. we just use the capital that we generate from oil sales to invest in ourselves, wean ourselves off relationships with the worst.

So that created an equilibrium where actually they were happy to have a really weak ruble. They were getting inflation under control, even though the buble had suddenly adjusted to a new much weaker level. That was fine, earning lots of money from that. But they also started buying dollars to keep the buble weak to build up their currency reserves so that they were almost looking ahead to when a war might happen.

I'm not saying they were planning for 1,22, but I think I'm quite sure that when Putin changed the Constitution so he could stay on for another term, he was thinking, well, you can't ride off the possibility the war will happen. So we need to save up our cash, which is what they did. And what happened when the war started? Essentially, you know, three very predictable things happened when the war started. The West put lots of sanctions on Russia,

the oil price went absolutely through the roof and the ruble went absolutely through the floor. Well, the sanctions, you know, by that time Russia's been living with sanctions for eight years and they say, screw you, we don't care anymore. I mean, they did have an impact. Let's be clear. Sanctions did have an impact, particularly the swift ban. But actually, you know, the Russians have been figuring out for eight years how to kind of live with them.

They have suffered 2% economic decline in 2022, bounced back with 4.6% economic growth in 2023. But in that first year, Russia made its biggest ever historical profit on oil and gas sales in its history because the combination of a sky high oil and gas price and a rock-bottom ruble price meant they were just going kaching, kaching, kaching from every barrel of all they sold. And idiots like Joe Biden and Boris Johnson are celebrating the fact that the rubles turn of robes. well you know Vladimir peach and he's got a wise smile in his face and it's flipping them one great big bird yeah all right you guys let's talk about crowd health at join crowdhealth dot com slash horton and or use

the promo code horton there to join crowdhealth join crowdhealth join crowdhealth dot com essentially the gangsters have priced us all out of health insurance what are you going to do well there's a solution it's not insurance it's crowdfunding and what you do is you pay cash and then your friends and fellow members at Join CrowdHealth help defer those costs and you help them when it's their turn and it works really well. It's really a great program to replace health insurance. Look at JoinCrowdealth.com slash Horton. All right, guys, let me take a second to tell you about expatmoney at expatmoney.com slash Scott. It's a guy named Mikhail Thorup. He's a great guy. I've met him and he's been an expat for many years and knows the rules and regulations all around

the world about buying property and or other investments, how to protect your neck, even get citizenship and passports from other countries and everything you need to know to be an expat, whether you're afraid of the coming collapse or just fighting modern day price inflation, find out what you need to know about how to protect your neck at expatmoney.com slash scott. I even read that it's at least figuratively true that it's Russian oil being piped through the BTC pipeline that was built to spite Russia and to cut them out of the Caspian game. But Azerbaijan is at least importing oil from Russia if it's not exactly the same fluid that's going through that pipe. It's same difference anyway, you know? Yeah, I mean, Russia's been investing in this southern corridor where they basically kind of are creating this big pipeline through to a lot.

on to kind of create that more bricks interconnectivity in terms of oil and gas supplies and so on. So that's been going on for a few years now, that kind of particular project. I mean, that's the other thing. Of course, you know, you kind of say, we're not going to buy Russian oil again. We're not going to buy Russian gas again. Oh, that's, you know, I mean, and let's be clear, not buying Russian oil and gas has cost Russia 180 billion US dollars a year. I mean, you know, we're talking big numbers.

But the problem is they're just selling it to China and India instead. So, you know, everything this happens since 2014, that they've turned to the east. That they've made up or not there? Yeah, I mean, Russia's, if you look at Russia's export surplus numbers, they're still above the average they were before the war started. Wow. And that doesn't include the absolute bumper, 592 billion,

you know, a harvest that they get in in 2022. $592 billion in oil and gas sales in one year. Can you think about it? I mean, I know by U.S. standards, that might not sound like a lot. But in terms of exports, you know, that's a pretty whopping deal. And look, I get it purchasing power parity and everything, all things considered.

But this war has also been hugely expensive for them. And also in terms of lives and in terms of opportunity cost and everything like that. And I wonder sometimes, you know, the, you know, you know, You know, when people cite GNP and GDP, these numbers are what they teach in junior college. The aggregate demand, as the Keynesians say. But if the aggregate demand is the government going into debt in order to buy weapons of destruction, then that's at least at the sunk cost or the overall cost of the standard of living of the people, even if by, you know, bubblegum and string

and bookkeeping gimmicks and whatever things look profitable, there's obviously a tradeoff for launching this massive war. And so... Yeah, yeah. The Americans, if you read the Washington Post, they'll say, look, everyone, military Keynesianism is working, and the GDP is up because the government spent all this money on the military. And then the same Washington Post will point,

at the Russians and say, yeah, their GDP is big this year, but a lot of that is just military spending. And that's just military Keynesianism. That doesn't really count. That's just these focus aggregate demand numbers. And I'm like, wow, the Washington Post sounds just like me, but only when they're talking about Russia, not the United States, you know? Yeah, exactly right.

I mean, of course, yeah, of course. I mean, you know, Russia's economy would look different today, you know, had the Ukraine crisis not started. That's absolutely clear. It would have made more moves towards diversifying its economic model. That's absolutely clear. But times changed and actually that they've adapted.

And the important question is, you know, have we adapted? You know, because economically, we are suffering in Europe more than they are suffering. So it's all about relative pain. From Putin's point of view, yeah, okay, you know, the economy is not what it could have been, had the Ukraine crisis not started, but who's feeding pain more, him or the Europeans? And from where he's sitting and the Ukrainians, from where he's sitting,

they're suffering a hell of a lot more pain than his country is. Yeah. All right. Listen, I'm going to let you go, but let me recommend a couple more pieces here to the good people. There is no functional way to end the war in Ukraine other than at the table is the point here. And NATO is failing Ukraine. And this is about, you know, all these false promises.

and, you know, prolonging the pain of Ukraine's great failure in this terrible war here. So it's Ian Proud, the peacemonger. What a great name, the peacemonger. Dot, substack.com, everyone, to go read his great stuff. And thank you for your time on the show. Really appreciate it. Yeah, look me up on YouTube as well, I, Ian Proud as well. Peace, Mung, you find me there too.

Thanks, Scott. Let's just get any time, my friend. I'm sorry, I meant to mention that. So I'm glad you meant to mention that. Yeah, everybody subscribe on the YouTube. Like and subscribe and hit the bell. Yeah, all right. See you next time.

Cheers, cool. This Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom, Roberts & Roberts, Brokerage, Inc., Moondos Artisan Coffee, Tom Woods Liberty Classroom, and APS Radio News. Subscribe in all the usual places and check out my books, Fool's Ayrned, Enough Already, and my latest, Provoked, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. Find all of the above at Scott Horton.org, and I'm serializing the audiobook of Provoked at

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