Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/30/22 Kyle Anzalone on the Evolving War in Ukraine

Episode Date: October 2, 2022

Kyle Anzalone is back on Antiwar Radio to update us on all the biggest news concerning the war in Ukraine. They run through the Russian annexation announcement, the Ukrainian victories reported in the Donbas, the Russian people’s reaction to increased conscription, the West’s depleting weapons stock, the destruction of the Nordstream Pipelines and the next round of U.S. support for Ukraine.  Discussed on the show: news.antiwar.com  Conflicts of Interest “Game On” (Harpers) Kyle Anzalone is news editor of the Libertarian Institute, opinion editor of Antiwar.com and co-host of Conflicts of Interest with Will Porter. Follow him on Twitter @KyleAnzalone_ This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and Thc Hemp Spot. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Pacifica Radio, October 2nd, 2022. 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 the editorial director of Anti-War.com. editor of the new book, Hotter Than the Sun.

Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,700 of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. And introducing today's guest, it's anti-war.com's opinion editor, Kyle Anzalon. Welcome back to the show, Kyle. How are you doing? Doing great, Scott. Thanks for having me back on. I really appreciate having you here. wear a couple of hats over there at anti-war.com, doing a lot of the news reporting, too.

So let's start with the bad news. As of the time we're recording this on Friday morning, the latest breaking news is that Putin has gone ahead and approved the annexation of these major Ukrainian regions, four of them, not just the Donbask, but also Zaprogia and Kurson as well. Is that right? Yeah. So this has, I guess, been a expected now for a couple of weeks. Since Russia announced they were holding the referendums, I don't think anybody really anticipated that Russia would hold a referendum and the vote would turn out be no in any of these regions. I think all were, at least the reported, the two southern regions, Kershaw and Zafarisia, voted at like 90 percent levels. And then they reported the

Donbass Republics of Donnesk and O'Hansk voting in like the 90s. 99% regions. My guess, Scott, is that, you know, if you hold a vote in the middle of wartime, the people who are living in the region occupied by the Russian forces are probably going to go out and vote to join Russia. Either they could be, of course, intimidated by reprisals. But my guess is a lot of the people who would support joining Ukraine have already fled. And we have to remember that these regions have been getting shelved.

I mean, for talking about the Dombas, we're really. going back like eight, nine years now where, you know, they've been under fire from the Ukrainian forces, but even the southern regions have been held by Russia for the past seven months, which means it's been Ukraine bombing them. And so a sediment in that region has turned against Ukraine. I don't think we, you know, should really be surprised by that. So, yeah, this is no reason really to presume the legitimacy of the counting or anything when it's in the middle of a war. It's clearly essentially a stunt and a pretext for annexation. regardless of the opinion of the people there, even if the opinion there is super majority

pro annexation, you know, sort of beside the point at this point, something that Russia is doing. Yeah, no, on my show Conflets of Interest, I've been calling it. It's like a military maneuver, but they just cloaked it in democracy, right? So Russia had a major offensive go against them by the Ukrainian forces, and I think a couple of things happened. And one, the people in these regions were worried that the Russian forces were going to withdraw. And if they withdraw, then the Ukrainian forces are going to come in. And a lot of the people there are going to be labeled sympathizers with Moscow.

And there's a lot of really bad actors within the Ukrainian armed forces and a lot of people who, I think, rightly feel reprisals. And so in one way, I think this was to ensure the people of these regions that the Russian forces weren't going anywhere. And secondly, I think for Putin, it was a way to try to draw a red line to say, hey, you better not attack these regions because we're going to start calling them Russia from now on. And this, it doesn't look like the Europeans or the Ukrainians are going to bat down on any of this and will attack these regions. So, you know, it's going to be an excuse for the Kremlin to escalate this war even further. Yeah, I mean, people need to really understand the context.

when he's saying, we'll do anything to defend Russian territory, including used nuclear weapons. And not necessarily, but up to and including nuclear weapons. Oh, and by the way, these four major regions are all now part of Russia again. When he knows good and well that Ukraine and NATO and America's position will be, no, it's not either, it's occupied Ukrainian territory is all it is, and they're going to continue attacking it on that basis. so that's a hell of a stunt if he thought it was going to get the Americans to back down or something like that that's wrong if it's a pretext for a massive escalation i don't think he needed it

but it's you know maybe for internal russian politics he needed to set it up this way for some reason or something like that but it puts the war in a whole new and terrible context with this you know it'd be like if in Iraq War II and America's fighting Muktaud al-Sauder and then Iran annexes Najaf right when we're fighting

in Najaf. Now we're fighting against Iran when before we were just fighting against their proxies in Iraq something like that. Not a perfect analogy but it's politically speaking he's setting us up for a major

escalation of the conflict here not just from the Russian side but I'm afraid from the NATO side too it sounds like Kyle yeah no I really agree because you know we've seen with the Crimean Peninsula which is going to essentially be in the same status although at least with that annotation there is a referendum that happened that wasn't during wartime that gives a little bit more legitimacy to that but you know it's going to essentially be in the same status as these other four regions which is clear territory claimed by Moscow that's not going to be recognized

by certainly anyone in the West, the European Union, any NATO members, any American allies. And we've seen that the U.S. says, yes, Kiev, you could go ahead and attack and try to tape back Crimea. Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, keeps saying that our forces are going to take back Crimea. And, you know, if we look at the reaction to this, you know, this is something that's in the now updated article on anti-war.com today, Scott, is immediately after the, the signing that were Putin this morning during a ceremony signed it and made all this official. The European Union released the statement saying that the annexation was illegal, but more importantly, Zelensky said that Ukraine would accelerate its application to become a NATO, a member of NATO and made the case that really at this point, Kiev is already a de facto member

of the alliance. And so we're talking about war between NATO and, you know, Ukraine are Russia now much more officially on Ukrainian soil here. This is game very serious and, you know, very, very intense escalations coming here, Scott. Man, talk about the perils of empire there when the satellites start saying things like that. Who's in charge of telling Zelensky to not say that? You know, I don't know. Maybe nobody. It's anti-war radio.

I'm talking with Kyle Anzalone from anti-war.com about the crisis. crisis, the horrible war in Ukraine and what it all means. Now, talk to me about the situation in Donetsk right now, because at least according to Jonathan Landay in Reuters this morning, the Ukrainians are making major headway continuously still in the Dombas now, where they had already taken back, I guess, the northern half of La Hansk, and now they're moving, and I'm not a master of the map of all those villages and towns and cities in eastern Ukraine, but apparently they're moving on a major portion of Garnetsk now and claim to have the Russians surrounded yeah so I I guess myself and then Dave DeCamp the news editor at anti-war dot com

haven't been doing a lot of like the battlefield uh because you know a lot of times offensives happen but then they're repelled within the days or weeks after but seeing the success that Ukraine has in recent offenses I guess is you know worth paying a little more attention to this, and especially it being in a region that Russia is now saying isn't Russian territory. Seems pretty serious, but I guess I'll see how this plays out over the next couple of days. If Ukraine's able to actually take and hold this territory, or if Russia is just leading some Ukrainian soldiers into a trap, they take one town and then instantly gets taken back, which happens with some frequency here. Yeah. Yeah, I had read a thing that said

that the Ukrainians were taking major casualties for essentially what amount to like PR stunts there, where maybe they move forward and take some territory, but they're losing so many men compared to the Russian losses in order to do so that it makes sense, I guess, in the short term, to say to NATO, see, you know, give us more weapons. It's working. At the same time, they're really cutting deep into their bench as far as who they have left to fight. Although on the other hand, there's a lot of reports about all the the conscription efforts and calling up the reserves and everything in Russia being quite chaotic and massive anti-war protests and all this kind of thing. So what do you know about that?

Are you following that very closely about the Putin's calling up of 300,000 reserves and expanding conscription and all this stuff and how it's going? Yeah. So it's always hard to say because, you know, we're getting the one angle from the Kremlin and they're saying they're calling up 300,000. Who knows that they can call up that many? I assume in a country the size of Russia, they probably won't have trouble getting that many, enlisting that many men. But they could be going for a lot more. And then on the other side, it's really the Western press that's highlighting the like, you know, anti-war protests and saying, oh, look, all these people are trying to flee Russia. Now they're, obviously they do have some video evidence and some evidence here

that there are definitely some men trying to get out of Russia. before they get conscripted into this war. But I'm not quite sure if it's as extensive as it's being portrayed in the Western press. There has been some coverage on it from RT. So, you know, it is definitely going on. There are anti-war protests. There is crackdown from the Russian authorities on those protests. And there are people trying to get out of Russia, either to the Central Asian countries

or potentially into some European countries. And then there's a lot of debate going on within the European Union. whether to welcome these people as essentially refugees or to say, like, you know, they can't come in because there's some kind of security threat to Europe. And there's kind of a balance and an argument going on there with the European Union on how they're going to treat and handle the Russians trying to get out to avoid being conscripted into the war. And I've also seen some people, Scott, and I should mention this too, within Russia, who are very much responding to this. as Americans responded to the early Iraq war and things like that, the rally around the flag. I've seen some women on the street saying real men decide to fight, and there are groups of young men going out, getting drunk, and all decided to go enlist and things like that, too.

So, you know, it isn't just the one way. It's not that all Russians hate this thing, and that is the way it's being portrayed in much of the Western press. Yeah. You know, it's funny because the propaganda, of course, is that the Russians, want to recreate the entire Soviet Union or at least the old Russian Empire and they're a threat to the Baltics and Poland next and all this. But at the same time, the narrative is, and seemingly true, they're having their problems and they essentially have a great artillery force or something, but they have no kind of armored force that would be required to conquer any NATO country,

even the Baltic states probably. It sort of looks like they got way ahead of themselves and overestimating their capabilities here and had to kind of retrench and change the tactics and strategy of their war to just this full-on artillery assault. But I don't know enough about battlefield strategy and tactics and so forth. But it seems like that only cuts it in some circumstances, but not all. And the Ukrainians have been able with obviously American coordination. They seem to have been able to maneuver around and score quite a few successes against the Russians. Even though they have a much larger force, they have not deployed yet. I guess the question is, you know, whether they're now going to, you know,

double or triple their number of forces in the country, because I believe so far they've only sent in like 120,000 out of their 400,000 man army, right? Yeah, so I think there's a few general points to be made on the whole strategy here. It's very hard to argue that this war has gone the way that, you know, the Kremlin has anticipated. And if nothing else, the Kharkiv offensive seems to really prove that because, you know, the Russian forces really were forced out of that. And even if there was some strategy in that retreat, it definitely seems to be the case that, you know, they had to give back Ukrainian territory that they held. Whether, you know, early in the war, the offensive towards Kiev was really aimed at taking the capital, really aimed at regime change in Kiev, or if it was to draw forces out of other areas.

of the country, you know, that all could be debated at the strategy level. A lot of the people who would maybe argue that Putin has decided to engage in a very, you know, limited war here. He's not carrying out carpet bombing. I mean, you know, it's really hard to imagine that Zelensky would be able to remain in Kiev, take photos for Vogue, walk around on the streets in the middle of this war. I mean, that's pretty shocking. The Zelensky's been able to do this does seem to indicate that, you know, Russia has waged a somewhat limited war here. Another thing I really don't think Putin and the Kremlin anticipated is the level of military assistance. The West has given Ukraine they've essentially matched the Russian military budget for this war. And so, you know,

everybody's making it sound like the plucky Ukrainians are fighting back against. the Russians, well, you know, Ukraine's a smaller state than Russia, but the Ukrainians have tens of billions of dollars of military equipment, you know, from the most advanced stoppiles in the world. Now, one thing that I read in, I think it was CNBC this week, Scott, was there's a real issue coming up here where all the Western countries have essentially given away all of their additional stoppiles to Ukraine at this point. point. And the number of munitions are required for Ukraine to continue waging the battle at the

rate they have been, far exceeds what the West is able to produce. And so I think the U.S. only produces about 30,000 155 millimeter artillery rounds a year. And Ukraine is going through that in two weeks. I think partly this is being promoted, of course, to benefit the military industrial complex who sees like just dollar signs on this war, right? They're going to be able to wrap up production. It's going to take, you know, at least six months for a lot of these weapons systems to increase production. But they're talking actually about two years, three years for a lot of these systems

before they're even able to churn out more armaments than they already are. And so they're gained huge investment from the White House and from all these other countries to produce more and more weapons for this war. But at the same time, there probably is a real logistics crunch here that's going to have to be examined when there isn't enough munitions being produced to continue to arm the Ukrainians with the weapons that we currently have been. I think the same case for the Haimar munitions that we've been sending Ukraine, the stoppiles are gained pretty low. And the Pentagon is saying, well, we're not going to send any more of our actual weapons to Ukraine because that could put us in jeopardy, say we had to fight a war. against any other countries. So, you know, I'm not sure how they're playing on making up the immediate gap here. Well, folks, sad to say, they lied us into war. All of them. World War I, World

War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq War I, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq War II, Libya, Syria, Yemen, all of them. But now you can get the e-book, All the War Lies, by me, for free. Just sign up the email list at the bottom of the page at Scott Horton.org or go to Scotthorton.org subscribe. Get all the war lies by me for free. And then you'll never have to believe them again. Hey, y'all, they've got great deals on weed at the hempspot.com. The hemp spot specializes in Delta 8 tetrahydro-canabinol instead of Delta 9, so they can send it straight to you anywhere in America. Recently, a friend moved and didn't have a guy in his new town. But then he heard about the hemp spot.com on my show and was saved figuratively and literally.

Because if you use the promo code, Scott, you get 15% off every order, and free shipping on any order over $100. Legal jams, bud, gummies, and the rest in your state. The Hempspot.com. Spell the THC. You guys, my friend Mike Swanson has written such a great revisionist take on the early history of the post-World War II national security state and military industrial complex in the Truman Eisenhower and Kennedy years.

It's called The War State. I have to say, it's the most convincing case I've read that Kennedy had truly decided to end the Cold War before he was killed. In any case, I know you'll love it. The War State by Mike Swanson. Well, I'll never forget, and people can read this in Harper's Magazine, their Washington editor, the great Andrew Coburn, wrote about how he had a source at this kind of corporate breakfast, I think it was,

in Crystal City. Right outside of Washington, D.C., home of all the Pentagon and its contractors and all of these guys. And it was all weapons firms, essentially, at this corporate breakfast they were having. And the news broke. The Russians are seizing Crimea in 2014. And they all were whooping and laughing and cheering and clinking their orange juice glasses, I guess, and celebrating that. Ah, forget the Middle East. The Cold War with the Russians again.

it's on big ticket items subs and planes and ships long range bombers hypersonic missiles oh man we're in the money and they're laughing all the way to the bank america's simply been captured by the arms industries that's it and they're threatening and get us all killed right now it sure looks like to me they'll make a buck today and be vapor with the rest of us tomorrow yeah uh and If anybody thinks that doesn't sound believable, Matt Ho told me on my show, and he's the great whistleblower and running for Senate now. But he told me that after the Libyan War started, he was at some dinner with all the fancy pants people like John McCain. And, you know, the war started and they were all just giddy about it, you know, all just happy because they knew they were made so much more money and we're so excited about it. And it's just incredible to see how far that they'll push things.

and how successful that they can be in forging their consensus as well. Give people a couple of scare stories. You know, you're too young to remember, Kyle. But 20 years ago today, they were saying, you're pro Saddam Hussein. How come you got Saddam Hussein's talking points, Mr. Saddam Hussein's side taker? And that worked on people.

As absolutely ridiculous as that sounds. There's no more Putin partisans in America than there ever were Saddam Hussein. partisans in America. No one ever was taking their side of the story is simply the truth versus the lie, that's all. The danger that were being put in unnecessarily. And of course, Saddam Hussein couldn't hit back and they knew it. That's why they were targeting him, not because he was a threat, because they knew he wasn't. Iraq is doable, said Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, right? Russia's not doable. Russia can erase every,

single city in the middle part of this continent in one afternoon can kill all of us. But we act like, yeah, what are you going to do about it, Saddam? At the same time, they say that Putin is the most dangerous psychopath on the planet since Saddam. Only we know he's got 6,000 H-bombs. But anyway. Yeah. Well, I do remember being a kid, Scott, and people, you know, saying, what are you with the terrorists? Anytime anybody questioned the narrative.

But one more story on this that Dave DeCamp wrote at anti-war.com this week, just how blatant they are. So one of the things that the White House is celebrating and telling the military industrial complex that will really be able to cash in on here is there's a lot of NATO member states that still use Russian or Soviet-era weapons because they were former, you know, USSR states or members of the Warsaw path until, you know, 1990. And they're saying that with the sanctions on Russia, there's no way that any of these countries will be able to buy anything to, you know, repair or replace or rearm their systems. So now, you know, Poland and all these other Baltic and former USSR and Warsaw, Pat State, Scott, they all have to come to the U.S. and get their weapons from the American arms makers now. They got to replace all of their Soviet-era taints and artillery systems and planes, which they, you know, most of these militaries are still all the Soviet-era systems. And so I'm sure they see just huge dollar signs and giant money beds rolling into Washington for all this in the next couple of years.

You know, it certainly doesn't trickle down to the American people. You know, it's not really going to help your town or whatever if Lockheed opens up a factory because they're only, going to pay people like $30,000 a year. You're better off at this point working at Taco Bell or something. So it's not really a good deal for you, but it's a good deal for Washington. Yeah. Totally out of control. All right now, tell me about what happened to the Nord Stream pipelines, everything you know, and at least report to me all the different speculations. I know you don't know. Yeah. So we don't know what happened. And this is really one of the harder things to try. to puzzle together for me, Scott, but we do know that there's, I think, four leads now,

four confirmed leads, and they had detected a few explosions, and it did hit both pipelines about the same time. And so that means that, you know, this being some kind of natural cause seems almost impossible. I don't know. I'm not like a geologist. I don't construct pipelines. I'm not an engineer. So maybe there's something that I'm not understanding here, but everything I've read fully suggests, and everybody from the Europeans, the Americans, even the Russians are saying that this wasn't at to sabotage. So I'm guessing that somebody did drop some ordinance in the water or set ordinance in some way to cause explosions and attempt to, I guess, permanently turn off these two pipelines. Both pipelines were pressurized with gas.

And so this is important, right? You can't just leave a pipeline. empty. I think you really should have something going through it at all times, but the very least, there has to be like whatever substance you're playing on pumping through it down there for it to maintain all this in structural integrity and everything like that. So when these explosions went off, you know, we're now getting pictures of these like, you know, huge areas of gas being released. A lot of people are pointing to the White House here because of comments made by Joe Biden and Victoria Newland about, you know, if Russia went to war, then these pipelines wouldn't ever function again. I'm really skeptical that the White House would resort to blowing

up the pipeline, Scott. You know, for years and years, we have seen the preferred method from Washington is to just use sanctions. And as far as I could tell, there's no real risk that the Europeans aren't going to go along with the American sanctions at this point, especially key countries like Germany where the Nord Stream pipelines run to. So I would guess the White House who had chosen Sanchez. I mean, these are civilian infrastructure. Also, it's an environmental disaster. And so it just seems to me that there's too many strides against it for this to be something that was at least approved by the White House. Now, maybe the CIA is out of control or, you know, the European command is completely out of control and something wild happened

there. But I'm not quite sure that this was approved in the Oval. office. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, my suspicion is that it was the Americans or NATO forces. I don't see the mileage in it for the Russians. When they want to turn it back on, it's already capped at the western end. The Russians are the ones trying to sell it. The Germans are the ones refusing to buy it. And as you're saying there, the Germans are well in hand from the American point of view. They're not going back to the Nord Stream 2, certainly not short of any grand deal with Putin now. So, yeah, I really don't have a reason to point the finger at the Kremlin either.

The only thing I could think of is that, you know, Putin would benefit by spiking gas prices again. And so, you know, maybe it was an attempt to create, uh, increase energy prices, but no energy was going through the pipelines at the time anyway. So I don't think in, and as far as I've seen in the markets, it doesn't seem to have made that big of a deal. And so I really don't see any, you know, benefit from, from Russia's point of view. you either. So I'm kind of baffled on how this happened and why. Initially, I really assumed it was

the polls. Yeah. Yeah, it could have been the polls, right? It could have been an independent actor in Europe with their own agenda. Yeah, absolutely. Anyway, I don't want to spend too much time on things that we can only speculate about, but at least it's important to know, you know, what's happening there. And then so the Senate has approved another $16 billion in Ukraine aid. But the point I wanted to ask you about was not just the 50 billion there and the 16 billion here, but the announcement that they make of every little bit of millions of dollars of equipment that they give in the meantime, you know, under that 50 billion, as they parse it out, they announced every little bit of it. And I wonder whether they ever talk about that as being a deliberate kind

of provocation to just rub it in the Russians face, that it is us and not the Ukrainians. that are fighting them and are giving them such a hard time and that kind of thing. Or is there a point behind that or there's absolutely that careless about how emotional they make their adversaries here? So I thought I assumed it was more for U.S. domestic consumption here because what's happening is Congress is authorizing like big bulk money that the White House could kind of use for whatever at once. And so a lot of the money has gone into the presidential drawdown authority, which is a slush fund that lets the president as commander-in-chief send weapons from U.S. stockpiles

wherever he wants them to go. And so, you know, Congress has authorized more money for that fund, and then the president has sent American weapons to Ukraine and is now buying more weapons to replace the ones they sold. They've also been giving a lot of aid to the Eastern European states in exchange for those countries sending weapons to Ukraine. We're either sending them new American weapons or giving them different kinds of funds and money. And so I think a lot of it is just having a new package every week that's like near or at a billion dollars. I think it sounds like we're doing a lot to the American people. And I think that's the perception that the White House wants to give right now. And then also I think is kind of just how it's worked because every

couple of weeks, the Ukrainians, oh, now we need more ammunition for the high Mars. Now we need more howitzers. Now we need taints or now we need mind clearing equipment. So we've actually seen that prior to the invasion of Kharkiv, the U.S. gave Ukraine a lot of equipment that would be needed if they recapture territory. And I think part of it is just strategic, too, that we're giving the aid in these chunks because, you know, the Pentagon's looking and talking with Kiev And they're saying, okay, so for the month of October, we went all this. And then they approve a $1.2 billion transferred to Ukraine with, you know, a month's worth of ammunition, it seems. And then, you know, new, new Haimar systems this time.

I think they doubled the number of Haimars. And each time, too, it seems like they try to ratchet up the level just a little bit on how provocative the weapon systems are, where, you know, at first, they're more small arms or things like. that and now in the next two months we're sending them advanced air defense systems the high mars were a big escalation and all the other equipment the drones and things like that anti-radar systems yeah all right i'm sorry we're all out of time for the bad news but you guys can find all of it at antivore.com where Kyle Anzalone is the opinion editor thank you so much for your time again call thank you Scott. All right, you guys, and that has been anti-war radio for this morning. I'm your host, Scott Horton. Find all the interview archives at Scott Horton.org, and I'm here every Sunday morning

from 9 to 9.30 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week.