The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1023: Victoria Nuland, Ukraine and Russia w/ Darryl 'Martyrmade' Cooper

Episode Date: March 7, 2024

80 MinutesPG-13Darryl Cooper is the host of the Martyrmade podcast and the co-host of The Unraveling with Jocko Willink.Darryl joins Pete to talk about the resignation of the undersecretary of state for political affairs, Victoria Nuland, her role in the ongoing Ukraine/Russia conflict, and an overview of the history of Russia and Ukraine since the Cold War ended.The Martyrmade PodcastThe Martyrmade SubstackThe Unraveling PodcastVIP Summit 3-Truth To Freedom - Autonomy w/ Richard GroveSupport Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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head on over to freemamie on the wall.com forward slash support. You can see the many ways you can support me there. The best way is right on that website. You can send me something in the mail. P.O. Box 413, Lineville, Alabama, 362-66. I look forward to trying to do a lot more this year with the show, and any support you can give me helps with that. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the P. Kenyano show. I'm here with Darrell Cooper once again. How are you doing, Darrell? Good, man. It's always good to be here with you. Thanks.

Well, thank you for joining me today. This is a week where an announcement came down that for those of us who actually know who runs foreign policy and who influences foreign policy, it was a huge announcement that Victoria Nulin was stepping down as I think was she undersecretary? Yeah. People like her, you know, their titles come and go. But she's sort of one of those undead creatures in Washington that no matter who's Republican Democrat Dick Cheney, you know, Joe Biden doesn't matter. Like she kind of always hangs around and they maintain that consistency of policy over the course of, you know, many administrations that has not ended well. And, you know, hopefully the fact that she's stepping down, I mean, she's going to land on her feet. Don't worry about that. I'm sure she'll have a nice gig at Harvard or something soon. It may signal that the policy that she's headed up in Eastern Europe since, you know, she was hired to her current position in 2013, 2014, when Maidan happened, that maybe we're deciding that we've got to accept defeat on that front and move on.

So hopefully that's the case. When you see someone like her step down, someone who's such a permanent fixture in what you would call the administrative state. really. What's your, what's your action? Well, you know, there's a lot of sort of musical chairs going on with things like this. And so you have to look at who she's replaced by. And, you know, the guy that they brought in, I don't know a whole lot about him, except that he used to work for Strobe Talbot. And, you know, Strobe Talbot was one of Clinton's main Russia guys back in the 90s. And, you know, he's not a, he's not an, he's not an.

idiologue like someone like like Victorian Newland and her set is like with regard to Russia. He's more pragmatic. He was always somebody though who You know when he he he may have thought something was a bad idea or he was pushing for something he thought was a good idea But when Clinton told him no, you're gonna go do this and endorse it fully and push it on everybody else He would follow orders and go do it. So you know, he All things told I'd rather have a pragmatist like that in there than somebody like Newland. But yeah, it's hard to read these things because, again, like, you know,

Newland's not leaving the foreign policy scene. She's going to go get hooked up at Brookings or CSIS and, you know, teach classes at Georgetown about how we ought to conduct our foreign policy. So, you know, it's not some giant victory, but as far as the immediate policy with regard to Russia and Ukraine, it hopefully signals, you know, an improvement in that area. When you look at all of this, I was listening to Scott Ritter the other day was saying he believes it as many as 400,000 Ukrainian men could be dead. And what they're judging that by is they're looking at obituaries. They're counting obituaries for the last two years that have appeared.

He says another 100,000 could be missing. Do those numbers seem in the ballpark of what you've been looking at? Yeah, obviously it's hard to say, but, you know, when I look at, you know, I think these numbers came from Ukraine or if not Ukraine U.S. officials, but one of the two, that the average age of a Ukrainian infantryman on the field right now is 43 years old. I mean, you know, that's like Germans in February of 1945 numbers, you know, because, you know, again, it doesn't mean that everybody on the battlefield is. 43, some of them are 25, but they got 55 and 60 year old guys out there now. And if you're scraping the bottom of the barrel like that, then, you know, a country of pre-war was a 35, 40 million people or something. And you're scraping the bottom of the barrel like that, then you're hurting for manpower, no question about it. And you'd have to kill a whole hell of a lot of Ukrainian men to get them to that point. So, you know, whether it's 400,000 or 500,000 or it's a lot. It's a hell of

of a lot. Go back to my Don and what is your take on it? What's your take on why a coup took place? Why the, you know, everybody wants to talk about the house. Everybody wants to talk about snipers here, there. I've read it all. To me, it's always the why. So why? You know, I read this anecdote from the former CIA director in defense. Defense Secretary Bob Gates, who, you know, obviously is a swamp creature, but relative to his colleagues, you know, is more sensible, I think, than most of the people who've been in those positions for quite a while. And he was asked about our difference in approach toward Russia and the Soviet Union versus our approach to China over the years. And this was, you know, a little,

this was a handful of years ago before a lot of people have started to talk about. you know, our need to start focusing on China more. But, you know, he said it was very interesting because you go back to 1989 and you have these two communist powers and one of them agrees to let their empire go voluntarily, agrees to have a bloodless democratic revolution essentially, agrees to end the Cold War without a fight. The other side had Tiananmen Square and, you know, I know there's sort of some revisionism going on about that. And I haven't really sorted sort of through any of that yet, but there's something going on in 1989 in China that was, you know, trying to, trying to put pressure on that regime and they squashed it. And from that point on,

you know, we've pretty much been treating China like a good buddy and somebody we can trust and work with and so forth. And we've been just like rabid dogs when it comes to Russia, at least after they stopped taking orders from us in the 1990s. And so Gates was asked about this. He says, you know, it is interesting. He said, if you go back to like World War II, this is hard for us to even really imagine these days because we're just, we've grown up in the empire, you know, when the OSS was stood up, when America came into the war, like we had no presence overseas. We had no intelligence presence overseas. We had nothing to the point where Dulles was actually bringing in recent immigrants from like Holland and stuff to ask

them to draw diagrams of like where the port is and stuff. That's where our, you know, our foreign intelligence presence was at the time. And so, you know, you start out like that. We have to stand up a Soviet Union desk at this new intelligence agency or, you know, we have to beef up the Soviet desk at the State Department. We have to build out these institutions now to deal with these things that are emerging. And he said when we started doing that with China, the people that we hired to fill all the seats at the China desk, whether it's State Department or DoD or the intelligence agencies, mostly, like overwhelmingly, they were the children of missionaries who had spent a lot of time in China. And they like China. They like Chinese people. They like Chinese

culture. And they sort of saw their role as, you know, facilitating peaceful mediation between their country in this country that they had a lot of respect for. With regard to the Soviet Union when we started doing that, and even before that, when we had like, you know, our diplomatic corps in the Russian Empire before the Soviet Union, small as it was, wasn't, you know, we filled that up almost entirely with non-Russian refugees who had come over, who did not like Russians, they did not like, you know. And they saw their role as helping the United States fight this. beast or using the United States to fight this beast. And that, you know, Gates said that when you start,

you know, bureaucracies have a lot of sort of, uh, just inertia behind them. And so when you start out with a certain attitude, a certain approach, it stays that way for, you know, unless you have some sort of conscious cleanup of it, it's going to stay that way because everybody there's like it. You hire somebody new. They get integrated into that culture. The old people retire. You bring in new people and it just maintains that culture and that approach. And, you know, I think that that's something we've really seen pick up, you know, in spades since the Soviet Union fell or really since like, I guess the 80s is when we started taking in like a lot of refugees and then in the 90s like a whole lot where, you know,

if you, if you, and not only refugees, just foreign nationals and, and, you know, know, recent immigrants and stuff. If you look back at the 1990s, for example, like whether you're talking about Madeline Albright, whether you're talking about the chairman of the joint chiefs in the, in the mid-90s under Clinton, General Salakashvili, just across the board, you see the same thing you saw during the first Trump impeachment hearing. It's just one emigre after another from Eastern Europe or from that region going up and you're like, you know, you kind of realize that these people are, they're bringing their priors with them when they come to the United States and join up for that. And, you know, you can understand what, look, I mean, if you need somebody

to work intelligence or in your diplomatic core for, you know, Nigeria, the child of a Nigerian immigrant is probably a good candidate to do that. You know, they understand the culture and can bring that to it. But there's downsides to it, you know, especially when the other side really comes with a chip on its shoulder. Pst, did you know? Those Black Friday deals everyone's talking about? They're right here at Beacon South Quarter. That designer's sofa you've been wanting. It's in Seoul, Boe Concept and Rocheburoix, the Dream Kitchen. Check out at Cube Kitchens. Beacon South Quarter, Dublin, where the smart shoppers go. Two hours free parking, just off the M50,

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Or you know, fight Brenda. I guess listening to what you just, says, some people could say, well, because they chose people who were more sympathetic to China, maybe that's why we have so many China problems now. Yeah, I mean, for sure. Although I would say our China problems really didn't start until, you know, the late 90s or so. I mean, when we decided to let them into the WTO and just kind of threw that open, you know, before that, and this really goes to like U.S. foreign policy as a whole, you know, if you go back to

even the 80, I'll say up through the 80s even. You know, you still had this sort of, this sort of old school wasp attitude, post-warlike kind of wasp attitude, where, you know, you had guys like James Baker, you had these people who had enough heft and gravitas, not just in Washington, but just sort of in general, that they could control the fanatics and hold them back a little bit and overrule them a bit. You know, you get up into the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, and a lot of those people really started to fade away to the point where you get up to

the Bush administration. And, like, you know, our foreign policy is just totally hijacked by a bunch of second and third generation neocons that somebody like George Cannon never would have even allowed into his office, you know? And so that sort of consistent hand on the steering wheel leadership at the very, very, very top level has sort of evaporated, you know, it really doesn't exist anymore. There is like a, there's a ruling class, but it's sort of amorphous and people come and go and you can come in and be cast out. It's not this, you know, it's not the sons of Cincinnati anymore, you know, the children

of the American Revolution or something. And so, you know, there's nobody who has like a real sense of proprietorship over the country and feels like, you know, by thinking about the long-term future of the country. They're looking after the long-term future of their own grandkids and great grandkids in a very real sense because this is their legacy that they're going to inherit. You know, now it's, there's nobody like that for the most part. And so it's just a big free-for-all, you know, and it's whichever interest group is the best organized and the best funded and the most ruthless and just the best at getting their way through all the various, you know, levers that that we provide for that, um, that they tend to get their way, you know, and it's not a conspiracy

necessarily. It's not something that, you know, there's a, there's this sort of, you know, deep seated sort of conspiracy against Russia that keeps us in this belligerent attitude toward them that, I mean, it's that in when I say there's not some conspiracy. I mean, it's not something that like pervades the whole government. It's not like the regime is like this. It's that the people who feel that way, they know how to work the system. They're extremely well organized. They're extremely well funded, you know, especially since Putin throughout all the billionaires, I mean, uh, or a lot of those oligarchs. Those guys have been spending their money in London and, and New York, uh, to get, you know, NATO and our countries to remain belligerent toward Putin ever since they got run out

of town. So, um, you know, there's a lot of money behind it, a lot of organization. And then you have on top of that sort of the, the long-term institutional approach that, that Gates described. Well, that's what part of being under a managerial regime does, right? You can have these little special interest groups, unelected special interest groups, you know, people who, you know, they can be fired, but if they do their job well, they can be there for a very, very long time,

even after the administration's come and go, they stay around. And you can have these where it's not really, really a conspiracy. All it is is there is one group inside the government that's like, okay, this is what we want to do. We have the power to do it. So let's concentrate. Let's work with this NGO, whomever. And let's institute a coup and put our guy into place. And you can have, you know, you can have audio on YouTube with the proof where, you know, they're like, Oh, what was the EU going to say? Well, fuck the EU.

I mean, that's what we get, right? When we have a managerial regime, we can have two or three people who decide, let's foment a war on the other side of the planet. And there you go. Yeah. And, you know, I think maybe in one of your conversations with Thomas, something he said, He said that the American government is a machine that was built to fight the Cold War, right? And, you know, and I would say the Cold War and World War II, because if you go back to, like, December 6th, 1941, and look at the size and the function of the federal government, it was 99% of what we have now.

Like, it was 1% of what we have now. And so it grew up in that environment, in the environment of total war and global conflict with the Soviet, Union. And, you know, that's not, that's just not something you can necessarily shut off. You know, I'm doing a, I'm doing a series on my substack right now about the history of like slavery, going back a long ways and taking it up to the lead up to the American Civil War. And I was talking about the Spanish and the Portuguese and how, you know, if you're going to, when you, when you want to talk about the approach they took when they, when they came over into the new world or any of the other places that they ended up, you know, these people had been in

war for hundreds and hundreds of years, for 600 years. They had been at continual war against the Moors, pushing them out of Liberia. And so it was built into their culture. It was built into the very way that, like, the incentives that led to certain people being promoted and receiving sort of, you know, and you can't just turn something like that off. And so we have a, we have a government that's built to fight a war like that.

And, you know, it's, it's, I mean, look, Samuel Huntington did not have to be a genius to know that after the Soviet Union fell, we were going to go look for another enemy, and it was probably going to be Islam. You know, he called that one. Islam proved to be sort of an unworthy adversary in a certain, at least for our purposes. And so we, you know, we sort of moved back to trusty old Russia. It really seems like that, that Russia can be made into the enemy at any given time. because when you when you had a standoff for so long, even before that under the Tsar,

there were issues. You can go to the Civil War and the argument could be made that the North wouldn't have won without Russia. It seems like Russia is definitely a whipping boy, someone that, especially a country that's so resource rich that you're. if you're in a perpetual war state, they're an easy enemy. They're not, they're Slav. They're not, a lot of people would say they're not like us.

They're not like Westerners. And yeah, there is, there are all of these riches there. And yeah, it just, it seems like it's the perfect, the perfect country to pick on, especially when you're, when you've done so much to, basically defeat and demoralize the countries that surround it, that you can insinuate yourselves into those countries and basically surround them, much like they did with Iran. Yeah, and you know, you talk about the money that's there.

I think that really gets kind of at the deepest part of, let's say, the most proximate cause of why we've taken the approach we have since Putin came to power. You know, if you look at, you know, after, you know, after, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 91, most people out there probably know things were not good in the former Soviet world, especially in Russia, you know, and just put that in some kind of context. I mean, you know, in 2020, 2021 with COVID, with record numbers of people in America committing suicide, record numbers of people dying from deaths of despair, alcohol and drugs and things like that. The life expectancy in America dropped. It dropped by about six months or something,

six, eight months, I think. And that's a big deal. That's a very traumatic thing to happen. You look at all the death that's happening. You know, record numbers of suicides and deaths of despair is no joke. People feel that. It affects the culture in a very deep way. The life expectancy in Russia, you know, from 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down to 1995, just six years, dropped about a decade, a little over a decade actually. And when you look at the distribution of who was affected, it wasn't that a lot more babies were dying at birth. It wasn't that a lot of women were dying.

Women life expectancy, female life expectancy, was not affected all that much. And the people who were already like 50 or 60 years old, like theirs wasn't affected too much. it was pretty much all just hyper-concentrated in that group of men like, you know, 15 to 40 years old. And they weren't dying of, you know, because of an increase of cancer rates. Like it, the life expectancy dropped 10 years because of malnutrition. Ready for huge savings?

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about COVID and the deaths of despair over here, which are all at records for it to drop six, eight months, for it to drop a decade, I mean, you need, you know, it was a nightmare. It was an absolute nightmare for these people. You know, you, and when you, you know, there's a, there's an element to it that's sort of like Germany after the First World War, you know, people, even people who are sort of pro-Russia and, you know, against the U.S. approach there, they don't necessarily like this analogy because, you know, the end result is that, that they, end up where the Germans are ending up. But I think it's a solid analogy in a lot of ways. You know, if you think about how, you know, the Germans fight this long, hard war and people can, you know, historians can debate how the whole thing ended and whether they were stabbed in the back or lied to whatever, whatever. But the fact is, like, they certainly felt that way. And they weren't just being bitchy about it. Like, they really felt that way. Like, and they had good reason. Even if you don't agree, you have to like listen to their reasoning and and and admit it's consistent right that they felt that

they had agreed to lay down their arms and Churchill kept the British Navy cutting off their food you know tons of Germans were starving to death and then they were basically forced knife to knife at their throat to sign just an unbelievably punitive treaty and so you know you have the hyperinflation in 23 and you you go into the 20s and you know you you you know you You have to try to put yourself in this place where you're observing this happen to your own society and how it would radicalize and affect you, right? Where, you know, the middle class due to the inflation just got completely and totally wiped out. I mean, you know, people out there who listed to your show know what hyperinflation is,

and they know that the middle classes are the ones who get annihilated by that. You know, the poor, they have nothing and they're in debt and their debts are worth less now. So in a way, they're better off. The rich people have international connections, connections to, you know, international currencies. They own hard assets and other things. And they sort of ride the inflation wave up to a degree. But the middle class, who has their money in annuities and savings, you know, when all of a sudden you've got to go to the store to buy a loaf of bread with a wheelbarrow full of cash, those people just lost. everything, like immediately. And you literally had like respectable middle class German women

who were having to resort to turning their homes into brothels because they just had no other way to feed their children or feed themselves. And this was epidemic across the country, you know, and you have to, again, think about like how, if that were going on, especially if you felt like the reason you're in this position is because you were tricked and misled and that you could have kept fighting if you knew they were going to do this and you would have, but that they lied to you, you know, it would be extremely radicalizing. And so, you know, if you, if you, if you want to follow that analogy further. I mean, shoot, after the First World War, we sheared off, you know, what, 15% or whatever it is of the German population. And from the

moment, you know, from the moment that happened, the new German government, even the Weimar government, was expressing a lot of concern about the fate of those people because, you know, you have a country like Poland that hasn't been a country for a long time. And now it's a country. And so you're going to have this upsurge of nationalist feeling and, you know, and all this kind of thing. And that's fine. That's totally natural. But, you know, how are they going to look at the German minority over in the West? And it wasn't necessarily good. Same with Czechoslovakia and other places. And so eventually, like, the Germans got to the point of, like, we got to get these people back.

And I mean, that's exactly what happened with Russia. You know, even Boris Yeltsin, our total, you know, just puppet throughout the 90s, like even the very, very early 90s, and we were trying to negotiate the withdrawal of Russian forces from Estonia and Latvia, things like that. You know, even Yeltsin, who, again, we controlled like a marionette, was resistant. He was like, we got to wait until I can. verify that the Russian people who live over there who woke up one day and now they're foreigners and a minorities in a foreign country, I got to make sure that they're okay and that they're going

to be treated okay. And from the beginning, I mean, there were signs of trouble, you know, in almost all of these countries, you know. In Estonia, for example, they started passing citizenship laws that made it very, very difficult for like native Russian speakers and ethnic Russians to get citizenship. And I think to this day, there's a, there's a large percentage of the Russian population still can't vote or anything like that. And you can say that's like, you know, sort of a, that's maybe a bit of a minor inconvenience. But when you look at what's happening in Ukraine and what's been going on since 2014 into a certain degree since 2004, you know, you can see why Yeltsin would have been concerned.

And Putin finally, now that Russia's back on its feet and able to actually do something, has done something because they never stopped considering those Russians their responsibility and their people, you know. And rather than respect that and understand how, you know, a country might feel about that, we've sort of used those people as foils to, you know, drive up the intensity of nationalist feelings in the post-Soviet countries. and to direct them against Russia, you know? And you read about this in, like in 2004 during the Orange Revolution, which obviously we had a hand in as well. Before that, you go back even 2003,

and you look at polls in even Western Ukraine, you look at polls about how people feel about Russia and Russians, and it's fine. It's, you know, a large majorities totally approved. everything good. 2004 comes along and you're going to have a revolution like that. You've got to have some energy to drive it

and where's that going to come from? And you start to see all of these NGO-funded and led media outlets that popped up and everything else start putting out a lot of propaganda, demonizing the Russian people, calling them the problem in Ukraine and they're the reason we're having these issues

and so forth. And that really started to pick up. And, you know, now in 2024, 20 years later, you know, the kids who were who were in elementary school, when that started happening, that change in attitude and approach started happening, you know, they're the guys who joined as of battalion later on. And yeah, it's, you know, it's not good. I mean, you know, and the thing is actually, you go ahead and redirect this because I'll keep going. Those people who love going out shopping for Black Friday deals,

they're mad, aren't they? Like, proper mad. Brenda wants a television and she's prepared to fight for it, if you ask me. It's the fastest way to a meltdown. Me, I just prepare the fastest way to get stuff and it doesn't get faster than Appliancesdelivered.e. Top brand appliances, top brand electricals,

and if it's online, it's in stock. With next day delivery in Greater Dublin. Appliances delivered.orgie, part of expert electrical. See it, buy it, get it tomorrow. You know, fight Brenda. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28th to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back.

We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Liddle, more to value.

Did you know, those Black Friday deals everyone's talking about. They're right here at Beacon South Quarter. That designer's sofa you've been wanting. It's in Seoul, Boe Concept, and Rocheburo. The Dream Kitchen, check out at Cube Citchens. Beacon South Quarter Dublin, where the smart shoppers go. Two hours free parking, just off the M50, exit 13. It's a Black Friday secret. Keep it to yourself. Okay, well, let's go back to the 90s then. To me, everything I've read about what was happening there, it was basically a looting operation. Okay. So now this empire falls.

Essentially, no one's in charge except the oligarchs. And they're just looting. And to the point, I know I was reading about 94 and 95, people are buying stuff with coupons. Their money isn't even in existence. And basically all of the wealth is being driven out of the country. That's what you understand, right? 100%. Yeah, and that was happening in Ukraine as well, by the way.

And the difference between the two countries is, you know, Russia got its Putin, and Ukraine never got its Putin. And so those oligarchs still run the country. You know, they were running it when the war started. They were running it when Maidan happened. They're still running it now, although a lot of them, you know, the bulk of their wealth and assets were tied up in the industrial east that is now controlled by Russia. So, you know, that's probably one of the reasons they're.

continuing to feed their young men into the wood chipper even past the point where it makes much sense to any outsiders but yeah absolutely and i mean you know you can kind of see how see it working when in this there's another here's another parallel the germany in the 20s is uh you know people who were in russia in ukraine who had access to uh you know like if you if you had access to a foreign financial institution that was willing to back you you. I mean, you know, you could buy up the whole country. I literally got to that point where, you know, seven oligarchs in the mid-90s, seven just, there were a bunch of them, but seven oligarchs owned 58% of the entire Russian economy, which is an insane number, you know.

And Ukraine, you know, very similar. And in both of those countries, you know, we don't have to go too far down this road. But, you know, in both of those countries, the vast majority, of the big oligarchs were all Russian and Ukrainian Jews, right? Which these are people who had cousins and relatives in other countries and they were able to sort of draw on those resources at a time when there was a kind of free-for-all within the country itself. And, you know, when you have a situation, again, where you go back to Germany where the middle-class, respectable middle-class women are having to, you know, sell their bodies to put food on their table, and people with foreign connections and foreigners themselves are not just getting rich,

but I mean becoming just fabulously insanely wealthy by looting your economy. That starts to draw up a certain amount of resentment. And, you know, it's very fortunate in a lot of ways that, you know, you haven't seen so much of that in Russia and Ukraine specifically with regard to the Jews because, you know, it's something that you could have seen happening, you know. Like in Russia, you know, those seven oligarchs who own 58% of the entire economy, six of them were Jewish. And when Putin came along and sat the oligarchs down and told them that, you know, look, you guys are going to stay billionaires, you're going to keep your businesses,

you're going to do all these things. But you're not part of politics anymore. Like, that's not a, you're your businessman and that's it. And if you are okay with that, then we're friends and you're rich. If you're not okay with that, then you're going to have a problem with me. And the ones who fled the country to New York and London and Tel Aviv were primarily those non-Russian oligarchs. And, you know, it's a, it's, it kind of goes to, you think about somebody like Bill Browder, you know. It was a guy who was working with Sergei Magnitsky, the biggest, to want to talk about like the biggest scam.

just it's mind-blowing like how well this operation is worked because that guy that guy was a straight-up criminal stealing from the Russian government and Sergei Magnitsky was his accountant who was helping him do that I don't you know the the conditions in Russian prisons are probably bad and you know it's not good that Magnitsky goes in there and ends up dying of you know sort of you could say negligence. But, you know, who might have talked when you look at the condition of our prisons and, you know, the conditions we throw people into. So, but the point is, like, you know, Browder was one of these guys, you know, people descended on that country like vultures, and they went and they found local agents that they could work with, people who were happy

to exploit everyone around them and do this. And, you know, whoever they could find was the most unscrupulous, you know, people around. It was the most ruthless people around. You know, there's people, like these oligarch, guys like Kodorkovsky, who, you know, is held up as sort of some type of a human rights icon, a dissident. That guy is a gangster who, if he had, you know, lived the life he led in the 90s in Texas instead of Russia, they'd have put him in the gas chamber. You know, he would be, he would have gotten the death penalty for that. And, uh, you know, but it was it was a great gravy train. I mean, you have like a giant, giant country with resources galore. And every big financial institution across the West is just making huge amounts

of money, you know, pulling that wealth out of the country. And in one country, you know, a guy stepped in who put a stop to that. Ukraine is what Russia would have looked like if Putin never came along. And the entire place was still, I mean, you look at like the people who were appointed as as governors of the different provinces in Ukraine after the Maidan revolution. It was a whole bunch of the oligarchs, you know, often in control of the zones where a lot of their particular industries were, you know, the rest were like U.S. State Department assets like like Sakashvili and stuff. But yeah, I mean, you know, Putin cut the gravy train off, and that was his great sin. And we've not forgiven him for it. And, you know, I think we had

this pipe dream, people like Victoria Newland had this pipe dream that maybe we could we could open them back up and maybe bring them back down a notch or two so that we could get the gravy train flowing again. But, you know, it's a very, like the people in Russia, they remember what the 90s were like. They remember what it was like and their parents at least remember what it was like. And they know that whether they, there's, you know, whether they agree with the Ukraine war, whether they like Putin or anything like that, what they know is ever since Putin came along, the way things were in the 90s, it's not like that anymore. You know, and they can live normal lives in their country. And, you know, those people are going to stick

by their leader when that's the case, you know, because they know the downside. And, you know, especially as time has gone on and our belligerence toward them and really are, I mean, our hatred towards them, you know, and like we see things over here that sort of go in and out of the news, like when, you know, some, some Russian tennis star is getting banned from tennis tournaments and, you know, Dostoevsky's getting pulled from the curriculum of some Harvard class or something. Like, we see that and it's like, oh, it's so stupid and whatever. That stuff is plastered on the six o'clock news in Russia, and everybody sees it, and they they think, this is crazy.

These people are crazy. Like, they really hate us. And seek our destruction. And, you know, and again, I think that most Americans don't naturally feel that way. But the people, the group who do feel that way, you know, they're very well organized, very well funded. And they know what they're doing. So is it safe to say that those people who the gravy train stopped, that Putin put a stop to the gravy train in the 90s were probably. behind everything that was happening in 2013 and 2014?

You know, they supported it, you know, financially. They backed the think tanks that employ the people like Victoria Newland when they are out of government and they exert a lot of influence in that sense. Like, I don't think that they're, you know, that that, you know, Roman Abramovich is meeting with the president or the prime minister of England and sort of giving him marching orders or anything like that, but they exert the influence that they have. And given the fact that the U.S. and NATO sort of foreign policy approach, or Eastern Europe, Russia approach, is kind of already geared in that direction.

Like, really, they're just giving it sort of an extra push. You know, it doesn't need much more of a push. But it's definitely a part of it. I mean, you're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars, maybe trillions of dollars, They got pulled out of that country. They got pulled out of Russia. I mean, we hear about the big ones like Abramovich, who left the country with $40 billion or whatever. But there were hundreds of these people, ultimately.

And, you know, and that's not counting. Like the money that got siphoned out to Western financial institutions as all this was going on. So, I mean, you're talking about a massive chunk of the Russian economy that was just straight up looted. And, you know, that's a... It's a hard thing to give up, you know. And when you have a lot of, when you're on that gravy train and you've got a lot of influence with the United States government, you're going to try to pull that lever to get it to act on your behalf.

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See it, buy it, get it tomorrow. Or, you know, fight, Brenda. So the narrative when Russia invaded Ukraine was, one of the narratives was that in the Donbass region, ethnic Russians had been slaughtered since 2014, hear numbers anywhere from 12,000 to 32,000. What do you know about that? I mean, how is it happening?

Were they bombing them? What was going on? Yeah, a lot of artillery, mortars, things like that, primarily. As far as I know, aircraft weren't primarily doing it. But yeah, I mean, they were just sort of indiscriminately targeting civilian areas and laughing about it. You know, you had Poroshenko who, you know, gave that speech and he was bragging about how Russian children are going to be hiding in basements or Donbass children are going to be hiding in basements, you know, to avoid our artillery, while our kids are going to eat breakfast and go to school. And it's just, you know, we have a word for that when, you know, Arabs do it or something. It's called terrorism.

And, you know, if you look at the immediate aftermath of the Maidan coup, there was essentially a nationwide pogrom against Russians, you know, against Russian speakers. And by, you know, again, a lot of the, you know, I've actually read like some of the memoirs of these hardcore as-of types, you know, there's a few of them in English. And you kind of feel for these guys in a way when you read them, even if you think that, you know, it's sad that they're, you know, puppets of a regime that really does not care about them or their country at all. and that they're you know they're they're they're ignorant or whatever for for allowing themselves to be used that way but these are you know these are hardcore like right wing patriots in their country and in the context of

their lives this is the way that it makes sense for them you know and um so when when you know 2014 happened uh i mean you you know the famous ones you know with a few dozen people getting burned alive in the trade building in Odessa. But that was something that was happening all over the place. People getting kidnapped because they were ethnic Russians who were considered, you know, politically unreliable in this new regime. And you're talking about hundreds or thousands of people getting kidnapped and abused and tortured and killed.

And again, we sort of, you know, we sort of look at that. If it gets mentioned at all over here, it sort of gets mentioned as like, well, yeah, there was a There was a revolution, and revolutions are crazy and bad things happened and, you know, in any revolution. And that's true enough, but, you know, this is, if you look at that from the Russian perspective, you know, from the perspective I was talking about earlier, wherever since the early 90s, somebody like Yeltsin was expressing concern over the fate of ethnic Russians in these countries, whether the nationalist fervor was going to get out of control and make their lives too hard,

Um, and just continually expressing concern about that over the years. Uh, and then watching that happen, watching all of those kidnappings and in murders happen, watching Don Bass neighborhoods get, get, you know, uh, bombarded by artillery. It's going to be very provocative, you know, and especially when you have larger geopolitical reasons to want to, uh, draw a line in the sand, you know, which, which obviously was, you know, was, you know, was probably like the stuff I just talked about the ethnic Russians I mean that probably gave the you know the sort of emotional impulse and the it sort of drives the enthusiasm for the war effort and the cohesion in Russia maybe to a large degree but I mean make no mistake they're in this

war because they they felt from a geopolitical standpoint like they had no choice and you know and I think we knew that and I think we put them in that position on purpose um I do think that probably we thought that they would continue to back down forever because we're America and they won't dare. We overestimated our own capability to cripple them and underestimated their capability to sustain a war. But we knew we were putting them in that position. You know, the current CIA director was the ambassador to Russia back in 2008. And in January of 2008, he wrote this, you know, kind of famous now memo back to Congress. Adela Liza Rice, who was Secretary of State at the time, called Niet means Nett.

And in it, he, I mean, it's so, it's uncanny, like how specific he is about the whole thing. He says, look, I'm over here talking not just, forget Putin. I'm talking to everybody in the upper echelons of Russian power, military people, civilians. It doesn't matter. They are unanimous that, you know, they put up with NATO expansion in the Baltics and these other places, you know, because they had no choice because they couldn't do anything about it but that expanding NATO into Ukraine and expanding it into Georgia are absolute red lines that they just they simply cannot tolerate and they will be forced to act and then he said specifically he said their concern in Ukraine is that if like like our movement

to try to try to push that idea and try to get them in in there would lead to tension between the Russian ethnic Russians in the east and the Ukrainians in the West who you know as that debate over whether they should join NATO or could they join NATO and everything heated up that it would lead to conflict between those two peoples and possibly even civil war and that and this is remarkable he said and that Russia would have to decide whether or not to intervene which is the decision they do not want to have to face and I mean so the State Department's kind of leads a Rice gets that memo from her ambassador to Russia and three months later in March of that same year, just three months later at the NATO summit, we come out and say, yeah, Ukraine and Georgia are going to

join NATO. And so, you know, it didn't take long, obviously, before the president in Georgia, Saqazvili, because we had the short Georgia war over there. You know, Sakashvili is a guy who, you know, who's educated in the United States, literally like was over, like, as part of a State Department program, you know, and he's a Georgian, but for some reason after the Maidan coup, he got put in charge of the Odessa Oblast in Ukraine as the governor there for nobody can really explain why, but I think everybody knows why. And so, you know, Georgia had a problem when it came to joining NATO, which is you can't join NATO if you have an ongoing territorial dispute because it essentially would have immediately require NATO to get involved with that territorial dispute. So you have to clear that up first. And he had that problem up in Ossetia and the northern region of his country that had been sort of in an uneasy but steady peace since the early 90s where they sort of governed themselves with some autonomy and there were peacekeepers in there and stuff. And it was fine. You know, it wasn't resolved, but it was fine. And he needed to clear that up. And so he moved to clear it up.

And so the Russians moved in and, uh, and, and kicked their ass and pushed them back. And, you know, you had John McCain like telling us like, he was literally John McCain was calling for us to, uh, to bomb the tunnels that the Russians were driving their tanks and their armored vehicles through and like just attack the Russians directly. Just madman. For, for, for what? You know, to, to bring Georgia into Ukraine, something that doesn't improve, uh, rather to bring. Georgia into NATO, something that doesn't improve NATO's fighting ability, its ability to extend power, nothing like that. Like all Georgia would be to NATO is an out-of-the-way new obligation that really didn't provide any kind of countervailing benefits to NATO itself. And, you know, kind of shows what the purpose of a lot of this NATO expansion is. And, you know, if Georgia, like Georgia's not anywhere near the North Atlantic, you know, I asked a question when I was talking to a Latvian guy I know who's very, very anti-Russian, pro-Ukrainian. And he denied that, you know, this, the NATO expansion was sort of targeting Russia, that it was directed at Russia.

Something that I think is sort of self-evidently silly, but I said, why don't, why aren't we trying to bring Brazil into NATO? Brazil is at least on the Atlantic, you know, but we're trying to bring Georgia into NATO. Why is that? Like, why is it only countries that are pushing in and surrounding this one country? And I think, you know, the answer is pretty obvious. And, you know, a certain point, you know, a leader of a country has to, has to, you know, you come to a Mirchheimer talks about this, right? where you can, you know, you can believe, like Vladimir Putin can believe that the United States and NATO don't want to attack Russia, that they can expand into Ukraine and Georgia and everywhere else.

And that does not mean, and probably and almost certainly doesn't mean that one day they're going to wake up and it's going to be June 1941 again and American tanks are just Russian. Like, he doesn't think that's going to happen. but he's responsible for national security in Russia. And so unless he can say for sure that's not going to happen, you know, you have to take steps to protect yourself. And we just haven't respected that at all. You know, we've treated Russia like al-Qaeda or something ever since, you know, the mid-2000s,

as if none of their concerns, nothing they say, nothing they worry. None of those have any legitimacy. Like we're not concerned with what ISIS is, you know, grievances are what their security concerns are just kill them that's it right and we treated Russia that way like just they have no legitimate interests or concerns whatsoever and look if you treat a country that's been around for a thousand years and has you know a strong sort of cultural base to build a sense of strong nationalism out of if it comes down to it eventually they're gonna buck

and you know Russia bucked and and again Hopefully, with the resignation of Victoria Newland, we may be coming to the end of at least this current cycle event. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items all reduced to clear.

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Trump sent money and guns Why do you think Putin waited so long? Yeah, so I mean, look, part of it is that Putin I think it's clear that he genuinely wanted to find a peaceful resolution

of this. You know, the Russians were coming to the table to negotiate the Minsk agreements in good faith. You know, let's work something out where, like, look, at the beginning of the war, uh, the Russian military did move in, like, for a while in 2014, 15, and they routed the disorganized Ukrainian forces at the time. And they could have pushed them back, but they didn't. You know, they, they stopped their progress and then they went back to Russia, you know, other than some special forces, little green men or whatever. And, uh,

when, you know, they annex Crimea and the leaders in the separatist area, Donbass, they said, well, do us, like, do us next. You know, we want to be annexed to Russia. And Putin said, no, you know, we did it with Crimea because, like, that's just so strategically critical for us that, you know, we can't risk losing, you know, our Navy base and so forth. But no, he told them no. You literally had, okay, like, and this was what's really crazy, there's a great documentary

that PBS series Frontline put out back in 2014. I think it's called, yeah, I can't remember, but it's like a 35, 40-minute documentary about what's going on in Ukraine at the time. And it's remarkably balanced. You would never see anything like this on like American media, mainstream media today. It's quite balanced.

And there's a scene where the reporter is in Kharkiv. and you know there's like an old woman and a crowd of people but like an old woman specifically who's on her knees and she's crying and saying Putin please save us please save us from you know from the fascist they hate us they're going to kill us please save us and so those people asked Putin to annex them and protect them and he said no because he thought like that was a bridge too far and you know with the state that the Ukrainian military was in at that point he easily could have done it. There's nothing Ukraine could do. There were a bunch of militias, you know, basically at that point. You know, they're totally disorganized. We hadn't trained them.

We hadn't armed them. Anything like that. He said no. And so he spends years, you know, participating in these, in these Minsk negotiations, which would have kept the Donbass as part of Ukraine, but, you know, had a sort of semi-autonomous governance system that would allow them to kind of do their own thing within the context of Ukrainian government to make sure that those people were protected from, you know, a Ukrainian government that was, like literally their parliament was full of people who had just led pogroms against Russians, like all across the country. And so, you know, I think he just genuinely wanted to find a peaceful solution to the whole thing, maybe partly because, you know, I think Putin, and you saw this a little bit in that

Tucker interview. I think he's probably, he seems like he's at the point now where he's done with the United States. Like there's nothing we can say that he can trust. There's no deal we can make that he would consider reliable anymore. But I think long term, he does still care about his relations with Europe. And he's looking forward to a possible future where, you know, Europe is something more than just an American base. And he can, can start to repair those relations at least. And so maybe he pursued the Minsk, the Minsk Accords because of that. But then, you know, you go through all that trouble, all that trouble. And then you, you know, you see the, the German chancellor as a French official, like people coming out and saying,

that was all BS. Like we didn't, the whole Minsk thing was just to drag things out and to make sure Russia didn't move in and take over to give us time to build up the Ukrainian forces and get them armed and trained. And could you imagine hearing that, like, as a Russian official? I mean, it, yeah, it's, uh, because I can, and it would, it would pretty much permanently break, uh, you know, my ability to take any, any negotiation with these people seriously again. And so, um, you know, I think when he invaded, it's when, uh, it became clear to him that the peaceful solutions that he had been pursuing up to that point were just not going to happen. You know, if you look at the week or two right before, right before the invasion,

from day to day to day, if you look at it, you know, there's a, there's a UN organization over there that was monitoring the ceasefire, right? They had a ceasefire where, you know, you could use small arms and stuff, and so the Ukrainians could do counterterrorism stuff. with like small arms tactics and stuff, but you couldn't use a whole range of heavy weapons, artillery and mortars and all these other things. And there were violations, you know, one way and violations the other way occasionally,

like as like the Minsk agreements were being negotiated and so forth. And then in a couple weeks just prior to the invasion, you know, it goes from like, and they're all on one side, they're all coming from the Ukrainian side firing toward the Dombas. It goes from like 30, violations, 80 violations the next day, 300 violations, a thousand violations. I mean, they're just ramping this up and then Russia invades. And, you know, the sort of defenders of U.S. policy over there will try to convince me that that had nothing to do with Russia invading. But, you know, to me, like the default position should be to assume that it did. And, and that, you know, that a lot of, you know, that a lot of,

along with a lot of other things, just led up to a point where Russia realized that if we wait another year, then they don't have to bring Ukraine into NATO. They're making it a NATO country right now, right before our eyes. They're not calling it that. They're not moving 40,000 U.S. troops in there yet or anything. But, you know, they're in every other way imaginable. they're essentially turning this into what it would be if it was a NATO country. And they're going to get to a certain point where we're not going to be able to do anything about it. You know, because if it gets to a certain point and they continue to think that we're just not going to act. And then, you know, in a very short period of time, you know, an executive order comes down and 30,000 American troops are landed in Ukraine and take up residents in a base that we're calling permanent.

now Russia has to face the decision of whether to invade and attack American troops like that's a whole different ballgame and I think he just decided that we can't wait any longer we just can't you know and and also actually around the same time like a little bit beforehand is when you had that attempted color revolution in Belarus and that may have had something to do with like him just you know deciding like these the Americans are never going to stop like these people are just absolutely relentless And at a certain point, you just, you know, there's even if you think you're going to get your ass kicked, sometimes you have no choice but to plant your feet and punch the bully in the mouth. Oh, they're not getting their ass kicked. They're, you know, unfortunately the, I know that Putin immediately after the invasion started asking for, you know, let's talk about this. Let's, let's find a piece. And it's just going on and on. And I think what we found out, I don't know, maybe you can correct me if you think I'm wrong on this, is that, well, at least against the Ukrainian military, the Russian military is pretty formidable. Yeah, and I would even add to that a bit by, you know, I think a lot of people in the West have this, have this idea of like, yeah, but it's the Ukrainians, you know, it's just the Ukrainians. this is an army now. I mean, they're, again, scraping the bottom of the barrel at this point. But, you know, in the, in the meat of this war, this was an army that was trained and equipped up to NATO standards. And I would say, you know, look, you think your average Ukrainian male, you know, who joins the military voluntarily, that he is not a hell of a lot tougher than, like, your average Ukrainian male, you know, who joins the military voluntarily, that he is not a hell of a lot tougher than, like, you're

average guy in France or Germany or America for that matter. You're damn right he is. Like, those guys are no joke. These guys are motivated. They're serious. They're well trained. They're well equipped. And other than, honestly, like, other than the U.S. and maybe Turkey and Poland, you go back to like just before the war started in 2022. And the Ukrainian military probably would have kicked the hell out of any NATO country one-on-one, you know, in a, in a, in a in a straight up fight. I mean, this is a formidable force. And, you know, people talk about the difference in population, which obviously is coming into play at this point, but at the same time, you know, Russia doesn't look at Ukraine and say, oh, this is such a tiny country.

Ukraine's got about the same ratio of population to Russia now that Germany did in 1941 to the, to the Soviet Union. I mean, and they know how much damage, you know, a small country can do if they, if they bust loose and break out. And so, you know, you. You know, Ukraine is, I mean, they showed it. Look, you take, take nothing away from the actual guys on the ground who were fighting. They showed their willingness for a long time. It looks like the edges are starting to fray now. But these guys showed their willingness to die in place, you know, to hold their ground and fight to the last man very often, not surrender when it was obvious that there was nowhere to go and that the fight was over. And, you know, these guys are very motivated game fighters who, who gave the look, I mean, Putin did not, people, people look at like the initial invasion when Putin supposedly thought he was going to conquer all of Ukraine and take Kiev and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, it's so silly. Like, when you look at the amount of troops and specifically like witch troops, a lot of Wagner troops and stuff who were brought in,

you know, it was the whole country coming in on five different axes was barely enough troops. to throw at one of Ukraine's secondary cities, I mean, if you're really going to take it. Like, you know, it was clear from the beginning that that was not what they were trying to do. I think that they probably severely miscalculated and thought that as long as we show that we're serious, then the Ukrainians will panic and come to the table, and then they'll sign a real deal, and we can, you know, get this done. And so you see it in the tactics they employed with, you know, you have, columns of of armor just rolling down country roads with no infantry support, no nothing,

and they end up getting shredded. And it's because I don't, you know, they weren't, they weren't expecting a fight. They weren't expecting the kind of resistance that they got. So they didn't go in prepared for it. But then even for months after that, you know, for months and months after that, it was very apparent, I think, that Putin, like, he didn't want to admit that this was even a war. You know, they call it a special military operation for a long time, and it took them a long time to mobilize. And, you know, even to this day, you know, Putin's rockets could have flattened Kiev a long time ago.

You know, at the beginning of the Iraq war, both Iraq wars, the first thing we did, we knocked out their entire communications grid, destroyed all their power, all their clean water, all their infrastructure. We just wiped it out, like the first night, you know, in Iraq. Putin didn't do any of that for like a year. He wasn't doing any of that. And he still is not attacking Kiev when he could be doing that. And he's not. And I think up until the mobilization, which I think was probably driven by internal pressure from people to his right in the Russian establishment,

you know, that he was still trying to find some way to get this done with minimal damage to both sides, you know? And then he finally just had to admit, okay, no, this is a war. And I can't sign a deal with the Americans or with NATO, nothing that they say is reliable. I just have to, you know, fight this thing to the end until this country is no longer a threat to me and and not an asset to NATO. And, you know, at this point, like, I don't know, you know, it's very unfortunate for the Ukrainians themselves, right? Because you go back, you mentioned that Zelensky and Putin were negotiating in the opening months of the war, and that they had a verbal agreement, like a tentative verbal agreement that was going to bring it to a halt. And that Boris Johnson flew over there. It's all infamous now and told him, you know, no, you're not.

And you think about that. I mean, that's really, that's really evil. I mean, this is because this is a country that, you know, Ukraine, like, we had the power to tell them, like, you end this war. And we're just going to leave you hanging. And you can, you know, your blown up cities and, you know, your destroyed economy and all that, you guys can just have fun with that because we're not helping. Even though you got into this whole thing largely because of, you know, policies we were using you as a proxy for, we could just abandon them and really put the hurt on them.

So we essentially blackmailed them into continuing to throw their young men into this meat grinder. And, you know, it's really awful. But, yeah, I think that at this point, unfortunately, you know, the Russians probably feel like they have to fight this thing to the end, which is not what Putin wanted to do. I think that's clear. And I'm not like, look, man, like Putin is not like some fuzzy, friendly fella, you know? I mean, he's a hardcore, ruthless dude. and nobody but a hardcore ruthless dude was going to pull Russia out of the condition it was in in the 90s when the government is controlled by the guys who own the entire economy.

They control regions of the country with their own private armies. And he managed to reestablish the prerogative of the Russian state and put that society back together and clip the wings of all those oligarchs without a civil war. I mean, that's amazing. It really is amazing that that happened. And, you know, some guy who was, you know, Bernie Sanders was not going to be able to do something like that. He's a hard man who came up in a very, very hard time. And so, but, you know, yeah, I think that, but yeah, I think that's where we're at.

I think that Russia has finally kind of, you know, reached a point of exasperation where it's affected, you know, over the long term, I think that they have accepted that, you know, we're never really going to fully accept them. And we're never going to let them in. And so that's why, you know, they've solidified their relationships with China and Iran and India. You know, India didn't abandon Russia. And a lot, you know, a lot of the countries around the world. I mean, that's what you want to talk about like the failures of the Newland policy. I mean, the Russian military is way stronger now than it was beforehand. The Russian military has a ton of experience fighting NATO tactics and NATO weapons systems that it didn't have before. It's, Russia has had

a long and brutal war to advance their understanding of drone tactics on the battlefield. You know, probably a decade or two worth of like military advancement in that space has probably been compressed into like two years and you know they've had to learn a lot of that the hard way but they've learned it now and if you look at the United States like what we gain from this you know what like you know our other rivals around the world you know China India just not not rivals but the other powers around the world have seen that there are limits to what we can actually do which you know maybe they believed that before but they weren't sure you know they saw Iraq or or or Libya or something and they say okay they you know Americans weren't able to

achieve their goal or whatever but they can sure as hell cause a hell of a lot of problems you know for us that we don't want but they see that there's limitations to that is to you know what we can act actually do a lot of countries that were you know that we're friendly with and we're still friendly with you know India Brazil Mexico a lot of these countries. We told them, you know, you have to, we need you to be with us on this, cut Russia off, you know, follow these sanctions. And most of those countries said no. And, you know, outside of, outside of NATO said no. And there were no consequences for that. You know, we weren't able to impose any consequences on them. And the fact that, you know, these financial institutions that the United States is

really used as instruments of global control for, you know, in the post-war period, like the, like the IMF and all these others, the SWIFT system and so forth. You know, these are things that before countries had to worry, like, what actually will happen if they cut us off the SWIF system? Like, that could be Armageddon. Like, that could be all. But now everybody's seen it, that actually, you know, you can get by. You can get by just fine. And, you know, we're in a much weaker position now. We, Europe is in a much weaker position, although, you know, I've heard people hypothesized that maybe that was, you know, kind of part of the goal of this whole thing was to, you know, was to make sure that, you know, Europe didn't, I mean, if you go, like, everybody

knows that Russia asked Yeltsin and Putin one time asked about Russia joining NATO, because that was one of their solutions. They were like, in fact, Yeltsin said, look, Why don't we, this is when we were talking about the first tranche of expansion in the mid-90s. And he was like, I'll tell you what, why don't we join NATO first? And then we'll bring in all the countries between us. And we won't have anything to worry about because we're part of the program. And of course, we said no. You know, we were, that was never on the table because, A, you know, NATO is, it's just the deal.

It's, it's the, you know, it's the instrument of American control over Europe. that's what it is. We're not going to share the room with another large power that we can't control and has ideas of their own. But then also it was, you know, if Russia is our friend, then Europe might start looking around and say, well, wait, okay, what do we need, you know, an American military base in Germany for if Russia is our friend? What do we need to continue to like take dictations from Washington, D.C. on our foreign

policy if the only country that's even feasibly a threat to us is now not just not a threat but an ally and you know so it's it's dark and crazy to think that you know that planners might have been thinking that way but at the same time it would be in keeping with you know a lot of their behavior where you use controlled chaos you know a lot of times chaos is the goal you know know if you look at like um this is something Putin talks about all the time and most Americans are just like huh what's he talking about but uh after but during as well but uh then even after the second war with Chechnya was over we were over there like funding training you know these jihadists who were there this is after the war's over like they're

not going to retake you know Grazni or anything like that's all over but what we wanted was just to keep enough chaos going in that region so that, you know, a pipeline couldn't get built down to the Black Sea that Russia was trying to do for years and a lot of these other things. You couldn't develop, you know, the region strategically because there's just too much chaos popping off. And then, by the way, and I, you know, some of this is public knowledge, but, you know, I have, like, confirmation from a Marine who was a part of the training operation working out of Istanbul when Marsok was training these jihadists and arming them. One of them, one of our main guys,

there were four main warlords that we were like really working with all their own militias. And one of them, his group, you know, and as far as I know, you know, we were not working directly with them anymore at this point. But it was his group that went and did the Beslan school attack in Russia. And so, I mean, you know, You just, again, you have to try to put yourself in the position of the Russians, and you see something like that.

You know, and think of how we would respond to it. And, you know, I think about like, you know, you've heard like Dan Crenshaw, Lindsay Graham, you guys just total maniacs. You know, they go on Twitter or they go in public. Dan Crenshaw actually said this. This is almost word for word, I think. He said, you know, I don't understand why people have a problem. with what we're doing over in Ukraine. A bunch of Russians are dying,

and it's not costing us anything but money. That's literally what he said. And so imagine, like, we're in Iraq, and the Russians are just training, arming, and not even on the sly. They're just, like, basically leading the insurgency against us. And Russian politicians are out there in public saying, oh, yeah, we don't, our only goal is to kill Americans.

Like, we just want to see more dead Americans. Like, other than that, like, if that happens, We're happy. Dead Americans is cool in our book. That's enough for us. You think these people are fucking maniacs, you know? And I think that's where the Russians are with us at this point. And it's unfortunate because, you know, I love Russia.

I mean, I started reading Russian literature when I was a teenager. And, you know, I've always loved it. I love the culture. And I find it to be a real tragedy that our relationship to that, country has been dragged down by a few, you know, really malicious interested parties. Well, let's finish on that. I mentioned before we started recording that, you know, we talked about managerially interested parties that they can get, they can start wars, they can foment wars, they can fund wars that even Americans don't have to fight in.

And Colonel McGregor, Douglas McGregor, has been running around basically, saying that he believes that there's a and the people who are doing this in the united states government are doing it out of an ethnic um and an ethnic vendetta basically that victoria newland her husband robert kagan kagan is russian for cone um that it's a jewish animosity for the palest settlement stettles the pogroms um how do you answer what what do you think of you know, McGregor saying that, what's your opinion? I think that there's, there's definitely something to it, but it's not just the Jews, you know? Like, you listen to the polls. Like, I think the polls, they're like, if we go to nuclear war, we go to nuclear war. Like, as long as Moscow gets flattened as part of that

deal, I'm cool for it. Like, they're just absolute maniac. And mind you, and mind you, there are 4,000 Jews in Poland. Yeah. I looked I looked that up recently when that whole when that one Polish politician extinguished a menorah, I looked to see what the Jewish population of Poland was and it's like 4,000 right now. So yeah. Yeah. And I mean, look, like there's this there's this there's this good joke. See if I can get it right where this this Polish peasant is out in his field and he finds a magic lamp, a genie lamp. And so he gives it a rub. He's going to have his wishes. The genie he pops out and says you get three wishes what's your first wish and he says i want china to invade Poland he says huh you want to repeat that he tells him he's like

whatever i was fine and so you know a few hours later or however long later see smoke on the horizon and tanks start rolling in and the air force rolls in the chinese military comes in just flattens poland just wipes out the guy's village everywhere else destroyed and then they go home and he says all right so I want my second wish he's like what do you want this time you want me to rebuild the country like what what is it you want he said I want China to invade Poland again he's like okay and so the whole same thing happens again and third wish he wants China to invade Poland again and so it happens again he says I got to ask you like why is it that you want don't you love your country like or do you really hate your country why are you want

want China to come destroy it. He said, are you kidding? I love my country. I love Poland more than anything. But to come to Poland three times, China's got to go through Russia six times. And, you know, on one level, like, I think that, and you know, I've got friends in the Baltics, especially, but in Poland as well. And they would all fight me on this. But I think there's a certain level, a certain way in which, you know, those countries were part of the Soviet Union, some more willingly than others. You know, Poland, honestly, is one of the ones that was part of the Soviet Union much more unwillingly. But, you know, the Soviet Union was a multi-ethnic, multinational project, especially early on before Stalin kind of reconverted it into a sort of a Russian empire.

But, you know, this is a multi-ethnic, multinational project that had participation, you know, from strong communist parties, like across Eastern Europe who were doing this. You know, it was not a bunch of Russians who were going into, you know, country A and, you know, attacking the ethnic people over here. It was their own communist parties who were leading those efforts, you know, and taking leadership from Moscow, obviously. And so this went on for a long time. And I think like, you know, there's some, there's something of, once the Soviet Union fell and these countries are sort of reckoning with their own past, their own, the fact that, you know, you're a country that was part of the Soviet Union. Now you're not.

But you're still living in the, you know, next door to a guy who was part of the secret police. You're living next door to a, you know, a communist apparatchik over here or something. And you have to figure out how are we going to knit this society. back together. Like, how are we going to? And I think one of the ways that they've done it is they just think now, like, the Soviet Union was Russia. Russia is the Soviet Union. Us, we're pure victims of Russian imperialism, and that was our role in the Soviet Union, just as victims. And so even our people who were a part of that or whatever, like, you know, we really had no choice and we can all kind of come together. And so I think it's been like a mechanism for pulling, you know, those societies

back together in a cohesive way. I don't want to say it's the beginning and end of it, but I think there's something to that. Cool. It's all everybody where they can find your work. So I've got a podcast where I do long form history stuff. It's called martyr made. And you can find that on iTunes or Spotify or whatever. I've got another podcast with my buddy Jock O'Willink called The Unraveling, where we talk about sort of more recent history and contemporary events. And then I've got a substack, martyramade.substack.com, where I kind of go into a lot of these things even more in depth. Subscribe to all of them. I do. Thank you, Daryl. Thanks, brother. Always a good time.