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April 11, 2025 - The Culture War - Tim Pool

02:05:38

America First or Supporting Ukraine War, DEBATE w/ Whick & Lactoid

BUY CAST BREW COFFEE TO SUPPORT THE SHOW - https://castbrew.com/ Become A Member And Protect Our Work at http://www.timcast.com Host: Tim Pool @Timcast (everywhere) Guest: Lactoid ⁨@LactoidTV⁩ (YouTube) Whick ⁨@Whick-TV⁩ (YouTube) Producers: Lisa Elizabeth @LisaElizabeth (X) Kellen Leeson @KellenPDL (X) My Second Channel - https://www.youtube.com/timcastnews Podcast Channel - https://www.youtube.com/TimcastIRL

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Speaker	Time	Text
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		This morning, Donald Trump put out a truth social statement saying Russia has to get moving.
		Too many people are too many people are air dying.
		Typo. Thousands a week in a terrible and senseless war, a war that should have never happened and wouldn't have happened if I were president.
		Well, we are heavily focused on other things, just tariffs and potential escalation with China and their retaliation, as well as this trade war or largely the trade war.
		But the issue of Ukraine is not over.
		And Donald Trump is bringing it up once again because.
		Well, he's trying to resolve it to some degree.
		But what does that resolution actually look like?
		And what should we as Americans do?
		We're going to debate the issue.
		We've got a couple of gentlemen joining us to have this discussion.
		Sir, would you like to introduce yourself?
unidentified		Sure. Name's Wick TV, and I run a podcast on YouTube of the same name.
unidentified		And I'm here to support Ukraine and advocate that we continue to aid Ukraine and even ramp it up a little bit.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Oh, interesting.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		And then, sir, who are you?
unidentified		Yeah, I'm Lactoy.
		You can find me at LactoyTV on Twitch, X, and YouTube.
		I am a libertarian lawyer.
		My position on this is that it's time for the U.S. to withdraw funding and to keep that money here at home.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Well, this should be fun.
		My friends, if you're just tuning in, smash the like button.
		Of course, share this show far and wide.
		It's Friday morning.
		The Culture War is live and we're going to be having this debate.
		So share the show if you really do enjoy it.
		So who wants to go first?
		Why we should or should not be supporting this?
unidentified		I'll take it away.
		So here, look, Ukraine has been unjustly evaded, invaded by an aggressive force, Russia.
		This isn't the first time Russia has invaded other countries.
		They did it in Chechnya.
		They did it in Georgia.
		They did it before in Ukraine in 2014.
		And they're doing it again now.
		The idea that if we suddenly withdraw our funding, if we withdraw our forces, if we decide to just, you know, let Putin have this little bite now that he will somehow stop,
		It's naive.
		Putin will not stop.
		He must be stopped.
		We have a situation where we are and should be funding more money into Ukraine because that money doesn't just go to Ukraine.
		It goes to American jobs in American factories, building American weapons to fight America's enemies and support America's allies.
		We made in 2024 $316 billion selling our weapons to foreign countries.
		This dwarfs the numbers that we've given in aid to Ukraine.
		And this demand spiked in 2024 by 26 percent, in part because we have shown ourselves at least a few years ago.
		least to some degree, to be a reliable ally.
		And so Poland, the Netherlands, other countries want to take and help rearm.
		They're up in their GDP, but there's more money out there than there is stuff.
		So we have an opportunity now to rebuild our industrial base and use Ukraine as a way to do that because there's other conflicts coming.
		We have a trade war with China coming up, right?
		Trade wars can often turn into something a little bit hotter, and it behooves us to be prepared for that.
		And I think Ukraine is a good reason to do so.
		That's my argument.
		that.
		I think we've been sold a lie when it comes to the war in Ukraine.
		We've been sold this tale of a David versus Goliath, this fledgling democracy that's being threatened by this massive authoritarian power, when the reality is the truth is much more complicated.
		I mean, here we are $200 billion later, and all we've managed to buy for ourselves is about half a million dead, probably more at this point.
		Another half million wounded, some critically, probably more at this point.
		And this was all done in service of a power structure in Ukraine that's becoming increasingly authoritarian, a power structure that was founded upon a illegal and unconstitutional coup that disenfranchised millions of people in the East that we just don't seem to
		care about.
		We didn't seem to care about it in 2014, but it's the direct cause of what's going on now.
		And on top of all of that, Ukraine is losing.
		And last time I brought this up, you and your comrades kept hammering, well, Kursk, they have Kursk.
		Kursk is gone, right?
		No, it's not.
		Ukrainians have lost Kursk.
		They have not.
		They still have forces in Kursk today.
		Not as much, right?
		Not as much of Kursk, but today.
		They have a single-digit percentage fraction of what they had, and the Russian forces are moving into Sumy.
		I'm following the war every single day.
		The Russians make gains every single day.
		The Ukrainians lose ground every single day.
		And we're dumping money into this dumpster fire.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Let's start here.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Why did Russia invade Ukraine?
unidentified		Well, Russia has always wanted to regain Ukraine.
		So Putin has said many times in his interview with Tucker Carlson and in his speeches and in other statements that he wants to –...regain the imperial power of Russia, to establish greater Russia.
		And Ukraine, in his mind, is part of that.
		He believes that they are ethnically Russian, that Ukrainians don't exist in a real way, and he just wants to bring them into his fold.
		That's his belief structure, and that's why he's doing this.
		This nonsense that people will say about, like, oh, it's NATO expansion, oh, it's this, oh, it's that.
		It's not.
		Putin has been very clear.
		He's doing this because he believes that Ukraine doesn't exist, and Ukraine is part of greater Russia, and he'll have it back.
		Yeah, I think that's the kind of American propaganda version of whenever the enemies are going to...
		That's what Putin has said?
		Well, no, it's more complicated than that.
		As I think we're going to visit a lot here, a lot of the claims here that are being made are more complicated.
		There's more gray area than I think you're giving credit for.
		The reasons for the war in Ukraine are complex, and there's many of them.
		But some of the main issues are the disenfranchisement of millions of people in Crimea and the Donbass and really the east of Ukraine that happened in 2014 when there was a...
		Constitutional, unpopular coup that took place.
		It's not a distraction.
		That matters.
		If we care about constitutional order and we care about democracy, we can't just ignore it when it benefits our enemies.
		Even if I grant you this...
		One last thing.
		NATO expansion is also, of course, going to be one of the major factors.
		A few days before the invasion, a demand was made, don't let Ukraine join NATO.
		That demand was ignored.
		It was up to them.
		And then a few days later, the invasion, the 2022 invasion happened.
		It is up to them.
		Why wouldn't it be up to them?
		Let me ask you this.
		Do you think that a country's sovereignty matters?
		I think that a country's sovereignty matters to an extent.
		To an extent.
		To an extent.
		Let me ask you a question.
		Let me ask you a question.
		If the Columbia protesters, right, the ones who supported Hamas and things were like, you know what?
		And they're citizens.
		I'm not talking about the student visas and things like that.
		The citizens of Columbia were like, you know what?
		We hate America.
		We want to be part of Hamas now.
		We want to join Gaza.
		So we're going to vote to join Gaza.
		Do you think that would justify in any way, shape, or form Hamas coming in and attacking America in order to liberate the Colombian protesters who have decided that, oh, we want to be part of Gaza now?
		It's disanalogous, and I'll explain why.
		A better analogy would be, let's imagine if Canada had an unconstitutional coup that was undemocratic and was against the will of the vote that had just happened, let's say.
		And there were parts of Canada that were thus disenfranchised because, like many countries, certain areas tend to vote for certain candidates more than others.
		And then on top of that, this new illegal government reached out to Russia and attempted to join Sisto and attempted to put Russian missiles on the border with the US.
		As a great power, it is myopic to think that The question I have is,
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		why Ukraine?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		What about literally any other country?
unidentified		What about Burma?
		I do think we should support Taiwan, for example, as another country where I think we should draw red lines and we should not let imperial powers come in and start taking chunks.
		And the reason why is because it's in our interest.
		And these are the key words.
		Ukraine is in our interest because Ukraine is connected to a lot of European countries.
		Ukraine isn't just the only country that borders Russia.
		You have Estonia boarding Russia.
		You have the Balkans, right?
		And you have, well, now Finland and Sweden and things, but they weren't part of NATO before the invasion.
		But this matters because the reason why a lot of countries in 2004 joined NATO was because they foresaw this Russian imperial aggression that was coming.
		They were worried over their sovereignty, and they wanted protection from that.
		So if we abandon Ukraine, what that does is it sends a signal to our allies that are our actually allies, the NATO allies that we have, that, you know what?
		If it costs too much, then maybe we're going to abandon them too.
		Ukraine can be, and I think it should be.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Sure, sure, but that's not what I'm asking.
unidentified		It's an art.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Because it's not.
		And so it's understandable what you're saying that if, say, Lithuania saw an incursion from, you know, Russia brought troops into Belarus and then, or Kaliningrad started launching incursions through the border of Kaliningrad.
		But Ukraine's not an ally, nor are they a member of NATO, nor the EU.
		So for what, you know, what is the reason the US intervened in this regard?
unidentified		Again, because it's in our interest.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		What are those interests?
unidentified		Sure. One of our interests is...
		The military-industrial complex.
		That was one of the things he mentioned.
		It's creating American jobs.
		It's a way that we can...
		That is one.
		Absolutely. That is one of our interests.
		But another of our interests is create stability in this region.
		Because if Ukraine falls, like, we talk about the cost of supporting Ukraine.
		We got to talk about the cost of not supporting Ukraine.
		What happens if we abandon Ukraine and Ukraine falls?
		What happens to our interests?
		What happens to the cost to American consumers?
		Trade? We have about a trillion dollars, a little less, a year with Europe in trade.
		And if that is disrupted, right, it just hurts our wealth at home.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		What would disrupt that?
unidentified		So, for example, if Ukraine falls, a lot of our European allies will see us as unreliable.
		And I'll give you an example of this happening.
		Canceled briefly.
		Paused the aid that was going to Ukraine, cut off intelligence and things like that.
		The EU began to question its purchases that it was making from us when it comes to us.
		It has granted them—so the EU has talked about they are no longer going to want to source some of the parts that they get for their munitions and their things from— It doesn't sound like that's related to Ukraine,
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		though. It is.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		It sounds like it's related to Trump's trade issues.
unidentified		No, no, this was before the trade issues.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		You're saying that...
unidentified		This was before the trade imports and anything like this.
		This is when Trump canceled our...
		or paused, I should say, the aid we were giving to Ukraine that we had already allocated to give to Ukraine.
		He paused that so it wasn't coming in.
		He also canceled the intelligence sharing that we were doing.
		And again, like, Europe is on this doorstep.
		And a lot of Europe are our allies.
		And they see...
		And they're watching how America is going to support them because by supporting Ukraine, we are supporting them.
		We are making the world safe for them.
		And that's a direct benefit.
		It is not a wild assertion.
		Wild assertion.
		They're not an ally.
		As Tim said, they're not an ally, right?
		You're saying they could be an ally, and I understand that USAID and several other...
		But you understand that Estonia is our ally.
		Estonia is our ally.
		They're a NATO ally.
		And I would agree...
		The Netherlands is our ally.
		For sure, for sure.
		France is our ally, correct?
		And they're covered under...
		They are all wanting us.
		They are all wanting us to support Ukraine.
		I'm sure they are.
		That's less money that they have to spend.
		I'm sure they all want us to get...
		They're all ramping up their money!
		What are you talking about?
		They are ramping up their money and spending it.
		I don't control their money.
		If they want to spend money, I don't think it's a good idea, but I can't stop them.
		But if you're saying, oh, they want us to spend this money, I'm sure they do.
		I don't think that we should.
		Not only for the reasons that I outlined before, but because...
		You're openly talking about, well, it's in our interest because the military is a complex.
		Yes, and our interest makes Americans safer and it makes the world safer.
		No, it's in our interest.
		American hegemony has made the world a safer place.
		A better place.
		Not just for America, but for the world.
		Do you think Ukraine was more stable or less stable after Russia invaded?
		I think it was less stable.
		Hold on.
		Do you think Ukraine was more stable after 2014 than before?
		Of course not.
		Okay. What happened in 2014?
		In 2014, Russian sent little green men into Crimea.
		What happened before then?
		They locked down, right?
		They locked down the parliament so no one can get in.
		Men with guns, right?
		What happened before then?
		They forced a vote.
		What happened before then?
		No! A hundred...
		Let me read the exact resolution here.
		That's why I took some notes.
		I'm sorry.
		UN Resolution 68262, right?
		The invalid referendum on 16th of March 2014 where Crimea declared its independence and joined Russia.
		This was obviously under coercion.
	Why'd you put that in scare quotes?
	Because it was, again, as the UN Resolution says, Invalid.
	You're saying it's invalid?
	We recognize it's invalid.
	I'm asking you, why was it invalid?
	It was done under duress.
	Was it?
	Because, yes, because Russians sent their little green men in, they brought guns, they locked down the parliament, they forced the vote.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		What's little green men?
unidentified		Little green men, so they have green uniforms, they rip off their badge, right, so they're not actually Russian soldiers, and they go in and they...
		Do their thing.
		And they have some plausible deniability, which people like my comrade Lactoid here will say, oh, that's obviously not the Russians.
		It's just some paramilitary.
		I want to educate Wick a little bit on this.
		So obviously there were Russians there.
		I'm not denying that the Little Green Men were Russians, obviously.
		Russian soldiers.
		Yes, of course, from Sevastopol, for sure.
		With guns that were threatening for us.
		Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.
		Okay. But when I asked you before, what happened before then?
		I think it's telling that you're just ignoring all the context, as is usual with this conversation, before you cut me off again.
		As is usual with this conversation, there's, oh, it just happened, right?
		There's this, oh, it just came out of the sky.
		This invasion just came out of the sky.
		When in reality, what happened is Crimea had for years wanted to leave Ukraine.
		In fact, in 1992, they declared independence.
		Ukraine said, you better nullify that within a week with the threat of force.
		So then they were like, okay, fine.
		we're not going to leave.
		Just like Chechnya.
		That's Russia did to Chechnya.
		We can talk about Chechnya in a second, because I also know about Chechnya.
		But then in 2014, in 2010, there was a president elected in Ukraine, Yanukovych.
		And in 2014, he was, do you deny that he was unconstitutionally
		No, but that doesn't matter.
		That doesn't matter.
		You know why it doesn't matter?
		Does them being disenfranchised matter?
		It doesn't give Russia the right to come in with guns, tanks, and material and force the issue.
		Russia or any other nation does not have the right to come in with force and violate someone's sovereignty to solve an internecine conflict.
		There are other ways to deal with that.
		Russia did this with military force.
		What way should Crimea have handled it?
		Any other way but this.
		Because Crimea didn't handle it.
		Russia did.
		Russia took away their choice.
		Because it's always been part of their plan.
		They want Ukraine.
		Putin's wanted Ukraine for a while.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		But why Crimea?
unidentified		Crimea had...
		pronunciation's hard.
		There's ports in there that gives them access to what they call warm water ports, right?
		Because they don't have a lot of those, and it gives them access and they can use their navies and things like that.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		It's the home of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, and their only warm water port.
unidentified		And they're primarily Russians in Crimea as well.
		But that wasn't under threat, right?
		Of course it was.
		Why? What was the threat?
		They had a lease.
		I'll explain to you why it was under threat.
		Okay, it was under threat for a couple reasons.
		But when you have the pro-Russian president get unconstitutionally couped in 2014, and now you have this country, which prior had promised to not join military blocs, is now looking towards NATO, right?
		There is a concern that if they join NATO— You were never joining NATO.
		You're saying that, but that's— As a geopolitical actor, how do you know that for sure?
		I need more than just a possibility.
		I need reasonable...
		You had a coup.
		You had a coup.
		How can you trust this new government when they ignored their own constitution?
		They ignored Article 108.
		They ignored Article 111.
		And they disenfranchised millions of people, millions of Crimeans.
		And by the way, the UN had done polling in Crimea prior to this and found that most Crimeans would vote.
		But we'll never know for sure if they would because the vote they had was conducted under coercive force.
		I think less than two months following the annexation of Crimea into Russia, Pew Research went in and did a poll, and 88% of Crimeans said that Kiev should recognize the results.
		Only 4% said no, which is relatively in line with what the referendum was.
		Once again, they were occupied by Russian forces.
		Don't say no.
		When they weren't occupied, they wanted to leave Ukraine and join Russia.
		What about that?
		Through a poll.
		Through a UN poll.
		It's in a vote.
		A UN?
		Because Ukraine wouldn't let them have a vote.
		They tried to have a vote in 19...
		In 1992, and Ukraine said no.
		You need more than just someone calling you up on the phones like, hey, buddy, do you want to secede from your country?
		You need an actual constitutional congress.
		You need something actual.
		Would Ukraine let them have that vote?
		At the end of the day, at the end of the day, at the end of the day, none of this justifies Russia coming in.
		Of course it does.
		Of course it does not.
		We would never let that happen in any other situation.
		Ukraine did not let them vote.
		Russia did not let that happen.
		When Chechnya tried to secede, right, when the...
		Warsaw Pact broke apart when the USSR broke apart and Chechnya said, okay, we want to go away too.
		At the time, they were like, no way, Jose!
		And they came in with military force and stomped them down.
		I absolutely do not because of the way they handled that.
		Whoa! Why don't you support that?
		Again, if you listen to that, because of the way they handled that.
		What way did they handle it then?
		Gross human violations of their rights.
		Do Ukrainians do that in the Donbass?
		No. No.
		So when Amnesty says that they were committing war crimes by firing unguided rockets in civilian areas, that's just thousands of people dead.
		Who cares?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		You brought up the vote from Crimea, and so I've been looking into it.
		I have a question for you.
		In the 2010 election in Ukraine, which you mentioned, Viktor Yanukovych won 49.55% against Yulia Tymoshenko, who won 46.03%.
		The country was split.
		The following 2010?
		Yes. Sure.
unidentified		And not to mention, during Euromaidan, the brutalities that Yanukovych was perpetrated on his people, 108 protesters killed brutally.
		And 13 cops were killed.
		So in terms of the political, I guess, oppression that came following Yanukovych's election, I'm sure there's criticisms you can levy.
		I know Yanukovych had issues with corruption.
		I know that, in fact, Ukraine now has issues with corruption.
		But just because there are those issues doesn't mean that you can trample upon your own constitution to remove a president and not expect separatism in the places, as you brought up, in the places that overwhelmingly voted for Yanukovych.
		In Crimea and the Donbass, it was overwhelmingly pro-Yanukovych.
		Do their votes not matter?
		Do you just get to replace this president in 2014 with somebody that was not democratically elected?
		Ignore your own constitution?
		This is what led to the separatism, and the separatism...
		And this new power structure in Ukraine and this new power structure in separatism is what led to the 2022 invasion.
		Well, let me ask you this.
		Had the U.S. backed and really wanted Yanukovych, political enemy that he jailed for three years unconstitutionally, right?
		If he had wanted— Well, we don't know the details about that, and you don't either.
		If he had really wanted—and I'll go with the hypothetical that what— Tim just said was accurate, and that was seen and pretty much seen as shady, as illegal, etc.
		So go with it.
		Run with me on this.
		Would that give us, the U.S., the right to go in with gun, tanks, men, and occupy and seek to annex parts of Ukraine?
		Would that have given us the right to do that?
		I don't believe you if you say that you think that we would have that.
		I think we've talked about matters of scale.
		Matters of scale.
		Yeah. No, for sure.
		Let me explain.
		In the event that the Constitution was violated, which we don't know if it was, I mean, we had an arrest warrant for Yanukovych issued in 2014 immediately after he left the country.
		You do have a history— He fled the country, yes.
		He left, yeah.
		You can say he fled because his car was shot at.
		If there's a constitutional issue with that, you can say there's major issues.
		You can, in fact, even potentially, if it's bad enough, if there's enough repression, that could potentially justify an invasion based on humanitarian reasons.
		Unless you want to say, well, hold on, hold on, hold on.
		Unless you want to say, hold on a second.
		Unless you want to say, well, we can't invade a country even if there's gross humanitarian violations, and then that means you can't, you know, invading Nazi Germany is out of the question, the Confederate South.
		That's what I'm saying.
		So you can, yeah, if there's enough violations of the Constitution and human rights that could justify potentially humanitarian violence.
		Human rights.
		But what I'm saying is this...
		The Euro made on was particularly egregious.
		We have a movement that, according to the last poll prior to the ousting of Yanukovych, had about 45% popularity and 48% unpopularity, primarily in the East.
		And you had the president removed, violating Article 108 and Article 111.
		And you had separatism.
		Well, to some extent it does.
		The United States had help from France.
		We had a general, Lafayette, come in to help us leave the UK.
		Let me ask you this.
		Does the U.S., because, you know, we argued no taxation without representation, and I think nullifying your vote is essentially removing representation.
		Do the U.S. have a right to leave the UK, England?
		Do we have a right to declare independence?
		Sure. They were doing more than just that.
		They were grossly—they were disappearing people.
		They were giving people no trial.
		They were just taking them off the street, right?
		But here's the deal.
		We don't live— None of this justifies.
		None of this justifies.
		And this is a principle, right?
		That a country's sovereignty matters and a foreign entity cannot use military force in order to violate another country's sovereignty in order to solve a crisis that they themselves have helped serve up.
		Because let me—
		Russia has a habit of doing this.
		Russia has done this before.
		They did it in Georgia.
		They took an internecine conflict that was in South Ossetia.
		I can't pronounce.
	Oh, Abkhazia?
	Abkhazia. Abkhazia.
	Thank you.
	And they pumped money into them.
	They sent their little green men in there again, their little Russian soldiers.
	And they stirred up this conflict, again, remarkably similar to how they behaved in Ukraine with the Donbass and with Crimea and these things.
	And they use this as an excuse, right, to go in with military force and take a slice, right?
	And today, even today.
	They occupy, illegally, 20% of Georgians' sovereign territory.
	Russia, and Putin specifically, continues to do this, and they play this game.
	So this idea that if we just stop funding Ukraine, it's not our problem, he's just going to stop, has not been borne out by the facts of the matter.
	If someone continues to exhibit a habit of behavior over and over and over and over again, what is different this time?
	Let me ask you this.
	You listed twice.
	You listed two times.
	That's less than the U.S. has intervened in other countries.
	We didn't annex Afghanistan.
	We didn't...
	No, we replaced the government.
	But that's a fundamentally different thing.
	And again, I'm not here to support every single thing that the United States has done.
	And I'm not here to support every single thing the Russian government has done.
	You can point out, and by the way, I'm actually critical of the Russian government when it comes to Chechnya.
	I think it's surprising that you're not, because...
	Or that you are, sorry.
	I think it's surprising that you are critical of the Russian government in Chechnya because the same arguments...
	It's a genocide, man.
	No, it wasn't a genocide.
	It was an annexation of an area that wanted self-determination, wanted to be separate because the Soviet Union had just collapsed.
	But under your logic of the countries are sovereign, we can't get involved, you should be against Chechnya.
	Because Chechnya was part of the Russian government, wasn't it?
	It was part of the Russian territory.
	Do you think that the U.S. should have gone in?
	In Chechnya?
	Probably not.
	Probably not.
	Hold on.
	Indeed. Just because of the expense and the kind of geopolitical reality on the ground.
	From a moral perspective, we would have been justified.
	We would have been justified.
	We would have strong justification.
	Again, until the Balkans, right?
	When we went in...
	NATO went in in the 90s, right, and stopped the Serbian genocide that was happening there that the Serbians were conducting, right?
	NATO offensive?
	Yes, that was good.
	That was something we should have done, right?
	And when it comes to the war crimes, like, we talk about when war crimes justify intervention.
	Look at Buka.
	What happened to Buka?
	498 civilians massacred.
	Does that justify the U.S. getting involved?
	I think it does.
	Look at what they've done by stealing 20,000, at least, children, Ukrainian children, and disappearing them into Russia to serve with Russian families, to live with Russian families, and to be raised as Russian against the will of their parents.
	Does that justify U.S. When you say against the will of their parents, what do you mean?
	I mean that the parents, they're not allowed to see the kids.
	Is that what's happening?
	That is.
	Do you even know what the Russian argument is on that?
	I don't care why they're doing it.
	It's wrong.
	They're orphans.
	And if the parents are identified, they ship them back to Ukraine.
	It is absolutely true.
	They're orphans in combat zones.
	That is not true.
	They're orphans in combat zones.
	That is 100% true.
	Now, you could say, well, Russia has an obligation to send the orphans to Ukraine.
	That could be a discussion.
	But again, hold on, hold on, hold on.
	The framing here, the framing here.
	Do you not think children should be reunited with their families if they're able?
	Wick. They're orphans.
	They don't have families.
	They don't have families.
	It's in a combat zone.
	But they do in many cases.
	Their parents are saying, give us back our kids!
	No, and every month when they identify parents, they do send them back.
	They are making it very, very hard to identify parents.
	See, you're all over the place.
	I'm not all over the place.
	You are all over the place.
	Again, let me ask you one more time because you keep not answering the question.
	Does the Buka massacre justify because you have agreed that violations of human rights allow us or allow a foreign country to go in militarily, right?
	So if Buka's not enough for you, is them snatching these 20,000 Orphans, as you call them, off the streets and disappearing them into the Russia.
	Is that not enough for you?
	What about all the other war crimes that have been recognized by the UN, by the ICJ, by the OSCE, by these other human rights watchdog groups that they know is happening in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories where they are forcing Ukrainian citizens to become Russian?
	Get a Russian passport, and then they conscript the men and send them off to fight against Ukraine.
	Does that not justify— Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
	Hold on.
	We got a problem with conscription now?
	Okay, we got a couple questions here.
	Yes, if you are making someone— Wick, Wick, please.
	A couple points here.
	First of all, you didn't know what was going on with the orphans.
	You were saying, oh, the children are being— This is absolutely happening.
	Wick, Wick, for God's sake.
	You made the claim, oh, all these children and their parents are begging for them back.
	In a lot of cases, yes.
	And this is happening in the majority or the vast majority of cases.
	That's what was implied.
	The reality is they're orphans in a combat zone and they're being moved out of the combat zone.
	There's a genuine discussion to be had as to whether or not the orphans should be sent to Ukraine or whether or not they should be sent.
	Hold on.
	Hold on.
	It's just not true.
	I let you finish, didn't I?
	Whether they should be sent to safer places, I did.
	Whether they should be sent to safer places deeper within Russia, away from the combat zone.
	I understand that Russia has annexed those areas, and there are people there now who the Russian government considers to be Russian citizens.
	The Ukrainian government is also conscripting people who don't want to fight.
	There's plenty of videos you can find right now of vans pulling up, grabbing people off the street, forcing them into the front line.
	And the big reason why this is happening is because Ukraine is suffering from a critical manpower shortage, which is one of the reasons why they are losing.
	You laid out like eight points.
	You want to talk about the Butcher Massacre?
	You keep talking about things, and we keep needing to address them because you bring up points that are just demonstrably wrong.
	And I wait for you to finish.
	No, you do not, sir.
	So General, the Army General Christopher G. Cavoli met April 3rd, right?
	He's the commander of UCOM.
	He's the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO Forces, right?
	He sat down in front of a session of Congress, right?
	An open session of Congress.
	And he talked about the Ukraine situation.
	This is very recent.
	In this, he testified, right?
	And I think he would be in a better position to know than you or I, considering the access to the intel he has, right?
	He'd also be biased.
	Right? Biased.
	He's involved in NATO, isn't he?
	Okay, yes.
	But he has the...
	Duty to tell the truth.
	Like, here we go.
	Like, saying he's biased because he's a NATO general, right?
	He's testified that Ukraine has solved its manpower issues.
	And, right?
	And it is currently in a better position today than it was last year.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I suppose my issue with this conversation so far is I still don't understand why I should care about Ukraine.
		You guys are arguing humanitarian issues.
		You want to talk about China and humanitarian issues?
		We can do that.
		I'm unmoved by the plight of a country that has nothing to do with us.
unidentified		I think you're just incorrect when you say it has nothing to do with us.
unidentified		Again, our allies, Taiwan, for example.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		We should invade China.
		Why? Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, these countries rely on us as well.
		China's been invading the South China Sea and sinking Vietnamese fishing vessels.
		They're building military bases.
		Should we invade mainland China?
unidentified		If they invade Taiwan, yes.
unidentified		We have a bright red line.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		They took over Hong Kong.
unidentified		They were mass protests trying to shut it down.
unidentified		The British government had made a contract to give it back in so many years that was a legal thing.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Is that the authority of a foreign government to tell Hong Kong that they give up their rights?
unidentified		The Hong Kong citizens, if you will?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		The Hong Kong citizens aren't beholden to the will of the Crown of England.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So when the protesters in Hong Kong started saying, we do not want the rule of mainland China, and China sent in tanks to crush them.
unidentified		Yeah, that was wrong.
unidentified		That was horrible.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So like with Crimea, should the US now get involved and support the people of Hong Kong and Southeast Asia in incursions against mainland China?
unidentified		If we could send aid into Hong Kong, do you think we should?
unidentified		If we could send monetary aid to help smuggle people out, do you think we should do that?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Should the US send...
unidentified		Well, can you answer my question?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I'll ask you a question first.
unidentified		Sure. Right.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Should we sink the flagship of the Chinese fleet in the South China Sea?
unidentified		If they invade Taiwan, yes.
		Well, they invaded Hong Kong.
		The people of Hong Kong did not vote for them.
		Characterizing as invasion is a little bit different.
		It's a different context.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		They sent in tanks.
unidentified		Again, horrible.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		The people fought back against it, and they started disappearing them.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Horrible. So what's the difference between Crimea and Hong Kong?
unidentified		So in Crimea, there was no contract, right?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So in Hong Kong, the British government— You said there was a lease that Russia had.
unidentified		With Serovopol, which is the military – sorry.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Pronunciations might – So the tanks that Russia had in Crimea were already leased to have been in there at the Black Sea port.
unidentified		But not to blockade the Ukrainian military bases there, not to lock down parliament there.
		Again, British had a – the British – As I understand it, and again, I'm not an expert on China by any means, but the British had an agreement with the government of China that in 100 years they were going to give back Hong Kong into China's hands.
		And the day came, and they did that.
		Now, I'm with you.
		China has done horrible things to the protesters in Hong Kong.
		Horrible things indeed.
		There might be an argument.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Our interests, I think, are very much at risk with China right now, considering the seizures, the atolls they've built, and their declaration of ownership of South Tennessee.
unidentified		Would you think it's beneficial, then, for us to stimmy China's allies, to hurt China's allies?
unidentified		Do you think making China's allies weaker would be in our best interest in the United States?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		No. No, why not?
unidentified		We're about to have a conflict with China.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		The reason I ask the question is that I understand that's the reason you asked me a question.
		The reason we asked the question is that we have multiple conflicts around the world.
		And my point was, when you guys are debating the humanitarian issues of Ukraine, I'm sitting here being like, I literally don't care.
		You're arguing with him.
		You're saying we should be involved.
		And you're saying, but there's humanitarian issues.
		I know you're arguing other things, too.
		But in that context, I'm just like, I literally don't care.
unidentified		Let me explain my position a little bit more.
		I think perhaps there's some agreement that me and Wick have on the extremes, which is that if you have a sufficient humanitarian crisis or a sufficient erosion of democratic principles or constitutional principles, that could justify intervention in certain circumstances.
		I think we all believe that, right?
		No. Intervention in Nazi Germany.
		We all agree.
		I mean— Stop them from doing what they were doing?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		The issue with Nazi Germany goes beyond humanitarian issues.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		The U.S. did not invade...
unidentified		So does Ukraine and so does China.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		The U.S. did not invade Storm of the Beaches of Normandy because of the Holocaust.
unidentified		But if we knew about the Holocaust and even if Germany wasn't doing all the other things that we invaded them for, I think that would have been sufficient reason to invade Germany.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So we should invade China now?
unidentified		No, I...
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I mean, they're giving forced abortions to Uyghur women.
unidentified		I'm not...
		Let me explain.
		I'm not saying that we should invade China now.
		I understand there's a lot of...
		It's a different situation and we can go into the minutia of the different...
		I think that there is a justification to do so.
		The question here is, does Ukraine deserve U.S. intervention?
		Is it worth $200 billion?
		What are we getting out of this?
		What's Ukraine getting out of this, right?
		Ukraine's getting the right to exist.
		From what I see is that really what's happening is, you said something a while ago that I thought was actually kind of profound.
		Your belief on the Israel-Palestine conflict is that Palestine needs to be allowed to lose.
		I sort of believe that about this as well.
		I think that by giving Ukraine weapons,
		We might be slowing the progress of the Russian military to some extent, but it's dramatically increasing the casualties, and the end result's going to be the same.
		You may believe that, but that is demonstrably untrue by the facts of the matter.
		But I want to talk— And it's not even a country— You keep saying things that are just not true.
		No, it is.
		You keep saying things that are just not true.
		You can look this up.
		You can look this up.
		People who have much more access— Should we invade Gaza?
		Do I think we should invade Gaza?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Should we invade Gaza?
unidentified		No, absolutely not.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Well, why not?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		There's a humanitarian crisis.
unidentified		Again, there are levels of intervention, and this is why I asked you the question earlier about Hong Kong, about, well, in this case, would you be okay not with military intervention, but with us intervening with aid money?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Do you think that— For Hong Kong?
unidentified		For Hong Kong, yes.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I don't think we should be involved in it at all.
unidentified		At all.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		At all.
unidentified		Right? Well, this is where I disagree.
		I think that the—well, let me ask.
		Are you an isolationist?
		I don't actually know.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		What does that mean?
unidentified		An isolationist is someone who doesn't want foreign involvement at all.
		So, for example— Okay.
		So, let me ask your line, then.
		At what point would it be sufficient—what do you care about?
		What would you care about in a foreign land that says, okay, the U.S. needs to get involved in this?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		What does it mean by involved?
unidentified		Whatever you think it means.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So, like, a trade negotiation?
		We're buying rare earths from China, so we negotiate a trade agreement.
		Involvement in that is fine.
unidentified		So when I'm talking about it, I'm talking about conflict.
		So if there's a conflict in China, for example, with the Uyghur Muslims, would that be something you should care about?
		That, hey, we need to stop this from happening?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's a coin toss.
		I don't know that the U.S. involved in a conflict which could escalate to kinetic conflict for which it's not a priority of the United States.
		There's an argument of, wow, it is really bad what they're doing.
		So maybe we just don't do business there.
		Maybe it's that simple.
unidentified		That's a form of intervention.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Not really.
unidentified		It actually is, though.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Saying I'm not going to buy bread from you is not me kicking your door in at your grocery store.
unidentified		You're saying, I'm not going to buy bread for you unless you change this.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		It's called a boycott.
unidentified		I understand, but it's a form of intervention.
unidentified		I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		That's an extremely absurd definition of intervention.
unidentified		I don't agree.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well then let's define this between kinetic intervention and purchasing boycotts.
unidentified		There's a whole host of other types of intervention that we can do when we talk about this.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So we're talking about, should the U.S. engage in forms of warfare, such as sanctions or kinetic conflict, psychological operations, cyber warfare, etc.?
		The answer is no.
		Should we stop buying from them?
		Yep. Yeah, if there's a guy who...
		He's got animals and he's a butcher and he tortures the animals before he kills them.
		I ain't buying from him.
		I'm not intervening.
		I'm just saying I'm not going to go.
		That guy's crazy.
unidentified		Let me ask you this.
unidentified		Do you think there's any foreign situation where you would be in favor of the U.S. using a kinetic intervention?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Probably. Can you give me an example?
		Yeah, like the most difficult position is should we have gotten involved in World War II?
		When you have an expansionist power, Like Russia?
		Go ahead.
		Not to mention Italy, not to mention Japan.
		So this was a global war for which the U.S. largely stayed out of until the final few years.
		So even in the minds of the Americans, we should not be involved.
		It actually wasn't until we were attacked that we decided to actually get involved, which is interesting.
unidentified		Do you think we should have gotten involved earlier?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Probably, well...
unidentified		Let me ask it this way.
		Do you think it would be better for the U.S. and the world had we gotten involved in World War II earlier than we did?
		No. No, why not?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Because we don't know what would have happened had things played out differently.
		What we do know is the timeframes by which we acted, we got a result that was largely beneficial until the prevailing powers created what's called the liberal economic order, which has created instability and chaos for generations, and the U.S. entering a bunch of wars they've never declared.
		The Constitution of the United States effectively ended in the 50s with these declarations of, say, the IMF, the World Bank, etc.
		So there's an interesting conversation that actually was lighting up with Douglas Murray and Dave Smith the other day, and it's been one of the principal discussions on foreign policy now.
		There's a lot of concern over the worldview of people like Daryl Cooper as well as Dave Smith and others who have made arguments that Winston Churchill was a bad guy, which I think is largely silly.
		I think the circumstances of World War II are the offshoot of World War I. World War I was high-density nations in dispute for a variety of reasons, came to the industrialization of war, which then leads to the wars it was.
		It's easy to say now 100 years on nearly.
		Well, I don't know because the outcome could have been substantially worse.
		Right now what we know is the Nazis were very bad.
		They were authoritarian.
		They controlled their economy.
		They functioned not too dissimilar.
		The difference between the communists and the fascists and the Nazis was largely on their view of culture, traditionalism, and progressivism.
		We don't want an expansionist authoritarian system that takes everything over.
unidentified		I agree that we don't want that.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		But the liberal economic order has functioned largely like that, only slightly better in some respects.
unidentified		I fundamentally disagree with that view.
		I think the liberal world order has made people more safe, more wealthy, and much better off than it was before.
		But that's another argument.
		We're talking about Ukraine, Russia today, and I want to— Because you said something there that I do think is interesting, like that we don't want authoritarian expansionist powers.
		And I would argue that we should have NATO again.
		There's a difference between expanding at the point of a gun like Russia does, and there's a difference between expanding, say, hey, you want to join NATO?
		And there's like, you know what?
		I would like to join NATO.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		If that's what had happened.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		But if you look at the history of Ukraine, that's literally not what happened.
unidentified		Ukraine isn't joining NATO.
		It hasn't joined NATO.
		It wasn't even discussions to join NATO.
		It got nixed.
		It is now because of Russia's actions, but it's probably not going to happen.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		And the conflict is largely predicated upon NATO expansionist policies.
unidentified		Once again, you have said that, like, oh, it happens in the case of NATO that it's just the same as Russia doing the guns.
		But no, NATO has largely expanded through...
		Voluntary joining.
		This has happened.
		Can you give me a country that you think that has joined NATO under coercion?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Right now in Romania, they've removed the populist right-wing candidate from being able to run for no reason.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		In France, Marine Le Pen has been accused of...
unidentified		What does that have to do with joining NATO?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		How is it...
unidentified		Romania has...
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		How can I determine whether or not the population of a country is willfully joining a nation when they remove its leaders?
unidentified		Okay. So if Russia...
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		France joined NATO.
unidentified		They removed Ukraine's leader.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		If USAID funds protests in Ukraine— Then Ukraine isn't joining NATO.
unidentified		Hold on.
		A few days before the invasion, a demand was said, promise to never join NATO.
		Why didn't they just say, yeah, sure, we'll never join NATO.
		NATO will never accept them.
		Because a country has a right to make its own choices.
		You said they're not joining NATO.
		So if they're not joining it, why not just say, yeah, we're never going to join?
		Because you don't let a foreign power come in and tell you what you can and cannot do.
		You say, we— If we're going to exist as a country, we have to be at least somewhat independent in being able to make our own decisions.
		They don't want to be a puppet of Russia.
		Okay, so we're never going to join it.
		But I still want an answer.
		Just real quick, I still want an answer from you, Tim.
		Which NATO country has joined through coercion?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So my point is, I cannot assess which country is joining of their free will when we know in these countries they forcefully remove opposition to NATO.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		When a president starts to rise up, say Marine Le Pen, and she says, we want to leave the European Union, so they accuse her of crimes, criminally charge her and remove her.
unidentified		Did she do those crimes?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		We don't know.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		And probably not.
unidentified		That's why they hold a trial to be able to find out.
unidentified		Hold on, hold on, hold on.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		You're right.
		You're right.
		He's completely correct.
		He's completely correct.
		You are completely correct.
		Crimea separated from Ukraine by a vote that was completely legitimate.
		We all agree.
unidentified		Of course, except for, again, in UN Resolution 68, they disagreed.
unidentified		Because there was evidence that it was under coercion.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So the people who are largely on the side of opposing Russia have argued that the election that happened in Crimea is invalid.
		My point is, you have chosen to respect only certain administrative procedures and not others.
		My position is neutral.
		We know that they've criminally charged Marine Le Pen.
		We don't know if it's true or not.
unidentified		If it is true, should they charge her?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		If Marine Le Pen committed a crime, should she be charged?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Yes. It's a question.
unidentified		Yes. Should she be removed?
		No. No, why not?
		Why do you think?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Well, because democratic countries allow for people to vote.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So previously in France, when other politicians...
unidentified		Do you think felons should be able to vote?
unidentified		Like convicted people sitting in prison right now should be able to vote?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Not in prison.
unidentified		Not in prison.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		There's due process restrictions, but once you get out, your rights should be restricted.
unidentified		If her criminal conviction involved jail time, and I'm not sure it does because I'm not quite up on that case specifically, let's say five years in jail.
unidentified		Do you think she should be able to run from a jail cell?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Interesting. Yes, because in a democratic institution, a democratic country, the people decide.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		You can't simply have a judge bang a gavel and say the people no longer have a right to vote.
unidentified		I can't decide to take away your guns.
		I can't vote on that.
		I can't decide to stop you from speaking, to de-platform you.
		I can't vote on that.
		And we understand that.
		We understand that because we have a constitution that protects this.
		We understand that in a democracy, there are certain things— That's not correct.
		Wait, wait, wait.
		Hold on.
		Do we care about constitutional rules now?
		Just want to ask.
		Like, do we care about constitutional processes?
		Do we care about constitutional principles?
		We care about principles.
		And sometimes principles comes into conflict, and you have to decide the higher principle.
		And when you have a principle of sovereign— I think that does rise above a,
		again, some legalese in a constitution.
		Fundamentally different.
		I have a question.
		I think your position here, really, it's very convenient, right?
		Very convenient because it's very correct.
		No, it's very convenient because, oh, if the people there, if they're powerless to stop their oppression, and now your position is, well, other countries, they can't go in and help the oppressed, well, that's very convenient, right?
		Now they have to stay oppressed because, hey, other countries can't go in.
		You'd be against the French sending Lafayette to help us in our revolution against the British.
		You'd be against the U.S. getting involved in Afghanistan for moral reasons and Iraq and Libya and Syria.
		You're just like – you're an anti-interventionalist across the board, surely.
		Of course not.
		And I've already recognized that there are severe extreme circumstances where, yes, intervention, you know –
		You probably should do that.
		Again, I gave you an example.
		In the 90s when we invaded the Balkans, right, and NATO did all that and stopped the Serbians from genocide, all these people, that was good.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Should we have invaded Iraq?
unidentified		Ooh, that's a good question.
		Which time?
		Gulf War?
		Either. Gulf War, yes.
		The other time, probably in hindsight, no.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Why did we invade Iraq in the Gulf War?
unidentified		Because they were taking over Kuwait, which was a sovereign country, which was pleading for our help and which was our ally.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		And then what about the second time?
unidentified		The second time, it was because we were sold a lie that there was weapons of mass destruction.
		Had there actually been weapons of mass destruction, there might have been a case there.
		And had we actually believed there were weapons of mass destruction, then fair enough.
		But I think in hindsight, it was a mistake.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Should we have intervened in Libya?
unidentified		I'm not familiar enough about Libya to make a decision on that, unfortunately.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		The actions of NATO resulted in the death of Muammar Gaddafi, which resulted in the reignition of the North African slave trade and tribal warfare.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		And the country is in relative chaos right now.
unidentified		I'm wondering for what reason NATO, Should we be involved in Syria?
		Now? Yes, I think we have interest in overthrowing a monster like Assad.
		Yes. He destabilized his people.
		How did he do that?
		Again, by severely oppressing the people who would rise against him.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		What does that mean?
unidentified		Chemical weapon attacks, mass graves.
		Again, look at what happened after Syria, right?
		After, I'm sorry, the rebels took back Syria, right?
		And what they found, again, I'm not for that.
		That's bad, right?
		But they found that doesn't make Assad good.
		That doesn't make Assad better, even.
		Because, again, the prisons found in Syria, where they had people who hadn't seen daylight in years, just mass prisons, was horrific.
		Again, I am not saying that every intervention is good.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Does the US do that with prisons?
unidentified		To the extent that Syria did?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		No. People are in solitary confinement for extended periods, maybe years, for instance, without trial?
unidentified		Again, this is incomparable to what Syria does.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		What does Syria do?
unidentified		Syria has mass prisons that they throw people in for simply opposing the government, for simply What does that mean, opposing the government?
		Does Ukraine arrest people and imprison them for opposing the government?
		Yes. Look, this idea, and these comparisons you guys are trying to draw here between Syria and USA, right?
		Syria and Ukraine are insane to me.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		That's not an argument.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		That's not an argument.
unidentified		I understand, but I make my argument after I say it's insane.
		I feel it's insane because, in which I make my argument, right?
		I feel it's insane because of scale.
		The matter of scale.
		These things matter.
		It's like water, right?
		It's good to drink.
		It's okay to drink.
		If I splashed you with water, it'd probably be bad, but it wouldn't be as bad as if a tsunami or a flood or any, like a biblical type of flood came in and drank.
		Just because a thing can be bad doesn't mean that scale doesn't matter.
		When it comes to Syria, the scale matters.
		And when it comes to Russia and Ukraine, look, I'm not here to say that Ukraine has been perfect, that Ukraine is this perfect country.
		I am saying that when you look at the scale, we're talking about a glass of water versus a flood.
		A flood that is Russia.
		Russia's war crimes in Bukha, Russia's war crimes in the occupied territories that it does, Russia's war crimes in Chechnya, Russia's war crimes in almost every conflict it's been involved in massively, massively outscale anything you could say Ukraine has done.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So what happens if right now we just stopped Ukraine and said, no more funding, we're done, we're out?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		What would happen?
unidentified		So first of all, that sends a signal to… Nuclear proliferation expands.
		Japan starts to want to get nukes.
		You have all these other smaller countries that say, you know what, we need nukes now because we can no longer rely on the global world order to protect us, which has been protecting us before.
		So now we need nukes for ourselves so we can be a sovereign nation and not worry about a greater power coming in and taking us out.
		So that's the first thing that happens.
		The second thing that happens is China takes Taiwan.
		It shuts down trade in the Bering Strait.
		I'm sorry, not the Bering Strait.
		My bad.
		The Taiwan Strait, right, where about $2 trillion a year of commerce goes through, and it just shuts that down because it can.
		And you have land grabs by smaller countries, each trying to take pieces of each other, because Ukraine is really a domino.
		And once it falls, it's going to this cascade.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		For clarification, you're saying that the structure of the liberal economic order right now relies on us staying in Ukraine?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Yes. Okay.
unidentified		Yes, in a very real way.
		And again, Taiwan is looking at us.
		We have our NATO allies looking at us.
		We have other countries looking at us.
		We have our enemies looking at us.
		How are we going to respond?
		Are we actually going to stand up for the values that we say that we hold?
		When we say we will support Ukraine no matter what, do we actually follow through on that?
		And they're looking to see if they can...
		Our new government has not said that, that we're going to support Ukraine no matter what, and that would be a wild standard to have.
		I'm curious why you support Taiwan, because if you have this standard, well, we can't get involved, even if the population there really wants to leave and perhaps has justification to leave and be a separate country, we shouldn't get involved.
		Why is the U.S. arming Taiwan?
		Why are we involved in Taiwan?
		Shouldn't we just kind of say, well, we can just let them be part of China?
		We just had a red line in Taiwan.
		China......decides to take over using military force, we will stop them.
		Because we recognize that there are fundamental, specific interests that are good for America that run through Taiwan.
		First of all, we get a bunch of chips from them, which we put in...
		I understand.
		I understand.
		What I'm asking...
		There's a lot of trade...
		Quick, quick, quick.
		I'm going towards the principle that you elucidated earlier, when you were saying that there's this principle of national sovereignty, and that countries shouldn't be interfered with by outside powers, even if certain sections of that country want to be independent.
		Now, it's clear that Crimeans wanted to be independent.
		They wanted to be separate.
		Hold on.
		And their contract was—the rest of Ukraine was violated when the Constitution was thrown away in 2014.
		So why are you okay with the U.S. intervening in Taiwan, this also kind of breakaway area, but you're not okay with the Crimean people wanting to leave Ukraine?
		Because, again, just like I would be okay if instead of – like if Taiwan wanted to hold a vote, hold a referendum now, right, today, right, with the situation it has now, they aren't under occupation right now, at least not in
		any real way.
		They could hold that vote, and they have several times to – do we want closer relations with the mainland of China and things like that?
		And you have fights politically where they elect leaders that go closer to China, go away from China, things like that.
		If they were to say, you know what, we just want to rejoin the motherland, and we are done being our own separate thing, and there was no or not enough coercive force, then –
		But if China came in and does what they want to do, which is send boats, missiles, and troops to occupy the nation and force the issue, then yes, I think we absolutely should stop that.
		I feel like you ignored something that I brought up earlier.
		Because that's what, again, that's what Russia did.
		Sure. Well, no.
		I feel like you're ignoring something that I said earlier.
		In 1992— Crimea declared independence from Ukraine, and they were going to hold a referendum to have a vote.
		The central government in Kiev said, no, you don't get to have that vote.
		You have one week to withdraw the referendum with a threat of force.
		So when you keep saying, well, the Crimeans should have been allowed to vote without Russian interference, I agree.
		The Ukrainian government wouldn't let them.
		And they also wouldn't let them in 2014.
		And so that's why the Russians intervened in Crimea, for also some political, obviously geopolitical reasons as well.
		But the people of Crimea, you keep saying, let me ask you, in 1992, do you deny the truth that in 1992 Crimea declared independence and Kiev said no?
		I don't deny it.
		So when you keep saying, well, the Crimeans should have had a vote themselves, and you have Kiev not letting them have the vote.
		I'm confused as to your actual standard here.
		Why do you support Taiwan?
		Do you think that the United States should have allowed during the Civil War the South to secede?
		No, because they didn't have their constitutional rights violated.
		What constitutional rights in 92 were violated from Crimea?
		Hold on.
		So the Soviet Union collapsed.
		We're talking between 1990 and 1992.
		There was a first referendum in 1991 in which the Crimean people overwhelmingly voted for autonomy.
		There was a second referendum in 1991.
		The Crimeans and really the rest of Ukraine voted to leave the Soviet Union.
		And then literally within a year of the Ukrainians having a referendum to leave the Soviet Union, which was arguably legal at the time, probably illegal, you had the Crimeans say, well, we're going to have a referendum to leave Ukraine.
		Ukraine. And the Ukrainians said no.
		So the Ukrainian people, when they wanted to have a vote, it was denied to them.
		And then in 2014, when they wanted to have a vote, it was denied to them as well.
	The OSCE refused to come in.
	I'm not saying that Ukraine is angels.
	None of this justifies Russia's aggression.
	Let's get back to the point, but this is the thing that justifies intervention.
	This is the thing that justifies intervention.
	When you have an area that has denied a declaration of independence, denied the right to have a referendum, and then when they vote for a president, fine, we're under your constitutional rule, that constitution is broken, and the president that they elected gets thrown out unconstitutionally, and now they're like, well,
	we want to leave.
	And then Ukraine says no, and the OSCE says we're not going to monitor it because Kiev didn't authorize it.
	And then you say, oh, but then the Russians come in.
	Nothing justifies this.
	Let me ask you, like, what at what point would Russian like it seems like your standard is they'll never be justified.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Wow. So in March of 95, Ukrainian parliament abolished the Crimean Constitution.
		All laws and decrees contradicting those of Kiev disarmed the bodyguards of the government.
		That's crazy.
unidentified		They've been bullying Crimea.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Crimean National Guard troops entered the residence of the leader of Crimea, seized it, and forcefully took it over.
unidentified		Yeah, look at 1992 as well.
unidentified		Wow. That was in 95. Yeah, I believe that was in 95. That was in 95. This has been going on since 91. There's 91, 92, 95, 96. When the Soviet Union fell, Crimea said, we're our own place.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Kiev said, we won't let you do that.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		And so then, over the next few years, Crimea had established its own forces and constitution, declared independence, and then Kiev invaded and took it over.
unidentified		I'm not here to argue whether or not Ukraine did correctly there.
		I'm here to argue that Russia did wrong when it forcefully invaded.
		Like, again, even in 95. If Russia had said, you know what, we're going to come in and we're going to take Crimea ourselves, that would have been wrong.
		That would have been not okay.
		That is something that we should oppose.
		We should not let large foreign powers intercede in conflicts that they themselves are stirring up.
		Remember? No.
		Hold on.
		Again, there's been a lot of evidence.
		You're about to totally misquote the actual history on this once again.
		When it comes to Crimea, Tim just pointed out 1995, 1996 there was also a constitution that was passed in Kiev that changed the relation.
		Hold on.
		You keep saying that.
		Because it keeps remaining to be true.
		But we all understand your point here.
		We all understand that you think...
		I don't think you do.
		No, I do.
		I'm disagreeing with it.
		I'm saying that when you bully an area to this extent, when they want to leave and you deny it, when you invade them and take away their constitution, when you violate the shared constitution that you forced Crimea to be under to their detriment,
		the person that they voted for, what it seems to me is that...
		If there's anything that justifies...
		This is way more justified than the US leaving the UK at this point.
		If there's anything that justifies intervention, this is what justifies intervention.
		And you keep saying, well, it's not justified.
		It's not justified.
		How convenient.
		This oppressed people that doesn't have the means to defend themselves, well, they can't appeal to any outside power to help save them, save them from this consistent oppression because, well, we can't have intervention.
		We can't have any intervention.
		They just have to sit and take it.
		That's your position.
		That is absolutely...
		Absolutely not true, because there are a wealth of options, right, that we can get into.
		Like, if we wanted to stop that from happening, there are sanctions, there are ways to...
		Who would have sanctioned Ukraine?
		The U.S. would have sanctioned Ukraine?
		Again, if what you're saying is true, and I have to look it up, and when I look it up, is it going to be true?
		Please do.
		I'm very curious.
		But we'll get into that, right?
		But in 1995, right, if...
		To the world order, Crimea had said, help us, and appealed for help to outside forces.
		Do you think that the only choices are military intervention or just letting them get away?
		I think at that point, the only option is military intervention.
		I disagree.
		I think that's untrue.
		The coup was pro-West.
		The West was not—we've already intervened on behalf of this power structure.
		Russia can impose sanctions as well.
		Yeah, what they're going to say is, we don't care.
		We're going to just trade with the EU now.
		We're going to trade with NATO now.
		We don't care.
		We're going to continue to oppress the Crimeans, and there's nothing you can do about it.
		There are other options.
		You keep saying there's other options, but first of all, there's not.
		And second of all, this standard you have where it's like there's always other options.
		There does not mean that you're correct.
		The standard you have where it's always other options whenever it's any kind of— You think I'm okay with all of U.S. interventions?
		I've named two.
		I've named two interventions by the U.S. that I've been totally against.
		One is the Iraq War as well as the Vietnam War.
		Those are two U.S. interventions that I think we should not have done.
		And then we asked you about Libya and Syria.
	I didn't know enough about Libya.
	But Syria, I think, yes, stopping Assad was a good thing and we should have done it.
	And I'd do it again.
	Couldn't there be other options for stopping Assad?
	There could have, but they weren't working.
	Couldn't we sanction him?
	Do you understand that we did sanction Assad?
	We went through the steps.
	To go from zero to a hundred, right?
	To go from doing nothing to, okay, now we're coming in with tanks.
	It wasn't nothing.
	This has been going on since 1991.
	We go through a step-by-step process.
	No, no, no.
	This has been going on since 1991.
	We brought up 1992, the Declaration of Independence that was ignored.
	We talked about 1995 when Kiev invaded Crimea and abolished their constitution.
	We're like, this has been going on for decades, right, at this point.
	And you're saying, well, you know, there could have been other things.
	They've been trying other things.
	It's not like Russia just invaded this out of nowhere.
	That's true.
	Russia didn't invade out of nowhere.
	Russia has always wanted Ukraine, and they have not invaded out of nowhere.
	They are invading because they want to gulp up this territory because Putin wants greater Russia.
	This is just true.
	What you were doing is trying to obfuscate and post-hoc rationalize.
	I'm not obfuscating.
	I'm citing facts.
	What has Putin said?
	What is his reason for invading Ukraine?
	He brought up the unconstitutional two.
	He gave two.
	No, he brought up way more than two.
	He gave two reasons.
	There are two objectives in Ukraine.
	What are they?
	You didn't even...
	Hold on.
	There are two objections in Ukraine.
	No, you're saying there's two.
	You're wrong.
	You're wrong.
	There's more than two.
	Emilitarization? Did you watch his speech?
	Enosification. He gave reasons for those objectives.
	Those were not the only two.
	He doesn't believe Ukraine should exist.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		You think that Putin is being honest?
unidentified		I think when he says that he wants Ukraine, that he doesn't believe Ukrainians are a thing, that Ukraine exists, really, that they're all really just part of Russia, then yes, I think he's being honest.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Did you know that Kiev was the capital of Russia?
unidentified		At one point?
unidentified		What point?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Hundreds of years ago.
unidentified		Okay, fair enough.
		Hundreds of years ago.
		We don't live in that time.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Right. My point is that, you know what Ukraine means?
unidentified		The word.
		The word itself?
		Yeah. No.
		You? I actually don't know.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		It means the borderland.
		That's why it's called the Ukraine.
		They changed, they dropped the the after the Soviet Union's collapse because they didn't want to be referred to Russia's borderland.
		Russia called it its borderland because it was historically a part of Russia and Kiev was its capital.
unidentified		I don't care about 800 years ago.
unidentified		I don't care about...
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		This is pre-Soviet Union.
unidentified		I don't care about...
		You don't even care about 1992.
		So... I absolutely do.
		You said like, oh, they just jumped.
		Again, if Russia had decided to militarily invade Ukraine in 1992, I would have opposed that.
		And I oppose it now.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		And again, I mean, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, we wouldn't have called it a military invasion of Ukraine because the Soviet states were in chaos and disarray.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		And they were largely under the rule of Russia as it was.
unidentified		There was a lot going on.
		And you're probably correct, actually, in the fact that we probably would have just let it.
		See where the chips fall.
		But the chips have falled, and we live in a world where certain borders have been drawn, right?
		And I think that, again, what is happening today—we're not talking about 20 years ago, we're not talking about ancient history of 800 years ago—is Russia is engaged in an illegal and unjustifiable, expansive project where it wants to take parts of Ukraine and— Absorb it into itself.
		Because Putin believes that ethnic Russians, that Ukraine isn't a thing, that they're all ethnic Russians, and he feels that a greater Russian empire wants to be a part, like, he believes he should expand Russia into this greater empire,
		that they could be a world power again, and he has these imperialist ambitions and dreams, which he has said over and over and over again.
		So to the question of the debate.
		Is it in the U.S.'s interest to continue to support Ukraine?
		Again, yes it is.
		Because we have financial interests there, we have military interests there, strategic interests there.
		And making Ukraine an ally in the future, which I think we're on a path to do, and I think that we should do, will give us access to rare earth minerals and better able to – like defensive bases where we can have better logistics and better protect our interests.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Do you know what the principal political conflict in Ukraine was from 2010 to 2014?
unidentified		The principal political – I can talk about some of the political conflicts.
unidentified		What's the principal one?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Trade. The trade issue?
unidentified		Whether we're going to be trading more with the European Union and all that.
unidentified		Or the Russian Federation.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		You're familiar with that conflict?
unidentified		Vaguely, yes.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I'd assume you'd be more than vaguely considering it's the reason for the war.
unidentified		You think that's the reason for the Russian invasion now?
unidentified		That was the reason for Euromaidan.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		That's what Putin said.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		And if we're taking Putin at his word, then...
unidentified		Putin doesn't always tell the truth.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So only when you think he's telling the truth, you'll take what he says.
unidentified		When I think what he's saying is backed up by his words and deeds, when it makes sense in the—when we see him acting in— What did he say about the trade conflict with Ukraine?
unidentified		The trade conflict with Ukraine, he obviously wanted people to be able to trade with Russia, and he wanted them to be closer to Russia because, again, he says he wants to absorb Ukraine.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		You're wrong.
unidentified		I'm wrong.
unidentified		What did he say then?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Putin said that he would cut off trade with Ukraine if they entered into an agreement with the EU because he didn't want cheap European products flooding into Russia.
unidentified		Okay. What does it have to do with whether or not Russia is justified or whether we have interest in continuing to support Ukraine?
unidentified		I'm just curious.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		It was a question about if you understood the political conflict that's occurring in Ukraine and why the war was happening because you made several assertions about Putin's statements.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So I asked you what Putin said and you didn't know.
unidentified		Putin said a lot of things, and I'm sure that there are things that I've said that Putin has said that I am unaware of.
		That's true.
		Fair enough.
		If he has said some things that I am unaware of, I grant you that.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		The trade agreement with Ukraine issue, largely in the election with Yanukovych and Timoshenko, had to do with whether or not Ukraine would be opening up to or joining the European Union.
		Many of the Western Ukrainians wanted to join the Schengen zone so they could get freedom of movement to leave Ukraine.
		And they viewed it largely as Poland—they saw it as an opportunity the same as Poland had.
		When Poland joined the Schengen zone, millions of Poles began to flee the country and go to other countries, notably in the UK, where they started taking jobs with higher base pay because Poland's economy wasn't as good.
		The EU didn't want to induct Ukraine because their economy was way too—way worse, substantially worse.
		And the average Ukraine at the time was making about $400 per month for your median job.
		That meant if they did open the door to trade with Ukraine, 10 million Ukrainians instantly leave Ukraine and go to any other EU country where they can start taking jobs that pay more, which would have caused economic destabilization not too dissimilar to what they saw with Spain and Greece, which they're trying
		not to repeat.
		However, Ukraine was actively in a political dispute.
		Western powers, notably the U.S., and funding various NGOs through USAID and with European interests were supporting the EU side of the argument.
		Russia was supporting the Russian side of the argument, which is why the country was split east to west.
		The Kiev Oblast obviously was moving to the west, which is why you get Euromidan.
		So a lot of NGOs were able to organize with the assistance of USAID.
		I don't think it's as simple to say that the CIA snapped their fingers and made a revolution happen.
		They provided the resources so that activists in places like Kiev could do the work without having to worry about having jobs or not getting paid enough money.
		So largely what ends up happening is Russia issues an alternative.
		Automatum. Both sides offered tons of money to Yanukovych at the time.
		Russia said, look, if you open the door to European trade, we're shutting you down.
		We're not going to do trade with you because cheap European products would then flood
		into Russia.
unidentified		Nothing wrong with that.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So Russia needs, has protectionist policies to prevent their economy from being disrupted.
		So Yanukovych said, okay, let me get back to you.
		Went to the West and said, Russia's going to cut us off.
		What do you have to give us instead?
		When it came down
		Russia offered, I think, somewhere around several billion dollars.
		And Yanukovych was leaning towards taking the deal with the Russian Trade Federation over the EU.
		This is when the Euromaidan protests ignited, and we got the coup, which led to the physical ousting of Yanukovych.
		Now, don't get me wrong.
		I'm not saying that Yanukovych is a good guy by any means.
		Timoshenko was also accused of corruption.
		Ukraine is considered to be one of the most corrupt countries in Europe, especially...
unidentified		Which is improving under Zelensky, to be clear.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Perhaps. I mean, considering 7 million Ukrainians fled, it's hard to know exactly what's going on.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		But what we got after the fall of Yanukovych was Poroshenko, which led to obviously the Burisma scandal, U.S.'s illicit involvement in Ukraine, the Qatar-Turkey pipeline conflict, Nord Stream 2, the expansion of the war, and ultimately where we're at now with Russia seizing the Donbass region and the Oblast stretching from the Donbass down to Crimea to secure a land bridge.
unidentified		What Russia is doing in Ukraine right now, its invasion that it started in February of 2022, is...
		Unjustified because it is trying to go in and annex territory.
		It's trying to seize territory unjustly from a sovereign nation.
		All this Euromaidan stuff is a distraction.
		It really is.
		It is a distraction.
		Because it does not matter to the justification.
		It does not matter to the justification.
		When we're talking about the war in Ukraine, you don't think discussing the cause matters?
		I think that the cause being Their leader was unconstitutionally outed does not justify, again, the Buka massacre.
		It does not justify the 20,000 children that were snatched away.
		It does not justify any of these actions that Russia has taken.
		And Russia has demonstrated again and again and again that this is how it operates.
		It stirs up this conflict, and then it takes advantage when this conflict happens.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Do you think it was justified for the United States to instruct the state to fire their state prosecutor?
unidentified		Are we talking about the Burisma scandal and things like that?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it's connected to it, but the question is, does the U.S. government have the right to go to Ukraine and say, we will withhold congressionally approved loan guarantees unless you fire your state prosecutor?
unidentified		I don't know enough about that to say, to be clear.
		And it doesn't matter in the end of the day.
		Because again, we're not talking about U.S. when it comes to, is U.S. justified in...
		Asking Ukraine to fire a prosecutor.
		We're asking, is the U.S. justified, and should the U.S. continue to aid this current conflict, regardless of how it started?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Is it justified?
unidentified		We have a situation where Ukraine's people are fighting for its life.
		They're fighting for its independence.
		They're fighting for the right to exist as a nation.
		And I think that we have both financial interest in this, right, in making them allies, in getting mineral trade deals like Trump is trying to do.
		We have an interest in setting them up and protecting our wider interest in the regions by, again, if we can stop Russia now, because Russia's not going to stop.
		They have other imperialist ambitions.
		And again, I encourage you to go watch the April 3rd discussion between the EU commander, Army General Christopher G. He's a NATO official.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I just have a thought.
unidentified		I wish he's going to have that opinion.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I have this thought, and it's probably super arrogant, but I was just thinking, like, I don't understand why...
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Every single conversation I've had with people who were in favor of the war in Ukraine literally know nothing about it.
unidentified		You say I know nothing about it.
		You were able to say, well, here are these minute details, these trivial details.
		Oh, you can't explain this period of history in complete detail?
		Oh, you must know nothing about it.
		The cause of it.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I don't know the cause of the war.
unidentified		The cause of the war is, again, Putin.
		See, this is what's happening.
		This is the dogmatic talking points.
		This is what happens, right?
		But it's just true.
		You're trying to obfuscate from this conversation.
		Talking about the cause of the war is not obfuscation.
		What's happening here is that you have a list of pre-programmed dogmatic talking points that you've been giving out this whole time.
		Putin is not justified.
		He's invading.
		Hold on.
		What I'm saying is that when you look at the history of the conflict, when you look at the causes of the conflict, that's relevant when we're deciding who to support with our money.
		I'm not saying support Russia with U.S. dollars.
		I'm not saying do that.
		I'm saying that...
		We should be a little bit choosy with which wars we're funding.
		We should be a little bit choosy with where we're sending billions of dollars.
		I choose to send my money to Ukraine, and so does most of America.
		I know you choose that.
		I'm arguing that we shouldn't.
		46% of Americans.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		That's not most.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		That's a plurality.
unidentified		A plurality of Americans.
		Regardless. 46% of Americans think that, and again, in the recent poll in March, let me finish, have decided they want to send more aid to Ukraine.
		They think that we aren't sending enough aid.
		Talking about dogmatic talking points, right?
		You continue to bring up these things that do not matter when it comes down to it.
		They matter completely.
		They do not.
		You keep saying that.
		You repeat it as if you're on.
		Why doesn't the cause matter?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Let me ask you a question.
unidentified		This is like Japan in 1945 saying, oh, the Americans are invading us.
		And then we say, well, what about Pearl Harbor?
		Oh, that doesn't matter.
		That's history.
		Who cares?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Right. Okay.
		So why is Vladimir Putin taking this specific region of Ukraine?
		We have the battle map pulled up.
unidentified		This specific – the ones he's – he wants to take all of Ukraine, I would say.
		Again, his stated goals at the start of the war were demilitarization and denazification, and you can't do either of those if you don't control at least a major portion of Ukraine.
		The region, the Donbass region, right?
		This is what he has been since 2014, since Crimea, sending in his little green men to stir up these and to fund these kind of separatist groups and to help them and to kind of stir up this conflict so he can,
		quote unquote, justify him coming back in.
		That's why.
		He's trying to take those regions.
		That's his quote-unquote justification.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		But again— Can you name the Oblasts that he seized?
unidentified		Luhansk and Donbass?
		And then Donbass?
		No. Zapazia?
		He has some— Zafrizia, her son, Donetsk and Luhansk, and then Crimea.
		Sure. Okay.
		I think it might be interesting to kind of put the election map from 2010 compared to the current occupation map.
		I think that's something that could be useful, right?
		One of the reasons why, and Crimea, the reason obviously the Russians were able to take it so quickly was because the population there was in support of Russia.
		But one of the reasons, again, why they managed to make such great strides in the areas that they currently hold is because the population is not vehemently anti-Russian.
		And there's polls that show this.
		And this idea that the separatist movement in the Donbass was just this entirely engineered thing, it's just not true.
		There are people there who were upset, again, because they voted for this guy that was removed.
		But again, well, do you deny that Russia has exacerbated whatever natural enmity might exist there, that Russia has used its— I have no doubt that the Russian government has helped the separatists in the East and in Crimea in the same way that I have no doubt the Spanish and the French helped the U.S. during our War of Independence.
		These are not analogous.
		The Spanish and the French did not take...
		If the state voted to join them.
		This is the thing that's very confusing, right?
		Self-determination includes a country voting to join another country.
		Self-determination doesn't count when you have guns pointing at your head.
		Which is what happened in 2014.
		That's not what happened.
		When the Russians intervened in Crimea, they weren't going and pointing the guns at the population that supported them's heads.
		They supported them both before, during, and after this whole incident.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Why don't they have an election?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Why doesn't Ukraine vote on new leadership?
unidentified		Well, first of all, it's unconstitutional.
unidentified		It's not true.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		What does the Constitution of Ukraine say about having an election?
unidentified		Under martial law, they are not allowed to have elections.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Who declares martial law?
unidentified		The president of the...
unidentified		The Constitution of Ukraine leaves out the president when it comes to who the elections are suspended for during martial law.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Wait, wait, wait.
		The president declared martial law.
		He could undeclare it.
unidentified		Yes, but he is in a state...
		The country is being invaded.
		Of course he's in a state of emergency.
		They shouldn't have elections.
		No, I don't think they should have elections now.
		I think it would disenfranchise millions of Ukrainians.
		I think that the people who are under occupied areas in Russia wouldn't have their voices heard.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Do you think that Zelensky should abide strictly by the Constitution or should he use extreme measures to secure victory?
unidentified		Really, it depends on the context.
		I can imagine situations where he probably should violate the Constitution.
		Let me ask you this.
		And he knew he was going to lose the whole country unless he violated one section of the Constitution.
		It would depend.
		I would need a specific example.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Let's try this.
		So right now there's heavy conflict in their northern oblasts.
		Kharkiv, for instance, is the Ukrainian front on the Russian border.
		If the government of Kharkiv had, let's say, 40 percent of the local government was in favor of seceding to join Russia, should he go in and remove them from power by force?
unidentified		In Kharkiv?
unidentified		Yeah. That's a good question.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Growing sentiment is rising, like hypothetically, growing sentiment is rising among the local population that they should actually join the fight with Russia against Kiev.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Should Zelensky send the military in and arrest those politicians?
unidentified		I think that they have a duty to the state and to the security of the state to go in and to stop that.
unidentified		I do believe that they have a duty to the state and the security of the state to go in and stop that from happening.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So in this context, if the people of these areas try to make self-determination independently through their own local government, you're saying he should stop that.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I don't think that— So they have no right to vote on how they should exist?
unidentified		I don't think that right supersedes the right for the state itself to protect itself from an ongoing invasion.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		That's why I said it's a political process.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I'm saying a political process by which the local elected leaders say, guys, we think we should actually side with Russia at this point.
unidentified		But the political process is existing in the context of an ongoing invasion by a foreign hostile power, and we can't ignore that.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So my question then is, you are saying there is no context in Ukraine right now where anyone has a democratic voice.
unidentified		That's not true at all.
unidentified		That's not what I'm saying at all.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		That's why I asked specifically about a minority group in Kharkiv voting through the natural political process against the interests of Kiev.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		And you said Zelensky should use military force to arrest those people.
unidentified		Not just against the interests of Kiev, but also joining the enemy that is currently invading them.
unidentified		Right. They're becoming enemy combatants in that case.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		That's not true at all.
		Not to join the fight, but to separate.
		That's not what I'm saying at all.
unidentified		To separate?
		Then that's a harder question, right?
		But again, under the context of a current invasion, I don't think it's okay for a portion of a country to try to secede during an invasion.
		So like, for example, if America was being invaded, if...
		Canada rose up for some reason, right, and was coming in through the borders.
		I don't think that it would be okay.
		I don't think it would be morally justified for Georgia to try to secede from the Union because there were— Well, this is a border state, which is why it's the example.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So it would be more like Oregon or Washington.
unidentified		Sure. I don't think that's morally— I don't think that the United States should allow that to happen.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Do you think Zelensky should suspend legal jurisprudence considering that war?
		Should he be able to detain and arrest anybody?
		No. So if there is an individual there who, say, a journalist, should he be able to just rendition that person?
unidentified		Or should they— There should be some justification.
		They should be able to show that they've committed some crime.
		There should be a legal process.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		But like a normal legal process at a serial court, like we know it.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Or are you saying, like, at the very least have a writ from a judge saying he's a bad guy?
unidentified		It would depend on the situation, right?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So depending on the situation means there would be a scenario then where the normal judicial process doesn't play out.
		Well, for example— Because you're either saying absolutely not, there will always be standard habeas corpus.
		And legal justifications through an adversarial court.
		If you say there's some – it depends.
		You're saying sometimes maybe he should just grab somebody and lock them up.
unidentified		In extremis.
		So like if, for example, there was a journalist and you knew, right?
		You found information that this journalist had a nuclear weapon that he was about to detonate.
		I don't think you'd do a trial.
		I think you'd take them out.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		You're not talking about a journalist.
		I was talking about terrorists or an insurgent or an enemy combatant.
		A journalist, you're not going to call a journalist unless their job is literally just dissemination of information.
unidentified		So dissemination of information, then in that case, if that's all they're doing, it should be a legal process.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		What about a foreign journalist operating?
unidentified		Are you talking about Coach Red Pill?
unidentified		Is this what we're leading to here?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		One of the things we're getting to is the execution of Gonzalo Lira, yes.
unidentified		Yeah, I can talk about that.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		He was murdered by the state.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		He was trying to flee the state.
unidentified		Can you prove that?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Yes, he posted a video at the border and then he was kidnapped and reported dead.
unidentified		Dead by what causes?
		He also claimed to be tortured.
		Dead by what causes?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Improper treatment, malnutrition, and dehydration.
unidentified		Improper treatment, malnutrition, and dehydration.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		For some reasons, when you lock them in a jail and don't give them medical treatment when they're trying to flee your country.
unidentified		How was he arrested?
		How was he arrested?
		Why was he arrested?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		He was fleeing the country.
unidentified		He was disseminating information.
		As far as I know, right?
		And I'd have to look into the case again.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Are you in favor of that?
unidentified		No, I don't think he should have been...
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Or has he been killed?
unidentified		Well, first of all, there was no evidence he was killed.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I mean, if you take someone by force...
unidentified		Who killed him?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		The state.
unidentified		The state killed him.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Yes, by locking him up.
unidentified		He died of pneumonia in prison.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Indeed, yes.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So you think in the United States...
unidentified		In the United States, if someone dies of pneumonia in prison, did we execute that prisoner?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		We are responsible for their deaths.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		If someone is not guilty of a crime, is fleeing, and we take them, and we put them in prison...
unidentified		How do we know he's not guilty of a crime?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		What was he put in prison for?
unidentified		He was put in prison for...
		Disinformation. I can tell you exactly.
		Which I believe was a crime in...
		Sure. Sure.
		But again, I'm against that.
		I think people should have the ability to have free speech.
		But to act as if the Ukrainian people don't get a say on their own laws, I think is silly.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's why I asked you about Kharkiv.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		And you said they should stop, they should arrest politicians who are against their will.
unidentified		No, again, in the context of them joining an enemy state that is actively invading...
		Invading their country.
		You keep leaving out these contexts and doing this funny little trick where you'll set up a hypothetical under certain circumstances, and then you will change the circumstances, and you'll say, oh, look, you said yes to this, so it must be yes to that.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Or it's literally called me asking you to find the degree by which you are accepting of certain degrees of power.
		So if you say, Zelensky should abide by the Constitution, I will then ask you, okay.
		Should we have elections?
		Then you say, right, so the issue then when I say, should there be standard habeas corpus?
		You say, it depends.
		That would literally imply sometimes there should not be.
		Yes. Yes, I'm asking you these questions to find the line by which you would say the line has been crossed, not to set up, as you described it, funny little hypotheticals.
		So I'm asking you, when we talked about Crimea, Crimea had an election and you didn't respect it.
		So I ask you, what if Kharkiv?
unidentified		If the Crimea had an election under gunpoint and the UN doesn't respect that, the international law doesn't respect that.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		What is the line by which you think the political process is a threat to Kiev?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		If the people choose, if the people in a oblast There are plenty of...
unidentified		There are plenty of instances where we wouldn't let people self-determine.
		I'll give you an example.
		The reason why I asked— I'll give you an example, right?
		Just explain.
		So if I saw someone on a roof who was about to jump, I wouldn't let them self-determination themselves to jump.
		I would physically stop them.
		I would grab them and stop them from doing that.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Now, the reason why I asked is because in the instance of Crimea— The people of Crimea overwhelmingly voted to join Russia, but your argument is it's fake.
		Russia was occupying the region, so it doesn't count.
		I then asked you, what about a legitimate election?
		And you still said the state should use military force from stopping those people from having that vote.
unidentified		Because during, in Crimea, they weren't under invasion from Russia, but in this other situation they were, and my answer was, in the context, I think you're missing my answer.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		No, you're not answering what I'm asking you.
unidentified		I'm absolutely answering the question.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		The point that was brought up is this.
		Crimea's election does not count because they're under duress.
		We agree.
		I asked you about what if another oblast had a legitimate election and you said no, which means even in the instance where Crimea was choosing to join Russia, you would not accept it.
unidentified		Because these legitimate, as you said, you sneak it in, right?
unidentified		But again, they are also under duress because there is a foreign military power actively engaging.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Agreed and understood.
		Now let me try to explain what I'm saying.
		Your argument then is it doesn't matter if Crimea is under duress.
		An oppressive force is seeking to take over Ukraine.
		We will not let Crimea secede.
unidentified		If Russia was currently invading the Donbass and Crimea tried to secede, let's say the Crimea referendum never happened.
		And Crimea was part of Ukraine in 2022 when they came in and Russia invaded the Donbass.
		And Crimea at that point tried to secede.
		Yes, I would also say that that's not OK.
		Which is my point.
		Again, you're missing the point.
		You're missing mine.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		The reason why I asked you this, because your point doesn't matter to why I'm asking you a question.
		You can assert some point after the fact.
		My point is, we are trying to understand your position on Crimea versus any other political process.
		You have asserted that the Crimean election doesn't...
		is not legitimate because they were under occupation.
		Agreed. What if there was an oblast not under occupation?
		You still think they should not be allowed to secede.
		In fact, when Crimea did get absorbed by Russia, the Donbass was already in conflict with Russian troops in the eastern region of Luhansk and Donetsk.
		Russia was already actively in this conflict, though it wasn't a hardcore invasion.
		The country was still considered in a civil war when this broke out.
		After Trump's election, this simmered down and they stopped referring it to as a civil war, but a separatist movement, despite the fact Crimea had already been absorbed.
		Your argument is inconsistent.
unidentified		I disagree.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I'd have no problem with you saying I don't care what Crimea wants.
		They don't get to vote for secession.
		And I'd say, okay, if you made the argument that I don't care what Ukraine does, the U.S. shall prevail, I'd understand your position.
		But you keep trying to create moral justifications for why this instance is right and that instance is wrong.
		I think your better argument would be, literally nothing matters, all is fair in love and war, and we're going to crush Russia.
		And I'd say, okay.
unidentified		Here's the deal, right?
		Again, when you gave me the hypothetical of Kharkiv, right?
		And I said, no, because...
		This legitimate process because, and this is a context I think you were ignoring and I think that makes me not inconsistent here, is that there is a form of duress, an extreme form of duress, and they're actively being invaded by the group that Kharkiv wants to secede to.
		Which is what Crimea did, right?
		No. What Crimea did was they were invaded by Russia.
		Russia locked their parliament, right?
		And they had guns.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		When did Russia invade Crimea?
unidentified		When did Russia invade Crimea?
		The 22nd?
		Maybe the 23rd?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		It really – there is some – Did Russia have any military in Crimea before then?
unidentified		Yes. They had a base and they were leasing – Was the base significant?
unidentified		Define significant.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I mean, are you talking about like 10 troops?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Are you talking about a million?
unidentified		Neither of those.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		If the U.S. built a port in Taiwan and staged their entire Pacific fleet there with all their flagships and 30,000 personnel, would we call that an occupation?
unidentified		Did Taiwan invite us?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Yeah. And we've been there.
		So let's say we have 30,000 people in Taiwan.
		Our flagship for our entire Pacific fleet is there.
		All of our warships are based out of there.
		And then we send in, I don't know, a few thousand more troops.
		Would we call that an invasion?
unidentified		Of course not.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So what you're saying is that Sevastopol was occupied by Russia the whole time and wasn't invaded because they already had their Black Sea Fleet flagship there.
		So it was their most significant port.
		In fact, their only warm water port.
unidentified		During the Crimean referendum, Russian troops blockaded Ukrainian bases that were located in Crimea, so they couldn't stop them.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		My point was this.
		Crimea already housed thousands or tens of thousands of Russian personnel.
		If you believe that Crimea was under duress...
		And then I ask you about another region not under duress, but your position is if they are going to be joining an adversarial force that is actively in conflict with them, we would not allow it.
		It would not have mattered what the results of either election is.
		It doesn't matter if Crimea is under duress or not.
		I don't know why you can't just say that.
		It's a simple answer.
		Crimea can't secede because we won't let them, just like in 1991.
		We didn't let them then.
		We're not going to let them now.
		End of story.
		Determination doesn't matter.
		There's no problem saying it.
		Abraham Lincoln didn't let the South make self-determination.
		So it's a simple argument.
		That's what I'm trying to understand.
		I don't see a cohesive moral worldview in the argument.
unidentified		Let me see if I can explain this in a different way.
		I think that in cases where – like self-determination matters to a point.
		I think that – Also, the sovereignty of a nation matters as well.
		Sometimes these things can come in conflict.
		I tend to side with sovereignty over self-determination when it comes to these things.
		But there are extreme instances where I think, you know what?
		Self-determination is probably the way to go.
		For example, if your people are being genocided and you want to break off and you're like, this is too much.
		We cannot suffer this anymore.
		Fair enough.
		That's okay.
		But to act as if the hypothetical you gave me did not map on or mapped on to what was happening in Crimea, it does not.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's actually just instead of going in circles, it's one for one.
unidentified		You keep saying it's one for one.
unidentified		It's simply not.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I asked you if there was an oblast that wanted to vote, should they be arrested?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		You said, yes, they should.
unidentified		Again, because of the context that they were being invaded by a hostile foreign power.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Ukraine was under invasion with a civil war going on when Crimea issued their referendum.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		They're not different circumstances.
unidentified		I think what you're missing, Wick, is that according to the Ukrainians, their argument is that they were getting invaded by Russia in 2014.
unidentified		No, no, no.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Ukraine maintained that Russia actually did invade well before the formal 2020 invasion.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		And in Luhansk and Donetsk, the fighting was largely from Russian troops.
unidentified		Russian troops, yes.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Right. So when Crimea seceded, Ukraine was dealing with a Russian incursion into their territory in what Ukraine referred to as a civil war.
		When I was in Kiev, this is how it was referred to, and when I returned in 2017, they said, no, no, we don't call it that anymore.
		We're now referring it to just separatist conflict, and everything seems to be much better now.
		And then, of course, after Trump's first term, 2022, Russia ends up invading.
unidentified		So they were using hyperbolic rhetoric at first.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		The view of the people in Kiev, and this is relatively anecdotal, as I interviewed them in these protest movements, was that when the fighting emerged in Luhansk and Donetsk, it was the beginning of civil war, which they referred to as civil war.
		When I came back three years later, they said, we don't call it that anymore.
		It's just a separatist movement, but it's largely being put down.
unidentified		Because they realized probably, during that space of time, that they had overreacted.
		They had used hyperbolic language.
		They had tuned down.
		But again, We can recognize that the invasion in 2022 is a fundamentally different thing at a different scale than whatever what was happening in 2014.
		Correct? Can you acknowledge that?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		The scale of invasion from 2022 was substantially worse than the separatists.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		The Russians supported incursions in the East.
unidentified		In 2014, yes.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		In 2014, you had limited intervention from the Russians.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		In 2022, you had a hardcore invasion by Russia.
unidentified		Yes. These are different things.
		Indeed. Scale matters.
		Right. That's why, again, these are not analogous.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So then you're saying that if the Russians didn't go into Crimea, Crimea could have voted to secede and you would have respected it?
unidentified		Depends on the context.
unidentified		Again, I think— We're trying to find out what your position is.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So, like, when can someone vote to secede?
unidentified		Again, if they're being genocided, if they're—again, there are certain lines, and I can't give you a specific one.
		What if they're denied to vote?
		Like, what if an area is disenfranchised?
		Should they be able to leave?
		How many times?
		Just generally speaking, the president they elected was removed, or I guess in the U.S. case, we're not allowed to vote.
		Like, where— How much of your representation needs to be denied before you say, hey, look, you have a right to form your own country?
		Because the UN has talked about this, and if you have an area without self-determination, that's one of the justifications for independence for that area.
		There was several litigated cases about this, including some islands in between Finland
		We could have that discussion, but unfortunately we can't because Russia interceded in a way that made it impossible for us to ever know whether or not Crimea would secede naturally or not.
		We can't have that conversation because Crimea tried to leave and Ukraine said no.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Actually, it's not the military.
		The National Guard.
		I didn't know this.
unidentified		I keep trying to explain this to you.
		But we're talking about 2014.
		Right. And what this demonstrates is that when Crimea tries to leave, they get swatted down.
		And in 2014, when they tried to leave, they were like, hey, we're going to have a vote.
		And they invited the OSCE.
		The OSCE refused because of Kiev.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		But actually, I think this is particularly more egregious because after the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine had no claim over Crimea.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		They just claimed it.
unidentified		I'm not here to argue that was right or wrong.
unidentified		Fair enough.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Indeed. It just appears that the Republic of Crimea, as they deemed it, and the people of Crimea have a substantially different worldview than the rest of Ukraine.
		They viewed themselves as autonomous.
		And Ukraine decided to crush them, remove their laws, and send in the National Guard to actually shut down their attempts at sovereignty.
unidentified		In 1995, had there been an incident there?
		Fair enough.
		But we're talking about 2014.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So the people who live there and have been there since then who wanted termination don't matter?
unidentified		They absolutely didn't matter.
		And something did happen in 2014, right?
		When Kiev forced this constitution upon them, they played by the rules set by Kiev, right?
		Set by the government.
		And then 2014 rolls around and the government breaks its own rules, right?
		You want us to play, you want Crimeans to play by the constitution and then you break the constitution and then surprise that they want to leave.
		I want Russia not to interfere in the...
		You want them to be unable to protect themselves.
		I want Russia not to be able to...
		Because that's the only way.
		Not with military force.
		Not with military force.
		That is absolutely not the only way.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I think we'd be doing the audience a disservice if we didn't actually give the real reasons for the war, which I think yours are largely emotional, moral, and one-dimensional.
		Russia's not invading Ukraine because they want to restore the Russian Empire, though Vladimir Putin has stated he does want to bring back the Soviet Union.
		He hasn't said it exactly as that.
		That's not the reason for the invasion of Ukraine.
		The invasion of Ukraine is specifically because Russia has one warm water port into the Black Sea, which is in Sevastopol that costs billions to produce.
		It's the home of their Black Sea fleet and it's where they do the principal exports through the Bosphorus Strait and through the Suez Canal.
		Meaning if Russia loses access to Crimea, they're not going to be doing any trade with North Africa or the Mediterranean and they'll get cut off from India and the rest of the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean.
		This means that Russia has no choice politically but to make sure they secure Crimea by any means necessary.
		After the Euromaidan protests and the ousting of Yanukovych, there was a large movement that was pro-EU, which meant Crimea would have fallen to the hands of European Union forces, NATO interests.
		So Russia obviously then says, referendum, oh, it's us.
		Yeah, I agree.
		I don't think is legit, but Russia is not going to give up their only Black Sea warm water port.
		Some have argued, why don't they just build it in Novorossilsk or whatever, or Sochi?
		They're not going to rebuild their entire military infrastructure.
		That seems ridiculous.
		Certainly they could, but this would mean that the next 30 or 40 years, they're caught up from the Black Sea, and their principal export, of course, is going to be energy, which ain't going to happen.
		A large portion of their exports, of course, are natural gas into Europe, which props up
		That's through Gazprom.
		Gazprom has a natural gas monopoly in Europe, and Gazprom runs through Ukraine.
		Russia is another means of delivery of natural gas into Europe, that's through Germany with Nord Stream.
		Of course, we now know, according to Germany, it is accused that Ukraine blew up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, sabotaging Russia's ability to export natural gas to Europe, for which was propping up their economy.
		So the reason why Russia invaded the eastern regions of Ukraine and secured only
		Donetsk, Mariupol, Kurson, and portions of Zaporizhia is so that they can secure a land bridge access to Crimea so they do not get cut off from their exports.
		They had a bridge that stretched from Russia through Kirch into Ukraine, but it was bombed by Ukrainian forces, presenting the West with the exact reason why Russia secured the eastern region and why they're not waging a sustained front through Belarus.
		It also explains why when people make the argument that Russia wants Ukraine so it can invade the rest of these countries is a lie, because these people don't even know that Kaliningrad exists.
		Right. That argument goes out the window.
		If Russia gets cut off from the Black Sea, they're going to lose 40% of their economy overnight.
		There is nothing, nothing that will stop Russia from fighting a war to secure this region.
		That is why this war is happening.
		Now, certainly, Vladimir Putin does want the Soviet Union back.
		He's not going to get it.
		It's not going to happen.
		That's why he's been largely disinterested in the expansion of NATO into Estonia and Latvia.
		He's allied with Belarus.
		Sure, there's a concern if the war expands.
		Maybe Belarus will carve out a piece of Lithuania and Poland to create a land.
unidentified		But this idea that they only are taking this specific portion, they, in the early days of the war, they had troops in Kiev!
		That they were rolling into Kiev.
		They tried to take it all.
		They were stopped from doing that.
		They have since decided, hey, this is probably only what we can hold on to.
		And, frankly, I don't know if they can hold on to it for much longer.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		You can play chess.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Sometimes in chess, you make a move to force your opponent to defend an area of the board you don't actually want.
unidentified		Sometimes. But there's no evidence that this is the case.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		It certainly is.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		All of the evidence.
unidentified		All of the evidence.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		And I'm going to say this as disrespectfully as I can.
unidentified		Please do.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		When you can't actually name the oblasts that are under occupation, I question what you actually know about the region.
unidentified		Fair enough.
		You can question that.
		But here's the thing.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		You don't know the names of the places he actually invaded.
unidentified		He invaded all of Ukraine, as I said.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Name the Oblasts.
		We've already said them once.
		I said them again just a minute ago.
		Say them again.
unidentified		Name the Oblasts.
unidentified		Name the Oblasts game that you're playing.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Why did Vladimir Putin invade these places?
unidentified		Why did he invade these places?
unidentified		Because he wants all of Ukraine.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So what did he invade?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Did he invade Lutsk?
unidentified		He tried to.
unidentified		If he could, he would.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		He tried to invade Lutsk?
unidentified		He's tried to invade Kiev.
		Again, he sent forces across into...
		Ukraine's territory, they went as far as they could until they were stopped.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		But they weren't stopped in the eastern regions.
unidentified		They weren't stopped in the eastern regions.
unidentified		They were pushed back to the eastern regions.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		No, they invaded, actually, from every direction.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		They invaded from the east and from the north through Belarus.
unidentified		Sure, but they, again, they gained a lot of territory.
unidentified		Ukraine has taken a lot back.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		What economic value does Russia have from securing Lviv?
unidentified		What economic value?
unidentified		It might have logistical value.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I think the challenge largely is, you know, the lack of understanding in conflict makes it difficult for a lot of people to understand the requirements of warfare and the targets that have to be secured first.
		It's why in the Gulf War we just dumped all their petroleum out.
		When you cut a nation off from their energy source, nothing else matters.
		Which is why in sci-fi they often make the joke, all of these movies are dumb because if aliens actually ever came here, they'd blow up North Dakota first.
		They'd take out our frack fields, eliminate our ability to power anything that we do.
		invaded in every direction likely has to do with any standard
		first grade level of chess.
		Sometimes you want to distract your opponent in one direction while secretly moving in an area where you want to secure it, which is why when Ukraine actually started to wage their counteroffensive, Russia did not retreat from the Donbass.
		In fact, the reason why it's largely considered that Ukraine's lost is because Russia has already secured the entire Donbass Eastern region, stretching down into Crimea, securing their Black Sea access.
		If the first thing NATO forces did was carpet bomb the East and flatten all Russian forces and cut them off from the Black Sea,
		Russia's economy would be decimated.
unidentified		Do you think that Ukraine has lost the war?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Yes. Yes.
unidentified		Well, CENTCOM disagrees with you.
		CENTCOM disagrees with you.
		The Supreme Allied Commander of NATO disagrees with you.
		They're losing.
		Forgive me.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		No, they lost.
unidentified		Forgive me.
		Forgive me if I trust professional...
		Military men who have waged war over a podcaster.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Indeed. So we'll appeal to authority and then I'll make the actual...
unidentified		Appeal to authority?
unidentified		Do you know why I'm appealing to this authority?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		And then I'll actually make the argument.
		The reason why Ukraine lost the war is because 7 million Ukrainians fled.
		They're drafting young women and elderly men.
unidentified		They haven't lost the war.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		And they're utilizing Western forces to keep fighting, which means Ukraine's no longer a factor in this conflict.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		It's NATO versus Russia.
unidentified		I want to...
		Hold on, because I have to address this.
		I have to address this.
		This lost the war, this idea that they have lost the war is just not...
		The facts are against you.
		Ukraine is fighting the war against Russia.
		Ukrainians are fighting and dying on the front lines.
		And North Korean troops and maybe Chinese troops at this point.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Ukraine is no longer a factor in this conflict except for the territories.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Indeed. Ukraine, as a governmental structure, has lost the war.
unidentified		Has Putin achieved its goal of demilitarization?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Has Putin achieved its securing of...
unidentified		Answer my question.
		Has Putin achieved its goal of demilitarizing Ukraine?
		Yes or no?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Yes? Have you ever looked at the battle map?
unidentified		If they were...
unidentified		Demilitarized? Then who is killing all these Russians?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		If they didn't demilitarize, how is it that the Ukraine battle map shows that they have secured the entire land bridge to Crimea?
unidentified		Again, their goal is to annex Ukraine.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		See, that's made up.
unidentified		Putin has said this.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		No, he didn't.
unidentified		Again, demilitarize?
		De-Nazify.
		You can't do either one unless you occupy Ukraine.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So you've assumed what the end goal of those things are going to be?
unidentified		You're assuming the end goal is the Crimean Lambridge.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I'm not assuming it.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Yes, you are.
unidentified		Do you think occupation necessarily means annexation?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Let's pause here and say, you exclaiming yes you are is not an argument.
unidentified		Neither is you saying no uh.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Because you asked me, did they demilitarize?
		Yes. They own their stated goal.
		They own it.
		They've secured the Black Sea.
		And they've demilitarized the entire land bridge into Crimea, which is their asset.
unidentified		Not demilitarization of a land bridge into Crimea, the demilitarization of Ukraine.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		That's an assumption you're making.
unidentified		It's not an exception I'm making.
unidentified		It's the stated goal of Putin.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Which was general demilitarization and denazification of the eastern region.
unidentified		Of all of Ukraine.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Sure, you can make that assumption, but Vladimir Putin sent troops into Luhansk and Donetsk.
		He sent troops everywhere.
		As of battalion.
unidentified		To try to take all of Ukraine.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Not in 2014.
		Not in 2014.
		The stated goal of denazification had to do with the Azov Battalion on the Eastern Front.
unidentified		But we're talking about 2022 now.
unidentified		That's why he wanted denazification.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		What has he said since then?
unidentified		This current conflict.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So what has he said as of then, then?
unidentified		As of then, then?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Denazification was 2014.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		What did he say in 2022?
unidentified		In 2022, the two goals were...
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		No, no, no.
		That was 2014.
		Denazification was the Azov Battalion on the Eastern Front.
unidentified		Do you not know this?
		He said that again.
		When? In February of 2022, before he went into Ukraine.
		Right. He said that they had...
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		And when was the first time he said it?
unidentified		He may have said it before, but he's saying it again.
unidentified		He's repeating that now.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So he was referring to which regions?
unidentified		The denazification of Ukraine.
		He believes that the whole structure of Ukraine is filled with Nazis.
		And he has had Russian times and people have said that.
		He has compared Zelensky to Nazis.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		You can take a look at the actual economics of the region.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		You can take a look at the actual companies that run their exports.
unidentified		Or you can listen to what Putin has said.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Which is vague nothingness.
unidentified		And what Putin has done when again he sent troops everywhere into Ukraine.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Could you imagine if NATO operated only on military strategy based upon what they've heard Putin say in interviews?
unidentified		They have intelligence that again they say that Ukraine is not losing this war.
		They have stopped largely Russia from winning this war.
		That's what NATO says.
		Can you imagine looking at a podcaster, right, and saying, oh, look, there's a land bridge there.
		I have post hoc rationalized, hmm, how can I make sure that no matter what happens, Putin's winning?
		What do I do for a living?
		I podcast as well.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So no one should listen to what you have to say about this.
unidentified		But they should listen to the UCOM commander.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		And what about any other experts on the issue in foreign policy?
unidentified		Name one.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		You name one.
unidentified		Sure. I will name...
unidentified		General Christopher G. Cavoli.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		And what's his position?
unidentified		He's the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		No, no, Ukraine.
unidentified		That includes Ukraine because he's in Europe.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So my point was Ukraine lost the war because Ukraine's government is no longer a factor.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		It's a NATO versus Russia conflict.
unidentified		Hold on.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		By all means, cite NATO and the NATO support, the NATO weapons, the NATO intelligence, and we agree.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		NATO is at war with Russia in the Ukrainian territories.
unidentified		If NATO withdrew its forces, or not forces, I'm sorry, if it stopped arming Ukraine, certainly that would be a very bad day for Ukraine.
		They rely in a large way on NATO, but Ukraine is the one fighting and using those weapons.
		Ukraine is the one that's deciding how to do that.
		Ukraine is the one that's drawing up the battle maps, that's drawing and deciding the targets to hit.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Except for the Black Sea Fleet.
unidentified		What do you mean?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		It was NATO intelligence and US special forces.
unidentified		We use NATO intelligence to strike at...
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I mean, come on.
		Telling a Ukrainian to press launch doesn't change the fact that the US delivered weapons to have fired at the Black Sea Fleet.
		That's like a weird argument.
unidentified		Do you not think that Ukraine wanted the Black Sea Fleet gone?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Of course they did.
unidentified		Of course they did.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		And? My point is that Ukraine as a government is not a factor in this conflict.
unidentified		So if I sell you a gun, okay?
		And you take that gun, and you go, and you pull the trigger.
		Did I shoot the target, or did you?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		If you give me a gun...
unidentified		Answer my question.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I am.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		If you give me a gun and tell me to shoot a guy, guess who goes to prison?
unidentified		I'm not telling you to shoot a guy.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		The United States told them...
unidentified		I'm not telling you which guy to shoot.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		The United States did.
		It is NATO.
		Let's be fair.
		It includes Europe, too.
unidentified		How many targets do you think that NATO specifically decides for Ukraine?
		All of them.
		All of them?
		I disagree.
		Where's your evidence?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		In Joe Biden threatening to withhold aid unless they agreed to the targets that the United States wanted.
unidentified		No. What Biden did was he said, you can't target certain things in Russia.
		Which is what I just said.
		That is not what you just said.
		These are different things.
		Saying, hey, here are the targets you can't strike is a remarkably different thing than, hey, we want you to hit here, here, and here.
		Ukraine might listen to advice that NATO gives it, but Ukraine is deciding its targets.
		On its own.
		And if you think that that's not the case, then please provide some evidence.
		I did.
		You have yet to do so.
		What you have done is provide rhetoric that does not.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Was it true that Joe Biden restricted the targets Ukraine can make?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Yes. Is it true that NATO provided the intelligence and the targets for their weapons for Ukraine to target in the Black Sea?
unidentified		Probably, yes.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		It is a fact, yes.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		NATO troops and US troops in Poland have been the ones training the troops, and you've got the International Coalition of Volunteers that are doing a lot of fighting on the ground.
unidentified		You understand that they are doing far more targeting than just the things that were in the Black Sea.
unidentified		Sure. That they have targeted things that leave...
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Let's try this.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		If NATO was uninvolved from Ukraine, would they still be fighting?
unidentified		In different ways, but yes.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Like insurgency?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Probably. Yeah, there'd be no war.
unidentified		It'd be a guerrilla war, but it would be a war nonetheless.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Insurgency, guerrilla war, but Russia would largely occupy and control Ukraine.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		That's your position, right?
unidentified		It's hard to say.
unidentified		It's much more likely that that's the case, yes.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I don't see why it wouldn't be the case, considering Russia already controls the land bridge to Crimea.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I mean, clearly, they've seized the Eastern Front.
unidentified		Again, the land bridge to Crimea wasn't their goal?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		That's not what I said.
unidentified		It's not their stated goal.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I said they have this, and if the Ukraine was not supplied...
unidentified		No, you said that Ukraine already lost.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		And if the Ukraine was not...
unidentified		You said Ukraine already lost.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		I'm going to slow down for a second so we can actually have a conversation.
		Please. The Eastern Front is controlled by Russia.
		If Ukraine was not supplied with weapons by the West, Russia would take more of Ukraine, no?
unidentified		It is likely that to be the case.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		And they would have done it much, much quicker, yes?
unidentified		Probably so.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Right. My point is Ukraine would not be involved in a war were it not for the West.
		It's a proxy war between NATO and Russia.
		Ukraine is not a factor in this conflict.
		Ukraine would have been flattened in weeks by Russia.
unidentified		Again, Ukrainians are the ones fighting and dying.
unidentified		And to say that they're not a factor in this conflict, we don't have NATO forces, NATO troops on the ground fighting and dying.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Is the U.S. on the ground?
unidentified		Not fighting and dying.
		They're training people, obviously.
		And you have volunteers.
		You have volunteers from the U.S. who have decided to join up with Ukraine.
		But it is a fundamental different thing having NATO forces.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Do you think that...
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Outside of the United States and Russia, the rest of the world sees American soldiers on the ground as just volunteers?
unidentified		Outside the United States and...
		Can you repeat that?
		I'm sorry.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So let's take a country, Madagascar.
		Sure. Do you think the people of Madagascar see U.S. troops fighting in Ukraine and go, they're not U.S. troops, they're volunteers?
		Or do you think they say, wow, United States citizens are fighting a war in Ukraine?
unidentified		United States citizens is remarkably different than United States military troops.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Do you think foreign countries view that as U.S. involvement or just random private volunteers?
unidentified		We are absolutely involved in the war, but we are not involved in the war by U.S. military troops fighting against Russians right now.
unidentified		We aren't.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		U.S. veterans and PMCs are on the ground and U.S. special forces are on the ground.
unidentified		Okay, but they are not involved in the fighting.
unidentified		What they're doing is they're helping to train?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Special forces involved in the fighting.
unidentified		Ukrainian forces.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		They are involved in the fighting.
unidentified		Are you saying right now that there are U.S. special forces that are currently engaged in hot conflict, kinetic conflict, with Russian troops right now?
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		How would you define involvement in kinetic conflict?
unidentified		Shooting at them.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		No. Okay.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		But U.S. special forces are actively involved in the conflict right now in Ukraine.
unidentified		I don't deny that.
		Right. Again.
		There are lines, and one of the lines is, are you involved in a hot, kinetic conflict where U.S. troops or special forces are shooting at Russian forces right now?
		And that's simply not the case.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		It is.
		You can't— Provide evidence!
		Are there American citizens who have previously served in the military on the ground in Ukraine shooting at people?
unidentified		Previous serving in the military is not the same as being an active military member.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Yes or no?
unidentified		Yes. They are.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Who are they taking orders from?
		Ukraine. And who's giving the intelligence and the weapons to Ukraine?
		NATO. Do you think that any sane person outside of the United States looks at that and says, don't worry guys, the U.S. is not involved because those guys aren't formally under the direction of Americans?
unidentified		Do you think my argument is that the U.S. isn't involved in this?
unidentified		My argument here, and the whole reason I'm here, is to advocate for further U.S. involvement in the form of aid and weapons and training.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Do you think the U.S. should intervene with troops on the ground?
unidentified		No. I don't think we've reached that line.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So then what is the end goal then?
unidentified		The end goal is to stymie Russia's imperial ambitions to help Ukraine maintain its sovereignty in the best way we can.
		Look, I'm not Nostradamus.
		I don't have a crystal ball.
		I don't know who's actually going to win this war, but I think that we have an interest.
		In making sure that Ukraine gets as good a peace deal as it can out of this, that at the end of the war, however this ends, that Ukraine is in a much better position than Russia is.
		That should be the goal.
		Will we achieve it?
		I don't know, but we should strive to do so.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Donald Trump right now says that he wants a peace agreement between both nations.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Do you see a reality where we get a peace agreement and Russia gives back the territories it seized?
unidentified		Not currently, no.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So, should the conflict end today, who would have won?
unidentified		I don't think there would be a winner right now.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Russia expanding its territory is not a victory for Russia?
unidentified		I'll correct myself.
		I think that Ukraine continued to exist as a fundamentally strong nation, right?
		I think that's a victory for Ukraine.
		It's a Pyrrhic victory.
		Again, like...
		It's hard to—they wouldn't have lost.
		They would have stopped Russia from winning.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		You don't think that it's a victory for Russia to control the eastern region into Crimea?
unidentified		I think that it shows that they have not achieved their stated military objectives in the conflict, so I would consider that a loss.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		So you think that Donald Trump is correct in negotiating this end because it would mean Ukraine won?
unidentified		It depends on how Donald Trump's negotiating it.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Right now, the war stops as is, and the territory is held by Russia.
		Yeah. Russia...
		Ukraine won.
unidentified		I agree a little bit with what you're saying and a little bit with what Wick is saying.
		I wouldn't say that Ukrainians have lost.
		I am kind of on the position that they're losing.
		If there is a peace right now and the only change is that the currently occupied territories go to Russia, I think it would be a sort of like a partial victory for Russia.
		But really, I think the other thing that is necessary for it to be a complete victory would be some kind of guarantee that Ukraine would not join NATO.
		I think that's the main thing they're really looking for here.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		If the position right now is Ukraine wins by securing their sovereignty and Russia loses by not expanding their goal, then I think we should be in agreement that the war ends today and Ukraine won.
unidentified		If that's what the Ukrainian people want, I would be supporting that.
		Look, here, at the end of the day, if Ukraine...
		I just don't think Russia would accept that.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		It's not about if they would accept it.
		The question is right now, if this is the means of victory and everyone agrees, then why not take it?
		Rubio says, we end it now.
		Russia keeps their gut.
		That sounds like you think Ukraine wins.
		I'm happy to see the fighting stop.
		This means U.S. saves money.
		We're no longer involved in a conflict.
		Ukraine remains Ukraine, but loses some territory.
		Russia doesn't expand into Ukraine.
		Everybody loses a little bit, but it's a victory for the West.
unidentified		Yeah, if it ended as it is right here, it would absolutely be a victory for the West.
unidentified		No doubt.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Well, all right then.
		Guys, this has been fun, but we are over time.
		So did you want to shout anything out before we head out?
unidentified		Sure. WickTV on YouTube and Twitch at W-H-I-C-K dash TV.
		We host cross-ideological debates all the time.
		Thank you for having me.
		It's been fun.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Right on.
unidentified		Yeah, I'm Lactoy.
		You can find me at LactoyTV, Twitch, X, and YouTube.
		This was a good conversation.
		I did want to get into a little bit more as to the humanitarian issues that are happening in Ukraine.
		Rest in peace, Gonzalo Lira.
		But I talk a lot about that, so.
tim pool ▲ ● ▼		Right on.
		Well, everybody, we're going to send you over to hang out with Jeremy Hambly at the Quartering.
		So thanks for tuning in to the show.
		We're going to wind it down now, but we are back tonight at 8 p.m.
		Timcast IRL.
		Check it out.
		It's going to be fun.
		You can follow me on X and Instagram at Timcast.
		Of course, we're back next week, but stay tuned.
		May 3rd is our official.
		Culture war debates live with an audience.
		Then you're actually going to hear laughing, clapping, booing, and all that stuff.
		I think that'll make things a lot more fun.

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