If you have any interest in the war between Russia and Ukraine, this one is for you. We welcome the pro creator of Ukraine War Analysis to cover everything from Russia's flawed initial assumptions to the current state of play and finally the most likely outcomes. Bumper: Slayed by Overseer Break: Don't Tell Mom I'm in Chechnya Close: Rock and Roll is Dead by Akvarium Jack recommends these sources: Russian side: Rybar Fighterbomber – active RU air force Russians with Attitude Ukrainian side: Osintechnical Rob Lee Status-6 WarTranslated For maps and general info: Suyriakmaps Warmapper Militaryland.net deepstatemap.live (pro Ukrainian) UkraineControlMap (publishes a great daily summary) Support The Free Expression Foundation Support Ash Sharp's wife and daughters: https://www.givesendgo.com/SupportingPSharp Support Sam Melia's family: https://www.givesendgo.com/sammelia Buy a David Irving book for yourself, a friend, or a political prisoner: https://irvingbooks.com/donate/ And for the love of all that is good and holy, write to a prisoner: https://Justice-Initiative.net Go forth and multiply. Support Full Haus at givesendgo.com/FullHaus Become a member. And follow The Final Storm on Telegram and subscribe on Odysee. Censorship-free Telegram commentary: https://t.me/prowhitefam2 Telegram channel with ALL shows available for easy download: https://t.me/fullhausshows Gab.com/Fullhaus Odysee for special occasion livestreams. RSS: https://feeds.libsyn.com/275732/rss All shows since Zencast deplatforming: https://fullhaus.libsyn.com/ And of course, feel free to drop us a line with anything on your mind at fullhausshow@protonmail.com. We love ya fam, and we'll talk to you next week.
It's been two years and three months since Russia invaded Ukraine, the largest and most sustained conflict in Europe since World War II, and perhaps in hindsight one day, the opening hostilities of World War III.
The war has dragged on a lot longer than I anticipated.
Russia's clear advantages of geography, economy, manpower, weaponry, and initiative were blunted by fierce Ukrainian resistance, massive Western aid, and perhaps poor planning and intelligence in Moscow.
But it certainly appears like the tide is turning again, and that this summer could see the dramatic Russian advances many of us expected back in 2022.
If you're listening to this, you probably never gave much credence to the blatant wartime propaganda, whether emanating from Washington, London, Kiev, or Moscow.
You probably also found yourself in one of three camps.
Pro-Ukraine on ethno-nationalist grounds rooting for the Natsak warriors, or perhaps pro-Russian on different ethno-nationalist grounds in eastern Ukraine, and opposing the further metastasis of a malignant Western tumor expanding ever eastward.
Still others bemoan yet another brother war and are leery of both sides and their motivations.
You could blame Russia for initiating a brutal invasion.
You could blame the West for sacrificing an entire nation to wage proxy war on Russia.
We supply, Ukrainians die.
And you can always blame Jews, one of whom is, of course, perched atop what's left of the Ukrainian nation.
But regardless of the factors at play, the ultimate outcome will be immensely consequential for all involved.
And that's why we're more than excited this week to welcome a serious, deliberately neutral analyst of the war to give you as much unvarnished truth as we can possibly muster.
So, Mr. Producer, it's time.
I declare war!
Welcome, everyone, to Full House, the world's most serious show for white fathers, at least this week, at least, aspiring ones and the whole biofam.
It is episode 187, and I am your feeling analytical host, Coach Finstock, back with another two hours about the fate of nations and civilizations, perhaps.
Before we meet the birth panel, though, sincere apologies for my atrocious audio last week and the week before.
I almost threw my phone in disgust at the quality of my DSL connection.
And this week, I bought a little adapter and I'm hardwired into it to see if that fixes it.
Now, if it doesn't, I'm going to have to go with Starlink, which I can't justify other than for the purposes of this show, because our DSL works fine for streaming movies, browsing, games, all the rest of it.
It's only this where it's a real issue with the latency or the pings or whatever the hell it is.
So we'll see how the show goes.
If I'm terrible again and frustrating again on audio quality, I may have to put out a call for angel investors.
Maybe just for the capital investment, I'll even go with the refurbed one and I'll cover the monthly fee because we can't go on the way I sounded last week.
And anyway, I'll shut up on that and just thank King Charles, Rusty, and Anand for their support last week.
We're, of course, at givesendgo.com slash fullhouse if you want to enhance our infrastructure or otherwise fill our sales.
And after all that, let's now get down to it.
First up, he has a deeply vested interest in this conflict, if only because he is one of the few surviving veterans of the original Crimean War.
Sam, welcome back.
Sorry.
I'm back on that all in just a minute.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, it is.
It is a great topic.
It's really honestly tragic when you think of the lives involved and the destruction and all that.
So I'm definitely interested in the conversation and have my own views of it too.
But yeah, this last weekend, I spent the weekend on the seemingly endless white sand beaches of the Florida Panhandle.
And I mean, I was blown away.
This is, it's another world.
Probably a lot of rich people live there, but it certainly was.
It was incredible.
Weather was beautiful and the beach was beautiful.
And you just, at least from my part of the country, it's hard to imagine these just seemingly endless white sand beaches going for dozens of miles in any direction.
So just imagine me strolling along barefoot, you know, with my screwdriver t-shirt, looking wistfully out upon the water and all that.
Yeah, a little pale.
A little pale.
Yeah.
A little pale.
But yeah, it was great.
It was, and there were a lot of people there too, a lot of guests, as well as our very dear comrades that we were visiting.
And so it was a weekend of great conversation, great food, great family time, a lot of kids, as always.
And we made of it a little vacation, me and my family.
And boy, did we love it.
And we sure love our comrades out there, good friends.
You know who I'm talking about.
So I'll leave it at that.
Good stuff.
Let's talk a little bit more about your impressions of Florida in the second half.
If any time we may do Palestine Israel in the second half, give a double shout to the audience.
Yeah, I remember when I was researching for the broader family for investment or rental destinations, the Panhandle, some of those nicer towns, and then the Gulf Coast in some of those were recommended.
Anyway, we got to get cracking.
Thank you, Sammy Baby.
Yes.
Next up, our trusty producer and most Aryan presenting regular would be right at home, either in Azov or the Rusich battalions.
Rolo, which one would you choose if you had to?
People love it when I give unfair hypotheticals.
The least gay one.
The least gay one.
Okay.
We won't pass any judgment on that.
Don't want to get hits put out on us.
How are you, sir, here before we get really going?
I'm good.
I'm feeling good.
Never better.
All right.
I don't believe you, but I'll take your word for it.
I never lie.
I never lie.
Sure, Saint.
All right.
Finally, our very patient and special guest.
He has been bird dogging this conflict from its inception and has been providing erudite, unbiased analysis with some dubious MS Paint map work on Telegram for probably over a year.
He came highly recommended by some trusted friends of the show.
And well, we just hope he doesn't disappoint.
Jack, no pressure.
Welcome to Full House, big guy.
I resent your resentment of my MS Paint diagrams, though.
But hello.
Oh, come on.
You're self-aware enough to recognize that you're just putting little arrows on a Google map.
Well, yeah, that's kind of the point, right?
Yeah.
It's supposed to be funny, but it also supposed to be slightly serious.
No, I can tell, you know, I was like, okay, I'll check out this channel.
I was like, huh, this is not some flyby night thing.
And curiously enough, did seemed it wasn't Intel Slava-Z and it wasn't, I honestly don't subscribe to any of the Ukrainian channels, but we'll get to that too.
But first, we got to get through the necessary, please, buddy, your ethnicity, religion, and fatherhood status.
If you're Ukrainian or Russian, then we got to disregard, you know, you're clearly biased, but go ahead.
Actually, I have 0% of either, which probably surprises some people.
I'm guess what you would call a total American mutt.
Okay.
There's nothing in me that's more than 25%.
It's Polish.
It's English, Scottish, Norwegians in there.
Dang.
Irish.
Yeah.
So it's literally all over the place.
So I guess I have a little bit of Western Slav in the pole, but yeah, no Ukrainian, no Russian.
All right.
Religion, I guess I'd be culturally Christian.
Mother was Catholic, father was Protestant, and never really played a huge role in my life.
But in terms of fatherhood, I guess I'm what you would call an aspiring father.
All right.
One of those.
Yeah, I would, if I have the, if I could give some advice to some of your younger listeners, do not play the field in your 20s and then try to date in your 30s.
You will find a apocalyptic wasteland of single moms and distributing.
Oh, boy.
I'm sorry, big guy.
Yeah, you got a nice voice.
I imagine you're dashingly handsome in addition to being brilliant as well.
No homo.
So if we can help, we'd love to.
Maybe a future show, but let's see how you do on this one first.
Now getting cracking here, Jack.
Why should the audience take your word on any of this stuff?
You're just some guy.
You're just some anon, so far as they know.
They can see the channel, of course, but a little bit of your street credit or bona fides, please.
Yeah, sure.
I do have, of course, the channel.
There's a body of work there, which I think speaks for itself, but no one's going to go there and read 47,000 posts.
In terms of the war, you know, I've been following, as you said, bird-dogging it since day one.
I was there when all the Google maps turned red on the from Belarus when the invasion started, all the traffic jams.
I was there when I saw the first tanks cross the border of the dash cams.
And I mean, I have a pretty deep knowledge of the conflict.
If when I was younger, I always wanted to be a military historian.
I realized later on I wasn't going to make a whole lot of money doing that.
So went with a different career, so to speak.
But if I could have chosen one, that probably would be it.
I do have a working knowledge of Russian, which definitely helps.
Good.
And I have quite a bit of familiarity with the defense industry.
And that's at the military industrial complex.
Fair enough.
And you've been to Ukraine or Russia in the past.
You don't have to say when or, but you got a little on the ground experience too.
Yes.
Fair enough.
All right.
Let's get going then.
First practical question.
I mentioned the propaganda at the top.
Obviously, can't trust anything out of CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, et cetera.
The British press is even worse than ours.
The Sun, the Mirror, I remember headlines, you know, Putin sick with cancer in a bunker early on in the war.
Like you could probably go back and come up with hundreds of total bullshit British headlines.
And then you obviously have Ukrainian propagandists and Russians, perhaps to a lesser extent. seem to be more dedicated to accuracy or at least withholding when there's bad news out there.
But a couple of the sites that you could recommend for the audience are where you're getting most of your scoop from.
So a little sidebar, since you mentioned the terrible British press, I think my favorite British press, I can't remember if it was the Guardian or The Telegraph, but one of the articles last year was the Challenger tank from the British Challenger tank is superior to the Russian tank.
Why?
Because its turret's still attached after being hit.
And then they got an up-close photo after the first Challenger was destroyed.
The turret was actually not attached.
It was blown off.
In terms of sources, right?
So the mainstream media, so to speak, any media that's actually big time is not going to help for the most part.
What you really need to do is you have to go into sources on Telegram, sources on Twitter, sources what we would call like the open source intelligence community.
And even then, you can't just pick one side, right?
You have to, you have to make a composite of both the Russian and the Ukrainian sides.
It depends on how deep you want to go, obviously, because I don't think you want to do what I do and look at NASA satellites to see if there's a tiny little fire in a place that may or may not have been hit by a drone, right?
That's probably a little bit too much information.
If you want to, if I had to recommend some Telegram channels, I would recommend from the Russian side, Ribar, which is a large comprehensive Russian site.
There's a Russian and English version of it.
Russians with Attitude is on YouTube.
They do a podcast.
I think it's a weekly podcast.
They also have a Patreon and they do very deep dives and they do it in English.
And they are probably your best source in terms of time, like time spent is probably your best bet for the Russian side.
Ukrainian side, most of the good ones honestly gave up after the counteroffensive kind of failed.
But for Twitter, you'd probably want to go like OSINT Technical, Rob Lee, Satisfys.
And I can give you a list of these that you can put in the show notes.
Good deal.
We'll do.
Well, thank you.
Thank you for your service.
And we'll put those in the show notes and let's get down to the first really serious question.
It's one, you know, sorry, Jack, I wish that Douglas McGregor were here, but, you know, he's a little bit of a Kool-Aid, perhaps, consumer himself.
So this is what I would have asked him first is why didn't Russia just steamroll Ukraine in those opening months?
All the reasons I mentioned at the top and some of the reasons for why they didn't, but what's your analysis of, you know, a long drawn out conflict instead of a Russian version of Blitzkrieg?
It's a big topic, but I'll do my best to condense it.
If I had to pick just like, say, three reasons why that didn't happen, it'd probably be lack of manpower, a series of poor assumptions, and also the restrictions that Russia was under, which actually feeds into the other two.
So just to go back to the week of February 24th, 2022, short version, the Russians built up along the border and they were under the cover of so-called exercises with Belarus.
In fact, I remember the Russian name for it, but I'm not going to be pretentious and start dropping Russian words in here.
So I'm just going to impress everybody.
But the idea was to be under the cover of the exercises and say, oh, no, we're not going to invade Ukraine.
We're just having a nice little chat with our neighbors here.
And clearly the plan here was to go in fast, go in hard, and most importantly, to go in with surprise.
They didn't really even tell most of their troops that they were going in.
When they heard the order to cross the border, they assumed it was still an exercise for the most part.
And I think the idea here was that they really wanted to deliver a knockout blow before Ukraine could organize a defense.
And remember, it was the U.S. was absolutely positive that they were going to go in, right?
Like, I think 10 days or two weeks before.
And there was a, I'm sure you guys remember there was a storm on Twitter about people saying, oh, these are the people that told us there were WMVs in Iraq.
You know, why would you listen to them, et cetera, et cetera?
But they were as confident as ever that I've ever seen the U.S. quote-unquote Intel community that it was going to happen.
But everyone else was not so confident.
Like Ukraine didn't mobilize until I think, I want to say two days before the actual invasion.
It was pretty late, right?
So the fact that the U.S. was so confident about it actually made a big difference.
That means the pipeline for AIDS could start flowing.
And it was flowing before they even crossed the border.
So that is one of the reasons.
And because they were going in with surprise, because they were trying to do this knockout blow, they couldn't actually use their conscript army, right?
Because Russia is a two-tier system.
They have their contract soldiers, their volunteer force, contrachniki.
And I just said I wasn't going to drop Russian words.
Sorry.
That's okay.
Live it up.
And then they have the Prizoniki, the conscripts, right?
The conscripts are not allowed to engage in foreign wars unless a war is declared.
That's why it's a special military operation, right?
And there's reasons for that going back to Chechnya, but I won't go into that.
So that's one of the restrictions that I mentioned.
They had to use that volunteer army, right?
And because of that restriction, well, they had to go for a quick knockout blow.
And the size of this volunteer army was not big, right?
It was 180 battalion tactical groups, about 130,000 men on paper.
Not a lot of dudes.
I mean, put that in perspective.
We invaded Iraq with about 160, including the British.
And the Soviet front in Ukraine in 1943 was 3 million people, right?
Against like 1.2 million Germans, something like that.
So when you have that sort of restrictions, you also, in manpower, you also have to have certain assumptions that you can do the job or else obviously they wouldn't have never done that.
And looking back, I mean, it's obvious to us now that this was not enough men.
But at the time, it was not a crazy idea, right?
Because if you look back to 2014, 2015, the Ukrainian army collapsed when the Russians hit them in 2014 and 2015.
The entire reason that, you know, brigades like Azov and the right sector, the whole reason those militias got their start is because the Ukrainian army performed so badly in 2014, 2015.
This is when the sort of the Donbass irregulars with some Russian help were pushing back after Maidan and Crimea.
Correct.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know how much we want to go into that, but essentially, yeah, in like the 20 second spurt, there was a separatist movement in 2014.
It got pushed back towards the border of Russia.
And then the Russians intervened somewhat secretly, somewhat openly in late 2014, 2015.
And when the Russian troops hit the Ukrainian army, they surrounded them and pretty much destroyed them.
Let me ask you real quick without derailing.
You mentioned a knockout blow there that Russia thought that it could still score a knockout blow despite only going with its volunteer troops.
What was that knockout blow?
Was that going to be to surround Ukraine, surround Kiev and have Zelensky abdicate or tuck tail and fly west?
I think it would have been the Zelensky government fleeing probably to Lvov in the West.
Yeah, as you would say, as you said.
It's hard to say exactly what they thought was going to happen, but I can only infer it by what they actually did, right?
Clearly, they didn't think there was going to be a lot of resistance, right?
It's actually, it's bizarre looking at it now.
I wish I had this video, but there's a video of Russian tanks stopping politely for civilian car traffic to pass, just stopping in the middle of the road, like in the middle of their invasion, right?
And you still, you have stuff in Kharkov, videos from Kharkov of Russians just driving casually through the street, you know, or walking through the street, expecting really minimal resistance.
And it's really a question of how much did they expect a repeat of 2015?
Because in 2015, a lot of Ukrainian army units just refused to fight or defected en masse, right?
Did they drink the Kool-Aid?
You know, I would have, no, I didn't mean to interrupt.
I would have thought that, and they probably did, that Russia had spies crawling throughout Ukraine then and now feeding them information.
I mean, if they thought they were going to crumble that quickly, and clearly they didn't, I mean, it strikes me as a massive intelligence failure, or they didn't pay attention to the warning signs, disregarded it.
A little bit of hubris on the Russian side.
There were a lot.
I would agree.
Yeah.
I mean, I would agree.
And Putin would also agree with you, considering the purge he did of the FSB intel arm six months later into the war.
Clearly, they got some stuff wrong.
And clearly, you know what I think?
I think had they realized what a Hail Mary this was, they would never, ever have done it.
Like it wasn't a bad plan, right?
It was the wrong plan.
It was a plan for 2016.
It was not a plan for 2022, right?
That absolutely would have worked in 2016.
They would have just demolished the Ukrainian army, but the Ukrainian army of 2022 was not the Ukrainian army of 2016 by a long shot.
And if I had to guess, I think the actual final decision to go in was made in 2019.
That's completely my opinion, but it got derailed by COVID.
And the reason 2019, that was Zelensky's term.
And it was also the year that Ukraine put their intention to join NATO into their constitution.
And once that was codified, there was basically no going back.
Russia would not allow Ukraine, a country they're currently hostile with, currently in a war with, literally, to join NATO.
Yep.
And then, yeah, and plenty of Russians, I remember at the time saying Putin was being way too hands-off with Donbass and letting their own people get killed and shelled daily.
And then, of course, he ended up waiting until the Chinese Winter Olympics were over.
It was like as soon as those were over, then he gave the final green light, perhaps in consultation with Beijing.
All right.
Very good, as thorough as we can with time allowing there.
Now, when I think back to those, maybe the first year, I think of the failed Kiev gambit and the shootout, the sort of disaster at the airport where they sent in special forces.
Perhaps a little bit later, the same withdrawal from Kharkiv or Kharkov, as you prefer.
And then also Kherson withdrawing south across that river, left bank, right bank.
Major Russian withdrawals early on there.
However, you those may be a continuation of poor planning from the initial invasion.
Yeah, they were certainly overextended.
Speaking specifically to the Kiev direction, And I'm not quite sure if anyone still needs to hear this, but Kiev was not a feint.
It was not 40 underwater chests.
They committed something like 60% or between 50 and 60% of their total forces to Kiev, both from the West and the East.
But they got stuck.
They got stuck at the Urpan River in the West.
They got stuck at Brovery in the East.
And once they realized that they really couldn't go forward anymore, they tried to sort of surround the city and the western side, cut the highways.
They simply didn't have the manpower to do that and to invade Bonbas and to contain Kharkov and to keep going towards Odessa, right?
Sure.
And I mean, the only place they really had a lot of success was in the south in Kherson.
They got across that bridge amazingly without it being destroyed.
But I digress.
That's probably too much detail that we don't want to get into.
That's all right.
Yeah.
But it, you know, people are still arguing over whether the Kiev withdrawal was a good faith negotiation tactic or not, right?
Because right after this is when they started beginning negotiations in earnest.
And I believe it was in Turkey.
And I think Putin maybe said that to Tucker too.
He sort of stuck like an excuse to me.
Oh, yeah, we were just trying to give space for negotiations when really we were getting whacked hard.
Go ahead.
Yeah, yeah, correct.
Something actually I forgot to mention in the first part about manpower.
In Western Kiev, I think it was the 11th, the 31st Guards, the airborne guys that actually went into the airport.
You were talking about Antonov Airport or Hostamel Airport.
In terms of their manpower problems, this is going to stick with me forever, this little anecdote.
They found a burnt out BMP, a fighting vehicle, and they found the documents of the guys that died inside.
The gunner of the vehicle was the division's meteorology, meteorological meteorological officer.
They sent the goddamn weatherman to fight.
This is sort of the manpower problem we were talking about.
But in terms of the negotiations, they said it was good faith, a good faith gesture, I believe is the actual phrase they used, right?
But whether it was a good faith gesture or not, it was also a military necessity.
Because can you imagine how much worse like Kharkov front would have been if they still had X amount of troops still near Kiev, right?
If they were still supplying all those troops through the Pripyet marshes near Chernobyl, still supplying the Eastern Bank front, like that would have been a nightmare.
They didn't have enough troops to begin with, right?
But negotiations didn't really go anywhere.
There's a lot of disinformation about that saying that they were about to sign and then Boris Johnson showed up.
That's not the case at all.
Yeah, that's from a particular interview with one of the Ukrainian delegates there.
And they basically just clipped his interview and then just threw the rest out.
The bottom line was there was no guarantee the Russians would stop from the Ukrainian perspective.
There was no third-party guarantor that was going to come in and say, yes, if the Russians continue, we'll come in and save you, right?
Because there's nothing that would stop them from pausing, getting their act together, and just coming back in three months later.
But it doesn't matter.
It became a poet anyway, because after the Russians pulled out, you had the so-called Buka massacre in that media fiasco.
And that killed all sense of any desire for them to negotiate.
Do you believe that was a Ukrainian or Western false flag fake massacre?
No, I believe the vast majority of people were killed by shelling.
And you can see that in the photos.
They have one famous photo of like four or five civilians lying across the road, and there's mortar shell impacts right next to them.
It's pretty obvious in that case.
There's a famous photo also of a guy with his hands tied behind his back with a white cloth.
He turns out to be an Azov militant that was actually active in 2014 and he was doing partisan stuff in the rear.
His girlfriend just went on a show in Ukraine to talk about that.
For the most part, it was a combination of things.
It was trigger happy Russians sometimes killing civilians.
It was people being killed by shelling, both the Ukrainians dropping shells on them and the Russians dropping shells on them.
And then there were some partisan activity.
And I'm sure there were some Russians that just popped off and did the deed, but it was not an organized systematic massacre by any stretch of the imagination.
Not a K10 Forest redo.
No, no, no, no.
Fair enough.
And please, I don't want to cut you short on any of this stuff.
You were worried about going too deep in the weeds.
Some of the audience is going to be going to want you to go more in the weed.
So I'm going to keep rolling down my questions, which are more highlights, and then you delve or deviate as you see fit.
After those sort of withdrawals from Kiev, Kharkiv, and then Kherson a little bit later, did the Russians then announce that first mobilization?
Because I have a buddy perhaps similar to you.
I don't think he has too much professional background in the area, but he follows it very closely.
And he said when Putin, when Russia announced the first mass mobilization, however many hundreds of thousands they were bringing up, that that was a major turning point in the war.
That indicated that they learned the lesson, that they were in it to win it, and there was not going to be negotiations.
Maybe my chronology is off, but do you agree with the strategic impact of that Russian mass mobilization?
I mean, it was a huge point in the war, right?
The initial number was 300,000 men.
However many actually happened, no one really knows.
Russia's always going to keep that under wraps.
There are people that say it was a secret mobilization of a million people, and now it wasn't.
Probably 300,000 is fair, not because that they didn't want to do more, but rather because the Voin Kamat, which is the mobilization service, the commissars basically that do mobilization, had not done that since 1941, right?
Not even during Chechnya, I guess.
They were just using the regular.
No.
They were using their regular conscripts that were already in there.
And Russia brings up conscripts twice a year, like 150,000 in the fall and the spring.
But oh, I just lost my train of thought.
Oh, so yeah.
So the Voint Kamat, I think Russians with Attitude said that it's staffed by alcoholic majors and 40-year-old cat ladies.
So it is not exactly the most efficient organization.
I'm trying to think what they equip is here.
I don't want my National Guard buddies to get angry with me.
So I'll avoid making a comparison.
But you agree, that was the sign that Russia was like, okay, this is not going according to plan.
We are not going to back down, withdraw and negotiate.
We're going to hammer them.
Yes and no.
I would agree that that was when they first started taking this seriously, when they first realized just how dire the situation was.
And if I recall correctly, this was directly after the Kharkiv counteroffensive by the Ukrainians.
And that brings back the manpower issue because the Russians were using all of their best troops to fight the Ukrainians attacking them in Kherson.
And funny enough, like people have this, especially if you read Western media, you have this idea that it's these hordes of zombie Russian conscripts and convicts, right, being thrown at heroic Ukrainian defenders and they're killing them at a 10 to 1 ratio and all sorts of crazy stuff like that.
That never happened.
It was in fact completely the reverse, right?
From, I would say, day seven until the end of 2023, the Russians were outnumbered in terms of manpower in Ukraine.
Incredible.
Yeah.
And no one, everyone, everyone looks at me crazy, like I'm crazy when I say that, but it's true.
The actual conscripts were not integrated into, properly integrated into the Russian army until mid to late 2023.
And I know that because there were actual leaked documents from units in the Zafrozia front and in the southern front during the Ukrainian counteroffensive in 2023 that said, hey, where are our mobilized battalions, guys?
We kind of need these guys to stop these Abrams tanks that are coming at us, right?
Sure.
But yeah, so in terms of the mobilization, the reason I say that yes and no, they definitely realized how bad it was because the Kharkov front had just been penetrated by a huge attack.
The First Guard tanks army was completely routed.
They were jumping into like little cars, anything that could move to get out of there because the front line was held by militia, DPR militia, which is the Netsk People's Republic.
It's one of the separatist states, but they were very badly equipped.
And there was like, you know, three dudes and a dog on this defense line.
And it was the manpower problem again.
And yeah, I mean, it's hard to believe, but that's essentially what happened.
And the Russian government, still at this point, I don't think they were super ready to admit failure.
They realized how bad it was, but they still wanted to continue.
They had this weird obsession with optics, right?
They constantly lie about stuff.
And not to put too fine a point on it, but basically it's a pathological need to just to not optics cock, but to be good optics to say, yes, they shot 12 missiles at us and we shot down 17 of them, right?
Just insane stuff like that.
And I'll give you an example during this period.
That's when the famous attacks on the Ukrainian energy grid, the power plants and stuff started, right?
Sure.
And, you know, of course, the media ran with that and said, oh, this is horrible and terrible and whatnot.
But for the most part, the Russians, it was kind of a farce because they were purposely targeting the stuff that could be the most easily repaired, the auto-transformers.
They were not, for the most part, targeting turbine halls.
I think they targeted one in the West.
And this year is different because they completely turned around on that.
And I think, you know, I think they were worried about what are the optics of a, you know, Ukrainian babushka, you know, shivering in a blanket on CNN.
Is that going to get more aid from the U.S.?
Is that going to get intervention?
And I mean, if you asked.
Sorry, I was going to say, I mean, I haven't mentioned it yet, but there have been theories that Russia was deliberately fighting with kid gloves.
One, because they thought they would give up a lot easier and didn't have to be smashed.
And two, they really perhaps, I'm sure they hate the Azov battalion and right sector and others, but that they really didn't want to destroy all the infrastructure and kill a lot of people.
They wanted to get this done as quickly and as bloodlessly as possible.
I don't know if that's too charitable toward the Russians, but it's possible at least.
They were certainly concerned about it.
At the beginning of the war, I know for a fact that Southern grouping, which is actually the origin of the Z, if you've seen the Z painted on Russian military stuff, the Southern grouping was actually the Z grouping.
And then it just became, it was, it was the most successful grouping.
So it just became the general symbol of the whole Russian invasion.
But they were, they had to call for approval if they needed to use anything larger than a machine gun in an urban environment.
It's similar to what we did in Iraq at one point.
Also, with this timeframe, I feel like the appointment of Surovikin as sort of chief of the special military operation of the invasion.
We can say invasion without getting in trouble.
It was much hyped at the time that this bulldog was going to come in and really go gloves off.
And yet he was only in there for maybe a year, top, six months.
And then he got posted to Africa or something.
Was that a failed effort by him?
Were they arresting him?
He might be on his way back.
What was the story with Surovikin?
So Vikin had a Yegini Progozhin problem.
He was the most friendly with Wagner's commander, Prigozhin.
And that friendliness ultimately sank him when Prigozhin decided to try and march on Moscow, especially after there was a weird, I think we're jumping ahead, but who cares?
We'll get there anyway.
During that quote-unquote March for Justice is what Prigozhin called it, by the way.
And for people that don't remember, it was basically him leading a mutiny against the armed forces saying that Defense Minister Shoigu needs to step down, et cetera.
They stopped off at the military headquarters in Rostlof Mandan.
And Surovikin met with him, this guy who is allegedly committing treason.
He's currently mutiny against the Russian state.
And they had a little powwow.
So he got questioned quite a bit by the FSB after that whole scenario.
And then he got quietly shuffled off because I think they just couldn't trust him after that.
He was just too friendly and he was too public.
They sent him off to coordinate, I think, like air defenses of the CSTO, which is like essentially the now defunct NATO of the East because they don't care about Armenia, apparently.
Yeah, Armenia is, well, we won't go into Armenia.
Yeah, that's a whole nother.
Yeah.
I'm not the greatest on that, but I think that conflict is pretty much over in Nagorno-Karabakh.
But in terms of Serovikin, he also, when he came in, they called him General Armageddon, right?
Like he was supposed to just drop a leg on the Ukrainians.
And he also coincided with the energy campaign, the missile strikes against energy.
They happened at the same time when he got in.
But he was also telegraphing the withdrawal from Kherson months in advance saying there's some very hard decisions that need to be made.
And eventually, they did withdraw.
Everybody said that was a wise tactical or strategic move, but it looked terrible.
It looked terrible.
And you know what?
That was literally the bottom.
The bottom for all the Russian military bloggers and people that are in the milieu of the Russian military.
That was their ultimate black pill moment, right?
That was the moment that they totally turned on the Russian MOD.
They stopped believing what they were saying.
Everything is terrible.
They went like, you know, a full Russian black pill is like another level of black pill.
I was quite shocked.
Bottom of the bottle by some of the things they were saying about, you know, Shoigu.
And, you know, funny enough, they call Shoigu the, was it Minister Dos?
Or he's the minister of wood planks, because his uh, his hobby is actually collecting oddly shaped pieces of wood and, and I wish I was making that up uh, but there's a video of him showing Putin his collection of oddly shaped pieces of wood yeah, while Russians are withdrawing on their supposedly soft neighbors uh territory.
Yeah yeah, they also.
They call him the Tuvin degenerate because he's half Tuvin.
But right yep yeah uh, all right hey, now that was a nice tie-in with Kherson AND Servikin, the Energy Strikes uh, we got to do a brief bit on Progozhin and the, the March For Justice or the March On Moscow.
Uh, what?
Obviously we know that he died in a plane crash later, that the, uh Lukashenko came in to basically run cover and negotiate and get him to stand down.
Uh, any inside baseball or analysis that perhaps we haven't heard on that one?
Uh no uh, that's pretty accurate.
Uh, Lukashenko definitely did come in uh, his own self-interest, for a number of reasons, one, to make him the big boy on the street that negotiated the deal right, and the other is uh, Wagner is still active in Belarus.
They still train the Belarusian armed forces.
They are still a active I don't know if they're active part of the Belarusian military, but essentially they can be used as a strike force if needed, still in Africa, working too right, they didn't just shut down.
Yep yep they're, they're still around.
Um, I can't remember if they're officially part of what's now called the Africa Corps.
Uh believe it or not?
Uh yeah they're, they're working in um Nigeria, Mali and a couple other places.
Um, and and, funny enough, the last thing that uh Pretegozhin did, uh right before he died, was fly to Africa to basically make a whole bunch of deals and whatever was going on there.
I totally forget off the top of my head.
Um, that's one reason why he wasn't just disappeared immediately or just, you know, thrown in a ditch somewhere.
They still needed his influence in Africa and other places, sure I?
I.
It crossed my mind when the uh Iranian, when Racy's helicopter went down, that uh, perhaps uh, Western or Israeli ops are a little more slickly done when it comes to air crashes, because with Progozhin it was like that thing got bombed or shot out of the sky.
With uh, with uh Racy, it was a little uh Raisy, sorry for the pronunciation.
At least some plausible deniability there.
Uh, a simple question, but a difficult question and sort of a break.
Here we're, maybe we're a little over halfway through.
What is your best estimate of killed in action for the Ukrainians and the Russians to date, or casualties, as you prefer?
So well, this is the one that gets me in trouble all the time.
Yeah, on the spot.
Yeah, no one wants to hear the number they don't agree with, right?
Um, my casualty numbers are typically lower than others and the reason is, I think people project, like World War One, World War Ii Style, casualties on this war, which is nothing like either of those wars.
Right, World War One, you would have probably three brigades, like 8 000 men um, to cover a two mile front, maybe a two kilometer front.
In this war, you have maybe 200.
I mean it's, the scale is completely different.
We're fighting a war with tiny armies, which makes it very difficult to predict, and it it's really down to a whole thing um, in the 2000s, where I called the uh the Rumsfeldization of uh armies and people remember Donald Rumsfeld, of course everything became tiny and focused on big technology, to to win wars.
And they found out, oh crap, we actually do need artillery shells um, and they, they really can't make a whole lot of progress with the manpower they have, but given that that uh, that preface um, That's why I think it's a lot lower than it actually, than people think it is.
Give me some.
We're not going to make fun of you when we find out 10 years later.
Yeah, what it is.
I mean, if I, no, I'm perfectly happy to give it.
Like, if I had to give a ballpark for the Russians, it'd be between 80,000 and 100,000 dead.
And I have a better handle on that than I do the Ukrainian.
And my data points, I know for a fact that the Wagner Memorial in, I believe it's in St. Petersburg.
They just put it up recently.
It's for Krigozhin and Dmitry Yukin.
But they also contained the names of all the Wagner guys that were killed, including convicts.
And there were 24,000, if memory serves.
That includes everyone that was killed in Ukraine, 2022, 2023, Ukraine 2014, 2015, because they were there, as well as Syria and Africa.
So you figure probably 20,000 of those are in Ukraine, right?
Sure.
And then there's also, I forget which news service does this, but this is like one of the only good things that the mainstream media has done.
They actually have an estimate based on probates in Russia.
Basically, when your relative gets killed, you can actually put in for extra cash and support and stuff.
And their estimate last time I checked was 80,000.
And that was right before, probably in the middle of Avdika.
So Navdivka was a pretty bloody battle.
So that's why I say around 80 to 100,000.
Hey, sounds like a pretty informed estimate, dropping the bucket compared to Great Patriotic War and roughly double our killed in action in Vietnam.
I'm frankly without having looked too deeply, I'm surprised it's that high, but perhaps I shouldn't be.
And then over to the Ukrainians, please.
Ukrainians are harder to figure out because they're better OPSEC, ironically.
One thing Ukrainians do, they actually split National Guard rather, well, territorial defense and army.
So Zelensky will lie and say it's 40,000, for example.
And he actually said that recently.
And I've never seen so many clown emojis in a Telegram news channel.
This was a Ukrainian news channel too, with Ukrainians reacting.
They were not pleased by this number because they knew who was lying.
But yeah, if I had to guess, it's probably in the 120 to 150 range.
Okay.
Yeah.
I don't have a solid data point on that, unfortunately.
Yeah.
But that's my best guess.
I'm going to make a fool of myself here.
Ukraine population pre-war was what, 20 million, 25 million, probably 5 million fled.
So not the decimation of a whole generation, perhaps.
But am I way off there?
And in terms of people that fled?
Population versus those that likely fled and then comparing that to the likely KIA.
Yeah.
Roloff, do you do anything around here?
Can you go to Wikipedia, please?
It's something like 20 million or pre-war.
Anyway, go ahead, Jack.
Yeah.
I mean, there is a good chart of Ukrainian democracy.
38 million.
Good God.
Maybe I was thinking it's 25 now.
Anyway, 38 million in 2022.
Yeah, there's a good chart somewhere of Ukrainian demographics that shows it broken down by age because the Ukrainian army, the average age is about 40, maybe like 41.
And there's a lot of reasons for that.
Obviously, not a lot of kids born in the 90s in the post-Soviet Union.
Not a lot of kids born in the 90s anywhere, right?
But compared to before that, but they had a serious lack of people born after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
And mobilization, which I'm sure we'll talk on later, that just got lowered to the age of 25 when it was 28 before.
All right.
Thank you for that.
And we still got tons to cover.
So I'm going to go to one of the Telegram questions from the Peanut Gallery.
This is from V, who says, this is, because I was going to go to technology, drones, missiles, and tanks next, which I know you've been champing at the bit to get to.
This is the first major conflict where we've seen extensive use of drones.
Reports indicate Russo-Chinese drones cheaper, more effective than the Western supplied counterparts.
Not surprising.
Where do you see use of drones going and any lessons learned in this arena for future conflicts?
And I'll broaden that just a little bit to say this is clearly the first, you know, I think I said on a previous show, it's like a hybrid of trench warfare of World War I and then video game warfare of the future.
But both sides are using drones.
Russia's using Iranian drones, Shahed, mini-suicide drones.
The footage is heartbreaking, brutal, bloody, spectacular from a war footage perspective.
Geek out on drones, wherever you want to take it.
What the audience needs to know about them, please.
Yeah, it's funny to think that a $600 FPV drone from China is a lot better than your $40,000 javelin missile.
Probably feels stupid after making that one.
Granted, the javelin's a good thing, and it was very good at the time.
But yes, what's FPV mean for the sorry?
You know what?
I actually don't even know.
Good.
It's the Chinese racing drone.
I actually forget what that acronym is for, but it's, you know, like, you ever see those drone racing competitions and they fly them through like the big lighted circles and stuff.
They're super duper fast.
Those are the drones.
Yeah.
Okay.
And yeah.
So basically, because they're very fast, they can carry a heavy payload and they can slam into something real fast.
And they have a long range because they're fast.
Sure.
Those are some of them.
The Russians have their own mass-produced version, the Lancet.
Ukrainians have some too.
But the question asker, the guy who asked that question, very astute in pointing out that the American drones are not as good.
That's why you don't see the American switchblade kamikaze drone ever, right?
Because the Ukrainians just dropped it and they're just buying cheap drones from China and putting an RPG on the bottom of it.
But yeah, they are, I never in a million years would have thought they were going to be as effective as they are.
But it makes sense.
You can target something with pinpoint accuracy at the squad level.
You just need one dude who played a video game one time to fly this drone.
And you can attack the top of the tank or a vehicle or whatever, wherever the armor is thinnest.
And it's like a miracle weapon, basically.
And they're extremely cheap and they're easy.
They can actually be 3D printed in little tiny workshops.
And that's actually what they do in like little tiny towns in Ukraine.
And they become a gigantic nightmare for both sides.
And people are always saying, like, oh, why can't you just jam the drone?
Right.
It should be easy.
You just turn on the jamming machine that you have.
Well, the problem is that jamming machine probably weighs like 80 pounds.
It takes batteries.
It doesn't work very good in the winter.
Right.
And you have to bring it to the trench.
And then when you get it there, you turn it on.
Oh, they just switch the frequencies on their drone and they just fly it into you anyway, right?
So it's a constant back and forth in terms of warfare.
And it's literally changing day by day.
How about somebody who's good with a rifle?
Couldn't you just shoot one of these like a bird?
Harder than you think.
They actually are actually developing shotgun attachments for rifles with birdshot.
That seems to be the most effective thing for the individual soldier.
Yeah.
There's a lot of crowdfunding for like 20 gauges and stuff from the Ukrainian side.
But for the most part, like I've asked myself that same question.
And then I've seen first person videos from soldiers.
You don't actually notice it's there until it's almost on top of you.
Right, unless you have like a infrared, like night scope or something, you can see it coming.
They're actually very quiet and they're very fast.
Yeah, heartbreaking footage is uh.
Most recently I believe it was a Russian soldier blessing himself right before he knew that a drone was about to come in and blow him to bits.
Um yeah uh, the cope cages on tanks and armored personnel vehicles.
Are those drone protection or javelin protection?
All the above, I know they're somewhat effective.
Not, you know, these big hulking looks like somebody, just you know, welded on a cage on top of some of these million dollar tanks.
Um moderate well, sometimes they could actually be worse um, believe it or not?
Uh, like back in the day in World War Ii, they used to put, you know um, track links and sandbags and stuff on the Sherman tanks.
You've probably seen those photos right, that actually made it worse um, for um, certain rounds, because it actually gave it something soft to bite into and so it wouldn't deflect off the armor anymore and has that that same effect on sometimes.
Sometimes with some drones, it'll give it a bigger surface to hit and then um, you know, shoot its shape, charge through um, whereas it might have deflected in the first part um, what is actually most effective is uh, cage armor.
Uh, the cage armor, you see, it's like slats, um with uh, you know, like like a on your on, like your window, like your window, blinds almost a little bit larger, and the idea is that the, the detonator passes the contact detonators in the front, it passes through the slats and the actual um warhead is hit by the, the metal slatch, which deforms it and then makes it explode in a non-ideal fashion or just deflects it entirely.
That works better than just welding extra armor onto it, because that rpg is going to go through like 500 millimeters of armor.
Like that, that extra panel is not going to do a whole lot.
The uh, the newer cope stuff um, and originally the cope cages were actually from Chechnya because they would throw grenades down on the, the vehicles.
But the, the newer stuff that comes from the factory um, has explosive reactive armor on top, especially from Russia.
That stuff is effective.
I've seen several of those take multiple hits, but it's, it's not a solution, right the?
The only solution to this is because the drones are so plentiful and so cheap and so easy to use.
The only solution is to get something to get mobile jamming of some kind, and then they're going to find ways to defeat that jamming right.
So this is going to be a constant problem for the next 50 years, probably.
Sure yeah, give and take.
Yeah, offense and defense yeah look, but one.
One last thing, because it's actually really cool, um, with the Fpv drones, i've seen footage of the new electronic and the new electronic warfare stuff.
I've seen footage of the drone coming in and then it starts spinning in circles before it crashes.
And what's actually happening is the Russians are picking up the command sent to it from the uh the operator and they're actually just replaying it over and over and over again.
So if you sit, tell it turn left 20 degrees, it's going to tell it turn left 20 degrees, 20 degrees, 20.
So it just spins 360 and then crashes.
It's like Mario Kart, you know, throwing a banana out the back and sorry.
Or in this case, more like you know, like you're playing my cart with your brother and you reach over and grab his controller, that this is, this is kind of what that is, but that's better.
Yeah, you win.
Uh question.
This is in line with another question, Prussian Blue Eyes.
He's a combat zone regular.
He says, how much are the Russians really holding back?
You hear they're using their old tanks first.
Uh, are.
Are they still?
You know there's on the tank issue, I could understand that uh, but are they?
Do you think they're still holding back their greatest and most expensive toys and throwing all that surplus still into the maw?
Uh no uh, they're.
They're.
They're not using their older tank first um, they're.
They're using whatever they have whenever they have it um, the T90ms is the most are the most uh expensive and most capable tanks that are currently in service and they are go.
They go right from the factory to the front line for the most part, and it's they do use.
He's not wrong, but they do use old tanks uh, they do use.
For example, i've even seen T-55s, um and T-62s unmodernized versions of T62s.
I actually got to see one of those on vacation recently.
It was pretty cool, it was actually right from uh Iraq.
But uh, these are very old, from the 50s and 60s.
Uh, those are typically used in very like, very niche cases where you have a mobilized unit.
They need to fill up the, the fill out the paperwork in terms of like okay, they need like 12 tanks.
Let's give them like one of these or they use them in um like a supporting artillery role almost for the most part, or as a mine trawler or something.
It's rare that they actually use those in in full-on combat, but I don't really see the Russians holding back per se in terms of equipment.
People will tell me, well, what about the T-14 Jack?
Well yeah, the T-14 Armada is not in service because the engine is unreliable and and frankly, at this point i'm never even sure it's going to be in service.
So that's a super expensive like, looks like future, future tech tank.
Yeah yeah, it's cool, but it's just they haven't worked out all the bugs yet, so they still use their like the T90, for example, is actually just the T72 chassis, like they.
Sure the Russians uh they're, they're very different than American tanks because they're 30 tons like uh lighter and it's a different philosophy want to say thank you so much so far.
Uh, tons of information packed in.
I'll try to keep my comments to a minimum.
If you need to take a break, we'll go a little bit longer here in the first first half.
Then let you wet your whistle uh, but one more geek out in terms of the weapon systems, uh, the missiles Iskanders uh calibers uh yeah, or unless that was the drone uh, but Russia's hypersonic missiles, and missiles in general, have been hyped as certainly better than anything the Americans have.
Um, how effective.
And then the converse of that is, I guess, our attackums, or whatever Ukraine has to launch into Russian territory effectiveness wherever you want to go with that.
What's most important, you're asking all the questions that are getting me in trouble right now.
Uh, how so?
Because everyone wants me to, everyone wants me to say, like Iskander, you know Lucia, uh rocket.
Uh, like the best uh rocket in the world right but um, in terms of uh Iskander uh, quite good, the Iskander is a ballistic missile right um, but for the most part, what people will talk about are the, the hypersonics.
That's the big, the buzzword right, and i've been promising people a deep dive on hypersonics for like three months and then I just like I got to work today and then I forget about it.
So uh, in my opinion, my humble opinion uh, hypersonic missiles, for the most part, are a marketing gimmick.
So i'll just let that sink in and make everyone, let everyone get mad for a second out there in uh, listener Land Ferraris or Lamborghinis of missile uh technology yes, kind of.
So yeah, so they're.
They're basically the topic go ahead.
Yeah, they're like the top, they're iterations on previous missiles.
I'll give you an example, the, the Kinzal uh the, which is Dagger in Russian.
Um, That's the one that, if you remember, maybe a year or two, it was a year and a half ago or whatever it was.
They wrote all those glowing articles about how, oh, we just took Putin's best shot and the Patriot shot down six out of six of his hypersonic missiles.
Like if you go back and Google News, you'll find that.
That didn't happen, incidentally.
But it too is not a hypersonic missile.
It is an iteration of the Iskander.
It's modernized, not modern.
It is a improved Iskander with more shielding so it can go faster and it's launched from the air.
That's pretty much what it is.
It's a better one.
It has more range.
It has more shielding so it can maneuver and go faster.
It is not hypersonic because hypersonic missiles, it's a long, it is a nerdy and long subject, but if you go onto Wikipedia, the definition for hypersonic missile is wrong.
It's just straight up wrong because they say it's a missile that can travel at hypersonic speeds.
Well, unfortunately, every ICBM since 1962 can do that.
Are they hypersonic missiles?
I don't think so.
Unless we want to call every single one a hypersonic missile.
So most of them are like that.
There are a couple of exceptions.
Like Zirkon is the one that people usually talk about with Russia.
It is typically a ship launched, vertical launched, hypersonic.
That one is closer, much closer to the hypersonic definition.
It is not like a perfect arrow.
It's not a magic bullet.
It goes very fast.
It does have utility, but it is not an unstoppable missile that can't be shot down by anything.
It can be engaged by U.S. air defenses.
Not very well in many cases.
The Patriot, it will very much stretch the Patriots' limit.
It probably, at its high end, when it's launched close to a target, it probably is out of the Patriots' engagement envelope, but it can be engaged by like an SM-3 missile, something that was designed to shoot down ICBMs and something like that.
I mean, the big difference with hypersonics is that they travel very fast inside the atmosphere and they can maneuver.
So it's just, they're basically a missile that goes really fast, really comparatively low to the ground, and it's really hard to shoot them down, but not impossible.
So that's a long answer, but it's that's that's basically what it is.
I'm sorry I messed.
I asked.
No, I'm kidding.
I'm glad that I asked.
And that will soothe the Jimmies or irritate the Jimmies of certainly some percentage of the audience.
The original question, though, it was besides that.
Oh, just it was the I just wanted to talk tanks, drones, and missiles and their impact on the war.
And I think we covered all that.
Oh, no, there was, he was saying something about the besides the hypersonics.
There's a question there.
Like, is it better than everything else?
Impact.
Oh, the Americans and what we're supplying to Ukraine and what they're using and what they're trying to do.
Oh, Attack M's.
Yeah, Attack Guns, what they use against Crimea and perhaps Belgaro.
Okay, right, right, right.
So ATT ⁇ CK-Ms is a semi-ballistic missile.
It's not super advanced.
It's good.
There's multiple problems in shooting them down.
And it's not exactly a technological issue for the most part.
Number one is Russia doesn't have enough air defenses, right?
They're spread out to defend everywhere from Vladivostok to Crimea, right?
They have to cover a lot of space, including Moscow.
And they kind of, the Russian air defenses were modeled to fight the United States, and they were designed to shoot down planes with big telegraph pole missiles really far away.
That's what the S-400 was designed to do.
That's what the S-300 was designed to do.
They really weren't designed to take down ballistic missiles like ATTACK-MS.
And for the most part, they're not great at it.
Okay, recently there's a couple of attacks the Russians did shoot down uh, a good chunk of them.
I actually I think I have one on video somewhere.
I can pull that out one of these days uh, they did get.
They usually get about a third to half of them, so they're effective and you can shoot a lot of them at a target and they eventually will get through, because it's you know, is is is comrade um um, what's his name?
Randomovich, does he?
Is he going to the bathroom at the time at three in the morning when the missile's coming in?
You don't know?
It's it?
There's, there's human factors involved and they have to.
They have to decide if is that a friendly plane coming at us or is that a missile.
So, right by the time you do that a lot of times, it's.
Yeah, i'm just disappointed they're called attack m's and not attack ems which uh, sounded a lot cooler to me.
Send the attackems uh, you don't even know, like I never heard anyone said out loud, so it could be either.
Yeah, maybe i'm, maybe i'm right in the grunts.
Call them attack'ems, it sounds funnier.
Uh, I wanted really quickly.
It seemed like one of the rare instances in the war was the Ukrainian counteroffensive and the Russia stopping it was as described in the mass media, that it was much hyped.
Uh, it was, you know, much forecast by the Ukrainians we're coming with a counteroffensive this summer and it gave the Russians plenty of time for their minefields, for reinforcements, and they just threw troops into the quote-unquote meat grinder and that chewed up a ton of manpower and material.
Is that more or less how you see it?
It did.
Yeah, it chewed up their artillery artillery, artillery reserves um, that they had been saving up for that offensive.
But that's, that's what you do, you save those up for defense, for offensives.
But immediately after that, they had to start restricting artillery use and that's why you know they had so much success at, like you know, Bakhmu Chasavyad and um yeah, but for the most part it was telegraphed um, they ran into a whole bunch of minefields.
Uh they, I think the Russian uh, rotary aircraft, their helicopters, get a don't get enough credit because they okay, they did a big job in stopping that attack dead.
There was so much helicopter footage immediately after that.
Um, gotcha that launch but um, that being said, they actually got farther than I thought they would.
They were much more persistent and more skilled than I thought they would be.
Okay, they didn't capture anything significant.
It was, you know, a couple of fields in in Robotny and Piataki um, where the you know they got just vaporized by Russian you know toss uh, thermobaric weapons.
But they did a.
I mean i'm, i'll salute them.
They did a very good job and they captured more territory, for example, than the Russians did in the last six months, eight months.
Fair enough, good context.
Uh Jack, do you want to take a break or do you want to keep rolling?
Both are fine binding.
Screw the audience, it's all in your hands.
No, we can keep going.
All right, good stuff.
Yeah, because we do have plenty more to cover.
Uh, you just say the word if you want to take a break.
You've been doing a ton of talking and we're extremely grateful.
Uh, let's move forward to today.
I think we did a pretty good trip down memory lane, both on what happened, why, and how.
Today, we have, I think, most famously, the sort of gambit feint or just push near Kharkiv, Kharkov, and rumors of a major Russian offensive this summer.
They've made tons of progress in Donbass, Abdivka, and Bakhmut before that.
I'll just leave it nice and big and you cover what you think is important.
What's going on right now?
What's the most important stuff?
And more importantly, what is it, a portent of things to come?
The current operation in Khartoum is, this was telegraphed a few months ago by Putin when he said he wanted a sanitary corridor along the border.
And the purpose is essentially to push Ukrainian artillery outside of the range of Belgorod, which is a Russian city.
I think it's like 10 or 15 kilometers north of the border.
They've been shelling that constantly since December.
When the Russians launched the very large air attack on Kiev in December, the Ukrainians responded by basically shelling Belgorod.
And there's actually a video of it hitting the Christmas tree square.
Well, the Christmas tree in the center of the city of the square.
They're using indiscriminate long-range rockets for the most part.
And it hasn't, I mean, it's killed, I think, oh, God.
I probably shouldn't even say that.
I'm not even sure how many people have died, but it's been more deaths in Belgorod from shelling than I think any other Russian city for the whole war, if you combine them.
Makes sense.
Yeah, it obviously makes the citizens very angry.
It makes the Russian government look very bad.
So they, and also out of concern for their own citizens, I'm not going to say that they're completely evil.
They obviously care about their own citizens.
And they decided to launch this operation basically to push that artillery out of range.
They need another probably 10, 15 kilometers before that's no longer in range.
That's pretty much what it is because I don't see it going anywhere.
There's major lines of defenses to the west and to the east.
They haven't got anywhere close to those yet.
And there's Kharkov in the middle.
There's like a million people in that city.
I don't know what you're going to do if you reach it, you know.
Sure.
But tying up resources for perhaps a major push.
So let's do a fun one here.
When the war kicked off, I got in my armchair general, easy boy, lazy boy, and said, if I were Putin, I would, I mean, ideally, you want to take the whole country, but that's a bit of a bridge too far.
I'd say I'd want to probably take the country at least to the Dnieper, including Kiev, and then go all the way over to Odessa, create that land bridge to Transnistria, maybe Moldova one day,
and basically control that whole north coast of the Black Sea or south coast of Ukraine, north coast of the Black Sea, Kiev if you can, and then perhaps leave a rump state in Lviv for either Hungary and Poland to take bites of or just see, just so the world can see, here's what's left of the Bandaristas, etc.
And then, so there's what you thought, what you thought or what you think Putin wants, and now what his objectives are perhaps for the rest of 2024, a perhaps forecast Russian counteroffensive, where they're going to go, what they really want to accomplish this year.
Pre-war expectations, pre-war expectations versus current.
Sorry for the long-weighted question, but I kind of had to do it there.
His pre-war or my pre-war?
Yeah, your pre-war expectations versus your 2024 expectations.
So where was I at the beginning?
I think I believed at the very start that it was going to be over in like four or five months and the Russians were going to win.
It was going to be a mopping up.
So I had a little bit more leeway built in than I think most people.
But I was just as wrong.
I don't know.
I don't know when this war is going to end.
If I had to guess, probably 2026, 2027.
I think we're in the mid, still in the mid-phase.
And we can talk about the most likely outcomes as well.
But in terms of, I don't think they're ever going to get to Odessa, unfortunately, for them.
I just don't see that happening.
I don't know what Putin's current expectations are.
Probably to take it one year at a time.
And I think what they're hoping for is eventually the Western Aid completely dries up.
Eventually the Ukrainians start to buckle.
And then things just start going faster.
And that will happen at the current trajectory.
That is likely to happen, but it's not going to be nearly as fast or as hard as they think it will happen, I think.
Yeah, it's so hard because you see posts where it's like, I think if I lived in Kharkiv, I would think about trying to get the hell out of there.
Or Zelensky has now superseded his democratically elected term and is now essentially the Marshal of Ukraine, Marshal Stein of Ukraine.
Yeah, but they're still, you know, they've held on this long and surpassed expectations.
So the rumor of Ukraine and its government and its military's demise is a little premature.
Major U.S. new arms supply.
Game changer just for prolonging the inevitable.
Anything in there that makes your eyebrows stand up or it's just another batch of stuff to keep them fighting?
There was nothing in there that was new that I saw.
I haven't read it line by line, but it was badly needed artillery shells.
And they did arrive.
I've been seeing much more cluster munitions going off than I did a month ago.
That was badly needed.
Also, air defense munitions for Patriots.
I know they started shooting at Russian planes again.
So they're back on the move with that.
Whereas for a long time, they weren't.
They basically had no ammo.
But ironically, Russians have not committed with a large missile attack in quite a while, which is odd.
The last one was against the hydroelectric dam, maybe like two months ago, something like that, three months ago.
But a lot of the new package is actually the U.S. strategic aid to Ukraine, which is actually like future deliveries.
It's basically, it's like, hey, Ukrainians, this is a voucher to buy something from Raytheon.
You'll have it in two years.
A lot of it is that.
And this is what has confused me about the U.S. strategy, because clearly we're, obviously, we're on the side of Ukraine.
The U.S. is.
So, and clearly they give them full-throated support, you know, in terms of rhetoric.
But there's also like 2,000 M1 Abrams rustling in the desert, Nevada, not to mention hundreds or thousands of aircraft.
And I've always wondered what the deal is.
And I think it's just, it's a number of reasons.
I think the point is to bleed Russia rather than to flood the Ukrainians with weapons.
Because I think that there was a point where the Russians were teetering and they were afraid that if they pushed them too far, it would actually be worse and the Russian government would collapse or something.
I don't know what their thinking was.
So they pulled the back on the aid a little bit.
But also they're just incompetent.
I don't think they know what they're doing.
They're being pulled in 47 different directions.
And I think you're going to see less aid towards the election as well.
Let me pause you right there because when I think of them holding back or delaying, because the Republicans delayed, what, four, five, six months?
And then they just like, okay, yeah.
Speaker Johnson had a conversation with Trump and decided to push it forward and then McCarthy was in there.
It made me think that the West was dragging things out.
Perhaps, I guess it's hard to say that they want to grind down Ukraine unless you really put on your conspiratorial hat and they're clearing Laban's realm for new Zion or an expanded Israel.
But you say that's interesting that you thought they were maybe slow rolling it because they didn't want to push the Russians back too fast.
And my first instinct would be that they are dragging it out to bleed the Russians too, but to bleed the Ukrainians.
You know, with Zelensky in there on top of the throne of skulls.
You don't have to answer that, but just it's hard to believe, you know, all the material, the tanks sitting chilling in the desert.
It's hard to believe that incompetence or fear would be holding them back when they've pushed it pretty far so far.
And just today, Speaker Johnson, one of the New Jersey Democrats who's like the son of the former governor Keene, said, no, we need to loosen the restrictions on Ukrainians striking into Russian territory proper.
And apparently, Secretary of State Blinken has been pushing for that newly as well.
And they're making Biden out to be the cautious, restrained one.
This has all happened in 24 or 48 hours tops.
So it seems like we're on the cusp of the U.S. now doing the opposite and saying, no, push, push, push, strike into Russia proper, which I'm always loath to suspect that this is going to escalate into World War III.
This doesn't necessarily have to.
It could be the opening salvos of it, but we really are getting into more dangerous territory, perhaps, either on the Russians taking massive amounts of territory and the government collapsing and NATO or Zog, if you prefer taking a huge L or vice versa, where Western arms are being deliberately targeting assisted or direct approval, go ahead and hit Russian territory with this attack M or whatever it is.
So sorry about that, but where things are now between the West and Russia and loosening engagements.
And do you think things are more dangerous now than they were in 2022 or last year?
You know, it's weird because I never understood the whole restrictions to begin with.
Because if you cast your mind back, you remember all the supposed red lines that Russia had talked about.
Like if you strike Crimea, we're going to, that's our red line.
If you do this, you send attack M's, right?
That's that's a red line.
Well, they've done all that stuff and nothing happened, right?
So I don't know.
I think Russia just keeps taking it for the most part.
Like what is, I always wondered why the Biden administration was so reluctant to just take the gloves off sometimes.
Like they must have, they must have been threatened with something, like a proxy war in a different location with Russian support, right?
Something that Russians would destabilize in the Middle East for our friends down there, right?
Or something.
And I always wondered what it is, but it never seems to happen.
In terms of targeting, attack Ems range would target, like Rostof Oblast and Kursk Oblast yeah uh yeah, what would happen was they'll.
They'll hit some airfields, they'll hit some stuff like that.
The Russians will just move the stuff um, they'll take some losses and it's.
It's the same thing that happened with the ammo depos and depots and High Mars.
It's not going to be good for them, but I don't foresee them escalating over that um.
But one interesting point, uh, in terms of targeting data, we actually, we absolutely do provide them with targeting data inside Russia.
It just we don't make it explicit that we say oh, you can't use American weapons for that.
You'd say, here's a picture of this oil refinery.
You know just, you know, just gonna just leave this here.
Do you think that?
Do you believe that the Russians have been remarkably restrained thus far?
All things considered?
I don't, you know, I don't think they have much choice in terms of like.
In terms of like a response to the Us per se right, if they don't want to escalate something.
Um uh like, if I mean, maybe they got enough to chew on right now.
Yeah, like when we, when someone blew up Nordstream, I thought to myself, good god, like at least a subsea comm cable is going to get cut or some pipeline is going to have a malfunction and blow up somewhere up in Canada or Alaska.
But well, supposing the Chinese, supposing the Chinese did cut it undersea cable yeah yeah, WALL Street Journal broke that just the other day.
Go ahead sam, please.
Yeah, and it's not as though Russia doesn't have its own internal problems.
Right, there's this ongoing purge of uh top, uh military people accused of corruption, and they also have their own, like groups within Russia that are, you know attempting, I guess we could describe as terrorist type operations, or uh yeah, whoever was directing those Tajiks to go shoot up a concert?
Yeah yeah, so it's.
It's like a really complicated situation over there for Russia and it's not as though they have, you know uh, one mind on this conflict it's.
It's a really good point sam, because obviously Putin just got re-elected and reinaugurated and now the arrests for corruption and the reshuffle Shoi Gu's out and the economy economist is in at the Ministry OF Defense uh, anything Jack has surprised you.
Uh, Putin's moves since getting his next five or six year term, I can't remember.
I'm surprised that Shoiku got shuffled um, because Shoigu was actually.
Uh, he was not, he was not made by Putin.
Uh, he's not.
He doesn't owe his career to Putin.
He's actually a Yeltsin man um, and he was.
If, if Shoigu was, was uh white, he would probably be president of uh Russia instead of Putin um, like uh Lebed, who also died in a helicopter crash, if I remember famous famous, semi-handsome Russian bulldog, general yep.
Yes, he had some electoral pull back in the day and then he died in a crash.
Yeah um, but Shoiku is half Tuvin um, so that that was never going to fly.
It wouldn't fly now, nor would it fly in um.
I guess that would have been 2000.
Um yeah yeah, right around when Putin was 2000 or 2001, I forget which one.
But can you explain for a moment what that nationality is you referred to a couple times now?
Uh, the Tuvin it's.
It's uh, I believe it's an autonomous.
Uh see, now i'm gonna have to look it up because i'm pretty sure it's an autonomous oblast in Russia.
Yeah, if you look at them sam they they, they look Asiatic uh, but not like a Chinaman, you know.
And Shoiku himself is half Shoigu could be your like Italian grandfather if you look at him in pictures.
Yeah, not yours personally.
Yeah, it's actually a republic, not even an autonomous localist, but they have that weird, not weird, but again, I guess weird, like sort of like half-mongolian look to them.
Yep.
They're a Siberian Turkish language, apparently.
Yeah.
They do call him the Tuvin degenerate.
It's funny because I remember I googled something.
I forget what it was, but I found the you ever see that site Rational Wiki.
Oh, for sure.
It's like basically anti-fatir.
Yeah, right.
So they have a whole section on the Russian alt-right.
I learned so much stuff.
Oh my God.
Like, thank you.
Thank you, Rational Wiki.
There was so much good stuff on there.
Like, I learned they called him the Tuvin Degenerate.
And I googled it.
I'm like, oh, my God, they do.
There you go.
Jack, I feel guilty.
We're milking you like a cow that's been out in the field without a farmer's hand for too long.
So let's pause there.
I don't know if it's the best place to pause, but I definitely want to get to the best Telegram questions that I solicited right before the show, and they came out of the woodwork with some good ones we haven't gotten to.
And perhaps we can close it up, even though we're, yeah, we could do this for, we could do an ongoing podcast.
But just the bigger picture, what this means for both sides and how dangerous it is and what the likely outcomes are.
But before we do that, on top of thanks, anything before we go to the break that you want to mention that you think we glossed over or I glossed over?
Or should we just hit the music that you have teed up?
I think we can hit the music.
All right.
What are we going to listen to?
This song is so don't do not tell mom that I'm in Chezhny.
It's an old Russian war song recently updated for Don't Tell Mom I'm Going to Bakhmut.
If anyone wants to go to YouTube and look that up, it's actually a great video.
It's filmed in Bakhmut with incoming artillery fire as he plays the guitar.
So little magic.
Yeah, this is the original song from the Chechnyan War.
Jack wanted to play this terrible audio, but very moving visual of a guy, you know, strumming and singing in the wreckage of some town, possibly Bakhmut.
I said, well, that's going to sound like crap on a podcast, Jack.
So we're going with the original and we'll include the link to the updated footage.
What's past his prologue from Chechnya to Bakhmut and God knows how much farther.
Thank you, Jack, and enjoy the song, audience.
be right back.
В тюльпане чёрном домой летит Быть бы матом, война под люка в огне горит Ты только маме, что я в чешки Быть бы матом,
война под люка в огне И только маме, что я в чешки Пят ребята и запах пота Пять из боя не вышло, трое плач, ари Только маме.
А караван мне посячкой манит, что он вернётся, держу пари Только маме,
Что я в чешки AND
welcome back to Full House, episode 187.
If I recall, 187 is the police code for murder pure coincidence on our episode that is all things Russia-Ukraine.
There's no chance that we're going to get to Palestine, Israel, unless we keep Jack until 6 o'clock in the morning, his time, wherever he lives.
So, thank you for riding with us there in the first half.
I think that was probably the longest we've ever gone in a first half.
And that's a great sign, frankly.
We didn't want to stop.
We had too much to talk about.
And I'll shut up there.
I wanted to ask Jack right here at the top: why such a passion for this issue?
You're not Russian, you're not Ukrainian, you don't have particular ties to that area.
This just captures your fancy.
Yeah, you know, I've asked myself that question, and it's just like a pathological need to be a nerd about this.
That's really what it is.
I mean, about most wars in general and military stuff.
Like my grandfather gave me a book, a series of books, the World War II on land, on sea on air, the battle atlases when I was eight.
I just couldn't stop reading that.
And then I got into Rome and Napoleon and World War II, of course.
Yeah.
So this is an extension of that.
And this is, you know, this is a, it's, it's a brother war, but it's also a war that I'm more interested in than, say, something in the middle of sub-Saharan Africa, for example.
For sure.
Yeah.
It's, it's got the epic background of centuries, millennia of history.
It is our own people, no matter how distant within the race and could get us all killed, as I've said before.
Unlikely he'll pop when you tangle with Russia, and it's clearly a proxy war with Russia, you're playing with fire.
And especially when a very competent leader in Russia knows that the nose over here would love nothing more than for him to be toppled and for the country to collapse into chaos.
We saw what they did throughout the Cold War and into the 90s.
And frankly, after 9-11, too.
Okay.
Let's see.
Jack, one more personal one, since it's a family show.
Are you still dating?
Have you had any luck?
Do you do the apps?
Do you try to meet up in meet space, friends of friends?
Have you waved the white flag on your quest to continue your bloodline?
No, certainly not.
It's actually interesting because in my, say, 20s and even early 30s, I was still in the, I'm going to be fat and play video games mode.
And it was really when I found our thing, right, that I realized, oh, I kind of have to have a purpose in life.
And I don't want to be an evolutionary dead end, you know, that frankly, and no one should.
So in terms of personal stuff, I've recently had a breakup over the issue of kids.
My ex was in still in party mode.
She was 10 years younger.
So, and I should have known better, frankly, but I wasn't going to wait and take a maybe for an answer.
So, yes, I'm currently back in the dating mode, and it's horrible.
I went on Bumble the other day, and I got a dude that wasolate that, Mr. Branzer.
Yeah, I got a dude.
Well, I got a dude, yeah.
You know, you said like man-seeking woman, but they'll just anyone could be a woman now, of course.
Full beard, thigh-high, high-heeled, what are those called?
Boots, in a weird like flower outfit, making a pose.
I was like, that's enough bumble for today, guys.
So I can, I can just give you my own opinion, guys.
Just find someone as quickly as possible, especially in your 20s.
Just hang on to them.
Good stuff.
Thank you for that, buddy.
So, hey, at least you didn't go out to the bar to meet up with the bearded bumblebee.
At least he showed his true colors online.
He didn't go out with a check.
Yeah.
And Sam, it occurs to me that Jack has a similar voice and perhaps mannerisms or speaking style as Ascot bro, who is also very, if you listen to it, he has the sort of same cadence and the same intensity of knowledge in these detail.
Yeah, detail-oriented knowledge.
Yeah.
Perhaps the brothers from different mothers.
He's a previous guest, Jack, who we went about three hours talking just about testosterone and the natural options.
It was over the top, but it was great.
People loved that one.
That wasn't back down to back down to business.
Aldi supremacists, big fan of the German discount grocer, says, what are the chances that the West actually allows itself to take an L in light of the BRICS sphere shaping up to be a real force in the world?
In other words, I'll perhaps put words in his mouth, but the United States backs off here and says, okay, the writing's on the wall.
Let's not risk World War III or any more skin in this game and just call quits Poland and Hungary and keep that together and Russia can have Ukraine.
I don't think they'll ever fully back off.
They may have already written Ukraine off.
They clearly didn't think the A-Bill was super important.
And Republicans typically always enjoy foreign wars.
They very well might just throw it in the garbage can, but I don't think they'll ever stop supplying something, giving at least targeting information, intel, that sort of thing.
But I think they'll definitely pull back with, because we're just going to be busy with the elections soon enough, right?
We're going to be busy with other stuff.
It's just not going to be a page one.
It isn't a page one thing at all anymore, right?
Now it's going to be a page 27 thing instead of a page 13.
So I don't know.
I really wish I could give you a better answer than that.
That's fine.
Yeah, it's totally speculative.
It's really hard on these ones that are bigger picture and more hypothetical.
I do want to mention to the audience, Myth of the 20th Century did an episode more focused on Russia and its war economy recently.
And whoever the guest was, I don't recognize his name, said something like, no, maybe it was Larry Johnson on Russians with Attitude who said that the CIA has like 12 different base stations in Ukraine, whereas in the Cold War, we'd have like one per country.
So we are, if you take his word for it, we are deeply, deeply invested in this conflict.
And I guess humility and long-term, wise strategic thinking and backing down is not a hallmark of our foreign policy going back to, you know, the late 18th century, 17th century, 18th century, excuse me.
All right, moving on.
Fred Davis Clark Jr. says, war being the banker's dream that it always is, what real incentive is there for Russia or Ukraine to end it, either by decisive force or compromise?
So that gets into the territory of this is not as it's advertised to be.
This is not plucky Ukraine against the evil Asiatic warmongering horde, but perhaps it's getting at, you know, Jewish war profiteers on both sides.
I would guess that both sides actually want to end it as decisively as they can.
What do you think?
Yeah, I would generally agree.
For example, in Ukraine, a lot of their actual assistance, quote unquote, is in the form of loans.
And those loans are deferred.
The payments are deferred, but not forever, right?
So even if, like, say you, you own a whole bunch of like farmland or enterprises in Ukraine, factories and stuff like that, the economy of Ukraine is going to be garbage for the next, even if they win tomorrow, it's going to be garbage for the next 10 or 20 years, right?
So there's an incentive to just get it over with.
Maybe I don't see any sign of that happening yet, any sort of significant movement inside Ukraine that says, hey, let's have a negotiation and like, let's just give Russia the Donbass or something like that.
That's still like a verboat.
But that is, I think, certainly possible and likely to start.
Now, in terms of Russia, that's even stronger because whatever we think, it is an elective war on Russian side.
Now, in my opinion, I think it is existential culturally to Russia, this war now, that will define what Russia will be going forward in the future, but it is not physically existential, right?
You know, Azov is not going to be marching through Moscow tomorrow if Russia surrenders.
The opposite may be true.
Rusich might be marching through Kiev, you know, if Ukraine surrendered.
Yeah, Rusich, I mentioned at the top there, of course, is the Russian.
You know, they have a semi-Hawkin cruise insignia, arguably neo-Nazi or Natsock sympathetic.
But go ahead.
Certainly.
Yeah.
I haven't seen much of them recently.
They were operating sort of under the wing of Wagner for a while.
Not sure where they are, but I haven't honestly went looking also.
Yeah.
Maybe quiet, maybe fold it up into them.
That discussion right there raised a question from me.
What have you seen, if anything, of Russian development or rebuilding or repopulation efforts in the oblasts or the provinces that they've taken?
I saw footage of like a new school opening in Mariupol, right?
Which could have been a Potyumpkin school.
They pumped a lot of money into making a pretty school for propaganda purposes.
But any idea if they're actually doing good deeds there?
Are they flooding it with Asiatic hordes, Turkmen and Kazakhs and etc.
Some of the workers certainly are, the construction guys.
You can imagine they have a typical problem with manpower at the moment, especially young men, a spade or a hammer, so to speak.
So that is it.
But there's still a lot of ethnic Russians at work in that construction.
And Mariopo is the poster child for the rebuilding.
Yes.
It's not as glorious, of course, as what the MOD would put out or the Russian government would say.
Like, sure, look, we opened it.
It's Kasivi, beautiful.
Yeah, it's kind of like, yeah, not wonderful, not bad, but they're making an effort.
They're making a serious, genuine effort to rebuild the areas.
But a lot of them, they can't yet.
Some of them, like in Donetsk, is still too close to the front lines, even though Doniesk is not like a ruin or anything, but they can't really build a whole lot of new stuff there.
But they are putting a good amount of money into it.
Do you, I'll put forth my, it's not a grand vision, but it's just a grand analysis of the big picture of what's going on here.
The West pushed too far.
Russia gave warning after warning.
Don't go there.
Red line, no NATO, no nukes.
This is our, you know, basically our sphere of influence.
And they pushed too far.
And then Putin, Russia, the leadership felt compelled.
They had no choice to go in to protect the Donbass, to keep NATO out, and that this is not a revanchist Soviet Union, bloodthirsty World War II Stalin era project to enslave the Ukrainians and starve them.
Hello to Moro.
Well, Ukraine is again the unfortunate bloodlands of West versus East.
Not putting words in your mouth.
Expand, disagree, whatever you think.
Yeah, we could do a whole show on that.
So I'll give you my take, right?
So it certainly is not a Russian imperialist thing.
And it's certainly not a NATO started everything thing.
It's neither, it's neither nor of those two holes.
There's an interview some years back with Putin, which I thought was fairly illuminating.
One of the things he said was one of the greatest tragedies that happened to my country is that in 1991, tens of millions of Russians woke up without a home.
And he's referring to Russians in the various in various what were then socialist republics inside the USSR.
Reminiscent, of course, reminiscent of a certain central European country that was the victim of misfortune in the 20th century.
Yep.
Yes, yes.
Yeah, including the Prussian reason.
Yeah, yes.
So, yeah, so that was illuminating in the sense that it's not really, for Putin, it's not so much an ethnic thing.
I believe he used the word Russiane, which is like more like Russian-speaking Russian citizen rather than blood Russian, which actually is Rusich, hence the name of that private military company.
So that is one, he views Russian as like a sort of a cultural, spiritual, ethnic mix.
It's weird.
At least that's what he does publicly.
So that's one reason he wants to bring that back into, bring them back into the fold.
There's a whole host of reasons.
I mean, for, I mean, imagine the situation where you have a government that gets overthrown on a neighboring country, right?
You have a naval base in Crimea.
You eventually have what becomes a civil war.
It's a murky civil war, but there is civil conflict between ethnic Russians and Ukrainians on your border.
Yes, of course you're going to intervene, right?
And you will have a lot of sympathy for the people in Lonbas being shelled, right?
Now, the same other hand, it's that same hand right now.
The other hand, on the other hand, I can perfectly sympathize with a whole bunch of Ukrainians in the West saying, hey, we don't want the whole Donbass to break away from my country.
It is an industrial heartland of eastern Ukraine.
This is part of Ukraine.
Or a Cash Cow.
Yeah, it's a Cash Cow.
And just economically, it's terrible for them, right?
Yeah.
And there's a lot of, and Ukraine is sort of a weird mix of a country.
You have Galicians and Hungarians and Ukrainian.
Yeah, there's lots of weird stuff.
And then people that are ethnically Ukraine and then people that are ethnically Russian.
Then there's a whole bunch of people that are in the middle that speak a pidgin Russian.
I forget what the actual name for it is, but it's a mess.
And like I said, I could do a whole two-hour thing on that.
If you really want, but I'll summarize, what you really want is the two-hour deep dive from Russians with attitude on 2014-2015 for that sort of reason.
Very good.
They're on Telegram, Twitter, of course.
And we've mentioned them on this show several times, despite my severe irritation at recent comments they made on Twitter.
But regardless, Blue Jacket, good friend of the show, he says, what could cause the U.S. to engage in direct combat in Russia?
So what could actually lead this to U.S. versus Russia, fighter planes, et cetera, or World War III?
And are you worried about that?
I think the most likely cause would be if they set a gay pride flag on fire.
Well played.
I mean, there is always the chance, right?
The chance of like nuclear exchange is low, but a low nuclear exchange chance is still like very bad, obviously, because it's nuclear.
The only way I can see it happening is if like, there was a situation earlier on the war where there was, I believe, an SU-35, which is a Russian fighter, and there was a British British spy plane, basically.
I forget if it was a KC-135 or whatnot.
No one really cares about those details except for Spurs like myself.
And there was an incident where the Russian actually fired a missile by accident.
And it crashed into the Black Sea.
Something like that could happen very easily.
It could hit that plane.
It could kill 13 or 14 crew members.
And suddenly, what do you think Lindsey Graham would do if they shot down an American KC-135 or something?
Oh, little boy.
Thank you.
Well played.
Yeah.
These people are so bloodthirsty that they would be ordering strikes and everything else.
Yeah.
USS Maine, Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, USS Maddox, USS Liberty.
Take your pick.
They've done it before.
Why would they stop now?
Right.
And I wonder what that would look like.
I mean, I think it would be a series of escalating strikes because you build in, you basically, well, if you're smart, which they're not, but if you're smart, you build an escalation ladder, right?
So you say, oh, you did this.
I'm going to do this.
And then if you do this, I'm going to do this.
You don't go from like, you know, A to Z right away.
Sure.
So it would be like, it would probably start off with strikes on like Russian airfields and stuff like that and escalate.
Okay.
Well, well done.
OAC vetting official, I believe that's the Ohio Active Club, asks a good one that is a massive can of worms.
We'll have to keep it tight here.
Why does Putin keep talking about denazification when he himself is clearly at war with the Jews?
Now, obviously, some in the audience would take issue with that latter assertion that Putin actually is in conflict with the Jews.
I would actually agree with it, that everything we've seen from the emigration to cracking down on corruption, et cetera, supports that.
But the denazification, the emphasis on the banda rights, the hang up about World War II, which we can understand, of course, from their loss of life and the historical significance of that in Russia, it's massive cognitive dissonance for so many of our guys who perhaps would be inclined to like Russia or take their perspective more often if Putin and Russians weren't constantly yammering about Nazi, Nazi, Nazi and the rest of it.
So you think Putin's a Jew shill?
You think he's just doing 4D chess with the optics?
Or is he confused?
Or is it all too complicated to fit into neat boxes?
You know, I'm so tired of hearing about denazification.
Sure.
Oh, yeah, ustalbarathan.
Like, I'm so tired of that.
I thought, you know, so Tucker asked that question to his credit.
What would that look?
That was one of the best questions of the Tucker interview.
What are you talking about?
You got to go around and like execute everybody who has like, you know, the wrong patch and Putin hemmed in Hod.
He didn't really give an answer.
Go ahead.
It's, it's so, it was, I thought it was just something at first that like they were like, all right.
So, you know, the leftists in the West talk about this all the time.
And they talked about this with the Azov Brigade.
They had this in the media until suddenly then the war started and suddenly Azov was good again, right?
But they figured, you know, oh, maybe we can get them a wedge issue here.
Like they'll have to, you know, jump on our side.
Of course, that was never going to happen, but that's what I thought it was at first.
But then, you know, I realized.
Because real quick, yeah, like our like insanely anti-white Jewish-owned system was like totally giving Azov, nothing to see here.
Who cares about the Nazis there?
Which, of course, made us think that they were perhaps useful idiots.
And it was the exact opposite in Russia, where they were like, Azov, Azov, Azov, Azov, which makes you like it's, it just scrambles you.
Sorry.
Carry on.
No, no, I talk too much sometimes, but now that you mentioned that, I totally forgot about during the aid portion, the age question, aid question.
You know, Azov is still trying to get delisted from the aid blacklist for American aid because they were put on a blacklist for military aid back in like 2015, 2016.
Their brigades still can't get it and they've been lobbying Congress to take that off.
And people forget this, like that, that never happened, right?
But in terms of where are they going with that?
Oh, so right.
So I thought it was just something they kind of just made up as a wedge issue in like 2022.
Little did I know.
This has been around for quite a while.
It was actually early after the Maidan in 2014.
There was a movement called the Zashishaya Sevastopola.
So like defend Sevastopol.
It was basically a little civilian movement to fight against any like pro-Maidan like hooligans and protesters that would show up in Sevastopol in Crimea.
And they released a statement talking about how these guys were all Nazis and this was Nazism and blah, So this has been around and it's been around for a while.
And I wish they would just shut up about it.
It just, it's so weird because it's the weird fetishism like of the Ukrainians wearing like the Toltenko for the SS runes and then the Russians countering that with the Soviet flag.
And it's just, I think some of it is them just trying to shock each other and piss each other off.
And then I don't know.
Do I think Putin really believes all of it?
I think he half believes it.
The thing people should remember about Putin that his older brother was killed in the siege of Leningrad in 1943, I want to say, before he was born.
So he's certainly not a favor in favor of like my comfy chair or anything like that.
Yeah, he couldn't either politically or just through blood memory.
It would be unreasonable to expect Russians to pay vocal lip service to National Socialism, the Third Reich, or any of that stuff.
Yeah, of course.
And I mean, they wouldn't have, they have a, remember, they have victory.
They have Den Pobievi every year, Victory Day.
They have the banners.
They have the Immortal Regiment where they march with their ancestors that were killed during the war.
And a lot of them were.
But I don't know.
Like, I don't remember what the original question was now, but.
Yeah.
No.
Well, yeah.
Putin and the Jews and denazification.
Yeah, it's it's hard.
It's a complicated issue.
Yeah.
I mean, because it's like, does he, I mean, he knows, but does the, it's like, okay, so there's like a lot of people that are, especially like the conservative moment that they know, but they just go along with it anyway.
Cause they, they know, like, like I'm trying to think of a good example.
Like, you know, there's, there's people that will laugh when you make the Jew joke, right?
Yeah.
About the money or the power because they know.
But then when you say something like actually upsetting, they're like, you can't say that, you know.
Right.
He might be one of those.
And he, he does, I don't know.
He does work with like a Bravovich.
Yep.
So I don't know.
I don't think that's like in his mental wheelhouse.
I don't think he's fighting a war.
he thinks he's fighting a war against Jews.
I don't think he's 100% also thinking he's fighting a war against Nazis, right?
Yeah.
But it's somewhere in between.
That's sort of a not answer for me, but like it's so hard to judge this guy because he's really like a weird tech, very intelligent technocrat, right?
He has an encyclopedic knowledge of like a foreign exchange rates and GDP numbers.
So who really knows what he thinks?
Right, right.
Like a lot, like, does Alon Musk know about them?
He has to know about them, but he certainly doesn't show it.
You know, Boomer, not Boomer, Putin comes across as a hyper intelligent, very like aggressively virtuous Sivnat Russian who's too smart to not know about the Jews, but may think he's so smart that they could still be included in the power structure, but just keep the good ones and, you know, discard the bad corrupt ones who try to, you know, the ones who tried to sell off the entire country to their brethren and the West in the 90s.
And it's we had a previous guest on who said there's no way that he was in the KGB in the timeframe that he was and that he was not intimately aware of, as we know, the Jewish role in the Bolshevik Revolution and the purges and their roles in destroying much of Russia and her populace.
Have you seen that video?
Have you seen that video of him speaking at like a Holocaust remembrance thing to a bunch of rabbis?
Go ahead.
I'm not sure.
So he basically says something like, you know, like most of the founders of the Soviets were Jewish.
He just said matter of fact.
Yeah, basically.
But he's like, that's a good thing.
It's weird.
If I find it, I'll.
He was saying it not in a bad way.
He was just saying like, oh, just a matter of fact.
Yeah, he gave the numbers too.
It was like, you know, 20, whatever percentage of the Presidium or the Pullet Bureau.
Yeah, I know what you're talking about.
All right.
Jambabwe, question from Jambabwe.
And this might be up your alley.
What role are the nationalist units of the Russian side playing?
We touched on Rusich already.
Haven't heard much out of Sparta Battalion, Somalia Battalion since the early days.
Building off that, what are the LPR and DPR forces up to?
So there you go.
So the Rusich, we touched, Rusic, we touched on earlier.
They are slash were a private military company that are, I guess you can call them Wignats, basically, like almost literally.
There's a really great black metal band uses that name as well.
Rusic.
Yeah, NS black metal.
Yeah.
yeah it literally means like blood russian um as opposed to like uh ruski or russiani like like uh russiani is more like a yeah yeah russiani is like a uh like a uh citizen or garage on you sorry Sorry.
It's hard to remember all these words.
I'm glad to hear him struggling with your Russian too.
We commiserated about that.
For the listeners, don't even try.
You're going to want to throw yourself off a bridge.
The Crimean bridge, no less.
Never want to hear a Spanish learner or a French learner or a German learner complain about the difficulty in learning those languages.
Go ahead.
Sparta, Somalia.
Yeah.
So I don't know where Rusich is these days.
There's a lot of like slash R guys that were hanging around.
Igor Mongushev was shot in the back of the head in a robbery, most likely.
There was a couple other ones that recently died and some got transferred to Africa.
They basically got broken up after Wagner for the most part.
Most of those battalions.
In terms of the Somalis and the Sparta Battalion, and for people that are not like nerds about this stuff, the Somalis are actually not Somalian.
They were called the Somali Battalion because they had such shabby equipment.
Someone said, you look like Somali pirates.
The name stuck.
They are still around.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
They're still around.
They're actually, they are incorporated.
All the DPR and LPR forces were incorporated into the Russian military.
So they all have Russian passports.
They're all part of official Russian units.
There you go.
They still, they still publish videos with their old name.
You'll still see Sparta Battalion drone videos, for example, smashing FPV drones into Bradley's and MVs.
Which we know from Sam means first-person view or vision, was it Sam?
View, yeah, first-person view.
Yeah, oh, Sam, Sam, our in-house gamer, I guess.
Question from me: Igor Gherkin Gherkin, I think not to be confused with the pickle, he was a prominent, famous, beloved Don Bass combatant leader, and now he's in the clink.
Did he just get too mouthy and too opinionated?
I can't recall what happened to him specifically.
I may have magnified the last name.
Pretty much what he did.
He's better known as Igo Strelkov.
Strolkov.
Thank you.
Yeah, I knew I was a wallpark.
Yep.
Gherkin is his name.
But Strelkov is his, I think, his mother's family name.
Very quick background.
He was FSB officer in 2014.
He was, he basically got a bunch of volunteers together and he went into Ukraine, excuse me, into Ukraine, occupied the city of Slovyansk, fired the first shots of the war.
And he doesn't look like, he doesn't look like a battle-hardened mercenary, right?
He looks kind of like a skinny noodle-arm nerd, but he's better.
If you're on Google, go look up the picture of him LARPing in Roman legionary armor.
It exists.
So, yeah, but he's a monarchist LARPer, basically.
But he's very, very much a Russian patriot and a nationalist.
He was criticizing the MOD way too much.
He was right in a lot of things he said.
He said they would need 600,000 men.
I think he's right.
But yeah, he wouldn't shut up.
So he's actually running for president for, he was running for president from jail.
And his basically slogan was like, you don't have to worry about me being corrupt and giving jobs to my friends.
I don't have any friends.
Hopefully he's getting good rations at least.
He's not dead yet.
Yeah.
Here's either a weird one or a galaxy brain one.
Johnny B asks, what are the metaphysical implications of this territory holding so much sway in the two last large conflicts?
Ukraine, of course, WW2, a lot of more current possible World War III, fertile land, geography.
But do you give any credence to the Second Israel connection or the Khazaria connection?
Any do you, yeah, I'll leave it at that.
Do you give any credence to some of the kookier stuff about Ukraine, Khazaria, new Israel?
Personally, I don't.
I never, I didn't do a deep dive on that.
So take that with, take my take with a grain of salt.
But from what I looked into, I believe the Khazars were basically a canate that of essentially of the disintegrated Mongols.
And they were converts to, or no, they were, I don't think they were Mongols.
They were a Turkish people, right?
There were Turkish people that migrated up there and they were converts to Judaism because they thought that'd be a good idea, question mark.
Why?
I don't know.
They actually literally, they have on their coins.
They took coins that just said, like, you know, the, the, the, was it the Shaheed, you know, like there's one God and Allah and what is it?
Muhammad is his prophet.
They just like scratch that out and just said like they're like, that's the black Hebrew Israelites of Crimea and southern Ukraine.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So no, I don't, I don't give, um, I don't give a credence to that.
But like I said, I never study it in depth.
The fact that a Jewish actor is the new wartime, you know, Mussolini of Ukraine is certainly suspicious, but we'll leave it at that.
Patrick Witham says, where will Russia stop?
We touched on this a little bit, but we didn't really get down to brass text.
Where will Russia stop?
And will what remains of Ukraine be fast-tracked into NATO after the war ends?
Let's go back to that.
Is Russia going to leave a rump state?
Our opinion.
They're going to take the whole thing, bisect the country on the Dnieper.
You know, okay, I'll go first.
I think that Russia has no choice in for a dime, in for a dozen.
I'll even contradict our glorious guest and say they want to get Odessa, they want to get Kiev, and they'll leave a rump state in Lviv as an example and to tempt those Eastern NATO countries to poach territory they lost after World War II.
Jack, what do you think?
I have no doubt that they want to take those things as the question is, can they?
And shout out to Patrick, good friend of mine.
All right.
I don't think they can do Odessa.
You have to cross the Dnieper River first, and then you have to cross another river.
It's not that far from Crimea.
Is it just geography?
They have tons of forces concentrated there.
Why do you say?
I mean, it is not that far from Crimea, but where's your landing logistics to supply an army to get over there, you know, especially if they mine it, right?
So there's Russia has a very few amount of landing ships in the Black Sea.
Another dispute.
And early in the war, people were kept talking about, oh, they're going to invade Odessa.
There's a landing ship going here.
Oh, it was spotted here.
There's a picture of it.
They don't really have the infrastructure to do like a marine landing and take a city.
How would you supply it?
It just doesn't work.
You have to do it by land.
And if you actually look at the land corridor to Odessa, it's like this tiny, like one mile gap, like over a river, then through a swamp.
So I don't think it's going to happen.
Sorry, what was the original question?
The rest of it.
Where do you think it ends?
Russia would take the whole enchilada if it could.
But yeah, what's more realistic?
Yeah.
Yes, he's going to be mad at me that I forgot his question now.
Well, I'm tabby guts here.
Go ahead.
It's fine.
I'll just buy him a drink this and I see.
Would the rump state of Ukraine, like, for example, if just off the top of my head, if they split the country at the Dnieper River or something, would the rump state probably be governed by Lvov or like Luzhitima or something?
I don't think so because I think it would still be locked in a frozen conflict, right?
I don't see Ukraine ever being like, well, we just give up now.
Right.
Even if they both signed a treaty, which by the way, they did, two of them in Minsk and one in two, and they kept shelling each other.
So, you know, I don't think it would be, I don't think they'd be crazy enough to put it into NATO.
Well, they might be stupid enough, but I think there's at least some European countries in NATO that would be like, oh, I got a problem with this.
Turkey might have a problem with that, for example.
Europe is showing far more signs of bubbling real nationalist activity, opposition to the invasion, of course, but also pushback on the foreign policy insanity and the essentially sat-trap status of so many of these countries vis-a-vis the United States.
Thank you, Patrick, for those questions.
Let's see.
Ted asks, why fundamentally does the West hate Russia?
I've never heard a concrete answer besides they are outside of Zog influence or influence.
I got an answer to that, but go ahead.
You take it first, Jack.
And that presupposes that the West does actually hate Russia, of course.
Yeah, certainly the people in power in the West do.
Let's put it that way.
Boomer hangover from the Cold War is one.
I actually, I remember when the war first started, I was getting my hair cut from this like Gen X slash boomer lady, this lovely Italian lady.
And she kept rambling on about how communist Russia was terrible.
And I'm like, you know, the Soviet Union kind of fell like 30 years ago.
But anyway, so a lot of them just don't know.
And they'll have that hangover from the Cold War.
A lot of the elites still in power were Cold War specialists.
Condolisa Rice was a good example of that.
She was a Soviet specialist.
Then you have our favorite tribe.
They just have an ethnic hatred.
Tribe called Quest?
Yes.
quest bar, uh, protein bar.
Uh, and then there's got that reference.
Yeah, I got that.
Of course.
What's the scenario, Rolo?
Here we go, yo.
Here we go, yo.
Sorry, I'll stop there.
Go ahead.
I could do more verses, actually, but I'll spare the audience.
So you get the ethnic hatred angle.
And then, of course, the Libtard angle is just the 2016 Russia Trump.
That put it off the scale, completely off the scale.
And then there was, I mean, you go back, and I realize I'm talking too much, but you go back to like 2002, whatever.
Putin was the new darling of the media.
He was supposed to be the dude that was going to be the savior of Russia.
He was the new Yeltsin.
He was going to open up Russia.
And then he was like, yeah, no dengue, no money for you.
No money for these oligarchs.
They have to play ball or else they get put in jail.
And that's what happens to Betozovsky, who eventually gets hung in the hotel room in London under suspicious circumstances.
Yeah, he was doing weird sex stuff like Harry Reid, you know, exercise ban gone wrong for Berezovsky.
It must have been.
Yeah.
You know, it's really sad when someone, you know, like asphyxiates like that and then throws himself off a bridge.
Yeah, speaking of a tribe called Quest, Shug Knight, yeah, same, same thing.
You hang out at Suge Knight's hotels.
You know, sometimes people just go flying over the balcony.
You mentioned, you know, Putin at one point being a Darling.
I'm not quite sure I remember him being a Darling, but I guarantee that the bloodthirsty powers that be in the West saw that sort of doe-eyed, impish, you know, suits that were too big for him.
You know, it looked like he maybe was a little bit overwhelmed by his sudden ascendance to the leadership of Russia.
And they were like, oh, man, we could totally roll this guy just like we did Yeltsin and Gorbachev, perhaps.
And yeah, absolutely took them by surprise.
I wanted to, you know, you mentioned the tribe there.
And there was a long time where I thought there's no way that the pogroms and like the Tsar could possibly still motivate these very, you know, intellectually competent, vicious world aspiring dominators.
Like that, that's got to be old news.
And more well-read and knowledgeable people than me said, uh-uh, uh-uh-uh, this, this, this goes back that they, they think in centuries, they harbor grudges forever.
Of course, going back to the time of Christ and even before that.
And I'll just say that I saw personally deliberate policymaking by Jews that was so extraordinarily contrary to American national interests.
Whatever you think about Russia, whatever you think about Israel or whatever, that it was so discordant that it was, I was thunderstruck that so many people of that tribe could be so atavistically, viciously hostile to Russia when a sober statesman, even if he hated Russia, would say, I think that we could probably play some sort of ball with them.
And there was a time when it looked like the United States might do that.
And then one thing happens and another thing happens.
And if Russia is not playing ball completely, then they eventually morph into the enemy.
And I 100% absolutely agree that Jewish antipathy, hostility toward Russia is central toward American policymaking that has driven them from a potential partner, maybe even an ally, if you really want to stretch it, into right now, the arms of China and borderline WW3 talk.
My two cents.
Moving on.
A couple more here, and then we can kick it and get the heck out of here because we have gone long.
Ron Paul's racist newsletters, another full house comment zone regular says, what percentage of Ukrainian shills on Telegram are ops or just dumb?
And I'll piggyback off that and say, you know, obviously there's dumb Ukrainians and op Ukrainians, but there's good and honest Ukrainians too, I assume.
Ukrainian war commentary.
I forgot about Ron Paul's racist newsletters.
This is one of the best names ever.
Holy 80s kids will remember.
So most of them are too stupid to be ops, frankly.
There's a lot of them.
A lot of them are just Americans.
And that's the weird thing about this is like, there's so many Americans that are like couldn't find Ukraine on a map two years ago.
Now they're like, you know, foaming at the mouth, like, oh, yes, Russian orcs kill the Russians.
It's weird.
There's a few.
But for the most part, there's not a whole lot of ones that are ops, I would say.
I know there was one that was a one was definitely an op.
There was one, the Caucasus account, the Caucasus War Report account, I think.
And then there was Visigrad is an op from the Polish government.
For sure.
Almost certainly Jewish too.
Yep.
Yes.
I think the founders move.
Radio Genova too.
Perhaps.
But I think it's certainly controlled and funded.
Then there's, oh, God.
You know, let me go back and dig because I have a list somewhere.
And I'll mind me.
First time for everything.
Go ahead, Roland.
How popular is Zelensky actually to the Ukrainians?
He's not unpopular.
It's more popular.
Yeah, well, he was funny enough, he was the peace candidate, you know, ironically.
Yeah.
Yep.
And that's a whole other thing.
Like Obama.
Yeah, there you go.
And, but he's not unpopular.
Who is more popular is the former general Zeluzhny.
And that's one of the reasons why Zeluzhny was dismissed because of the political threat.
Now he's the ambassador of the UK all of a sudden.
He's not, his government's not going to get thrown out tomorrow.
Like they're not super unpopular.
They have a, I think they have a more than a 50% approval rating.
And who knows what the polls are actually.
Well, that's why I asked, because if you look at Western media, no one has ever been as loved as Zelensky is by his people.
Like, you like, according to the Western media, Zelensky is more loved by Ukrainians than Reagan is to American boomers.
Yeah, no, he's definitely not that worshipped.
But he's, like I said, he's not unpopular.
They criticize him for a lot of things he's done, especially one of the big ones was mobilizing too late at the beginning of the war.
Corruption accusations, that sort of stuff.
But in terms of that, like the new mobilization law pitched a bunch of people off.
But at the same time, there's currently not mass protests.
There was a trucker protest recently, a couple of days ago.
But they're not going to throw him out of office anytime soon.
If that makes sense.
Yep.
And I wasn't being glib.
Obviously, he was a TV star before, but he really has, but he's harnessed the power of the media by doing essentially like a nightly news report from the president's office where he's, you know, he has been a good wartime actor.
Ah, you know, all that stuff from early in the war when they were like, he's not actually out in the streets in Kiev.
He's somewhere in Lviv.
Maybe, maybe not.
I'm not a green screen analyst.
But, you know, you got to give credit where it's due.
Whoever ginned up that line, whether it was him or one of his advisors, like, no, I don't need a plane ticket.
I need bullets.
That's the stuff that memories are made of.
And, you know, the proles lap up and like, oh, well, he's willing to fight.
Look at him and his fatigues.
He's done a very good media job in Ukraine and the West, at least so far as I could tell.
The flip side of that, and this comes from Justin Warren, how are Russian civilians reacting to the mass slaughter of their cousins in Ukraine?
And I got to tell you, Jack, we're like asking everything under the sun here.
I don't expect you to have an authoritative answer for everything, but Russian domestic opinion and disquiet about the conflict seems like whatever there might be has been pretty well tamped down or muted or not extensive.
With respect to how they feel about killing like Ukrainians, like they don't, I mean, they don't really view it as like so much of a brother war as we would.
They don't want to be doing it.
But at the same time, if you asked a random dude on the street, like, hey, what should we do about Ukraine?
He'd probably say, why are we not bombing them harder?
Right.
Like, get this over with because like, why is this taking so long?
We need to stop this war and get it over with, et cetera, et cetera.
There's probably, I haven't looked at this in a while, but last time I looked, it was like 20% was like sort of anti-war slash like mid middling anti-war, but the anti-war movement was more like, it wasn't like it wasn't like Iraq was here, right?
Yeah, it wasn't so much like that.
It's like, well, you know, maybe we just like shouldn't do this.
We should like just bomb them with a little, I'm trying to think of a word to use, bomb them a little bit more gently.
It was like, it's kind of what the anti-movement's been.
You know, limited objectives, let's negotiate kind of thing, but keep bombing them.
There's a very small like liberal aspect in Russian politics.
There has not been a coordinated anti-war movement.
I mean, despite what people say, like they can have opinions in Russia, and they do, especially if you go online and you look what they're saying, it's just, it's not a super popular thing to be anti-war in Russia.
But that, I think that will change.
And I don't know if we want to touch on like predictions for the future.
If we're going to do that, then I can talk about that when we're done to wrap up.
Yeah, I mean, hey, we're already, we went an hour 20 in the first half and we're at 40, 40 minutes here.
Yeah.
I feel bad.
I just keep talking.
No, do not, do not feel bad.
We are feasting at your buffet table, big guy, and we're really appreciative that you have not hogged the mic or gone on autistically whatsoever.
I appreciate your humility.
My, yeah, I guess I was going to go.
My last question for you, honestly, was going to be, what's your biggest surprise of this whole two and a quarter year enterprise?
What sticks out in your mind as the most surprising or most searing in your memory?
I guess for me, for me, it would be that Russia didn't go in big, hard, and more effectively.
And secondarily, that this thing has dragged on and that Europe and America have emptied so have dumped so much money and so many weapons in there.
And here we are still and like the Russian juggernaut is just starting to get going.
But that's mine.
Please wax poetic.
Biggest surprises or impressions from the past two and a quarter years.
Not even sure how to answer that one.
Are you do you view it tragically?
Yeah, we'll start there.
Like, are you sad about this whole thing?
Or do you see this as like a course of civilizational rise and decline?
Like this was always going to happen if Russia wasn't going to collapse.
Russia wasn't going to be part of the West.
It was either going to be smashed into a million oblasts or it was going to be resurgent and pushback on the West.
Whatever you want to talk about.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not happy that it happened.
I don't like to see them killing each other, but I said I feel like when I, you mentioned it earlier, there's that Russian soldier that crossed himself just before he hit by a drone.
Like you feel that right in the fields, right?
But the song that we played, watching the Russian soldier play that song with literally just incoming artillery flying out behind him.
But as you said, it was also a historical inevitability, right?
This was going to happen from the second the Soviet Union collapsed.
There was no way that this country was going to stay together.
Separatism in Crimea is not new.
It was attempted in the mid-90s and the Ukrainian army had to go into Crimea and depose the president.
Crimea man.
I missed that something.
No one, no one talks about that.
Literally uh, everyone seems to have to.
I mean, I was a kid at the time but I didn't know it was happening.
But no one seems to go back and talk about that.
You think you know that'd be an important point.
Organic resistance to Ukrainian rule?
Yep right, because I mean, like Sevastopol is like 90 Russian, like yep, Crimea is it frankly, is ethnically Russian.
It made total sense right, but at the same time, like it was inevitable that this was going to happen, there was talk of separatism in the first Maidan in uh.
Was that 2004, 2008?
I can't remember which year it was.
The Orange Revolution, the yes, that was 2004.
Yep 2004 yes, so there was it's.
It's been coming, it's been a train that probably could never have been stopped.
I know that because I wore a stupid orange scarf on the DC metro back at the time.
I don't know what I was doing.
I think I was probably protesting the Iraq war or something.
Yeah yeah, around that same same thing.
It's from there that we get this uh Color Revolution, uh term.
You know that the CIA fosters these fake revolutions around the world.
That's right.
Yushchenko with his pockmarked face because he got poisoned, and then Yulia Timoshenko and the NEW DAWN for Ukraine, and they were all corrupt, and I think Yulia Tymoshenko is actually Jewish, despite looking like a wheat field.
Yep yeah, I believe she was interim prime minister at one point yeah, and then arrested for corruption Ukraine, the most corrupt country in the world.
Yeah uh, I don't know.
It's a lot of things that I mean a lot of things surprise me.
Um yeah it's, it's.
It's so hard to pick what i'll pick to something that I remember very strongly.
I don't know why, but it was the, the withdrawal from Kersal.
Um, they blew up the bridge, the Antonovsky Bridge, and in the early in the morning there was uh, the last of the Russian soldiers were walking across what was left of the pontoon bridge in the early, like morning mist, and they were walking away, and I remember feeling like oh, my god, this war is about to change like severely, like it may not be tomorrow, it may not be six months from now, but this is now, it's a war, it's on, and I don't know why I felt that way.
Um, and I guess I was right.
Um, and it's, there's no end in sight, unfortunately.
Sad, but true.
Uh, I want to say, Jack that uh, I think you've, done a better job, and certainly a more thorough and generous job, than uh colonel Douglas Mcgregor would have done on the show.
Um sincerely, what about, what about, uh colonel Tom Parker?
Well, you just got to sublime guitars and peace and love through music and make money.
Thanks also for the audience.
A little background color.
At the break I said Maybe I asked or he volunteered it, you know, Rolo, did I?
How did I sound on the first half?
He said, you broke up your robot at about 12 or 15 times.
And I let out a huge expletive.
I was so sad and angry.
I was sangry.
And apparently my internet has held up with me tethered to the router here through a long yellow Ethernet cord.
But that's because I really, like, I care about this show.
Yes.
When I heard that my audio was so bad, that's disrespectful to the people who listened to us.
And I certainly didn't want to do it or have it happen on this one.
And of all people, it was Jack who said, you need to get adapter RJ42365.
I was like, I don't know what the hell that is, but I'll look it up.
And it's like 12 bucks on Amazon.
So I've been hardwired into my router here tonight.
And hopefully I have not robotted nearly as bad as before Rolo's trolling of me at the break, notwithstanding.
I'm tapped out on questions.
We've asked too much of Jack already.
Sam, Rollo, over to you guys.
We'll give Jack the last word.
And then I've got an obscure Russian rock song to go out to because I was listening to it all day.
I know the de-de-te and I like some hi-fi pop from the 90s, but I found a gem in the rocks.
Sam, go ahead.
I think Jack did a wonderful job and certainly enlightened me on a lot of things.
So I think we end it there.
And I don't think he was being fake, unbiased or objective either.
You know, he might have his private stuff, but he wasn't blowing smoke one way or the other.
Rolo got about a dozen games of Magic the Gathering in.
Plus, he may have opted out for some moonlight pickleball.
We're not on the street.
Rolo, thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you for writing this and for giving me a good heart attack at the break.
Well, I thought your heart was just doing too good today.
So, you know, it's good to shock the system.
Oh, no.
I've been looking at my Apple Watch stats and the weight is going down.
My steps are going up in accordance with daylight and physical activity and trying to get Beach Body ready.
So vanity has its assets when it comes to trying to get healthy as well.
But thank you, Rolo, sincerely.
Wouldn't happen without you.
And that leads us, of course, to the champion of this show, one of our best, one of our longest.
And frankly, like, I don't know, a gem in the rocks or a hidden gem, criminally underfollowed Telegram channel.
And couldn't have asked for more from you, Jack.
Thank you most sincerely.
Oh, thank you for having me on.
I was surprised that people wanted to talk about Ukraine.
It's kind of like page 27 these days.
Well, I'll give credit to our buddy who kicked my tires and said, you know, I love those shows you did back in the day.
And it's true, you know, you get fatigue over this stuff, right?
Like, oh, it's dragging.
It's dragging.
It's not the hot thing anymore.
Palestine, Gaza, et cetera.
I maintain that Russia, Ukraine, and the West is by far the most important happening in the world right now, Israel, Gaza.
Maybe we'll do another one on that with our pal, Patrick Martin, sometime soon.
So audience, thank you.
Hope you enjoyed it.
If you didn't, screw you.
This has been Full House episode 187.
You know where to find us.
Email us, fullhouse show at protonmail.com if you don't want to get lost in the telegram shuffle.
You know we're on Telegram and we're on Gab.
And do hit us up at gibsendgo.com slash fullhouse.
And I think we can probably hold off on the Hail Mary Starlink fundraiser as long as this little adapter and yellow cord, yellow Ethernet cord hold up and shows going forward because I think it worked pretty well.
So I was cruising around today listening to all my Dede T, which is an excellent, if liberal 80s, 90s Russian rock band.
They're sort of like the Russian rock band, so far as I know.
I loved a group called Hi-Fi, which did some wonderful pop in the late 90s.
I was listening to them in Kiev as an exchange student, and I still listen to it today.
But there's this group called Akvarium Aquarium, of course, that is one of those 80s, 90s, you could call it Russian boomer rock, regardless.
And I heard, and it just came on randomly and it instantly hit me.
It's not sophisticated.
You might cringe a little bit at old school Russian rock, but Sam actually came to mind.
I said, you know what?
I bet you Sam would respect this one.
And it's called Rocky Roll Mjotorv.
Rock and Roll is Dead.
And, you know, dramatic Russian boomers declaring the end of rock and roll as they play rock and roll.
Anyway, I hope that you like it.
It's from Radio Africa is the name of the album.
And I got nothing else to say.
So yeah, I, hey, here's the deal.
I hope that nobody else loses their life in Ukraine or in Russia over this whole thing, but I can wish in one hand and do something else in the other.
At this point, it's got to end conclusively one way or the other, in my opinion.
And we'll see how it plays out.
Thanks again, Jack.
Check out Ukraine war analysis on Telegram.
Anything else you want to plug, or is that your main hobby, horse?
That's pretty much it.
I try to do like a weekly summary.
How do you say that word?
See, Russian is so hard.
Well, what are you trying to say in English?
God, I'm so tired.
Don't worry about it.
I probably shouldn't.
There you go.
Nate Toppulitz.
Never always doesn't always turn out that way.
I'm trying to do like a weekly summary because no one really wants so much spurgery.
Hot a show.
Well, whatever you got, big guy, we're appreciated of it.