Ukraine's Counteroffensive Is Officially a Failure—It’s Time to Reevaluate. Trump Indictments Boost Already-Significant Primary Lead. Covering the Republican Debate LIVE From Milwaukee | SYSTEM UPDATE #134
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, there's no question that the war in Ukraine has radically changed.
Even Western media outlets that have been steadfastly cheering for this war Indeed, even Ukrainians themselves are now starting to admit what battlefield realities dispositively prove.
The much vaunted Ukrainian counteroffensive, the imminent dramatic event we were assured for months would be transformative in finally giving Ukraine the upper hand and dislodging entrenched Russian positions inside Ukraine.
Our claim that doubled as a propaganda tool to assuage a growingly restless western population about their endless support for this war is now, no matter how you slice it, a failure.
After months of multi-pronged attacks, Ukraine's gains are so minimal and trivial as to be barely worth noting.
Russia continues to occupy a very significant chunk of both eastern and southern Ukraine, along with Crimea, which they have held since 2014.
Even Western intelligence reports acknowledge that the Russians' defensive positions are more fortified and entrenched than any seen in any conflict in decades.
The U.S.
has already depleted its own stockpiles of artillery and other vital weapons and simply do not have to give to Ukraine what they need to have any hope of changing the situation in anything resembling the near or even the midterm future.
What makes all of this vastly worse is that the cost to Ukrainians and lives are staggeringly high.
Consider just this one harrowing data point.
More Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in the first 18 months of this war than the number of American soldiers killed during the decade-plus war in Vietnam.
The Ukrainian men who were eager to fight and who have volunteered to do so from the start have long ago been used up, killed, maimed, or exhausted.
Zelensky's only option for continuing combat is to increase domestic oppression, impose greater and greater punishment for desertion, and use harsher and harsher means to force those unwilling to fight to do so against their will.
In so many ways, this conflict resembles some of the worst horrors of World War I, including the need to put unwilling men who do not want to fight into the deeply grim choice of either offering themselves up as cannon fodder or face unimaginably harsh punishments by a government completely unconstrained by basic considerations of human rights or legal process and operating under full-scale martial law.
At this point, debates over who is to blame for this war barely matter.
All that does matter is the question of how this will end, and who will end it.
It is simply becoming unsustainable, politically, economically, and morally, to justify having Western nations pour their resources into fueling and continuing this war that Ukraine has less and less chance of winning.
At the start of the war, many who claimed that the real goal of the U.S.
was not to save Ukraine and Ukrainians, but rather to destroy them, at the altar of their geostrategic goal of weakening Russia, were accused of being callous and conspiratorial.
Now, there is little reasonable space to contest if they were right all along.
Joe Biden just asked for another $25 billion to keep this war going.
As he offered $700 checks to the victims of the Maui fire, and his profits for the European arms industry reached such record heights that they do not even bother to conceal their glee.
Even if you were someone who supported the U.S. role in Ukraine back in February of 2022 with the best of intentions, namely you wanted to help a country seeking to avoid Russian domination, the failed nature of this mission has to compel a re-evaluation of perspective and policy.
The last thing this war is doing is protecting Ukraine and Ukrainians.
It is destroying both of those while imposing suffering among everyone in the U.S.
and Western countries other than a tiny sliver of arms dealers and intelligence agencies.
In other words, the war in Ukraine is following exactly the same pattern of almost every other U.S.
war fought over the last 50 years.
Then, polling data now leaves no doubt that every time Donald Trump is freshly indicted, his polling lead among Republican voters both increases and solidifies.
We'll examine exactly why this is.
Why it is that a presidential candidate being indicted by the Justice Department and district's attorney around the country is actually helping his standing with Republican voters.
And then finally, This week we will be in Milwaukee to cover the Trump-free GOP presidential debate live.
We will have coverage both before and after the debate starts on Wednesday night, as well as, we hope, interviews with the candidates and others who are there.
Our primary reason for going is that while Fox is hosting the debate and has exclusive rights to broadcast it on TV, This is the first time that Rumble has received the exclusive rights to broadcast and stream a presidential debate live online.
We regard this as a watershed moment for both independent journalism and a free internet.
This was a rejection by the Republican Party of big tech platforms.
Motivated in part by the fact that Republican voters dislike and distrust Big Tech, but still something that could only have happened if independent media in general, and Rumble in particular, were growing with enough speed and developing enough of a reach to a mass audience that the Republican Party could afford to give Rumble exclusive online streaming rights.
And yet, that's exactly what is happening.
And we will spend a little time before heading to the airport tonight to fly to Milwaukee discussing the significance of this moment.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
You wouldn't necessarily know it from media coverage, which has really lost a lot of interest in this conflict.
But the war in Ukraine is far and away the number one priority of the U.S. revolution.
foreign policy community, of the CIA, and of NATO.
Winning in Ukraine has become something on which the United States and its European allies have staked a great deal, a great deal of credibility.
They have invested enormous amount of weaponry and enormous amount of their citizens' resources.
Over the last several months, there has been a growing amount of concern and distrust in the ability of Ukraine to win this war.
There has been a growing sense in Western populations that they were somewhat misled and deceived about the likelihood that Ukraine that Ukraine can win this war.
They were told that oftentimes the Russian military was on the verge of collapse.
And as populations started to turn against the war and against the commitment of endless amounts of resources, which are really starting to affect negatively the quality of life of people in the United States and multiple other European countries, a propagandistic campaign was launched a propagandistic campaign was launched to convince everybody that change was on the way, that victory was around the corner in the form of a vaunted counteroffensive.
Which we were told would involve the Ukrainians gathering a great deal of sophisticated Western weaponry, being trained in that, and then being able to use it to break through the entrenched front line, again, of Russia, which is very formidable.
If you look at a map, it covers hundreds of miles in eastern Ukraine into southern Ukraine, and we were told that the key To Ukrainian victories to break through those front lines, sever Crimea from the rest of the supply line, and then finally be able to expel Russia from the 20-25% of Ukrainian territory that they are now not just occupying, but occupying in a very fortified and in a defensive way.
And for months we were hearing this counter offensive was coming.
It was the thing on which we should rely in order to be assured that the dynamic of the word was about to be transformed.
And yet very quickly, Western media outlets felt compelled to tone down expectations because as soon as the counteroffensive began, it was very obvious that it was going to be anything but an easy success.
Within the first week, there was an enormous amount of military equipment provided by Western governments, particularly tanks that at one point we were told was going to change the dynamic of the war.
An enormous number of them that were just sitting in the battlefield open and destroyed.
German tanks and American tanks alike.
And over the last several months, there have been so few advances, So little territory retaken by the Ukrainian military that the Western media is resorting to celebrating whenever they take tiny little villages, even ones composed of literally six or seven or ten houses or three or four blocks.
That's how much of a slog it is.
And all along, the number of Ukrainian soldiers who are being killed as the Ukrainians try and probe where the vulnerabilities are in the Russian defensive lines is starting to skyrocket to extremely disturbing numbers.
And remember, one of the main disadvantages Ukraine has had from the very beginning is simply a matter of
Available people to fight Russia is a much bigger country in terms of population therefore it has many more men of Fighting age than Ukraine that is an enormous advantage in a war of attrition of this type on top of which the Ukrainians have experienced an artillery shortage from the very beginning that the United States is not able to fill because for all kinds of complicated reasons that I think ought to disturb us and
We spend almost a trillion dollars a year on our military, more than the next 8 or 10 or 12 or 15 countries combined, and yet apparently we don't have enough artillery to supply the Ukrainians in a way that the Russians are able to supply themselves, and that has been outcome determinative in this war so far.
So we are now at the point where even the biggest boosters of the U.S.
role in the war in Ukraine, Western corporate media outlet, U.S.
intelligence officials, and increasingly even the Ukrainians themselves, are now starting to acknowledge that the counter-offensive, if not yet a failure, An irretrievable failure is most definitely something that has failed to meet every expectation by a significant margin.
So just to give you a taste for how extreme are these concessions, here is the Washington Post, which needless to say has been a cheerleader of this war from the start on August 17th.
The headline is, U.S.
intelligence says Ukraine will fail to meet offensive's key goals.
Not some of the goals, but the key goals.
Quote, Ukraine launched the counter-offensive in early June, hoping to replicate its stunning success in last fall's push through the Kharkiv region.
But in the first week of fighting, Ukraine incurred major casualties against Russia's well-prepared defenses, despite having a range of newly acquired Western equipment, including U.S.
Joint war games conducted by the U.S., British, and Ukrainian militaries anticipated such losses, but envisioned Kiev accepting the casualties as the cost of piercing through Russia's main defensive lines, said U.S.
and Western officials.
This is a very grim assessment.
Not even mincing words, just right from the beginning, saying this counteroffensive is failing by every key metric.
The New York Times on August 18th gave a sense for how significant the carnage on both sides of the war is now starting to be, how these deaths and casualties are starting to mount in ways that are almost definitely undercounted and yet still horrific.
There you see the headline.
Troop deaths and injuries in Ukraine war near 500,000 people, US officials say.
Quote, the total number of Ukrainian and Russian troops killed or wounded since the war in Ukraine began 18 months ago is nearing 500,000.
U.S.
officials said a staggering toll as Russia assaults its next-door neighbor and tries to seize more territory.
In the first two weeks of the counteroffensive, as much as 20 percent of the weaponry Ukraine sent to the battlefield was damaged or destroyed, according to U.S.
and European officials.
The losses included some of the most formidable Western fighting machines, tanks, and armored personnel carriers that the Ukrainians were counting on to beat back the Russians.
American officials are worried that Ukraine's adjustments will race through precious ammunition supplies which could benefit President Vladimir Putin of Russia and disadvantage Ukraine in a war of attrition.
But Ukrainian commanders decided to pivot reduced casualties and preserve their frontlines fighting force.
Now here is a part of the media account that I find absolutely extraordinary.
So in that paragraph, the New York Times just got done saying that one of the reasons why Ukraine has adjusted its strategy that the United States was hoping it would pursue to break through Russian entrenched defensive positions is because their casualty count has been so shockingly high that they're running out of people to fight.
And just morally, they're watching thousands and thousands and thousands of Ukrainian troops being killed every week as part of this counter-offensive.
The Russians have mined this territory to such an extent that military analysts say they haven't seen this kind of defensive mining since at least several decades ago.
And so just in order to have any chance to even probe the entrenched Russian positions ensures that huge numbers of Ukrainian troops will die.
And this is one of the reasons why Ukrainian men are starting to desperately try and avoid being sent to the front lines or fighting at all, at all, why they're trying to bribe Ukrainian officials to get out of Ukraine or risking their life to do so because they know that enlisting or fighting means being used as cannon fodder.
When you purposely send troops into a certain combat position knowing that they're likely to die, but needing them to do that in order to just test where some vulnerabilities might be.
So you just offer them up and see which ones get killed and how and where.
You send them kind of in defenseless or against mines.
And the Ukrainian government is starting to kind of recoil at this and say, we don't want to keep pursuing a strategy where such a huge percentage of our population is being slaughtered with not much difficulty.
Remember, this is supposed to be a war to protect Ukraine, to protect Ukrainians.
And it's very difficult to maintain that's the purpose of the war when the strategy the Americans are insisting that they use is one that automatically ensure that huge number of Ukrainians are being killed seemingly for little purpose.
And here's a line that I want you to really focus on in terms of what its meaning is.
It kind of is expressed in a kind of cold New York Times-ese jargon, but if you really think about what it means and the amorality of it and what it really reveals about the American view of this war, I think it should disturb any decent person regardless of your view of what your view of this war has been.
Quote, American officials say they fear that Ukraine has become casualty averse.
One reason it has been cautious about pressing ahead with the counter offensive.
So they see that the Ukrainian government doesn't want their people, including people who don't want to be fighting, to be slaughtered in large numbers.
And now the Americans are upset about this.
They're worried about this.
They're calling that casualty-averse, which, if you strip down the euphemism, means the Ukrainian government is trying to prevent even more of its citizens, who have already been killed in the hundreds of thousands, from dying in a war effort they're starting increasingly to believe is futile.
And the Americans are upset about this.
They want more and more Waves of Ukrainian troops being sent to those front lines and dying to try and test the Russian defenses.
So you have Americans saying outright they fear that Ukraine has become casualty averse.
What kind of world government is not averse to casualties?
The New York Times goes on, quote, almost any big push against stuggling Russian defenders protected by minefields would result in huge numbers of losses.
And that's the point.
The Russians have had months.
If you look at a map, which we're about to show you, the front line has really remained unchanged for months.
They occupy, the Russians do, large swaths of eastern Ukraine.
The region of Ukraine they vowed they wanted to protect because that's where a lot of ethnic speaking Russians are, who they felt were being increasingly mistreated.
That, of course, is where there has been fighting for eight years.
This war did not start in February of 2022.
It started in 2014.
When the US helped Western Europeans remove the democratically elected president before his term was up, and Victoria Nuland picked the next government, and the people in eastern Ukraine decided they didn't want to be subject to an illegitimate government in Kiev, and they started waging a war for autonomy or for separatism that the Russians had been backing,
And they were essentially fighting against the Azov battalion and other extremist nationalists, or as the media has long called them, neo-Nazi battalions.
And that was Putin's argument for invading Ukraine was we need once and for all to create a buffer between our country and these neo-Nazi militias that are assaulting and degrading and mistreating Russian-speaking ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.
So the Russians have achieved a big part of their goal of occupying and now, according to them, permanently annexing these parts of eastern Ukraine, these provinces, as well as fortifying their control over Crimea.
And the whole time that this has been going on, they have been circulating and surrounding themselves with minefields filled with a number of mines unseen in a long time that make it almost impossible for the Ukrainians to breach it unless they're willing to sacrifice huge numbers of young men that don't want to fight and that they don't really have to sacrifice any longer.
In fact, The Economist on August 10th, so just about a week ago, published a really horrifying and disturbing article about how there are now so many Ukrainian soldiers being dying That are dying, that they're needing to dig up mass graves from World War II in order to make room to bury their new dead.
There you see the Economist headline, to bury its dead, Ukraine is having to dig up victims of past wars.
In Exhuming the Bodies, the country also brings its past to the surface.
Quote, so many people have been killed in the war that in Lviv, in western Ukraine, the latest victims are displacing the dead from war's past.
On August 4th, Vitaly Chekhovsky's family looked on sadly as he was buried with two comrades in a military section of the city's historic Ligachivka...
Uh, Lychakiv Cemetery.
The sandy earth where they buried him was soft and loose, until only weeks ago, his grave had been the resting place of someone else.
The numbers of war dead are a secret in Ukraine, but it is possible to get an impression of the scale by visiting the rapidly expanding military cemeteries that feature in every town and city.
At the Lichev Ceremony, says Alexander Dmitriev, its director, Mr. Tchaikovsky was the 507th to be buried since the invasion began on February 24, 2022.
At first, the dead were buried in another part of the cemetery, but space quickly ran out, so the cemetery turned instead to a grassy slope where a war memorial had been built in the 1970s, while Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union.
As the rows of graves marched up the hill, the grave diggers unexpectedly found skeletons.
Does this sound like a war to you that is protecting Ukraine and Ukrainians?
Or does it sound like a war in which the West and the United States are using Ukraine as a proxy to weaken their adversaries in Russia without having to have any of their people die on their own, but using Ukrainians as the cannon fodder to keep the Russians trapped in Ukraine and weakening the Ukrainians?
Again, that was something that people in the beginning of the war were reporting was the real goal, the real vision of Western policymakers.
Neil Ferguson had several articles in Bloomberg that we reported on at the time where he was speaking to British and American intelligence officials who were telling him That the propaganda that was being fed to the West, that we were going to protect Ukrainian democracy, had nothing to do with the real intended goal, which was to sacrifice Ukraine at the altar of trying to undermine the Russians.
And increasingly, whether intended or not, that is the reality of this war.
That is the reality.
There's no getting around that.
Along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, The Economist, also a big cheerleader for this award, is starting to acknowledge with growing explicitness how failed the counteroffensive is here from August 20th.
The headline, Ukraine's sluggish counteroffensive is souring the public mood.
Now, this is an article about not how the United States or Western intelligence agencies are perceiving the failure of the counteroffensive, but how even Ukrainians are now starting to acknowledge that this counteroffensive seems not to be working, that the goal of expelling the Russians is increasingly futile,
And as a result, morale is starting to seriously erode in Ukraine, and even what was previously once unthinkable, namely asking the Russians for diplomatic negotiations as a way of resolving the war, is starting to become something more and more people are starting to consider.
The disappointing pace of Ukraine's counter-offensive has been the focus of international headlines for weeks.
For Anastasia Zemula, the consequences have been more tangible.
Mr. Zemula is a co-founder of Civit Blossom, an all-woman volunteer organization that supports Ukrainian units on the front line.
Her crowdfunding appeals have struggled, as hopes of a quick breakthrough have dwindled.
Now she says her attention is devoted to counseling exhausted troops whenever she sees them.
Quote, the idea of a counteroffensive is bliss when you talk about it from an armchair, she says.
That's how people in the West are talking about the counteroffensive from an armchair or from newsrooms or from green rooms.
Quote, it's much harder when you understand that it means darkness, death and despair.
The public mood is somber.
Criticism of Vladimir Zelensky, the president, has increased.
And the reasons for the dissatisfaction are clear.
Having once promised a march to Crimea, occupied and annexed by Russia since 2014, the political leadership in Kiev now emphasizes more realistic expectations.
Lack of air cover is another difficulty.
The source adds that Ukraine's army was never blind to the challenges of breaching Russia's minefields and the defense lines without air superiority.
On August 20th, the Dutch and Danish prime ministers said they would donate up to 61 of the jets starting in the new year.
For that reason, the military leadership delayed the counteroffensive as long as it could after a disastrous start in early June.
When two Western-trained brigades lost an uncomfortable number of men and equipment in minefields, the initial plans were adjusted.
Ukraine has since prioritized preserving its army.
Quote, we no longer plan operations that presuppose large losses, said the source.
The emphasis is now on degrading the enemy, artillery, drones, electronic warfare, and so on.
That, by the way, that adjustment to military strategy, the refusal to continue to sacrifice huge numbers of Ukrainian troops for no apparent benefit, is what prompted the United States to say that they were concerned that Ukraine has become, quote, casualty averse, meaning a desire not to watch more and more of their fellow citizens be slaughtered in a meat grinder that achieves nothing.
Quote, in recent days, Ukraine's armed forces have made important advance in the crucial southern theater and may have reached enough minefields to reach the first of those three lines of Russian fortifications in several locations.
They have also degraded Russia's operational reserves and logistics.
That's about as optimistic of an account as you'll find.
Quote, still two and a half months in, Ukraine remains a long way off its strategic goal of nearing the Azov Sea and thus cutting Russia's seized land corridor to Crimea before the rains of late October when mud will make much harder going.
The grim mood is spilling over into Ukraine's politics, which have been on hold for much of the war.
Rumors have circulated all summer that Mr. Zelensky's office may call early parliamentary and presidential elections.
The logic is that it is better for him to seek re-election while still a national hero, rather than after being forced into peace talks that might require an unpopular ceasefire or major territorial concessions.
When is the last time that you heard in the Western press any talk like this?
Of the possibility, not just of a ceasefire, but of the need for Ukraine to make major territorial concessions.
I haven't heard that since the beginning of the war, where there was nothing but maximalist vows that Ukraine will never, ever concede an inch of Ukrainian territory as a way of ending this war.
And now the realities are starting to set in of the fact that Ukraine is fighting a much bigger and more powerful neighbor.
Which has been what the realists school of thought led by people like John Mearsheimer and Stephen Wald and others have been emphasizing.
That it may not be pleasant, it may not be morally exciting or inspiring, but the reality is that the world is run by and always has been what they call great powers.
The fact that there are certain great powers who are so big and powerful that they can Exert all kinds of military, superior military force over their neighbors.
And Ukraine is a country situated to a great power and cannot compete with it in terms of military strength or population size, no matter how much Western aid flows into that country.
And as usual, the realists are turning out to be prescient because they don't indulge in propagandistic fairy tales that are feel-good in nature.
Quote, in the absence of a military breakthrough, peace negotiations with Russia would be an even harder sell.
True, there have been some signs of a shift in mood in unexpected quarters.
In early August, a Ukrainian sniper fighting northwest of Bakhmut made waves by dismissing the prospect of Ukraine ever regaining its full territory.
He suggested that many soldiers would now welcome a ceasefire, a notion that would have been once unthinkable.
Many of Ukraine's young are, of course, already bearing the burden of a war that has no one in sight.
For young men, in constant danger of being served conscription papers and sent to the front, the pressure is particularly intense.
Those keen to fight volunteered long ago.
Ukraine is now recruiting mostly among its unwilling.
Quote, it makes the air so thick that you can actually feel it, says Ms.
Zamula.
Everyone knows that the cost of regained territory is dead soldiers.
Even hoping for success in the counter-offensive has become an act of self-destruction.
Here is something that is incredibly grim when you think about it, which is that for a long time we were told that it was the Ukrainians who wanted to fight to the end and that our only Obligation was to support them and give them everything they needed.
And as it started to turn out, and it's been clear for quite some time, there's been a lot more resistance to fighting in Ukraine than the Western media has been willing to acknowledge.
Every few months, and we've been reporting on this, Zelensky has had to significantly harshen and intensify the punishments for desertion.
And to fortify the military force that prevents people from leaving the country because more and more Ukrainian men are trying to flee rather than fight.
Because they don't want to fight because they perceive the reality of this war.
And the demands that the Ukrainians fight until the end have been coming not from Ukraine, but from the United States and from the West.
For their own reasons having very little to do with the welfare of the Ukrainian people.
Now what makes this even more nauseating is the propaganda to which Americans were subjected to deceive them yet again into believing that victory was around the corner at exactly the time that they started to question whether or not this endless investment of their resources was justified or was doing any good as we've talked about before.
Right when the American public started turning against the war in Iraq in the third, fourth, and fifth year after they were promised by neocons in the Bush administration that this war would be a matter of weeks or months at most and not years.
We showed you the debate in 2003 on C-SPAN between Bill Kristol and Daniel Ellsberg, where Ellsberg warned this could be another Vietnam, the war in Iraq.
And Bill Kristol said, I can assure you George Bush has no intention of fighting this war like the war in Ukraine.
And Ellsberg said, maybe George Bush doesn't, but Saddam Hussein and the Iraqis might have a very different intention.
And of course, it was the insurgency that kept that war going for so long.
Now, at the time when American public opinion started turning against the war, we were presented with this brand new strategy we were told would transform the war finally and let the Americans win.
It was called the Surge.
It was primarily sponsored by Victoria Nuland's family, by her husband Fred Kagan.
Who would write about it positively and encouragingly in the Washington Post without disclosing that it was his brother, Fred Kagan, and Fred Kagan's wife, Kimberly Kagan, so Victoria Nuland's brother-in-law and sister-in-law, who were the primary architects of that surge.
And it got Congress on board to say, oh, let's give David Petraeus, this brilliant Princeton-educated general, a specialist in counterinsurgency, the ability to test his theories of counterinsurgency to turn the war around.
And of course, it didn't work.
And now they started copying that same branding propaganda campaign but not with the surge but with a counterinsurgency from the same exact people.
Here in the Washington Post there was an opinion by Max Boot who performed the same role during the Iraq War.
Obviously it didn't cost him any Reputational damage or career impediment.
He's still a columnist writing about war in the Washington Post even though he's cheered every futile and disastrous American war of the last 20 years.
And in June, just several months ago, Here he is saying, in the Washington Post, the Ukrainian offensive is beginning.
David Petraeus is optimistic, and it's an entire column trying to convince Americans to put their faith in the counteroffensive, that it was going to completely transform this war for the better.
And these liars and propagandists, as usual, turned out to be full of deceit, on purpose.
The same exact people, over and over, who do that.
It is amazing that if you turn on any of the network news stations in the United States and hear people talking about war, invariably, invariably, these are the same people who sold the war in Iraq, who sold the war in Syria, who sold the war in Libya, who kept assuring us we were winning the war in Afghanistan,
It's almost a prerequisite to get on TV and talk about the new war in Ukraine to be able to prove that you've been cheering these wars forever.
And of course, the same outcome continues to emerge because the same people doing it with the same deceitful motives.
Now, not everybody is suffering from this war.
I think it's extremely important to point out that there are some people thriving from it.
There are some real winners.
Now, before we show you one of them, I just want to show you this map from The Economist of this year.
Here you can see the current state of the front line.
Here is the territory in eastern and southern Ukraine, there you see it in orange, that has been occupied by the Russians since September of 2022.
So they have now been digging in for 10 or 11 months into all of these regions here.
This is all the Donbass, the regions of eastern Ukraine into southern Ukraine, and then connecting it into Crimea.
And this is a look at how wide and long that front line is, that defensive position.
And look at oh, Big of a chunk of Ukrainian territory it is.
Here, of course, is Russia.
So you see the buffer that they are trying to provide and actually are providing between them and NATO, which is all here in Western Ukraine, trying to expand into and up to the Russian border, which is what this war in so many ways has been about.
Is the Russians fearing that right on the other side of their border, their most sensitive border, would be a Western-controlled government in Kiev that would have free reign up to the part of the Russian border that was twice invaded in the 20th century, resulting in the deaths of many tens of millions of Russians.
And this was what Bill Burns, the current CIA director in 2008, When Victoria Nuland was the ambassador to NATO, when the Bush administration began promising Ukraine expansion into NATO, he was trying to warn that doing this, expanding Ukraine up to the Ukrainian border, would not just be a red line for Putin and his allies, but for everybody in Russia, including anti-Putin liberals.
That there is nobody in Russia who regarded this as acceptable.
In fact, it was such a red line, said Bill Burns back in 2008, when trying to warn Condoleezza Rice of the idiocy of this plan, that it would almost guarantee war in eastern Ukraine and in the Crimea.
It would force the Russians to take action to create exactly this buffer that they've now created.
And they've had nine months, ten months, to, while we were hearing they were on the verge of collapse, They have been manufacturing their own artillery in a way far superior to the West, including the United States.
They've been using Uranian drones that Western military analysts were laughing at at the beginning for being so primitive, and yet they've been crucial on the battlefield.
And even if the F-16s finally arrive, and they take months and months to train Ukrainian soldiers on, And there's all kinds of delays in getting these F-16s to Ukraine.
It really won't change much.
For so many reasons, that won't allow them to break through these front lines.
At least not for years to come.
And so we're talking about, in the process, spending hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of billions of dollars more.
And for what?
How does the governance of these regions in orange affect the lives of American citizens in any way?
It was President Obama and then President Trump who said it doesn't.
That this region is not worth going to war with Russia over.
And yet that's exactly what the Biden administration has done.
Now, as I said, there are people who are benefiting from this, and we ought to tip our hats to them and acknowledge it.
The Economist in August of, on August 17th, war in Ukraine has triggered a boon in Europe's defense industry.
Look at how many benefits this is producing for them.
Quote, Last year, military budgets worldwide rose by 3.7% to $2.2 trillion.
In Europe, they increased by 13% faster than in any other region.
Growth was particularly pronounced in countries nearest to Russia.
Finland's military budget rose by 36%, Lithuania's by 27%, Sweden's by 12%, and Poland's by 11%.
Germany, the continent's largest economy, is at last reversing its decades-long miserliness over military spending.
In February last year, the government pledged to increase the country's defense expenditure from around 1.4% of GDP to 2.2% and announced a $100 billion special fund for the arms forces.
This is translating into big business for European defense contractors who have secured a flurry of new contracts for military wear in recent months.
In April, the British arm of MBDA, a pan-European maker of missiles, signed a $1.9 billion or $2.4 billion contract to supply air defense systems to Poland.
In June, Safran, a French arms maker, sold several tactical drones to the Greek Army.
In July, BAE Systems, a British defense firm, struck a deal to replenish the British Army's stock of artillery shells.
That same month, Rian Mustall, who won a contract for munitions from the German government, worked up to 4 billion euros in a 1.9 billion euro contract to supply the Germans and Dutch with more than 3,000 airborne vehicles.
This will be our best year for orders ever, rejoices Rian Mishtal's Mr. Papager.
Now, unless you think it's an immense coincidence that every time there's a new war the arms industry benefits, then clearly this is a factor.
And even if it is a coincidence, The fact that there always is a sliver of the population that wields great power in Western and American capitals is clearly a factor in why this work continues to be sold and supported and pushed.
And you can just see it.
There's no way to hide it.
So this war to protect Ukrainians and to protect Ukraine has resulted in the complete destruction of Ukraine, while firms like BlackRock and J.P.
Morgan circle like vultures waiting for the reconstruction that will amend down to great profit for them, while Ukrainians, the people we were told we were protecting, are dying in such massive numbers that already in 18 months more of them have died than in the entire Vietnam War in terms of the death count for American soldiers.
Who this war is helping and who this war is destroying could not be any more transparent at this point.
And one of the tragedies of it, it would be one thing if American officials and Western officials had tried very hard from the start of the war to avert the war through diplomatic efforts and didn't succeed because one or both sides was being unreasonable or just refusing to negotiate.
The opposite was true.
There were many opportunities diplomatically to avert this war, to save all these lives.
In a way that had so many obvious options to take the people of Eastern Ukraine who have been fighting for eight years in a civil war for independence and give them a referendum supervised by the UN where people agreed it was a fair and free election and allow them to determine their own fate using the model that the United States and NATO insisted upon for Kosovo, which to this very day has independent status in many
In the eyes of many countries because they voted to be independent of Serbia and the United States supported that independence on the grounds of Kosovo autonomy.
And it was Putin who warned at the time that that would be a very destabilizing presence because there are many provinces throughout Europe that are jammed into countries to which they feel no fealty.
But he was ignored and that was the precedent.
So that's one possibility.
Or to allow Russians, speaking ethnic Russians, who do not want to be part of a Western controlled government in Kiev, to be part of Moscow instead, the way the people of Crimea clearly chose to.
Even if the referendum was invalid because of the presence of Russian military on their soil, nobody doubts That the majority of people who live in Crimea, if not the vast majority, have a deep, historic, multi-generational tie to Moscow and prefer to be part of Russia than Zelensky's rule in Kiev.
And determining what the people of eastern Ukraine want is one way to resolve the conflict without handing Russia parts of eastern Ukraine as though a One, a war of conquest, but also not forcing them to be part of a central government in Kiev to which they feel no allegiance.
And there were so many opportunities to try and diplomatically resolve the war that way, and we know for a fact the Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, for example, said that his efforts to forge a diplomatic resolution were aggressively squashed by the U.S.
and by the U.K., especially by Boris Johnson.
Here in Politico in this week, there's a headline, General Milley had a point.
General Milley last year argued that the Ukrainians were at the peak of their leverage and that that was the time to try and negotiate.
Quote, in November, the Joint Chiefs Chair said Ukraine's strong military position and upcoming winter season combined to make a good time to consider peace talks.
Plus, operations to expel Russian forces out of the whole of Ukraine, which Vladimir Zelensky demands, had a slim chance of success.
Administration officials immediately scrambled to assure their counterparts in Kiev that Milley was just riffing and not reflecting a secret sentiment in the White House.
One U.S. official, who didn't want to run afoul of the administration by offering real views on the record, said the realities of the counteroffensive were sinking in around Washington.
Ukraine's tactics to preserve troops and equipment, Russia's dug-in positions, and the fight on multiple fronts have led to slow advances, shifting a possible breakthrough further into the future.
While the U.S.
still backs Ukraine's fight, the official said, quote, we may have missed a window to push for earlier talks.
The official also stressed, however, that few believe that Moscow has been at all serious about negotiations since the war's start.
And no senior leader felt then or feels now that the counteroffensive was a mistaken play, considering how Ukraine maintains full support from the West and has had remarkable success throughout the war.
Still, the official declared, quote, Millie at a point.
Another U.S.
official said the administration is increasingly asking itself this question, quote, if we acknowledge we're not going to do this forever, Then what are we going to do?
What is the answer to that?
What are we going to do?
Does anyone have any idea from an American or Western perspective how this war can end?
Do you actually think the Ukrainians are suddenly going to find a way to expel the Russians from their deeply entrenched positions?
And even if they do, that the Russians are just going to allow themselves to be humiliated and defeated on the world stage and allow the West to just overrun eastern Ukraine and go right up to their border without doing anything in response?
What is this game being played here?
Especially given the obviously growing concerns and resistance inside Ukraine to do the only seemingly necessary thing that could possibly bring any chance of breaking through the Russian front lines, which is sacrifice so many of the lives of their citizens, that they're just not willing to do it to the consternation of the United States.
And so if they're, quote, casualty adverse, What is the plan for getting the Russians out of those territories, absent diplomacy?
Or even with diplomacy?
And if you're somebody who thinks it's unfortunate or wrong that the Russians now have control over significant provinces in eastern Ukraine, sometimes reality is reality.
And you have to accept it, even if it's unpleasant.
And just throwing more money and more lives is very easy to do, especially if it's not your lives that you're sacrificing in that cause.
But the Ukrainians are clearly becoming resistant to continue to fight in this way.
CGTN in February of 2023 was one of the many news outlets that reported what I alluded to about the former Israeli Prime Minister, who said the West, quote, interrupted Russia-Ukraine peace talks.
Quote, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett revealed to Israeli media that he traveled to Moscow as Israeli Prime Minister last March to broker an early ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, and the two sides agreed to make compromises.
But the ceasefire talks were, quote, interrupted by the West.
Speaking on a podcast with Israeli television channel 12, which lasted for almost five hours and was published on Sunday, Bennett said that after the outbreak of the Russian-Ukraine conflict last February, he tried to act as a mediator, as he believed that there was still a chance to end the conflict by diplomatic means.
According to Bennett, he contacted U.S.
President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, offering to act as a conduit between the Russian and Ukrainian leaders.
and also persuaded German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to join the conversation.
Bennett said that during his mediation, Zelensky promised not to join NATO, and Putin dropped his main goals of special military operations, seeking disarmament and denazification of Ukraine, adding in his impression both Russia and Ukraine want a ceasefire and have drawn about 17 adding in his impression both Russia and Ukraine want a ceasefire and have drawn about 17 or 18 ceasefire drafts, but at some point the West decided, quote, to
The former Israeli Prime Minister also said that all of his actions have been agreed in detail with the U.S., Germany, and France.
Quote, they interrupted the talks, he said.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said on Sunday that Bennett's remarks at talks between Russia and Ukraine at the beginning of the special military operation were interrupted by Western countries is, quote, another confession.
In April 2022, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that Russian-Ukrainian talks that were proceeding quite successfully in Istanbul were broken down, quote, on the direct order from the U.S.
and London, which, quote, totally controlled Zelensky, who had evidently received an order from the Washington patrons to frustrate the negotiations.
I know there's a desire to feel good about what the United States has done in this war.
Let's remember that every war that the United States fights, there's a narrative created that this war is different because the United States is operating with benevolent motives.
We were trying to free the South Vietnamese from the invasion and repression of Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese communists.
We were trying to free the Iraqi people from the repressive rule of Saddam Hussein.
We were trying to free the Syrians from Bashar al-Assad's despotism.
We were trying to free the Libyan people from Muammar Gaddafi and his various forms of authoritarianism.
In Afghanistan, we were trying to free Afghan women and allow them to live equal lives.
There's always a humanitarian narrative.
Always.
Two American wars.
This one has been no different.
But when you look behind the propaganda and you see the bloodshed, senseless bloodshed, that the Americans and British have encouraged and funded and fueled, often against the wishes of both the Russians and the Ukrainians, it's hard not to reach the conclusion
That the United States wanted this war and continues to want this war for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with the welfare of the Ukrainian people which could not be suffering more severely as a result of this war and everything to do with American self-interest and the one thing I would add is that
It's time to remember that the CNN polling and other polling showing that majorities of Americans have now turned against this war and no longer believe the United States should continue to fund it have one exception, one demographic group that continues overwhelmingly to want this war to continue.
Those are self-identified liberal Democrats who by a massive margin of 75 to 25% want this war to continue.
And I vehemently believe the reason for that is because the liberal section, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, has been feeding on anti-Russian hatred from their media for years now.
They blame the Russians and the Kremlin for the most cataclysmic event of their lives, which is the defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016.
And there's no geopolitical rationale.
There's no moral rationale.
They want this war to continue because they hate the Russians for helping Hillary lose and want to see them suffer and are more than happy to sacrifice as many young Ukrainian men and as much of Ukraine as possible in order to satisfy their bloodlust to make Russia pay in vengeance for the 2016 election.
When you think about it that way, it's hard to imagine A more amoral, a cruder, a more repellent motive for a war than this one.
But whatever else is the case, no matter how well-intentioned you might have been genuinely at the start of the war in wanting US support for Ukraine, it is now clear 18 months later that there is nobody suffering worse from this war than Ukraine and the Ukrainians.
And it seems as though that recognition is increasingly coming, not from anti-war elements in the West, but from the Ukrainians themselves.
So just briefly, we wanted to cover a couple of other topics, one of which is the rather remarkable fact that the former president of the United States and the overwhelming frontrunner one of which is the rather remarkable fact that the former president of the United States and the overwhelming frontrunner to be the next nominee for the Republican Party as the presidential candidate and somebody who leads the incumbent president,
Joe Biden, in at least some polls, not by a large margin, Donald Trump has now been indicted four times, twice by Democratic Party district attorneys in highly Democratic Party cities, Atlanta and Manhattan, and two other times by essentially the Biden administration by a special counsel chosen by the Biden Justice Department.
And it used to be the case for a very long time that if a politician had a scandal involving legal difficulties, it was career-ending.
Nobody could run for president with the threat of a criminal investigation, let alone four indictments hanging over their head.
And yet, not only are these four indictments not sabotaging the Trump campaign, they are clearly, clearly at this point, no doubt about it, Fortifying Trump's campaign, his lead continues to grow the more he gets indicted.
CBS News from August 20th, quote, CBS News poll finds Trump's big lead grows as GOP voters dismiss indictments.
Quote, right now the Republican Party would easily re-nominate Donald Trump for 2024 and it's not close.
The former president now holds his largest lead ever, Over his rivals in our polling amid his recent legal troubles.
In fact, most of the voters, his voters, cite those troubles as yet more and more reason to show him support.
His nearest but not too near rival, Ron DeSantis, has fallen even further back.
Everyone else is in single digits.
Here from the CBS Poll 2024 Republican nomination, who would you vote for today?
Donald Trump, 62%.
Ron DeSantis, 16%.
Vivek Ramaswamy, 7%.
Pence, 5%.
The rest, not even worth mentioning.
That's a 46-point lead from Donald Trump.
Which has grown significantly each time he's gotten indicted.
And then if you look at the granular detail from CBS News, there you see at the latest Trump indictment, which concerns you more?
Is the indictment politically motivated or that Trump tried to overturn the presidential election or both?
77% say the indictment is politically motivated.
8% say their bigger concern is Trump trying to overturn the presidential election.
15% say both.
This is a gigantic indictment on the part of half the country of faith and legitimacy in our justice system.
Which is a cataclysmic and unhealthy state of affairs for any republic to have.
If you have half the country now distrusting fundamentally The system of justice at the federal and state levels to the point that they believe that indictments of a political official make their support for that political official more justifiable.
That is a crisis of authority that is almost unprecedented, at least in the 20th century and into the 21st century.
And I know the way the media wants to deal with this is to say that Trump voters are in a cult.
Or that they're stupid or racist.
That doesn't work.
How many times do they need to do that before they see that doesn't work?
At some point there needs to be some reckoning.
With the extent to which this distrust is growing among these institutions, almost every major American institution, We still just don't have any willingness to reckon with the question of whether some of this distrust is justifiable.
Of course, the distrust is even more severe for the corporate media, which is an even bigger reason why they don't want to question that.
But all you can do is watch this, and no matter what side of the equation you're on, Any amount of honesty requires an acknowledgment of how dangerous this is to social stability, to the ability for institutions of authority to claim any kind of legitimacy or credibility whatsoever.
So we will continue to keep our eyes on that.
But at this point, we just wanted to make clear that the causal relationship between the indictments and the growth of Trump's support is now indisputable.
And the reasons seem pretty clear.
Finally, as our last topic, as I mentioned at the start of the show, as soon as we are done, and tonight is not a live show, we are taping this show just an hour or so, two hours before it airs, because we are heading to the airport to travel this week to Milwaukee, where we will be live at the first presidential debate in Wisconsin on Monday, on Wednesday night, rather.
And one of the major reasons we're going, because it is a Trump-free presidential debate, so It is very likely that the audience size will not be very high for that with Trump not there.
In typical Trump style has decided to counter-program it by giving an interview to Tucker Carlson who I'm sure himself was very happy to provide some sort of programming alternative to one of the most important events that Fox News, his former employer who fired him, has had in months.
So he has Donald Trump over here and people can choose whether to watch Donald Trump with Tucker Carlson or a bunch of At the moment after Fox and the Republican Party who are going to be debating one another without Trump present and
We're going mostly because we think it is a watershed moment in the rise of independent media and in particular the arrival of Rumble as a major player in the media ecosystem.
It is remarkable that the Republican Party has decided to award Rumble the exclusive rights to stream the debate online.
Nobody else can stream this debate on the internet other than Rumble.
Fox has the rights to host and stream it or rather broadcast it on television.
And like I said, part of the Motive is that Republican voters don't want the GOP doing deals with Google or Facebook, whom they do not trust, because they regard them as radically and fundamentally biased against conservatives in the way they censor for reasons that are obviously valid.
But there's no way the Republican Party would be doing this if Rumble weren't a major player in the media ecosystem.
This is a major showcase for the Republican Party.
It's important that they get as many people as possible to watch.
And they would not give these rights to a platform that did not command a massive audience.
And all I can tell you is I see our internal numbers for the show that we've been broadcasting for barely nine months now.
And the audience size that we are amassing, both in terms of the number of people who watch live, the number of people who watch in the first 12 and then 24 hours, The number of people who watch my podcast, the impact and reach of our show and of other shows like it, Russell Brands and Dan Bongino's and other people on this platform exceed all expectations.
For what we expected, for what we budgeted, for what we hoped for in terms of our audience growth.
And that's because Rumble is growing rapidly.
There are huge names with people with large audiences who are either signing with Rumble or just migrating to Rumble automatically.
I don't know if you saw, but the overnight musical sensation Oliver Anthony with the song Rich Men North of Richmond.
Just kind of casually announced without any explanation or fanfare that he was starting his own network on Rumble because people don't want to be part of big tech platforms that have a stranglehold on the limits of their speech.
And not just a stranglehold, but a totally arbitrary and cock ass one where at any moment you can be demonetized.
You can have your entire platform destroyed.
There's no explanation.
There's no appeal.
There's no clear rules.
It's pure despotism.
And, of course, if you have a viable alternative to offer that gives genuine guarantees of free speech and, at the same time, the ability to reach a mass market, which Rumble is now doing, that's going to be extremely appealing to people.
That was extremely appealing to me.
It's why I left Substack, where everything was working very well, and I undertook this responsibility of producing a nightly show, which I knew would be labor-intensive and I hadn't done before.
In part because I saw that Rumble was an extremely important platform to preserving a place for free speech on the internet.
So the fact that they have this exclusive debate, this exclusive right to broadcast a Republican debate is something that excites me.
It makes me believe even more in Rumble's future.
And in the future of platforms that can offer genuine free speech that are constructed with their own independent infrastructure that make it much less vulnerable to pressures from corporate media and governments to censor.
I think Rumble has been very shrewd about anticipating the kinds of pressure that will be brought to bear on it as it grows even more.
And anything I can always do to fortify platforms like this, including Rumble, is something I'm going to do.
And so when we were asked to come to Milwaukee and be part of Rumble's coverage, it's something I barely had to think about at all.
We're taking part of our team from the studio.
The rest of our team will be here in the studio making sure that the program that we're able to do from there is at its professionalized and high level.
We hope to have interviews with some of the candidates.
either at the debate or ones that we can arrange in the near term future.
I'd actually rather have longer, more in-depth sit-downs with the candidates rather than 10-minute, you know, kind of quick interviews at these debates.
I don't intend to go to the spin room.
We're going to figure out what we want to do in a way that, you know, is consistent with the ethos of our program.
I'm not going to offer a bunch of horse race punditry or go to the spin room and talk to surrogates.
But at the very least, we're going to be present there and find a way to build relationships with a lot of these staffs and campaigns and other people who are going to be there.
But mostly I just wanted to make sure that I was putting my imprimatur on the fact that I do think this is an important moment for Rumble, for independent media, and for the ability of a free speech platform to start to become a major player in the media ecosystems.
So look for us.
This week, as I said, we may not be on at exactly what our regular time.
One way to solve that is by downloading the Rumble app, which we've been hoping that you will do anyway.
It works very well, it's easy to navigate, and it offers the functionality that you can follow our show and other shows and be notified when we're on air, which is a particular value if we're not all on air at exactly the time that is our normal time at 7 p.m.
So we hope that further encourages you to do that.
That will conclude our show for this evening.
We need to get to the airport.
We are, as always, very thankful to those of you who have been continuing to watch.
We are pretty sure we'll be back on air tomorrow night.
It depends.
We're traveling overnight to Milwaukee.
We'll see how things go and if we can Broadcast tomorrow night, but if not, we'll obviously be back on Wednesday for as full coverage of the debate as we can possibly give, but not just the debate, but of related issues as well, including whatever Donald Trump does, so we hope you'll watch for that.
Thank you so much for making the show a success.
We hope to see you back.
Like I said, possibly tomorrow night at 7 p.m., but certainly Wednesday night and then the rest of the week at 7 p.m.
Eastern, our regular time, exclusively here on Rumble.
