Dr. Fauci Coddled by Democrats During COVID Testimony While He’s Grilled by GOP; PLUS: Interview with Russia/Ukraine Expert Prof. Ivan Katchanovski on Ukraine’s Growing Problems
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Fauci Coddled By House Dems (8:40)
Interview with Ivan Katchanovski (47:42)
Outro (1:32:24)
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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...
The COVID pandemic was unquestionably one of the most significant events of our lifetime.
Entire populations, countries, and communities were forcibly shut down for almost two years.
Children, including very young ones, were forcibly masked, vaccinated with an experimental medication, and were prevented from attending schools for months at a time.
People were trained to acquiesce to a level of control previously unthinkable, from being arrested for certain kinds of political protests, told they must stand six feet apart from one another in public, and subject to curfews and lockdowns.
Questioning many of the pronouncements and policy decisions of health care and other political officials was banned through online censorship for at least a year into the pandemic.
In any situation of this magnitude, there are of course going to be serious mistakes and highly dubious decisions made by those in power to decide these things for the globe.
That is true even if those in power, in theory, are as benevolent and well-intentioned as possible.
But perfect motives never drive human institutions, and the more unquestioned and centralized power they are given over other people's lives, as was done in COVID, the less likely that is to be true.
Now, on top of well-intentioned error, one will almost certainly find in the decisions and decrees of key policymakers, a wide range of corruption and self-interested motives, abuse of power, attempts to hide what they are doing to shield themselves from critique, And oftentimes outright lies that are knowing and deliberate for a wide range of reasons.
All of that is present in the two plus year management by centralized states and healthcare organizations in the COVID pandemic.
Yet, for a variety of reasons, there has been not only no accountability for those wrong acts, but exceedingly little transparency or institutional interest in finding out what happened.
In part, that is because COVID turned into a partisan culture war issue, where a defense of Dr. Anthony Fauci and the World Health Organization became a virtually religious duty, as it was with Robert Mueller and Jack Smith and all kinds of other officials like that before him.
And yet at the same time, any criticisms or even questioning of Fauci's decisions and judgments were decreed off-limits, deemed as right-wing attacks on science.
And thus, for liberal elites and most Democratic Party members and followers, they basically insist that Dr. Fauci is nothing more or less than a hero, that any inquiry should begin and end there, and that all of the other questions and debates and controversies should be left alone and unresolved and ignored, either as unfair critiques or even anti-scientific conspiracies.
We should really be thankful that at least some members of Congress and some members of the media, especially the independent media, have been refusing to allow such a momentous moment in history to go unexamined and unquestioned.
Over the last year, there has finally been some reporting that makes undeniably clear, undeniably clear, that many of the statements made and actions taken by top health policy elites were highly dubious, if not outright and deliberately false.
But establishment sectors have implicitly decided that there's no benefit in re-examining any of what happened during that period, almost all of which they vigorously endorse, which is why they don't want it examined.
And they believe many dangers from looking into all of this.
Now, I have many criticisms of the current House Republicans, particularly with respect to their unifying almost entirely with the Biden administration's foreign policy in Ukraine, Israel, and most other places.
But one of the places where they have done a commendable job is in taking their oversight responsibility seriously with respect to the executive branch.
As part of that, today the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, something I guarantee would not even exist if the Democrats were in control of the House, held a hearing at which Dr. Fauci testified.
While one Democratic member of that committee after the next expressed outrage that Dr. Fauci was even being questioned at all, and instead used their time to heap unfettered and obsequious hero praise on him, Much like they do when officials from the U.S.
Security State appear before Congress, almost demanding that they not even be questioned, Fauci was grilled by Republican members on a wide range of issues, including his statements and decisions regarding the origins of COVID, mask mandates, vaccine efficacy, school shutdowns, and far more.
Many of these exchanges were quite revealing.
Either of Dr. Fauci's borderline pathological willingness after decades in Washington to simply lie about what he said and what he did, or about the substantive issues themselves.
And we will report on some of the key highlights and exchanges from today's hearing.
Then, disturbing scenes of Ukrainian men violently resisting efforts to force them to the front lines in the war against Russia.
Men who have decided that they will not serve as cannon fodder for this futile NATO war against Russia have become increasingly common, one video after the next, emerging seemingly every day.
Now, in general, they know what everyone knows whose name is not Zelensky or Lindsey Graham.
Namely, that there is no way NATO can achieve victories in this war in the ways that they originally and still do define victory.
Namely, the expulsion of the Russian Army from every inch of Ukrainian soil, including Ukraine.
Ivan Kachanovsky has been one of the most reliable sources for news and analysis since the start of the war began.
A scholar in Russian studies and in that region, Professor Kachanovsky now teaches at the School of Political Studies and Conflict Studies and Human Rights at the University of Ottawa and has been a visiting scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard.
I've been informed about this war by him as much as anyone and we are thrilled to welcome him tonight for his debut appearance on System Update.
To discuss the latest defeats and problems for Ukraine in the West in this war, the serious and growing challenges of Ukrainian recruitment, and the causes that led to this conflict in the first place.
Now before we get to all that, a few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
We spent a lot of 2021 and 2022, essentially before the war in Ukraine, subsumed everything, reporting on a variety of lingering questions and doubts about reporting on a variety of lingering questions and doubts about the veracity of many of the claims that were made and we were told during the COVID pandemic,
But also about the policy decisions that were made, whether there was any real basis for having made them, whether the certainty that was asserted about them had any justification about the lack of transparency and even censorship that was imposed in order to prevent that transparency.
The number of questions that still linger about the COVID pandemic, the wisdom of mask mandates, whether the benefits of vaccines were oversold and the dangers hidden.
Whether schools should have been shut down as they were, whether lockdowns were effective, whether they lied about the use of masks knowingly, and most importantly of all, I think, what the origin of the COVID pandemic was, and whether or not the scientists under Dr. Fauci who announced at the start of the pandemic that they knew for certain that this came from a natural occurrence and a species jump and not from a lab leak, We're deliberately lying.
And of course, whether they were denying it all, the question of the origins still needs to be proven, even though there's overwhelming evidence now in favor of the lab leak, something we were told at the start of the pandemic was so provably untrue that anyone suggesting it was engaged in an anti-scientific and bigoted effort to attack and disparage Chinese scientists.
Now, for whatever reasons, this has been all grinded through the dreary partisan culture war where liberals feel compelled to defend government officials and to heap praise on them and turn them into heroes and to shield them from any attempt to discharge their congressional duty to exert oversight over executive branch officials and to, especially with an event this momentous, this consequential,
To investigate what happened, even if it's simply to find out what mistakes were made to prevent future mistakes from occurring in future pandemics, and yet they have absolutely refused to do that, absolutely resisted it, suggested that any attempt to even want to investigate or find out more Is some sort of bad faith, right-wing or far-right conspiracy theory?
Because any questioning of government officials in the eyes increasingly of Democratic members of Congress is an unpatriotic act, even though the duty of American citizens, or the right of American citizens, the duty of the American Congress, is to engage in exactly that sort of inquiry.
The Republicans formed a subcommittee to investigate the COVID pandemic, as of course they should have done.
When 9-11 happened in the United States, there was originally an attempt to insist that George Bush shouldn't be questioned or criticized, but it was a significant enough event that there had to be formal investigations to lay out what happened.
Same with the Kennedy assassination, same with any major event in American or global history.
The Congress and official bodies of the United States government have to at least report to investigate, give transparency, and then tell the truth.
And Democrats not only have no interest in that, they affirmatively oppose it.
They get enraged at anyone who tries to do that.
Now, here is a video from today's hearing, and this is from Representative Robert Garcia, who is a Democrat from California, and he was a mayor at the time of the COVID who is a Democrat from California, and he was a mayor He He had six minutes, like every other member of the committee, to ask questions of Dr. Fauci.
And again, even if you think that Dr. Fauci was well-intentioned, even if you believe that maybe he made mistakes, but they were understandable in the wake of the complexity of the Pandemic?
None of which I think is even viable at this point.
But even if you still believe that, you should still then be asking him questions about those errors, about what could have been done better.
And instead, like so many Democrats on this committee, almost all, all they did was use their time not to ask questions of Dr. Fauci, but to heap unfettered praise on him and to express outrage that anyone on that committee or anyone else would even question If you think I'm exaggerating, let me just show you one example.
the hero of modern science who saved hundreds of thousands of lives, if not more, through his decision making.
And if you think I'm exaggerating, let me just show you one example.
Here is, again, Robert Garcia from the Democratic district in California, in Long Beach, in Los Angeles, who has his time to speak with Dr. Fauci, and instead, this is what he chose to do.
The world.
Vaccines, a vaccine that you and your team helped foster have saved millions of American lives.
Now, remember, this vaccine that they're now saying Dr. Fauci helped foster was actually a policy implemented by Donald Trump.
Who promised that there would be a vaccine for COVID by the end of 2020.
Everyone scoffed at him.
Kamala Harris and others spread vaccine skepticism by saying, I would never take a vaccine developed under the Biden administration.
But now that liberals believe in this vaccine and love it, they want to rewrite history And pretend that it was only Dr. Fauci on his own who was responsible for the advent of this vaccine, when in fact, the Trump administration announced that they were pouring massive resources into an unprecedented effort to have a vaccine by the end of the year.
And everyone said that was impossible, that if there was one, it would be unreliable.
And now they're saying that it was Dr. Fauci who did it.
These attacks are ridiculous.
Now, even before this committee started, I'm going to point a few things out.
Even before this committee started, this same member that just went on this rant introduced the Fire Fauci Act and promoted it on a podcast, saying that COVID was a bioweapon.
That is how insane some of these comments are.
And I want to quote this.
This is a quote from the same member.
I don't believe in evolution.
These viruses were not making people sick until they created them.
They weaponized these viruses to be able to attach to ourselves and make us sick.
It's a bioweapon.
The they created them, sir, is you.
They are attacking you and our medical community for actually creating COVID that has caused the deaths of millions.
Now, let me just stop there and say that this is a focus on Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was one of 12 or 14 Republican members of Congress.
And I should also note that the idea that the coronavirus was manipulated in and then leaked from or came from a lab in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, far from being a conspiracy theory, which is what they depicted it as being, is now the consensus view
of the leading scientific units within the FBI, the Department of Energy, and other government agencies around the world who believe it's far more probable than not that it came out of the Wuhan lab, one in which Dr. Fauci had invested, had lied about continuously in terms of whether they were doing gain-of-function research, which is when you manipulate viruses occurring naturally in order to make them more contagious as a means of supposedly
Developing vaccines against them, but obviously if you're manipulating viruses in order to make them weaponized or more dangerous, that also has the dual use of developing a biological weapon.
As we reported on in the episode that we devoted to the anthrax attacks on the United States shortly after 9-11 in October and November of 2001, We were told at the time by people like John McCain and many others that that almost certainly came from Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi biological weapons program.
In fact, according to the FBI, it turns out that in their own narrative, it came from the United States government.
And at the time we were hearing these were incredibly weaponized forms of anthrax, that these weren't just naturally occurring anthrax.
These had been manipulated in a lab to make them Fatal and contagious.
Only for it to be revealed seven years later that it was the U.S.
Army Lab at Fort Detrick that was doing that.
And of course, they immediately said, well, we were doing this, but only to develop a vaccine.
But every time you manipulate a virus, it has a dual-edged purpose, one of which is to develop a vaccine, another of which is to develop a biological weapon.
So the idea that it's so preposterous that the Chinese would be developing biological weapons when we ourselves develop biological weapons all the time in labs, and even if you don't believe they maliciously released it, a lab leak is a biological agent that gets out into the world.
And though we were told that was such a preposterous theory at the beginning when Dr. Fauci knew nothing about the origins, to the point that people were censored for even asking that question, let alone asserting that opinion, You can now find governments around the world, Western democracies, that will say that their scientists inside the government believe still that it is far more likely than not that it emanated from a lab, specifically the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Let's continue with his insistence that anything that deviates from Dr. Fauci's proclamations is some kind of, not just baseless conspiracy theory, but somehow malicious and inappropriate.
And we know that these extreme comments are targeting public health officials across the country.
I also want to show you this other comment.
Same member who just attacked you.
The Fauci-funded Wuhan lab created the virus.
This is so crazy and irresponsible.
In this post, the same member of this committee is accusing you of orchestrating a global conspiracy to create COVID on purpose just To make people get vaccines.
You've done this, sir.
This same member routinely promotes complete misinformation about vaccines and actually has encouraged the routine prevention of vaccinations that even eliminate diseases like the measles.
Dr. Fauci, you've brought together our nation and the world's best and brightest scientists to take on COVID and create a vaccine that works.
I want to ask you a question.
I want to be crystal clear for the public.
You brought together the world and America's best scientists.
Do you believe that the vaccine that you all helped create and ensure is safe and effective for the public?
Yes, and its track record has proven that.
And do you also agree that it saved hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of lives in America and across the world?
That is absolutely correct and it's very clear that it's saved millions of lives here and throughout the world.
So that is obviously not a use of congressional investigative functions.
Which is a constitutionally endowed obligation for them to investigate the actions of the executive branch.
That is propaganda to say that everything Dr. Fauci did was correct.
Now here is a exchange with Congressman Jim Jordan.
Because this to me illustrates the ease with which Dr. Fauci is willing to just continuously lie and deceive.
Remember, he's been a creature of Washington for decades.
He was the official who managed and directed the U.S.
government's response to the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.
I remember very well that he was one of the principal targets of attack and critique by various AIDS activists, including the group ACT UP.
That's how long he's been around in Washington.
And you don't stay around in power in Washington for that long if you don't know how to lie, to bureaucratically conceal and deceive.
And he is an expert at this.
Watch this exchange.
Do you agree that there was a push to downplay the lab leak theory?
Not on my part.
Really?
Really.
Wow.
I think most of the country would find that amazing.
I still got 11 seconds.
Well, look at the facts.
I've kept an open mind throughout the entire process.
Alright, I yield back.
Does anybody, just think about your own experience, your own perception, I'm about to show you what really happened, but does anybody actually believe that Dr. Fauci was encouraging people to keep an open mind?
about the origins of the COVID vaccine.
We were told by the scientific community that he essentially runs through his control of billions and billions and billions of dollars of research grants and others.
If you get on the wrong side of Dr. Fauci as a scientific researcher, you essentially, your career is almost over.
You can't research anything.
His power is immense.
And he was getting emails from the top epidemiologists in the world at the start of the pandemic in January and February and early March of 2020 that were insisting that the analysis that they did of the COVID vaccine made very clear that a lab leak was far more likely than not.
And yet within a week, Many of the scientists who were talking to him had gotten together and all signed on to a consensus that was the exact opposite of what many of them told Fauci just a week earlier, announcing in the now notorious Lancet letter that
There was absolutely no reason to believe anything other than this occurred naturally, that any attempt to suggest it was made in a lab was a vicious, anti-scientific conspiracy theory, and based on that, the American media essentially excluded the possibility of a lab leak, insisted that it was proven that it was naturally occurring, to the point that Big Tech actually barred any assertion that the COVID virus was made in a lab.
Now, everyone knows that Dr. Fauci was not out there saying, no, we should keep an open mind about a lab leak.
Nobody was saying that from the U.S.
government or the leading health officials in the United States.
They were doing exactly the opposite.
Over and over and over, that was one of their main orthodoxies.
And the reason was, was because in part they wanted to ensure that nobody was blaming science for having manipulated this.
A virus that at the time they thought could lead to the death of millions of people, but which they knew was going to shut down the world economy for many months if not years.
But also, in particular, because Dr. Fauci himself, through the Echo Health Alliance and others, had given grants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to engage in exactly the kind of research that would manipulate coronaviruses.
And it's not just science in general, the institute in particular, that would be incriminated in this kind of worldwide pandemic.
But Dr. Fauci and the U.S.
government itself, they were just as involved in this research as the Chinese were.
The problem is that in the United States, it's much more difficult to conduct gain-of-function research because of legal and ethical restrictions on it, whereas you can do it in China.
And they did do it in China, right in the city where the pandemic was first discovered.
And now Dr. Fauci is trying to say under oath to Congress with a straight face that I was not part of the effort to insist that this was naturally occurring.
I was open-minded from the start, he said, that this could have been a lab leak.
Here is another congressman who is Rich McCormick engaged in a highly illuminating Summary of the questions about Dr. Fauci and the accusations against him, many of which are proven to be true, these accusations, and others of which are completely unresolved.
And the reason I'm choosing to show you this is because it's an outstanding, concise summation of all of the questions about Dr. Fauci and the management of this global pandemic that have never been answered, and for which there's all kinds of evidence to justify suspicions or worse.
And even if you don't believe in past accountability, and how could you not?
It's vital that these questions be answered so that we can understand how to avoid these mistakes and this corruption in any future crisis or pandemic.
Listen to his summation of what the hearing was supposed to look at.
Politicians, only politicians, only bloggers, only conspiracy theorists are disagreeing with you.
I want to point out that I'm probably the only member of Congress that actually treated patients during the pandemic from the very beginning to the very end of the pandemic during night shifts in the ER.
Thousands of patients during that time.
And in 2020, I was censored.
My medical license was threatened because I disagreed with bureaucrats.
Literally taking off the internet as a person who is treating patients with leading-edge technologies, developing theories, but doing my very best, but being censored by the United States government for the first time stepping in and taking the place of medical professionals as the experts in healthcare.
Any dissent surrounding COVID-19 treatments, mask mandates, and any public policy surrounding the pandemic was immediately labeled as anti-science.
I mean, that is unquestionably true.
We all remember this.
You were not allowed to question the theory that this was naturally occurring and jumped from species or emanated from wet markets in China.
And if you did, you would be banned from social media for at least a full year as a result of this.
Really, one of the biggest disgraces in science and journalism, or journalism and scientific journalism in decades, which was the publication of that Lancet letter early on that purported to know the origin of the COVID virus without In any way, having disclosed the multiple conflicts of interest on the part of those who signed it, let alone the fact that only a week before, in private, they were telling Dr. Fauci that they believed exactly the opposite.
Here's some more of those questions.
Watch as public health officials and politicians told my patients what treatment options were best for them regardless of their comorbidities or their medical history.
Despite my education and my training and my experience, my opinions were relegated to conspiracy and misinformation by so-called healthcare experts who had never treated a patient throughout the entire pandemic.
This has been a black eye on medicine and has highlighted why government should never Never insert itself in between patients and their health care providers.
The American people deserve to make medical decisions through conversations with their physicians rather than politically motivated mandates.
Dr. Fauci, did you ever treat a patient for COVID during the pandemic?
I was part of a team that was at the NIH that took care.
We didn't take care of many of them.
Okay, so not hands-on.
Got it.
Thank you.
Why would I be criticized by a bureaucrat for doing my very best as a health care?
This is a rhetorical question.
But why?
Why would the government, who has never treated a patient for COVID, you can read all the things you want, but you're not there.
You're not seeing patients.
I think one of the things that this exchange illustrates is so important is you may remember that Dr. Fauci came out and said, I, Dr. Fauci, represent the science.
Such an arrogant and self-glorifying proclamation that I am the science.
Not that I'm one of the many scientists, but I am the science.
So that if you questioned Dr. Fauci, if you disagreed with Dr. Fauci, you were by definition being anti-scientific, even though there were huge numbers of highly trained clinicians and physicians.
Like Congressman McCormick, but so many others on every level.
Epidemiologists, scientists in academic institutions.
Some of whom were part of the case brought against the Biden administration for unconstitutionally censoring dissent on the internet.
You had scientists all over the place and doctors all over the place.
But ordinary citizens have the right to do so too.
And they were trying to make it seem as though every scientist was in agreement with Dr. Fauci.
And one of the ways they accomplished that was by excluding from the media discourse any scientist who disagreed, And even by banning them from social media.
One of the galvanizing events that happened in 2020 was that Rand Paul had called several scientists, trained epidemiologists and others.
Remember Rand Paul himself was a medical doctor.
He had called to a Senate hearing several medical experts.
He wanted to testify about all sorts of dissent that some people in the medical community had about treatments and other aspects of what we were being told.
And when he published, Rand Paul, the video of that hearing online on his YouTube account, YouTube banned it.
It was an actual Senate hearing in the United States, convened by Senators.
In fact, by one of the very few medical experts, trained medical professionals in the Senate And Google decided this cannot be heard by the American people.
That's the level at which censorship was imposed to make it appear falsely as though all scientists were in agreement with Dr. Fauci.
I am the science, he was able to say.
Here is a timeline on the proximal origins of SARS-CoV-2, which is just to give you an idea of how early on some of these epidemiologists were telling Dr. Fauci that it looked highly likely That this came from a lab, or that at least it was 50-50, or 60-40, or 40-60, that it was uncertain.
This is a week before that Lancet letter was issued, where many of these email authors ended up signing on to the statement that Fauci wanted, declaring the question already resolved.
Here is this one email, February 2nd, 2022.
Quote, there are possible ways in nature, but it's highly unlikely.
Jeremy Farrar tells the virologist who participated in the call that scientific discussion should be limited to a credible group convened by the WHO.
After the call, Farrar collected some thoughts from the group and emailed Fauci and Dr. Collins, who is his British counterpart.
Quote, on a spectrum, if zero is nature and 800 is lab leak, I am honestly at 50.
My guess is that there will remain gray unless there is access to the Wuhan lab, and I suspect that is unlikely, Farrar said.
Farrar also relayed more thoughts from participants on the call to Fauci and Collins.
These emails, first obtained through FOIA by BuzzFeed News, were viewed unredacted by congressional staff, in camera, and reported by The Intercept.
This is one of the most important reports The Intercept has done in the last several years, which is where they did a FOIA request hoping to prove that a lot of these claims and suspicions on the right were conspiracy theories, and they ended up proving the opposite with these FOIA documents which, to their credit, they published.
That proved that Echo Health Alliance through grants from Dr. Fauci were in fact doing exactly the kind of gain-in-function research that Dr. Fauci repeatedly denied under oath to Congress he had authorized or in any way been involved in.
And then here is from Mike Farzan, the discoverer of the SARS receptor.
The RBD didn't look, quote, engineered to him, as in no human would have selected the individual mutations and cloned them through the RBD.
I think we all agree.
Tissue culture passage can often lead to a gain of basic sites.
And then the key part here is in the highlighted part where he says he is bothered by the furrin site and has a hard time explaining that as an event outside the lab, though there are possible ways in nature, but highly unlikely.
And then finally, this document concludes.
So, given the above, a likely explanation could be something as simple as passage SARS-Live COVs in tissue culture on human cell lines for an extended period of time, accidentally creating a virus that would be primed for rapid transmission between humans via gain of fur in sight from tissue culture and adaptation to human ACE2 receptor via repeated passage.
And so these were the kinds of discussions that were taking place in private that were continuously given to Dr. Fauci in the early part of the pandemic, and then
We got the Lancet letter, which is in February 19, 2022, just a week or two after some of these emails I just showed you, where you can see these epidemiologists that Fauci convened were either saying, it's highly unlikely it occurred in nature, it seems far more likely that it occurred in a lab, or people saying 50-50.
And this Lancet letter, at the earliest stage of the pandemic, obviously when they had no idea what its origins were, Issued this letter saying statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combating COVID-19.
And we went over this the other night.
The letter essentially says that any attempt to suggest that that lab was in any way responsible for the lab leak constitutes malicious misinformation about COVID's origins.
They said here, uh, Let me just get this part here.
They said, we stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.
This is what is so scandalous.
I just showed you Dr. Fauci saying, oh, I had no attempt whatsoever on my part to suggest that this was naturally occurring.
I was open-minded.
And yet all the people with whom he was communicating, including the ones telling him, that they thought it was more likely that it came from a lab magically appeared in the Lancet, engineered by Peter Daszak, who was heavily involved in the research that they were saying didn't lead to the COVID pandemic.
Obviously, a huge conflict of interest.
Obviously, if you're part of the research Doing gain-of-function research in a Wuhan Institute of Virology, you have a huge financial and especially reputational interest, and say, no, that had nothing to do with this pandemic.
It's proven that it occurred in nature, to the point where they say, we all stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.
Things that they could not have possibly known, and we know from those emails we just showed you, and many more, that they did not know And yet they go on then to say that scientists from multiple countries overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife as have so many other emerging pathogens.
This is further supported by a letter from the presidents of all of the scientific Institutions, and then they said, quote, conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumors, and prejudice that jeopardize our global collaboration in the fight against the virus.
And you might even recall that one of the ways it was stigmatized to suggest that the virus came from the Wuhan lab was to say it was racist against the Chinese to suggest that.
When it was a complete inversion of what racism actually is, it shows you the way the establishment forces constantly cynically weaponize racism accusations to shield themselves from dissent.
Now, it doesn't really matter which of the theories is more or less racist.
All that matters is which of the theories is true about the origins of COVID, which in turn really matters in terms of, say, preventing A future pandemic or demanding increase in the safety protocols in labs, if it were a lab leak, or finding out how to prevent naturally occurring species jumping viruses, if that's what it were.
We, of course, want to know the truth about one of the major events in our lifetime that had among the most far-reaching implications of any, on par with things like 9-11.
And yet, there's very little Knowledge of or interest in on the part of most institutions.
This question, especially that was true for the first two years of the COVID pandemic, and in part was because they somehow got people to believe that what was racist was to suggest that extremely sophisticated research conducted by Chinese scientists In cooperation with or with the support of the American government had led to a leak.
How was that racist or at least more racist than the theory that they were pushing down the throat of everybody in the world which is that the Chinese are so filthy and unsanitary and primitive in their eating habits and in their wet markets that they cause through the consumption of bats and other sickening eating habits The release of this virus.
Theirs was the far more racist theory, and yet to stigmatize and ban the alternative theory, they labeled it racist when theirs was the far more racist.
Although, again, what only mattered was not what was the racist theory, but what the true one was.
Now, just to give you a sense for how suppressed these questions were, it was not until May 2021 A year and a half basically into the pandemic, almost a year and a half, three months or four months after the Lancet letter, when the government of the United States, the Biden administration, admitted for the first time that they actually didn't know what the origins of COVID were, that there was huge doubt about whether it was occurring naturally, something the scientists in March of 2020
Insisted they knew for sure, even the Biden administration ended up they didn't know and therefore ordered an investigation of what really was the origin of COVID-19.
And it was only then, on the very day when the Biden administration admitted that they didn't even know, that Big Tech finally decided they were going to lift their ban on any kind of questioning Of what Dr. Fauci and his band of scientists had insisted on.
There you see Politico, May 26, the same day Biden administration ordered an investigation into COVID's origin.
Quote, Facebook will no longer treat a quote, man-made COVID as a crackpot idea.
Facebook's policy tweak arrives as support surges at Washington for a fuller investigation into the origins of COVID.
Facebook and Google had banned any questioning of the pronouncement of Dr. Fauci and his crew, even though there was no scientific basis for asserting it and plenty of reason to doubt it, they banned public questioning of it for a year and a half.
And it was only when the U.S.
government finally said, you know what, this is allowed to be investigated, did Big Tech then permit the citizenry to question it and debate it.
And then, in 2023, Leading officials of the Biden administration began to admit that they believe, not only that there's reason to question the original theory that it came from a natural occurrence, but actually that the most likely explanation is a lab leak.
Here from the BBC, FBI Chief Christopher Wray says that China lab leak is the most likely.
Sometimes people say, Oh, well, the US government wants to blame China to pin the blame on them when in reality, they did everything to protect China from the beginning.
And there's no way to blame China for this lab leak because the United States under Dr. Fauci and EcoHealth Alliance, we're helping to fund it.
We're highly supportive participants in it.
And then finally, the Wall Street Journal, February 26, 2023, so we're now talking about over two years after publication of that Lancet letter, reported this, quote, the lab leak is the most likely origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Energy Department now says.
The U.S.
agency's revised assessment is based on new intelligence.
And it even went on to describe how.
It wasn't just the top scientific researchers at the Department of Energy, which, remember, have some of the best scientists in the world since they're responsible for overseeing nuclear programs, but also the top scientific investigators at the FBI.
Both of them have concluded that a lab leak is not only viable, yet it's the most likely cause of the COVID pandemic.
So we went from Dr. Fauci engineering A fake and false consensus on the question to having Big Tech ban it for a year, to the U.S.
government finally admitting that there was actually reason to question this because they didn't really know for sure, to now the official government position of at least many of the scientists inside the U.S.
government, many other governments being, that it's more likely than not that it came from a lab leak.
So you have Dr. Fauci sitting in Congress today denying what everyone knows is true, which is that he played a crucial role in forcing this false consensus on the citizenry, on our ability to question it.
And obviously so much of this congressional hearing covered a huge range of other important COVID debates that weren't allowed about the efficacy of masks, about the wisdom of school closures, about lockdowns, about whether they exaggerated the benefits of the vaccine or hid the harms of it, so much of which is now starting to become proven.
And so to watch Democrats sit in this hearing, and essentially proclaim that any questioning of Dr. Fauci is unpatriotic and in bad faith and anti-scientific, Really shows you where that party is in terms of aligning with the US government, demanding that nobody question it.
And so much of this is really, I've always said, you expect policymakers with a complex pandemic, a novel pandemic, to make mistakes in their judgment.
But so much of this, including all the evidence about how they purposely avoided FOIA, deleted emails, which I showed you in the middle of last week, purposely misspelled names to prevent FOIA requests from finding them, and then acknowledging and admitting this in secret memos, shows that a lot of this was far from well-intentioned error that much of it was maliciously intended to shield themselves from not only accountability, but free and open debate.
And that's exactly what happened, not just in the United States, but throughout the West.
As you know, one of the reasons we moved from Substack, where we had a large readership and where things were working very well, to Rumble is because we really believe, I really believe, that preserving to Rumble is because we really believe, I really believe, that preserving a free internet is, if not even one of the most important causes, but the most important
Everything that we just talked about is possible only because there's a free and open internet and independent media that can question all of these consensuses that are shoved down our throat by Corporate media in conjunction with the US government, but in order to support a free and open Internet, one of the most important weapons to challenge the constrained, controlled deceit of the flow of information by power centers, it's obviously necessary to support
The very few platforms that are really fighting, not words but actions, to defend the cause of free speech.
That's one of the reasons why we decided to move our audience and our show to Rumble to help them support them in that mission.
And one of the ways that you can now also support that is that Rumble is starting to release their own brands of various products that you would obviously buy from other companies that don't share these values in order to have you support Rumble's mission, and one of them is that they now have their own brand of coffee, which we've talked about before, which is 1775 Coffee.
It's one of the ways that you can purchase it, but we wouldn't ask you, I wouldn't, to purchase it if I also didn't really believe in the product.
It is outstanding coffee.
It's ethically sourced from the heights of Bolivia using coffee grounds from Bolivia and seeds from Bolivia.
It's organic.
It doesn't have bad add-ons or additives and the like.
I'm very particular about my coffee.
I have experimented with all of the brands.
I have my own favorites, but if you go to 1775coffee.com and use Glen, you will get 10% off your first order.
You can try all the experiments.
As I said, my favorite personally is the Dark Roast, but there are a lot of other ones and it's a great way to start your day, not just with great coffee, but also knowing that you are supporting an important cause.
1775coffee.com/Glenn.
As I said at the top of the show, The co-professor even has been one of the most reliable sources for news and analysis since the start of the war in Ukraine, a scholar in Russian studies and in that region.
He now teaches at the School of Political Studies and Conflict Studies and the Human Rights Program at the University of Ottawa.
He's been a visiting scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard.
He has written books on post-Soviet Ukraine and has been cited as an expert on the conflicts in that region and in Ukraine and media outlets throughout the world.
He was also the person who essentially broke the story that you probably remember that the Ukrainian Canadian man who was honored and cheered by the Canadian Parliament led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with President Zelensky at his side was in fact a nazi ss soldier during world war ii something that was not just embarrassing But really highlighted the oft-ignored problem of the presence of neo-Nazi factions in Ukraine.
As I said, I've been informed about this war by him as much as anyone else, and we are thrilled to welcome him tonight for his debut appearance on System Update to discuss the latest defeats and problems for Ukraine in the West, the serious and growing challenges of Ukrainian recruitment and where this war is and will likely to go.
Professor, thank you so much for joining us.
It is great to talk to you.
I've been following your work for a long Thank you for the invitation.
It is a pleasure to be on your show, which is, I think, a very important and great source of information about different issues, in particular about the war in Ukraine.
Absolutely, I couldn't agree more.
And I want to just start before we get into the substance, because there are so many people who seem to have become overnight experts in this region, whereas it seems to me like a lot of them couldn't have placed Ukraine on a map prior to this conflict.
You pontificate on all sorts of things.
Can you talk about the basis of your studies and interest in and expertise about Ukraine in this region?
Yes, originally myself from Ukraine, from the western part of Ukraine, and I studied Ukrainian politics since I did my dissertation in the United States at George Mason University on regional political divisions in politics in Ukraine and Moldova.
And I specialized in politics in Ukraine since that time.
For a very long time I researched the politics in Ukraine because I view this as a very important issue.
Not only to Ukraine but also to other countries and now I think we witness such a development in terms of war in Ukraine which has effect not only on Ukraine but also on many other countries including the United States because this war is now became a proxy war between Russia and the West in Ukraine in addition to being war between Russia and
Ukraine, but I think I also published four books based on my research and 20 peer-reviewed journal articles and just today I finished another book manuscript, a book-length manuscript on Maidan Massacre in Ukraine, which I submitted to a major Western academic press for publication.
So I specialized in research in Ukrainian politics for a very long time, and specifically I specialized in research in politics in Ukraine, and I do this not relying on the media.
Because I think this is a very important distinction, because if people who just view the Ukrainian war via the New York Times coverage or NPR or any other Western major media, they have a very a biased perspective and a very one-sided view of war in Ukraine.
And I think it's very important to rely on primary sources, on Ukrainian sources, and I publish them often in the media, on my social media and on Twitter.
And I research this each day.
I view hundreds and hundreds of videos.
I read different sources in Ukrainian and Russian, which is another major language in Ukraine.
So I think this is very important To have perspective and to hear also Ukrainian voices which are very limited in terms of their representation in the Western media.
And I can say that there are few political scientists in the world who are actually able to do such research because very few of them know Ukrainian language and Russian language which are required for such research.
And I think this is a very important issue to research and I think media in this regard is not a very good source of information to say it mildly.
And I also researched Western media coverage of the UK before actually this conflict started.
And I think this is a very important issue and perspective which is often likened by the media, in particular concerning the UK, but not only the UK but also other countries as well.
So congratulations on the completion of that manuscript.
I think it's so interesting because social media in general, Twitter in particular, is often maligned, is a place where misinformation is spread.
And at the same time, I think one of the most important benefits of it is that it enables people like yourself With real expertise who would not be given access to a lot of mainstream places in Western media to find an audience, to be heard, to challenge a lot of the orthodoxies.
It's one of the ways that I discovered your work and it kind of shows just how important it is, I think, for people like you to be willing to use those platforms to be heard.
All right, let me ask you about the war itself because talking about Western media and this kind of closed information system and say the New York Times and NBC News, For the first year of the war, it was forbidden to suggest that Ukraine would have difficulty in this war against Russia.
And there were some early successes that surprised people that the Ukrainians had against the Russian military.
But now, sort of two and a half years into the war, even the Western press that would never have allowed this kind of claimed two years ago is really admitting that essentially the Russians are winning the war, that they're advancing rapidly, the Ukrainians haven't been able to gain any control, any territory, that their front line is increasingly fragile and endangered.
What do you make of where the war is and where it's likely to go, just in terms of the battlefield?
I think it was very clear from the start of this war that Ukraine has no real chance of defeating And this did not change since any events which took place in Ukraine, including Russian withdrawal from Kiev area.
Again, at the end of March and April of 2022, after this peace agreement was very close to being signed by the UK and Russia to end this war.
But this peace agreement was blocked by the Western countries, by Boris Johnson, and I think by the Biden administration as well.
And I think this was the main reason for Russia to withdraw their forces from the Kiev area.
And I watched these battles taking place in the Kiev area myself on social media.
On the Telegram, different Telegram channels, videos, because originally I also studied in Kiev at my university before I came to the United States.
So in this case, I think it was very clear that this was not a military defeat of Russia.
So the Russian just basically, even though they have very significant resistance from Ukrainian forces, they decided to withdraw from Kiev area because of this peace agreement, which was very close to being signed.
And I think a lot of media just use this withdrawal of Russian forces as evidence actually that Ukraine is defeating Russia, that Ukraine is winning this war.
Even so, this was not the case.
And the same, I think, happened with Kherson withdrawal of Russian forces, and Ukraine was able to take back territory which was poorly defended by Russian forces in Kharkiv area.
And now Russia basically launched a new offensive in this region and was able to capture some part of Ukrainian territory in Kharkiv region.
But it was very clear, and I pointed this in my Twitter, From the start of this war, I pointed this in my academic studies and also in my interviews, media interviews, that the UK basically has close to zero chance to defeat Russia and it was clear that basically Zelensky and his Patrons in the United States, Biden administration, basically gambled against all the odds of defeating Russia.
Even so, there was no real chance, no real possibility.
And I regard this as a major folly, as a major mistake.
And I think this was a mistake for many people, but I think many did this kind of willingly.
They wanted specifically to use Ukraine as a tool To defeat Russia, even so, not to defeat Russia, to weaken Russia, as former, as current head of Pentagon stated in spring of 2022.
So they did not believe that Russia can be defeated, but they basically presented this as propaganda that this can be achieved in order to justify such a policy, which I think has a very negative and damaging effect on Ukraine.
And I think this is just a manifestation of this issue, which I can also say, based on my research in particular in Ukraine, that actually it's not social media, but actually politicians and governments, and also mainstream media, which are major sources of misinformation, because they have vested interest to misrepresent for their own political interest, or for the business interest, or personal interest, actually what's going on.
And I think in this case, academic research is a very important alternative Just to present a picture which is based on evidence and facts and not on a kind of political, wishful thinking or any kind of political biases.
I want to get a little bit more into the motives of the West and NATO with regard to this war.
But before we get to that, one of the tactics that the Western media and especially the American media has used for a long time to sell wars is that they will make claims about what the people in that country believe or want by selecting, handpicking a certain group of people who represent not necessarily the views of the whole country, but the views that the West wants to hear.
This was a Famous and well-used tactic before the war in Iraq.
We heard from all these Iraqi exiles who hadn't lived in Iraq for 40 years, who are presented as speaking for the Iraqi people, who said, Iraqis hate Saddam Hussein.
They want the West to come in and overthrow them.
They'll be welcomed as liberators.
Same thing in Libya, in Syria.
It's a sort of tactic that's done all the time.
And one of the things that has happened since the beginning of this war and into it is that we're constantly being told how much Ukrainians love their central government in Kiev, how much they support Zelensky, how much they hate Russia and the Russian invasion, because we basically only hear from people in the parts of Ukraine that are actually anti-Russian in Kiev and in the western provinces.
And we never hear, basically never, From Ukrainians who live in, certainly in Crimea, or in the eastern provinces who have a different view.
Can you talk about the difference in perspective and identity and history between these two parts of Ukraine?
Yes, and I published a book on this very topic based on my doctoral dissertation at George Mason University in the US, and I can say that the UK was a divided country between the eastern part of the UK and the southern part of the UK, which were pro-Russian, because they used to be part of Russia for a very long time, for centuries, while Western Ukraine, and to a lesser extent Central Ukraine, used to have a different history.
Western Ukraine was for a long time Part of Poland, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and after World War I, it became a part of Romania and Czechoslovakia and Poland.
And only as a result of World War II, Western Ukraine was incorporated into the Soviet Ukraine under Joseph Stalin.
So in this regard, Ukraine was a very divided country because people in Western Ukraine were very pro-Western, but also pro-nationalist, and they were also very anti-Russian in contrast to people In eastern and southern Ukraine.
But it's also very important to understand that pro-Russian views in eastern and central Ukraine did not necessarily mean support for Russian invasion of Ukraine or desire basically to be part of Russia.
Because only in two regions of Crimea and Donbass, according to my research and according to a variety of public opinion polls, there was a majority support for joining Russia.
seceding from Ukraine and joining Russia.
And these two regions included ethnic Russians, who were a majority of population in Crimea and also were close to 50 percent of the population of Donbas.
So these two regions actually support current war by Russia and Ukraine.
They also support the annexation of their regions by Russia or joining Russia voluntarily.
of their regions by Russia or joining Russia voluntarily.
The other regions of Eastern and Southern people supported better relations in Russia, and people in the West of Ukraine and also to a large extent in the central Ukraine, in Kyiv city in particular, they supported joining the European Union and NATO.
So there was such a very significant divide, and this divide was manifested in all elections since the Ukraine became independent in 1991, and a variety of public opinion also shows a similar divide, because the majority of people in the West, they said they wanted to join the because the majority of people in the West, they said they wanted to join the European Union, they wanted to join NATO, but the people in Eastern and
And now, a lot of, again, media now uses public opinion polls to basically say what people actually in the UK think about the war or peace agreements.
They say that people in the UK are actually against peace.
Deal with Russia to end this war.
But actually now public opinion polls are not reliable because Ukraine now became even less democratic than it used to be before the war.
And basically it's not a democracy anymore.
There is no free press.
There is no possibility to express political opinion freely because of repressive policies by Zelensky government.
So only people actually who are able to express opinion In the UK now, people who support the Zelensky government and people who have different views actually are not able to do this.
Many of them are actually even in prison if they would criticise or say something Which goes against the current policies.
So in this case, I think the voices which are present in the Western media of Ukrainians who support this war, continuation of this war, and claim that they support Zelensky government and his policies, are actually often not representative of all Ukrainians in Ukraine.
They are actually very biased, and a lot of people who speak very good English, again, they are interviewed very often in the media.
I'm talking on behalf of all Ukrainians, but actually they're not talking about all Ukrainians, they often talk about themselves, or their own views, or very narrow elite, or often just people from Western Ukraine and Central Ukraine, also to a significant extent, and they are given basically only unlimited or very significant media coverage, while people who have different views, including myself, I'm originally from Western Ukraine and I supported
Again, um...
From the start I supported the European Union, joining the European Union membership if you can, but it's very difficult actually to get my views expressed in the media, mainstream media in the United States.
Actually now, since the Russian invasion, even though I gave now a few thousand media interviews in different media of more than 80 countries of the world, basically all mainstream media in the United States now basically did not ask me for any interview.
Since the start of the Russian invasion, and I think this is just a manifestation of the problem, because the kind of representations that people are given in the media, including also very prominent media like the New York Times, are often biased and not representative of the views of Ukrainians.
And I think this is very important, because If you look into a variety of public opinion polls, they are often cited by the media as evidence of views of Ukrainians, but public opinion polls now are not reliable, because people are not able to express their views freely, and I do not use public opinion polls.
Actually, I look into the actual behavior of people, because what people do has a much bigger manifestation of their actual views compared to what they say.
Especially if they feel pressured to say what actually would be regarded as politically acceptable, which often people do now in Ukraine.
So one of the ways that we can actually see some dissent, I guess you could call it, from the war policies in Ukraine is something you've been reporting on and discussing a lot of and showing videos a lot of, which is the growing number of Ukrainian men who are physically resisting
Not just hiding, but when they're found, physically resisting the Ukrainian military recruiters who are trying to take them and force them to enlist in the military and then fight in the front line.
There was a BBC report from a month ago or so that said since the start of the war, something like 650,000 Ukrainian men have left the country, have fled the country, have found a way out of the country, presumably to avoid the war.
Do you think that this trend that you're showing is a growing trend among Ukrainian men resisting being drafted?
And if so, why is that growing?
Yes, this is exactly, and the videos which you just showed from different regions of Ukraine, one of them was filmed in the native region of Dnipro, Dnipropetrovsk region of southern Ukraine, or eastern Ukraine, which is the native region of Zelensky.
Another video was from Kiev city, and another video was actually from Lviv region in western Ukraine, which is a very anti-Russian region.
And in all these regions, basically in all these different locations of Ukraine, People try to escape evasion, they try to evade evasion, specifically because they are caught by police or by military recruiters on the street, and then they are sent to the front line without a very significant amount of training, without any skills, and many people get killed.
So I look into such evidence, I analyze these videos on social media, I watch hundreds of videos each day, and I only post a very limited amount of the videos, because this is kind of just what I find as part of my research, just representative videos which I posted instantly and which received also a lot of attention.
But I can say that a number of such videos increased very significantly since new mobilization law was announced by Zelensky two weeks ago.
And they show that there is very significant resistance to mobilization, to forced mobilization to continue this war by people not only in eastern and southern Ukraine, but also people in western Ukraine and people in central Ukraine.
And this is not only based on videos, because if you look into statistics in addition to the number of people which are mentioned in this BBC report, which you cited, 650,000 who actually left Ukraine, actually according to a statement who actually left Ukraine, actually according to a statement by a former advisor to President Zelensky, who actually said in one of his media interviews that four and a half million of Ukrainian men would...
who actually said in one of his media interviews that four and a half million of Ukrainian men would resist it, updating their information in military recruitment offices because they do not want to be called for the military, updating their information in military recruitment offices because they do not want to be called for the military,
So four and a half million Ukrainians resisted doing this voluntarily and now they face very significant punishment in terms of very significant fines and even possibility of confiscation of property and even imprisonment if they would continue not to register the information to military recruitment offices.
And just looking to, just if you're looking to other kind of source information, there was an interview by one of the officials from Lviv region, again, in the Western Ukraine, which is very anti-Russian region, who said that recently just 2% of people who actually called to summons to who said that recently just 2% of people who actually called to summons to military So this means 90-80% of people in the most anti-Russian region of the UK do not want to do this.
And according to Kind of other information, according to Ukrainian media reports, there were millions of people who actually, more than one million people, men of military age, who actually now were called to be wanted by the police because they also evaded military registration, they evaded to be called for the military service.
In addition to this, I just checked my native kind of region of Western Ukraine, the Volyn region, which is very close to Poland, and there is a telegram group of people Who actually just watch announcements about, daily announcements about military conscription offices, their location and what they do, in which places they wait and try to capture men for the military service.
And this group now has almost 40,000 members, subscribers.
So this is just information.
So basically this means if you're looking to possible Number of people who are eligible for military service now in this region.
So this would mean that at least 25% of people, men actually, who are eligible for military service actually try to escape and avoid a call for such a service in Western Ukraine, in this region.
But If you're looking to other people who are not subscribers to this Telegram channel, but watch this, just read this, without subscribing, or people who may be doing this as part of their families.
So now it's very likely that the absolute majority of people and men in Western Ukraine actually do not want to be basically captured and brought to the front line.
And I think this is much more significant evidence of actual opinion of Ukrainians compared to what we see in the media and public opinion polls, which are not representative, because they are, I think, very biased and just not reliable.
And I have a new book which will be published also soon.
Which is an open access book in which I also examine these issues, I cite these issues specifically as evidence of real public opinion and not what is actually presented in the media as basically Ukrainian men and Ukrainians wanting to justify Russia to the last Ukrainian.
I think this is actually a view which is expressed by Western politicians.
They often kind of use Ukraine just to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian and I think this is a very unfortunate situation.
One of the things that amazes me is there's been a lot of reports, even in the Western media, about the political difficulties Zelensky had in expanding the draft mobilization law.
The age of the draft had been 27, and he lowered it to 25, and even that was It's very difficult to pass.
It had a lot of political resistance.
And then you had an American senator, Lindsey Graham, who's been a very vehement supporter of the war in Ukraine and pretty much a vehement supporter of every war that has ever existed, who went to Ukraine and then came back and he said he was shocked to learn that the draft age was only 27 and then moved to 25.
Now, it kind of scares me that someone who's been so involved in Talking about the war and governing the war in the United States didn't know what you would know even just from reading basic reports.
But I think one of the things he was reacting to is that during Vietnam and other American wars, the draft age in the United States was 18.
So we were sending 18 and 19 and 20 year old kids over to fight in Vietnam and other wars before that where the draft was used.
Why is the draft age in Ukraine not been lowered to, say, 18?
Why is it at 27 and now 25, given how difficult it is for Zelensky to get enough people on the front line?
I think one issue is political difficulty, because Zelensky did not want to damage or endanger his reputation, his approval in Ukraine, because for him, basically, public relations is the most important issue.
So he very carefully pays attention to his image, and a lot of his actions dictated by his own view, what would be beneficial to him in terms of public opinion in Ukraine and in the West.
So in this case, such a change of recruitment age to lower age would be not very popular in the Ukraine, and for this reason, Zelensky resisted this for a very long time.
But this change, after visits by the United States politicians, and also the US Senator whom you mentioned, and they basically told Zelensky to lower the draft age, and he did this.
Because Ukraine is what I say is a client state of the United States and the United States has a lot of say and influence in terms of policy of the Ukrainian government.
Zelensky just follows often US policy in this case.
And instructions given by U.S.
politicians, so here kind of just follow this in the case of lowering the draft age.
But I think another issue is that there is a very small number of actually people or men of this age group eligible for military service in Ukraine, because one of the issues that was after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was a very significant drop of of a number of children that people have.
And so in this case, the number of people who could be eligible in this age group is much smaller compared to older generations before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
And another issue is that a lot of younger people of this age group Before, younger than 25 years old, I also have exemptions from military service because such exemptions are given to students, for instance.
So a lot of people who just went to universities or study in universities, they are exempt from military service.
And I think one of the policies dictated by Zelensky since the start of the war was to ban all Ukrainians from the age of 18 years old to 60 years old from leaving the UK.
So now people who are eligible for media services by their age, and not only this, people who are 18 years old and 25 years old, men are not able to leave the UK.
And this is just a result of the policy of Zelensky.
And I think there is still a possibility that because of the current situation on the front of Ukraine, which has a very negative dynamic for Ukraine because of Russian military advantage, so Zelensky might be forced to even lower military age, daft conscription age to much younger age groups, including daft conscription age to much younger age groups, including 18 years old.
And there are a lot of people, specifically far-right, people who are now given interviews on Ukrainian television, and they call to do this, they call openly, For Zelensky to lower the draft age to 18 years old, and this is specifically given by people from the neo-Nazi Azov regiment, or from the far-right sector group, and so on.
So now they lobby basically, or they press Zelensky to kind of lower the draft age, and I think this is a possibility that he would be forced to do this, because now this very difficult situation in the UK, and specifically Zelensky will try everything to do to prevent this.
But basically using, again, Ukrainians to try to kind of stop Russian advance, which would be, I think, very difficult to do this because Russia has advantage in manpower, but also military advantage in weapons.
Just have a couple more questions for you.
Just because we've gone for about 30 minutes.
So I just want to be respectful of your time.
But one of the things that seemed very clear from the start of the war was that if you looked at what the US and NATO were saying, and how they were defining victory, which was essentially Victory means the expulsion of every single Russian troop from every inch of Ukrainian soil, including Crimea, which the Russians have annexed since 2014 in response to the change of government there that a lot of people consider to be a coup.
So you have, on the one hand, the U.S.
and NATO saying, we're going to fight until victory, which means expelling every Russian troop from all parts of Ukraine, including Crimea.
And then obviously you look at it from the Russian perspective, and that's something they could never allow and would never allow and would do everything possible to prevent.
And it seems like there is no way out of it because the Russians aren't going to leave Ukraine, certainly not going to leave Crimea, but it seems impossible as well for the West to win The war by the standard that they've defined it.
Here we are two and a half years into this war, and we're essentially in the same position.
And I think, you know, one of the reasons you see NATO officials talking about escalation, allowing the bombing of US weapons inside Russia, or even deploying NATO forces there, is because they're petrified of suffering defeat as they define the victory.
There's a peace conference coming up.
What do you see over the next, say until the end of the year, as the prospect for having this war end?
I think now the policy of the U.S.
government and other Western governments, which basically follow the U.S.
policy in this regard, is to continue war there as long as possible, because otherwise they would be forced to admit defeat in this conflict, which was very easy to prevent in the first place.
and avoid such defeat specifically or minimize such consequences with a peaceful agreement which was almost reached in Istanbul in spring of 2022 but was blocked by British and US administration Specifically to use Ukraine to weaken Russia in this proxy war.
So in this case, there are public claims by Western officials that the goal of Ukraine is to defeat Russia by taking back not only Donbass, but also Crimea.
It kind of looks as a total.
And this was very clear from the start, and again, I mentioned this in social media, in my media interviews, and in my publications, academic publications.
There is no, basically, this is close to zero chance that this could happen.
Which means, basically, in reality, that this would never happen in practice, because Russia specifically stated that they would resort to all means, including nuclear weapons, if what they call territorial integrity of Russia would be threatened.
And they recognized Crimea as part of Russia, even so it was annexed in 2014.
So this would mean, basically, that even if Ukrainian forces were able to move into Crimea and to take back territory of Crimea, this would have led to escalation of this war, and Russia using nuclear weapons or using a set of nuclear weapons.
So this means it was not very likely that such scenario would happen.
And at the time, as also mentioned, because Russia had military advantage.
So again, this is not a real scenario that the UK would be able to kind of take back Crimea.
But it was presented by the media and again by politicians as a realistic scenario.
And a lot of people actually believed this would happen.
And Zelensky himself, he also declared this as a goal.
of his policy.
And now he's in a very dangerous situation because he basically has no way to retreat from this, because he said that peaceful agreement now is not possible unless Ukraine would take back Crimea and Donbass.
So this would mean, again, kind of a continuation of this war for a very long time.
And I don't think that this war can end at the end of the year, but there is actually possibility that this war can end.
So now it's much more significant possibility.
And I also believe that there is also possibility that the land scheme will not be able to stay in power until the end of this year because of going opposition to his ruling, which again became very desperate according to media reports and according to his public statements.
So he recently went against Trump, calling him a loser, basically, if he would have a peace plan, basically, for Ukraine to kind of admit Russian occupation of Ukraine.
Or if Biden, he criticized Biden for not going to peace summit in Switzerland, and he just now went against China, Saying the Chinese basically are puppets of Russia and so on.
So basically now Zelensky's acting is very kind of erratic and desperate way.
And the new peace conference which would be held in Switzerland later this month is basically only public relations stand.
So this is again for Zelensky just to show that he still has support in the West, in many other countries, but in reality it would have no possibility of real peace.
Because, again, a real peaceful agreement was very lucky.
It was a realistic possibility in March and April of 2022, but it was blocked by the Western countries for the reasons which I mentioned.
So I think a lot of people just lie really near, because they wanted to use Ukraine to weaken Russia and not to defeat Russia.
But a lot of people actually believe that this would be a real possibility of defeating Russia because they did not know actually what was going on.
They rely on the media and politicians and government officials as their source information.
So this is what I call in my Twitter comments, I call this kind of way of representation of Ukraine as kind of a failure tale, Hollywood basically movies kind of happy end, and also garbage in, garbage out.
Because if you rely on such information, which is basically garbage information, and decisions, kind of outcome of this would be basically garbage.
So this is what the situation now, and I think a lot of people now recognize that they were basically fed all this misinformation, misinformation, disinformation by the governments, by media.
And now I think a very tough situation for Ukraine and for Zelensky and for Western governments because they would have choice of defeating, basically accepting defeat, limited defeat, and reaching peaceful agreement to end this war.
Or otherwise they have a choice to continue this war without any realistic possibility of defeating Russia.
So this would mean more casualties to Ukraine, more forced mobilization, without any actual prospect of defeating Russia, And I think Russia would be able to take even more territory of Ukraine as a result of this conflict if it would continue.
So I think this is a very clear choice and a very clear situation from the start.
And now I think the choice is for people actually, for politicians actually, to admit this major mistake and try to minimize this mistake.
It's still possible to save a lot of Ukrainian lives in this case.
Well, last question for you.
One of the things that really genuinely alarmed me as a journalist was watching how the Western media narrative about Ukraine that had existed for eight years or nine years before the Russian invasion ...switched immediately and completely the minute the media needed to sell this war in Ukraine.
And they did this in a lot of ways, but the most notable one was that pretty much every media outlet in the West had spent many years warning of the dangers of these very strong neo-Nazi militias inside Ukraine, like the Azov Battalion.
And of course, this isn't to say that Ukraine is a Nazi country, that all Ukrainians are Nazis.
That's, of course, not the true and not the point.
The concern was that these are the really armed factions inside Ukraine, that they weren't really integrated with the Ukrainian military, that they're real neo-Nazis.
They have, you know, pictures of Stepan Bandera and Nazi insignias everywhere.
And after 2022, the Azov Battalion got turned into heroes.
You know, you would see all kinds of praise from the New York Times and others and Western officials embracing them and heralding them.
How do you see Today, the threat of these neo-Nazi militias or battalions inside Ukraine, and what do you make of these excuses that, oh, the Azov battalion has moderated, that they integrated into the Ukrainian military, that they no longer have this dangerous Nazi ideology?
What do you make of all that?
I think I researched this issue for a very long time.
I researched fire fighting in Ukraine for more than 10 years and published academic studies about this issue.
For me, this was a shock to see in the media the total change of their coverage of Azov, which is an openly neo-Nazi-led unit of the Ukrainian National Guard.
and now became a new brigade in the UK military and so on, and UK military intelligence.
So this was kind of unbelievable.
This is almost like George Orwell.
So you see kind of basic people who are openly admitting their neo-Nazi views publicly on social media before the Russian invasion using neo-Nazi insignia, like swastikas and assessed symbols and so on, becoming suddenly heroes. like swastikas and assessed symbols and so on, becoming suddenly They are met with top officials from the US government, they are met with members of the US Congress.
They met with top university officials.
For instance, recently they met with Oxford University, I think the chancellor of one of the colleges of Oxford University.
They met with Boris Johnson, who called them heroes.
Again, quite unbelievable.
Even before the Russian invasion, U.S.
Congress passed an amendment to the U.S.
Defense Bill in which there was a prohibition of giving any assistance, military assistance or training or money to the Azov battalion because of their ideology.
But now, this was a total change of policy because this was, I think, motivated, again, purely for political reasons.
Azov did not change.
Their neo-Nazi ideology did not change.
But they became kind of presented as a totally moderate kind of rebels equivalent.
So this is similar to what happened with Syria.
When there was al-Qaeda, a filial in Syria, which suddenly became kind of jihadist and so on, they became moderate rebels because Supporting democracy and so on.
Similar situation was in Kosovo during a kind of war between NATO and Serbia over Kosovo in 1998.
Suddenly overnight Kosovo Liberation Army became from terrorist organization into organization which was supporting freedom and so on.
Mujahideen in Afghanistan during the Soviet war in Afghanistan We're also presented as basically freedom fighters and so on.
So this is basically just politics, pure politics, motivated by a desire to, again, use Ukraine.
And there is now open support by the Western governments and media for open neo-Nazis.
I think this is a very dangerous situation in Ukraine, because there are real power in Ukraine, because of Even though they are numerically small, they do not have representation in the Ukrainian parliament or Ukrainian government.
They are not Nazi or neo-Nazi government, as Russia claims.
But actually, far-right, including open neo-Nazis, had a very significant role in overthrowing Yanukovych's government, the Russian government, in 2014.
As a result of this Maidan massacre, which I just submitted my book today, about this event and what happened during that time.
So they have a very important role in the violent overthrow of Yanukovych's government, specifically by murdering their own people, own supporters and police, in order to blame the government of Yanukovych.
And afterwards they became very powerful because of the alliance on force and the threat of force.
So after Zelensky was elected, As President of the UK, he promised a peaceful resolution of the war in Donbass, which was a civil war, with Russian support, Russian military intervention.
But then two things happened.
One, far-right, basically neo-Nazi, Matan Sumazov told Zelensky that they would not retreat from military front line.
They said to him that if he would reach peaceful agreement, he basically would be killed in Kiev.
So they threatened him openly.
This happened also with far-right leader of right sector.
And again, they did not face any retaliation.
They were openly kind of supported by Zelensky.
So Zelensky, instead of trying to go against the far-right or including open neo-Nazis, he openly started to support them, placate them, giving them kind of support, money, kind of saying that they are now models, they support Ukraine and so on, giving them a lot of Order medals and so on here of Ukraine, titles and so on.
So this is now, I think, a very dangerous situation because far-right in Ukraine is a real opposition or kind of real power and they can overthrow Zelensky because they rely on violence, they have support in military forces, they have now integrated military, they are integrating security forces and police.
So they kind of just they can accept Zelensky or just use violence and overthrow him if he would attach a peace deal.
So I think in this case, I think this is very important danger for the UK from far right because they are alternative to Zelensky and if Zelensky would attach a peace deal, he would be overthrown or would be threatened by far right.
And I think in this case, Western governments are now kind of, and Western media actually are using this far right for their own benefit, but they can suffer blowback, in this case, similar to what happened with Al-Qaeda in, again, in Afghanistan, which was initially supported in Afghanistan, which was initially supported as part of Taliban, supported as part of Mujahideen during the war with the Soviet Union.
But then they kind of launched 9-11 in the United States.
And this similar situation can happen also with far right, including neo-Nazis in the UK.
And they can be very dangerous for this reason, because now they have military power, they have ability, they have their own military units, so they can use violence not only in the UK, but also in other countries, including Western countries, because they will be very bitter against the United States and many other Western governments for not defeating because they will be very bitter against the United States and many other Western governments for not So in this case, I think this is a very dangerous situation for the UK, but also for the West.
And part of this problem is actually because of this policy, which was dictated by political reasons to basically whitewash far-right, including open neo-Nazis, which are, I think, still open neo-Nazis, and they are still far-right, even some media and politicians tell otherwise.
Well, Professor Kochanovsky, I think people can now understand why I consider you to be such an important source of information and knowledge and scholarship about this war.
We're going to put your Twitter account in the notes to the show.
So hopefully people can follow you there.
I really appreciate your taking the time not just to talk to us, but to shed so much light on this area in which you're an actual expert.
And we'd love to have you back on soon.
Thanks very much.
Thank you.
All right.
Good night.
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