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Feb. 26, 2025 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
02:03:14
Glenn From Moscow: Russia Reacts to Trump; Michael Tracey Debates Ukraine War

Glenn joins from Europe for a brief update, and Michael returns from CPAC with exclusive content and a debate on the Ukraine War with Tom Mutch. -------------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update:  Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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- Hey everybody, welcome to a new episode of System Update.
As you can undoubtedly see, I am not in the studio.
Instead, I am in Budapest.
You can probably see the landmark, one of the landmarks of Budapest sitting on the Daniel River over my left shoulder.
The reason I'm here is because I have been traveling the last several days.
That's why I wasn't very present last night on last night's show and won't be that much on tonight's either.
I've been traveling to do a bunch of different interviews.
Obviously, there's a lot going on in Eastern Europe, in Russia, in response to all the flurry of new policies, new approaches, new narratives.
In Washington, as a result of a new Trump administration, I spent the last several days in Moscow.
Where I conducted several different interviews, one of which we are extremely excited to show you for tomorrow night.
That will be with one of the most influential and prominent professors in Russia, Professor Dugin.
And it was a really wide-ranging hour and 45-minute discussion.
We hope to show you that tonight.
It's not quite ready.
It'll be ready tomorrow night, though.
I found it really fascinating.
Obviously, as you undoubtedly know, there's an attempt to ensure...
We in the West never hear from Russian voices.
Almost immediately in the wake of the invasion of large numbers of Russian troops in February of 2022, the EU actually passed a law making it criminal, illegal to platform Russian state media like RT and Sputnik.
It is always the case that when you hear from the other side, from different perspectives, you hear the full planoply of their views not mediated through others, not summarized, not caricatured.
And it's extremely illuminating whether you agree with it, whether you disagree with it, you think the war is horrific, whatever your views are, there's still a huge journalistic value, a huge intellectual value to understanding the perspectives of other people that we don't hear from.
So I'm very excited to show you that tomorrow night.
We're also going to – I also was able to meet with Edward Snowden.
We didn't do an interview.
We might do one shortly.
But I was able to speak with him, speak with a lot of other people.
I'm going to do the same here, and we'll fill you in as we go.
But tomorrow night you can look for that interview with Professor Dugan.
I'm also going to have some discussions and thoughts about my trip so far.
particularly about what it is that I heard in Moscow from Russian officials, Russian journalists, Russian activists.
with whom I met, with whom I was able to speak about the war in Ukraine, about the perspective of U.S. relations in light of Trump, about what the new Trump administration means for Russia, how the Russians are looking at the possibility of a resolution in the war in Ukraine, which may not be the same as what the United States is looking for, or even what the United States which may not be the same as what the United States is looking for, or even So we're going to put that on Locals for our Locals members.
And as you know, Locals is the community on which we rely, the members and supporters, to support the independent journalism that we do here.
Every night, you just click the Join button right below the video player on the Rumble page, and it will take you there.
Tonight, we are excited to feature a always illuminating and entertaining Michael Tracy on the Road series.
We showed you last night a series of interviews he did at CPAC, which is the conservative conference that has become really the epicenter, not just of American right-wing politics, but international right-wing politics.
Tonight, we have a variety of segments he was able to do there, including a debate.
On Ukraine, a debate with several hardcore Trump supporters on a variety of different issues.
I think it's very good Michael Tracy content that you probably won't find anywhere else.
So that'll be for tonight.
Stay tuned for tomorrow night where we will have this exclusive and I think really All
right, welcome to another exciting edition of System Update.
I'm Michael Tracy.
Glenn is once again out flitting around the world on his Magical Mystery Tour.
So you are once again stuck with little old me.
Ha ha ha ha.
If you tuned in yesterday, I'm actually recording on the same day, but I'm going to pretend like yesterday's show was in the past.
If you tuned in yesterday, you'll know that I was covering...
This past weekend's CPAC conference for System Update.
You can also follow me at mtracy.net where there's additional stuff that I'm sure will be to your liking.
So go to mtracy.net, mtracy with an E. But for now, System Update has been on the ground here in Washington, D.C., talking to the movers and shakers.
Had a bunch of interesting interviews.
So they're going to be largely posted in full on the System Update channel.
So that's at Rumble YouTube X. So follow all those channels.
And we have an interesting show in store for you tonight.
actually one of the guests is going to be somebody who has wanted to debate me for a long time or at least have a mildly contentious discussion I guess.
He's a journalist.
His name is Tom Much.
He contributes to a bunch of publications and he's always been wanting to take me to task for my views on Ukraine.
So given that we're marking the three-year anniversary of the war I thought maybe we could mix things up and have a bit of a more adversarial discussion coming up soon.
But first I want to get to a couple of more clips that I think are very illuminating from the CPAC reporting trip that we took.
So the first has to do with not Ukraine, but Gaza, although to call to mind Joe Biden, we were all supposed to be viewing these conflicts in the Middle East and in Europe as part of the same continuum of...
Upholding democracy in the rules-based international order.
I'm not 100% sure if the current Trump administration is abiding by that particular rhetorical or ideological framework, but nevertheless, the two main issues that I think I'm still interested in covering much of the time are the ongoing conflicts or...
Simmering conflicts in the Middle East because the Gaza war is technically under ceasefire conditions at the moment, but that's set to potentially expire just within a couple of days.
And so it remains to be seen whether the further negotiations that will be required to sustain that ceasefire will actually come to pass.
There has reportedly been no further negotiation.
Between Israel and Hamas, with the U.S. as obviously a crucial broker, to extend the current ceasefire framework into its second phase, which is set to begin on March 1st.
So there's not that much time left to at least begin the process of some fairly arduous negotiations if that ceasefire framework is to be extended.
Complicating factors in any further ceasefire negotiations are these factions within Israel who have a messianic political ideology in terms of the rightfulness of the Jewish inhabitants of Israel to take over or to inhabit.
All of the territories which Israel ultimately views as within its sovereign jurisdiction.
So that's in the north and the south of Israel.
And with the Gaza takeover proposal, a lot of the Messianic elements in Israel, like Ben-Gavir, the minister who resigned from the Netanyahu cabinet, but is...
Jockeying to penitentially get back into that cabinet, and also Smotrich.
These are people with genuinely Messianic beliefs about the so-called Greater Israel Project and how the Jewish settlers have a divine right to settle any area they wish and potentially expel the native Arab populations.
And so at CPAC, something interesting happened, and we can pull up a screenshot of this, actually, hopefully.
There was a particular Israeli official there.
His name is Israel Gans, so his first name is Israel.
Israel Gans, and he is essentially the governor or the administrator of a consortium of Jewish settlement organizations for the West Bank, which they will call Judea and Samaria,
invoking this biblical lineage that connotes Explain what your title is.
My name is Israel Gans.
He ushered through a resolution that CPAC passed, not that the CPAC resolution passing process is particularly consequential, but he passed a resolution that called on the United States to recognize Israeli jurisdiction or annexation of the West Bank.
And that's long been speculated to be One of the goals of Miriam Adelson, one of the top Republican funders who gave at least $100 million to the Trump 2024 re-election effort, effort, which is that she and people of a similar disposition want to see the U.S. officially recognize Israeli sovereignty over these occupied territories in the West Bank.
There were some initial incremental steps that the first Trump administration took toward that end, but according to this element of Israeli society in conjunction with some of their supporters in the United States, they would like to see it taken to its full fruition.
Under a second Trump term and just do away with any pretense that the Palestinians in West Bank have any self-governance whatsoever.
And so I interviewed the head of one of the Governing consortium councils for the Jewish settlers in the West Bank who have, as their kin, the people like Ben Gavir and Smotrich.
And I asked him about this proposal or this resolution that he got CPAC to pass about Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank, plus issues around Gaza and whether there could eventually be Jewish settlements that return to Gaza.
Because If you recall, or if you never knew, I'll tell you, prior to 2005, there were Jewish settlements in Gaza that were then evacuated.
So some of these messianic elements in Israel want those to be reinstated, and the Trump plan, the ostensible plan to take over Gaza and make it into a U.S. protectorate, could allow for...
The reintroduction of Jewish settlements in Gaza.
So it's a pretty interesting interview.
This is at CPAC. This is myself with Israel Gans, who is the governor of, again, a consortium of Jewish settlement organizations for the West Bank.
Explain what your title is.
My name is Israel Gans.
I am the governor of the Benjamin Regional Council and the chairman of Judea and Samaria.
It's a real organization about all the people in Judea and Samaria.
And you were involved in getting a resolution passed at CPAC this year, calling for the U.S. to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the whole of Judea and Samaria.
What do you see the significance of that being, and what do you anticipate Trump will do in that area?
So, we are never allowed to avoid the truth.
The truth is...
That Judea and Samaria belong to the people of Israel.
Jews came from Judea, and the Western countries forced us to leave this area, and we got terror, and we got Iran arms in the center of our state.
The resolution here made a history.
They declared that Judea and Samaria belong into the people of Israel.
Judea and Samaria belong into the Jews.
I think that this will cut the hope of Iran to have this area.
And I hope President Trump adapts this way and will push for sovereignty in Judea and Samaria.
One of Trump's big supporters and donors is Miriam Adelson, who you...
I'm sure you're familiar with.
And one of her objectives has been just this, which is to push for full Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria.
What do you know about her influence on Trump and whether she might be helping to lobby for that outcome?
I know that Miriam Edelson, I know her.
She's an amazing, amazing woman.
woman and I know President Trump that he is so smart and so strong and brave to make history.
And together when they meet each other they can make history.
It doesn't matter where in the world but they think different, they think out of the books and I promise you they together will change the world.
So when you say that Judea and Samaria or as some call it the West Bank is for the Jews, What does that mean for the Arabs who live there?
Will they just be permanently subordinate to the Jewish authorities or will they be forced out?
What's your ideal outcome for the Arabs who live there?
So when you have sovereignty even here in the United States, it doesn't say that someone has to leave, but you can leave there according to one main rule.
No terror, no education for terror.
You have to leave the terror.
When you do that, you can stay there.
And you have your own rights.
But even today, you know, they have their own rights, their own autonomy to run their communities.
But if we will not be in care, and this area will have terror, like we have, and we saw at the last, even last day, even yesterday, we saw the bombs that came from Tulkarem.
Sovereignty, which means...
The whole area will be under Israel's responsibility, and everyone will have the rights to live there in peace without terror.
But will the Palestinians or the Arabs who live there have any form of self-government?
So, you know, they have.
It's not a government.
It's called authority.
But you want to get rid of that, right?
You know, you know, that they didn't have an election for more than 20 years.
And you know what's the reason?
The reason is because everyone knew that if they will have an election, Hamas will take over the government.
So today, Palestinian Authority not represents the people.
When I met the leaders of the community, they told me, we have to read off Palestinian Authority.
They don't represent us, even today.
So now...
Exactly like President Trump suggests for Gaza Strip.
If someone wants to leave, he can.
If someone wants to stay, he can.
He can leave if he will declare that he will not support and deal with terror.
This is the only reason.
About the only question that we have to deal with is about the right to vote.
But even here in the United States, you have Puerto Rico.
You have about four million people.
They have all rights, but they don't have the right to vote.
They vote for their own authority.
Each will be the same.
So I've been to Judea and Samaria, West Bank, and I've talked to Jewish settlers who believe that they're embarked on a messianic project, meaning that they believe that there's a religious sort of prophecy behind why they're in this area and that if they take control of this land, the Messiah will return.
Is that your belief?
I'm not dealing right now with ideological.
I'm practical, what we see.
I will say different.
Look, God will stand with everyone that helped him.
God brought us to the heartland after long exile.
And we have to continue the process.
What will be happening, God will say with us.
That's what I can tell you for sure.
Okay, and finally, Trump announced his plan to take over Gaza.
And there were some people who are also settler, you know, who are messianic believers or settlers, like Ben Gavir and Smotrich and so forth.
I'm curious what your views are on them, but they supported Trump's proposal, whereas this is not something that Netanyahu is necessarily advocating, so it was kind of, threw everything a little bit off kilter.
What do you make of that proposal for the U.S. to take over Gaza?
And would you want Jewish settlements to also return to Gaza, as they had been before 2005, when under Sharon, they were evacuated?
So, as they started, the state of Israel belonged to the Jews.
But we have a problem for decades, and no one could bring a solution to the table.
President Trump came with, I think, a very brave idea.
Because the people there, they leave, you know, the average salary is $2,000 per year.
You can provide them a much better life in different places.
It solves the problem forever.
What if they don't want to leave?
You know, no one talks about forcing them to leave.
But, you know...
It's a crazy idea that they live there.
You know, you, yourself, can leave this place and you can live wherever you want.
Why people encourage them to stay there and no one lets them to leave?
Why?
Why are they hostages?
Because all the countries in the world, they're talking about their rights.
In fact, they want this bomb to be exploded.
If people from Italy want to move to the United States, he has a process to do, but he can do that.
I'm from Israel, can move to Italy or France, I can do that.
Why is they not allowed to leave the place?
They don't have self-government in the same way.
So why do you want them to stay there?
I don't, necessarily.
And again, why do Jordan and Lebanon...
Can they go to Israel?
Why do Lebanon and Jordan didn't give a citizenship to the towns that they have from refugees camp from 1948?
Because they want them all to come back to Israel and to destroy the one Jewish state.
This is their goal.
But they couldn't go to Tel Aviv, right?
Why?
I ask you again.
Why don't you ask Jordan?
That they have refugees camp since 1948, and they still don't give them citizenship.
Why?
Why Lebanon and Syria do the same?
Why Egypt do the same?
Because they keep all these Arabs, what they call Palestinians, as hostages.
President Trump came and said it's over.
We have a solution, and he will give them...
only brave that brought a realistic decision to the table and do you want jewish settlements there eventually it will be a part for everyone that come it will be you can come from related saints you can pre you can come from israel and i'm sure you will see a much more beautiful asa okay so there's that gentleman who again is
Residing over the governance of the currently existing Jewish settlements in one of the occupied territories, expressing optimism about how, under this potential Trump plan to take over Gaza,
Gaza's going to be made very much more beautiful because, as I asked him to comment on, there could be the addition of some of these long, Sought after additional Jewish settlements in Gaza.
So I guess that's just an insight into who is the most enthused about this Gaza takeover proposal, which again is very inchoate.
We don't have any exact operational details about what that would look like.
But even in terms of just the principle now, so far as it's been floated over the past couple of weeks, people like that gentleman are probably the most excited about how it could be used to advance their kind of longstanding religious and political objectives for expanding Israeli territory and making it all a home to the Jews, as he would put it.
There you have it.
That's some exclusive content here on the system update.
One more item from CPAC that I wanted to show to you.
So this is a little bit out of left field, but interesting nonetheless.
As I was meandering around CPAC, somebody chased me down and said, hey, you should interview us.
And I'm like, who are you?
Oh, they're the third-term project.
So these are people who are organizing for Trump to be able to serve a third term, so to run again in 2028, and be constitutionally eligible for office, which is, as of now, not allowed under the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution.
But there's a growing movement of people who...
Are so dead set on Trump remaining in power that they're prepared to amend the Constitution.
And there was a bill introduced to this effect by a Republican member of Congress.
And anyway, I thought this is, again, maybe a certain insight into elements of the psyche among attendees at CPAC. And so I did want to show you this interview.
All right, so I was just chased down and asked if I would like to interview the people behind the Trump 2028 project, which I can only imagine the meaning of.
Okay, so is this serious?
And how would that be actualized?
Is it about repealing the 22nd Amendment?
Yeah, there is a constitutional amendment that's been introduced by Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee.
It's currently active, so we're with the third term project.
We are pushing support for the Andy Ogles amendment.
So we're rallying, first starting with more conservative lawmakers in D.C., working on getting them on board as co-sponsors, and then trying to broaden the support from there.
So yes, we are very serious about pushing this, and there's already been an amendment resolution introduced in Congress, so right now we're rallying support behind that amendment.
But do you really think that two-thirds of state legislatures would ratify the amendment by 2030?
28, usually it can take many years.
It's definitely...
It wouldn't just be Republican states that would have to ratify it.
It's definitely going to take a lot of work.
So we're building the foundation right now.
There's a huge groundswell of support.
Close to 100% support here at CPAC for the idea.
Our buttons are moving pretty fast.
So we're happy to build the groundwork for that.
Obviously it's going to take a lot of work, but we're happy to do the work.
So there's no scenario in which Trump could simply disregard the 22nd Amendment, right?
No, you're actually advocating for a constitutional process.
In other words, I've heard it argued that depending on how you read it, there's potentially some way to read the text of the 22nd Amendment that would enable Trump to run for a third term, maybe because he's been elected to two non-consecutive terms.
Something along those lines.
You do think that the 22nd Amendment, as it reads today, would not allow for him to run again?
Well, you know, I'm a part of the group Republicans for National Renewal.
You know, we're for the Constitution, supporting the Constitution, restoring the Constitution.
So, no, we don't want to go around the Constitution.
We want to amend it, whether it's done through Representative Andy Ogle's constitutional amendment or whether it's done through Article 5 Convention of the State.
So that's what we're looking for.
And, you know, we don't want to disregard the Constitution.
We just want to give the people a choice.
And if Trump signed the ballot in 2028 and the people...
Right, so the Article 5 convention, that's never been done before in American history.
I think it was, didn't Thomas Jefferson say that once every 30 years or something, there should be a new constitutional convention, but that never occurred.
Actually, I read in the New York Times maybe a month ago an article that was pretty good on developments or momentum around the concept of an Article 5 convention that you might not have...
What's the status of an Article 5 convention?
And just explain what that means for people who might not be familiar.
Basically, it would be a convention of the state, so the states could call what would essentially be a constitutional convention to amend the Constitution.
There's been more, there's been momentum developing around the idea in recent years.
I know there's been resolution, I'm from the state of Michigan, there's been resolutions that have been active in gaining mainstream support.
So, you know, for various ideas, you know, people have talked about a balanced budget amendment or something along those lines.
So injecting the Trump 2028 idea, the third term project.
That discussion is something that we're also going to do.
Right now, we're primarily focused on garnering support for Representative Ogles' amendment.
But we also are going to push for Article 5, too, in case that doesn't work.
And what's the underlying motivation for it?
Is Trump really just that irreplaceable or historically anomalous that J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio or somebody else couldn't carry on the mantle?
Why does it have to be Trump?
Personally, and he would be, what, 83 or 82 if he were to run again in 2028, which is pretty old.
Well, if you look at, you know, different presidents, you know, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, the recent presidents, you know, they went into office and it looked like, by the end, they looked much older.
Trump seems like he's aging in reverse.
You wouldn't think he was in his late 70s.
You would think maybe early 60s and 50s.
So I think he has a special man with the vitality to do the job for another four years.
And you're going with a proven commodity.
When I got involved in the movement, I was a Ron Paul supporter.
And Ron Paul, he had a pretty good groundswell of grassroots support.
Didn't win a primary.
Didn't come close to winning the nomination.
Same for Pat Buchanan.
So Trump was able to fight the establishment and get across the finish line.
So we want to go with a proven commodity, a proven winner.
And J.D. Vance, what is he, 40, 41?
He'll still be a young man.
With 2032, when his time comes, he'll still be a young man.
He'll still be able to take the mantle from there.
But I think we go with a proven commodity.
what Trump is doing with Doge and with cutting, you know, attacking the federal bureaucracy that's been, you know, in my opinion, strangling the American people for so long.
Let him finish the job, let him alter the trajectory of the country, and give him his third term. - What would you say to people who hear this idea and think that it's reminiscent of some sort of authoritarianism or this idea that maybe Trump has An excessively outsized, like, cult of personality around him, or people are willing to literally revise the Constitution just at his behest.
Is there anything to that critique?
Well, you know, let them be outraged.
You know, a lot of outrage on Twitter right now is getting us a lot of publicity.
So let them be outraged.
But the way I see it is, you know, if you look at what Trump's agenda is doing, he's going after the federal bureaucracy.
He's dismantling the administrative state, the deep state.
So let that, and that, in my opinion, is decentralization.
So Trump is decentralizing government.
He's taking power away from the government, giving it to the people.
I think that's the opposite of an authoritarian agenda.
Foreign policy, I think he's going more toward the direction of non-intervention, whereas Biden was throwing all the money at Ukraine.
Well, it wouldn't be a non-interventionism to have the U.S. take over Gaza and turn it into a military protectorate, would it?
Well, you know...
How's his big proposal so far of the second term?
Fair point, but I do think that's just more of him throwing some stuff out there, trying to get both sides.
I think it's more of a negotiating tactic than a solid policy.
That's impossible to know.
I mean, he's repeated it over and over.
We'll see.
I'm willing to give Trump some leeway on stuff like that, considering I think that he generally wants to go in more of a direction of peace.
So I'm willing to give him more leeway on that, especially what he's been doing in Ukraine, I think, is going in the right direction, not just giving a blank check to Zelensky, trying to get Russia and Ukraine to the table to negotiate some sort of peace.
So I'm willing to give him more leeway than probably...
Is there anything that could happen in the next three years or anything Trump could do that would make you change your mind on whether this is a good idea?
Could he actually, just as a hypothetical, is there anything that you can conceive of that would maybe make you reconsider whether you want to enable him to be permanently installed into power?
Absolutely not.
I think we know what we're getting with Trump, and I think it's his second term.
I think he's learned a lot of the lessons from his first term.
I think you look at Tulsi Gabbard as DNI, you look at RFK as Health and Human Services Secretary, Kash Patel, the head of the FBI, Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense.
I think you see those are four outsiders who have been put into those roles, and it shows that he's done.
We're not putting in swamp creatures, so to speak, in key roles.
That's a lot of power over the bureaucracy.
So I think he's going clearly in the right direction, and I don't see anything that can happen in the next three years that would change my mind or the mind of the people here that Trump should have his third term.
Finally, you do have a likeness of Trump where he is represented as Caesar.
People might look at that and wonder about the potential of some kind of tyrannical rule.
I mean, maybe it's a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but I don't know.
What's the relationship between Trump and Caesar, or what led to that?
We think it's good optics.
Like I said, people get offended if they are going to cry on Twitter.
That's going to give us good publicity.
It's a little bit of a trolling then.
Let them be triggered.
That's kind of the way we're going with our advertising and our promotions.
Alright, very good.
Shane Trejo?
Yes.
Go to thirdtermproject.com.
We're rallying support for Representative Andy Ogle's amendment.
Have you coordinated with him?
Not yet.
We're looking to, but not officially yet.
So we're definitely in his corner, and we're trying to get as many co-sponsors on his resolution as possible.
All right.
Well, thanks a lot.
Thank you.
All right.
Well, there you have it.
That's the fledgling argument in favor of amending the Constitution.
I guess if there are any paranoid Democrats out there, at least for now, they're not talking about literally subverting or ignoring the Constitution.
They do want to go through a constitutional process, which is perfectly legal.
It's a political process to amend the Constitution.
That's kind of a heavy lift.
That's why there are Not that many amendments that have ever been ratified to the Constitution.
So, I don't know.
My sense is that you'd have a hard time getting a bunch of Democratic-leaning states to meet the two-thirds threshold for state legislatures to enact that amendment.
But you never know.
Maybe Trump really will be held up as a new Caesar.
And he just needs to be in office until approximately age 86. So we shall see how that goes.
Again, I think some of that's a little bit tongue-in-cheek, and as that guy mentioned, he's partly motivated by trolling people on Twitter slash X. But however serious it is, I think the receptivity to it among the CPAC faithful, as he recounts there, Let's give you a little bit of an insight to how people kind of are conceiving of themselves in relation to Trump, which could raise some interesting issues.
All right, so we now should be having, I believe, our guest on the line.
Is he there?
All right, great.
Let's bring him on.
This should be an interesting dialogue, hopefully.
All right.
Tom Much.
Is that how you pronounce your name?
Much.
Much.
Okay.
Tom Much.
So you're a journalist.
You have been covering Ukraine for quite some time, rather intensively.
I would say pretty intrepidly, based on some of the reporting that you've done.
So I commend you on that.
But for a while now, you and I have been going back and forth about wanting to have...
Maybe something of a debate.
I don't know that we have to call it a debate.
Maybe just kind of a spirited discussion.
Yes, exactly.
There's no formal debate moderator here or anything.
But just give us a little bit of background on why you wanted to have this discussion and explain to the viewers where you are right now and then maybe just briefly sketch out what you see to be the couple of top pressing issues around Ukraine and US policy in relation to Ukraine.
Yeah, absolutely.
So I am originally from New Zealand.
I grew up there and then I've spent most of my life based in the UK. I have been in Ukraine kind of back and forth on and off since January 2022. So just before the full-scale invasion started.
I got there about a month beforehand.
I was there when the Russians sort of kind of did that blitz towards Kiev.
And I've sort of been hanging around and...
Just going from place to place, documenting everything that's been going on.
I've been to a number of different front lines.
I spend most of my time in Kiev, but I've been to a number of front lines.
You can probably see by the flag, I do kind of wear my heart on my sleeve.
And that's actually one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is because one of the problems I've had is I feel too many people who spend a lot of time in Ukraine or support Ukraine.
I took Ukraine a little bit too much for granted.
And I had this problem at first as well, where I was like, OK, we just assume it is a moral cause and that anybody who doesn't see that is somehow dumb or deluded.
And after having had a little bit of correspondence with you, I was like, that really isn't the right approach to take to this.
I actually think people who are here need to do a better job of explaining, one, what the issues in Ukraine are and why they're important for the rest of the world.
Two, I think we need to own up to the places where Ukrainian supporters have gotten out of hand or have told a lot of stuff that just isn't really...
Accurate.
And also, I think it's really important to bring the discussion now because we are looking at an endgame now.
I think a lot of people, even here and even in Russia, expect that within about the next six months, we're going to see something of a slowdown.
So I think it is actually time to start looking at some of the wider issues of the war.
Some of the wider issues such as, while I still blame Russia entirely for the conflict, could there have been something the people in the West and in Ukraine could have done to avert it?
Could the conflict maybe have ended on slightly better terms or earlier on before all of the destruction in Ukraine happened?
And so that's kind of why I wanted to have that kind of conversation with you, because I know we have probably different views on this topic, but I have admired that you've constantly been consistent with your writing, you've been consistent with your principles, and I thought this is, you know, as good of a discussion to have as anyone.
One point, by the way, on the US side of things, As an American citizen, as not an American citizen partner, I don't really have a specific dog in that sort of fight, if you know what I mean.
So I can't say this is why I want my money spent on Ukraine, because it's not my money, if you know what I mean.
So I hope that gives you a bit of a...
Yeah, yeah.
So let me respond with my own kind of broad overview as to where I think would be most fruitful for you and I to dialogue on.
I sort of agree, but in an inverse way about sometimes my having some reticence about people who have been skeptical overall of the U.S. intervention or involvement in Ukraine writ large or skeptical of the policy status quo, kind of only talking at one another.
And I think that's at times led to a bit of a feedback loop where At least in my experience, it goes beyond what I've always maintained as rational skepticism or critique of the policy into some kind of overblown, fanciful notions about the intrinsic evil of Ukraine on a spiritual level or something, or even undo...
I used to be accused over and over again of being a secret stooge of Russia or taking illicit money from Putin or all this other nonsense just to discredit me for being what I would have considered a critic of.
U.S. foreign policy or like hating Ukraine.
Like I never had any particular reason to hate Ukraine, especially individual Ukrainians.
Everyone that I've met, I've gotten along perfectly fine with.
So it was a tried and two tactic to attempt to undermine or discredit anybody who had a good faith criticism of the war policy.
But at the same time, now at times I do feel like it's gotten a little much where rational criticism sometimes It transforms into either, number one, genuine support for the Russian war effort, which I never have been a supporter of, or number two, kind of like quasi-mystical indictments of Ukraine as like an inherently evil or corrupt country.
Obviously, it has definitely corruption problems with the governance, but it kind of becomes almost like a theological hatred of Ukraine that I don't identify with.
I think the rational critiques ought to have been given more of an airing from people of your disposition.
I know you wear your feelings on your sleeve.
You've been a staunch supporter of Ukraine.
You've called for and wanted for there to be Western, including U.S., funding for Ukraine's furnishment of weapons systems.
And my attitude toward that from the beginning was...
In furnishing those weapon systems, and maybe this is because I tend to be more specifically familiar with how the U.S. foreign policy apparatus works, you're setting into motion sort of a project that takes on its own bureaucratic momentum.
And so you can first just have the Javelin missiles sent, and then it's the heavy artillery systems.
And then it's the HIMARS, and then eventually it's the F-16s, or the Patriot anti-missile systems.
And all of this seems like really exciting to people who are agitating for Ukraine to get support, but it doesn't necessarily go in concert with any overriding strategic objective that is achievable.
In the meantime...
You have waves and waves and waves, hundreds of thousands.
I mean, we don't have to quibble over the exact number, but however many casualties there have been, it's been a staggering loss for both Ukraine and Russia.
And so my focal point in analyzing this situation really has been about the casualties.
I mean, these are people, maybe this is like me being a hippy-dippy...
I don't consider myself a pacifist necessarily, but if I look at the killing fields of the Donbass and there are 25 and 30 and 35-year-olds and sometimes even older soldiers in the case of Ukraine because people into their 40s and 50s have gotten conscripted.
I mean, you can correct me if I'm wrong about that.
You're right.
So that to me, if there's no particular good reason for it other than this like...
Outburst of war fervor, and if you criticize it, you're inundated with trolling by the NAFO guys, where, I mean, they would just, I mean, I'm not complaining about being trolled online, it comes with the territory, but like, that was a tactic that was given some official sanction from people in positions of power, like the Estonian Prime Minister, Kallus, I think that's the correct Baltic state, and others who are like loving this idea of like...
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, so they're supporting just, you know, heaps of abuse being leveled at people who have what I think that thought was always a fair critique.
And I understand people were emotional as you're in the midst of a war.
You're trying to be sort of extra diligent about rooting out who you think might be saboteurs or maybe secret agents of your opponent in a war.
So I get it.
I mean, war itself kind of intrinsically breeds.
A lot of irrational hysteria.
So anyway, so this is why I think that the discussion that you're wanting to have now, I commend you for wanting to have it, but I guess I lament that we couldn't have had it three years ago, right?
When something maybe could have been done to forestall what I suspect is going to prove to be ultimately needless death and destruction.
Yeah.
I don't really have a fundamental disagreement with a lot of what you're saying.
I will say, when you talk about war as an emotional sense, you're like, okay, things escalate and Ukraine gets this and Ukraine gets this.
But take the example you use of Patriot missile batteries.
About two nights ago, I remember I was in bed with my girlfriend.
We're just watching a movie, like anybody who is watching this, and all of a sudden you just hear bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.
Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times.
I think that night there were...
And, you know, 247 drones fired at Kyiv, which were taken down by Patriot missile batteries.
And it's like you have your girlfriend in your arms kind of scared and cowering.
You will have an emotional response that's like, thank God those Patriot missile batteries are there.
Thank God they're protecting the skies over Ukraine.
I would be in danger of dying.
People I love and people I care about would be in danger of dying.
And so I think that is one of the things that people in Ukraine have is because you could directly see.
Ways in which things like this were saving the lives of you and your loved ones, if that makes sense.
So, for instance, it's like we talk about javelins, for instance.
It's like, well, it's a very different issue if you, and I'm talking about one of my friends here who's from a village that was occupied in the east of Kiev region.
It's very different to kind of think of, oh, perhaps javelins will escalate a war when you see those, you know, tanks rolling down literally towards the village where your grandparents live.
And needing those stinger, the javelins and the in-laws to get rid of those tanks that are sort of, you know, firing willy-nilly around your grandparents' house.
And I think one of the problems was, especially in the start, the Russian forces just seemed around, and I'm talking particularly around the Kyiv Oblast here, so callously cruel, so indisciplined, so paranoid, that it's like, well...
When people are describing them as this kind of, you know, horde that needs to be pushed back, you can see it with your own eyes and you're like, I really understand the point of why these people really want these weapons to defend themselves so much.
Now, was there a diplomatic way out of the conflict to start with?
That's, I think, a question that is going to take a little bit of going into because I think there's still a lot of questions over...
You know, and I think it's actually a question that historians are going to actually have to grapple with.
I don't think there's an easy answer to this as to whether something like a NATO, like the U.S., like Jeffrey Sachs claims that if the U.S. had just said, plain, no NATO for Ukraine, there wouldn't have been a war.
I don't entirely buy that, but that might be a discussion for historians to have.
Just to interject briefly, yeah, I mean, it's always going to be a counterfactual discussion.
So we're never going to be able to prove one way or another if this or that diplomatic concession might have averted the war.
However, in the run up to the invasion in February of 2022, I was pointing out with some exasperation that it seems to make not that much sense for then the Biden administration to be proclaiming as an unswerving principle that under no circumstances I was pointing out with some exasperation that it seems to make not that much sense for then the Biden administration to
As if the Biden administration had some, like, unshakable ideological investment in the concept of Ukraine joining NATO.
And my belief at the time was why is this supposed principle superseding What I would think would be a far more immediate need to potentially avert what at the time seemed to me and still seems to me as a pretty insane war.
Like, I was one of the people who got berated because, I'll admit it, I was skeptical of a lot of the intelligence leaking that was going on in the initial run-up to the war because we had just gone through, like, Russiagate in the United States and a lot of that intelligence was being, you know...
Exaggerated or weaponized or selectively leaked.
And I still think there are some questions to be asked about what exactly happened in that pre-war period.
But nonetheless, the war happens and Biden and Blinken and the others obstinately clung to this idea that, of course, because we're so into the rules-based international order and NATO has an ideological principle that we can never even entertain the notion of taking Ukraine's NATO membership off the table.
And then ultimately, as you well know, Biden never even has seen it to Ukraine joining NATO. So Ukraine basically has like a subsidiary status within NATO. It's getting a lot of NATO support.
At the worst of both worlds.
It had the worst of both worlds.
The prospect of NATO membership dangled over it, pissing off the Russians as much as possible without the actual protection of NATO under Article 5. The one thing that I think is very, very clear is that decision in Bucharest in 2008, I'm pretty sure it was, to say Georgia and Ukraine will be members of NATO. But not actually making them members was one of the dumbest things that could have been done.
And then it was repeated again.
I mean, Blinken, when he updated the U.S.-Ukraine strategic partnership, which is just like the bilateral agreement that the State Department brokered with Ukraine in November of 2021, in the text of that agreement, it reaffirms in the text of that agreement, it reaffirms that Bucharest declaration of Ukraine ultimately joining NATO.
And in fact, even the first Trump administration reaffirmed that principle.
Now it could be more on the chopping block.
We'll have to see.
but if the trade-off is...
Ukraine guaranteed the future potential option of joining this military alliance versus preventing hundreds of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians from being sent off to their death.
I don't know.
It just doesn't seem like that hard of a choice to me, but if you made this case in 2022, then you got inundated with...
The kind of, you know, abuse or online harassment, not that I care much about online harassment, but, you know, you got subjected to a lot of scorn in a way that didn't seem to me particularly rational.
I think now in 2025, it's much easier to make these points, but when it really mattered, there was a whole apparatus in place, particularly online, to kind of stamp out Those critiques.
And I'm just wondering, do you view that treatment of criticism in the early days, let's say the first year of the invasion, to have ultimately been to the detriment of Ukraine?
Or do you still look in hindsight on that tenor of how the discourse operated as having been...
I think, you know, especially in the heat of wartime, that's when you really need the most vibrant debate and discussion rather than blocking out all potential critiques, despite how emotionally intense the situation might be.
I mean, that ironically is when the debate and the criticism is most necessary.
You're not wrong.
I do think when we're talking about NATO, one of the things that often gets lost in the debate is what is the purpose of NATO and why there were so many...
Okay, to your point about argument and critique, I do think you're right, as in the sense that these...
I'm not saying I necessarily entirely agree with what you're saying.
However...
100%, we should have been more open to taking people's criticism seriously.
And the difficulty is the fact that we didn't take honest critique seriously meant that now, further down the line, we're not just dealing with honest critique, we're dealing with nonsensical attacks.
Because I find it interesting when you talk about being assailed by NAFO. I always thought NAFO, the dog thing, was pretty cringe, by the way.
I never got involved with that.
Is that now there's a huge...
It's kind of swung a little bit the other way.
I remember I posted a tweet that kind of went viral and defended Zelensky.
And I was just attacked over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.
I got like 20,000 comments on my tweet saying things like, Zelensky's a...
Puppet master.
Zelensky's a puppet of the US who steals all the money and puts it up his nose and buys villas in Monaco and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Bunch of them going on about how he was a Jewish criminal as well.
That one popped up all the time as well.
However, I think one of the things that we forgot about NATO at the very start was the purpose of why it existed.
And I think it is also important to say that one of the reasons that NATO... Membership was so attractive, particularly in the East, is that these countries had been under Russian domination within living memory, right?
Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, all of these countries had a recent historical experience with...
And so I think it's absolutely completely reasonable for Ukrainians to say, we want that kind of protection as well.
And I would also note that the only reason we got into talking about why NATO was a good thing for Ukraine, Ukraine had not actually expressed very much interest in joining NATO until...
Russia came in and basically stole the Crimean Peninsula from under their nose and instituted the sort of separatist rebellion in the Donbass, right?
You know, that was started by Russia as well.
It wasn't entirely a separatist rebellion.
The first shots were fired by Russian infiltrators in Slovyansk in 2014. Am I making sense or am I still missing a point slightly?
No, I mean, you're right.
I've been to the Eastern European countries and there is a deep-seated visceral antipathy toward Russia.
That stems from the living memory of many people of what life was like under the Soviet Union.
But the irony of NATO expansion is that when it really picked up and went to these Eastern European countries starting in the 90s and into the 2000s, that was when the Russian Federation, the successor to the Soviet Russian Republic, was at a nadir in its power.
It was at a low point in the threat that it could potentially pose to these countries.
So why then protect against a potential future Russian threat with in the form of fortifying a military alliance when there are other potential ways to integrate Russia into the international system that itself might have been a bulwark against?
Future military threats.
And I know there was some of that done, especially early on in Putin's tenure to integrate Russia into the G8, etc., which they've been subsequently expelled from, but maybe Trump will want to bring them back.
Who knows?
The point is that I think people are often quite short-sighted or myopic in terms of their enthusiasm around using military means.
To ensure so-called security, because oftentimes what you'll find throughout history is that building up military resources, if anything, could become an instigating factor, and then we see that coming to fruition with Ukraine.
And so I'm not defending necessarily the Russian annexation of Crimea, but that at least...
Was a bloodless annexation and that there wasn't a hot war associated with it, really.
There was no, you know, major combat.
And so, you know, for then NATO to be seen as the obvious viable option, I mean, what did it get Ukraine in the long run?
No NATO membership, at least as far as anybody can tell now, and three years of pretty brutal war.
So I think the people who were warning...
About the potential ill effects of this jockeying for NATO membership and the U.S. dangling it over Ukraine.
Maybe they should be given a little bit more credit for having been a bit more prescient of the people who were so euphoric at the beginning of this war.
I mean, I remember after the Istanbul negotiations broke down in April or March or April of 2022. And particularly after Ukraine initially had some success in that counter-offensive around Kharkiv and Kherson,
you had people in the United States, in Europe, and in Ukraine saying, oh, man, we're now on the march where we can militarily retake Crimea if only we get the right amount of support from our Western partners.
Or there was talk of potentially trying to destabilize Russia itself.
In order to win the war, because the war can only be run if the head of the snake is chopped off or something, which would be the removal of Putin from power.
So would you agree that in the midst of that early war fervor, a lot of people in positions of power and influence started to get some fairly unrealistic ideas about what would be achievable, and then that kind of just continued...
Ultimately, just a continued attritional warfare where you're fighting over pretty meager amounts of territory and even the highfalutin ideas around these ultimate maximalist ends, there's been really no progress toward them.
Okay.
There was a lot in that, so I will go through...
Sorry, I went on a little long.
Yeah, no worries.
I don't mind as long as I get to go on.
So, okay, if we go back to the...
When we're talking about Russia was at the nadir of its power.
So the Israelis did something interesting recently.
Now, I am, by the way, not a big Israel guy.
I'm absolutely not a supporter of what they've been doing.
However, they do seem to know what they're doing militarily.
They went and they bombed a huge amount of Syria's military assets just after the Assad regime fell.
When again, Syria's at the absolute nadir of its power.
Because the Israelis look...
At capabilities and potential future capabilities.
The reason that all these countries in Eastern Europe were so desperate to get under the NATO Article 5 Military nuclear umbrella of the rest of NATO and the United States was precisely because they had had so many historical experiences under both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union of Russia becoming more powerful again and then moving out and becoming expansionist and basically gobbling them up.
So they were like, we can only do this while Russia is too weak to respond.
And I think it's worth noting that people say, oh, you know, Russia wasn't being...
What it was being is it was still being a very brutal power at home.
I think it's worth thinking about what happened in Chechnya in 1996 and 1999 when the Russians basically wiped Grozny off the map.
Grozny was at one point the most destroyed city in the world.
So people in Eastern Europe are looking at those wars and they're saying, no, Russia still has military capability and it still has the desire to inflict...
The potential to inflict this level of damage on what it sees as a recalcitrant population.
Now, we go a little bit further forward until we're talking about, you know, Ukraine and the war effort and certain things with, you know, oh, there were these expectations that could have happened.
One of the things I'm going over, by the way, I have a book coming out about this war, and one of the things I go over here is when we're talking about the battles in Kherson and Kharkiv, there is actually a very good case, I believe, that the Ukrainians could have maybe not taken back everything, but dealt the Russian military a fairly, basically a mortal blow that would have forced the Russians to at least go back to the status quo antebellum.
We're talking...
Lines of February the 23rd, 2022. And the argument, it's not necessarily true, but I think it's one to take seriously, is that if they have been provided with a military equipment, whether it's Abrams tanks, Bradley Armored Infantry Fighting Vehicles, the best, highest range, Haimars and Atakums, when the Russian army was in the process of effectively starting to collapse in...
September 2022, during the Kharkiv counteroffensive, if Ukraine had actually been able to push further, it would have been able to push properly into Luhansk Oblast, it would have been able to completely take out some of the major supply and logistics depots in the Donbass.
It may have been able to take much more of Zaporizhia Oblast than it ended up taking.
The problem is that Ukraine, and this is one of the problems with the Biden administration, is that it never got its strategic goals.
It never decided, do we want the war to end quickly and easily with a diplomatic settlement, or do we want to back Ukraine to the hilt and give it everything we can and basically let Ukraine take as much of its territory back as possible.
That's why actually people got very, very angry in Ukraine, got very, very angry with Joe Biden towards the end because they kept on thinking, he's drip feeding us weapons, he's giving us just enough to stay in the fight with Russia.
He's not giving us enough to win.
And in a way, there was some kind of cruelty to the fact that he wasn't giving enough for them to lose, so that at least if they were going to lose the war, it would have been a foregone conclusion from the staff.
However, I do think there is a pretty good case to be made that Ukraine could attack.
Ukraine had more soldiers, actually, at this point than Russia.
People don't really understand that.
It was what happened is that Russia, they appointed a competent senior commander, General Surabekin, and...
They restructured their armed forces.
They mobilized efficiently.
They built these huge, big, long defenses in Zaporizhia, which were immaculately built.
You know, give to the devil what belongs to the devil.
The Russians are not this sort of, you know, fake paper tiger anymore that they might have been in 2022. They really got their act together.
They reorganized and they managed to become a pretty formidable fighting force.
And that's why Ukraine failed in 2023 and has been failing in 2024. To an extent.
There's arguments over all of the little cases of strategy here.
But I don't think that when people were coming out and saying, oh, you know, these ideas were all pie in the sky, they're all totally unrealistic.
I really don't think they were, and I think there's a historical case, and I go into this more in my writing and in my book.
Well, the problem in that period, so fall of 2022, is that's right around the same time where...
Joe Biden came out and said, oh, by the way, guys, it turns out that we're facing the most severe nuclear threat since the Cuban Missile Crisis, and you had this dynamic where as Russia at that point was suffering some military losses with the Ukraine counteroffensive,
the more severe those losses were, it was thought, the more likely that Putin could opt for some nuclear retaliation scenario, which Biden had also said that he was determined to avoid.
People forget, but at the early stages of the war in March of 2022, Biden came out and said, look, folks, there's not going to be any World War III under my watch.
And one of the criticisms from the pro-Ukraine people was that any reference to a potential risk of nuclear exchange Or any expression of worry that this could lead to an escalation, like escalation itself almost became a taboo word to use in certain pro-Ukraine circles because it was seen as legitimizing Russian propaganda or something.
So there wasn't an awareness that you could be legitimately worried about the escalatory potential of certain U.S. policy actions independent.
Whatever Russia was saying, but the point is, and you still see some of this now, although it's not as potent, the point was that so much that whenever a critic of U.S. foreign policy said anything that might incidentally align with maybe something that a Russian was saying, that could then be immediately dismissed as just a propagation of Russian narratives, even if you didn't...
Speaking for myself, I never actually had that desire to propagate Russian narratives.
It just so happens that every so often you say something that could align with a particular state that you have no affinity with.
So it was very difficult to disentangle that rhetorically or discursively if you were ever trying to engage, as I did often, with people who were pro-Ukraine.
But here's a question I would have for you.
In hindsight, you talk about how there seems to be a shift, particularly online, with...
Whereas in 2022, the pro-Ukraine people were much more ascended and powerful, but now the anti-Zelensky sentiment or whatever seems to be more powerful.
Some of that could be down to Elon Musk taking over X, but I think there's also an organic shift in sentiment to some degree, as you would expect as a war drags on over the course of three years.
The initial fervor inevitably has to become mitigated.
But I would ask you, in hindsight, I think a lot of it has to do also with this pent-up frustration over so many of the platitudes that we were being flooded with in the early stages of the war around rules-based international order, liberal democracy.
We have to look at Ukraine as this black or white conflict between good and evil.
And I just don't think a whole lot of...
Foreign policy or even the history of warfare really boils down to so simplistic a framing.
Usually it tends to be a bit propagandistic to justify continuation of a certain pro-war policy.
And especially, I mean, you were talking about Israel, Palestine.
I mean, what standing does the United States have to pontificate about the rules-based international order or international law?
If, meanwhile, it's doing what it's been doing in Israel, and Biden was trying to claim that Israel and Ukraine were like just two prongs of the same fight.
So how much longer could this rhetoric be sustainable?
I agree with you totally here.
By the way, I have no issue with that argument whatsoever.
I spent three months in Israel after October the 7th and got pretty disillusioned with it pretty quickly.
I have no qualms with that whatsoever.
Actually, I've spent a while sometimes trying to think about what is a good analogy for US support for Ukraine.
And the best I can come up with is Soviet support for Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s.
A very imperfect analogy.
But we're talking about a regional hegemon that acts in its own interests.
That, you know, is funding what is a genuine national liberation movement that has a lot of ugly sides as well, which is the Vietnamese, and that in history looks to be on the right side of history, but it is rather problematic as well.
That's what I'm saying.
I don't take the case as the US as some kind of moral arbiter or great moral hegemon, because I just happen to think it was right in this particular instance, if you know what I mean.
And I totally understand why if you're an ingrained sceptic of US foreign policy, this could look like just a...
Another one of the US's failed interventions or sort of excursions abroad.
At some point, I will describe the Soviet and Vietnam analogy a little bit better.
I don't think I did it that well there, but I hope the point comes through.
I want to go back a little bit to what you were talking about in Herson with the nuclear scenarios for escalation.
And I want to take them seriously.
I think there's a couple of things to look at.
One is, one of the problems is, and I don't think this was ever properly resolved, was the idea of precedent setting of nuclear blackmail.
We are going into an era where, you know, there might be a hundred years worth of wars coming up in this century.
This century looks quite, you know, war-like, unfortunately.
What if we're in a situation, for instance, where the Palestinians manage to get their act together, get a really good army and start taking large amounts of Israeli territory and the Israelis threaten that unless they're stopped, the Israelis are going to start nuking their neighbours because the Israelis have plenty of news.
What if Iran gets a nuclear bomb and then Iran decides to invade Iraq or Azerbaijan, one of the neighbours that it has a problem with, and then it starts to get beaten back and it's like if someone doesn't cut funding to Azerbaijani troops.
We're going to, you know, unleash our nukes.
I think allowing someone, I know this sounds normie and cringe, a pretty brutal dictator to get away with not losing a war simply because he can pull a nuclear switch is a dangerous road to go down.
Now, there are no good roads to go down in this case, but I think that's a particularly dangerous one.
I also want to talk a little bit about, and I think this is one important thing that kind of forget.
Let's go back to 1994. Ukraine had nuclear weapons.
I know there's a million caveats around that, by the way.
Let's just mention one of the caveats, which is that Ukraine never had autonomous control over its nuclear arsenal.
The launch codes were located in Moscow.
So when Ukrainians say, oh, look, we gave up our nuclear weapons, so now we should be entitled to certain security guarantees or military support, it really is a fundamental misrepresentation.
Of Ukrainians' possession of those nuclear weapons.
There was no state to speak of, really, that even had the capacity to manage those weapons, which is why the U.S. was involved in kind of rolling back the new nuclear arsenals in the post-Soviet states because the fledgling states couldn't even manage them.
They lacked the state capacity.
They didn't have operational control.
This is true.
That does not mean that they did not have the ability, if they had put their minds to it, to build a nuclear deterrent because they had the missile technology, they had the scientific capability, they had the fissile material, which is usually the biggest obstacle to building a nuclear weapon.
Again, I think this is going to be one of those things that historians debate.
I don't think there's an easy answer.
However, it's not just about Ukraine.
I think that that is also a very dangerous precedent setting.
Because whether Ukraine could have ultimately had operational control or not, in the end, after a couple of years, I argue that it could have, but I accept that I may be wrong there.
I think it's a very dangerous precedent to set that Ukraine was given security assurances that if it allowed the nukes to be taken off its territory, it would have its sovereign borders guaranteed.
What country in the future will ever give up nuclear weapons again?
What dictator will think, oh, my...
My position in power is strong enough.
I can afford to give up news.
What democratic country, leader in a democratic country, could say, oh, I think we've come to an age where we need to, you know, start unilaterally disarming.
And give up nuclear weapons.
I think Ukraine has set a potential that if countries get rid of nukes on their territory, whether they can control them operationally or build a deterrent out of them or not, I think we've set a very, very dangerous prison.
And I want to make one last point about escalation as well.
And one of the reasons that Ukrainians got very frustrated is because we kept being, I say we, you know, I'm talking about, you know, pro-Ukraine advocates and Ukrainians kept getting frustrated is because we kept hearing There will be a red line that will be crossed that could bring more escalation and possibly nuclear war.
That would be German tanks fighting in Zaporizhia.
That would be long-range attackants.
That would be strikes into Crimea.
That would be the invasion of Russian territory itself, which happened in Kursk.
That would be the use of long-range missiles in Russian territory in Kursk.
And at almost all of those points...
Well, at all of those points...
None of this escalation ever happened.
In fact, because this is the thing about nuclear escalation as well.
Nuclear escalation is a very, very, very top of the ladder, right?
There are ways that Russia can escalate that it would go to before it went to nukes.
That's the top.
The first one, for instance, is to declare a war, not a stupid special military operation, and actually start forcibly mobilizing large portions of its population to put the economy entirely under state control and completely create a war economy.
That's the escalation rung, not nuclear weapons.
Does that make sense?
You may not agree with all those points, but I think they're worth debating and worth considering.
Yeah, I just think that it's a bit untenable to say that everybody, Everybody, to argue that everybody who ever warned about the prospect of nuclear annihilation was proven wrong because the nuclear annihilation never happened.
Like, let's say that in the fall of 2022, the risk of nuclear annihilation did, in fact, increase substantially.
So from like 1% to 30 or 40%.
Biden said there have been like CIA estimates that it could have been over a 50% chance of a nuclear exchange at that point.
I don't know how accurate that is.
But just for the sake of argument, let's say that correct.
To me, that alone is a pretty serious policy failure.
You're imperiling humanity with your policy actions in a way that with a flip of a coin could lead to our eradication.
So that's a pretty big deal to me.
And so just the fact that one of these red lines hadn't been fully crossed enough to the point where A nuclear exchange happened, to me, doesn't retroactively vindicate the policy necessarily.
If anything, it shows how dangerous the policy really was if these estimates are to be taken seriously of a risk being north of 50%.
That should be seen as intolerable for any American president, I would think.
If I were in charge, and under my watch, I subjected or I contributed to subjecting the world to a 50% chance I might be a little doubtful of whether I had pursued a prudent and wise policy.
And then the most hardcore or fanatical or vehement elements of the pro-Ukraine war lobby were constantly agitating for policies that could raise that risk even higher.
And look, if Putin is the dictator or the madman or the Totally deplorable actor that a lot of the pro-Ukraine people think, and there might be some merit to some of those arguments, then do we really want to put it in his hands to determine whether or not he's going to react to something rationally?
Especially if we're talking about literal invasions of Russia.
Yeah, the Ukrainian operation in Kursk hasn't led to nuclear war, but...
I don't know.
There have been points in this war in which it wasn't that far-fetched of a scenario.
I think there were elements within the U.S. national security community, let's say, who in June of 2023 were hoping that that Purgosian insurrection or that Purgosian semi-coup attempt actually did fundamentally destabilize the Russian state so then Ukraine could, quote, win.
And then we'll leave it to somebody else to take care of who's going to control the world's largest nuclear arsenal if Putin is overthrown in this push or something.
So there have been a lot of, like, a bit of harebrained ideas around how to achieve a resolution to this war that really I do think were not just fanciful in their practical implementation, but legitimately dangerous.
I mean, there was a warning that was dispatched to Russia by the U.S. In October of 2022, saying that if a so-called tactical or nuclear weapon is used in Ukraine,
the U.S. is going to fully basically become an active war participant, start bombing the Russian fleet in the Black Sea, and that really could have resembled something like a World War III. We now see like North Korea has some at least tangential involvement in the war.
So I know that people of your sort of disposition were annoyed with people of my disposition for constantly warning about escalatory potential.
But I do feel like we have seen a lot of escalations.
They haven't risen to the ultimate extreme level of a nuclear exchange, but they've gotten pretty serious to the point that we're in a dangerous situation now.
We're like...
A few things go differently, and who knows what the outcome is for humanity.
I guess then we have to go back.
Okay, so one thing.
I think when we're talking about this situation in October 2022, it wasn't just the United States warnings that made Russia step back.
It was also a large amount of pressure from the international community, particularly China and India.
I don't think people in my camp, I guess you could say, have ever said Putin is a total madman.
They've considered him a rational actor.
With deeply immoral objectives.
And a rational actor does not want to get his entire army destroyed, nor does he want a possibility of a nuclear exchange that will end up with a nuke being detonated over Moscow, if you know what I mean.
But I guess it would come back to the fact that what would you have, say, particularly the Ukrainians do?
Should someone with nuclear weapons thereby get to determine the fate of any war that they engage in?
Based on the idea that they will say, I fail my military objectives or my war doesn't go the way I want.
I'm going to turn towards nuclear weapons.
And I'm genuinely asking, like, what should the response from, say, the US government or, say, the Ukrainian government should have been in a case like that?
Because, again, what happens if that precedent repeats itself in further conflicts with potentially much madder and less rational actors, right?
You know, Israelis, they have some nutters in their cabinet that would probably enjoy.
Well, the United States has nuclear weapons.
The United Kingdom has nuclear weapons.
France has nuclear weapons.
China has nuclear weapons.
And Russia has nuclear weapons.
And so does Israel, actually, but they don't declare it.
So whether we like it or not, the existence of nuclear weapons in the possession of those states does have additional implications in terms of how much those states can be threatened by external actors because there's always the existence of nuclear weapons in the possession of those states does have additional implications in terms of how much those states can be threatened by external actors
I don't particularly like the concept of nuclear weapons, but I also have to acknowledge their existence and factor that into my calculations about how to manage international affairs.
So I don't like this idea that in just recognizing that Russia has the world's largest nuclear arsenal.
And if its back is really up against the wall and it can claim that its core national integrity is being threatened, then that could result in a nuclear exchange scenario.
I kind of have always resented that that means I'm just succumbing or capitulating to nuclear blackmail.
I mean, well, no, it could also just be trying to engage as rationally as possible in the current international system.
Sometimes you really just do have to analyze certain events on their own terms.
I think it's kind of a bit of a stretch to say 100 years from now, or however long, it's impossible to know with any certainty whatsoever that this is going to have set a precedent whereby other states are going to be given free reign to do whatever they want just because they have nuclear weapons.
Maybe that's the case, maybe it's not, but I've never bought into this idea which you hear repeated a lot from I just don't think that, like, international actors necessarily look for messages in the way that people want to act like.
I think that's kind of like a reductive kind of caricature of how, like, Xi Jinping, for instance, would calculate his ability to, for example, Seize Taiwan and put it back under the control of the PRC. I think oftentimes that logic is used basically as like a propagandistic kind of bullying tactic to get people in line to support the pro-war policy.
And so that's why you see, you know, Lindsey Graham and people will always be promoting that line.
I just don't think it really, it's kind of intangible.
It sounds maybe right, but...
I don't think it aligns up with how states actually act in practice.
I could say in that case that the risk of nuclear escalation is the same thing.
It's an intangible in the sense that we don't really know whether it's going to come true or not.
This is one of the difficulties, and this is one of the things that, as I said, I don't think was discussed properly.
And I'm annoyed, actually, that...
Either me or you or other people didn't really sit down and have these debates face to face earlier, because it should have been done two years ago.
And I sort of apologize on, I guess, my end for that, because people never actually got to air these ideas in the open and really have them out.
But again, when you say- Well, I debated plenty of people on the internet, but sometimes those are on X in particular, and those aren't the most fruitful debates.
Because they devolve into just pure trolling, which I'm not that interested in.
Yeah, yeah.
But however, okay, look, here's the thing.
A good argument or a logical argument can also be used as a bullying tactic and a blackmail tactic to get people in line.
The two are not mutually exclusive, if that makes sense.
That's true.
That's true.
But in the case of this like...
about how if we don't defeat Putin in Ukraine, that's going to give license to all manner of other tyrants throughout the world to seize whatever territory they want.
I just don't think that really matches up with how actors in the international system calculate their own self-interest and their ability to pursue their goals.
Actually, it's another variation of a common Republican talking point in the U.S., which is that Putin was emboldened to invade Ukraine because Biden was so feckless in Afghanistan...
So Biden withdrew the U.S. from Afghanistan.
That showed the U.S. was weak and that Putin could fill the vacuum.
I've never seen any hard evidence that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan had anything at all to do with Putin's decision-making vis-a-vis Ukraine.
It would be bizarre if it did, right?
Because why would one situation in any way translate to another?
Other than people are always searching for talking points that they could muster to demand the most hardline interventionist policy outcomes.
I have the answer for that.
Here's the thing.
I think this is, again, one of those intangibles that we will never quite know.
But, look, you have to look at what...
Not just what the reality of the situation on the ground was, but what Putin saw the reality of the situation on the ground was.
Putin's, at least as far as we can understand through his own writings, really, his kind of view of the world is that a lot of these countries are effectively U.S. puppet states and that Afghanistan and Ukraine were effectively the same.
They were both U.S. puppet states and that the Ghani government and the Zelensky government were effectively just U.S. puppets.
Well, they were, right?
I mean, maybe puppet is a pejorative way of putting it, but they're client states or, I don't know, vassal states.
Choose your synonym, but the core claim is not entirely wrong, right?
I don't believe Ukraine falls into that situation, no.
Definitely not before 2022, right?
Ukraine was not being...
Okay, so here's the thing.
People are like, yeah, Ukraine only survived the war because of USA. That's not untrue.
But Ukraine really wasn't receiving large amounts of supplies of USA until about...
April or May of the war, they were using their own Soviet stockpiles.
They were buying fuel and ammunition from Bulgaria.
They were really not being supported.
They definitely were not a client state at that point.
Well, they were getting real-time targeting assistance from the U.S. military.
The U.S. was providing the targeting technology, Starlink and everything else.
There's so many aspects of it that were solely dependent on the U.S. No, it doesn't make them a client state, though.
Why not?
I mean, client state doesn't mean that it's in every respect.
I mean, Israel is a client state of the U.S. in a way.
It doesn't mean that every aspect of Israeli society and governance is 100% inextricably dependent on the United States.
It's just that the United States has a particular state within its sphere of influence such that it has a direct...
I mean, this was another frustration over the course of the war.
We were always being scolded to respect the sovereignty and agency of Ukraine.
So if we talk about how the U.S. is basically furnishing Ukraine with a brand new military almost overnight, or at least trying to, with Abrams tanks and all this.
And therefore, the United States is playing a direct policy-making role in the course of the war.
That would often be interpreted as you're denigrating the agency of Ukraine, like you're not respecting their sacrifices.
Well, no.
I mean, I've never doubted, going back years, that there are probably many instances of individual valor in terms of what Ukrainians are doing on the battlefield and so forth.
But we talk about the macro level of the power dynamics.
I mean, at least post-2022, I think you would have to concede, the Ukrainian state largely existed at the pleasure of the United States, right?
Or as a function of U.S. largesse.
Yes, the EU also gives arms and funding to some degree, but even that is all dispersed at the facilitation of the United States.
Where I don't...
And that's the essence of what a client state is, right?
So it's not a derogation of the nature of the state necessarily.
I would say that like a vassal state or a client state, I would say that that therefore gives you some sort of almost final direct say over that state's foreign or domestic policies, which I really do not think the United States ever really had in Ukraine.
Like, here's the thing.
Even when you get down to the nitty-gritty tactical details, Ukraine always made final calls on where it would attack, on how it would use its intelligence, on how it would use these weapons.
Actually, there's a huge row in the historiography now of why the counteroffensive...
And actually, it's interesting that the U.S. officials, if you talk to them, will always come out and say the reason that Ukraine failed is because it wasn't enough of a client state.
Let me ask you this.
Let's say hypothetically, let's say in June of 2022, the United States cut off all supply of military armaments to Ukraine, cut off the satellite systems that were providing for the targeting operations.
And cut off the subsidies, essentially, for the state functioning.
Like, the U.S. was essentially subsidizing the pensions and the salaries of Ukrainian government workers through an IMF funding instrument that ultimately was authorized by Congress.
So let's say, hypothetically, all that was cut off suddenly in June of 2022. You're telling me that the U.S. would not...
Be directing a final outcome in terms of what Ukraine was capable of doing?
Of course it would.
Ukraine would have basically ceased to function as a state at that point.
I think we're looking at a situation that may well look like that in the coming months, and we will see.
We should get to that, actually.
I think that's one of those intangibles that actually we may get an answer to much quicker than we think.
However, and this is, I guess, one of the reasons that, as I said, this is one place that we'll go to the math for Ukraine on, is that I think...
And one of the frustrations that a lot of Ukrainians have, I talk to them all the time, it drives nuts, is this idea that the decisions that have been made, foreign policy...
Foreign policy and domestic policy decisions that have been made in Ukraine have in fact been forced upon them by outside shadowy actors and they haven't actually been the will expressed, whether in popular protest or in democratic elections of the Ukrainian people themselves, if that makes sense.
That's why the client state and the vassal state argument riles Ukrainians up so much.
Was there a particular period where the US basically could have decided whether Ukrainian state lived or died?
Quite probably.
Also, I think it's reasonable to say that at that point there was a fair amount of alignment of interests.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that...
Ukrainian agency was and remains a real thing.
And one of the interesting things at the moment I've been doing for this book, I've been doing a lot of interviews with Ukrainian officials, is Ukraine has actually been preparing for a long time for the potential of the US funding cutoff.
And one of the things it's been doing is it's been extraordinarily increasing its homegrown armaments industry.
Not just homegrown, but also armaments industries that are based from Ukrainian expats in Europe.
Mainly to do with UAVs and drones and the artificial intelligence targeting systems and stuff like that.
Yeah, and the U.S. has even convened investment councils and things to facilitate exactly that.
Ukraine developing more homegrown defense industry.
So even that is at least in part a function of the U.S. support for Ukraine to kind of cultivate their ability to sustain themselves with production of drones.
We're winding down a little bit in terms of our time right now, but let's look at what's going on today.
We just did a three-year retrospective, but Donald Trump is in power.
where I know you don't have as much of a direct engagement necessarily in domestic U.S. political affairs, but like it or not, it does have a very real impact on Ukraine, as we all can see.
Yeah, I've done it on that.
And so today, or just this week, actually literally today, the day we're talking right now, this is going to go up tomorrow, the 25th, but we're on the, this is the three-year anniversary, February 24th or 23rd in Ukraine of the this is the three-year anniversary, February 24th or 23rd in Ukraine of the war, and the text of a new agreement a bilateral agreement between the United States under Donald Trump and Ukraine.
And it looks like the details are...
Essentially finalized.
We don't know if it's officially been signed yet, but there's this economic partnership agreement where the U.S. is actually affirming that it will assume a long-term financial commitment, that's a direct quote, to Ukraine, and that could take the form of various forms of funding, they call it tangible and intangible.
We don't know exactly what portion of that could consist of military.
Supplies necessarily, but it seems like that would fit under the umbrella of what's being codified here in terms of this deal in exchange for, like, I don't know, 50% or even more in certain instances, if you look at the text of the agreement, of a U.S. ownership of Ukrainian rare earth minerals.
And now, there's definitely a way in which this agreement is fundamentally extractive.
Or basically like an expropriation by the U.S. of Ukrainian natural resources.
And obviously the U.S., Ukraine, to maintain its continued viability of the state, needs to maintain its relations with the United States.
Like the EU is not going to have the military capacity to make up for what the U.S. might be prepared to withdraw should it come to that.
So it's looking like, you know, Zelensky has suggested that he's willing to potentially...
Seed ground on some of these tenets of the agreement and sign on to it.
And it could allow for the continuation of U.S. aid to Ukraine in some fashion.
So I'm just curious, what do you make of this agreement and what are people saying about it in Ukraine so far as you've been talking to them?
Annoyingly enough, I haven't had the chance to actually read the full text of that agreement because it was only released in the last couple of hours, which is...
A pain, I know.
Mostly people, like, mostly, so I can basically just go over my interactions in the last week.
Mostly I think people are very, very, very pissed off because they saw the US agreement as a...
A lot of Ukrainians, like, genuine, and this is perhaps one of the tragedies of Ukraine, is that they genuinely saw their relationship with the United States as a partnership of sort of...
Share democratic allies with the same goal.
And I think they're right now being very, very harshly disabused of that notion because they think that they're being treated effectively.
Yeah, so this is the interesting thing.
They think now they are actually being treated like a proper client state.
And this is why Zelensky was actually willing to say, no, I'm not accepting the original agreement.
And that's why his popularity has actually exploded in...
Ukraine recently, simply because he was seen as someone who's not just standing up for Ukraine on the military side of things, but that he's also not willing to sign effectively stupid, extraordinary, exploitative agreements with the United States for...
You know, on the domestic, sorry, on the international stage as well.
Pardon me, it is midnight here after a hugely long day.
But he apparently is willing to sign like a revised version of it.
So maybe it's not as extreme as the first draft, but he's signing some variation of it.
That is called negotiation.
That is called being a, that is, you know, our client states, devassal states negotiate and extract concessions from their sort of puppet masters.
I would argue no.
Well, I don't see why not.
I mean, would you agree that Israel is, in a sense, a client state of the U.S.? I can't help feeling that that's more the tail wagging the dog in that case.
Well, okay.
I mean, there are always...
A client state relationship doesn't mean that the client has no room to negotiate the parameters of its relationship with the principal.
I mean, so I don't think that necessarily disproves the idea of a client state.
I don't think it proves it either.
Okay, well, I mean, they're kind of nebulous concepts.
I'll agree with that.
But this is why I thought it was a bit overblown last week.
I mean, it was notable that Trump was, like, you know, very harshly ridiculing Zelensky, called him, like, a moderately successful comedian or something like that.
But as always with Trump, you do have to kind of, you know, at least what I try to do, and I don't always succeed, but what I at least strive to do...
Is try to remain focused on the underlying policy rather than the daily theatrics in terms of the public rhetoric.
Wise approach.
And if U.S. aid is fundamentally going to continue in exchange for this extremely potentially exploitative economic partnership, then isn't that a scenario that you might actually...
Welcome.
I mean, you have people who have been the most fanatically pro-Ukraine this whole time, like Boris Johnson, who was in Kiev today commemorating the three-year anniversary, saying, look, everybody, this is actually a great deal for Ukraine.
Donald Trump is doing peace through strength.
So, yes, hurry up and sign this economic partnership agreement, and then that'll allow Ukraine to do things that it determines are within its sovereign right to do, like potentially even invite some sort of European, quote-unquote, peacekeeping force with the French and the British.
To have soldiers more fulsomely on the ground in Ukraine, hard to imagine Russia really looking kindly on that.
I mean, wasn't the whole reason for the war that Ukraine, according to Russia, was being turned to a bulwark of anti-Russian sentiment and building up foreign military resources and they wanted it to be totally militarily neutral?
How could Ukraine be, on the one hand, militarily neutral, but then also be hosting...
NATO forces, which it would be if it had British and French troops, maybe with some kind of American backstop.
But whatever the case may be, doesn't it reassure you at all?
And this is not what I would be arguing in terms of my own preferences, right?
But why would it not reassure you that people like Boris Johnson or whomever are saying, look everybody, this is actually a fantastic deal for Ukraine.
Let's go ahead and sign it as quickly as possible.
Okay, so we're talking about issues of causation here as well.
And I think actually, so you're talking about, you know, Ukraine being turned into a Western anti-Russian bulwark on its borders.
That has effectively happened, let's be honest.
However, I would say the causation is actually the other way around.
It was actually Russia's actions in Ukraine that caused this creation of an anti-Western bulwark.
Ukraine never wanted, there was no...
Widespread support for Ukrainian NATO membership.
Barely a majority for EU membership.
Before 2013, 2014, the annexation of Crimea.
The only reason that Ukrainians wanted to go into NATO was because Crimea had been annexed.
Part of their sovereign territory had been taken from them.
But even then, up until 2022, Ukraine was not an anti-Russian bulwark because the vast majority of Ukraine, maybe not the vast majority, but the...
The majority of Ukrainians in polls that were published saw the Russians as friends and compatriots and potentially family.
And it was only the full-scale Russian invasion that turned Ukraine into an anti-Russian bulwark because everyone...
And this is one of the reasons why going to eastern Ukraine right now, which I've done many times, is so, so, so interesting because a lot of those people genuinely were...
Maybe they didn't want to be part of Russia, but they were very much we're a community, we're kind of one family, we might even be the same cultural world, the same cultural sphere.
They called it a ruski mir, which basically means it could translate to Russian world or Russian peace.
And now what they would do is you would drive past a destroyed building or a blown out hospital or church or school and you'll say ruski mir, kind of in that sort of irony.
But here's the thing with the economic partnership.
What it does, and I think this is rather important for Ukraine, is that if they can get a sensible deal that includes American self-interest, well, here's the thing, because what they're not just trying to do is they're not just trying to invite peacekeepers onto their territory.
They're trying also to invite American, effectively, corporations and personnel onto their territory.
And especially as this territory is all out in the east, so that they effectively act as a deterrent.
Because if they're all out there mining lithium or mining silver, I'm not a geologist.
I don't know the ins and outs of what Ukraine does and doesn't have.
But there, they are effectively building another type of security deterrent, and therefore they think they have enough.
To prevent the Russians from going again.
So no, I don't think an economic partnership, if it's worked out to be in the interest of Ukraine, is necessarily a bad thing.
But at the same time, I do not...
And again, maybe we are just quibbling over definitions here.
I don't think that makes them a vassal state or a client state for the US. Definitely, I would have thought a vassal state or a client state looked a lot more like what Poland or Czechoslovakia or Hungary looked like under the Soviet Union.
I don't think that same applies to Ukraine.
But again, we may just be quibbling over the definitions here.
Yeah, I mean, dependent on the United States, I'm not particularly wedded to any particular term.
It's just meant to capture the power dynamic, if you want to put it that way, with the U.S. as the superior power, Ukraine within the U.S. orbit and dependent on U.S. largesse for the continuation of itself, for perpetuation of itself.
As a state.
I mean, sometimes it's difficult to even encapsulate that dynamic without people taking it to be an insult, even if it's not intended as such.
Okay, so any final points?
Any concluding thoughts in terms of where you think I've gone wrong or any forward-looking statements?
I mean, do you think that...
Are you...
When would you hypothesize that we might see a cessation of hostilities?
And actually, let me throw in one more question there as you ready your concluding thoughts.
Do you think that it's objectionable on principle for the U.S. now under Trump to have resumed diplomatic engagement with Russia, which had been frozen for roughly three years?
Like, to me, it seems like the lowest hanging possible fruit.
For, like, a Secretary of State, who's supposed to be America's chief diplomat, to engage in diplomacy with other states, even states with whom there is an adversarial or hostile relationship.
But, you know, master diplomat Tony Blinken did not do so for three years.
years and I'm not necessarily a the most long-standing booster of Marco Rubio or whatever but he has initiated at least the parameters of what the resumption of diplomatic engagement between the U.S. and Russia could look like and to me it's not it's insane that the two the world's two largest nuclear powers were essentially a diplomatic standstill for the past three years so whatever else comes of it
I find it hard to see what the objection could be to at least the beginnings of that resumption taking place but maybe you disagree tell me no no I know I I There I'm more than happy.
There are pro-Ukraine advocates who say that was a terrible, terrible thing to do.
I disagree with that.
I think it absolutely was time to, I don't know to what level, but I think it, I actually think diplomatic engaging with the US should have happened a long time ago.
I actually think that there was a, and this, again, this is something that I need a bit more time, I'm arguing this in my book, is that actually, I think earlier in the war, there should have been more Aid to Ukraine, but at the same time, more willingness to diplomatically reach a settlement with Russia.
Because here's one of the things is that I think there was sometimes people took an either or approach.
Either we give Ukraine a huge amount of aid and we, you know, let it like smash the Russians to bits on the battlefield.
Or we diplomatically engage and that's a surrender and that's a total negation of US power and blah, blah, blah.
Again, as an American, I don't really care very much about US power abroad.
But I think the two tracks should have been pursued in parallel from the beginning.
So I don't think there's any problem with at least the principle of the resumption of negotiations with the Russians.
What people...
In Ukraine, had a real problem with was the way in which it was done.
So the two aspects that were particularly galling, one was the fact that if they are going to come to the negotiating table, the fact that there wasn't even a Ukrainian representative in the room to even observe those talks taking place, they are the fact that there wasn't even a Ukrainian representative in the room to That really rubbed Ukrainians up the wrong way.
And it also- But they're not exclusively about Ukraine.
Like, the US and Russia have mutual interest that it could re-engage on separate and apart from Ukraine.
So just, like, resuming that one track of a bilateral relationship, I think it's kind of ridiculous to say it's, like, inherently exclusionary of Ukraine.
The meeting in Saudi Arabia was explicitly billed as a, this is going to be a meeting that stops the war in Ukraine.
The U.S. also has a nuclear treaty with Russia that it needs to renegotiate within a couple of months or else there's no regulatory framework for the U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles, the new Star Tree.
So there's other issues that could flow from the U.S. Russia resuming their engagement.
If the US and Russia want to have a bilateral meeting about security in the thawing Arctic and access to resources there, I see no reason why Ukraine should be involved in that at all.
That's purely a bilateral matter for the Russians and the Americans.
But if it's a meeting that's specifically billed, that's because basically what the US... As far as we can tell, approach to Russia has been as like, look, we've got to get the Ukraine war sorted and out of the way, and then we can resume bilateral.
But the Biden administration's mantra was, nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.
I don't know how many times I heard Blinken say that, and where did that lead, except this stagnant war of attrition.
So, I don't know that that's a superior alternative.
I don't think.
Then why not have a...
I don't think that nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine is in any way incompatible with a diplomatic negotiation to end the war in Ukraine that includes a US representative on the table.
And the other reason that Ukrainians have found this sort of meeting between Trump and Putin so galling, or the phone call in the Rubio-Lavrov summit, is because it seems like Based on his public statements, Trump has it out for the Ukrainians and not for the Russians.
The fact that he called Zelensky a dictator.
Zelensky has his problems, by the way.
We don't really have time to go into them today, but there are genuine problems with Zelensky's governance.
Would you agree that there are dictatorial...
Look, I'm not trying to be a booster of everything that Trump blurts out, necessarily, but would you concede that there are dictatorial elements?
Dolinsky's current rule.
I mean, martial law has now been ongoing and continuously renewed for several years.
He did ban opposition political parties under the pretense that they are Russian plants or Russian agents.
He did seize almost unilateral control of much of Ukrainian media.
Maybe he hasn't been able to maintain that control as absolutely...
As he would like, but he did centralize the Ukrainian presidency's control over media in the country, and elections haven't been held.
I know the pro-Ukraine people have a constitutional argument about why elections can't be held, but really, I mean, that's dependent on Zelensky's party, which is in control as the majority in the RADA. Continuing this martial law resolution, which then activates this supposed constitutional provision that disallows holding elections.
But that's a political choice, right?
So, I mean, would you concede that there are maybe, if you don't want to use the dictatorial elements, give me what is the legitimate criticism at this point of Zelensky in terms of his rule?
Okay, I want to quickly address a couple of the points that you raised there.
Because, okay, you have to consider...
That this is a society at an existential war.
And the fact that you still have pretty good freedom of movement, freedom of speech, freedom of opposition, it's pretty normal for a country in a state of war to shut down a...
And I'm not saying it's necessarily right or wrong.
I'm just saying it's how life works, that a country in a state of war...
Right, but if you're a civil libertarian, as I've always considered myself to be, if the United States was doing that, I would oppose it.
I wouldn't start preaching about how the abrogation of those civil liberties is somehow consistent with this freedom and democracy mantra.
But it is the exact same thing that democracies do when they go to war.
It's the exact same thing the Americans would have done.
I've always opposed that stuff.
But what I am saying is the imposition of...
Okay, one, these are broadly supported throughout society.
The imposition of martial law and the restrictions that come along with martial law in wartime are not the same thing as using or misusing or abusing your power as a dictator.
Now, to the elections point, I think it's important to actually...
Because this is one of the biggest things.
So I will spend a little bit of time on this, if you don't mind.
And I know we might have gone over.
It's not that Ukrainians don't want elections.
The problem is that holding elections now would be really difficult, right?
You have millions of people who are still overseas.
You have millions of soldiers who are on the front line.
You can't just take soldiers off the front line to go to a polling booth.
You have millions of people who live under Russian occupation.
Their future or current status is yet to be determined.
Holding elections at this time would be an utter logistical nightmare.
And even the major opposition figures in Ukraine, whether it's Julia Tymoshenko or Petra Poroshenko, General Zaluzhani being quite quiet, have not demanded elections.
The United States held presidential elections as mandated by the Constitution in 1944 when we had hundreds of thousands.
Or millions of troops abroad in the European and Pacific theaters.
And even if you want to go back further into history, the United States held elections in 1864 when there was a literal civil war going on.
So it's just odd to me for Americans to be saying, here are all the rationalizations for why elections need not be held, when the United States, perhaps uniquely in the world, has a history of, in fact...
Following through on its constitutional obligations to whole elections, even during the most intensive war times.
Because...
Okay, 1944. Is the U.S. mainland being bombed on the regular?
No.
Well, let's go to 1864 then, and there was a literal war in the U.S. mainland.
Yeah, but again, did the Confederates have ballistic missiles that could reach New York?
That is not true.
No analogy is perfect.
No analogy is perfect, but it's like organizing.
You've got to admit that there's a bit of a risk organizing.
Massive big lines of people in bowling stations in a country that gets hit with missiles and drones on the regular.
And now, I actually think that the Ukrainians, I think they're very ingenuous and they come up a lot of things very well.
I actually think they have the capacity to organize an election, but it is nowhere near as simple as just saying, hold an election or you're a dictator.
Does that make sense?
Again, I think we can kind of agree to...
Respect the other point of view here, even if we don't necessarily completely agree on it.
Yeah, I see that.
I think the term dictator is overused in general, so I think there may be some issues to be raised with Zelensky's rule, but I don't know that getting into the...
Overly personalized insult is particularly helpful.
And frankly, I feel the same way when people just say, oh, aren't I brave?
I'll call Putin a dictator and warn about it.
He's going to do a blitzkrieg throughout Europe, just like Hitler did.
I mean, I kind of roll my eyes at all of it.
It kind of seems like lazy mental shortcuts to me to describe the actual nature of what's going on.
Would you at least admit Putin is a little bit more of a dictator than Zelensky?
Right?
Power for 25 years.
I mean, yeah, 25 years is probably a little bit too long for anybody to maintain power, so I'm not going to dispute that.
Putin does impose censorship within Russia, so that's what I'm saying.
That's why I can acknowledge both of those phenomena, and that's why I've always been averse to...
The insistence on framing the conflict as this black and white struggle between good and evil, to me, life is almost always more complicated than that.
Yes, however...
Because here's the thing, I think you can say it's not black and white, but it's like...
Cream colour versus grey.
I'm not going to quote that.
Please don't write that on my gravestone or whatever.
But you kind of get what I mean.
I think you can have a conflict in which one side is the moral superior to the other.
And I do think the Ukraine conflict is one of the conflicts where that is at least more clear-cut than other conflicts.
I wouldn't want to have this debate, for instance, over Israel and Palestine.
I have tried to do that before, and it absolutely does my head at me.
Yeah.
Okay, so we actually probably should wrap up at this point, so I am going to invite you to make any kind of closing comment.
Maybe just reflect on whether you found this discussion to be useful and what you take from it and what we should be looking out for going forward as the war seemingly might be on the verge of winding down.
Although, with Donald Trump in office, you can never say anything with total certainty, so maybe the negotiations will break down.
Hard to say.
Actually...
Trump actually, at one point, had threatened that if Putin does not agree to conditions for a cessation of hostilities that are more favorable to the U.S., or even Ukraine perhaps, that there's a possibility that U.S. weapons to Ukraine could intensify.
He's all over the map on so many things, so it's hard to say with any real precision.
Anyway, that's my kind of garbled prompt for you to conclude with.
Sure.
Well, I have found it useful because, as I said, I think more of these discussions need to happen.
I think that Ukraine advocates actually need to be willing to go on to hostile or skeptical audiences and say this is the case for Ukraine and admit that we might not convince everyone and admit that we might not be right about everything.
And I found it enjoyable, to be frank, because I actually, you know, I enjoy having...
Having a discussion that produces both heat and light, if you know what I mean.
I don't think having a debate or disagreement or a bit of a go-back and forfeit at each other is a bad thing.
I think there needs to be more of this.
And I hope that if we are getting into a stage where we're going towards negotiations, that people can start actually having these conversations and sitting down and...
Properly defending these issues and finding points of agreement and finding points of disagreement.
But what about you?
No, I mean, I basically agree.
I've always been open to these sorts of conversations, I think.
But maybe we can embody a fruitful way forward for people to kind of at least attempt to reconcile some of their diverging views on this stuff.
And we'll see what happens.
Like, my advice is, look at the underlying policy.
Don't get too caught up in the Trump bombast.
And we'll see what happens, I suppose.
So, Tom, much?
Actually, one last thing I would say.
If you ever want to come to Ukraine, and this is one thing that I think is important.
I've been here for three years.
I know many people who've been here for three years.
Foreigners from all countries all around the world.
I don't know anyone who's become disillusioned with Ukraine's cause, and I think that says something.
I know plenty of people who've gone to other places in the world and come away and be like, fuck that place.
I know almost no one, including people that have been blown up, right?
Almost everyone, years and years on, still thinks that Ukraine had the right cause.
So I guess I would actually say, if you, or if anyone who ever wants to come to Ukraine, wants to come to Ukraine and see, you know, what it's like, it's possible to do.
It's possible to do safely.
And I would invite them to do exactly that, and I'd be very actually happy to help anyone who wanted to come in good faith to do so.
All right.
Yeah, I mean, that's been something I've been thinking about doing for a while, so I would definitely take that under advisement, and maybe we can make it happen.
But in any event, for now, I appreciated the conversation.
I hope the viewers and listeners did as well.
So, Tom Mutch, tell people where they can find your work.
Okay, so I'm on X at Tom the Scribe.
I'm on Instagram, which is where I do my photography, at N-T-M-U-T-C-H, which is my last name.
Too much.
Any joke that you can think of has been made by the time I was about seven years old.
So, you know.
But anyway.
I think, yep, that's a reasonable note to end things, and I'm glad we could have a good and a heated discussion as adults rather than as primary school children flinging insults around a playground.
And I'm looking forward to your feedback as well.
All right, hear, hear.
All right, take care.
Thanks for coming.
No worries.
Thanks for having me.
All right, everybody.
Well, that'll conclude this episode of System Update.
That went on...
A little bit longer than maybe I anticipated, but hopefully you got something out of it.
And tune in tomorrow for more.
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