Welcome to The Deling Pod with me, James Delingpole.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I'm really, really, really happy to welcome back to the show, Vanessa Beely.
Vanessa, we've come... well, I've come such a long way since our first podcast, haven't we?
It's like...
I'm from a different planet.
We all have our journey to make, James, but yeah, when I look back on that first, I wouldn't say we were restrained with one another, but we were on very different planets as regards some issues.
Well, I do remember you being quite shocked by how rampantly pro-Israel I was in the past.
I actually refused to talk to you in the beginning.
Did you?
I didn't know that, or did I?
No, I think I said to you, well, I'm a bit nervous because of your pro-Israeli stance.
Yeah.
Well, you know, in some ways my position has not changed.
My heart goes out to all the ordinary Israelis who've been coerced into having these death jabs.
I have no problem with ordinary Israeli people any more than I have any people anywhere in the world.
I'm not so sure about the regime.
Or the aims they're on, or the ultimate goals they're on.
That's my problem.
Exactly.
Exactly.
But, you know, I think what's great about you is that you're open to discussing with anyone about anything, and I think that's something that we're really losing, and have been losing for a very long time, and it's terribly important to maintain it.
You make me sound like some paragon.
Actually, Vanessa, there are some things I wouldn't have on the show.
For example, I wouldn't have an anti-foxhunting person on the show to tell me why foxhunting was evil.
And I don't think I'd have a vegan on the show to tell me why meat-eating was wrong.
But you're right.
Right.
Generally, generally, I'm I'm I'm pretty, pretty open, open minded.
And whatever you say about living through end times and with revelation about to be fulfilled.
I mean, A, it's an interesting ride.
And B, I'm learning so much about the world that I didn't know before.
I mean, do you still learn stuff?
Are you still on the... Oh, God, yeah.
Do you know everything now?
The deeper you dig, the more complex and nuanced it becomes.
And that's the whole point.
The point of mainstream narratives is to keep it on the surface.
You know, to keep it at this reductionist, gladiatorial level where nobody actually discovers what's underneath and how many layers comprise any given situation or issue.
That, for me, is why it's important for people like us to keep challenging everything.
You know, I challenged myself.
I challenged my own conclusions.
And that's what they don't do.
Because what they're doing is producing propaganda, basically.
You're absolutely right.
You are a proper investigative journalist of the kind they don't make anymore.
And I totally respect what you do.
I found myself getting into a lot of arguments recently over Ukraine.
You won't be surprised to hear.
And there was one occasion where I was at a party and I was talking to two pillars of society.
One of them was ex-army and was something like the Deputy Lord Lieutenant of the County or some such position, you know, impressive.
And the other one was a lord, I think probably, he'd inherited his title, and told me that he spoke Russian, so he had a special insight into things, and I think he probably worked in the city and worked with Russians and stuff.
And when I tried pointing out to them that Putin Whatever you think of him, had a casus belli, which went back to the 2014 colour revolution, organised by the American Deep State.
Not only did they not listen to me, but they laughed at me.
I've never actually had somebody laugh in my face, just with such contempt.
And I was thinking, there is such a huge gulf in the world right now between those who understand the deep background of what's happening in Ukraine and everyone else who seems to be a victim of this massive psy-op.
Yeah, basically.
And I mean, it's kind of interesting because I don't know if you know of a journalist called George Eliasson.
He's on Twitter.
He has a show on TNT.
You should have him on, actually.
I mean, he's an American journalist.
He's lived in Ukraine first and then in Luhansk, I think, for the last 10 years.
He's married to a lady from Ukraine and his insight is really quite extraordinary on so many levels both from being on the ground and being in the communities that were being targeted from 2014 onwards and then also talking about how And this was very interesting for me because here there are parallels to Syria.
How neighbours were turned against neighbours who was working behind the scenes to actually instigate this hatred.
Because this is what it is.
It's hatred for your neighbour.
So literally neighbours who then of course joined the ultra-nationalist and the Azov and IDAR battalions etc.
started literally bombing People that previously they had been living peacefully alongside.
So, you know, and this entire project, I mean, he names one guy, which is Joel Harding, who has connections to the Pentagon, CIA, to military, special forces, US, and he basically was in charge of the entire
Cyber operation in Ukraine and actually I just want to read you something from an article by George written in 2015 and this is a quote from Joel Harding on Ukraine's cyber strategy just to give you an idea and then we'll talk about the repercussions of Going to independently observe the referenda in Donbass because it ties in so basically he said what would we do?
disrupt deny degrade deceive corrupt Usurp or destroy the information meaning the information coming from the other side of course.
The information, please don't forget, is the ultimate objective of cyber.
That will directly impact the decision-making process of the adversary's leader who is the ultimate target.
So this was back in 2015.
Right.
So what you're looking at now is the SBU, which is the Ukrainian Intelligence Services, which, by the way, is something like three times the size of MI6 in sheer personnel size.
It's massive.
It's one of the biggest intelligence operations probably in the West.
And it's controlled by MI6, CIA, right?
So all of these kill lists that are being produced by this organization, by the SPU, and there are now kill lists actually on UK soil, by the way, established in the UK, doing exactly the same thing, identifying Russian war criminals or sympathizers for Punishment.
And, you know, we've seen enough videos to know what SBU punishment means.
It's assassination, or it's torture, or it's detainment, or it's disappearance.
You know, how many opposition members, how many media journalists that opposed him has Zelensky effectively just got rid of?
You know?
So this began way before 2015, of course we can also go back to the Second World War when the West absorbed the Nazi elements from inside Ukraine and actually took them into the US and from there they established entire networks of businesses and organizations still involved in the US war machine.
Right.
So in a sense, this has been planned for such a long time, you know, how they can laugh contemptuously at you when they have.
Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard, which talked about the balkanization of Russia, the weakening of Russia.
You have RAND reports from 2019 that actually lay out the entire strategy of NATO to encroach on the border of Russia, to balkanize Russia, to weaken Russia.
etc.
You know, it's, it's a bit like people who deny the Great Reset, when the Great Reset is actually in writing, it's in black and white in front of them.
It's ridiculous for them to deny what is going on and what has been going on and what has been planned for decades.
Because you can't forget that prior to that you had Ossetia, you had Chechnya, you had various other operations to weaken or destabilize countries on Russia's borders.
But of course Ukraine is the biggest of those and certainly the biggest prize for NATO because of its resources, because of its positioning.
But, you know, let's face it, NATO doesn't give a flying whatever about Ukrainian lives.
I mean, they are, as people keep describing them, and I don't like saying it in this way, but they are, they're going in the meat grinder for NATO.
You know, NATO isn't committing its own troops as it did in Syria.
It's committing mercenaries, foreign mercenaries.
And it's committing Ukrainian troops and it's NATO-trained Nazi and ultranationalist battalions that are committing atrocities on a daily basis against the people of Donbass.
It's effectively an ethnic cleansing exercise against the people of Donbass that's been going on since 2014.
Against the Russian-speaking population?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Basically.
Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
So, as I understand it, 14,000 were killed in the aftermath of 2014.
Yes.
Still, I think nowhere in any mainstream media have I read about the immolation of those people in Odessa when they were hosed into a trades union building in Birkin Life.
It's as if these things have never happened.
Nobody talks about Mariupol either.
It's a very similar massacre of Russian sympathetic, or not even Russian sympathetic, but people who were against the regime change and against having effectively a Nazi regime imposed upon them, right?
And the same thing happened in Mariupol.
And so, therefore, you know, all of these narratives that describe Mariupol as having been seized by the Russians.
I met refugees from Mariupol in Ufa, which is in the east of Russia.
When, because when we went as independent observers there were more than a hundred and thirty, I think there were a hundred and thirty-three independent observers from all over the world, so from Congo and Togo and Ghana, Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Mozambique, I mean literally everywhere, right?
It was quite extraordinary actually and The organisation was quite incredible.
I mean, we arrived and we were literally, you know, bussed and planed from one part of Russia to Donbass, to Eastern Russia, to Northern Russia, to St.
Petersburg, to meet with refugee communities.
And of course, another one of the kind of Western mainstream propaganda tropes is, oh, you know, these forcibly resettled Ukrainians in Russia.
Well, I can safely say from all the refugee centers that I went to, they're not forcibly resettled.
They're perfectly happy.
They receive free health care.
They receive a weekly allowance.
They receive free food.
They're cooked for three times per day.
They're living in well-heated, well-supplied buildings.
One was a former summer camp for children, another one was a former hospital that had been converted into apartments and dining room and play area for the kids, etc.
So they're living in Relative luxury when you look at how Syrian refugees, for example, are treated in Germany in the refugee camps, right?
You know, we have to draw comparisons here.
And these refugees, many of them from Mariupol that I met, I mean, they effectively told me when I said to them, you know, how do you feel coming up to the referendum?
They said, look, we take this back to 1991.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, when basically the territories were made part of Ukraine, we see it as that.
We never wanted to be a part of Ukraine.
And what they consistently told me was that Ukraine never wanted peace with them.
Never.
Even from 1991 onwards.
1991 onwards, they were treated as unequal within Ukraine, right?
From a religious perspective also.
Yeah, you know, the...
Because the West, of course, is traditionally Catholic, right?
So the Russian Orthodoxy has been also under persecution for some time.
I mean, even recently there was, I've forgotten which area it is, where Ukrainian soldiers were talking about an Orthodox monastery And describing the priests as Russian collaborators.
So as collaborators, if they're captured, they're going to be tortured.
So now even priests, even members of the church, and we know there are priests that have been disappeared, that have been also persecuted.
And, you know, George, when he talks about the early days in 2014, he describes Really, we're going back to the Bandera days, when people were literally disappeared and detained and tortured.
And who's behind the torture?
NATO member states.
Who teaches them waterboarding?
Who teaches them all of the torture methods that they're now using?
Right, that's what I'm saying.
The SBU is kind of the front man, but who's behind it?
Who's engineering this?
Right.
Well, people are going to be... Actually, not many people who watch this podcast are going to think that, but we're all kind of on board now.
But there may be one or two people who are... They think of NATO as an organisation which was designed to protect the West from the evil Russian bear.
You know, the tanks rolling across Lunenburg Heath, as John Hackett described in his book, The Third World War.
And that was my childhood, you know, fearing the Russian invasion, and I thought NATO was a good thing.
People will find it rather shocking that NATO... What's its game?
Why does it hate Russia so much?
Why do all the people behind this... What's their beef?
Why do they want to destroy Russia?
Well, I think then you have to go back to Brzezinski, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and the Grand Chess Board that he wrote in 1997, where, you know, Russia is the threat, Russia and China, but Russia right now is the threat to US supremacy.
And NATO is governed by the US.
The EU is governed by the US.
The EU Parliament is bordering on a fascist entity.
EU states have no sovereignty because the governments or the regimes now are totally controlled by US foreign policy.
Right?
And NATO is no different.
NATO is for war, it's not for peace.
NATO has been waging war for decades, or NATO member states, with impunity.
So NATO is only a facade to protect US unipolarity and hegemony globally, and Russia stands in the way.
And it always has done.
That's one of the reasons for the war against Syria was Syria's long term relationship with Russia.
The fact that within Syrian territory or Syrian waters, Russia had its last remaining military base in the Middle East.
And of course, Syria is the gateway to Eurasia.
And as Brzezinski said, if you control Eurasia, you control the world.
So Russia stands in the way of American supremacy and that's basically what it comes down to and that's what Brzezinski was talking about in 1997 and what all the RAND reports as I said some of them, no in fact they're all publicly available.
Is one, the vulcanization and destabilization of Russia, the weakening of Russia.
And of course, that also started in 1991.
And don't forget that Gorbachev dissolved the Warsaw Pact, but NATO kept going.
So, you know, yet again, we see this complete hypocrisy between the West and its, you know, equals on the global stage.
The intent is always to weaken everyone else to ensure US supremacy.
That's basically what it comes down to.
So NATO shouldn't be viewed as an organisation or a group of independent states, just as the EU shouldn't be.
All of them central power United States.
Right, right.
Imagine I'm one of those people who've got a Ukrainian flag in my bio.
I believe all the stuff I read in the Daily Mail.
Do I have to?
Well, yeah.
How are you going to persuade me that I'm an idiot?
What have you seen on your tour of the free and fair elections in, I'm presuming they were free and fair, as an election observer?
Tell me what you saw out there.
Well, um, as I said, you know, the organised, sorry, I've come back with a terrible cold from Russia, with, with, from Russia with love, so that's why I'm, um, croaking a bit.
Do you think it's, do you think it's, it's, it's something they call Covid?
Do you think you're going to die?
No, I don't, and I have to say that Russia was incredibly relaxed about all of that.
They don't require PCRs, no one wore masks, no one gave a shit about Covid, actually, for the whole time I was there, and I travelled- Actually, Vanessa!
A fair amount.
Yeah.
One of the biggest debates on my telegram group is whether Putin is a goodie or a baddie, whether he is a secret agent, a secret stooge of the World Economic Forum where he was a young leader and there's evidence of him sort of being quite close to the WF in the past and also
People say, oh, you think Putin's your hero, but you see he's just as bad on enforcing the Vax as any other Western country.
Where are you on this?
Look, I can only talk about what I saw, yeah I know about this whole kind of tranche of commentators and some of them I have huge respect for, I don't agree with them.
I don't particularly buy into any kind of saviour complex, you know, I don't look at I look at Putin and I see what he's saying and I like what he's saying.
Do I trust any world leader?
No, not particularly.
Do I trust any government?
No, not particularly.
But when I was in Russia, what did I see?
I saw huge investment in civilian infrastructure in some of the kind of, for example, the far eastern industrial cities.
Massive investment into housing, into hospitals, into entertainment centres and when I'm talking entertainment I'm talking for example National Opera or National Ballet and I actually said to them yeah but Is it too expensive for the average person?
Because that's what it's like in the UK, right?
If you want to go to the Royal Opera House, it's going to cost you an arm and a leg.
And they said, no, no, no.
It's at a price for, you know, anybody can go.
That's the whole thing.
We want it to be popular.
People are being encouraged to invest in property, in land to build.
Right, so I'm seeing really the complete opposite to what's happening in the West, where the Western regimes, through the WEF and Davos, etc., are effectively destroying the health service, destroying the working class, destroying all kind of civilian infrastructure, reducing the economy to dust.
Right, destroying small businesses, etc, etc, destroying unions and so on and so forth.
In Russia, what I saw was free health care, free education.
Okay, there are areas, rural areas, that I think they're working on.
I mean, it's a vast country, right?
But in the outlying, not capital cities, as I said, I saw Huge, I was being described, huge improvements from even one year ago.
For example, in the city of Ufa, whole streets have been renovated from one year ago.
And it's affordable housing for the people that are coming there because it's an industrial city.
Right, so what I saw completely negated this whole let's destroy everything WEF agenda.
And I didn't see COVID hysteria.
I mean, in the hotels, nobody was wearing a mask.
I didn't need a PCR to enter Russia.
Syria and Lebanon were still asking for it.
They've changed.
They've cancelled that now.
Um, right.
I, speaking from that experience and speaking, you know, I was talking to Russians quite openly about this, many of them, and when I said to them, you do realize that in the West people kind of think Russia's in on it, and their jaws kind of dropped, you know?
I mean, and this is the thing, I mean, I think how I Look at this.
You know, I do believe that within Russia, within China, within everything, even within Syria, there are fifth columnists.
There are people that are there to destabilize and to effectively bring these countries into line with a Western-centric power grab.
Right.
I do believe that is the case.
So you're going to see conflict internally, even within the government.
And you also have to remember that effectively Russia is governed as almost separate republics.
So each republic has its own governance and its own decision maker.
Of course it all, you know, eventually, centrally goes back to government in Moscow.
But it's so vast, you know, these, these republics can't be constantly asking Moscow for permission to carry out policies in their areas.
So it may be that in some areas they are more COVID, what's the word, COVID happy.
Let's say, than they are in others.
So, and how I look at this, I look at this as an existential war.
When I look at the values that the majority of Russian people uphold, it's the traditional values that we've completely ...perverted in the West, or we've allowed them to be perverted, right?
I mean, Putin has spoken about this regularly.
He spoke about it recently in his speech after... Yeah!
...the ratification of... Didn't he mention Satanic?
He mentioned... That was in... Satan?
Yeah, that... he... I'm not sure if he mentioned it this time, but he definitely mentioned it in his 2007 speech.
So, I mean, even going back to then, And, you know, I think people forget that Russia still believes in diplomacy.
It still believes in global security, right?
So you will see, for example, Lavrov being perfectly amiable with people that Russia might consider an enemy.
But that's diplomacy.
I mean, apart from Liz Trousfouche, he was openly, he openly disliked her, but, I mean, that's fairly understandable.
Did he?
Well, I think he described their conversation as the mute speaking to the deaf in the press conference.
But this is rather the vibe I'm getting at the moment, Vanessa, from I see That Liz Truss has been hot for war with Russia for some time.
So has her new defence secretary.
Clearly an appointment for the war party.
I see an MP popping up in my wife's Daily Telegraph in the basement op-ed column again.
coming up with all this why we really need to go to war with Putin now stuff.
I see the defence correspondents and the diplomatic correspondents all arguing expertly that really A. Putin is very weak and foolish and stupid, but B. he's incredibly dangerous and that we really got to crush him.
I see professors who are supposedly experts in geopolitics And I would have believed them, you know, for a time.
They're clearly MI6, or they're stooges of the Deep State, and they are all singing from one hymn sheet which says, we must go to war with, we need a third world war with Putin, starting in 2023.
So, um, is there anything we can do about this?
Oh, stop reading the Telegraph, and stop reading the Guardian, and start, you know, I think the thing is that I'm not talking about me.
No, I know.
No, I know.
We're okay.
But just generally, you know, generally we've got to be a little bit more discerning about the experts that we follow, because there's a lot of kind of what I call confusing disinformation out there, where it can have the appearance of being on target, but in reality it's kind of dropping in little kind of seeds of disinformation, which then grow into this
I mean, I'm seeing it from reporting, from being on the ground in Donbass.
What am I seeing?
The main things are, yeah, well, you know, Russia invaded.
No, it didn't.
No, it didn't.
Basically, who's defending Donbass?
It's the DPR and the LPR.
Militia.
National Defence.
Who are?
Russia has been the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic.
Militia.
National Defence.
They have been helped traditionally by, for example, Abkhazia, of course, who Made itself independent from Georgia and that also, by the way, has not been recognized by Western countries, only by North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, Russia.
I might have missed one there, right?
So, Abkhazia is fighting alongside them.
And a number of other allies.
It's true that the Syrian National Defence Forces in the Orthodox Christian areas of Syria also offered to send support for the Donbass forces.
And actually, Russia advised them against it.
So that's another story that was kind of surfacing that, oh, but Syria is sending soldiers to Donbass, etc.
No, they didn't.
They offered.
They offered.
And the Russian troop presence in Donbass was minimal.
I saw them at the border.
But not in huge numbers.
I saw a few armoured vehicles and a couple of tanks and that was it.
But once I entered Donbass, it was all DPR, LPR defence forces.
So that's number one.
So the whole point of Donbass now becoming Russia is that Russia can deploy its forces Into these areas because now it's part of Russia, but up until then Russia had been supplying training it had been supplying some weapons and some help with air defense because I mean even when we were in Donetsk and we were observing
The ballot there in various areas of Donetsk, including the city and Maikhaevka, which was a suburb where the ballot was being held in a school that had been regularly targeted.
You saw the craters in the street outside.
This is a civilian area.
It's not a military area.
This is not about military against military.
This is about Ukrainian military ethnically cleansing Donbass and murdering children and civilians on an almost daily basis.
When we were in Donetsk, all you could hear were incoming missiles and interception by air defense.
It was 24-7.
I mean, I was only there for a few hours.
Eva Bartlett, for example, has been there this time for two or three weeks, but she's spent considerable time there, and she's saying exactly the same thing.
It is civilians that are being targeted.
There are only three very, very minimal military bases inside Donetsk itself, and it's a vast area.
Two days before I went in Kherson, They targeted RT journalists in a hotel.
They tried to murder Murad Gajdiev of RT.
His cameraman was buried under the rubble and two journalists in the room next to him in the hotel were killed outright.
So, you know, this is, as I said, it's not about military against military.
It's not Ukraine against Russia.
It's Ukraine against the civilians of Donbass who are being defended by their own national defences.
So that means farmers, students, doctors, young men.
that took up arms to defend themselves against Ukraine very similar to what happened in Syria in many of the outlying areas that couldn't be reached by the Syrian army national defenses were formed right now of course that that they become Russia that's why they are so happy because now Russia can fully deploy To help them.
Up until now, that didn't really happen.
It was minimal assistance.
Because, as I've said, Russia respects global security.
It respects international law, unlike the West.
When you say up until now, you mean that the population has now voted overwhelmingly that they want to be with Russia rather than Ukraine, and that therefore, de facto, Or even de jure.
Is that right?
Is Donetsk, sorry, the Donbas, is that now part of Russia?
Yes.
Of course it's not recognised by the UN and the West, etc.
But yeah, it is now effectively considered.
And under international law, of course, it is absolutely legitimate that it is now recognised as part of Russia, because the whole point of... I mean, I'm not an international lawyer by any stretch of the imagination, but I've spoken to international lawyers
And, effectively, because the people of Donbass were, since 2014, under serious risk of genocide, effectively, their sovereignty, provided it is recognised by a neighbouring country, which is Russia, because you have to remember in 2014 there was already a referendum.
Where they voted for independence and at that point Russia didn't want to absorb them because in a sense it wanted them to just be independent, right?
Fast forward to now There was intelligence that NATO was preparing for a big push into Donbass and it would have been a massacre and it would have meant then that NATO military would be on the border literally with Russia and it would have been a massacre in the Donbass.
So Russia had no option at that point But to come to the assistance of the DPR and the LPR to push back against the Ukrainian forces.
But as I said, there was absolutely no Russian troop presence on the ground where I was in Donetsk.
I didn't go to Lugansk, I didn't go to Kherson and I didn't go to Zaporozhye.
Did you go to the front line?
area of the nuclear plant.
There may well have been theirs, particularly in Zaporozhye because they were protecting the nuclear plant from attack by Ukrainian missiles but in Donetsk, no.
Did you go to the front line?
Presumably there is a front line between the West and the East.
The front line is in the cities because it's a war of long-range missiles rather than hand-to-hand fighting.
So it's just a constant exchange of missiles.
And in the centre of Donetsk, I mean Eva was there a few days before I got there where I think it was 13 13 people were just massacred in the street.
I can't remember which area it was.
It might have been close to one of the markets.
And these were all civilian targets.
So, again, if you read the UK media, all you will know is that for the last month or so, the Russians have been absolutely tranced.
They've been in a retreat and it's extraordinary how pathetic they've been made to look and blah blah blah.
What is the state of play with the intervention, or whatever you want to call it?
Um, well, I mean, I think first of all, you know, Western media is going to say that.
I mean, I think the last big advance ended in huge losses.
I think between 6,000 and 8,000 Ukrainian soldiers were killed.
When they advanced into effectively what was really a trap laid for them by the Russians.
So they advanced very quickly and then they were very vulnerable, right?
And I think even Ukraine, as far as I know, has admitted that they had huge losses in those areas.
Look, I'm not a military expert.
There are people like Andrei Martyanov that I would recommend people follow for a very sort of dry, factual analysis of the military situation.
And another guy is the former Swiss intelligence officer Jacques Boldt.
Oh yes, Jacques Boldt.
Yeah.
Who I think gives the most kind of Insightful, logical, rational analysis of the actual war operations and of course Scott Ritter, I mean he comes at it from a very sort of an understanding of the Western strategy point of view, but he's also worth listening to.
But, you know, it's not that I would completely discount what is being said in the West.
I would take it with a pinch of salt and I would not underestimate anything.
I mean, Jacques Boe has actually talked about this quite extensively.
You know, the Russians fight on a very different level to the West.
The West is all about shock and awe and, you know, propaganda.
A lot of the Western war is about propaganda.
Right.
The Russians are kind of... What's that wonderful saying?
Revenge is a dish best served cold.
You know, that for me encapsulates the Russian mentality.
You remember when Turkey shot down their jet over Syrian airspace.
I think it was back in 2015.
And Putin was very kind of, you know, Very cool about it.
I mean, had that been the West, of course, we'd be at war with Turkey, right?
Yeah, yeah.
You know, so, um, don't underestimate the Russians.
He's read The Godfather, hasn't he?
Because that's what, that's what Michael Corleone does when, when, when his brothers, when, yeah, when his brothers get killed, he just, Yeah, it's fine, we're just going to live in peace.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And, you know, they have a completely different war strategy.
And the fact is that they've deployed a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of their armed forces.
I think it's around, I've seen figures around 1%, right?
Because as I say, it's mostly the DPR and the LPR and Abkhazia and these elements that are fighting the war in Mombasa.
Russia has massive reserves behind it.
I got the impression from when I was more interested in the fighting stage of the war that a lot of the fighting is being done by Chechen units, presumably because they're a bit like the Gershwins, they're massively feared.
Um, and they're not afraid to go in with, with, with the knives and stuff.
Um, and then there's the mention of the, the Wagner group?
Um, who are mercenaries, aren't they?
They're sort of, like, sort of... I think they've now been made official, haven't they?
Uh, I could have, um, misread that, but I thought they had been made an official part of the Russian army now.
I'm not sure, don't quote me on that, but I, I think I saw something fairly recently.
But to be honest, all of these forces, from what I was told, they were still basically trained by the DPR and the LPR, because the DPR and the LPR have been fighting this war since 2014.
So the Chechens came in and, let's say, they were not quite as experienced as the DPR and LPR.
So, for example, they were advancing in columns.
Until the LPR and DPR guys said to some guys, like, if you're gonna advance like this, forget it, you're gonna be finished in five minutes, you know?
So I think this was indicative to me of to what extent The indigenous forces, the national defense forces, had been fighting this war for years before these other regiments came in to reinforce them, right?
But just coming back to this idea, and you know there's a lot of talk about Russian mobilization of citizens.
No.
The mobilization is of reservists.
So people who were previously in the armed forces, you know, and they're always basically kept in the wings for when there's a need to mobilise, and it's the reservists that are being called forward.
You know, citizens aren't being forced into armed services right now.
Again, that's one of these mass rumours that has somehow gathered traction.
And the other thing that has gathered a lot of traction in the West, of course, is this idea that people being I have to laugh because the people of Donbass just cracked up when I mentioned this, that they were being forced at gunpoint to go and vote.
Yes, you know, there were, there was a lot of armed presence, but of course there was, this is a war zone.
And, you know, people have to understand that the SBU has infiltrators even inside Donbass that act as spotters.
I mean, to give an indication, right, even on Twitter there are people that do this.
I mean, um, not so long ago I wrote about a dreadful woman called Louise Mensch, who's on Twitter, former UK MP, kind of a chick-lit author, but she's basically on Twitter.
Married to the manager of Metallica.
Yeah, as a spotter, because she picked up that Eva was in Donetsk.
She put out a tweet saying, tagging the SBU or the Ukrainian Special Forces.
And two days later, Eva's hotel was targeted.
Right?
So this is not a coincidence.
So the SBU has... What a piece of work.
Yeah.
And that's how they murdered... Oh, God, his name escapes me.
In 2018, the head of the DPR.
Sort of their independent government was assassinated in his office in Donetsk.
There's a huge memorial to him because one of his own people was the spotter for the SBU.
So he basically radioed them and said, look, he's in his office.
You can kill him now.
And they targeted the office.
They assassinated him.
So the presence of military is for the protection of the people that were coming to vote.
Right.
And when I spoke to the people and I said, OK, do you feel intimidated?
They just laughed at me.
They said, but this is our own.
These are our brothers and our fathers who have defended us for eight years.
Of course, we're not afraid of them.
Yes.
Let me ask you, I get my information about what Norma's think when I go riding, and our riding instructor, you know, she thinks I'm, you know, I'm mad, obviously.
Well, she's mad too.
She says, oh yes, James, you think Putin's winning, don't you?
And I say, well, what do you think's going on?
She said, well, what about all the footage of these people in Russia trying to escape before conscription starts?
Have you heard this story?
Yeah.
What's that about?
As far as I know, I've seen a couple of posts about it on various Telegram channels.
It's kind of nonsense.
I think some of it is footage from actual Ukrainians trying to get out of Ukraine to get away from conscription.
But, you know, the general feeling that I saw from the celebrations in Moscow, from... There are people who are against mobilization, by the way, inside Russia and, to be honest, they are drawing up petitions and they are protesting quite relatively freely.
I didn't see them being stamped out by anyone and Navalny is allowed to write letters from I would argue that there's an awful lot more free speech in Russia than there is in the West right now.
And I'm living proof of that.
near death of Murad Gajdiev in Kursan.
So, you know, I would argue that there's an awful lot more free speech in Russia than there is in the West right now.
And I'm living proof of that.
I have an MEP calling for me directly to be sanctioned for my involvement in observing the referendum and my involvement in exposing her role in Syria.
So it's a personal vendetta.
Oh, what did you expose about her role?
Her name is Natalie Loiseau.
When she found out, basically, that I had been one of the independent observers, she wrote a letter to the High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs, Joseph Borrell, calling for me personally, not all the observers, me personally, to be sanctioned because I was assisting the Russian regime in Donbass.
And because I had assisted Al-Assad in Syria.
What I exposed her for doing was leading the charge against Syria of the Douma chemical attack, which led of course to the unlawful aggression, the bombing by UK, US and France of Damascus shortly after the Douma chemical attack, when no dossier had even been produced.
And since then, of course, we know that the OPCW report was completely corrupt and compromised and influenced and the inspectors are still waiting to be heard within the OPCW.
And she is still pushing the absolute scam that was the chemical weapon attack.
So I've already called her out publicly On that.
She also has a pretty shady past.
I mean, she was involved in, um, covering up the, uh, attempted murder of a whistleblower in Benin in Africa, uh, Francoise Nicolas.
Her case is very well known in France.
And, um, uh, Loiseau was involved in, in the cover-up of embezzlement and, and murder and the attempt to silence a whistleblower there.
So she has, she has history, let's say.
She's probably an asset then.
Yeah, absolutely.
And a relatively powerful one.
So she's gunning for me because she sees this as an opportunity to abuse her power to bring me to justice as far as she's concerned, which means shutting me up so that we don't bring her to justice, basically.
Vanessa, I'm old enough to remember a time when to be an observer in any form of elections was a sort of protected position which would be respected by all parties, certainly by politicians and the media.
Am I incredibly, am I being incredibly naive here?
Actually what I'm leading to is a question about, look, I cannot think of a single example of, okay, Peter Hitchens has been fighting a lonely battle.
I can't think of anyone else anywhere in the mainstream media, not even in The Guardian, which you might think might be taking a different line, which is doing anything other than push us closer to war with Russia over this.
There is no reporting on the other side at all.
How is that?
Well, I mean, I think we saw this during the whole Syria campaign, or the anti-Syria campaign.
The Guardian from 2012 onwards, I mean, they got rid of the decent journalist.
John Pilger no longer writes for them.
Jonathan Steele, what was his name?
Ian Cobain was kind of mothballed.
You know, I think he's still with them, but he rarely writes anything for them now.
And they brought in a ton of spooks, basically.
You know, like Martin Shulov, Karim Shaheen, Simon Tistle, who's one of... I mean, he is utterly abhorrent, that guy.
I mean, I don't know anyone else that is...
Permanently calling for war, like he does.
I did a sort of montage of all of his headlines, it's quite incredible.
I mean, he's just, you know, he's just out there calling for blood the whole time, whether it's President Assad or it's President Putin, it doesn't matter.
I mean, he's just there banging the war drums.
So for me now, the media is nothing more than a bunch of spotters and hitmen.
You know, working for the SBU and working for CIA and MI6.
That's basically what they do.
They discredit the people that are a pain in the neck for these organizations.
Right?
I mean, they've done that to me for the last eight years.
Consistently.
And that's pretty much what they do.
They just shore up The establishment narratives, the government narratives, and it doesn't matter anymore if it's Republican or Democrat or Labour or Tory, they're all on the same track.
You know, we don't have choice anymore, and governments aren't really in control, otherwise we wouldn't have an idiot like Liz Truss.
Who do you think is in control?
Huh?
Who do you think ultimately gives the orders here?
Well, eventually, the oligarchs, the billionaire complex, you know, the people that run the military-industrial complex, the pharmaceutical complex, the big guys behind the throne, basically, governments now.
Point out to me one decent Western government.
Point out to me one Western statesperson.
You can't.
There isn't one.
Bolsonaro.
Who?
Bolsonaro.
Balsonaro.
He's about to get kicked out, though, in Rigoletto.
I bet Lula gets back in, because they've got Dominion machines, and Balsonaro will get... I mean, you've also... I mean, you've got... Yeah.
I mean, you've got Viktor Orban, also, in Hungary, who, to some degree, is protecting the sovereignty of his country, but... To some degree.
There is no one.
You know, even in Serbia, where the population is predominantly pro-Russia, you still have a Tony Blair guy in power, Vucic.
You know, Tony Blair is his influencer.
And so, for me, look at Zelensky.
Zelensky encapsulates what we have right now.
Well, Zelensky and trust, because, I mean, Christ, you know, we couldn't have a more embarrassing Prime Minister Then her, actually.
In history.
Oh, I don't know.
I mean, they're all shit.
Come on.
Sorry.
No, I mean, honestly.
They're all just... Come on, would you rather have Tony Blair than Liz Truss?
Come on.
It's like choosing between Satan himself and one of the junior demons.
Well, yeah, exactly.
I mean, that's... You'd clearly rather have a junior demon than Satan.
I'd rather have a clever demon.
I mean, she's... What, so he could just fuck you over more effectively?
Vanessa, I've got to ask you.
You mentioned Mariupol.
Yeah.
Tell me about... I mean, what do you know about the biolabs?
What do you know about the... all that stuff that under the Azov style?
Have they... has this come out?
I think Russia has produced reports on the existence of the Biolabs.
I'm a little bit behind on all of that, but yeah, I'm pretty certain.
Somebody did talk to me about it when I was there.
Memory hold.
But yeah, it's almost certain that there was A biolab within Azovstal.
Yeah.
I mean, as I said to you, the majority of the refugees that I saw in Ufa in the East all came from Mariupol and arrived.
You've also got to remember that these people, I mean, it's like something out of the Second World War, actually.
I mean, they arrived by train, utterly exhausted, everything destroyed, carrying literally one bag of belongings.
And, you know, people talk about this forced resettlement.
They arrived on trains, they were met by Russian officials who put them onto buses and took them to centres that had already been prepared, as I said to you, that were absolutely, you know, if you're a refugee, I would be really quite happy to be living where they're living.
They're not crowded and on top of each other.
Each one of them had their own cabin, for example.
As I said, food was provided, a bus was provided to take them to town every day and bring them back if they needed to go and do shopping and sort out their paperwork.
They're given free citizenship if they want it, right?
And the whole labor law was suspended so that they could immediately work the minute they arrived.
So these people were extraordinarily well taken care of, by the way.
And they were given psychological trauma treatment, also.
Will they be going back?
Yeah.
When Mariapause is being rebuilt?
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, what they told me is that actually Russia, with the DPR and LPR, are rebuilding very fast.
Apartment buildings are going back up very fast.
And, and this, you know, also, again, this is complete opposite to the West.
The West just destroys everything and then just leaves it, including the mines and, and everything else, you know.
They don't give a shit.
But actually, Russia is, in Mariupol, they're building, they're rebuilding very, very, very quickly, and allowing people to go back to apartments very quickly.
And I think that will be the pattern throughout the areas that have been very badly damaged.
Did you get any stories about what happened when... I mean, presumably, you say that they needed sort of counselling, some of them.
It must have been fairly traumatic, what they went through.
Yeah, I mean, you know, all of them are, as Russian speakers, were under constant threat of execution, detention, torture by the Azov battalions and the Aida battalions that were effectively in charge of Mariupol.
And that's what they told me.
I mean, another girl that I met who had voluntarily left Gorlovka, I think in 2015, because it was just becoming so incredibly dangerous.
She didn't want to leave.
But she said I had no choice.
You know, if I'd stayed, I would have eventually probably been raped, tortured, imprisoned, etc.
And so these people lost literally everything.
I mean, this one guy lost four apartments.
Him and his whole family were in Ufa.
They lost four apartments, family apartments.
They left with nothing.
Literally nothing.
As I said, all their belongings in one bag.
But as he said to me, you know, because we said to him, how do you feel about Donbass being reunified with Russia?
And he burst out laughing.
He said, I don't care about Donbass.
I just want Mariupol to be Russia.
That's all I care about.
You know, so this is where it's very difficult To take the level of cognitive dissonance in the West, because when you see these people and when you see how they don't even consider themselves to be Ukrainian, they have always considered themselves to be Russian.
So for them, this is just a natural step.
Right.
And it is a huge majority.
And coming back to the referendums, 133 observers, and not all of them sympathetic to Russia, by the way.
You know, there were journalists from Iceland who was very neutral.
There was a Serbian delegation that was definitely pro-Vucic, so pro-NATO.
Not one of them found any violation.
In all the referendums that they covered, and they covered everywhere.
I mean, I have to say the organisation from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs was extraordinary.
People went to St Peter's.
They went from every corner of Russia.
Were you a UK delegate or a Syrian delegate?
UK.
I was the only UK delegate.
That's why it's easy to pick me off.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Do you know, I'm still, I'm still reeling from that story of, of, about Louise Mensch.
You know, I remember her when she was a, she used to write Chick Lit.
She was a novelist called, called Louise Bagshaw.
She wrote Chick Lit.
Yeah.
And now here she is sort of shopping, shopping Eva to try and get her killed.
It's just...
It's hideous how people... Yeah.
And now every single one of the observers is on the kill list, by the way.
We're all on the kill list now.
And the kill list includes more than 300 children.
Children!
So under the age of 16.
And the kill list is not Ukrainian, this is what people need to understand.
The kill list belongs to the UK and the US.
And in the UK there's an organization called MOLFAR, M-O-L-F-A-R, people can look it up, MOLFAR Global, and this effectively has a very similar AUK list, so Russian military and sympathizers who, again, it's a kill list.
You know, it's kind of disguised as these people should be tried as war criminals, etc.
And you know there was a recent security, cyber security and disinformation meeting in Ukraine chaired by the US State Department.
UK was involved where effectively now journalists that are reporting from Donbass will be known as information terrorists and we're liable to prosecution as such as war criminals.
Graham Phillips of course has already been sanctioned by the UK Alina Lipp, a German journalist, has been sanctioned and threatened with prosecution by the German government.
One of the German observers, who was a company director, has been sacked from his job.
He's been given asylum now in Russia.
So, you know, it's becoming, it's really becoming kind of dangerous to be a journalist doing what we're doing.
Really.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, things are just going to get so bad in the next few years anyway, I think.
Yeah.
I think any of us that gets out of this one alive is going to be one of the lucky ones.
Yeah.
I'll tell you something, how far down, where are you on religion?
Are you a person of faith or not?
I'm a person of faith, but I don't like putting a label on it, so I tend to have my, I believe, but I don't like to be classed as one thing or the other, so I keep my independence even in that.
No, well I wasn't asking you anything more than that.
I just, I just, I did this really, really interesting podcast the other day.
Yeah.
with a woman, people will see it, who's very, very high up in the satanic hierarchy.
And she has met, she's encountered, she says that lots of the world leaders are trained from an early age as, you know, They're selected.
They're part of the Satanic bloodlines and they go through all these rituals, starting at the age of 12, when they do things so hideous I can't even describe.
I was asking her about various world leaders.
And, you know, most of them are deeply compromised.
I mean, they are effectively working for the devil.
They've made pacts with the devil.
It's part of the deal about becoming a world leader.
And I asked her about Putin.
And I said, like, did he receive this, like, satanic training?
And she said, I'm not familiar with that, but she said, I think he's one of the good guys.
And she said, I think he, and this was even weirder, President Xi... That was weird.
That was really weird.
And I've had this... Vanessa, I've had this before.
When you mention this stuff, they...
It happens.
I tell you, this stuff is real.
Yeah, I know.
That was just bizarre, because everything cut on my end.
It's the evil one who's giving the orders.
It absolutely is.
It's a bugger with my recording system, because you have to go through these problems now.
I hope you record it.
Anyway...
That was the point I was making, Millie, that it is possible, according to one leading retired ex-Satanist, that actually Putin is one of ours.
I'm presuming you're on my side.
I think you are.
Yeah, President Putin, President Xi and President Trump, she numbered among the good guys, which I thought was curious.
OK.
Tell me before we go, how are things in Syria?
How is your lovely horse?
Oh, sadly I had to let my horse go because I just, I don't have the time and, um, so he's, he's gone to a very good friend of mine, uh, so I can still see him, um, and he's very well taken care of.
And ride him?
Yeah.
Um, yeah, but I, I really don't have much time at the moment, um, so, but he's very well taken care of, but I do miss him.
I do really miss him.
But still, I have the dogs.
Um, things in Syria are, I mean, I think we're heading for a bit of a dark winter as regards, you know, electricity and fuel and blah blah blah, but at the same time, um, yeah, exactly, um, things are changing for the better.
I mean, I think now Syria has the upper hand in a number of instances.
Israel is facing, um, Well, it's basically under attack on four fronts now, from Yemen, from Syria, from Hezbollah and from Palestine.
So the attacks on Syria have actually kind of stopped for the time being, which is interesting.
Syrian-Russian exercises in the northeast are Putting pressure on the US occupation of the oil fields and Erdogan has an election coming up in June 2023 so he's very much dependent on Assad to allow one million Syrian refugees back into Syria to kind of give him a bit of an election advantage.
So to some degree he's backpedaling on Turkey's role in toppling the Syrian government.
So, you know, it's shifting sands.
People like to try and promote the fact that Russia is abandoning Syria.
That's absolute nonsense.
You know, Russia is not going to abandon Syria.
Syria is essential to Russia, apart from the very long-term alliance between the two countries.
It's essential to Russia.
Um, to have a foothold in the Middle East and have a gateway to Eurasia.
So, you know, it's not going to happen.
Russia's not going to be abandoning Syria any time soon.
And there are actual, um, sort of live fire military exercises going on right now in the Northeast and in the South, which of course is Golan territories.
I can't say any more at the moment, but they're in, you know, they're in the crosshairs.
And how, um, what are Syrian winters like, where you are?
Um, where I am, I'm sort of on the outskirts of Damascus and quite close to the mountains, so they can be quite harsh, but they're short.
Um, I mean, right now it's 35 degrees outside.
Oh, wow.
So I came back to Moscow, where it was, Moscow was 8 degrees.
Uh, Donbass was around 18, 20 degrees.
Ufa was 25 degrees, so the variation in, and in, uh, I think Siberia, they already had snow, because one of our translators was from Siberia.
Um, here it's... I'm not moving to Siberia.
No.
Here it's, um, yeah, it's mid-thirties right now.
Oh, I wish I were there with you, Vanessa.
I know!
I mean, it is nice, because we'll have this kind of weather into November, and then really December, January, February are the winter months, although in February we can have really hot weather.
So it's harsh but short.
Mm-hm.
Which I don't mind.
Um, yeah, good.
Well, um, I'm sorry for asking you mainly about Russia and Ukraine this time.
No, no, it's fine.
I mean, I've just come back, so it's inevitable.
Good.
Um, well, um, listen, until our next time, um, great to see you.
Sorry to hear about the horse.
Um, keep fighting the good fight.
I will.
I'm glad that we've, I'm glad that we've, we've finally converged and that we're now thinking on pretty much the same... Yeah, absolutely.
I think we always were.
Who'd have thought, eh?
Yeah, well, I think so.
I think all these things are meant to be.
And I think, you know, the important thing that I take away is this existential war.
Russia, whether you agree with the government, whether you agree with Putin, and he's saying everything that I agree with, The Russian people and the Syrian people and all the peoples that kind of stand behind Russia, either actively or passively right now, are doing so because the West is destroying humanity.
You know, it's destroying all of the values that make us human beings.
And in these countries, those values are still held dear.
And for me, that's what I see.
Yes, you can argue the Covid issue.
You can argue all of that.
But the peoples, you know, that's what they represent to me.
I totally agree.
You just made me think, then, of that line from The Doors, from the end, where Jim Morrison sings, the West is the best.
And at the time, or rather when I used to listen to it as a child, I used to think, yeah, go West.
West is great.
I didn't realise at that point that Jim Morrison was the son of the admiral in charge of the US fleet which was responsible for the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and that he was basically a CIA operative trying to pollute Western culture with drugs and sex and rock and roll, and actually he was not contributing to the West being the best, he was contributing to its demise.
So there you go.
That's a nice point to end on.
But yeah, I mean, that's where I stand on it, anyway.
Everything is an illusion.
Yeah.
Yeah.
OK.
Thank you, Vanessa.
Dear listeners, if you've enjoyed this, I'm sure you have, don't forget to support me on Patreon, on Subscribestar, on Locals, and on Substack.
And it's great to see you, and you're welcome to the sites and have conversations with me and see stuff.