Human Events Daily - Jack Posobiec - Tales of Regime Change: Ukraine

Dec. 31, 2025 - Human Events Daily - Jack Posobiec

48:00

Tales of Regime Change: Ukraine — Shadows of Ukraine

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	This is what happens when the fourth turning meets fifth-generation warfare.
	A commentator, international social media sensation, and former Navy intelligence veteran.
	This is Human Events with your host, Jack Posovic.
	Christ is king.
	More than 200,000 protesters gathered in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev today, furious over the government's refusal to sign a trade agreement with the European Union.
	Police use tear gas and clubs to beat back demonstrators who surrounded President Viktor Yanukovych's office.
	They are demanding his resignation, saying the government is corrupt and too tied to Russia.
	The United States stands with you in your search for justice, for human dignity, for security, for economic health, and for the European future that you have chosen and that you deserve.
	After those deadly protests, the government firing back, the president tonight is in hiding, and just look at the images coming in now.
	Families wandering the grounds of his luxury home outside the capital today, taking turns playing on his private golf course, helping themselves to his golf clubs.
	And now the former prime minister is now freed from prison where the president had put her, reaching out to her supporters right there.
	Ukraine's billionaire presidential candidate, Petro Poroshenko, has declared victory.
	An exit poll suggests he got enough votes to avoid a potentially divisive runoff.
	A comedian with no political experience has won the first round of Ukraine's presidential elections.
	Vladimir Zelensky came in comfortably ahead of the incumbent Petro Poroshenko.
	They'll face a runoff vote in three weeks.
	Volodymyr Zelensky's win is a political game changer.
	And at this Kiev park today, Ukrainians were talking about what the new president's first moves might be.
	The good thing about Zelensky is that he attracted young people, says this man.
	Before that, it was just the old guard.
	And now there's no going back.
	It's a nice opportunity to change everything and maybe it's something in our country.
	I agree with his position.
	But even as an astounding 73% of voters put their faith in the political rookie, his plans for Ukraine remain unclear.
	Zelensky's only political experience is playing Ukraine's president on television.
	Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard for today's edition of Tales of Regime Change.
	Shadows Over Ukraine.
	And folks, I've been saying this for years now, but it's clearer than ever.
	The war in Ukraine isn't what the mainstream media and neocons keep shoving down our throats.
	No, we know that this was a classic U.S. regime change operation that went horribly wrong.
	It backfired spectacularly, and now we're all paying the price.
	With endless billions of dollars, the risk of nuclear escalation, you've got the people, the good people of Ukraine, caught in the crossfire.
	They don't deserve this.
	And you've got millions upon millions of people dead.
	And you look at the catastrophe that goes on in there.
	And our own diplomats, our own leaders, they knew about this.
	They knew what would happen.
	This didn't start in 2022.
	It goes back decades, right after the Soviet Union collapsed.
	We had a chance for peace.
	Gorbachev, Yeltsin, they were ready to partner with the West.
	But what did the U.S. do?
	Well, they broke every promise.
	James Baker, Bush Senior Secretary of State, told Gorbachev flat out that NATO won't move one inch eastward if you let Germany reunify.
	That was the deal.
	But then Clinton came in and boom, NATO expanded.
	You got Hungary, you got the Baltics, you got all the way up.
	And all the while, Russia was warning again and again, red line, red line, red line.
	George Kennan, the architect, the literal architect of containment theory, called it a fateful error to push NATO all the way up to Russia's borders.
	Even Bill Burns, who was just CIA director under Biden, wrote in 2008 that pushing NATO into Ukraine would cross Russia's deepest red line, provoke a crisis, and even a war over Crimea.
	That might be Bill Burns calling me right now.
	But the neocons, the regime changers in Washington, they didn't care.
	They saw Russia weak and they thought, let's encircle them.
	Let's install puppets on their border.
	Well, fast forward to 2014, the Maidan protests.
	And look, we know that protests happen, but what did our State Department, what did Victoria Newland do handing out her cookies, literally funding millions through the NGOs to fuel the uprising against the elected president Yanukovych, who we know at the time was considered pro-Russian, but he was democratically chosen by the people of Ukraine.
	The United States backed the overthrow.
	This was the Obama government.
	This was Hillary and her people when they were there installing this, pushing this, Victoria Newland.
	And then a new pro-Western government was installed with no election whatsoever.
	And suddenly, Ukraine is talking NATO membership.
	So what did Russia look at?
	They saw an existential threat.
	American missiles, minutes from Moscow, a hostile regime in Kiev funded by the United States.
	That's the regime change part.
	The United States and the West wanted to flip Ukraine, pull it into our orbit, weaken Russia permanently.
	But the people of Ukraine didn't vote the right way, so we backed an overthrow of a president.
	Well, it turns out it went wrong.
	Russia didn't just roll over.
	What did they do?
	They went right back into Crimea, where their Black Sea fleet is based.
	They would never have given that up.
	They worked with groups in the Donbass.
	And then after years of ignored warnings, Minsk agreements sabotaged, shelling in the east, Russia invaded in 2022.
	And now it's a meat grinder.
	Hundreds of thousands of dead, millions dead, trillions wasted.
	Europe decentralized without Russian gas, and we are closer to World War III than ever.
	This was bipartisan.
	Democrats, Republicans prolonged the slaughter.
	It was not inevitable.
	But folks, perhaps there was a way to end the bleeding and stop poking the bear.
	See what happens.
	Jack Kosovic, coming up more, Human Events Day.
	Top story.
	Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev has been removed from power and there are tanks now in the streets of Moscow.
	Vice President Gennady Yanayov says he has taken over as acting president as the head of state of a special state committee.
	All right, Jack Kosovic, we're back here.
	Human events, special tales of regime change, shadow over Ukraine.
	And to really understand how the Ukraine war began, you have to go all the way back to the end of the Cold War and the way that U.S. policy towards Russia changed.
	If you remember, see, I can remember this.
	I'm old enough, certainly, to have remembered the fall of the wall.
	I remember the fall of the Soviet Union.
	I can even remember when the Soviet Union was the government of Russia.
	And one thing that we were told early on was that this meant peace.
	This meant friendship with the Russian people.
	This meant that we would be able to work potentially with Russia as a partner country on various issues, policing, international criminals, international trafficking organizations, international terrorism, all of these transnational threats, and that the United States essentially had become the new superpower and that we really were going to get what was called the peace dividend.
	And Clinton talked about this for years.
	But then something else happened in the 90s.
	And what did the U.S. do in terms of foreign policy?
	Well, the Clintons, and again, this goes, this is why it all revolves around them and really the forces that propped them up in government, specifically Hillary, that they broke the deal by expanding NATO forward.
	And they pushed so that every vestige of any type of Russian relationship had to be removed from all of Europe, or at least all of Western Europe.
	And in doing so, they also pushed what they called shock therapy economics inside of Russia.
	And this was when the Clintons actually went and interfered directly in Russian presidential elections when they were attempting to institute democracy.
	It was the Clintons who went in.
	And so you see this move of the Clintons working with various of these new oligarchs that sprung up throughout Russia to loot the place.
	They were just looting everything they could from Russia, from the Soviet Union, from these industries, and using it to enrich themselves.
	You saw this later with the Clinton Foundation.
	And then what did they also do?
	The same thing to any Russian area of part of Europe.
	So Yugoslavia, the Balkans, et cetera.
	And any time that anyone didn't want to go along with this, whether it be the Serbians or otherwise, what do they use?
	They used the power of NATO and NATO's military to go in and show that they meant business.
	Someone who knows all about this all too well is, of course, Mike Benz from the Foundation of Freedom Online, though I'm told he also wears another hat these days, interestingly.
	Mike Benz joins the program just again.
	How are you, Mike?
	Hey, great to see you, Jack.
	Great to see you, Jack.
	Good to see you as well.
	So we're doing these tales of regime change, and we're walking through why it was, at least in this first part, that the U.S. was so focused on Russia.
	And I guess my point is it wasn't the U.S. in the wake of the Cold War.
	It was the Clintons, and it was NATO, and the idea that NATO would actually become this new sort of international force for Brussels, for this globalism, which is the system of globalism is what we're talking about.
	They didn't have the name for it back then, and that NATO would become essentially the military force.
	And any country that didn't want to go along with this, like the Balkans or Yugoslavia, was basically smashed, was smashed under NATO force and was told that they had to go along with this.
	Now, people might say I'm crazy, but Mike, does this follow with what we see in terms of history?
	Actually, it's exactly what George Soros wrote in a book called The Future of NATO in 1995, as exactly what NATO's role in the world should be, as the institutional force that would be capable of effectively dominating the 21st century and serving to essentially route out political opposition inside.
	of Post-Soviet Europe.
	This is written about, if you go to some of my, I think there's videos on my ex-timeline breaking it down, but if anyone just goes and looks up George Soros' the future of NATO, I believe it was 1995 that he wrote that may have been 93, but I think it was 94.
	Well, and Benz, we should even say, and I'm remiss for not even saying it at first, that it's out of this sort of post-communist soup, this milieu.
	This is where Soros comes from.
	This is where Soros gets his power in this convert.
	And Soros becomes probably the first oligarch that the Clintons begin to work with.
	There's others, Victor Pinchuk and a variety of others, but he arises out of Hungary and he says, I'm going to work with the West.
	I'm going to work with the Clintons to create a new system.
	This is where George Soros originally got his power from.
	And so to understand Soros the way we talk about him today, you've got to go all the way back to the start.
	And that was the fall of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Iron Curtain, and people like Soros and the Clintons who saw it as a way to ride themselves to riches and power.
	In fact, there's a great clip.
	I have it on my ex-timeline, but it's George Soros openly bragging that the Soros Empire was built out of the ashes of the Soviet Empire and that as the Soviet Empire receded, the Soros Empire picked up the pieces was his phrase.
	And this is quite literally true.
	The assets of the Soviet government and the European governments that were under Soviet effective vassalage were quite literally sold off to the George Soros Management Fund.
	This happened inside of Russia.
	It happened in Ukraine.
	This was done in tandem with USAID in the United States, as well as institutions like the Harvard Institute for International Development.
	But it was the George Soros Open Society Foundation that played a key role in actually breaking up the Soviet Union inside of Hungary, inside of Poland, inside of Romania.
	And this was done in tandem with the U.S. government, with the National Endowment for Democracy, with USAID, with the U.S. embassies in the region.
	The same way that in the United States, Soros incubates these student groups and young people and unemployed people and criminals.
	The same was done in the 1980s.
	And you can argue that it had a positive result on the world in that case.
	Whatever your view on the morality of the tactics used was, that there was brutal Soviet domination in those countries.
	But the fact is, is what ended up happening was power corrupts, absolute power, corrupts, absolutely.
	And Soros absolutely corrupted these countries.
	And we are now living in the aftermath of it as these rule of laws.
	And let me just point this out, too, because there's a lot of people that I see when they encounter some of these histories, they'll say, wait a minute, so Soros was a good guy at first, et cetera.
	It's almost like saying that, you know, you have communism, but then you also have globalism, and neither of them are actually producing freedom.
	And they are not open societies, as George Soros calls them.
	They are, in fact, a different form of totalitarianism.
	It is shadow totalitarianism.
	It is shadow communism that is put under the guise of globalism in the guise of the World Economic Forum, and they create all these supranational institutions and organizations to be able to claim that this is the new freedom.
	But we know, we know from the fruits of it that it is not freedom.
	So, just because you were against the Soviet Union doesn't mean you're not peddling a new form of communism.
	It's almost like, you know, it's almost like the difference between the communism and the democratic socialism, if you will.
	Right.
	No, that's exactly true.
	There's nothing open about the open society concept.
	When you dissent, look how fast the system snaps shut around you.
	Just today, it was as we're recording this, it was announced that multiple journalists inside the European Union have been sanctioned for merely suggesting that Russia was going to win the war.
	These are journalists for simply having an opinion about the war.
	There's nothing open about the open society.
	It just means open to our control.
	The moment that control is threatened, watch how quickly the open society closes around you.
	But the fact is, that was a pretext.
	It was a ruse.
	So to open it up to our influence and to our markets and to our control doesn't mean they want it genuinely open.
	It means open to us.
	Now, and Ukraine was the crown jewel of these maneuvers because Ukraine has $14 trillion worth of natural resources.
	It is the gateway between East and West.
	It is the main point of transit for gas, natural gas's entry into Europe.
	It has unbelievable quantities of wheat and agriculture and arable land.
	It has the third largest petroleum reserves in all of Europe.
	It is just an incredible bounty, as well as hosting the only warm water port to Russia through the Black Sea and Crimea.
	So tactically, if you want to control Russia, having control over Ukraine gets you there.
	That's in Russia's $75 trillion worth of natural resources.
	And for a brief time, the United States foreign policy establishment had a kind of vassal state control over Russia in the early to mid-1990s at the same time that Ukraine was having its so-called opening.
	Now, there were two color revolutions that were done to Ukraine: first in 2004 through the Orange Revolution, and then again in 2014 through the Euromaidan Square Revolution, which is now being rebranded as the so-called revolution of dignity.
	But if you go to BBC News and you look at the before and after pictures of the Euromaidan Square, I think nothing quite shows in such vivid colors as the before and after pictures of what the square around the parliament building of Ukraine looked like before and after the George Floyd-style protests that were galvanized by John McCain and by Mike,
	we're coming up on a quick break, but that's exactly where we want to go in the very next segment.
	Jack Pisobic, Mike Benz, The Shadow Over Ukraine, Tales Regime Change.
	In the very early morning, unidentified shooters opened fire on the protesters and on law enforcement.
	Tensions were very high, and both sides were furious.
	All right, Jack Soaker, back with Mike Benz, Shadow Over Ukraine, Tales of Regime Change.
	Benz, talk to me about the Maidan Revolution.
	There's a lot of people who have heard about this.
	There's a lot of people who have heard reference to it.
	We've seen pictures, but what was it like going back to really the end of 2013, beginning of 2014, when all of this kicked off?
	If folks remember the scale and scope of the terror that happened during Black Lives Matter in the summer of 2020, imagine if that Black Lives Matter lawless mob going around looting, throwing Molotov cocktails in police cars, burning down police precincts.
	Imagine if that had actually toppled the U.S. government and installed, without an election, a new head of state in America.
	That is what was done in Ukraine in 2014 in the Maidan Square.
	Now, what had happened was there was a tug of war in Ukraine between the U.S. government and its Democrat and Ukraine's democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych.
	Viktor Yanukovych was not a Russian vassal leader.
	Russia at the time was split between a largely Ukrainian ethnic, more pro-EU, pro-Euro-Atlantic Axis West, and a Russian ethnic, more pro-Russian East.
	And the two basically demographic blocks of the country resulted in there being a mostly middle-of-the-way president in the form of Viktor Yanukovych, who tried to play nice with both sides.
	That is, while the still maintained gas transit and a sort of cozy economic relationship with Russia, still signed multi-billion dollar deals with every manner of Western company,
	including a $10 billion deal with Chevron, a $10 billion partnered with NAFTAGAS, the main gas giant in Ukraine, which is responsible for most of Ukraine's internal revenue, a $10 billion gas deal with Shell, the British petroleum giant, as well as many others.
	But at the time, the U.S. government, as well as the Brits, were trying to pull Ukraine into an economic treaty that would have foreclosed on effectively any economic activity with Russia.
	And the terms of this were very brutal on Ukraine.
	And Ukraine rejected this deal in late 2013, in about December 2013, after dragging its feet for a long time about who it was going to go to prom with, effectively, in terms of its economic pact, either the West or Russia, ultimately decided to sign this economic deal with Russia.
	And within two months of that, the Americans and the Brits organized probably the most significant, other than 9-11, you could argue, the most significant event in 21st century history geopolitically, which was the Maidan Square Revolution, which set in motion the war we are now in today.
	What happened?
	Let's also point out, let's name some names here because this wasn't just happening in a vacuum.
	You had people like Victoria Newland handing out cookies.
	Hillary Clinton was, of course, fanning the flames of this all along.
	She'd stepped down from the Obama administration, but really setting all this in motion, and then working to run for president.
	So she was extremely linked.
	Jake Sullivan, who someone was there, Tony Blinken, who someone was involved.
	But we look at some of the names that are on the ground.
	It was a little bit bipartisan, wasn't it, in terms of Americans who traveled over there?
	Oh, absolutely bipartisan.
	You had John McCain on the ground.
	There's footage you can look up of him actually recording out of his window in Ukraine as the Ukrainian rioters were taking over the parliament building in the square.
	You can see him looking out his window, and they appear to be toasting to it.
	Him and Chris Murphy, the senator from Connecticut, I believe.
	It was very much a bipartisan thing, as is not uncommon in these regime change operations.
	This is how you have institutions like the National Endowment for Democracy on the ground with both of its political cores, the NDI, for Democrats, the IRI for Republicans.
	The National Endowment for Democracy was set up by the CIA in 1982, 1983, and was even defunded by Congress in 1984 for being too much of a CIA front.
	But you had economic stakeholders from the donor class of both parties who had a vested interest in taking over Ukraine, in buying it up, in privatizing its assets, in taking control of its natural resources.
	And this is quickly what was installed in the post-2014 Ukraine government.
	You mentioned Victoria Newland, who at the time was the Assistant Secretary for Europe and Eurasian Affairs at the U.S. State Department, as well as Jeffrey Pyatt, who at the time was the head of the U.S. Embassy in Kiev.
	And Victoria Newland bragged on tape that in December 2013, as she's standing in front of a sign for Chevron and ExxonMobil.
	She's literally right in back of her are signs for Exxon and Chevron as she's talking in 2013 about the USAID funding Ukrainian civil society institutions to the tune of $5 billion.
	Now, those are assets.
	That's called capacity building.
	When you are think of it like raising a mercenary army, $5 billion, which goes a very long way in a low GDP country like Ukraine towards being able to bribe people, towards being able to mobilize people to take action.
	This is what Jeffrey Sachs, the Harvard economist now at Columbia, said when he was brought to Ukraine as an economic advisor in the immediate aftermath, the week after the Maidan coup, that he was toured, he was taken around to tour the Maidan Square and was told about how USAID had effectively bust in protesters to the capital.
	This was a playbook that worked very effectively in Serbia.
	You can watch a documentary called From Taking Down a Dictator that was produced, I believe, by PBS, which shows in granular detail how these operations are logistically coordinated.
	They were showing the operation because they were celebrating it.
	But of course, if we call it out and are critical of it, they will claim that we are conspiracy theorists and none of it happened.
	Jack Pisovic, Mike Benz, right back.
	We will not accept Russia's occupation and illegal annexation of Crimea or any part of Ukraine.
	Ukraine must be free to decide its own destiny.
	And this week, NATO must send an unmistakable message in support of Ukraine as well.
	Today we are bound by our treaty alliance.
	We have a solemn duty to each other.
	All right, Jack Prosovic, Mike Benz.
	We are back live.
	This is Tales of Regime Change Shadow Over Ukraine.
	And Benz, you're walking through how this Maidan revolution really was a George Floyd-style U.S. government-backed color revolution that saw elements of John McCain and Democrats and George Soros all working together to, again, and I just want to be very clear about this.
	I'm going to be very, very clear about this to everybody out there, that whether or not you liked or supported Viktor Yanukovych, the previous president of Ukraine, he was a democratically elected president of the country.
	He was elected by the people of Ukraine, and there was no legal process to remove him from power.
	He was ousted.
	He was forced to step down and flee the country by elements of the U.S. government, all in the name of democracy.
	And just that basic understanding that the U.S. government under Obama at the time, working with Hillary, was targeted and openly stating their hostility towards Russia.
	Then, when you see the response from Russia, you have to really ask yourselves, was this unprovoked?
	Or perhaps was there something that caused them to react this way?
	So the Maidan revolution takes place.
	The U.S. government gets their hooks in U.S. intelligence.
	Benz, what happens next in Ukraine?
	Well, so on the topic of the intelligence state, the New York Times actually published that the very night of the, the very morning after the Maidan Square toppled Viktor Yanukovych and installed Yatsenyuk in Ukraine, he was not elected.
	The new head of state was literally selected in a joint phone call by Victoria Newland and Jeff Pyatt, who in very explicit terms picked the next president of Ukraine, not the Ukrainian people.
	But the very next day, the New York Times, as they published in a piece, I believe it was last year or two years ago, they published a reconstruction of Ukraine's intelligence state.
	They did this as the funding for the CIA was potentially under pressure in Ukraine.
	But what they said is that the new head of Ukrainian intelligence walked into the building of Ukraine's intelligence center the day after the coup was complete and the lights were off and documents were scattered everywhere.
	And the first thing he did is he placed two phone calls, one to the CIA chief of station and one to the MI6 chief of station in Ukraine.
	And a three-way partnership was struck the very day after the coup to rebuild Ukraine's intelligence state from the ground up as a three-way partnership between Ukraine, the CIA, and MI6.
	So not only did The Obama administration and the British government overthrow the democratically elected government of Ukraine, but then they immediately took control through the CIA and MI6 of the intelligence services in Ukraine from the ground up.
	Now, it's important to, I guess, get a granular view of the terror that takes place during these key moments of a color revolution.
	Not only was $5 billion funneled to the right sector mobs and protesters who took to the streets in Ukraine.
	What is the problem?
	What is situation?
	Hold on.
	Hold on.
	What is right sector?
	When you mentioned right sector, who are they?
	What do they believe?
	Well, the problem is that I think you're probably getting to is that many of these elements have been associated with Nazi elements in Ukraine.
	But the right sector is essentially a hard-right nationalist movement in Ukraine that comes out of this anti-Soviet milieu.
	There was a kind of Nazi versus communist civil war playing out in not just during World War II, but in the aftermath as there was a struggle between hard-right elements in Europe and hard left elements in Europe.
	And in the same way that the U.S. government backed Islamo-fascist elements like the Mujahideen and Al-Qaeda and ISIS, when it's geopolitically useful, the U.S. government also supported factions like the Azov Battalion and hard rights.
	Wait, wait, guys, I just want to.
	Oh, no, sorry, finish sentence.
	Finish that of the right sector in Ukraine, because they were so virulently anti-Soviet, it was deemed as being useful as a battering ram to take down Ukraine's democratically elected government as a pro-Russian government.
	And the only thing I wanted to add is that, so, you know, for the folks watching these episodes, Mike hasn't seen the other, you know, go pull back the fourth curtain here a little bit, go break the fourth wall, as they say.
	Mike hasn't seen the other episodes because that's exactly what we talk about in those episodes as well.
	So, and in fact, the one in Afghanistan was to take out the Russians.
	And so we took this element that we said, oh, this can be a good, useful proxy for us, a proxy group.
	And yes, they may have these radical Islamic beliefs, but who cares?
	Let's prop them up and fund them and arm them and we can use them against Russia.
	And then we can do the same thing.
	And by the way, all of this, just go look at the timeframe.
	This was happening almost concurrently with the Operation Timber Sycamore, which is going on in Syria, where you're seeing the same elements go up against Assad, who was also Russian, you know, Russian-backed.
	So we broke this series down into different elements, but you need to understand that Syria and Ukraine were happening at the exact same time.
	So 2012, 2013, into 2014, these were not, we're breaking it down episodically as separate, but they weren't separate in reality.
	It was the same people, the same CIA, the same president of the United States, the same commanders, the same chain of command, if you look at it all the way from top down.
	And then Libya, of course, was right before the entire Arab Spring, Benghazi, the rest of it, running guns, running man pads.
	This is what the Obama administration, particularly the second half of his administration, were doing the entire time.
	And what do they do?
	They find these groups and they say, hey, so it was radical Islamists in the Middle East and Up in Ukraine, they found a bunch of neo-Nazis to do their dirty work for them, and they never considered what the secondary consequences or effects might be.
	I just wanted to pause.
	Sorry, Mike, didn't mean to break your flow there, but it's just so endemic.
	And here you point it out, even when you haven't even seen the other episodes.
	Oh, I'm glad you bring that up because that was part of the strategic calculus.
	Operation Timber Sycamore, the CIA operation to arm effectively ISIS and al-Qaeda elements who are now in power today.
	Mohammed Al-Jalani was literally an ISIS and al-Qaeda commander being trained and funded by the Central Intelligence Agency during Timber Sycamore was from 2011 to 2016.
	And part of the strategic calculus around Ukraine was to weaken Russia's economic muscle so it couldn't support Assad.
	This is part of the economic deprivation strategy.
	Russia was providing S-300 and S-400 air defense systems, which made a bombs over Baghdad campaign not feasible in Syria in the way that it was in Iraq.
	But what was happening in the Maidan square was you had 90% of Ukrainian media, 90, 90% of Ukrainian media institutions were funded by USAID.
	So the media inside Ukraine was all telling these people, your government is illegitimate.
	These riots are mostly peaceful protests.
	Of course, they were armed.
	There were snipers shooting people.
	Everything was set on fire.
	It looks like a total incineration of the main parliament square.
	That was, if you look at the before and after pictures, it's just, it looks like Minneapolis, what was done to the capital city of Ukraine at this time.
	Now, meanwhile, everyone was being psyoped and gaslit into the idea that these were peaceful protests or mostly peaceful protests.
	And that cudgel, the idea that these were peaceful protests, which they absolutely were not in the same way that the George Floyd riots were not, was used as an economic cudgel.
	There's a very important linchpin to framing violence as being peaceful protests, because that means if a government cracks down on the protests, that can now be contextualized as a human rights violation because they are peaceful.
	And this is exactly what the U.S. government did to Ukraine.
	As it was funding the riots, the U.S. government threatened sanctions on the democratically elected government of Ukraine if they fought back, if they used police or military security forces to defend itself from the riots of the U.S. government.
	It was a hostile coup.
	It was a hostile coup, and it needs to be described in that way.
	Jack Prasovic, Mike Bairns, right back.
	As the brutal war between Russia and Ukraine rages on, fierce fighting persists across multiple fronts.
	In a grim milestone, recent reports indicate that over 1 million lives have been lost since the conflict escalated in February 2022.
	Jack Prosovic, we're back here.
	Tales of regime change, shadow over Ukraine.
	And so I want to fast forward now in our final segment to where we're currently at.
	So, look, I've had the opportunity of a lifetime, and I want to say I'm honored to be considered to have the ability for the Trump administration to have a front row seat to history in the making.
	Secretary Besant, Secretary of Treasury, took me on a train all the way to Kiev, night train to Kiev, and traveled with him to meet with Zelensky at the presidential palace of Ukraine to be able to talk with him the opening stages of Trump's attempts to end the current Ukraine war regarding the mineral deal.
	Then, President Trump himself asked if I would accompany the Air Force One on the way to the Anchorage Accords, the sit-down with Putin that was held in Anchorage, Alaska, the first time a Russian president has ever set foot, or any Russian leader has ever set foot in Alaska, even going back to the time when Alaska itself was under Russian control, Russian imperial control.
	And these negotiations, as they've been progressing, as they've been continuing, that we need to understand that when we're talking to the Russians, now this is key, this is key.
	When I say we, I mean the Americans, we need to understand that this is their perception of events.
	Now, you can disagree, and you can say, well, you know, Russia shouldn't have done that, and they shouldn't look at it that way, and that's fine.
	But you need to understand this is the perspective from which they are coming.
	And if you disagree and discount and disavow their perspective, then guess what?
	You won't have any idea what you're doing.
	You won't be able to come to any solution.
	So, Ben's, I'll bring you back in here.
	When we talk to the Russians, when the U.S. is going through these negotiations, these are still the red lines for the Russians when it comes down to it, because they don't want to see something like this happen again, where Ukraine could then be used as a launchpad for either a direct invasion or military attack, obviously, into Russia, or even worse, another Maidan-style revolution being launched in a place like Moscow or,
	say, St. Petersburg, where we remember that the original Bolshevik revolution all the way back to 1917 was a German-backed revolution, a color revolution, if you will, that started in St. Petersburg.
	Well, that's exactly right.
	And it was during the Obama administration that USAID was kicked out of the country.
	The National Endowment for Democracy was kicked out of the country, precisely for fomenting color revolutions tactics inside of Moscow.
	The U.S. government was supporting Alexei Navalny, who was organizing riots inside of Ukraine.
	He was even brought to the Yale Jackson School, the Maurice Greenberg World Fellows program.
	Maurice Greenberg was asked by Bill Clinton to be the Central Intelligence Agency director.
	This is literally a CIA incubator program that we brought over.
	Hillary Clinton openly promoted this activity as Secretary of State inside of Russia.
	You had the U.S. government funding through the National Endowment for Democracy.
	The Pussy Riot street protests.
	Pussy Riot was this music group that was trying to incite violent protests against Putin inside of Russia.
	She met with Anthony Blinken at the U.S. State Department.
	They were supported directly by the U.S. Embassy, by the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA front.
	That's what, contemporaneous with the Ukraine coup.
	Russia is obviously not going to forget this.
	This is existential for the Russian government, as it would be for any reasonable government.
	I am all for U.S. influence and global leadership.
	But when you fight this dirty, when you stoop to these tactics, there is blowback.
	There is always blowback.
	There is global resentment, and the people on the streets remember it.
	To this day, Jack, when we mentioned Black Lives Matter and the terror that we all felt in the summer of 2020, we are now over five years past that.
	And it still feels like a fresh memory.
	You can imagine what that feels like for the people of Ukraine, for the people of Russia, in the aftermath of that.
	And the aftermath created that situation we're in now.
	What happened after 2014, after the Maidan Square coup, was a counter-coup.
	The entire eastern half of the country broke away, did not respect the newly installed voted government, which was not voted on.
	So Luhansk and Donetsk declared themselves breakaway republics.
	This would be like, for example, if Black Lives Matter toppled the U.S. government and installed, like, you know, Letitia James or something as president without a vote, if Florida broke away and Texas broke away.
	And then Crimea voted in a democratic referendum to join the Russian Federation formally.
	This would be like, you know, Florida and Texas deciding that they are now a part of, I don't know, Hungary or Poland or something as a way of creating a kind of military point.
	Here's one of the ones that I like to say.
	Let's say somehow, all right, you know, somehow like Texas gets taken, you know, breaks away from the United States, and then maybe elements of another country come in and form a socialist revolution there, and the socialists take over.
	I know people are saying it wouldn't happen.
	I get it.
	But, you know, then they come in and they say, oh, we're going to be signing a deal with the Chinese and the Mexicans so their military can come into Texas.
	The United States would never allow that.
	They would just never allow that.
	No serious leader would allow something like that to ever occur.
	They would say, this is Texas.
	This is ridiculous.
	That is our territory.
	It has been our territory.
	We fought for that territory.
	And the Russians, when they look at Ukraine, they say, we fought for this territory and lost how many millions in World War II when they fought to defend Ukraine and push the Nazis out of Ukraine.
	To your point, that's why there's so many of these leave-behind groups in Ukraine in the first place.
	And also, there could be an interesting, we could do a whole episode on who exactly was funding those leave-behind groups and working with them in those places after World War II, because it may have some interesting elements that people might not like to know who was working with the neo-Nazis after 1945 all across Europe.
	But the point being is that's how the Russians see it.
	And if we want to approach these negotiations with any degree of understanding what the other side is trying to say, we have to understand that this is their perspective.
	And in fact, much of it rings true.
	Last two minutes.
	There should be a formal apology by the Trump administration to the Russians as part of this peace process for the actions undertaken by the Obama government and some sort of assurance.
	I think that would go a long way.
	We are sorry for overthrowing the democratically elected government in a coup.
	That was a mistake not to be repeated.
	It was done by a corrupt administration that was power-hungry and mad and overzealous.
	And we have disbanded many of the institutions associated with that, including USAID and I hope the National Endowment for Democracy and the like.
	I think that that sort of formal statement would go a long way to saying that this administration does not stand with those sort of tactics to destabilize.
	to destabilize governments and put them in the ruin that they're in.
	Exactly right.
	Mike Benz, we're just out of time.
	I wish we could do four hours on this.
	And I'm sure you have.
	Tell people where they can go and get access to your content and your info.
	You can find me on X at Mike Benz Cyber, also on YouTube and Rumble.
	Folks, this has been Jack Pasobic, Mike Benz here on Tales of Regime Change, Shadow Over Ukraine.
	We need to understand these regime change operations, where they come from, who the people are behind them, who's really benefiting from them, and how they always fail up against the law of unintended consequences.

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