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March 13, 2022 - Rudy Giuliani
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Biden's Fears Mean War Crimes Continue | Rudy Giuliani | Guest: Matthew Tyrmand | March 12th 2022
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Hello, this is Rudy Giuliani back with another edition of Rudy's common sense Today we're going to focus on Ukraine as At current it is really the most dominating issue and the one that probably will determine a good deal what happens to us in the future and we have We have with us A guest who has recently been in Poland, has direct knowledge of what's going on in Ukraine, and his name is Matt Tierman.
I think you probably know him.
Matt is a Polish-American investigative journalist.
He's someone who is a very active, committed conservative, and happy to say that he is.
And he's a recovering Wall Street investment banker.
And the best thing about him, he's from Brooklyn, New York, Midwood High School, and a place dear to my heart known as Canarsie.
And he's very, very knowledgeable, very interesting, and he's got extremely relevant knowledge.
So, Matt, it's a great pleasure to have you with us.
That was the coolest intro I've ever gotten.
You know, I mean, I grew up when you cleaned up the city and, you know, I remember the Dinkins years and I remember, you know, when you came in and really made it, made New York great again.
So I appreciate it.
Somebody's gonna have to do it again.
Well, Matt, tell us, recently, when we were talking yesterday, we discussed, you know, we were in Poland, so you have a, you know, a better than a usual view, pretty much a bird's-eye view, as to what is actually going on in Sure.
So, by way of background, I'm a Polish-American.
myth about it and so much emotion. It'd be interesting to talk to somebody who's balanced
like you are and committed conservative, but obviously someone who looks at the world in
an objective way. So what is, you tell us what you saw there and what you experienced.
Sure. So by way of background, I'm a Polish American. My father was an anti-communist
dissident and writer, Leopold Tiramont, who escaped communism in the sixties and came
to New York. And then he used to say that he didn't let the Nazis beat him. He didn't
let the commies beat him and he sure as hell wouldn't let the New York liberals beat him.
So he ended up moving to Rockford, Illinois and founding the Rockford Institute of Conservative Think Tanks.
So I was actually born in Rockford, but grew up in Brooklyn when I was four years old on.
And so I've been going back to Poland for 10, 12 years.
I'm a dual citizen.
I'm very involved in Polish journalism, media, politics.
When Donbass was destabilized by Putin's first invasion and then Crimea, so you had Eastern Ukraine, all of the Ukrainians, you know, there are no real Ukrainians in Eastern Ukraine anymore.
There were.
It was a very disputed area and region for a thousand years of different Slavic tribes.
But it is now very much Russian because in 2014 the Ukrainians left.
They were pushed out and they were forced out and many of them came to Poland.
There's an estimate that there were two million Ukrainians from the east in Warsaw, in the cities of Poland.
Poland was very open to them because they assimilate well, they work, and you saw in Warsaw, for instance, I use this anecdotally, that they were driving Ubers and the cost of Uber went down dramatically.
This is before, we're talking about 2014 up until before the recent Putin invasion.
Yeah, the Donbas area, Luhansk, Donetsk is the biggest city.
Kharkiv is the second biggest city in Ukraine.
That is right now ground zero for the fighting.
We'll talk about what Putin's goals were.
I do not think Kharkiv was in his tier one playbook that he was going to get it.
He may get it yet because of the escalation.
But Kharkiv is a very important city.
Before we finish, I want to ask you about Kharkiv.
I know it quite well.
I designed an emergency management center for it.
I've been there.
And they used to be very pro-Russian, but now they are fierce warriors against Russia.
And it's an amazing transformation.
Yeah, well, they were on the other side of what the Ukrainians called the contact line, which was the unofficial, unformally drawn border where the Ukrainian forces were sort of piled up to defend deeper incursion from what we call the Little Green Men.
These were the Russian separatists funded and organized by Russia in 1415.
That were there to break away these parts of Ukraine.
They were not formal military.
They were sort of like mercenaries, Russian mercenaries.
So to help the audience, what I'm going to do right now while we're talking, we'll put up a map.
And the map will show Ukraine.
It'll show, let's call it free Ukraine, so far.
Crimea, of course, is Russian, for sure.
And then let's call it the disputed territory.
Which is still a little bit south of Kharkiv, a little south of it.
And Russia now is expanding that.
If we were to show another map, you would see an expansion of that, which is where Russia has attacked.
They don't necessarily control it yet, but they're in the process of attempting to control
it.
It would give them a land bridge to Crimea.
It would largely cut Ukraine off from the sea.
And it would give them most of the important part of eastern and a good portion of southern
Ukraine that they don't have right now.
This is what he really wants.
You know, the whole reason that he, you know, obviously power abhors a vacuum, as I've been saying repeatedly.
And we saw what happened in Afghanistan.
We see how feckless the West is.
You know, Trump made a great point when he went to NATO headquarters the first time and they had a billion dollar new building.
And he asked a very simple question to Jen Stoltenberg, can you withstand a missile attack?
And they had no idea.
Well, we're going to take a short break and we'll be right back.
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Welcome back to our interview with Matt Tierman.
And we're discussing Russia's inroads that they've made so far and the reason for it.
The rationale for Putin, you believe, is what, Matt?
So, you know, what he saw, the power pours a vacuum.
And he has been, you know, when someone tells you who they are, believe them.
It's one of my sort of rules for life.
And he has been saying for 25, 30 years that the greatest tragedy that has The fall in the world geopolitically is the breakup of the USSR.
So he has this revanchist dream to imperially build back.
Putin has wanted, since he picked up Crimea, Crimea is an incredibly geopolitically strategic point in the sea.
It allows a navy to build up its reserves.
We'll put up a map right now of Crimea, which is really a natural extension.
You can almost see, it appears as if Russia is creating a road from eastern Ukraine, Russia,
to Crimea that they control, that is not sovereign Ukraine territory.
It is so necessary for them because right now, for the last seven years, Crimea has
been an incredible loss leader for Russia.
They have to subsidize it with supplies and they have to do it by water and they need
an overland route to continue to build it out as a Russian protectorate.
So to do that, they need to take over this entire region between Crimea and Rostov-on-Don,
the river that separates what was the border of Ukraine, but that border will be redrawn.
The problem in the middle is Mariupol, which is the 10th largest city, and they thought that they would be able to roll right over it and take it.
But Mariupol apparently is where a lot of the Ukrainians who left Crimea went.
and they're defending it really well. Mariupol's the key.
If Mariupol falls, and this is a very, you know, disputed historical city because there's all
sorts of Eastern Orthodox churches and history there, so culturally it's an important center,
and the Ukrainians are defending it much more strongly than was expected. Amazing. And they've been
attacked by land and by sea there, both, right?
And air, of course.
And air.
And, you know, initially there were some very smart moves by the Russians done.
For instance, they took out the airfields to neuter and render impotent a Ukrainian aerial response.
The most important airfield they took out was Mykolaiv, which is just on the west side of Crimea, and that would be where they'd be staging their counteroffensives, the Ukrainians would be.
So they took out that airfield.
It's also very geopolitically strategic because there's a river there that is a natural border that would separate a sort of a newly defined Russian protectorate.
So they took out that airfield.
I actually know that there's a lot of Ukrainians trying to get out of Mykolaiv right now, including there's a sort of well-publicized orphanage.
and they can't leave. And so I know that there's some special forces types who are trying to help
in that and remove and help extricate some of these innocent people caught in the crossfire
of this geopolitically strategic point. But this is a land bridge. Let's again slow down a minute
and let's show them that area. Let's show them that area of Russia, which of Ukraine, which is
this, which is which is essentially the covered by that land bridge, but we can call it from
basically the Russian border to Crimea.
And what you're saying is that in order to accomplish that, they have to take Mariupol.
Let's jump ahead a little.
Marypole, otherwise they're going to have counterinsurgency like Afghanistan 1979, which
is what they have in Kiev as well.
Let's jump ahead a little.
If Russia were successful in taking that, and it seems like they might be, it seems
like the question of Kiev and Western Ukraine is much more an issue.
The caravan.
The caravan seems to have been a tragic, from their point of view, blunder.
From our point of view, fortuitous.
One of the great military blunders of all time, actually.
And do you find it strange that we won't allow Poland to turn the MiGs over to Ukraine?
I can't see that that's going to escalate anything with Russia.
We're already supplying them.
You know, we're supplying Overland.
We're supplying Javelins and Stingers to some sort of like mitigated degree.
They need a lot more, you know, surface to air missiles that can take down Russian aerial bombardments.
as well as tanks, you know, a lot of these, these smaller, you know, midsize arms.
They're not heavy arms like tanks.
They're much more maneuverable and transportable.
These have been, you know, the, the, the, what has been saving Ukraine, what has been
able to take out all these, because they've taken out a huge amount of Russia's hardware.
Putin really.
And I think this is what we were talking on the phone earlier, Rudy.
You know, this was Putin being in a cloistered polypura in the Kremlin with a bunch of sycophantic generals who were scared that because he's gone full Stalinist, they're going to lose their heads.
So they just tell him, yes, it's a good idea.
Yes, our military is capable.
It is a huge blunder to go into Ukraine in late winter when snow is melting and ground is softening because it becomes one big mud pile.
And I've been to Ukraine many times, you know, just driving from Medica, the border I was at last week, to Lviv.
It's not a very, you know, high quality European Union level or U.S.
Eisenhower interstate system kind of road.
This is, you know, it's, they're single lane highways and they're prone to flooding and mud.
There are drainage ditches on either side.
And so him trying to move this convoy in as the ground is softening
and not and only expecting to have to you know that he could roll over these cities in
three to five days telling the Russian conscripts that they're on an exercise.
They don't want to be there.
They don't want to kill their great cousins.
What are I hate to put it this way.
What are the odds that he will take Mariupol as opposed to being able to take Kiev?
Yeah, so I think, you know, his encirclement of Kiev is meant to create a concession point later on when he looks to redraw the map lines where he benefits with the expanded territory that he is now occupying.
So obviously Donbass and Luhansk, he's recognized these quote-unquote people's republics.
They've been all Russian occupied by separatists for the better part of eight years.
That's a default conclusion.
You know, ultimately, I don't think he really wanted him.
The perfect situation for him was continuing to just supply the separatists with some weapons.
He redraws the map line and takes control of them and folds them into.
Western Russia, now he's got to pay the pensioners pensions.
That's not a small task.
That's why Kharkiv could end up being important for him because there's actual value there.
He takes Kharkiv, he's got an industrial footprint.
It's the second largest.
I call it to Americans, it's like the Pittsburgh of Ukraine.
It actually produces steel.
It's got some industrial footprint that he can make, derive value from.
But the key point is the Crimean land bridge, because that is why he went into this adventure
in the first place.
after Yanukovych was deposed, taking over Crimea, because he needed this geopolitically strategic point
to rebuild Russia for the next thing.
If he does have success and is able to roll over, his military actually does what their generals promised him,
apparently fallaciously, that they're not in shape for this.
But assuming that he's going to do it, that's quite a revelation, by the way.
I know that they're weak.
Look, Russia and communist systems always function under Potemkin Village Syndrome, where it looks real, but it's fake.
You know, my father used to say about the communist media, about Pravda, that they would tell us every year there was a record crop yield, yet we were all starving to death.
So what do you believe, Pravda or your rumbling belly?
And so he's got a Russian military that is not very strong.
Yes, he can conscript more young men, but he's losing his hardware to the broken convoys
that can't be refueled and refed and restocked.
So originally I thought that if he was going to have early success, he would make his way
down to Odessa and then he would now be on the border of Moldova.
And Moldova is a former Soviet republic as well.
And he would then, the next stage would be in his revanchist imperial pipe dream, was
bring in Moldova.
And then he'd be up against the Romanian NATO border.
And if you want to be against a NATO border, you want to be against Romania, not Poland,
because Poland has put tens of billions, almost hundreds of billions into their defense systems
and their offensive weapons systems.
Romania has not.
As I'm looking at the map, Latvia is on the Russian border.
Bye.
Latvia is a NATO country.
It is, but it's so small with no weapons defenses.
But you could easily move weapons into Latvia.
100%.
He's played some games with the three Baltics, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia.
A couple of years ago, there was a border guard who they picked up.
The Russians came over the Baltic border.
I forget if it was Estonia or Latvia, and they kidnapped him.
So they played some games to try and escalate a little.
You know, my view on NATO is that it basically lived its purpose until 1991, and then it just became another deep state machine that would launder, you know, military industrial complex contracts for their friends and the defense ministers around Europe.
And it's pretty impotent.
That being said, he knows as a historian that what is impotent now could be stronger later with the framework in place.
So NATO does make him nervous.
What makes him more nervous is the European Union.
The European Union, Picking up Ukraine as a member, all of a sudden you would have a very hard westernization, culturally, that would change the dynamics in Russia.
Because to have the EU and the free movement of people, of good services people and capital, into and out of Ukraine, especially if Ukraine one day adopted the euro, now I don't think that will ever happen.
The Ukrainian economy is not there, its governance structures are not there, it does not meet Maastricht, the economic standards to enter the Ukrainian, to enter the European
Union, especially the European Monetary Union, and adopt the euro.
It won't happen.
It cannot happen.
So this is a bit of kabuki that Germany and all these countries, Slovakia are bringing
in, Slovenia, I'm sorry, Prime Minister Janse, are bringing in, you know, a fast track expedited
status to get Ukraine to the EU.
This is ridiculous.
And talk about escalating with Putin.
This is what he doesn't want because he knows that the, the exportation of Western cultural
values would lead to the exportation of democracy oriented values.
And then the Russian regime would eventually fall.
You wouldn't have one Navalny, you'd have hundreds of Navalny.
Given all of this, what level of obligation Thank you.
Do we have to Ukraine and what level of obligation do we have the best interest of the United States to support them?
How far should we go in our support?
There seems to be almost unanimous agreement left and right.
We shouldn't put troops on the ground.
Correct.
Or no fly zone.
No fly zone, a little less unanimous support, but generally yes.
But to go so far as to not give the maximum armament and technology support, that seems strange.
And I'll tell you why it seems strange.
Part of the right's reaction to this is what you and I experienced, which is the corrupt part of the Ukrainian government's alliance with the Democrat Party.
It's total.
I mean, in 2016, the Ukrainian, the American embassy in Ukraine was a Hillary Clinton for president operation.
Yeah, totally.
Yeah.
And so was Burisma.
I mean, and the embassy and the Ukrainian crooks produce false evidence, help to contribute to the Steele dossier.
If someone interfered in our election, no one's interfered more than the Ukrainian crooks.
Under Poroshenko.
Under Poroshenko's guidance, who was very close to Biden.
Yeah, yeah.
The chocolate oligarch, I call him.
So, the right-wing MAGA and whatever, however you want to describe it, says, what do we do in supporting this corrupt, Democrat, Socialist-oriented government where their corruption is almost inextricably combined with American corruption, particularly high-level Democrats and a few Republicans, as you know better than anyone.
What good is it for us to have them be a free and independent country?
All they're going to do is try to undermine our American form of government, our American way of life.
Well, politics and governance are somewhat of a relative game.
We look at, for instance, candidates in elections.
Sometimes they're all really bad, but you have to choose the less bad candidate, like you have to choose the less bad outcome.
And it is a very positive trending outcome for the Pax Americana, for our European allies
to have a stable and free Ukraine, not a Yanukovych led Ukraine.
Not a right.
You know, when Medvedev, when Zelensky gets attacked by someone on the right with some
of these narratives, they say he imprisoned his opposition.
He imprisoned a guy named Medvedchuk, who was a Yanukovych ally, who Putin was plotting
with Putin to depose all of the.
Well, let's take a short, let's take a short break and we'll get back to that about about
how we evaluate Zelensky.
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Welcome back.
You see, but if we use that approach, that whenever Russia says nuclear war, nuclear war, like Putin has Lavrov saying, right, which seems to me Putin's KGB psyops background, scared the living daylights out of these cowards.
He wasn't doing it when Trump was there.
He wouldn't do it if Reagan was there.
Reagan would say, fine, I'll cut off your rocket and I'll destroy you.
Gee, and by the way, I've got these rockets with the names of your cities on it.
And, you know, make my day.
He would out psych them, which is how we won the Cold War.
But now we're like a bunch of sniveling cowards.
You say the word nuclear war and we fall apart.
Well, you know, every war game that has been war gamed out by every power, NATO, Brits, Americans in the Pentagon for 60 or 70 years ends the same way, which is they even release one nuke toward one small city anywhere, whether NATO or not, and Moscow disappears off the face of the map 25 minutes later.
And I think the people around Putin, even if Putin is like a caged dog right now, and now
he's bit off more than he can chew and he's going to escalate because he wants to save
his operation and his grand vision swan song of revanchism, I don't think the people
around Putin are too thrilled with the idea of losing Moscow because they have friends and
family there as well, even if he's secured his people.
This is the calculation that Reagan made.
And having made it, he won the Cold War, at least for 20 years, without firing a shot.
By the way, how negotiated has Fukuyama been about everything?
Gosh, unbelievable.
Unbelievable.
I mean, and also we have China.
The other concern of the people on the right is that we're ignoring China.
But I'm not ignoring China.
I still see China as a much greater threat, and I see this as something China is going to evaluate.
This is like a stalking horse for China.
They're going to make their calculations, and I'm not sure what their interpretation of this is.
They're still figuring it out.
They're going to see how things play out and then they're going to make their determination on Taiwan.
Now I've talked to, you know, I've argued with Bannon about this, that, you know, he says we need to get to, you know, Russia and put them into the Western community of internationalism and multilateralism.
But I've said from the beginning, because I know communists, they were always going to end up in bed with China because they are the same top-down autocracies built on the same flawed logic and philosophy of Marxism.
This is their power structure.
This is their economic.
organization from its heart. It is workers the world unite and let's dominate the world.
It's Cuba, it's North Korea, it's Venezuela, these people.
And you look who's standing with Russia now. It's an axis of really horrible powers,
Pakistan, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, and China's the only one playing it savvy. And
we talk Turkey as well as playing it savvy because they're worried about Iran.
Well, I see China as more calculating than Putin, smarter.
And therefore, they're going to calculate, in exchange for getting Taiwan, what damage do we do to our world relationships, which will affect them.
It doesn't affect Putin.
But China wants to be the world's largest economic power, the largest military power.
If you alienate the world, if you frighten all those African governments you're trying to influence, who could easily be very frightened by them rolling over Taiwan, you've made a major setback.
So, yes, we have to calculate China in this, but we have to be intelligent about it.
And a Russia that controls half of Ukraine, or all of Ukraine, makes for a much more powerful China.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
The other thing people have to recognize about the China situation, the fluidity behind their decision making, is that Xi has to be reappointed as premier later this year at the, you know, every four year party Congress.
And so if he goes in now and does something and he screws it up, his career is over and he ends up in a gulag.
So he's also, you know, calculating, OK, how do I secure my unprecedented third straight term, first time since Mao that you'd have someone in power that long?
in China, appointed by the party Congress. So I actually think he's going to keep his guns
holstered for the moment. Watch this play out, get his reappointment, and then he'll make his
sort of aggression moves. So Matt, let's do the best you can to put aside the political emotions,
biases, prejudice, which I think are clouding many, many people here on both sides.
What would purely be in the best interest in an ideal world with a real president who could
calculate that, which I know we don't have, but what would be in the best interest of the ideal,
in your view?
Yeah, and not just a president, but I don't know if you saw Kamala Harris in Warsaw, even Duda was looking at her like, they really, they're not sending their best.
Russia is a big country.
Ukraine is a ha-ha-ha-ha-ha small country, ha-ha-ha.
Cackle diplomacy, the northern flank.
The best interest of the U.S.
in my view is a preserved sovereign Ukraine.
It will not be preserved in full.
The realpolitik is that Russia now owns the separatist breakaway republics of Donbass and Luhansk.
He's going to get the land bridge and he will escalate until he does.
He needs that geopolitically.
What we need to preserve is Kiev and the rest of the country with its democratic government, as corrupt as it is, the parliamentarians, the legislature democratically elected under with fair and honest mandates.
Zelensky, whether he was, you know, helped along there by the Council of Foreign Relations and the State Department or not, he is still better than Poroshenko, the chocolate oligarch, who was better than Yanukovych, a Lukashenko style vassal.
From, you know, Yanukovych, to give you an example of who this guy was, Ukraine has a huge military armaments industrial sector, much of it was built in Kharkiv.
And they were selling all of their military defensive capabilities to African republics like Chad for cash in Swiss accounts.
So, you know, when you have a vassal state, they can't defend themselves at all.
Yanukovych was a car thief, by the way, from the age of 14.
That's who Putin put in charge of the country.
So, you know, the level of corruption is rife.
It's a post-communist nation.
But it was trending better.
And we want that trend to continue, even if Russia has carved off more of its near abroad into its direct control.
We do not want them fully taking over Ukraine because then that means they've got Odessa.
How much, how far do we go?
How far do we go in preventing Russia from assuming they want to take all of Ukraine?
We have an existential risk of World War III.
This is a replay of the Polish invasion by Germany in 39 and the debate over Sudetenland.
And we do not want to escalate it with... I really don't believe we should have a no-fly zone or boots on the ground, NATO or U.S.
We can give them weapons.
It was incredibly stupid the way they blocked out, and I believe it's nefarious, blocked out the Poles from handing over the planes that the Ukrainians... When you say it's nefarious, why?
What's the rationale within the Bidenistas for doing that?
I've got my own conspiracy on this one, which is that They want to weaken Poland's position because they don't like this government.
This is a right-wing government that the EU is trying to sanction, just like Hungary.
You know, the same way Russia tries to interfere in elections all over Europe, the EU does as well.
They're willing to take the risk that we lose Ukraine.
A Ukraine with which they, as Democrats, at least of the leadership of which they were very closely tied to and owe a lot to.
They're willing to give that up in order to screw Poland, basically.
Well, I think they want to screw over all the post-communist nations that are members of NATO.
They want them to become, in their mind, good, multi-culti, as we say in Poland, pro-LGBT, Western-style leftists.
It makes sense.
It makes sense. It's really a tragedy and it really does indicate, when we say that
the Ukrainian government is corrupt, you could say the same thing about our government.
We can, but the difference between the Ukrainian government corruption and the American government corruption is still different than the Russian government corruption, the Chinese government corruption, and also akin to the North Korean, Venezuelan, Cuban... Very, very difficult distinction for most people to make.
We're not murdering, we're not dropping bombs on civilians and women and children and causing a giant refugee crisis where... I was at the Poland border...
And neither is Ukraine.
Some of our corrupt leadership is stealing money.
Yeah, they're horrible.
They're horrible people.
They're destroying their countries, hollowing out their own people's economic prospects for, you know, short term theft and graft and grift.
But they still, as bad as they are, everything's relative.
They are not mass murdering civilians.
Their respect for human life is higher than Putin's and Xi's and Maduro's and Castro's.
So we have to make a distinction behind those who are truly evil and capable of mass murder.
At this point, do you think that once Putin achieves the objective of, let's say, the land bridge we're just showing a picture of right now, that he would then call it a day?
Yeah, I think that if he gets the redrawn map lines with Donbass, Luhansk, Crimea, Mariupol, the entire, and probably Mykolaiv as well
on the other side of Crimea to defend it.
Possibly Kharkiv would be like a cherry on top because he may actually get some value
from these regions economically.
Then he leaves Kiev and he wants one other insurance.
He wants, you know, I don't know what it's going to look like in terms of time period, but he wants an assurance that maybe it's 10 years, 20 years, no NATO ascension, no EU ascension for Ukraine.
And if he gets those... That last one I'd have a real problem with.
Him dictating what NATO does.
The rest of it I understand in the world of real politics.
Also, I think we have to calculate the fact that should he take, let's say, include Kharkiv, he's going to have an insurgency for the rest of their existence.
These people may have been pro-Russian back in 2007, 2006, after 2014, a large portion of even Eastern Ukraine turned against Russia.
They wouldn't be fighting like this if they didn't turn against Russia.
What's going to happen once he occupies them?
That fighting doesn't stop.
That becomes Northern Ireland on steroids.
Exactly.
Or Afghanistan, 1979, which they have experience with.
And I think he knows that taking over all of Ukraine is not possible.
Look at how much he lost just in economic capacity.
But you know, the resistance of Mariupol and Kharkiv tells you he's going to have problem occupying them.
Not only taking them, but You don't fight like this and then just submit after they take over.
Oh yeah, yeah, no.
It's going to be counterinsurgency efforts.
You fight like this and when they take over, you start bombing them.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, Mariupol, what he can do is what he did in Crimea in Sevastopol, which is he can basically give the Ukrainians a free pathway exit and say, I own you now.
Your life's going to be totally Russian.
We're going to be speaking Russian in the schools.
Ukrainian as a language will be banned.
So get out now.
And I think that's what he'll do in Mariupol.
In Kharkiv, it's a little more difficult.
That's a big city.
I think it's a million and a half, two million people.
It's the second biggest city after... They have, and I know them probably, well, because they're smaller, I probably know them better than Kiev.
And although they used to be pro-Russian, they are heavily, they are still pro-Russian.
They are very anti-Putin.
You can't find people who hate Putin more than the people in that city, which is why they're fighting like they're fighting.
That's not going to change.
More and more Russians will wake up because these sanctions usually sanctions are pretty much a fig leaf and kabuki.
But here are these sanctions.
You know, we've done some sanctions on Cuba, obviously, with the embargo and with certain African countries and certain Middle Middle East countries.
But sanctioning Russia has never been all that effective.
But with the with the sort of coordination.
For crying out loud, the Swiss banks went on neutral.
This is the first time in their 1200 year history that they, you know, they skewed their neutrality and have sanctioned Russia and frozen their accounts.
The Russian people not getting iPhones, not being able to buy new Apple products, not getting Western culture, McDonald's, Coca-Cola, no matter what information veil they have over them by the Putin-Pravda machine, they're starting to wake up and realize something's amiss.
I believe that's true, and I think you can see that in the reaction of, let's call them the Ukrainians who are pro-Russian.
Many of them have turned, and they've also tasted enough freedom so that they'll fight for it.
You don't see that in China where people haven't tasted freedom.
You don't see that in some portions of Russia.
You do in others.
Last question.
The hope, which I think is somewhat supportable by rationality, that this could be a situation that really alters Zelensky personally.
So he knows all the corruption of the present government of the United States.
He knows it's a thoroughly corrupt government, that it corrupted his government.
He's in a position to know it better than almost anyone, and he has the information that would reveal it.
He also knows they completely double-crossed him.
And that the gamble that was made to go with them certainly doesn't protect Ukraine going down the road.
And he has to be smart enough to know that if a Trump were there...
It would be different.
First of all, he never would have invaded in the first place.
When Trump said to him and Xi, you invade on my watch and I'm going to beat the crap out of you, even as Trump said in that Instagram clip with John Daly that's gone everywhere, even if it was 5% to 10% true, they're not in the business of making these reckless gambles.
No question about it.
All you have to do is look at the fact that he invaded under Bush.
He invaded under Obama, he invaded big time under Biden, and not even talk about it for four years while Trump was there, or the way in which Reagan basically psychologically beat them.
Putin waited a long time to begin this invasion, and Biden invited it by constantly demonstrating his weakness.
Now, I don't think there should be troops on the ground, but I have no doubt he should not have signaled that in advance.
He egged them on so much when he said they're going to invade tomorrow, they're going to invade the next day.
And we know why.
They're wagging the dog, like the movie from the 90s about the Balkans, because his numbers are horrible.
COVID has to be removed from the narrative because it polls so badly and it's going to affect them in November.
The economy is cracking after it was the best it ever was.
Inflation's at 10%.
So they were wagging the dog.
They wanted this war.
They wanted something to change the narrative.
And then, by the way, mark my words, no matter what happens, Ukraine gets chopped in half, Zelensky gets assassinated, or we have a resounding defense of Ukraine.
Biden's going to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize this year.
I guarantee you.
Well, that's a great way.
That's a great.
That's a great way to conclude.
It gives you an idea of how screwed up a large part of the world is.
But thank you very, very much, Matt, for your observations and your views.
They're very, very valuable.
And it's important.
It's really important.
I urge people to put aside their emotions here and start and think very rationally about the best interests of our country.
And thank you, Matt.
My pleasure.
Thank you for having me.
Be safe.
Thank you.
It was a very interesting and provocative interview with Matt, who's someone who's spent
a great deal of time in Poland and a fair amount of time in Ukraine and knows it, you
know, knows it personally and also comes at it from a very highly conservative point of
view.
you.
And it's really important that we focus on the best interests of the United States.
And so I'll sum up my views about this, because it's slightly different than Matt's and slightly different than some of the people on the right and most of it and all the people on the left.
And I've always been my own thinker, right?
So I'll give you the benefit of my analysis, having spent myself a great deal of time in Ukraine.
It is in the best interest of the United States that Ukraine remain free of Putin, no matter how it affects our internal politics, because that's transitory.
The other is permanent.
And a Republican government following this one is going to have to deal with a far more dangerous world if Putin controls Ukraine and anything beyond that.
And it also increases the threat of China because China and Ukraine are like this now.
The idea that we can convert Russia to our side is an idea worthy of academic debate.
But not one that we can put any rational support behind or risk any American lives for, because the odds are that we can't.
And we're faced with the fact that in a tough situation, they're going to go with China, even though there's historic animosity between the two.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, but we shouldn't risk anything based on that.
So here's what I believe should be done.
There's no question that it was a simple decision to allow Poland to give Ukraine the MiGs, which could have been used, for example, to wipe out the convoy to Kiev.
And maybe end completely the idea that Putin can go beyond the land bridge that we talked about.
I still think that that invasion of Kiev can be defeated.
Again, I think, I'm not certain.
I believe also that there's a good chance that Kharkov can resist the Russian siege.
And I would like to see the United States assisting in both those objectives, preserving the capital, preserving the second largest city, where there has been nothing less than valorous and totally inspiring a fight for freedom, which no matter your political biases, you have to respect.
And it has to give you goosebumps to see what these people are doing for freedom.
It has to tell you that one thing worked.
The Ukrainians have acquired, or many of them, the desire for freedom, which means Russia has lost long-term, and China, because even if Putin were to take more of Ukraine than he has right now, they'll continue to fight him forever.
So we should be giving them All the support we can, short of committing troops on the ground.
And we should consider, if we're going to lose the rest of Ukraine, we should consider a no-fly zone.
Right now, I would say it's a reasonable decision to resist it, because of the fear of nuclear war.
But should they move to take the rest of Ukraine and look like they're going to be successful, we've got to reconsider that.
And at some point, we can't let our decisions rest on our fear of nuclear war.
Otherwise, China and Russia win like Reagan did without firing a shot.
Because as cowards, we back down constantly.
And that is precisely what Biden has demonstrated.
particularly in his four or five or six weeks of pitifully explaining as a almost a guy kneeling that we would never use troops and we would never provoke Russia.
Instead of keeping that decision to himself and basically being a Reagan or a Trump, you know?
Don't force me to do it but I'd really hate to take down those big bubbles in Moscow, which is what Trump told Putin once.
And Putin said, well, they're churches.
And Trump looked at him and said, oh, come on.
Like you really care about churches.
So let's see.
This is still an evolving situation.
I plead with you, because it's a great exercise in moving our country beyond where we are now.
Get beyond your political prejudices.
Take a look at this cold and calculating and rationally in the best interest of our country.
That's the only way we really achieve the best interest of the United States.
Not if we just self-actualize a prior political prejudice.
That's the key to what's always been our growth.
Free, independent minds coming to the best conclusion.
Well, I thank Matt for his contribution.
I thank you for listening.
And we'll be back with a podcast very, very shortly, I'm sure, on this subject and related subjects.
And also, we are not ignoring China.
China is the bigger threat.
And we'll be back with a lot more information on China as well.
We can't keep our eye off China as we keep one eye on Russia, and particularly Putin.
Godspeed to the people of Ukraine.
I admire your fight for freedom.
Even those of you who are corrupt, I admire your fight for freedom.
Freedom is beyond measure, you know, the most important thing this world needs to be peaceful.
And second, God bless the greatest country on earth, the United States of America.
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