True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 236: Pledge A Legion
Aired: 2022-07-05
Duration: 01:10:54


=== Sounds Like Winhorst (04:27) ===

[00:00:00]  I have something to say.
[00:00:01]  Oh, great.
[00:00:02]  What?
[00:00:03]  Did you say Gwait?
[00:00:05]  Oh, Gway.
[00:00:05]  Oh, Gwait.
[00:00:06]  What are you going to say to me?
[00:00:10]  I was listening to old Ghelane trial episodes when I was down there at the courthouse.
[00:00:19]  Narcissistic.
[00:00:20]  You're not going to understand this reference, but some of our listeners will.
[00:00:23]  And for those who do, I think it'll bring a smile to their face.
[00:00:26]  So I just want to say it.
[00:00:28]  The clip that Young Chomsky puts in the theme music for the Ghelane episodes where it says Galois Maxwell, like that person's voice.
[00:00:37]  Can you put it in right here?
[00:00:40]  Sounds exactly like Brian Winhorst.
[00:00:45]  He might as well be speaking Ukrainian.
[00:00:48]  If you know what I'm saying, it sounds exactly like fucking Brian Windhorst.
[00:01:12]  Well, call my ass Brace Lose Donkey.
[00:01:17]  What?
[00:01:18]  Win Wind Horse?
[00:01:20]  Lose Donkey?
[00:01:21]  I don't know.
[00:01:22]  Oh, Windhorst with a D and a T at the end.
[00:01:26]  Wind horse.
[00:01:27]  Call my ass Breezy Mule.
[00:01:32]  Hello, everyone.
[00:01:33]  I'm Liz.
[00:01:34]  My name.
[00:01:35]  Well, listen, that's a little above your pay grade, but I'll give you a hint.
[00:01:41]  Initials: B-R-A-C-E.
[00:01:44]  And of course, we're joined by producer Young Chomsky, and the podcast is called Trodon.
[00:01:50]  Hello.
[00:01:50]  Hello.
[00:01:51]  It would be so funny if you, when people asked you, when they were like, wait, Brace, that's a weird name.
[00:01:57]  You were just like, yeah, it's an acronym.
[00:01:59]  Yeah.
[00:02:00]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:02:01]  Oh, I don't like that.
[00:02:03]  I got to think of one on the spot.
[00:02:06]  Well, can't say, all right.
[00:02:08]  R is going to be tough.
[00:02:10]  It is going to be tough.
[00:02:11]  Oh, my God.
[00:02:12]  Well, while Brace thinks about that, I will introduce the episode, which is a good one if I do say so myself.
[00:02:19]  We have our old pal, Seth Harp, on the show, everyone's favorite, fan favorite, I believe, here to talk about a slew of articles that he has recently published in Harpfurs, Rolling Stone, One Forthcoming, and The Intercept, all of which will be linked in the show notes, all about his time in Ukraine, trying to track down the Foreign Legion.
[00:02:45]  What is the Foreign Legion?
[00:02:46]  Doesn't exist.
[00:02:47]  Does it exist?
[00:02:49]  And what's up with that?
[00:02:52]  Balding.
[00:02:54]  Balding, retarded, asexual, cryptkeeper haircut, comma, Esquire.
[00:03:03]  Crypt Keeper haircut.
[00:03:30]  Just kidding.
[00:03:31]  You are not out there on any of the many battlefields that dot this beautiful little place we call home.
[00:03:37]  No, you are in fact listening to a new episode of Truanon, of course, with returning guest.
[00:03:43]  So not a new guest, but a well-worn and much-beloved one, investigative reporter Seth Harp.
[00:03:50]  Seth, how you doing?
[00:03:51]  Hey, Brace.
[00:03:52]  Good.
[00:03:52]  How are y'all doing?
[00:03:54]  Good to see you again, Seth.
[00:03:55]  Yeah.
[00:03:56]  Good to see you all again.
[00:03:57]  Thanks for having me.
[00:03:58]  Glad that you're back home safe.
[00:04:00]  Yeah, likewise.
[00:04:01]  Glad you survived the Ghislaine Maxwell trial.
[00:04:04]  I'm sure that was pretty very well.
[00:04:06]  Liz was actually, unfortunately, killed.
[00:04:08]  And we just got a new.
[00:04:10]  There's like a lot of clones of her.
[00:04:13]  She was part of some experiments as a child.
[00:04:14]  So we have a like, I think this is our third Liz we're on.
[00:04:17]  Have you seen that movie Multiplicity?
[00:04:20]  No.
[00:04:21]  Oh my God.
[00:04:22]  At least Young Chomsky's nodding.
[00:04:24]  Our listeners out there know what I'm talking about.

=== Searching for the Ukrainian Foreign Legion (15:24) ===

[00:04:27]  So we're having you on today because you just recently, I think last week, published an article on Harper's, which is as far as I can tell.
[00:04:36]  The cooler New Yorker.
[00:04:37]  Yeah.
[00:04:38]  And also a longer version of your own last name called Army of Shadows Searching for the Ukrainian Foreign Legion.
[00:04:48]  And you spent some time in Ukraine at the beginning of the war.
[00:04:52]  You know, I spoke to you several times back then, and you kind of told me what you're working on.
[00:04:58]  And it's a pretty impressive piece, along with the other ones you've written on the war.
[00:05:02]  I know there's one for at least one for Rolling Stone.
[00:05:05]  And I know you were saying you got a new one coming out in the intercept, which should actually be out by the time this episode is out.
[00:05:13]  So can you tell us the reasoning you went over there and really what you were looking for?
[00:05:20]  Yeah, the assignment I had from Harper's was like, as soon as the war began, they sent me over there to find out what was going on with this Foreign Legion, the International Legion, because you probably remember in those days there was a huge amount of press coverage about all of these foreign volunteers going over to Ukraine.
[00:05:39]  President Zelensky of Ukraine came out, you know, I think within two or three days of the invasion and announced the great fanfare, the creation of the International Legion for the Territorial Defense of Ukraine is the official name of it.
[00:05:52]  And this led to an enormous amount of press coverage, literally hundreds of articles, every single publication you can imagine.
[00:05:58]  I don't think there was a single major U.S. publication that didn't cover it.
[00:06:04]  So the assignment was to go over there and find out more or less what the deal was with this unit.
[00:06:11]  That was a story that I wrote for Harper's.
[00:06:14]  A lot of it involves the chaos and disorganization that I found there, a lot of the smoke and mirrors around the reality of the Foreign Legion and the extent to which it was basically an exercise and propaganda by the Ukrainians and a very good and effective one at that.
[00:06:34]  Since then, I've continued to cover the story as a clearer picture has come into focus of what exactly this unit, what exactly, who exactly belongs to this unit and what exactly it's doing.
[00:06:47]  I recently, so the Rolling Stone piece is about some of the first casualties because when I was first there in March and April, there hadn't been a single Westerner killed in combat.
[00:06:58]  And since then, there have been a number of them.
[00:07:01]  I think there's been about seven KIA, according to my account, and probably an equal number of POWs taken.
[00:07:10]  So the piece with Rolling Stone is about the first indications of what the actual composition of the Foreign Legion is, which is primarily U.S. and UK veterans, combat veterans, people with not only military experience, but substantial military experience.
[00:07:26]  So that appears to be to the extent the International Legion actually exists as units that are really organized and going into combat.
[00:07:34]  That's who they are.
[00:07:36]  And then the intercept piece that you mentioned that will be out probably tomorrow morning is about a couple of volunteers who were killed in the International Legion who appear to have been far-right extremists.
[00:07:49]  And so it's another element of this story as it's continued to develop and evolve.
[00:07:53]  I wouldn't say it's the majority of the guys that are going over there, but certainly there are now some first indications that a number of them may be outright neo-Nazis.
[00:08:03]  So I'm happy to get into all of that.
[00:08:07]  But I also know that we want to talk a little bit about the volunteers in Syria and the YPG as well, because as we were discussing before we started recording, the story of the International Legion in Ukraine probably has a certain significance for you personally.
[00:08:26]  Yeah, yeah, no, I absolutely want to get into that.
[00:08:29]  Yeah, something that was sort of really notable about Zelensky coming out so early in the war and calling for this International Legion.
[00:08:38]  And, you know, it was, like you said, tons of ink spilled about it, a lot of press, really with that as like the main hook.
[00:08:45]  A lot of press that didn't really seem very well researched, sort of just like, I guess, regurgitating PR with maybe a couple caveats here and there that, you know, these are the reported numbers, or this is, you know, this is the alleged amount of people that were heading over.
[00:09:00]  But it seemed part of a concerted effort by the Ukrainian government, quite understandably, to shore up international support.
[00:09:06]  And so you go up, obviously, they're doing it at the high levels with NATO and with, you know, trying to get basically various non-NATO countries behind them as well, or at least a raid against Russia.
[00:09:18]  And this was sort of more like a both a PR move and a kind of almost like grassroots move, really to a certain, I think, subset of, like you said, probably mostly American and British young men to get them behind Ukraine, or at least to get them really interested so that they're looking into it more.
[00:09:39]  You know, I know that we spoke when you were in Poland doing some work over there, and you mentioned that you saw a lot of Westerners heading for the border.
[00:09:50]  And so can you tell us about like your sort of initial contact with like people who were like what kind of people were actually trying to get into Ukraine to join to join the Foreign Legion and were they successful?
[00:10:00]  Well, it was a big, kind of complicated, chaotic, ongoing story at the time that I was over there in March and April.
[00:10:08]  And a lot of those initial news reports, documentaries, and stuff that came out really treated the volunteers in a rather credulous way, basically just reported everything that they were saying.
[00:10:18]  So you got this really confused picture that for the most part was presented as there's 20,000 foreigners over there from 52 different countries and they're taking the fight to Russian forces.
[00:10:31]  All of that.
[00:10:32]  You know, when I was there, there was nothing of the kind going on.
[00:10:35]  Almost all the volunteers who showed up to Poland were getting turned back.
[00:10:39]  They were a very mixed bag of people with military experience, no military experience, varying levels of psychological civility, all kinds of different ideological motivations.
[00:10:50]  And the Ukrainians just basically sent most of those people home.
[00:10:55]  Now, since then, it's shaped up to appear that they are selecting guys that have military experience.
[00:11:03]  So if you're a veteran of the Iraq war, Afghanistan war from the US and the UK, they will take you.
[00:11:09]  But yeah, at that time, it was a total, you know, total shit show at the border there.
[00:11:13]  And the amount of rumors and misinformation were just completely out of control.
[00:11:17]  I mean, almost every volunteer that I spoke to was convinced that the Ukrainians were using volunteers as like a meat shield and just throwing them in front of the Ukrainian army.
[00:11:25]  But actually, none of that was happening at the time.
[00:11:30]  But yeah, yeah, that was Poland.
[00:11:34]  You described the Foreign Legion.
[00:11:37]  I think you said such as it is that it exists or like such as it exists.
[00:11:42]  And I'm just curious how if you can kind of explain, like, I mean, how integrated is it?
[00:11:48]  Or is it even a thing that we can kind of talk about as a sort of cohesive unit in any sort of real kind of real way?
[00:11:58]  Well, look, I think that the main significance of the International Legion was a propaganda stunt on part of the Ukrainians.
[00:12:07]  And the Harper's piece is mostly about that, about the Ukrainians media savvy and their ability to play Western media like a fiddle, basically.
[00:12:15]  And, you know, for what it's worth, like props to them, I kind of understand why they would do that.
[00:12:20]  And it, you know, worked, it has worked, it worked for them really well.
[00:12:22]  It led to this deluge of positive press coverage.
[00:12:26]  But the Ukrainians have the largest army in Europe, if you don't count the Russians.
[00:12:31]  They have a huge amount of untrained reserves that they, so they don't need any more manpower, basically.
[00:12:39]  Like they don't need foreigners to come to Ukraine.
[00:12:42]  They're completely unnecessary.
[00:12:45]  Except for the value that they serve as sort of combat ambassadors, for lack of a better term, from all these different countries that are now sort of indirectly invested in the Ukrainian conflict because they have their citizens there.
[00:13:01]  And, you know, Brace is probably familiar with a similar dynamic with the YPG in Syria.
[00:13:06]  Like, I'm not sure that foreign volunteers were necessarily hugely significant in terms of the actual combat between the YPG and ISIS, but it was very helpful for the Kurds to have a number of people there as, you know, in some ways, they're just literally like, you know, shields, like human shields, because it raises the stake for ISIS.
[00:13:26]  It raises the stake for Turkey to bomb Kurdish positions.
[00:13:32]  So even now as we're seeing more foreign legion units really coming together and actually being deployed, I still think it's mainly exercising wartime propaganda.
[00:13:43]  Yeah, you know, you mentioned the sort of the rumors of people being used as meat shields, which I also discounted as well.
[00:13:50]  I think that was probably a lot of people whose nerves were getting the better of them.
[00:13:53]  But, you know, similar similar rumors happened in, you know, I heard similar things in Syria as well, which I also, you know, was not true.
[00:14:04]  But I think, you know, it's funny.
[00:14:09]  You know, you mentioned Turkey might be hesitant to attack Kurdish positions if there were foreigners there.
[00:14:15]  That turned out not to be the case.
[00:14:16]  I mean, it looks like they deliberately bombed a position with several foreigners in it, which killed Robin from Sacramento, whose parents I know pretty well at this point.
[00:14:28]  And it's in Ukraine, though.
[00:14:32]  I think it was a much more, I mean, they have the PR sort of machine that they obviously have set into motion.
[00:14:40]  That's probably been set up over the past, you know, eight years.
[00:14:43]  But really with the, with the start of the war, I mean, it has just been sort of incredible to watch how adept they've been.
[00:14:52]  You know, the thing is, they didn't actually ever really need to make a foreign legion.
[00:14:57]  They just needed to make the announcement that there was going to be one and have a certain few people.
[00:15:02]  I mean, I was.
[00:15:04]  like many other people reading the Reddit dedicated to getting people over there in those first about that first month.
[00:15:11]  And it was, God, excruciating to read, you know, sort of the questions that some people had, the really basic questions where if you're even asking them, you shouldn't leave your house, let alone go to Kiev or Donbass.
[00:15:27]  Well, it's funny, right?
[00:15:28]  Because it's like that, you know, it does sort of exist in this realm of, you know, wartime propaganda as this kind of like fake thing that Zelensky is throwing out to shore up international support, like you were saying, Brace, like you're saying, Seth.
[00:15:41]  And then suddenly, as you kind of detailed specifically in the Harper's piece, it's like then the Ukrainian army has to deal with then the like meet space ramifications of like all these dudes from Alabama and from Reddit and from wherever and in the UK just like showing up at the border being like, all right, I'm here to fight.
[00:15:59]  And then being like, we don't know what to do with you because we don't actually really need you.
[00:16:03]  You need to go away, you know?
[00:16:06]  And these guys, but it sounds like, I mean, very intent and, you know, being over there and, you know, by hook or by crook figuring out how to, you know, meet up with somebody who will introduce them to somebody who will get them,
[00:16:21]  you know, to the front line or whatever they have in their, you know, in their mind about like what it is that they're supposed to be doing over there based on just this like one fake thing that was just kind of invented out of thin air just as a press release.
[00:16:37]  Yeah.
[00:16:38]  And this may show a bit in the Harper's piece, but for all those reasons, as I was reporting the story, I kind of lost interest a little bit in the foreigners because they seemed a little bit like a sideshow and was more interested in like what was going on in the Battle of Kiev and the defense of Kiev.
[00:16:55]  But apart from their actual significance to the war effort, what really drew me to this story in the first place and to previous reporting that I've done on foreign fighters is the foreign fighters themselves and the motivations that impell them to do such a crazy thing and what it says about the places that they're coming from and the countries that they're coming from and the sort of media environment and the spectacle in which they're immersed.
[00:17:22]  And Brace, I don't know if you would mind me asking you a little bit about like, because you went through the same process of like, I don't want to say radicalization, but you know, this happened to you.
[00:17:33]  Yeah.
[00:17:34]  And I wonder if you, because so, so I wonder if I could ask you to kind of, for background, and so far as it reflects on the Ukrainian story, like what was that like for you?
[00:17:43]  You were, I guess, about 26 years old or so.
[00:17:46]  You're working at a flower shop and somebody's talking about it.
[00:17:49]  No, it's a boxing gym at that time.
[00:17:50]  Okay.
[00:17:52]  All right.
[00:17:52]  And then what happened?
[00:17:53]  I mean, it probably started on Reddit for you too.
[00:17:56]  Yeah, well, no, actually, I've never been a user of Reddit, thank God.
[00:17:59]  But I actually, I came across a news story about Ivana Hoffman, a German woman who I think was the first, the first foreign fighter, well, on the YPG side that was killed in Syria in the Battle of Kobani.
[00:18:17]  And she was with MLKP, who was fighting underneath sort of the YPG's command.
[00:18:22]  And I got really sort of interested in reading about it.
[00:18:27]  And I realized that I was sort of obsessively looking at it.
[00:18:31]  And, you know, it's funny because sometimes I've seen people talk about my motivations like that.
[00:18:38]  People I don't know who sort of like maybe half remember stories or, you know, I don't know, have heard things from other people or whatever.
[00:18:46]  And it's, you know, it's like, oh, he got sober and then he was looking for something in life and he went over there.
[00:18:52]  But really, I don't know.
[00:18:57]  I knew a lot of Kurdish people.
[00:18:59]  I knew a lot of Turkish people as well.
[00:19:02]  And some of them had been there.
[00:19:05]  And through talking with them, I was like, well, I want to go there.
[00:19:08]  And at that time, really, the only way for a foreigner to get there, as far as I could figure out, was to join the YPG.
[00:19:15]  And, you know, I had no, and this sounds a little absurd, maybe, but like, I had no particular animus against ISIS, you know, like, I mean, yeah, they're bad and stuff.
[00:19:25]  But, you know, to be like, I didn't, I didn't think of them in sort of the same like way that you hear people talking about like, you know, Russia is like this great threat to the world.
[00:19:35]  Obviously, they're a great threat to the people of that region.
[00:19:37]  And, you know, and in some sense, other parts of the world too.
[00:19:42]  But, you know, it wasn't like I was like, I got to go stamp out ISIS before they get to.
[00:19:48]  Like a Nazi fighter, you weren't thinking of yourself in that way.

=== Radical Volunteerism? (07:14) ===

[00:19:51]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:19:52]  I was like, you know, I wasn't like, I'm going to go save the world or anything.
[00:19:56]  And I had no, you know, I had no, no real, I didn't think I was like a hero or was going to be like a great fighter or anything.
[00:20:05]  I was just like, this seems like the only way I could go.
[00:20:08]  And I, you know, I, I, I, I really agree with you that I'm actually, even though I'm obviously included in this category, I'm also fascinated by foreign fighters and meeting obviously quite a few of them, including some people who went to Ukraine afterwards.
[00:20:26]  It was sort of just fascinating, I guess, character studies, just from a purely like, you know, point of view or my interest in people, which I have a great interest in people.
[00:20:36]  And yeah, I didn't actually maintain contact with really almost anybody after I got home.
[00:20:42]  The one guy really, there's a couple guys I spoke to.
[00:20:45]  One guy ended up killing himself.
[00:20:47]  The other guy is doing just fine.
[00:20:50]  But I'm still, you know, whenever I get a chance, like, I mean, I devoured this article when you put it out.
[00:20:56]  It really just, I don't know.
[00:20:59]  There's a lot of sort of like fascinating people, I guess, is a way to put it.
[00:21:06]  Well, it's really shaping up to be like this thing, like this sort of 21st century youth culture thing that people can do.
[00:21:13]  Of course, it's very obscure and limited to its little corner of the internet, but like there's lots of opportunities to be a foreign fighter in conflicts now.
[00:21:22]  And it's something very, you know, the word postmodern is overused.
[00:21:26]  I'm just kind of searching for the term for it.
[00:21:28]  There's almost like this traveling core of foreign fighters now that can go from place to place.
[00:21:33]  I mean, I guess it's pretty limited to Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine.
[00:21:37]  Yeah.
[00:21:38]  But I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing it popping up.
[00:21:40]  Libya as well, some foreign fighters there.
[00:21:43]  Burma too, Burma Rangers.
[00:21:46]  Yeah, could be.
[00:21:47]  So it's starting to kind of be a thing where like people can, and countries that are combatant or countries that are at war are able to now send out an international call to arms and have people who for their own disparate motivations will come to flock to their country to fight.
[00:22:03]  But I don't think we've ever seen anything like it on the scale of Ukraine before, because when you're talking about Ivana Hoffman and the YPG and Abdullah Oshalan, and I know you were, you didn't mention a second ago, but I know that certainly there was an ideological component for you.
[00:22:18]  Absolutely.
[00:22:19]  I mean, the Kurds were, I don't know exactly how to define it.
[00:22:21]  I would say anarcho-feminist, but whatever it was, it caught your attention and sympathies.
[00:22:28]  Whereas, but you had to go and search for that.
[00:22:30]  It was something very obscure.
[00:22:31]  I mean, at that time, hardly anyone had heard about the Rojava Revolution.
[00:22:35]  And one big difference that I see is in this case, this is being blasted out to people.
[00:22:40]  Everywhere.
[00:22:40]  Yeah.
[00:22:41]  Everywhere.
[00:22:41]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:22:43]  And so it's happening in much, much greater numbers.
[00:22:46]  And you start to wonder what's going to come of this.
[00:22:50]  I don't believe that Ukraine has anything like 20,000 volunteers, as they claim, probably in the high hundreds is a truer estimate.
[00:23:01]  But even then, what's going to happen?
[00:23:04]  What's going to become of having all of these foreigners on the battlefield, especially when, you know, as I was writing in the Rolling Stone Piece, it looks like a lot of them, almost the majority, or excuse me, almost all of them are Anglo-veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
[00:23:20]  It's interesting, right?
[00:23:22]  There's, Brace, when you went over to Syria, I feel like, I mean, I'm trying to kind of put myself back in that time period, but the kind of where the internet and social media and everything was at that point versus where it is now.
[00:23:36]  And this is something we talked about right when the war in Ukraine broke out was that the amount of propaganda that we were seeing on social media and the kind of like, you know, all of the not just recycled nonsense videos you would see that people would post, like trying to make it look like stuff that was happening in Ukraine, but it was obviously footage from, you know, previous conflicts or whatever, was stuff that we, I think we both remember from during the war in Syria,
[00:24:03]  which really felt like kind of one of the first big wars that, you know, so much propaganda happened online.
[00:24:15]  And that was like kind of this new like battlefield that was sort of occurring.
[00:24:20]  And this, you know, this time with Ukraine, it kind of like ramped up even more.
[00:24:25]  And so it's, it's sort of like mirroring in that way.
[00:24:27]  You know, you talk about the way that how easy it is for all of these guys going over to Ukraine to kind of connect with each other via Reddit or how it's way more mainstream.
[00:24:37]  And it's, it's, you know, you don't really have to be in these niche groups and seek out this stuff in ways that you used to, where you'd have to kind of carve out these little pathways.
[00:24:48]  Like they're, they've all been formed.
[00:24:52]  They're all there or they're much wider than they used to be at least.
[00:25:00]  And I don't know, you know, apart from the, what the foreign volunteers are actually doing in Ukraine, they're interesting to me as like individuals and even the ones that come from more like a right-wing ideological, which I didn't find.
[00:25:16]  Like most of the people I talked to had totally generic political beliefs.
[00:25:19]  They were there to defend freedom and democracy.
[00:25:22]  That was about it.
[00:25:23]  I love a radical centrist.
[00:25:25]  They really are.
[00:25:26]  They really are like radical.
[00:25:27]  You know, another thing I'll add is that another pattern that's clearly discernible is that these guys are much older, I think, in general.
[00:25:34]  That's something that really stuck out to me from a lot of your reporting is how many guys in their 50s there are.
[00:25:39]  Totally, totally.
[00:25:40]  So it's like that, it's like a jihad for like, you know, for radical centrists who are radical middle-aged centrists who watch NBC and CNN, I guess.
[00:25:50]  That I would not have expected, but certainly they are.
[00:25:53]  I mean, actually, I was looking and I have like a spreadsheet of people that have been killed in action or taken prisoner.
[00:25:58]  I think their average age is 40.
[00:26:00]  Wow.
[00:26:02]  So I'm not quite sure what to make of that.
[00:26:05]  But either way, like, you know, the places that these people are coming from, they're just like in this soup of social media and media in general.
[00:26:14]  And it just, I think that they're appealing characters because they're usually marginal.
[00:26:21]  They're some kind of marginal lifestyle.
[00:26:23]  They're typically not college educated people.
[00:26:26]  And I totally get like the emotional drive to want to go and be at the center of world events, to do something special, to not be just confined totally to the banality of a lower middle class or working class existence and to take part in this kind of thing.
[00:26:44]  So even though I do play up some of the Black League comic elements of this, I'm not here to shit on these guys in any way because it's something so extraordinary to save up all your money and buy a plane ticket and go to a country that you've never been to and may not have been able to find on a map until you started getting into one of these wormholes.

=== Jarring First Days in Syria (02:39) ===

[00:27:06]  And then you're there and then you're in the middle of a real war.
[00:27:08]  And Braysa, if I could bring it back to you again, I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about like those first days, like stepping off the plane in the Urbil airport.
[00:27:17]  And it's like, holy shit, now all of a sudden you're in Iraq and you're really faced with going through with it.
[00:27:22]  Like what was that like for you, given that like so many other hundreds or possibly thousands of people are now going through the same thing in Ukraine?
[00:27:29]  Well, first it was Suleimania because Erbil is a place I can as forbidden to me as Turkey is.
[00:27:35]  But, you know, it was jarring.
[00:27:39]  It was the YPG's communications, as I'm sure you know, are not always the clearest.
[00:27:46]  And, you know, it's a big leap of faith to just get on a plane to Suleimanya and to just have to hand your phone to a taxicab driver and have him call a number and then go to wherever that number says.
[00:28:01]  I mean, it was funny because in actually getting over there, there were so many delays and so many times that we just had to sit around and wait for several days with no, you know, obviously we didn't have our phones.
[00:28:13]  And you kind of just like sat there and looked at the wall or tried to, you know, practice Kurdish on somebody.
[00:28:21]  But I got to be honest, like it was, for me at least, it was fine.
[00:28:27]  You know, I actually, I was probably the first date was really jarring because obviously I was a little jet lagged.
[00:28:32]  And also I was in a very confusing situation.
[00:28:36]  The liaison between the smuggler and basically getting to the actual guy who took us over the river was an annoying process because the guy that was that was facilitating that was just a fucking psycho who later, the rumor was actually ran off with all of our information and gave it to Turkey.
[00:28:54]  But I mean, who knows if that's true, but that's what that's sort of that's what went around afterwards.
[00:29:01]  But once I actually got into Syria, you know, it was jarring for the first, I would say, couple of days, but then you just get into a routine.
[00:29:10]  And I had read extensively about it.
[00:29:12]  I had spoken to several people I knew in my personal life who had gone over there.
[00:29:18]  And so I knew somewhat of what to expect.
[00:29:22]  And frankly, I mean, we were just basically for a month in the in the in the training academy.
[00:29:27]  And so that was really like, it was, it was kind of gradually easing us in there.
[00:29:32]  But yeah, I mean, I can't imagine, you know, the one thing I did try to like really focus on was learning the language.
[00:29:40]  And that is something that I just keep in all of your reporting, you know, reading about this.

=== CIA & JSOC's Active Covert Operations (15:08) ===

[00:29:46]  I can't imagine going over to Ukraine and not being able to read Cyrillic letters or speak Ukrainian at all.
[00:29:53]  I mean, the thing about Kurdish is it's actually a fairly, once you get the hang of it, it's a fairly, you know, it's a simple language.
[00:29:59]  You know, it's by that I mean like that there's rules that make sense.
[00:30:03]  And, you know, generally there's not too many synonyms for different words.
[00:30:07]  And also the letters are, I mean, I'm not, I don't know exactly the word for it, but it basically uses the Turkish alphabet, which is legible to somebody who speaks English.
[00:30:18]  I cannot for the life of me imagine going over to, I mean, I've been in Ukraine and I couldn't tell what the fuck was going on 90% of the time.
[00:30:25]  And I was just trying to get a cup of coffee and go to a Ukraine.
[00:30:27]  And imagine you got to go through Poland to get to Ukraine.
[00:30:30]  So you got to understand Polish and then Ukrainian and be able to differentiate it from Russian.
[00:30:36]  Yeah.
[00:30:37]  Yeah.
[00:30:38]  That was one of my big questions.
[00:30:40]  Because yeah, like you say, Cyrillic alphabet totally indecipherable.
[00:30:43]  I mean, I couldn't read the train schedule.
[00:30:45]  I had to get someone to help.
[00:30:47]  Yeah.
[00:30:48]  But so that was one of my big questions.
[00:30:50]  How can Ukraine possibly have 20,000 foreign legionnaires in this unit that has a splashy website and all this other stuff?
[00:30:58]  Like no one else speaks Ukrainian.
[00:30:59]  So how is it possible?
[00:31:00]  And when I asked Ukrainian officials about this, they would always say, well, you know, Ukrainian young people speak English.
[00:31:06]  And there are people in the army who speak English.
[00:31:09]  To me, that struck me as kind of a cop-out answer.
[00:31:12]  But as a clearer picture has developed over the subsequent like four months, and I have been able to get like insider accounts from small squads that have been of foreigners, of English-speaking foreigners that have been in combat, it seems like that's pretty much, that is what's happening.
[00:31:28]  They're organized in small groups that speak English, and then they'll liaise with a member of the Ukrainian army who speaks English.
[00:31:36]  Now, how effective that's actually going to be, yeah, probably not too effective.
[00:31:41]  And I think that, you know, that POW video that I sent you of the two guys being interrogated by a Russian interrogator, two of them were captured.
[00:31:55]  Both Americans, both veterans, and they spoke of real miscommunication with their unit.
[00:32:01]  At least I hope it was miscommunication because otherwise the situation they were describing is that on their very first mission, they went out as a squad, fired one shot, missed, ran away, hid in a hole, and then surrendered to Russian forces.
[00:32:20]  But on their way out, they sort of got overrun by the retreating Ukrainians who told them, hey, you guys stay right here and cover our retreat while we get in the vehicles and leave.
[00:32:31]  And so they were just basically abandoned by the Ukrainians.
[00:32:35]  Now, that was a Russian interrogation video.
[00:32:37]  Who knows?
[00:32:38]  You know, you have to take it with a grain of salt.
[00:32:39]  They're clearly under duress facing possible execution.
[00:32:43]  But it sounds like a lot of miscommunication.
[00:32:44]  And yeah, the language issues is a big part of that.
[00:32:48]  And the French Foreign Legion, they place a huge emphasis on language training because that's essential to have any kind of functional foreigners brigade.
[00:32:55]  Well, that's something that stuck out to me about your report in Rolling Stone about the American that was killed as well.
[00:33:00]  And I really noticed that similarity when I was watching the interrogation video of these two Americans is that there seems to be a lot of problems with communication, whether the community, it's the language barriers, but also basic like squad to squad or team to team communication.
[00:33:18]  It seems like both of those situations possibly could have been avoided with really just a basic modicum of communication.
[00:33:26]  The interrogation video, I agree.
[00:33:28]  I mean, these guys are being handled seems pretty expertly.
[00:33:32]  The guy, at least, I don't know if he's the translator or the handler or what, but the guy that's talking to them is really he's good at his job.
[00:33:40]  And so who knows if that's actually the truth?
[00:33:42]  You know, their stories differ a tiny little bit.
[00:33:46]  But yeah, it does seem like they were possibly left behind.
[00:33:48]  And I can see that kind of scenario happening.
[00:33:52]  Again, if that's actually what happened.
[00:33:56]  And I can only imagine how terrifying that would have been to see these sort of trucks driving off in the distance and being like, wait, well, maybe I should have possibly been on one of those trucks.
[00:34:09]  But that's something that really sticks out to me about this is that just it's such a foreign environment.
[00:34:16]  And it's not only, even if you're a veteran, you know, now you're on the other side.
[00:34:21]  Well, you're, you know, obviously it's combined arms warfare on the Ukrainian side, but now you're the subject of missile strikes.
[00:34:27]  You're the subject of airstrikes.
[00:34:29]  You actually are at a disadvantage when it comes to, in some, in some instances, when it comes to material and to armor and, you know, and to transportation.
[00:34:38]  And I think a really great indication of that, I mean, I don't want to say great, but an indication of that is those missile strikes on the foreign training base.
[00:34:46]  And you were in country for that, right?
[00:34:48]  I know it was a pretty big deal in the formation of the International Legion.
[00:34:52]  Yeah, the Yvoriv base, that was where they were initially congregating foreign volunteers because one thing I was looking for in trying to assess how real the Foreign Legion is and how much of a flesh and blood existence it had on the ground as opposed to an online existence was where is their training base?
[00:35:12]  Like, where is their base?
[00:35:13]  Who is their commander?
[00:35:14]  What does their chain of command look like?
[00:35:16]  And they did have a base.
[00:35:18]  They did have an area at the very beginning.
[00:35:19]  It was Yvori.
[00:35:21]  And Russia just fired this volley of cruise missiles at it.
[00:35:25]  There's like one video of it, and it was so destructive.
[00:35:28]  You can see like the hole is so deep that you can actually see the water table like 30 feet down from the impact this cruise missile made.
[00:35:37]  Honestly, man, I have no idea what happened at Yvori.
[00:35:40]  I mean, almost every volunteer that I spoke to who was there said that they personally saw foreigners killed.
[00:35:45]  Like they were like, oh, I saw their bodies being dragged out of the rubble.
[00:35:48]  And yet here it is, I think three months later, and there still hasn't been a single confirmed Westerner killed in Yvori.
[00:35:57]  So what the hell happened there, I don't know.
[00:35:59]  But I think one thing to keep in mind is the possibility that the Ukrainians are keeping concealed the news of a lot.
[00:36:07]  I think a lot more foreigners may have died than the Ukrainians have disclosed so far.
[00:36:11]  Because when I reported Zabilsky's death, it was like a month after it happened.
[00:36:15]  And it just came to me by accident.
[00:36:16]  Someone messaged me on Facebook and told me about it.
[00:36:20]  But he had been dead for a month.
[00:36:21]  The State Department knew about it.
[00:36:23]  The Ukrainians knew about it, but it hadn't been published.
[00:36:25]  So how many more cases are there like that out there?
[00:36:28]  So one thing that you had said, I can't remember for the life of me exactly when you said this, but at least a couple of months ago, was that you had heard that JSOC was operating in Ukraine.
[00:36:41]  So this is a different kind of foreign volunteer.
[00:36:43]  Oh, yeah.
[00:36:44]  I don't know about volunteer.
[00:36:45]  I guess we have an all-volunteer military.
[00:36:49]  So in a very technical sense, a foreign volunteer.
[00:36:53]  And people got really mad at you for that.
[00:36:55]  In fact, I will go ahead and say that every single time that you have tweeted about Ukraine, people have been very angry at you.
[00:37:03]  I know that you posted a text message exchange with a Marine that people were saying was fake.
[00:37:10]  And then obviously you came out with an article about the exact same incident a couple of days later.
[00:37:15]  It's just the incident that we're referencing here with the American being killed.
[00:37:19]  Actually, obviously it was very obvious if you're reading it wasn't fake.
[00:37:22]  But, you know, people got really mad at you.
[00:37:27]  And then I think it was just yesterday the New York Times comes out and essentially confirms what you had been saying, that the CIA and their assassination arm.
[00:37:35]  So that's not all they do, but it's a very large aspect of what they do.
[00:37:39]  JSOC, we're operating in Ukraine.
[00:37:41]  Yeah.
[00:37:44]  So I heard about that initially, I think a week or two after the war started.
[00:37:50]  A former JSOC colonel who was instrumental in creating the AFO is the Advanced Force Operations, which is like the JSOC of JSOC that is the super covert stuff.
[00:38:00]  He told me that they were over there.
[00:38:02]  And I don't know why he told me that.
[00:38:06]  Maybe he is just a guy who likes to talk.
[00:38:08]  But in any case, while I was reporting, being focused on identifying Americans who were over there, it came up repeatedly.
[00:38:14]  It wasn't just that.
[00:38:16]  The Ukrainian officials that I spoke to, I would ask them, are there Americans in combat?
[00:38:21]  Is the Foreign Legion actually deploying people to the front lines?
[00:38:24]  They would say, no, not yet.
[00:38:25]  We're holding them in reserve.
[00:38:27]  But they all told me that there were highly trained retired specialists from the United States and other NATO countries who were on the front lines.
[00:38:37]  So that was something that I heard consistently throughout it.
[00:38:39]  There are ex-operators who are in the battle from the start.
[00:38:43]  Now, obviously, there's a pretty, pretty, there's a gray line there between, or a blurry line there, I should say, between retired and active, because just think of the community that we're talking about.
[00:38:55]  It's not really something that you retire from.
[00:38:59]  And yeah, as you mentioned, the Times came out with a piece recently that's clearly sourced to U.S. officials who basically, the way I read it is these officials got on the phone and called the New York Times.
[00:39:11]  I'm like, hey, you prepared to copy?
[00:39:13]  We're about to tell you some good info.
[00:39:17]  I wouldn't say it directly confirms the thing about JSOC because the New York Times article stopped just short of confirming that there are U.S. operators in the fight.
[00:39:28]  But they do say that there are French ones, British ones from other countries, and that there are CIA operators, like active CIA operations going on in Ukraine right now.
[00:39:37]  Also, back in May, the CIA added two stars to its wall, or it might have actually been four.
[00:39:43]  I really can't figure it out.
[00:39:44]  There's like conflicting reports, but at least two that they added back in May.
[00:39:49]  Explain what that means.
[00:39:51]  Yeah, when CIA, when covert officers are killed in combat, their names are typically not disclosed.
[00:39:56]  Sometimes they are.
[00:39:57]  There was that guy in Somalia not too long ago.
[00:40:01]  But typically they're not.
[00:40:02]  If they were covert under a covert identity, then only their families are informed.
[00:40:07]  But the CIA has a memorial wall where they put up stars, like these black stars.
[00:40:11]  And I think there's 139 of them currently.
[00:40:15]  And they added the 138th, 139th back in May.
[00:40:19]  So it's like, gosh, I wonder what that country, what country they, I mean, they could have drowned in the scuba diving incident in the Philippines or something or whatever.
[00:40:27]  But it seems pretty likely that that happened in Ukraine, given the extent of U.S. covert operations that are there that are now basically confirmed.
[00:40:38]  What's your feeling about why the why the CIA would call up the New York Times to get them to publish that story or that information?
[00:40:45]  That's a really good question.
[00:40:48]  I have no idea why they would do that.
[00:40:50]  Because, I mean, people have been speculating about that.
[00:40:52]  And the Russians had said that from the get-go, that there were not just U.S., but obviously NATO special forces very active in Ukraine, Donbass, you know, all over since the I mean, since the beginning of the war.
[00:41:08]  And so it seems odd, or it's just kind of, I don't know, odd timing or I don't know.
[00:41:13]  I could know, I couldn't really wrap my head around why they would come out and do that, but I don't know.
[00:41:18]  It's interesting.
[00:41:19]  It is interesting.
[00:41:21]  And to draw all this together, all these things that we're describing, CIA covert operations, JSOC or other NATO commandos, and then also, needless to say, the provision of huge amounts of heavy weaponry to Ukraine, direct financial assistance, because the State Department is just funding the Zelensky government.
[00:41:41]  And in addition to that, the Foreign Legion that, as we're saying, is mostly comprised of US and British veterans who just years or months ago were getting a paycheck from the Pentagon or the Ministry of Defense.
[00:41:58]  So all of this taken together shows that the U.S. is as fully engaged in the proxy war in Ukraine as they could possibly be without having actual regular army infantry units deployed on the ground.
[00:42:12]  I was hoping that maybe we could pivot for a second.
[00:42:28]  I love saying that.
[00:42:29]  Pivot.
[00:42:32]  And maybe turn our focus a little bit to the third piece that which will be, I'm going to call forthcoming.
[00:42:38]  But like Bryce said, by the time this episode comes out, should be already out, I think.
[00:42:44]  Or the piece should be out.
[00:42:45]  Both the piece and the podcast will be out.
[00:42:47]  How about that?
[00:42:49]  Which is the piece in the intercept that details maybe some of the kind of far right elements and you kind of trying to track down, you know, some of these sort of, I mean, I don't know if calling them neo-Nazis is correct.
[00:43:07]  I don't know how they identify, but, you know, how these guys, these kind of, yeah, like far-right extremists, like what percentage of these guys are over there, where they're coming from, what their motivations are.
[00:43:23]  And, you know, what's the, what's the deal with that?
[00:43:27]  Yeah, this was something that my editor at Harbor's was keen to know about when I first went over there because, of course, there has been the Azov Battalion for years, which has relentlessly attracted controversy for its quasi-fascist ideology, pretty unapologetically espoused by its various leaders.
[00:43:48]  There have been skinhead-type volunteers in the Donbass, not many, but there's been reports of them over the years.
[00:43:56]  And Ukraine, just in general, has a very assertive and aggressive ultra-nationalist sector, far-right sector in Ukraine.
[00:44:04]  It's very active politically.
[00:44:06]  So as soon as the news of the Foreign Legion came out, people are questioning, well, is this going to start attracting right-wing dudes from all over the world to go and fight in Ukraine?
[00:44:15]  And as far as I was able to tell, dealing with that just herd, that multitude of people that were flocking to the Polish border trying to join, really not that many.
[00:44:25]  Like we were saying before, it's mostly just like older dudes.
[00:44:28]  It's just like dads, like radicalized dads, like midlife crisis style, I guess.
[00:44:33]  I don't know.
[00:44:35]  And I couldn't, of course, people may be keeping this on the down low because they know that I'm a reporter for like the liberal mainstream media.
[00:44:46]  But I doubt that because I'm an American.
[00:44:49]  I can tell kind of like I can get like a right-wing vibe from somebody if that's the deal with them.

=== Iron Cross Volunteers (06:29) ===

[00:44:54]  Couldn't really detect any of that.
[00:44:57]  However, as things have developed, you know, when you're reporting on war, you sometimes have to use deaths as like a proxy, especially in Ukraine when you can't get access to the front lines, when it's a very secretive military culture.
[00:45:10]  It's an ex-Soviet military.
[00:45:12]  So it's extremely secretive.
[00:45:14]  I mean, embrace the access that I had with the YPG.
[00:45:17]  You know, when I met you in Syria, they basically just gave me free reign.
[00:45:20]  There was no minder.
[00:45:21]  There was nothing.
[00:45:22]  They were just here to go.
[00:45:23]  Yeah, here's the question.
[00:45:24]  Yeah, you just cruised over and hung out with us.
[00:45:27]  Yeah, and ate chicken.
[00:45:30]  But they were just kind of like, here's your fellow countrymen.
[00:45:33]  They're over there.
[00:45:34]  Do what you want.
[00:45:35]  Ukraine's a totally different story.
[00:45:37]  You can't get access.
[00:45:39]  So as I'm saying, like, you have to go off the desk as kind of a proxy for who's involved in this.
[00:45:44]  And so on June 4th, the International Legion announced that there had been four more guys killed in action.
[00:45:52]  One of them, a French guy named Wilfried Blério, they published a picture of him on their official Facebook page.
[00:46:00]  And he's wearing front and center in his body armor a badge of something called the Misanthropic Division, which I had never heard of before.
[00:46:09]  But as soon as I looked into it, I found pretty quickly that it is said to be a sort of black pilled volunteer wing of the Azov Battalion.
[00:46:20]  And I got into their tele, I found their telegram group and found that it was a sort of subculture of the foreign volunteers in Ukraine who are not just far-right extremists, but hardcore neo-Nazis.
[00:46:36]  Like their telegram is full of like black sun wheels and Hail Hitler and all of everything.
[00:46:42]  It's all in there.
[00:46:44]  All the classics.
[00:46:45]  All of the classics are in there.
[00:46:48]  And Blerio, there's photos of him.
[00:46:51]  The Telegram channel was the first to announce his death.
[00:46:53]  So he was part of this subculture or click.
[00:46:57]  I don't know exactly what to call it because I'm not sure if it's an actual military wing.
[00:47:01]  I'm not sure if it's, as we're talking about before, with the International Legion itself, not sure how real it is, whether it has a commander, et cetera, whether it's really part of the Azov Battalion, or whether it's just something that anyone online can claim.
[00:47:13]  Yeah, just like a big group chat for freaks.
[00:47:19]  Yeah.
[00:47:20]  Well, regardless, this French guy who was 32 years old, French army veteran, he was 100% a neo-Nazi.
[00:47:27]  There's pictures of him on the Telegram, like dressed in his misanthropic division t-shirt.
[00:47:33]  There's like flags of him, et cetera.
[00:47:36]  And then there was another guy, a German named Benjamin Klavis.
[00:47:40]  Again, the International Legion published a photo of him, which you can see on the back of his right hand, he's got an Iron Cross tattooed very conspicuously on the back of his right hand.
[00:47:51]  And, you know, sometimes in the U.S., you'll see the Iron Cross displayed in a kind of like non-racist context.
[00:48:00]  Yes, Seth, my grandfather won that for bravery during the First World War.
[00:48:04]  He was at Verdun, okay?
[00:48:07]  Well, actually, they give out the U.S. Army's marksmanship medal looks exactly like the Iron Cross.
[00:48:13]  So I don't know.
[00:48:14]  Whoops.
[00:48:15]  In my opinion.
[00:48:16]  It could be.
[00:48:17]  But Klavis, the guy that was killed, he's from Germany.
[00:48:20]  Okay.
[00:48:21]  There's not a whole lot of ambiguity when you have a huge iron cross on the back of your right hand and you're from Germany.
[00:48:30]  That's the hand he always with on his independent brand skateboard.
[00:48:35]  Yeah, that's right, man.
[00:48:39]  So these are indications that among the volunteers, at least among the European volunteers, there are some of these guys, which before I had been a bit dismissive of.
[00:48:47]  You know, I have other concerns about the war in Ukraine, have other concerns about the foreign legion.
[00:48:52]  I wasn't really tracking the right-wing thing, but lo and behold, here it is.
[00:48:55]  It looks like, yeah, there really is an element of that.
[00:48:58]  And so the question with them, I think, is going to be, well, how much of a danger do they pose to their home countries when they get done fighting against a technologically advanced enemy in combined arms warfare, you know, on the Donbass front line?
[00:49:12]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:49:13]  I mean, you know, I know there was concern about that with a lot of the European YPG volunteers.
[00:49:20]  In fact, most of those guys, not most, but a lot of Europeans I know have been arrested at one point or another for their experience in the YPG.
[00:49:30]  And, you know, talking about, you know, you and I both know Tommy.
[00:49:34]  And, you know, he faced some pretty serious prison time and it's couched in the language of like radicalization and possibly a possible threat to Denmark.
[00:49:45]  You know, in America, it was a different case because it's not actually illegal to fight if you're not fighting another government, which actually raises some questions about the legality of American volunteers in Ukraine, although I'm sure that they will all be overlooked.
[00:50:00]  But certainly, obviously, we were surveilled in various different ways, interrogated, stuff like that.
[00:50:08]  But it's going to be interesting because there was one guy, Dan Baker, who was actually, I believe, at Chaz, which that's a rough one.
[00:50:22]  But he was actually arrested for passing out some pretty misadvised flyers, let's say, in Florida, basically saying that I think it was maybe around Jay 6th or in the lead up to that, being like, if Trump supporters, you know, don't accept the election or whatever, like we should take guns out and like make it was a pretty violent, violent flyers, essentially.
[00:50:47]  And he had been flying for it.
[00:50:48]  You know, it was a short video I watched on him, and he looked like a pretty, I don't know, down, down and out guy, like a guy who was pretty lost after fighting over there.
[00:50:58]  But as far as I know, that's the only ex-YPG person who's been arrested anywhere for something, I guess, similar, like in violence-related reasons.
[00:51:11]  I do think, though, that if we've seen in the past, I don't know, five, 10 years, and really in the past 30 years, that there is a pretty high incidence in certain places of right-wing violence.

=== Executed or Imprisoned? (14:20) ===

[00:51:24]  Certainly a lot more capacity for that in some sectors of the right wing, especially the extreme right wing.
[00:51:33]  And so, yeah, I agree.
[00:51:34]  Like, I don't know what it's, I mean, you are seeing essentially like a cadre of veterans being trained both within Ukraine and, well, all of it's within Ukraine, but both Ukrainians and foreigners being trained by, you know, Azov is no joke.
[00:51:49]  I mean, they are, they are, you know, not only are they obviously, I mean, they say that they're not ideological now, but they are, they're sort of renowned for their prowess.
[00:51:57]  You know, they are a pretty fearsome fighting unit, especially in comparison to other parts of the Ukrainian army.
[00:52:05]  I know a lot of them were captured as Azovstal.
[00:52:09]  I know that some of them are being traded for, you know, I'm sure that many of them eventually will be traded for prisoners in the future.
[00:52:16]  I know, I think it was like 150 yesterday.
[00:52:20]  But they're actually rebuilding Azov elsewhere.
[00:52:23]  And I know that, you know, you actually, you, I believe, sent me a picture that you actually interviewed the commander of the Azov Battalion.
[00:52:30]  And so can you tell us about that experience?
[00:52:33]  Sure.
[00:52:34]  I think in general, Western liberals who are backing Ukraine are in denial about the role of Azov.
[00:52:42]  They try to minimize its size.
[00:52:45]  They try to minimize.
[00:52:46]  700, only 600, 700 people, they say.
[00:52:49]  Is that what they say?
[00:52:49]  That's not true.
[00:52:50]  That's the new number.
[00:52:51]  It went down from 2,000, which is what people were saying at the beginning of the war, which actually, I guess it probably did go down by a couple thousand people.
[00:52:59]  Well, both Andrew Bileski, the founder of the Azov movement, and Maxime Zorin, who's a high-level commander in Azov.
[00:53:06]  I think he's the commander of Azov Special Operations.
[00:53:08]  Both of them told me that Azov has several thousand soldiers and that they're growing rapidly.
[00:53:13]  And when I saw their base in Kiev, it was full of new recruits.
[00:53:16]  That was what was going on.
[00:53:18]  They're all filling out paperwork.
[00:53:21]  And yeah, as you say, they're no joke.
[00:53:23]  They're the most squared away, hardcore-looking soldiers that you'll see in Ukraine because a lot of Ukrainian soldiers look really shlubby, to be honest.
[00:53:32]  They're people that just came out of civilian roles and joined the army.
[00:53:35]  Azov is not like that.
[00:53:37]  People, to get accepted to Azov, you have to look a certain way.
[00:53:42]  You have to hold yourself a certain way.
[00:53:44]  You have to have a certain military bearing that's consistent with their ideal of like Aryan masculinity.
[00:53:52]  I mean, there's no need to make any bones about it.
[00:53:55]  I think people go a little bit too far when they just say Azov is just straight up neo-Nazi.
[00:53:59]  I'm not sure you can say that about them.
[00:54:02]  They've never called themselves Nazis.
[00:54:04]  They've never defined themselves as National Socialists.
[00:54:08]  But it's not too far of a step.
[00:54:10]  The way they do define themselves, not too far away from it.
[00:54:13]  They are ultra-nationalists.
[00:54:14]  They are as far to the right as you can possibly be on the political spectrum.
[00:54:21]  Well, I would say in that instance, it walks like a duck.
[00:54:26]  You know?
[00:54:28]  Sure.
[00:54:28]  I mean, I get what you're saying.
[00:54:30]  However, they don't call for like genocide against Jews, for example.
[00:54:34]  I mean, I'm not trying to make apologies for Azov, but look, at least they'll pretend to be.
[00:54:39]  Like when you interview it, they'll pretend to be, have a basically acceptable political idea.
[00:54:46]  I tried to ask Bileski who his philosophical and political heroes were.
[00:54:51]  He actually gave a name of some Singaporean philosopher who I could never figure out who exactly he was.
[00:54:58]  Do you remember?
[00:54:58]  One of our listeners might know.
[00:55:00]  I can't remember, man, but look for Singaporean authoritarians because that's who it's going to be.
[00:55:05]  Well, that's, I mean, throw a very heavy rock in Singapore that you can't even throw very far and you'll hit about 50 of them.
[00:55:13]  Well, they will tell you straight up they don't believe in democracy.
[00:55:17]  Azov does not believe in democracy.
[00:55:20]  Their philosophy is that sort of Nietzschean ideal of a strong leader coming to the fore through the express will of the Volk and military heroism.
[00:55:30]  That's their ideal of how society is organized.
[00:55:34]  And their defense of Mariupol has made them, has greatly increased their prestige in the eyes of ordinary Ukrainians.
[00:55:41]  They're kind of like, they kind of have a bad rap in the West.
[00:55:45]  They're looked at askance.
[00:55:47]  Not in Ukraine, man.
[00:55:48]  Not in Ukraine.
[00:55:49]  I mean, because just imagine, I mean, they were prepared to fight to the death at the Azostahl plant only because the government ordered them to surrender.
[00:55:58]  Did they surrender?
[00:55:59]  They held out for months, three months.
[00:56:02]  So Ukrainians look at that are young Ukrainian men who are all faced with the possibility of being drafted or in some way wanting to join the army.
[00:56:09]  They look at Azov and think, these are the guys that want to be a prisoner.
[00:56:12]  Right.
[00:56:12]  If you're going to be drafted, you want to go into that as opposed to the other guys who, you know, like you said, maybe, you know, don't have the best training or doesn't seem like the safest bet, right?
[00:56:24]  Yeah, I got to say in that article, if there's a, you know, if I'm a regular Ukrainian guy who has to join the military, I'd probably rather join like the hardcore, like really together guys than like the guys you smoked weed with in a base.
[00:56:39]  Yeah, me too.
[00:56:40]  Well, that's just territorial defense.
[00:56:42]  That's like the big reserve militia, which is why to bring it back, you know, the Foreign Legion is really unnecessary.
[00:56:47]  They have this vast militia of untrained guys that they can basically pull from indefinitely because Ukraine is a huge country.
[00:56:55]  And although Russia does have a much bigger army, they haven't like the Russian expeditionary force is not much larger than the Ukrainian army.
[00:57:02]  They're pretty well matched in terms of personnel on the battlefield.
[00:57:05]  Both sides are able to call up lots of things needed.
[00:57:24]  You know, we mentioned early in the episode the video of the two POWs, the American POWs that were taken.
[00:57:31]  And a pretty expertly produced, I mean, I don't want to say expertly, but a pretty well-produced YouTube video.
[00:57:38]  You know, essentially of their, I mean, it sort of couches the interview, but it's essentially interrogations or public-facing interrogations of these two guys.
[00:57:47]  You know, do you have any indication of how many Westerners have been taken prisoner, essentially, or surrendered?
[00:57:56]  Looks like seven, according to my count, but there's probably a lot more than that.
[00:58:00]  Those are just the seven that we know about.
[00:58:03]  Yeah.
[00:58:04]  Because I mean, I know, I know the two first guys who, I believe the first two guys who had been taken prisoner, Aiden and Sean.
[00:58:13]  I met Sean, I believe when I was leaving Syria.
[00:58:17]  He had fought in the YPG, and I actually can't remember if I met Aiden there, but a year later when I was in Greece, actually just on vacation, I went down to the Labrio refugee camp, which is a very large Kurdish refugee camp that I think might now be closed.
[00:58:35]  And he was actually staying there.
[00:58:37]  And I spoke to him, you know, at length, and he had mentioned that he wanted to go to Ukraine.
[00:58:44]  You know, this was a sort of popular topic among a few of the, really the kind of more non-ideological guys.
[00:58:51]  In fact, I would say exclusively among the more non-ideological guys.
[00:58:56]  And I had told him that was probably not a very good idea.
[00:59:02]  But he did it.
[00:59:03]  I think he joined the Ukrainian army, I guess, the next year in 2018.
[00:59:08]  And he and Sean and another guy, I think maybe from Morocco, were captured in, I believe, Mariupol, but not in Azov Stall.
[00:59:18]  As far as I know, they weren't an Azhop battalion.
[00:59:20]  But there's a very public footage of them being put on trial and sentenced to death.
[00:59:30]  And, you know, I was just wondering what your take on that is.
[00:59:35]  You know, if these guys will actually be put to death or there will be something like a more high-profile prisoner swap.
[00:59:42]  Because if I'm the Russians here, this is a pretty, these are, these are, you know, some pretty good pieces to hold on to in order to swap for some guys that you might really want.
[00:59:53]  Yeah, no doubt those guys are in deep shit.
[00:59:56]  Can you imagine being interrogated by Russian military intelligence?
[01:00:02]  That's pretty scary.
[01:00:03]  Yeah.
[01:00:04]  I mean, dude, I'm telling you, I want to never be in a situation where that's even a possibility of that to happen to me.
[01:00:13]  Right.
[01:00:16]  So they have been sentenced to death.
[01:00:18]  In the interrogation of other two guys, which is much more lengthy, they are asked directly by the interrogator, do you realize that you could be put to death?
[01:00:29]  Yeah.
[01:00:30]  Which is a pretty intimidating question to be asked.
[01:00:34]  God, of course.
[01:00:35]  Whether they'll actually do that, I mean, first take, because it seems like unlikely.
[01:00:41]  But on the other hand, like, what does the United States have to trade for them?
[01:00:46]  Yeah.
[01:00:47]  Because they're not actual combatants in the war.
[01:00:50]  So are they going to trade, like, are the Ukrainians going to trade prisoners?
[01:00:54]  I just don't know how it worked exactly.
[01:00:55]  But just imagine if they went through with it and just stone cold took six or seven Americans and British guys and just shot them in the back of the head.
[01:01:05]  Like, what would the United States do about it?
[01:01:07]  What would NATO do about it?
[01:01:09]  And I don't think there's anything that they could do about it.
[01:01:13]  Yeah.
[01:01:13]  Yeah.
[01:01:14]  I don't think they have any way to stop the Russians from carrying out those death sentences, which would be fucking crazy if they actually did that.
[01:01:22]  I mean, it would be totally insane.
[01:01:25]  Yeah, that's the thing is like when that was actually announced, you know, I obviously paid attention to the news of them after they'd been captured, you know, what was going on, you know, with their trial.
[01:01:37]  And, you know, they made Aiden, and this is actually kind of an interesting tactic that the Russians have been doing.
[01:01:41]  actually you know they put the interrogation of the two americans on youtube uh they actually made aiden it looks like start his own youtube channel um which is really and i think that might be technically cruel and unusual punishment but um That's banned in the Geneva Conventions.
[01:01:58]  Yes.
[01:01:59]  No, it actually is banned in the Geneva Conventions, I think.
[01:02:03]  And, you know, it's, I don't know.
[01:02:08]  I mean, I agree with your assessment that like it seems unlikely from where I'm sitting right now that they would actually be executed.
[01:02:15]  You know, Russia, I believe, officially doesn't execute people.
[01:02:18]  I mean, they don't actually enforce the death penalty if they have it.
[01:02:22]  I don't think they even have it.
[01:02:24]  But regardless, like it seems highly unlikely that they would be executed by Russia proper.
[01:02:30]  But, you know, in these two republics that technically aren't Russia, there is the death penalty.
[01:02:37]  You know, they are, I can't speak to the other guys, but I know Aiden and Sean, I know, have both been, or from what I've read, have actually both been, they're Ukrainian citizens, I think.
[01:02:47]  They've both been there for like three or four years and in the armed forces for that long.
[01:02:54]  You know, I think, you know, legally, they are members of the Ukrainian military and American, excuse me, they're never American citizens, but they're members of the Ukrainian military and Ukrainian citizens.
[01:03:05]  So I don't think even if they were legally able to be executed as like mercenaries or something, they could be.
[01:03:13]  But again, that's all that shit's fake.
[01:03:16]  So who knows?
[01:03:18]  Yeah, I think it's more likely they languish in a Russian prison.
[01:03:21]  I'm also, I would say, not to be insensitive to those guys who've been captured.
[01:03:26]  I hope I hope that they get released.
[01:03:29]  I certainly hope that they're not executed.
[01:03:31]  But honestly, I feel more sorry for that WNBA player who got arrested for having like CBD vapes in her luggage like right before the war started.
[01:03:40]  She has just really bad luck there.
[01:03:42]  Yeah, she's going to be in for, I mean, who knows how long she'll be in for.
[01:03:46]  I know.
[01:03:47]  Yeah, I mean, that's the thing is like, I mean, they knew what they were signing up for.
[01:03:50]  You know, that was always a possibility.
[01:03:52]  Obviously, I hope they don't get executed.
[01:03:54]  And I hope that they do get traded.
[01:03:57]  But yeah, that is, I can't even imagine.
[01:04:00]  And their imprisonment and the possibility of their execution is just another illustration of what I think is the biggest issue around the Foreign Legion is that the existence of so many guys from NATO countries taking part in hostilities in Ukraine is just going to continuously draw NATO countries deeper into the conflict as they get either killed in action or taken prisoner.
[01:04:21]  Well, speaking of YPG or PKK, which of course have no affiliation to each other, you know, I was reading the news today that Turkey is no longer going to block Sweden and Finland's membership into NATO.
[01:04:33]  And a big sticking point there was the existence of, let's say, pro-Kurdish organizations that operated legally on Swedish and Finnish soil.
[01:04:45]  And they are now going to, at least they say, I mean, I read the agreement between the three countries.
[01:04:50]  At least they say that they're now going to enforce basically terror laws against them.
[01:04:55]  And so whether a bunch of Kurdish people now get deported to be imprisoned for life or executed in Turkey in exchange for these two countries joining NATO, we'll see.
[01:05:06]  But yeah, it does seem like, I mean, was it today the NATO conference?
[01:05:12]  Yeah, was that Madrid right now?
[01:05:14]  Yeah.
[01:05:14]  Yeah.
[01:05:16]  Or today, rather, the start of it.
[01:05:18]  I mean, it does seem like this is going to both draw NATO closer together, but also like focus that closeness into Ukraine and just more and more billions of dollars material and manpower gets sent over there.
[01:05:34]  Yeah.
[01:05:35]  Yeah, the Ukraine war is not going to end anytime soon.
[01:05:38]  This Foreign Legion business isn't going away.
[01:05:41]  And we're just going to see more and more of this, unfortunately.

=== More Aid to Ukraine (04:07) ===

[01:05:45]  Yeah.
[01:05:45]  And at that point, you have to wonder if the Foreign Legion is a feature or a bug of drawing NATO more and more deeper in.
[01:05:55]  Yeah, I think we know the answer to that.
[01:05:57]  It was something that the Ukrainians did very deliberately.
[01:06:01]  And I think it's possible that they may have been consciously thinking about the YPG volunteers when they decided to do this thing.
[01:06:10]  There may have been advisors to the Zelensky government who said, hey, here's an idea.
[01:06:15]  This led to really great press in Syria.
[01:06:17]  We can do the same thing over here.
[01:06:19]  I think that the Ukrainians are being advised by, that would be an interesting thing to try to track down.
[01:06:23]  What consulting companies are working with these Ukrainians to shake their minds?
[01:06:28]  The best and the brightest out of Faco, Illinois.
[01:06:31]  If you're a journalist that is listening to this and has access to that kind of information, please look into it or just even just let us know.
[01:06:40]  Because yeah, I can only imagine how like Dark McKinsey is dealing with sort of Ukraine, Ukraine PR behind the scenes.
[01:06:51]  Some little bootage guy, a legion of them just tapping away at MacBooks at some brewery in Kiev.
[01:06:58]  Yeah, that's the real Foreign Legion.
[01:07:01]  It really is.
[01:07:02]  I mean, certainly a thousand times more effective than like, you know, six 55-year-old, you know, ex whatever gate guards with fucking, you know, Kalashnikovs.
[01:07:14]  Malcolm Nance.
[01:07:15]  Yeah.
[01:07:16]  My God.
[01:07:17]  Shout out, Malcolm Nance.
[01:07:18]  Shout out, Malcolm.
[01:07:19]  All right.
[01:07:20]  Well, my computer's literally about to die.
[01:07:23]  And I don't have enough plugs to both plug in my computer and my microphone.
[01:07:29]  So Seth.
[01:07:30]  That's crazy.
[01:07:31]  I know.
[01:07:32]  Well, you know, you know our problems with plugs, Liz.
[01:07:35]  Seth, it has been a real pleasure having you on again.
[01:07:38]  Thank you guys so much for having me.
[01:07:41]  Keep on exposing those pedophiles and stay out of Utah.
[01:07:45]  Okay.
[01:07:45]  And I want to make it clear.
[01:07:47]  Actually, I don't know if you can say this, but can you tease your Jace's new Fort Bragg article?
[01:07:51]  There's a new Fort Bragg article coming out.
[01:07:54]  It'll probably be in the September issue of Rolling Stone.
[01:07:58]  First of all, September issue, Blockbuster.
[01:08:00]  Blockbuster.
[01:08:01]  Oh, the September issue is always the biggest issue.
[01:08:04]  Is it?
[01:08:05]  Oh, yeah.
[01:08:06]  Classic.
[01:08:07]  Of all magazines or just of all magazines.
[01:08:10]  Yeah, September issue.
[01:08:11]  Second of all, we got to have you back on for that because the people, myself, Brace, Yung Chomsky, none of us can get enough of this, I don't know, crisis at Fort Bragg.
[01:08:24]  Well, we've got our hands on the documents and we're going to blow the lid off.
[01:08:29]  That's what's coming next.
[01:08:30]  So stay tuned for that.
[01:08:31]  I love it when a guy gets his hands on the documents.
[01:08:49]  I loved having Seth on the podcast.
[01:08:51]  He's great.
[01:08:52]  Me too.
[01:08:53]  I know.
[01:08:55]  Seth is one of my favorite guests, but also I feel like one of the most likely guests to be killed at work.
[01:09:01]  No.
[01:09:02]  Well, I mean, that's objectively true.
[01:09:04]  Oh, because you mean, yeah, conflict journalist.
[01:09:07]  Yeah.
[01:09:08]  I mean, he's always going to like somewhere scary.
[01:09:12]  Yeah.
[01:09:12]  Do you know that I kill, I might have mentioned this when we had him on the first time, but I still have a little compass Seth gave me, which he doesn't remember giving me in Syria in my backpack.
[01:09:23]  That's nice.
[01:09:24]  Do you use it?
[01:09:25]  No, I have like actually perfect direction.
[01:09:27]  I'm not kidding.
[01:09:28]  I do not.
[01:09:29]  That's absolutely not true.
[01:09:31]  100% true.
[01:09:32]  I literally always can orient myself.
[01:09:35]  Yeah, I'm not joking.
[01:09:36]  I really can do that.
[01:09:37]  I have really good memory of directions as well.
[01:09:40]  All right.
[01:09:41]  Well, I don't believe that for a second.
[01:09:43]  I'm Liz.
[01:09:44]  My name is, well, I'll just go with Brace.
[01:09:50]  And of course, we okay, fine.
[01:09:51]  Um, all right, all right.

=== Perfect Direction (01:01) ===

[01:09:53]  You know what?
[01:09:54]  Bigoted, racist, uh, uh, asshole.
[01:10:00]  Uh, what's C C what does C stand for?
[01:10:07]  Creamy.
[01:10:09]  Um, and E stands for English.
[01:10:17]  No, you know what?
[01:10:19]  Elephant Titus of the Dick.
[01:10:22]  Belden.
[01:10:23]  And of course, we are joined by producer Young Chomsky and the podcast is called T-R-U-E-A-N-0-N.
[01:10:32]  It's called Trunon.
[01:10:33]  We'll see you next time.
[01:10:35]  Bye.
[01:10:54]  Come out.