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May 11, 2022 - RFK Jr. The Defender
46:14
War Blunders with Army Officer Samuel Cook

Former US Cavalry Officer, Samuel Cook, discusses recent wars with RFK Jr in this episode.

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Hey, everybody.
My guest today is Samuel P.N. Cook, who graduated from West Point in 2000.
He went on to become a U.S. cavalry officer and served as regimental adjutant for Colonel H.R. McMaster in the Battle of Telefar in Iraq in 2005 to 2006, which was cited by President Bush as a turning point in the war.
He had a front row seat to history, and Sam was responsible for the media messaging and writing the history of this campaign.
In 2007, Sam returned to Iraq as the commander of Crazy Horse Troop, 1st Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, Where he was cited in the Washington Post and in Tom Ricks' best-selling book on Iraq for his novel counterinsurgency strategy that combined tribal negotiations and police-trained parole systems for mass surrender.
When he returned from Iraq in 2008, Sam went on to get a master's in Russian and Ukrainian history at NYU's Jordan Center for Slavic Studies.
He then went on to teach history at West Point from 2010 and 2013.
Sam has spent the last four years living in the Ukraine.
His fiancée is a Ukrainian of Russian ethnicity.
And he has been an outspoken skeptic about U.S. foreign policy in Ukraine.
And, you know, I tell people this all the time.
I don't have a position on Ukraine, but I hate propaganda and I don't like war.
And I think we ought to avoid it whenever possible.
And so I've made this platform...
A forum for people who have alternative views, which are now being shut out in the mass media.
I really wanted to have you on because you've had a very, very thoughtful and, I think, well-informed critique of U.S. policies.
So tell us a little bit about how you end up with your interest in Ukraine.
You have two tech companies there, right?
First of all, Robert, thank you for engaging in this important conversation on Ukraine.
And I have two companies there.
I started a media agency that works in digital marketing and film.
And then I also started a tech company called Sanity Desk that produces software for small businesses.
And I moved there specifically and founded my tech company there because of the extreme talent pool that resides in Ukraine, technical talent.
Just the second best educated workforce in the world and the poorest country in Europe economically, unfortunately.
So I moved there because of the amazing talent pool for the projects I was working on.
Just out of curiosity, who's the first best educated workforce in the world?
First, most educated.
I actually don't know.
I'm guessing it may be Ireland, but that may be personal prejudice.
I actually was born in Belfast, Robert, and I did grow up in Northern Ireland for the first nine years of my life, and probably it would be Ireland if I were to guess, but that's certainly why people go there and set up their companies.
I heard a joke when I was in Ireland from an elf-ass cabbie, and the cabbies, when you get in there, they're talking about, you know, Harold Pinterblaze and Shakespeare and all this.
He said to me, if you ask an Irish carpenter, The difference between a girder and a joist.
I'll tell you, a girder wrote Proust and a joist wrote Ulysses.
Well, the Irish have a, especially the Northern Irish, have a blend of, I think, the best of both sides of the conflict there.
Certainly, I really enjoyed living there growing up and miss it, actually.
And I think that's probably why I go to countries like Ukraine to live, because Ukraine's been at war for the last eight years.
Were you living in Kiev?
I was living in Kiev for the last four years, yeah.
In Kiev, there's actually very, very strong support for the war, right?
Actually, across the whole country, there is.
And it actually shocked me, because when I was living in Kiev, observing what I saw as this pending invasion we were hurtling towards, I wasn't sure that the Ukrainian people would...
One, I wasn't sure the government would survive the initial shock of the invasion.
I think most intelligence agencies assess that the government would quickly fall.
And my fiancé, who's from the East, which is...
95% Russian speaking.
I was speaking to her father before the war and said, hey, do you need help evacuating?
And he wrote me a note and he said, and her father grew up speaking Russian.
He's got half relatives in Russia and he was in the Soviet army.
And he said to me, he said, don't worry, we're fine.
We believe in our military.
And if necessary, I'll take the women out and go back and go to war.
And he said, you know, your job is to take care of my daughter.
And when I read that, I was first of all, I was a little bit shocked.
I was getting all my tech company workers out of the country and something kind of sparked in me.
I said, wow, this is I didn't expect that from the people.
But I also it's kind of shocking even to people like him to say that because there's a natural affinity in eastern Ukraine for Russian culture and Russian language.
Her mother, my fiance's mother is Ukrainian, but speaks Russian at home and teaches Russian literature.
And, you know, obviously since 2014, that's not as in vogue in schools anymore, Russian literature, but still has a huge affinity for the culture and the language.
So something went wrong in the Russian game plan here because they lost the Potential natural loyalties they had in eastern Ukraine, which I was surprised by the unity of resistance in the east, which is where the war is being fought, the south and the east.
Because the Ukrainian government has essentially been in a civil war with the ethnic Russians and the Basques.
Since 2014.
Is that an accurate assessment?
Well, the Donbass is really interesting because most of my friends in Ukraine from, I thought the Donbass was really pro-Russian, but a lot of the refugees, I think a majority of the refugees from the Donbass have actually fled to either Europe or Or to Ukraine itself.
And one of the interesting facts I've learned about the Donbass is a disproportionate number of Ukrainian soldiers who are on the front lines are actually from the Donbass because they want their homeland as they see it to be part of Ukraine.
Now, there are also people obviously as part of the Donbass, which is these separatist regions that do fight against their own brothers on the other side.
But it's really tragic because Most of the people on that front line are literally cousins or sometimes even brothers fighting each other.
What you're saying is that even a majority of people in Donbass may be opposed to Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
Yes.
And Ilya Pomerenko, he's a Kiev independent reporter, and he's got, I think, 1.2 million followers on Twitter.
He's from the Donbass.
And he's the military analyst for the top independent newspaper in Ukraine called the Kiev Independent.
And he speaks about this all the time, and he'd be a great person to also speak to on the show to give a Ukrainian perspective, someone who's from the Donbass.
But I was surprised that...
A lot of the people in Ukraine are from Lugansk and Donetsk, are now living in other places in Kharkiv.
There's a huge community that was displaced by the original fighting.
A lot of them are in Kiev.
A lot of them used to work for me in Poland when I had my media company in Poland.
Some of my team members had gone to Europe.
Now, other people from the Donbass have moved to Russia or they still live there.
So it is split.
But there's a healthy majority that have moved actually either to Europe or to Ukraine, which just shows their orientation on where they wish the Donbass was situated, I guess, politically.
I'd love to get your opinion about this.
I read two separate articles.
One in Newsweek that said the war was over and the Ukrainians had won.
And one on a kind of right-wing site that said the war is over and Putin has won.
So...
So the fact that there's so much polarization, even in agreeing on the facts, I think you're a perfect person to give us what your assessment is.
Well, look, since the war started, I actually couldn't focus on my day job, and I started interviewing Ukrainians that were in the territorial defense, that were in the Defense forces and refugees, people who'd volunteered, not in the military, but were volunteering in society.
And we've done 23 episodes, the Borderland show, Stories from Ukraine.
And what I found out from all of these interviews, we have three or four guests on every time we do a show, how united Ukrainian society has become over this.
And it's imagine America level of polarization in Ukraine, which is essentially what they were experiencing before the war, a very unpopular president, 23, 25% approval ratings.
And they are 93% behind their president now, 90 plus percent believe Ukrainians believe they're going to win.
And 47% believed that they're going to win in the next two weeks.
So that's what's going on among Ukrainian people.
I've never seen anything...
I lived through 9-11.
I was in the army after September 11th.
I saw that kind of brief moment of national unity, which quickly dissipated, I think, with the...
Rightly so, the controversial invasion of Iraq, which I think in hindsight we can all agree was a mistake.
But Ukraine's united, and 75% of businesses have stopped trading.
People are quitting their day jobs, and if they're not in the army, they're volunteering.
There's a line to get into the army.
In fact, Ukrainians who want to join the army can't because the next people allowed in that are being mobilized are veterans who have combat experience.
And the war is definitely not over.
Now, there's a big pause in the war because both sides were exhausted by the initial month of fighting.
The Russians especially have outrun their supplies.
All their vehicles are breaking down.
They're having serious logistical problems.
Ukraine has consistently counterattacked and regained a lot of, not a lot of territory, but a significant portion of territory around Kiev on the west and the east side, and even around Sumy and Kharkiv close to the border.
So on all fronts, Ukrainians are pushing forward in very localized attacks.
So I wouldn't say the war is close to over, but what I would say is the Ukrainians are...
More likely winning than the Russians if you look at what are the war aims of both countries.
The Ukrainian war aim is to survive and to regain at least the status quo of 24 February.
That's their war aim right now is to negotiate getting all the Russian troops out of at least what was not occupied since 2014.
The Russian war aims were topple Zelensky, regime change, and basically subsume, if not all of the Ukrainian territory, at least everything from the east side of the river, which would include Kiev.
So if you just look at what each side strategically wanted to accomplish, I would say Ukraine's much closer to winning Thank you.
And if he gets killed, someone will step in.
Because Ukrainian people have never been so united, which is amazing.
Because nobody was that confident in the Ukrainian government's ability to survive the shock of an invasion.
And actually, I was interviewing a prominent economist from Ukraine who's advised multiple administrations.
And he said the reform the Ukrainian government has done in the last 30 days since the war started, economically building a lot of systems that should have been built a long time ago, is breathtaking.
Their lawmakers are finally getting their act together on reforming the country.
So I'd say Ukraine's a lot closer to victory, but the war is far from over.
They're still...
Hundreds of soldiers dying on either side every day, and civilians are obviously caught in the crossfire, especially in Mariupol, and that doesn't mean the war's been won on either side.
Oh, at our maximum troop commitment to Vietnam during the Vietnam era, the United States had 250,000 troops in Vietnam.
During the 20-year war, we lost 56,000 casualties dead, and then 2 million Vietnamese were killed.
What is the military commitment by Russians right now and Ukrainians?
And what has been the casualty count on each side?
Well, actually, Robert, I know you lived through the Vietnam War, or you probably remember it, and I don't have any recollection.
I think militarily, from a historical perspective, our maximum troop count might have been closer to 500,000.
I couldn't remember whether 250,000 at a time was there, or 500,000 over the 20-year period, but you may be right.
I think 500,000 on a rotational basis in country was the height of the war, probably when in the 68 campaign through 71 or 72, that was the maximum.
And yeah, we took 56,000 killed in action in the United States Army during that period.
And before you go on, tell us what's happening in the Ukraine.
What was our commitment in Iraq?
Our commitment in Iraq at the height of the surge was about 175,000.
When I was there in 2008, I think we peaked north of 150, closer to 175,000.
There were 4,000 killed over 12 years, or I think 17 plus years now, in Iraq, U.S. soldiers.
And in Afghanistan, I think our highest troop count was 130,000.
And over the 20 years, there were 2,400 and some casual or killed in action in America.
The Soviet Union from 1979 to 1988 lost, I think, close to 15,000 killed in Afghanistan.
And they're Troop count was, I don't know the exact numbers, but I think a couple hundred thousand there on a consistent basis.
So what, compare that to what's happening in Ukraine now.
Well, what's happening in Ukraine is a lot more akin to World War II. And the first 30 days, it's assessed.
The Ukrainians assessed 17,000 killed in action.
NATO estimates are between 10,000 to 15,000.
There was a Russian pro-Kremlin website which published a figure about two weeks ago of 9,800-something killed in action, and then they quickly took it down.
They claimed they were hacked.
Ukrainians, Russians.
Russians, Russians.
And the Ukrainians, about two weeks ago, published their killed in action as 1,300.
And probably it's closer to 2,000 or more at this point, especially because they have a lot of troops surrounded in Mariupol.
And the Ukrainians could well be understating their killed in action.
But When you just said NATO's count was 17,000, did you mean Russians killed or total killed?
Ukrainian claims are 17,000 Russian killed.
NATO intelligence believes it's between 10,000 to 15,000 killed and 30,000 to 40,000 wounded or missing or captured on the Russian side.
And Ukraine has publicly published 1,300 about a week and a half ago.
And Ukrainian society, they're a lot like the Americans in that they will not typically leave dead soldiers on the battlefield.
That's one of our tenants in the American military is never leaving a dead comrade behind.
And the Ukrainians are pretty similar in that respect.
And they are doing their funerals publicly.
And there are a lot of fresh graves and grave sites and funerals in Kiev and around the country.
So I think Western media can verify because of the public announcement of deaths in Ukraine a lot easier and see if that figure of 1300 or 2000, wherever it is now is accurate.
But the Russian side, I spoke to someone from Russia on our podcast the other day, and he's a former GRU Spetsnaz soldier who got on and said he was against the war.
And he said that what's probably happening in Russia is unless they have the bodies and they've processed it, they're probably just counting as many probable KIAs as possible as just missing because the official Russian count right now of their own killed is only 1500.
And there's a lot of soldiers that the Ukrainians have stored in refrigerator trucks across the country, Russian killed.
In fact, they're asking the International Red Cross to claim these bodies on behalf of Russia because they've left a lot of dead on the battlefield that have been ambushed across Ukraine.
How do you explain that to them?
10 to one disparity.
Is that just, because isn't it usually when you're on an offensive troop has like a four to one casualty rate to a defensive troop.
How did we get 10 to one?
How do we get to 10 to one?
Maybe it's 5 or 6 to 1 versus 10 to 1, but I would say it's probably close to 5 to 7, right?
Let's say 2,000 Ukrainians and maybe 12 to 14,000 Russians.
I think what you're seeing in the casualty figures is the Russians went in in the early part of the war.
They basically felt like, and the troops were told at the beginning of the war, they said, hey, first of all, they weren't told until right before the junior officers and soldiers didn't understand they were going to invade Ukraine until a few days before the war, which was a disaster from a psychological perspective and planning perspective.
When you're going to war, you need to know about it in advance and prepare psychologically and train for it.
So they were, first of all, surprised they were going into war.
Secondly, most of the soldiers, and you see this in interviews of prisoners of war, they were told, hey, you're going to go in there.
Ukrainians, there's a few Nazis holding the entire country hostage.
They're going to welcome you with open arms.
And there's even stories I heard from Ukrainians who are fighting of Russian soldiers they captured that had their dress parade uniform and medals for the conquest of Kiev, Lviv, Odessa in their kit.
And they were literally expecting...
Two or three days into the war to be having a parade in the center of Kiev and dancing with Ukrainian girls who are going to be welcoming them with flowers.
So I think the high casualty rate was literally fundamentally strategic assumptions that were wrong, an arrogance.
An overestimation of their own abilities and a complete underestimation of Ukrainian will to fight.
And that's why the casualty rate is probably six or seven to one versus three or four to one, which you'd expect when someone's attacking.
And how about the equivalency in equipment and training?
Well, that's the big surprise here from Russian military experts is they have very advanced equipment.
And Ukrainians had older equipment and a lot less of it.
But what happened in the initial part of the war, especially with the Air Force, I mean, Ukrainians are flying MiGs, old Russian aircraft, But Ukrainian Air Force still apparently has 80% of their planes left and they're contesting Russian airspace, much more advanced fighters on the Russian side, to the point where Russian pilots are generally avoiding Ukrainian airspace and they're firing precision-guided air-launched cruise missiles from...
In Belarus and a lot of times Russian territory.
And when they do come in, there are estimates on the Ukrainian side, at least, of over 100 Russian fighter jets shot down and similar amount of helicopters destroyed.
So whatever the number of Russian aircraft lost, they're much more advanced and they aren't winning dominance.
And I think one of the reasons for that is the Ukrainian Air Force has trained for the last 29 years with where you are, the California Air National Guard.
Especially since 2014, they've really stepped up their training and their modernization of how they fight.
And the same thing's going on on the ground.
The Ukrainian, even though they have 10 times less equipment than the Russians, they've captured a lot of Russian equipment during the fighting.
And they've just made better use tactically of what equipment they do have.
And they've obviously sustained a lot of losses in their own equipment.
But this just goes to show that the intangibles in war, the most important thing, frustratingly, is the thing you can't measure as an intelligence agency, which is the spirit of the army, the morale of the army, the willingness to fight and die for a cause.
And I think what you're seeing is the Russians really don't understand why they're there.
Probably a lot like our soldiers in Vietnam, sometimes in Iraq and Afghanistan to a less extent, and the Ukrainians know exactly what they're fighting for and why they're fighting.
And I think that's why the disparity in casualties and equipment losses are so high.
When the Russians get stuck in the mud, when their vehicle breaks down, they have a high breakdown rate, they just run away.
They're abandoning their vehicle because they know that they're a target, they can't move, and the Ukrainians are stalking the countryside with anti-tank weapons looking for them.
What do you think of Putin's justifications about denazifying the country and stopping the slaughter of ethnic Russians on the one hand, and then we'll get to NATO in a minute.
Well, the mayor of Melitopol was just released from Russian captivity.
This is southern Ukraine.
The mayor of Melitopol, which is in southeast Ukraine, was occupied by Russian forces.
And he tells the story of being captured by Russian soldiers and how frustrating it was when they tried to interrogate him because they said, we're here to find the Nazis.
And save you from the Nazis.
And he said, well, that's interesting because I've lived in this country my whole life and I don't see any Nazis in Ukraine.
And statistically, 2% of the vote in the last presidential and parliamentary elections went to what you'd consider Nazi political parties.
And then he said, they said, well, we're here to save Russian speakers because...
You're being discriminated against and killed and rounded up.
And he said, actually, my city is 95% Russian-speaking.
We all speak Russian on a day-to-day basis.
We have no issues with that.
And there's a Ukrainian law which says in public buildings or restaurants, you should start out in Ukrainian.
But if the speaker is more comfortable in Russian, you can immediately go to Russian.
So that's Ukrainian law right now.
And my fiance speaks Russian natively, knows Ukrainian.
She much prefers and she always speaks Russian.
And then the third thing they said was, well, we heard...
That World War II veterans were being mistreated and killed off.
And he said, it's the opposite.
We still celebrate May 9th.
It is celebrated, especially among the older veterans who In Ukraine and people who lived in the Soviet era, it's not an unimportant public holiday, but it's not as important now as Ukrainian Independence Day.
So that's a verified source, the mayor of Melitopol, which really, I think, encapsulates the Russian soldiers came being told all these things were happening, and they're finding that it really hasn't happened.
Now, in the Donbass, it's not a genocide.
It is a legitimate genocide.
800-kilometer trench line before the war started of Ukrainian regular forces fighting separatist forces who were backed by Russian officers, Russian snipers, Russian trainers that were in there giving the separatist forces their military supplies, their military training, their military leadership.
So, you know, a war between Ukrainians fighting each other where both of them on each side of the trench lines are mainly Russian speakers.
I wouldn't call that a genocide when I'd call it exactly what it is, which is a separatist internal civil conflict.
And what about the criticism of the Azov Battalion?
Well, the Azov Battalion, I think, rightly has A reputation issue.
In 2014, the origins of the Azov Battalion was the Ukrainian military after the Euromaidan revolution collapsed.
It was infiltrated by people who are sympathetic to the Russian regime.
So they had no will to fight, no equipment, no training.
I mean, the Ukrainian army literally collapsed or it was non-existent in 2014.
So a lot of Ukrainians, especially from Western Ukraine, but really from all over the country, formed these volunteer battalions.
And they flocked to the front line to help take back the separatist-controlled territory.
And one of the most famous ones, the Azov Battalion, did have some extremist elements in it, for sure.
But since the static positions formed, it was incorporated into the Ukrainian military, and it became legally and structurally part of the Ukrainian military.
But they still retained that heritage, let's call it symbolism, of that volunteer battalion.
And they have a brand and image issue.
But it is a very small percentage of the Ukrainian military, the Azov Battalion.
It's a brigade.
I guess it's a couple thousand soldiers.
And most of the Ukrainian army, as you can see now, is very professionalized.
And they're fighting under a national military structure, even the Azov Battalion.
But I think it's an interesting point that you bring up, because Mariupol, where the Azov Battalion is headquartered right now and is surrounded, has refused to surrender, and they're probably going to fight to the death.
And President Zelensky offered...
Anyone in Mariupol to get out.
The Marines are there, the Ukrainian Marines are there, the Ukrainian Army, and the Azov Battalion is part of that Ukrainian Army contingent.
And they've refused.
They said, we're going to fight.
We've got wounded here we need to care for.
We've got dead that we're not going to leave behind.
We have civilians to protect, so they've refused to leave.
But I would probably compare the Azov Battalion to some elite ranger regiment or airborne unit in America, where there's a lot of good old boys in our military.
And maybe, you know, we have some of our own extremist elements in the military, which obviously the American Army really fights against that.
But there are some tendencies in our own elite units sometimes.
They're very homogenous, white, southern...
More rural units.
I think Dezov Battalion has a heritage for sure.
They have things they've done in the past that have rightfully been condemned by U.S. government, State Department, and other organizations.
But I think the Ukrainian military went a long way towards professionalizing and cleaning that up while retaining some of their unit heritage.
Whether that was a right or wrong decision on their part, that's how they handled it.
Let me go back to something I asked you about before.
Just briefly, what is the comparative troop commitment from Russia versus the Ukraine?
How big is the Ukrainian army and how many men or soldiers has Russia committed to this fight?
Well, the Russian military has 900,000 soldiers on paper.
About 60% of their force is conscript, 40% are professional soldiers.
And they committed to this fight about 190,000 soldiers, of which maybe 100,000 of those were frontline combat soldiers and the other 90,000 were mainly support elements.
But they generated about 120 battalion tactical groups to invade Ukraine.
The Ukrainian military is a lot harder to pin down on how big is it on paper.
I think it's 250,000, which gives them about 100,000 of combat troops.
So really, Russia came in with a two-to-one advantage when you think about overall fighting frontline soldiers, 200,000 to 100,000.
On the front lines.
And that Ukrainian number 100,000 is what's out there in the field, which is combat troops and support troops.
But Russia didn't come in with what you would expect.
Doctrinally, you would at least probably want 300,000 to 500,000 to overwhelm an army of 100,000 when you're trying to take over a whole country.
And one of the reasons why Ukrainians didn't believe Russia was actually going to invade the country and try and take Kiev was they assessed, if you're going to want to do this successfully, you guys better bring 500,000 in.
And 200,000 is just too small a force, as we're seeing now, to accomplish the big objectives that Russia tried to accomplish with a small force.
And Russia probably thought, we've got more advanced equipment.
They counted on the fact that they believe they had bought off through their FSB, their foreign intelligence.
They thought they had a government in waiting.
That government never materialized, maybe because Zelensky stayed.
If Zelensky would have left, maybe the people they paid off would have risen up and said, hey, we're going to welcome the Russians in.
But for whatever reason, whether it's bad assumptions, Putin was lied to, Ukrainians stole the money.
The Russians had this idea that they only needed 200,000 because Ukraine was going to collapse from within, and it just didn't pan out that way.
In the United States, one of the key propaganda assumptions is that Putin is a madman who's acting like people who are questioning U.S. policy.
Point to the fact that he's behaving perhaps rationally by standing up against the encirclement of his country by NATO. In 1962, when my uncle Jack Kennedy was president, The Russians moved missiles into Cuba, which was 1,100 miles from Washington, D.C. And, you know, we were ready to invade Cuba at that point.
And so do you have, what's your take on that?
Is he behaving rationally?
Is there any part of you that's saying, you know, I see his point?
Well, I'm not a biased observer in this.
I am pro-Ukrainian because my fiance and her family are from there and I've lived there.
But if I take my historian hat on and look at Russian history, he's certainly behaving in the tradition of rulers of Russia, which Russia has always either been expanding or contracting throughout history.
And it ebbs and flows throughout history.
And what President Putin believes is his historical mission is to reverse the collapse of the Soviet Union and gather their borderland territories.
Ukraine literally means borderlands in English.
And to reconstitute the Soviet Union.
And with Ukraine, it's very emotional because that's the birthplace of Russian civilization.
Kiev is much older than Moscow as a city.
It's where the Orthodox Church started in Russia.
It's where Russian civilization was literally born, was in Kiev.
I mean, the The Kiev territories before the Mongols invaded in 1240 covered Moscow all the way up to Nizhny Novgorod, all the way to the Ural Mountains.
Everything that was in Russia from the Ural Mountains down to the Black Sea, including Belarus, was all Ukrainian territory.
Actually, Kievan Rus, they called it back in the day.
So Moscow grew up after that territory was conquered.
And I think what you see here is it's very emotional for Putin.
He views it as a rational move because I think every one of us make decisions emotionally and justify with logic.
I just think that what Putin did here was it makes sense for them from a great power, realistic rail politic to try and get this territory back.
For sure.
And I acknowledge that as a historian, as a military strategy historian, it makes sense for them to try and expand their borderlands, their buffer territory, because they don't want to be encircled by NATO. But I think one of the things that we fail to do in America is understand the Ukrainian perspective, right?
And the Polish perspective.
In 1997, the Poles Literally went to Europe and America and said, if you guys don't accept us into NATO, we are going to create our own nuclear weapons because we don't want to be under Russia again.
They'd been under Russia for 130 years after the Great Partition under Catherine the Great.
And Ukraine had the same perspective in 2004 after poisoning of their presidential candidate, the one that was running.
And they said, hey, we're going to start moving west because we don't want to be a Russian puppet anymore.
And what the Ukrainians have done, and this is what Putin's really messed up over the last 18 years, 20 years, is he felt like Ukraine just should have been part of the Russian world, but his activities from poisoning a presidential candidate to then seizing Crimea and then fostering and supporting the separatist movement in Donbass, every time he stepped in and interfered, Ukrainians kept pushing their orientation to the West.
And this war, America could not have avoided this war because the Ukrainian people literally, if their president would have accepted the Minsk agreements, President Zelensky probably would have suffered an internal street revolution in Ukraine because Ukrainians were not prepared to accept the key concessions that Putin was demanding over their sovereignty, basically giving Russia a veto in its foreign policy by accepting the Minsk agreements.
They just weren't willing to do it.
And Zelensky tried in 2019 to make peace.
And he realized, and I spoke to someone on our podcast, who's part of what they call the Ukrainian resistance.
He said, look, we were camping outside of Zelensky's hotel room in Paris to let him know we were watching him and that he better not cede one inch of territory, Crimea or the Donbass to Russia in any kind of peace agreement.
So the Ukrainians have a voice in this, and they really chose this war by not giving in to what were maximalist.
Everyone really recognized them as unrealistic.
You know, President Putin, his ultimatum was a lot like our ultimatum to Saddam Hussein in 2003.
Saddam Hussein was stuck between a rock and a hard place because if he would have accepted it, he probably would have suffered a coup internally.
And if he rejected it, he knew he was going to get invaded.
And that's what Putin did to Ukraine.
And what kills me as an American is part of our moral high ground was seeded by our own invasion of Iraq because we had done that.
And I think where America really has lost the plot here, and Russia too, was understanding the Ukrainian perspective.
America thought Ukraine was going to get invaded, and they thought they were going to fall very quickly.
They were right on the first one, dead wrong on the second one.
Russia thought that Ukraine would fold because they felt their intelligence had done the work, and they bought off who they needed to buy off, and the Ukrainian military did know how to fight.
Ukrainians had a voice in this, and I think you're starting to see that on the global stage.
And my main critique of America and the West, actually, is Ukraine actually has to make their own decision here on what they want, and don't let them drag this out.
I think that the war is horrible, and I don't like to see it, but Ukraine, they're fighting for literally their hometown.
My fiancé's family is 30 kilometers from the fighting, and her father refused to leave.
Because he said, this is my home.
And if someone comes into our town, I have to be here with our people.
And I think it's just hard in America, because we haven't had that for almost 200 years, to understand that level of You know, what they're up against.
What about the criticism of Zelensky that he has abolished political dissent in his own country, that he's jailed some of his political opponents, that he's illegalized the other party?
Is that true and is it possible?
Well, it is true because the day the war started, the parliament, which consists of all those parties, voted for martial law.
And Abraham Lincoln, during the Civil War, did a lot of the same things.
He put in jail anyone who was a threat to the Union.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, look, during a war where you have an existential threat to the country, that's why parliaments basically cede dictatorial powers to their president.
So President Zelensky, he did abolish 11 political parties' activities because the mayor of Melitopol, who was kidnapped by Russian forces and sent away, the one that replaced him was a lady from one of these political parties.
And she volunteered herself to be one of the puppet governments.
So Ukrainian intelligence has assessed that these 11 parties are probably part of the FSB payroll that Putin thought were going to rise up.
So what they're trying to do and whether they're overdoing it or not, they have the power is to forestall any other puppet regimes in any of the occupied territories from being able to rise up legally so that these people know that if I step up and do this, they're going to suffer severe consequences.
So it's a very practical, hard-nosed thing to do, but it's certainly within the law right now, given martial law.
No men between 18 to 60 can leave the country.
Everyone has to register with the draft office.
The whole society is existentially under threat, and the president's doing what he's legally allowed to do right now.
Did U.S. intelligence agencies participate in the coup in 2014 to replace the Ukrainian government?
Well, I've seen Oliver Stone's Ukraine on Fire, and I've also watched Winter on Fire, which is, those are like two ends of the spectrum, and I'm a historian, so you always have to watch both sides of the issue.
Did George Soros and the CIA back that revolution?
I'm sure they helped.
I have no inside knowledge of whether they did.
But I've lived in Ukraine for four years and I know all the people who participated in that.
And here's what I do know.
Whether the CIA bankrolls it or not, no revolution is successful without people who are willing to lay down their life.
100 plus people were gunned down in the streets by FSB agents, probably from Russia, snipers that came in.
So I'm sure there was a conflict going on between the CIA and the FSB.
But it would not have been successful because without Ukrainian people who really wanted that political orientation for their country, and I'd say probably 60 plus percent of Ukrainians that I've spoken to were very glad that that revolution happened.
They weren't happy with the loss of life.
And there were a sizable majority of people who didn't agree with that revolution.
I'm friends with them.
And they didn't believe that that was the right way to deal with Yanukovych.
But Yanukovych really shot himself in the foot by the way he sent riot police out to beat college students right after they started protesting.
And then that just kind of snowballed.
I don't think if the CIA backed it in a major way that they would have...
We've been successful without this really being an organic movement.
I think we've seen throughout history, and I know you know this more than I do, having seen the government, we're not very good at backing revolutionaries and making them do things that they don't have popular support for.
I mean, your uncle again in the Bay of Pigs, we have experience of this going horribly wrong.
This came up organically in my view.
Did the CIA and other organizations support it?
Sure.
Probably, I don't know how much...
I'm sure they supported it, but I think we overestimate sometimes, because I worked with the CIA in Iraq and saw them, I think we overestimate their competence a lot of times and their abilities in fomenting these things.
At one point in the 1990s, Putin reached out to our country to propose Russia's inclusion in NATO, and we refused him.
And was that a signal that we wanted to keep the Cold War going?
Yeah, so I think the incident you're speaking about is when President Putin came into office in 1999, he had a bit of a bromance with President Bush.
I think President Bush famously saw into his eyes and looked into his soul, which I think is a pretty cringe-worthy historical moment now that we look back on it.
But the story, as I understand it, is that President Putin inquired that he was exploring the possibilities And I think that he wasn't interested or Russia didn't want to submit to some of the qualification requirements.
I do think that was a strategic mistake on America's side for not pursuing that option more.
I think that H.R. McMaster, my old boss, in his book, The Battlegrounds, The Fight for the Future of the Free World, he makes a point that rather than antagonizing Russia or rather than Russia trying to fight us, what they probably should do is look at Joining European Community of Nations and really helping buffer what is the true emerging threat to America is China.
And I thought that was a really interesting point that General McMaster made.
And I do think if that's true, that we miss that opportunity.
We certainly miss an opportunity to bring Russia into the Western world.
But I also think that how has Putin governed his country?
And is he willing to govern his country in a way that's A bit democratic and free versus, I think, the repressions that we're seeing now.
There's probably a lot of fault on both sides.
But I do think that America failed for a long time to listen to Russia and to potentially engage I think?
Your enemy's perspective, as I would say, legitimately, I view President Putin in Russia right now as an enemy to my own interests living in Ukraine.
But I also need to be honest and understand that I have a very biased perspective.
And as a historian, you have the beauty of hindsight and the ability to look back and see where we made mistakes.
And I think if we go back through President Putin's reign and see how America Welcome
to my show!
You can't do things over.
You can't, unfortunately, run a split test as we do in tech companies.
But there's certainly a huge what-if in American foreign policy where that misadventure into Iraq really cost us.
I think it's cost us our national prestige, our moral high ground in this current situation, a lot of money, lives.
And I wish we could have done that differently.
And I wish that President Putin hadn't gone down the path he's gone, because I think he deserves a lot of Thank you so much for really an extraordinarily informative interview.
Very, very thoughtful.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for having me.
I couldn't have been better.
I really got an education and a real change in my perspective from listening to you.
So thank you for being so honest and so well informed.
Well, thank you, sir.
And I know that you have a lot of influence and a lot of communities that I think could hear this perspective.
And I'm happy to speak to anyone who would like to reach out.
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