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May 10, 2023 - RFK Jr. The Defender

01:10:43

How The West Brought War To Ukraine with Benjamin Abelow

Author Benjamin Abelow discusses his book, How The West Brought War To Ukraine, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Click here for more info on How The West Brought War To Ukraine: https://www.amazon.com/How-West-Brought-Ukraine-Understanding/dp/0991076702

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	Hey, everybody.
	I'm very, very excited to have today a guest who I've been thinking about.
	And I've actually read your book now three times.
	It's such an important book.
	Benjamin Abelow is an American citizen who believes that The U.S. and NATO policies are causing great harm in the Ukraine, in Europe, in the United States, and in the Global South.
	Benjamin Avalow is the author of How the West Brought War to the Ukraine, which is a book that I think I wish somehow every American could read.
	It's a very short book.
	I think I read it once in the text, in the paperback.
	And listen to it twice on Audible.
	I think it's about a 90-minute, as I recall, on Audible.
	So it's very, very easy, but it has extraordinary clarity, not only of language, but clarity of thought.
	It's very persuasive.
	The book has been translated into German, Italian, Polish, Danish, Slovenian, with many more coming.
	It has been a number one Amazon bestseller in multiple categories in Switzerland.
	A major news magazine philanthropist distributed 340,000 copies of the German translation.
	ABLO was runner-up for the 2022 Peer Spray Awards for Defense Reporting and Analysis.
	This award is sponsored by Ben Cohen of Ben& Jerry's.
	The judging panel included two former Pentagon analysts and the current editor of Washington Harpers Magazine, Andrew Coburn, an old school liberal.
	How the West or the Ukraine has been endorsed by some of the most experienced diplomatic, military, and academic experts in the United States, including former Soviet Ambassador Jack Matlock, who's a friend of mine.
	Chas Freeman, the former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs.
	John Mearsheimer, the Endowed Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago.
	Colonel Douglas McGregor, who was on this podcast last week.
	and many, many others.
	Avalo previously worked in Washington, D.C., where he lectured and lobbied Congress about nuclear arms policy.
	He has a BA in modern European history from the University of Pennsylvania and a medical degree from Yale, where he also served as a lecturer in medicine.
	His other areas of specialty include the study of trauma, including war trauma.
	So let me, you know, ask you the question that, you know, is the kind of accusation against anybody who departs from the official narratives.
	Are you a big fan of Vladimir Putin?
	Are you trying to help him somehow?
	No, I have no special connection with Vladimir Putin or no special love or no particular dislike beyond if he mistreats people or if he invades another country.
	I see that as something that's reprehensible.
	I view this as a- As you say in the book that Vladimir Putin had other choices besides invading Ukraine, although you make a very, very good case, an incredibly compelling case that the invasion was provoked.
	You do say that he had other options.
	That's a tough one.
	I think what I had in mind was that anytime you launch a war that is going to kill innocents, and even one has to keep in mind, even soldiers are innocents in a certain way.
	They're oftentimes just civilians who are in some sense sucked into combat.
	One has a deep obligation to try to find other alternatives.
	So in some sense, I feel the United States and NATO backed him into a corner.
	But in another sense, I feel it was incumbent on him to seek other avenues and that he went to war at a time that he shouldn't have.
	Of course, it caused great devastation and it may end up destroying him.
	So I think in many respects it was a mistake.
	But I find it, no matter how provoked a war, it is almost impossible to justify a war.
	And this would apply, a war that's going to kill innocents, and this would apply in many war settings.
	So I think that's what I had in mind, really.
	Well, let's start with this.
	What were the provocations?
	And let's go back.
	Let's go back to the 1990s.
	Yeah.
	And talk about the provocations that occurred between the end, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the history between the Ukraine, NATO and the United States and Western Europe, between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany, and 2014.
	Sure.
	So I think a good point to start is that when East and West Germany were reuniting, there were 400,000 Soviet troops stationed in East Germany.
	And in order for the Germanys to reunite under NATO auspices, those troops had to leave.
	And one of the inducements that was basically given to the Soviets to induce them to have those troops leave was What we could call assurances that NATO would not expand eastward of their current location, which is more or less the middle of a divided Germany.
	Oftentimes we hear about these comments from Baker about not one inch, but the assurances went far beyond that.
	So, for example...
	James Baker, who was President Bush's Secretary of Defense, Our Secretary of State allegedly told the Premier Gorbachev Yeah, it's interesting.
	That particular promise or assurance has been debated.
	I've read the original transcripts of the conversations or the notes that were taken of those conversations between him and Gorbachev, and it certainly gave me the impression that he was trying to communicate the promise without exactly making it a formal promise.
	But there were many other statements that were made as well.
	So if you go to the National Security Archive of George Washington University, there are 25 documents there, and there's a detailed analysis by the staff of the National Security Archive where these declassified documents are housed.
	And they basically conclude that these were assurances that were given.
	They don't use the word promises because they never were instantiated in written form, but they were certainly verbal assurances.
	And it's very clear there's a detailed analysis by a scholar named Joshua R. Schifrinson published in the journal International Security where he basically looks side by side at the American archives along with public statements that were given to the Soviets.
	And he saw that, in fact, there was deception going on.
	And then just a few years ago, there were notes that came out of a meeting that was held.
	I believe it was in France.
	And these were notes that were taken by the British delegation.
	It was an important meeting involving France, Germany, the US, Britain.
	And what this basically showed that in 1991, the German representative made a very clear statement that in terms of establishing the security arrangements for the post-Cold War Europe, that it would not be possible to expand NATO because promises had been given to the Soviets.
	And that, to my mind, completely sealed the case that promises had been given to So within a few years of that, it became clear that, in fact, NATO was going to expand.
	And by 1997, it became very clear.
	And the first tranche of the expansion occurred in 1999 with Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland.
	And before that, there was very widely disseminated statements by a great many experts in the U.S., including George Cannon, including prominent hawks such as Paul Nitze, including Richard Pipes, who was kind of a crusading anti-communist professor who was kind of a crusading anti-communist professor at Harvard.
	By chance, for those who are familiar with Fiona Hill, he was one of Fiona Hill's doctoral dissertation mentors, and he was strongly opposed to NATO expansion.
	And all these people, this was actually an open letter of 40 people that was organized by General Eisenhower's daughter, Susan.
	And then George Cannon, who was the developer of the Doctrine of Containment, made separate statements in the New York Times that, And they all basically said this would be the worst disaster of the entire Cold War period for the U.S. foreign policy, that it would radicalize the Soviet Union, that it would undermine democratic forces.
	I'm sorry, in Russia at this time, the Soviet Union broke up in 1991 formally.
	Any case, this went ahead.
	And then in 2004, there was another Trump.
	Let me just interrupt for a second.
	Yeah, sure.
	Their point was that we had won the Cold War.
	That we should stop treating Russia like an enemy, and we should start maybe treating them like we treated our enemies after World War II, which is to nurture democracy and to nurture the relationship and the friendship between Russia and the NATO countries and the United States.
	Essentially, if we started treating them like an enemy, They were going to resurrect this enemy.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Very well put.
	It was really a question of these people arguing and many others argued it as well.
	You know, all we're doing is redrawing a line of hostilities in Europe where none need exist.
	And in fact, that's gradually what happened.
	Expansion continued in 2004.
	Another tranche of countries, the Baltic states, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia, And then really the problem hit the fan, so to speak, in 2000, late 2007, late 2008, where the U.S. wanted to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. And it was very clear that this was a real red line for Russia.
	William F. Burns, William J. Burns, who is currently Mr.
	Biden's director of the CIA, was at that time the ambassador to Moscow.
	And he basically made very clear that I think?
	the National Intelligence Council had made a prediction that there was a real genuine risk that if we, the U.S., NATO, tried to bring in Ukraine and Georgia, that there would be not only the taking of Crimea, but a much larger action taken into Ukraine that there would be not only the taking of Crimea, but a much And in fact, this occurred.
	So there was ample, ample notice that this was viewed as a dangerous red line for Russia.
	They viewed themselves as being encircled and threatened by a massive military force that in a few years earlier had been directly directed against them.
	So this went on.
	And by the way, Ukraine has a 1200 mile border with Russia.
	Yes.
	And parts of that border are only 400 miles from Moscow.
	And, you know, the Russians have been invaded three times with the last time they were invaded from the east through Ukraine.
	A third of their nation was destroyed.
	One out of every 13 Russians was killed.
	So they have a justification.
	My uncle, John Kennedy, told this story in his American University speech.
	And he said, you know, we have to understand what The world feels like, from Russia's point of view, if we're going to make peace, we need to understand that.
	And really, that speech is an extraordinary speech, because it was a speech that was given to the American people, explaining the Russian point of view, which he thought it was critical for us to understand.
	Yeah, John F. Kennedy had incredible guts and incredible foresight, as you know better than anyone.
	Yes, it was actually one in every seven Russians that died.
	Welcome to my show!
	Several million died during the – I think it was 1.5 or 2 million died during the siege of then Leningrad, now St.
	Petersburg, where they were resorted to cannibalism out of starvation.
	They were put under siege.
	So there's a whole mindset that Americans can barely begin to get their mind around unless they really start to focus on it, that not only were the things that NATO was doing highly provocative in a way that if they had been done by a foreign power to the U.S., let's say forming an alliance with Canada on the U.S. that not only were the things that NATO was doing highly provocative in a way that if they had been done
	But there's an entire history of massive death of invasion, as you said, through the lands that through Ukraine that really are not taken into account.
	I mean, you're referring to a concept that some have referred to as strategic empathy, basically putting yourself in the shoes of your opponent or your potential opponent and recognizing that whatever you might think of them, they are also human beings and they're also leaders of a country that have certain security needs that can be legitimate. they are also human beings and they're also leaders of And that if they're not taken into account, there will be difficult consequences as they respond, sometimes aggressively, to threats that they perceive.
	Okay, so tell us then what happened in...
	One other provocation that you forgot about is that we walked away, I think it was in 2008, from the Intermediate Missiles Treaty.
	Good point.
	I think the treaty you're thinking of was the 1972 ABM, or Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
	The U.S. walked away from that at the end of 2001, early 2002.
	And this was often seen as the cornerstone of the arms- - This was the neocons in the Bush White House, you know, who wanted the project for the new American century and they decided to walk away from that treaty.
	And that treaty was actually a very stabilizing treaty. - Yeah, it was extremely stabilizing.
	I mean, on the surface, it sounds crazy.
	Why would we want a treaty that would prevent anti-ballistic missiles, missiles that would allegedly protect targets?
	But what happens is it turns out that it's very easy to overwhelm defensive systems, either by putting multiple warheads on your existing missiles or simply fake devices that can be deployed, even balloons, which when there's no atmosphere can fall very rapidly and be misperceived as a warhead.
	So they're easy to overwhelm.
	And the Russians were strongly opposed to the withdrawal from this treaty, but the U.S. thought they could somehow come up with mechanisms to really defend.
	In any case, that initiated a lot of an arms war.
	The intermediate range treaty that was withdrawn from, that was also withdrawn, but later in 2019.
	I think President Trump...
	Yeah, that was under Trump.
	That was also a destabilizing event because we basically had missiles that could, in a few minutes, hit Moscow and that could decapitate the country's leadership and their capacity to respond, which the Russians worried might trigger a US preemptive attack if tensions rose.
	To knock out their, you know, basically to decapitate the country.
	So they are very worried about that.
	Yeah.
	Again, you need to consider, everyone needs to consider the important thing is how the U.S. might respond in an equivalent circumstance.
	I mean, all we have to do is, again, coming back to your uncle, look at the Cuban Missile Crisis, for instance, where nuclear missiles were placed roughly 90 miles from the U.S. border.
	The U.S. almost had a nuclear war then, and had not it been for the really perspicacity of JFK, And for the prior relationship he had established with Nikita Khrushchev, his Soviet counterpart, it's quite possible that we would have had a nuclear war.
	So that's kind of remarkable.
	I'll give one other example that I think is quite illustrative of the sorts of threats that Russia has perceived.
	You know, we think of NATO expansion – here we're jumping ahead of 2014 – but we think of NATO expansion as somewhat of an abstraction, or it's very easy to think of.
	Oh, NATO expansion, what does that even mean?
	One example that I like to give was in 2021, the US did a series of live-fire rocket exercises in Estonia, which is right on Russia's northwestern border.
	These missiles were fired off 70 miles from Russia's border.
	The missiles had a range of 185 miles, could easily have penetrated into Russian territory.
	And the point of this was to practice destroying air defense targets inside Russia.
	Now, NATO was actually not actually planning to invade Russia.
	What they had in their mind was, well, what do we do if Russia invades the Baltics, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia?
	And they saw an attack on Russian air defense systems as part of that defensive ploy.
	But again, one has to look at how this is perceived by Russia.
	What would the US do if Russia or China had formed an alliance on the US border with Canada, for instance, formed an alliance with Canada and began to carry out military exercises on that border, including practicing firing missiles with an avowed aim of destroying including practicing firing missiles with an avowed aim of destroying air defense targets inside the United States?
	I mean, the US, its military leaders, its politicians, its political elite, its foreign policy elite, Even ordinary American citizens would have felt remarkably threatened and endangered by this, and it's quite possible this itself would have started a war where the US would have demanded the immediate cessation and withdrawal of those forces and practices, and if that had not been carried out, the US might well have invaded.
	So again, we need to keep all this in mind, again, through a path of strategic empathy or how this looks to the opponent or putting yourself in your potential opponent's shoes.
	How would this look to Russia when we carried out a whole series?
	And this exercise in Estonia was just one of many exercises that were carried out on or near Russia's border.
	And then also another provocation was in 2008, we essentially expressed or announced our intention of incorporating Georgia and the Ukraine into NATO, which the Russians sent messages after message at that time saying that was a red line that could not be crossed.
	Yeah, exactly true.
	The US wanted to – this was under George Bush II – wanted to not only offer – to state that Ukraine and Georgia will join NATO, which in fact that statement was made, but they wanted to actually give them – What's referred to as an MAP or a membership action plan,
	which would basically be an immediate runway into entry into NATO. Now, that was opposed by both France and Germany on the grounds that Russia and actually Angela Merkel, then the German chancellor, later stated that this would have been perceived by Russia as an act of war.
	So the membership action plan was not given, but nonetheless, a definitive statement was made that Ukraine and Georgia will join NATO and And four months later, Russia entered into Georgia.
	Now, that's often perceived as an unprovoked invasion, but not only was Russia responding to the threat of NATO expansion into Georgia, but in fact, there were actually attacks carried out by Georgia onto the enclave of South Ossetia, which is a kind of a semi-breakaway republic on the northern border of Georgia.
	And the EU declared that the Russian assault was actually perhaps possibly justified due to the death of several Russian peacekeeping forces that were in there that were attacked as part of this Georgian attack on the area of South Ossetia.
	And by the way, South Ossetia is analogous in Georgia to what the Donbass is in Russia.
	It's a Russian, ethnic Russian, Russian-speaking province that has historically very, very close ties to Russia.
	Yeah, there are definitely important analogies.
	And actually, I'll mention one more thing too, which is sometimes not talked about by those who want to portray this Russian move as an unprovoked.
	Just two weeks before the Saakashvili government of Georgia launched this massive 24-hour artillery and missile barrage on civilian areas within South Ossetia, the U.S. had led a 2,000-man military exercise inside Georgia.
	So the US was really deeply involved in trying to break off Georgia strongly into a kind of anti-Russia territory.
	And Russia perceived all of this, not just the threat that Ukraine on its border – I'm sorry, that Georgia on its border would join NATO, but that the US was actually leading these multi-nation military exercises there that just two weeks later,
	whether they were tied in directly or not, who knows, but were followed directly by Georgian attacks on basically what amounts to a kind of a semi-Russian ally within Georgia.
	Interestingly, again, I mentioned Fiona Hill.
	She referred to this and she said specifically – this is an interview she did in Politico on February 28, 2022, just four days after Russia invaded.
	She stated that the National Intelligence Council – That these are all assessments the National Intelligence Council made that I referred to before.
	She stated the reason why Russia invaded – it wasn't frankly an invasion, but let's call it an invasion – invaded Georgia.
	Well, it may have been an invasion.
	It certainly wasn't unprovoked.
	The reason why Russia invaded Georgia but did not invade Ukraine – and this is from the mouth of Fiona Hill describing what seemed to have been the view of the National Intelligence Council – The reason why Russia did not invade Ukraine at that time is that Ukraine pulled back from joining NATO. So here we have right from the mouth of somebody who is best known for arguing that the whole NATO provocation thesis is a joke.
	And actually is a kind of Putin-esque propaganda, basically asserting that the reason Russia did not invade Ukraine in 2008 was that Ukraine pulled back from joining NATO, which seems to me to be...
	An implicit acknowledgement that NATO was actually a decisive feature.
	And so we have it not only from the many people before NATO expansion began and from William J. Burns right in 2007-2008, but we have it apparently from the National Intelligence Council and from the mouth of Fiona Hill.
	I'll leave it at that.
	Okay, so just to sum up where we are after promising in the early 1990s that we would not move one inch to the east, we now have moved NATO a thousand miles to the east and included now, I think, 13 former Soviet satellite states.
	I forget the actual number, but that sounds about right.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	And so, yeah, I think that's a beautiful summary you just did.
	And I'll add to that, that not only did this expansion occurred, but the kind of military exercises that I described for Estonia, which of course was one of these countries that joined, that promises made would not join, that these military exercises right on border, on Russia's border were carried out from that these military exercises right on border, on Russia's border were carried out from these countries that promises had been
	So if you're looking for a notion, for a way to undercut any possibility of trust, not only do you deny that assurances and promises have been made, but you then carry out what can be very provocative exercises right on or near Russia's border.
	Now, let me just add one point.
	You know, the East Europeans and the Central Europeans, of course, had a terrible history with the Soviet Union.
	And leaders such as George Cannon made very clear that Russia is not the same thing as the Soviet Union, that in fact, the very people who led to this great bloodless overthrow of the Soviet regime are now the ones in power in Russia.
	But still, we can understand why some of the Central and East European countries might be very concerned and might have wanted some kind of assurances.
	But part of the problem is that there could have been other security arrangements made at the time that would have taken into account much more clearly Russians' own security needs and would not have been sort of redividing Europe and making it the West, including the United States, against Russia again.
	So I want to just acknowledge that some of these East European countries, one can understand why they had concerns, but that does not mean that the security arrangements that could have been made had to take the form that they did, which, as we've described, were very threatening to Russia, as we've described, were very threatening to Russia, especially in conjunction with these military exercises on and near its border.
	Another related point is That NATO's attitude, and I think the American people's attitude, which is amplified and echoed by the press, is that NATO is a well-meaning organization.
	It's a defense organization for Western Europe, and that it has no antagonism toward the Soviet Union.
	But many of these other nations have long histories of bad blood with Russia.
	And particularly Poland and the Ukraine, and particularly some part, you know, some factions in the Ukraine, the factions that are now running the Ukraine, in Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania and Slovenia, all these countries have their own histories of antagonism with their neighbor.
	And when NATO incorporates those organizations, I mean those nations, it kind of changes the tone of NATO. It changes the character of NATO, where it slightly changes the posture of NATO toward Russia, making it more antagonistic, because that reflects the attitudes in those countries.
	Yeah, I think that's a very good point.
	You mentioned that you had had Colonel Douglas McGregor on, I think you said last week.
	And I'll just mention here that not only was he kind of a PhD and has written multiple books on military strategy and was a Iraq war hero, he was also the director of a very important NATO command center in Europe.
	So he was deeply immersed in all this.
	And one of the comments he made, apropos of the point you just made, One of the deep concerns with 1997 through 1999 when Poland joined was that the entry of Poland might serve and somehow stir up trouble between Poland and Russia and actually serve as a provocation that could draw NATO into a war.
	And certainly what we see right now within this war, we see very provocative comments and actions coming out of Poland.
	I think as a NATO member, they almost feel unconstrained to make very provocative statements, feeling, well, NATO has our back.
	This couldn't possibly lead to a war with or an attack by Russia on Poland.
	But I think this is an extremely foolish way to approach things when you look at that this war taking place right on Russia's border with military forces right on Russia's border is perceived by Russia as an existential threat.
	So I just affirm what you said that there are attitudes in some of these countries that especially now that there are members of NATO – It leads them to act and to speak in very unconstrained ways that could suck us into a war, a direct NATO-Russia conflict, even one that's quote-unquote more direct than what we have now.
	Some people would argue we're already at war with Russia due to all this supplying and tactical support and targeting and everything.
	There's still a difference between that and a real full-on war, which is a major concern.
	And in fact, just recently, the RAND Corporation came out with an important report discussing the risk of this.
	Okay, so that brings us kind of to 2014.
	Yeah.
	But something was happening prior to 2014, which was the Ukraine had a duly elected pro-Russian government.
	And the United States State Department through USAID, which is generally regarded as a CIA front, was funneling billions of dollars, probably as much as five billion dollars, Yeah, exactly right.
	In 2013, Victoria Nuland, who was then an assistant secretary of state and is now the undersecretary of state, sometimes described as the number three position, and Biden, of course, was...
	One of the leading neocons.
	Yeah, exactly.
	She stated publicly that there were $5 billion that were channeled into these democracy promotion causes, which, as you describe, are often a front for a variety of different things.
	Yes, Yanukovych was the sitting president from 2010 to 2014 when he was ejected, and he was elected.
	It's overstated the degree to which he was pro-Russian.
	There were actually negotiations he was involved in where he played a very savvy role trying to get the best deal for Ukraine, irrespective of what Russia was offering, but certainly had some pro-Russian leanings, and he was overthrown.
	Now, there certainly was a popular uprising among part of the Ukrainian population, the so-called Maidan events.
	But what people don't often realize is a number of factors tied with this.
	Number one, the Ukrainian far right, ultra-nationalists, played a very important role in the Maidan events and played a very important role in fomenting violence.
	And actually at the culmination of the Maidan, which actually led to the final ejection of Yanukovych and to the unconstitutional vote that took place in the Rada of the Ukrainian parliament, was basically run by the Ukrainian far right.
	Um, So let me put it another way.
	There was a genuine uprising.
	Yes.
	That was a popular uprising that, you know, was called the, I think, the Revolution of Dignity, sometimes people refer to, yeah.
	But it was financed also by the United States.
	A lot of that uprising was U.S. finance groups who organized it.
	But it was hijacked at its height by what I think are fairly called neo-fascist elements within the Ukrainian political landscape.
	And it's unclear how much those were supported by the U.S. government.
	That's probably something that we will never know.
	Yeah, we may never know, but let me pick up on a point you made, was this notion of a hijacking of a popular revolt.
	I want to emphasize that by pointing to the work of a particular scholar.
	This is a Ukrainian-Canadian scholar, and anyone who's listening who really wants to dig into things, I would just search the name.
	He's got a page on academia.edu.
	You can find all of his papers.
	His name is Ivan Kachanovsky.
	He grew up in western Ukraine of all places, which tends to be the most nationalistic part of the country.
	He received his undergraduate training in Kiev.
	He was involved in anti-Soviet protests.
	I think I'm going to go.
	The actual event that led to the final termination of the Yanukovych government was what's sometimes referred to as the Sniper's Massacre.
	This is a killing of dozens of Ukrainians and about one or two dozen of the Ukrainian police.
	It led to the death of dozens of Ukrainian protesters.
	These are pro-opposition protesters.
	who were massacred by snipers.
	And it has long been portrayed in the West and also within Ukraine itself that these killings were done, carried out by the Berkut, which is the Ukrainian special forces and other police under Yanukovych's leadership.
	But it actually turns out, and this is what Ivan Kachinowski's research makes clear, that most of the killings during this massacre were actually a false flag attack carried out by the Ukrainian far right with a shooting occurring from buildings that were completely controlled by the pro-opposition far-right Maidan leadership, including
	Svoboda, which is a kind of a neo-fascist Ukrainian ultra-nationalist group.
	They used to be called the Social National Party, deliberately named after with resonance with the National Socialists of Germany.
	But they changed their name to Svoboda, which means freedom, a couple of decades back to try to kind of clean up their optics.
	That was Stefan Banderas' party.
	Well, Stefan Bondera really was the head of the particular faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.
	But definitely, that Bondera faction has had a deep influence, not only with Svoboda and the rights sector, and sadly, within parts of the general Ukrainian population as well.
	So there's a certain element of cultural resonance that's occurred where Ukrainians have kind of, let's say, gobbed onto the reality that some of these neo-fascist groups or radical nationalist groups were involved in trying to fight for Ukrainian nationalism in the past, but they often disregard the fact that they killed many, many people, including tens of thousands of Poles and Jews in the early 40s.
	And in fact, some of the mass murderers have streets named after them.
	Shukhevich and Bandera now have streets named after them and these were people who were central.
	Shukhevich was the leader of the Ukrainian insurgent army.
	That was directly involved in the killing of tens of thousands of Poles and Jews in 1941 and 1943.
	So there are resonances that are occurring within the general Ukrainian population.
	These sayings such as glory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes, these originated in their current form under Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.
	It's really, there's a lot going on that most people in the West don't have any idea about.
	Let me just say one more point here, which is that in saying this, I don't mean to disparage the fact that the vast majority of Ukrainians are not part of this movement and really wanted peace.
	Zelensky ran for office and in 2019 won with over a 70% majority on a peace platform.
	But in fact, he seems to have been compelled away from that by threats on his life.
	We can talk about that in more detail if you want.
	But he eventually was pushed over to adopt what really amounted to sort of far-right domestic and foreign policies, and including a renunciation of peace talks with Russia over the Donbass.
	And this is certainly a factor that contributed to war.
	Jack Matlock and others, as you mentioned, one of the last U.S. ambassadors to the Soviet Union who helped negotiate the end of the Cold War, has stated that if the Minsk agreements had been carried through, that it's very likely this war never would have occurred.
	And so the U.S., let's go back to 2014.
	The Yanukovych government gets, Yanukovych leaves the country right in front of the right-wing group that was trying to murder him.
	Yeah.
	And the U.S. government then is essentially handpicking the new government of the Ukraine.
	Yeah, very true.
	The U.S. was deeply involved in handpicking the government that eventually came into power, and they were actually deeply involved in ways that many people are not aware of.
	Again, Ivan Kachinovsky has written extensively on this, as well as others, and Joe Biden was deeply involved in this, Victoria Nuland, etc.
	Let's talk about Victoria Nuland's phone call.
	Yeah, Victoria News phone call is very interesting.
	That's one of the areas that I am hoping to spend more time looking into.
	It's unclear to me right now the extent to which that was a direct tie into the violent overthrow or whether that was simply part of a deal that the West was trying to foster with the Yanukovych government to arrange a gradual replacement or a constitutional replacement of power.
	So this is one of the, I would call it a vexed area, at least vexed to me, of what the exact nature of that call was.
	This is the call that she had, Victoria Nuland, the Assistant Secretary of State at that time, with Jeffrey Pyatt, who was then the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine.
	And in that call, basically, she wanted a particular prime minister in named Arseniy Yatsenyuk.
	Who did become prime minister.
	But the U.S. was involved in multiple layers of Ukrainian internal politics.
	The U.S. was also deeply later involved in the removal of Arseniy Yatsenyuk from power.
	So there were many...
	The U.S., Kouchinovsky describes it, that at that point, Ukraine effectively became a client state of the U.S. So much of the idea of, quote-unquote, Ukrainian agency is undercut by the fact that That the Ukrainian policies were largely hijacked by the far right, number one, and then number two, by the direct involvement of the US in picking who would be in power and what sorts of policies would be enacted.
	And now talk about how these events prompted Russia's invasion of the Crimea.
	Yeah.
	As we've been saying, the extent to which the U.S. was involved directly in the violent elements, as you said, will probably never be known.
	It certainly was involved in a high level of democracy promotion towards the nonviolent overthrow of the party.
	Whether they were involved in the overthrow may never be known.
	But Russia perceived this as a U.S. attempt to basically...
	sphere of influence in Ukraine, where it did not have one previously, and was actually deeply concerned that the US might, number one, establish NATO bases in Sevastopol, which has been a major Russian fleet area for 300 years, was concerned that which has been a major Russian fleet area for 300 years, was concerned that the US might actually bring in the ABM launchers, which are nuclear capable, They had
	They're currently in Romania, and I think they were supposed to have been established in Poland in 2022.
	There were some delays.
	I've never actually checked out whether they're fully in play in Poland already.
	But the U.S., Russia was deeply concerned that the U.S. would basically turn Ukraine even more than it had been into an armed military bridgehead on Russia's border.
	Right.
	And just to fill that in, the U.S. was doing maneuvers in the Black Sea.
	The important Crimea is...
	Russia is Russia's only warm water port.
	It's absolutely critical to their national security, to their survival as a country, to their economy.
	And there was fear within Russia that the U.S. Navy would appear in Sevastopol and basically make it a U.S. port and turn the Black Sea into an American Sea.
	Yeah, exactly right.
	So this was all feeding into the deepest rush concerns about encirclement, about military threat, both nuclear and conventional, on its border.
	And again, whatever we think NATO's actual intentions are or were, we really need to be looking at these things from the perspective of a country that whatever we may think of certain authoritarian directions and tendencies – Okay,
	so the Russians invade Crimea.
	And then tell us what happens after that.
	What happened in the Donbass?
	Once the new right-wing government that we helped put in, what did they do in the Donbass?
	What was the Donbass like before and after that government comes in?
	Let me say one more thing about Crimea.
	People often think, well, this is part of a long Putin-esque plan to take over Crimea.
	Michael McFaul, who was a fairly hawkish And was at one point a U.S. ambassador to Russia also actually stated that the decision to annex Crimea was actually an impulsive move taken in response to what Russia proceeds to be a coup in Crimea.
	The U.S. basically at that point, I would say, went into overdrive in trying to arm Ukraine and bring it up to NATO standards gradually, first with non-lethal weapons and then with lethal weapons starting in 2017, again under Donald Trump, basically increasingly threatened Russia.
	Whatever extent Russia felt threatened by the overthrow of the Yanukovych government, The moves that took place from U.S. and NATO since then were increasingly threatened.
	And actually, not only in 2017 were there, as we just described, was the beginning of sale of lethal weapons, but in 2019, as we were talking about earlier, the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
	This is a treaty that would basically have to do with land-based nuclear missiles with a range of between 500 and 5,500 kilometers capable of striking deep within Russia.
	The U.S. withdrew from that unilaterally and refused to negotiate about trying to keep it intact.
	Both sides accused each other.
	Russia accused the US of violating the treaty in terms of specific technical terms.
	The US accused Russia.
	But this is nothing that's so unusual is for either side.
	These are very complex treaties with very complex terms that are hard to interpret.
	And in many respects are very legalistic that have ambiguities in them that need to be negotiated if these uncertainties arise.
	But what happened was Russia deeply wanted to negotiate about the uncertainties and to reestablish a stable working relationship, but the US refused to.
	Part of the reason was that the US wanted to counter The Chinese buildup of nuclear weapons, the treaty that the US had with Russia was bilateral, did not affect China.
	Russia basically said, look, let's work out a moratorium.
	You can deploy these against China if you need to, but let's at least work out a moratorium where we don't deploy them against each other.
	And the US basically said – would refuse to negotiate that.
	Then going on from there in 2021 in Brussels, NATO reaffirmed the 2008 decision that Ukraine and Georgia would join NATO. And in later that year in November – August and I believe November – The U.S.,
	both through the State Department and the Defense Department, signed bilateral treaties with Ukraine, not only to facilitate further arming of Ukraine, but to specifically reaffirm the NATO announcements that Ukraine and Georgia would join NATO. Ukraine and Georgia would join NATO. At that point in December,
	Russia issued statements, proposals to both NATO and the U.S. that we should be negotiating about this and that having NATO expand into Ukraine and Georgia was unacceptable.
	The U.S. flat out refused to negotiate that.
	This has been documented by a man named Derek Chalit.
	who holds a position called counselor to the secretary.
	He's a close assistant of Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, who basically stated in an interview on War on the Rocks that the U.S. basically said, forget it.
	We're not going to talk about NATO expansion into Ukraine.
	That's none of your business.
	And within a couple of months of that, we had the invasion.
	Talk about also what was happening on the ground in Donbass to the ethnic Russians who are living in top of us.
	Yeah, yeah.
	After the overthrow of Yanukovych, Ukraine is in some sense a deeply divided country.
	It's been more unified now as a result of the invasion, at least partially.
	But there is a large population that speaks Russian, a significant population that speaks Russian as their primary and first language, speaks Ukrainian as a secondary language.
	Many people speak them both as co-languages or as Ukrainian first but Russian second.
	In addition, there are ethnic Russians, which is somewhat – they're closely related but a somewhat distinct group, which actually refers to people who are of actual lineage from Russia.
	Now, the ethnic Russians and also many of the Russian speakers in Ukraine, in the Donbass, eastern Ukraine, Eastern Ukraine were very taken aback by this overthrow of Yanukovych, in part because the very first act taken by the Ukrainian parliament, the Ukrainian Rada, was to remove Russian as a second language for official purposes.
	Now, that was eventually withdrawn.
	But this immediately set off concerns about the Russian-speaking and ethnic Russians in the Donbass.
	Further, there were protests at several points in Ukraine against what they perceived as a coup against their, an official Yanukovych that they had supported and that they felt had a benign position towards Russia an official Yanukovych that they had supported and that they felt had a benign position towards Russia and towards their own desire to have
	Included among this was a massacre of 49 persons in the city of Odessa that basically the far right in Ukraine drove dozens of pro-Russian or Russian-speaking ethnics and just plain Russian speakers who had protested against the takeover of the Yanukovych government.
	They drove them into a building and then burned the building down.
	49 people died.
	Something like 150 people were injured.
	Many of the people that died did not simply die due to being burned alive, but when they fled from the buildings, they were beaten to death by the Ukrainian far right.
	Now, as it turned out, at that point...
	The entire police and court system within Ukraine was deeply influenced by the far right.
	And they did not protect the people who were beaten to death or burned alive.
	And the people who were responsible were not tried.
	So this, as you can imagine, created only more fear among the ethnic Russian population.
	And then the Ukrainian government launched what came to be referred to as a, quote unquote, anti-terrorist operation.
	The official Ukrainian line was that those in the Donbass that wanted to have some sort of federal arrangement with some sort of autonomy within the structure of an overall Ukrainian sovereignty, or who actually wanted to withdraw from Ukrainian sovereignty.
	Russia, sorry, the Ukrainian government stated and perceived them as pawns of Russia.
	Where in fact, the evidence is actually that this was really largely an endogenous or a native movement.
	Then the Ukrainian government launched what they referred to as a quote-unquote anti-terrorist operation.
	And it was actually only several months after that when it became clear that the Ukrainians who were attacking the ethnic Russians were about to be defeated.
	The Russian-speaking Ukrainians and ethnic Russian Ukrainians in the Donbass were about to be defeated that Putin sent in troops.
	So people often have this mistaken idea that what happened in the Donbass was an immediate invasion by Putin that was completely run out of Moscow.
	That's not at all the case.
	It was largely a homegrown, you could call it a kind of civil war, an attempt to establish a federal autonomy within Ukraine that is a significant autonomy, but under ultimate Ukrainian Kiev authority.
	And then Putin sent in troops.
	They wanted the Donbass to be an autonomous region within the Ukraine.
	Exactly.
	To preserve its language and culture, our part of its traditions.
	Yeah, yeah.
	But there were certainly some who wanted a frank withdrawal and a true separation, either to...
	At that point, either to affiliate with Russia or as a total standalone entity.
	My memory is that they actually voted to withdraw and join Russia and the Russians wouldn't let them do it.
	Yeah, the Russians wouldn't let them do it.
	I mean, actually what happened was...
	Even after they voted to join Russia, the Russians said no, we don't want to.
	The Russians said no, yeah.
	I mean, some of the people within the Donbass, having seen what happened with Crimea, they thought, well, we want to have the same thing happen there.
	We want annexation.
	But Russia did not want that.
	Russia felt that the best way forward was actually...
	To continue under Kiev's Ukrainian authority and sovereignty, but to have significant autonomy, to basically have what would be a true federal structure.
	But this was completely considered unacceptable.
	The whole idea of a federal structure is completely unacceptable by the far right in Ukraine.
	That's probably what Zelensky would have ended up negotiating if he had been allowed to go forward and had his life and his government not been threatened by the violent far right.
	I don't want to keep you much longer, but that history is important for Americans to know.
	And one other little, I think, addition to that, the involvement of the U.S. in the war since then has been really extensive, including using intelligence assets, U.S. intelligence assets to target the murder of Russian generals, the sinking U.S. intelligence assets to target the murder of Russian generals, the sinking of Russia's biggest ship, their flagship in the Black Sea, and a lot of Almost certainly the destruction of the pipeline.
	Yeah, let me just comment briefly on all of that.
	First of all, as far as the pipeline, I agree with your statement.
	I don't think this may be one of the things we never know 100%, but I certainly would put odds that it was the U.S.
	You know, if you look at the actual statements that came out of both Victoria Nuland and Biden in the weeks before Russia invaded, they were remarkably similar.
	They both began with the statement, if Russia invades, verbatim agreement between what Victoria Nuland said at the end of January 2022 and what Biden said in February 2022.
	I think it was February 7th.
	If Russia invades, they basically said one way or another, the pipeline is going to come to an end.
	I don't know from a legal point of view what one calls that.
	I don't know whether it's a prime facie case or whether this is a circumstantial or what.
	it's a prime facie case or whether this is a circumstantial or what, but to me, it's pretty strong.
	But to me, it's pretty strong.
	And then when you put that in the context of all the other statements that have been made, it seems to me very, very likely this was a U.S. operation, which of course the U.S. immediately blamed Russia for right off the bat.
	Now, as far as the U.S.'s role, you know, the U.S., if the U.S. had supported Zelensky in his peace effort, I think it's quite likely this war never would have happened, but the U.S. did not support Zelensky.
	And in fact, specific members of the U.S. political establishment specifically tried to undercut the possibility of these peace agreements before the war started.
	And then very importantly, many people don't realize that after the war started, within weeks of the war starting, there were active peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine that were occurring in Turkey, under Turkish auspices and the U.S. and Britain, under Turkish auspices and the U.S. and Britain, certainly Britain and probably with the U.S. involvement, sabotaged those.
	And And that's actually quite well documented now.
	It's documented not only by Ukrainian publications, Ukrainska Pravda, it's documented by statements from the Turkish authorities.
	It's documented by Naftali Bennett, who was then Prime Minister of Israel, who was involved in that process.
	And ultimately, it was documented by Fiona Hill, again, and Angela Stent in Foreign Affairs magazine, who referred specifically to the fact that their interviews with...
	I can actually see if I have it right here.
	Well, I won't try to read it, but basically said...
	Good numbers of senior former U.S. officials described how a working interim agreement seems to have been agreed upon.
	And then ultimately that was broken off.
	So from multiple sources, we see that the U.S. tried to prevent the war.
	And what appears happened was...
	Prevent a compromise.
	I'm sorry.
	Yeah, to have a compromise.
	Basically, the terms would have been to have a neutral Ukraine.
	Neutral does not mean unarmed.
	It means unaligned with NATO. And many countries would have been free to continue sending arms to Ukraine and selling arms to Ukraine.
	It would have been a neutral, non-bloc Ukraine.
	It would have been withdrawal of Russia.
	To the pre-invasion borderlines, and it probably would have involved negotiation over the status of NATO and the positioning of forces within certain East European countries.
	It's quite remarkable that the West did not allow this to go through.
	As a result, nobody knows the accurate numbers.
	Colonel McGregor has certain numbers which may well be accurate.
	Other people have lower numbers.
	But to my way of thinking, they're probably – I just make – from my talking thinking – I say 100,000 Ukrainians died since that peace process was broken off, and 200,000 to 300,000 were severely injured.
	So the deaths exceed 300,000 military personnel.
	I have no way of confirming or denying that.
	I have a lot of respect for his views.
	All I know is I've heard different numbers, and I don't really have the technical knowledge or military analytic skills to...
	For my own opinion.
	But the numbers are huge.
	I mean, we're talking about, let's call it 100,000 dead minimum.
	Let's call it 300,000 injured minimum.
	Let's call it millions internally displaced, maybe 10 million externally displaced.
	I mean, it's a disaster that's happened.
	And what may well happen now is that Ukraine ends up not even functioning as a viable state.
	To say nothing of more and more Ukrainians being killed.
	Keep in mind that it's against the law for men between the ages of, I think the ages of 17 and 65, to leave the country.
	So we don't really even know what the actual desire of many Ukrainians is to fight.
	The opposition media have been outlawed.
	Opposition parties have been outlawed and individuals who are too outspoken about alternate policies, their lives may be threatened by the far right.
	So we don't really know what the actual status is there.
	What we do know is that the U.S. is deeply committed to a war to, quote unquote, weaken Russia and to basically using Ukraine as a geostrategic pawn to weaken Russia.
	It's often described as humanitarian, but what I see is something that's actually quite anti-humanitarian.
	It's as sometimes is quipped, so to speak.
	This is fighting to the last Ukrainian for Ukrainian independence for the American desire to weaken Russia.
	And Zelensky is kind of almost as much a victim of U.S. policy as he is of Russian policy.
	Yeah, I would say that Zelensky, number one, this invasion did occur, and it's a bloody, vicious mess.
	I in no way support this or support the action of it.
	But...
	I would say Zelensky in Ukraine was victimized by Russia.
	It was victimized by the US. It was victimized internally by the far right, which used violence to inflict its will.
	Far beyond what its voting numbers would have allowed.
	One last subject.
	Talk about the Minsk Accords, because that kind of would have provided a framework for the settlement of this whole thing.
	It shows the Russian advocacy of the Minsk Accords demonstrates that the Russians really had no desire to go into the Ukraine.
	It suggests, anyway, that there was no Russian desire to go into the Ukraine and take over.
	Yeah.
	What actually happened was that in mid to late 2014, the Minsk proposal was made, and then the Minsk II was made in early, I think it was April of 2015.
	These were negotiations that occurred in Minsk, Belarus.
	I believe it was the French, the Germans, Ukraine, and Russia, with maybe US having observer status.
	They weren't primary party there to federalize the breakaway republics in the Donbass, all under Ukrainian sovereignty.
	And Russia specifically told those who were trying to break away, no, we will not support you.
	So it should be very clear that what Russia wanted – look, Russia has a number of aims.
	And I think people sometimes, they feel there's some kind of dichotomy where one has to have either Russia is using the Donbass as a geostrategic element in its confrontation or desire to buffer itself against the West, or they are fighting for their Russian ethnics and Russian speakers.
	And I think the reality is probably both factors were important.
	I think Russia wanted an element within Ukraine that could have some kind of moderating influence on Ukrainian policy on the far right, which was extremely Russophobic.
	I think they also felt these are human beings we're talking about in Russia.
	Again, no matter what you think of them, these are human beings who feel a connection with Russian speakers and ethnic Russians in the Donbass.
	And I think they were deeply concerned about, quote unquote, let's call it, their people.
	The idea that one has to decide between the two, I would see that as reinforcing.
	But they wanted, I think, to basically both help the ethnic and the native Russian speakers in the Donbass area.
	They wanted to help them have some degree of autonomy to live their lives more as they wanted and to have freer affiliation socially and familiarly with Russia.
	And they also wanted them to remain within Ukraine proper in terms of its overall authority.
	And any authority that they would have as autonomy, they wanted to have formally delegated voluntarily by the Kiev government.
	But this was all unacceptable to the Ukrainian far right.
	The U.S. was ultimately opposed to it.
	Let's call it at the very least, it did nothing actively to support it.
	And Poroshenko, who was the then sitting Ukrainian president after 2014, made clear that in his mind from the beginning, this was a ruse to try to stall any further conflict while Ukraine built up its military.
	And then subsequently, Angela Merkel and the French prime minister or the French president also stated that this was effectively a ruse.
	I mean, this is horrific that this would have been – the best chance for peace was treated as a ruse to pull the wool over Russia's eyes.
	In any case, Minsk was never implemented – Ukraine would not implement it.
	U.S. would not help.
	And then it appears that – I don't know whether Merkel and the French president was – help was deliberately at that point trying to pull it over Russia's eyes or whether they simply later felt they had to say that because they didn't want to be accused of being Putin's puppets once the war broke out.
	But in any case, had the Minsk agreements occurred, then we would have had no Russian intervention in the Donbass, no further Russian intervention in the Donbass.
	There would have been autonomy in the Donbass and it's very likely this terrible war that we experience now would not be happening.
	And I'll point out one other thing.
	If Mexico began slaughtering and slaughtered 14,000 American expatriates who were living in Mexico, I don't have any doubt that the United States government would go in there and intervene and invade.
	And a lot of your book is really wonderful about pointing out of what would happen if the roles were reversed.
	You know, we have the Monroe Doctrine in this country that we've enforced for 150 years that says we're not going to tolerate the presence of any other of the great powers and military powers in our hemisphere.
	And we've never been invaded.
	And we consider that existential.
	And we seem unable to understand that the Russians have the same feeling about their country and that, you know, if we're going to have peace on Earth, we need to understand that.
	And there's so much about this Or that reminds me not of World War II, you know, with a lot of the neocons trying to draw analogies that Putin is like Hitler, you know, with this bottomless appetite for conquering the world for which there is very, very little evidence.
	But it seems a lot less like World War II to me than it does World War I, where all of the great powers of Europe just sleptwalk.
	Into a, you know, into this insane conflict from which there was, they ultimately were not able to get out, but it was a quagmire that nobody wanted.
	There was no justification for it.
	And yet, you know, 50 million people died.
	I agree completely with what you're saying.
	People are preoccupied with an unreal threat, a threat that has never been real, that Russia had intentions to invade all of Eastern Europe and take over and reestablish the Imperium.
	I don't think there's any significant evidence for that.
	I think there's evidence to the contrary.
	I think if you look at the history of the last 30 years, you see what's actually been the cause, is this encirclement and perceived threat on Russia's border in violation of promises to boot.
	This could all go very badly.
	Let me just build on what you said with two quick points.
	I just heard today, people may or may not know that there was a drone attack on the Kremlin.
	Two drones attack the Kremlin that seemed to be some kind of assassination attempt on Putin.
	Ukraine has explicitly denied that, although I also just heard today that Ukraine has already issued a stamp I don't know if that's true.
	If it's true, that seems to bear on the question of whether Ukraine was doing it or not.
	But very disturbingly, I also heard this today, and I'll wait for it to be confirmed, is that Russia has stated from two different public statespersons that they believe the US was behind that attack.
	So we now may be in a situation where Russia perceives that the US has been directly involved in an assassination attempt On
	the Russian president.
	And they had several points there.
	Among them were, number one, Ukraine is unlikely to gain back significant territory.
	Number two, that if the war becomes a general war between NATO and Russia, there is a high chance of a significant chance of it becoming a tactical nuclear war.
	And then if a tactical nuclear war occurs, there's a significant chance of it escalating to global thermonuclear war.
	And they basically state that it is not in the U.S. interest to have a long war.
	Now, how they define long war is up in anyone's guess.
	But that report came out in January.
	And we now have what seemed to be confirmation from these, quote unquote, discord leaks that other branches of the U.S. government felt also that it was unlikely that Ukraine would be able to do more than, at best, recovering some modest degree of territory. recovering some modest degree of territory.
	which of course means they could easily lose more.
	So certainly my position, and I suspect yours too, is that what's needed here is an immediate ceasefire, not only for the sake of Ukrainian life and for the sake of the integrity of whatever's left of Ukrainian territory, but to avoid the possibility of NATO being drawn further but to avoid the possibility of NATO being drawn further into this war and to avoid the possibility of a nuclear war, which could kill, well, certainly hundreds of millions and possibly billions of people, even end civilization on the planet.
	Yeah, I mean, I'll point out that both Russia and the United States have in their arsenal enough nuclear weapons to permanently destroy life on planet Earth.
	And the Russians have a thousand more nuclear warheads than we do.
	And they have equipment that in many ways is more modern than ours.
	They have the capacity to level the entire continental United States in about, I think, 30 minutes.
	So, you know, what we're playing with here is insanity and the people who got us to this point should not be in government.
	You know, what they're doing is really a form of psychosis, I would say.
	Benjamin, thank you very, very much for your book.
	Which has really the capacity like Uncle Tom's Cabin or some of these very, very important books in history, which was also a very short book, but it's short enough that people can read it in an hour and really get a deep understanding about how we got into this mess and a feeling of indignation.
	About our leadership and the leadership from both political parties that is allowing this catastrophe to proceed.
	Yeah, well, thank you.
	I agree with you.
	This is the kind of madness that we're in the middle of, and we're being deceived about what's actually happening and about how we got here.
	Benjamin Avalo.
	Benjamin Avalo.
	How the West or the Ukraine, this is something you have to read if you want to be effective in your advocacy about this issue.
	Thank you.

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