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Feb. 16, 2022 - Viva & Barnes

02:04:17

Sidebar with The Duran - Ukraine, Russia and More! Viva & Barnes LIVE!

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	A real good evening now.
	It feels like I haven't seen you guys in like 30 minutes.
	All right.
	Look, nothing's changed except, like a boss, I've got my sidebar beverage, which is for anybody.
	I'll show you the color just so that you'll never know what it is if I don't show you.
	This is the color of it.
	And it's a natural color.
	So it's not...
	It's not some high school mix drink.
	It's a blue gin.
	And what it's got in it, it's got...
	Okay.
	Gin Floral Distingué from Quebec.
	But it's got this substance in it that makes it change into pink when you add an acid.
	I forget what it's called.
	Someone in the chat, tell me what it is.
	Is it antifreeze?
	It's not antifreeze.
	It's not antifreeze.
	And don't give anybody any bad ideas.
	What's the word?
	Somebody in the chat, it's a pea, a pea yeast, something along those lines, that changes.
	It's not bathtub gin either, people.
	It changes pink with acidity.
	So it changes colors.
	And the first time I got it, I was like, oh, cool, a blue gin.
	And then I put in the olives.
	And then I started noticing around the olives, it was like turning pinkish purple.
	And I was like, holy crap, this might be a supervillain or a superpower drink.
	And now it's delicious.
	Not quite as good as my brother-in-law's gin, La Chaufferie, which is my favorite.
	And I have no financial interest in the company.
	I just have emotional interest in my brother-in-law, but he works hard and he made a great gin.
	Okay, tonight, people, this is the sidebar.
	We've got the Duran on and we're going to have jokes about Canadian politics.
	But we're getting away from Canadian politics.
	I think we just did a solid hour on the Emergencies Act in the state of madness in Canada.
	I hope everybody knows the Duran.
	If they don't, you're going to meet them now.
	Wickedly intelligent, wickedly knowledgeable, wickedly charismatic.
	And that's it.
	Everything has to go by threes.
	So we're going to talk about the situation in the Ukraine, Russia, NATO, European stuff.
	For those of you who don't know, I have a minor in Eastern European history that dates to 1998 to 2002.
	I didn't do very well in that class, and I don't remember any of it.
	And I feel ashamed that I don't remember any of it, because it was still nonetheless 26 credits, I think, of my 72 credits, or 96 credits, and 72 was in philosophy.
	So there's that.
	I've forgotten everything.
	That's not my strength.
	That's not my forte, and I have questions that they're going to have to answer.
	Standard, the humble brag.
	Oh, yes, I got my minor in Eastern European history with my honors in philosophy.
	The most useless honors degree imaginable.
	Except my thesis is currently sitting by my...
	I'm spitting all over the place.
	My thesis, which was called deontological consequentialism.
	One day, I think I'm going to publish that as an exclusive to locals for members.
	Publish my thesis.
	I just have to reread it and make sure there's nothing in there that's going to get me canceled in today's day and age.
	All right, peeps.
	Standard disclaimers.
	No legal advice.
	No medical advice.
	No election undermining fortification advice.
	For educational purposes only, Barnes is going to join us soon.
	But for right now, I'm going to bring in...
	Who do I bring in first?
	Alex or Alexander?
	Alexander was here first.
	I'm going to bring him in first.
	Bring in Alex.
	And when Barnes gets in, we're going to have the perfect Brady Bunch square.
	Gentlemen.
	How goes the battle?
	Well, it goes extremely well, and we're delighted to be on your programme, and thank you for the very nice things that you said about it, which were hugely appreciated, and we're delighted to be talking about the subjects we're going to be talking about today.
	And those of you who are rather stunned by my English accent, I too did a degree on East European affairs way long ago at the School of Slavonic Studies in London, so that's where I got it.
	I got education in England.
	And Alex, tell us who you are before you tell us what the Durand is.
	I'm Alex Christoforou.
	You just heard from Alexander Merkuris.
	And thank you for having us on the show again.
	This is our second sidebar, I believe.
	And go truckers.
	No doubt, go truckers.
	You're doing great.
	The government might seize our YouTube channel if anybody says any of that.
	He meant go.
	I'm joking.
	I'm not that crazy.
	YouTube channels, they won't let you travel.
	They're going to seize your bank accounts, your cryptocurrency.
	Wow.
	Wow.
	What statements from Freeland.
	Absolutely incredible.
	But you're doing great work on the streets in Canada.
	I've been following your live streams.
	Unbelievable work.
	Really, really entertaining.
	Really insightful.
	And on our end...
	Alexander, I believe we should tell everybody, happy Invasion Day.
	Because today was Invasion Day, according to the mainstream media and the Davos elite.
	Before we even get there, briefly explain.
	I know we talked about it the first time you guys were on, where we were discussing the debacle of the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
	That was an amazing, amazing discussion of that incident at the time.
	Explain what the Duran is.
	How you guys got to meet each other and what you put out by way of content.
	Alex, do you want to start this?
	Because you were there at the origin of the Duran.
	He was there before me, actually.
	I can certainly add about how we first met, but do you want to start, Alex?
	Well, you were there at the origin, but...
	Not exactly, but carry on.
	To put it real simple, we're a RealPolitik geopolitical news channel.
	We cover geopolitics.
	That includes the US.
	It includes what's going on in Canada right now.
	And it includes much of Europe and Asia.
	We focus a lot on the EU and on Russia.
	Alexander has a channel that focuses a lot on Russia and China as well.
	And we just try to cover the news from a RealPolitik perspective.
	We try to understand what's going on with many of the statements that governments are putting out and a lot of the lies that the media is also pushing.
	And we try to get to the truth of things and we try to present it in an entertaining and fun way as well.
	So that's basically what the channel is.
	I'm sorry, Robert.
	I didn't mean to bring you in so quickly.
	I was scrolling over and accidentally brought you in without being able to announce you.
	Robert, how goes the battle?
	Good, good.
	Though I was surprised, I had from a reliable source, a source so reliable that it has the word intelligence in it.
	And not only that, it's the central intelligence agency that we were supposed to have a war today.
	Apparently Putin didn't get the message.
	Today was the day of invasion.
	You know, you just type in Ukraine into YouTube.
	You'll see about 50 articles in a row of all mainstream media, CNBC, CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, saying, War imminent!
	War imminent!
	War imminent!
	But apparently Putin didn't get the telegram.
	It got delayed somewhere along the way.
	There is no invasion, but it was something, of course, that Duran has been talking about as the light as there was going to be no invasion, while our good Central Intelligence Agency manages to get something else wrong once again when it comes to war in Eastern Europe.
	Look, I know in order to get into what's going on in the Ukraine with Russia now, how far back do we have to go to contextualize it to make sense for a noob like myself?
	Who might not even understand the current geopolitical context?
	Yeah, I think if you want to understand the present crisis in Ukraine, the way to go back is, well, you can go back to the time the Soviet Union broke up, but the real point of...
	The start of this particular crisis is 2014, when there were protests in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine.
	There was a contest within Ukraine between those who supported orientation with the EU and those who supported orientation with Russia.
	The president, who was at that time in office, was a man called Yanukovych.
	Deeply corrupt, in fact, grotesquely corrupt, very incompetent, very inefficient.
	But nonetheless, he was there.
	He was trying, to some extent, to keep on both sides of the divide.
	Didn't really succeed.
	He made the EU extremely angry because he didn't act out an association agreement.
	He agreed with them.
	The result was that he got overthrown after street protests.
	Kiev, and that resulted in a major political crisis within Ukraine itself, with the regions in the east and in Crimea, where most people speak Russian, feeling that an anti-Russian, pro-EU government had come in, which they didn't like, and starting to sort of edge away, and with a government in Kiev, which is pro-EU.
	Pro-Western, viscerally anti-Russian, determined to take measures to keep them within Ukraine.
	And that led to a war in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and 2015, a war which Ukraine lost.
	It led to Crimea breaking away or being united with Russia or annexed by Russia.
	It depends which side of the fence you're on, what words you use, but Crimea left Ukraine.
	Joined Russia.
	And of course, you also had in the eastern Ukraine, a region, a former coal mining, heavy industry region.
	People there speak Russian.
	They, in fact, to a great extent, think of themselves as Russians.
	They set up independent republics there which survive with Russian protection.
	And in 2015, there was supposed to be a peace agreement negotiated in Minsk, brokered by the Germans and the French, and to some extent the Russians, which was supposed to lead a pathway towards reunification of this region in the east with the rest of Ukraine.
	But that peace agreement has never been implemented much to Russia's responsibility.
	So that's the internal conflict.
	There is an external issue as well, which...
	It cannot be underestimated in its importance, which is that the Western powers have been moving NATO eastwards.
	Ever closer to Russia's borders.
	The Russians would be getting extremely angry about this.
	They feel they were promised back at the time the Soviet Union ended that there would be no eastward expansion of NATO.
	And so far as they're concerned, the moment has now come when they feel strong enough to say so far and no further, we are not going to allow Ukraine.
	Ukraine, which was formerly part of the Soviet Union, formerly before that, then part of the Tsarist Russian Empire, to become part of NATO.
	So that's where we...
	That's the crisis at the moment.
	If I can just explain how we got there, that's a sort of quick sketch.
	To the super chat question, Lavrov actually joked about that recently, that this is what the U.S. and the West would predict.
	I mean, to give an idea of how...
	Sardonic, the approach of the Russians is to all of this insane talk of invasion.
	When Lavrov, for those who don't know, the sort of lead foreign diplomat for Russia, he actually started off with a joke and then someone said, are you going to invade?
	And he just shook his head yes and smiled and then laughed.
	So there was no plans of invasion.
	People forgot, conveniently, that this was supposed to happen last February.
	The Russians do various training.
	They call it training.
	Other people say it's provocative.
	You can make whatever interpretation you want.
	But the Russian explanation is they do various training near the Ukrainian border for a range of their own internal security reasons.
	They did it last February.
	There was all this talk.
	War was coming.
	War was coming.
	And then the soldiers left and went.
	Many of them left and went home that were just part of training.
	And, of course, that's happening again.
	They're leaving and going home.
	And, you know, parts of the Biden administration, Jake Sullivan news.
	He has his own set of problems at the moment.
	They are saying it's only because of their efforts that the invasion didn't happen right away.
	But for people to Viva's question, I mean, if you want to go back further, there are some people that blame it on the Vikings and the Kievan Rus.
	You have the Cossacks and the Tatars and others.
	But here's a good question or good point to sort of illustrate.
	Ukraine on a map as a country.
	Didn't exist before the Soviet Union.
	So the idea that there is an underlying identity that Western Ukrainians identify as Ukrainian.
	It was identified by other things before, but they really were part of Polish-Lithuania.
	That's why if you do an ethnic ancestry test, you'll find a disproportionate number of Baltic identity.
	I mean, it's the legend of Ukrainian women's beauty.
	You know, they've been doing DNA testing to kind of figure it out.
	But was, you know, high level of Balkan, high level of Baltic identification.
	And you guys will like this.
	A surprising level of Greek because of a history that goes way, way back.
	I mean, you have the steps in one side, but basically you have the river that divides the country west and east.
	And to the east, you have, for a range of reasons, some blame, you know, Russian oppression from the empress all the way back in the 1800s.
	19th century, 19th century, so forth.
	Or others blame Stalin, the Holder Moore, and all of that.
	Whatever you attribute it to, the reality today, and has been since 1990, is that basically Eastern Ukraine mostly speaks Russian, is culturally Russian, is ethnically Russian, identifies as Russian, has never identified as Ukrainian.
	And basically there's been this political fight.
	Between Western Ukraine, which was once part of Poland, right around World War I at one point, as part of the compromise that was reached.
	Western Ukraine identifies itself as Ukrainian, speaks Ukrainian, which used to be identified as a different language, is anti-Russian for a range of reasons, but unfortunately has some ugly undercurrents, including some people that were pro-Nazi and have a history of it.
	The most active neo-Nazi real movement in the world, arguably, is in Western Ukraine, in the modern world.
	And a lot of this was, and it's been this battle back and forth with corrupt oligarchs profiting in between, between the Eastern Ukrainians who want to stay identified with Russia, that's where their economic future also is more likely to be sustained, and Western Ukrainians who want to disassociate from Russia and are
	They culturally align more that way going back centuries.
	And they have their own political reasons for that.
	But I think the economic mythology is what it is.
	And I think Ukraine has passed Moldova.
	Now it's the poorest country in Europe.
	I'm not sure, but it's been getting that way.
	So you have an economically despairing region with longstanding conflicts.
	And in 2014, The Obama administration, with the aid of John McCain, and some people who are now back in power, Victoria Nuland and others, sponsored a coup is what happened.
	Blame the existing Ukrainian government for shooting on the protesters.
	Evidence later suggested that those were...
	There was at least substantial evidence of false flag in staged events, that that was not the Ukrainian leader who did so.
	And the coup overthrew the government that had decided to turn down the EU and go with Russia, because frankly it made more economic sense.
	Even George Soros admitted that, who has been very active in trying to overthrow the then existing Ukrainian government, said the EU offer was too cheap.
	And the Russian offer was more generous.
	And then as soon as they got into power, not through legitimate democratic means after the Maidan coup, they did things like ban the Russian language.
	They did things like start to honor Nazi heroes from Western Ukraine that are still celebrated in parts of Western Ukraine from the Nazi era.
	I mean, some of these guys were so bad, even the Nazis were, the Nazis, as I like to say, after Brad Pitt from Inglourious Bastards.
	We're so bad that even the Nazis thought they were, you know, that guy's a little too rough.
	So that's some of the backstory.
	I represented a client who was Jewish from Kiev who had escaped years ago and filled me in on some of that.
	The degree of Western Ukrainian anti-Semitism mixes in with anti-Russian sentiment, mixes in.
	So you have plenty of legitimate...
	We have concerns that are not anti-Semitic or just reflexively anti-Russian that really think the EU is the solution and so on and so forth.
	But you have some bad instincts and bad actors, or as Trump would say, bad hombres mixed in as well.
	And that bred the current internal conflict.
	And as Alexander says, the external conflict is the constant efforts of the West to use the old Soviet states as to undermine the power of Russia long after the Cold War.
	Why the North Atlantic Treaty Organization still exists when its sole purpose and premise for existence was the existence of the Warsaw Pact is a question that only Trump was willing to ask and then even he walked it back later because it's something that can't be discussed.
	That's some of the...
	Sort of broader backstory if we were to go through all of the different undercurrents of ethnic hostility.
	It's kind of like African colonialism where we drew maps around regions that were not natural countries where you had competing tribes and you throw in some natural resources and boom.
	But the poverty of Ukraine and the complete and utter failure of this president who got elected, Zelensky got elected on, I'm going to bring peace.
	I'm a change guy.
	I'm an outside the beltway guy.
	And then the last component that's sort of in all this mix is the Biden and Clinton and Democratic political machines and the Western grifters who saw Ukraine.
	I mean, the number one contributor to the Clinton Foundation for a substantial time period where people connected to Ukraine.
	What was the Clinton Foundation doing in Ukraine?
	They're there to help the children like Haiti, eh?
	It was very questionable histories.
	And then, of course, famously, the Biden family has all kinds of corrupt ties to Ukraine.
	It was supposed to be a...
	The grift that keeps on grifting.
	Helped the defense industry justify itself.
	Helped NATO justify itself.
	Helped get some lucrative contracts and get some extra cash for the democratic political machine.
	So that's a backstory.
	And then you have Jake Sullivan with his collateral problems getting caught spying on behalf of the Clinton campaign.
	Let me say, Robert, this is going to be, when you ask Robert for the backstory, you're going to get a history of the world.
	It'll be abbreviated.
	I'm trying to digest all this, and I want to get a few things in there.
	Alex, I don't know which part of that you would be best to speak to.
	Are you able to speak, just to summarize, except if it's the Homolidor or the Holodomor.
	The Homolidor.
	Can you elaborate for people who might not know what that is?
	Because I think there's a lot of people out there who don't even know what that is in context in history.
	Yeah, we're moving.
	I think there we're probably moving even further back.
	I would say that Alexander is probably better, better able to speak to the Holomodor.
	But everything that Robert said was just absolutely spot on.
	And I think it's it is a long explanation because even if you just go back to 2014, there is a lot about the Ukraine story that the mainstream media.
	Just does not report.
	I mean, they just shut it out, for example, some of the really nasty forces in the West.
	I mean, these guys are really, really bad.
	They never talk about Stefan Bandera.
	No one even mentions that name whatsoever.
	You know, the fact that John McCain was in the Maidan giving speeches when the protest was going on, a U.S. senator.
	Just happens to drop into Kiev to give speeches and to tell the crowds to continue to protest.
	I mean, you had protests going on for a month or two, actually maybe even three months.
	Some of the protesters, I mean, a lot of the protesters, yes, they were angry.
	They wanted to integrate more with the EU.
	But you had a lot of protesters who were provocateurs.
	And they were hijacked by the typical Soros NGOs and all these forces.
	And these guys got very, very violent.
	And what you did have, as Robert very well explained, you had a coup d 'etat.
	And isn't it funny that you had all the Western leaders from the Freelands, the Trudeaus, the Obamas, the Bidens, the McCains, cheering on this coup d 'etat, cheering on the protesters because it was all about democracy and freedom.
	You know, no one ever mentions the fact that Yanukovych, as corrupt as he was, This is a good point.
	Ever since the Soviet Union broke apart, Ukraine has not been able to get on its feet and find any sort of rhythm where Russia went through a very difficult period in the 90s.
	But once Putin got into power, Russia stabilized.
	And whether you like Putin or not, you can't deny the fact that when Putin got into power, Russia went from almost breaking apart and breaking down to becoming definitely the regional power that it is right now.
	I mean, Ukraine has not been able to find its footing because of the oligarchs, the corruption.
	That's a whole other story.
	But international observers were at those elections with Yanukovych, and he was democratically elected.
	I mean, and many of the people that elected him were the Russian speakers of the East.
	Anyway, Alexander, do you want to...
	Yes, right, now you're going back further in time.
	To the early 1930s.
	This is the time when, of course, it was the Soviet Union.
	The Soviet Union incorporated Ukraine.
	Ukraine was one of the constituent republics of the Soviet Union.
	And Stalin is going to embark on this massive industrialization program.
	He's also going to centralize power around himself.
	He's going to eliminate his opponents.
	And he's going to collectivize agriculture.
	He's going to round up all the peasants and put them in collections.
	And he does it in a way which throughout the Soviet Union, but of course especially in Ukraine, or perhaps to a great extent in Ukraine, provokes a famine.
	It causes a famine because it's done in this ruthless, brutal, also...
	Incompetent way, it's forced on people from above, it's forced on them in a way that disrupts their lives.
	Now, many people in Ukraine have come to see this famine in which millions of people died.
	There's a massive argument, by the way, about the numbers exactly, and I'm not going to go into them, but there are millions of people who died during this famine.
	Many people in Ukraine see it as a genocide.
	Because I think the New York Times, the Pulitzer Prize reporter, winning reporter of the New York Times during the 1930s, said none of that was happening, right?
	Well, that's absolutely true.
	That's completely correct.
	At that time, of course, the New York Times was very, very, or at least its reporter at the time was very sympathetic to Stalin to the Soviet Union.
	It was saying, you know, all these stories about famines in Ukraine or anywhere else in the Soviet Union are not true.
	And he even said that the famous show trials...
	In Moscow where Stalin's opponents were rounded up and executed after trials, which weren't really trials.
	Well, they were actually...
	Proper trials and fairly conducted and those sorts of things.
	So, you know, when we read the New York Times today, let's remember that there is a history there.
	I think the name of that reporter was a man called Durant, but perhaps Robert remembers him better.
	Anyway, the fact is the holodomol, the famine in Ukraine caused by the collectivisation.
	Was perceived by many people in Ukraine, or is perceived today by many people in Ukraine, as a deliberate genocide by Stalin of the Ukrainians.
	The idea being that he wanted to smash the Ukrainians in order to wipe out their identity and basically centralise the whole power structure within...
	The Soviet Union in and around himself and imposed a kind of Russian identity on Ukraine.
	This is very, very strongly disputed in Russia.
	The Russians say, well, we suffered the famine too.
	There were famines in every part of the Soviet Union.
	It also particularly badly affected the Republic of what is today Kazakhstan.
	And this is a matter, I think, best left to historians.
	The important thing to say is It is something that people in Ukraine today talk about and remember, and it is part of the reason, or it is part of the argument that you hear from Ukrainians about what has distanced them from Russia.
	So that's what the Holodomor is.
	And a little further historical addendum, it goes back also to the Cossacks.
	Which were big within a region of Ukraine, being in constant conflict with the Russian Empire.
	And this is actually referenced briefly in a James Bond film, of all things, the one with Pierce Brosnan.
	And so there's history upon history upon history.
	It was a joke that someone made when they visited the U.S. They said they love the U.S., but they wanted to get back to a place that was a little more than 200 years old.
	It's just here conflicts can go back, you know, centuries in some cases or be further informed or inflamed as the case may be because of it.
	Indeed.
	And can I just say the Cossacks, some of the Cossacks are, of course, in Ukraine.
	Some of them are in Russia.
	So the Zaporozhian Cossacks, who spoke up particularly badly, were in what is today Ukraine.
	But, of course, Don Cossacks are just across.
	The border in Russia, in the city of Rostov, which our Foreign Secretary, List Trust, our British Foreign Secretary, has never heard of, apparently, even though it's bigger than any city in Britain, apart from London.
	But anyway, I hope that answers those questions.
	I've got to get two out because I don't want to avoid the ugly ones.
	First of all, man with books and wallpaper.
	Dangerous.
	It is a beautiful backdrop you have there.
	Two questions.
	There was a movement at one point to try to recognize the Holodomor as a genocide, or as a, call it a genocide, and there was opposition on the basis that it wasn't genocide, it was a famine.
	The flip side to that was it was a deliberate famine, therefore it should be a genocide.
	Then there's the argument that it was communist-induced, therefore there's, I'll ask the tough question, a Jewish connection.
	Because, you know, the Jewish leaders of communism and then tying that into the New York Times running propaganda for communist Russia.
	Yes.
	Can you elaborate on those questions?
	Very, very quickly.
	I mean, first of all, the Jewish thing we can completely dispense with, because, of course, this was Stalin.
	He was he was a Georgian.
	It was the Soviet government.
	It was a communist government.
	They had a policy of collectivization.
	Now, many people in Ukraine are convinced that this famine was deliberate in terms of Ukraine, that it was directed at them, it was intended to destroy their ideas.
	Now, I think that there has been a fierce argument, a debate about this.
	I will simply state my own view here.
	I go with those historians who think that what was driving Stalin was more a communist...
	Will to smash independent farmers.
	People that the Soviets called kulaks, in other words, farmers who own their own land, to put them all together in collective farms because they saw private property relations in the countryside as a threat to the ideology, to the system, the socialist, centrally planned system that they were intent on creating.
	So I think that this is more a...
	Class-oriented, socialist, Soviet, communist project than in any way an ethnic genocide-type project.
	And there are lots of arguments about this.
	There's no agreement, and people in Ukraine have their opinions, which they're entitled to have, and there are people in Russia who disagree with those arguments.
	These arguments are real.
	They're strongly felt on each side.
	As I said, I have my views, but one can't impose them.
	Eventually, in time, no doubt, some kind of understanding of this process will gradually be achieved.
	But for what it's worth, my own view, as I said, is that it's a communist policy centrally imposed by Stalin as he's seeking to mould...
	The entire Soviet Union into his socialist concept with himself in full control.
	And with famine and all those kinds of problems that you saw in Ukraine also happening in every other part of the Soviet Union, including Russia itself.
	Evidence for that is that he did it to everybody, didn't matter where you were.
	If you were part of that class, you got oppressed by Stalin.
	Initially, they were saying they wouldn't do it.
	Then they shifted, of course, and did do it.
	Alex, what do you make?
	I am still startled by the approach.
	I get some of the State Department folks, etc.
	But people on the right, like Senator Ted Cruz, people like that dimwit.
	Football coach, Senator from Alabama, Tuberville, who's only in there because Trump was too bitter at his own decision and decided to blame it on Sessions.
	But who's out there yipping about how Putin just wants to recreate the USSR.
	And the whole goal is to recreate the USSR.
	And that's why he wants all of Ukraine.
	One, can you respond to that?
	And second, I guess it's shocking to me that people still...
	Ignorant they are, not only in the history of Ukraine, but truly don't understand Putin.
	You can like him, you can hate him, but you have to at least understand him.
	And they show no ability or capability to do so.
	Yeah, I think there's definitely an inability to understand Putin.
	Sometimes I think people try to understand Putin too much, and they create this caricature of some sort of grandmaster chess player, super villain, a Bond-like super villain.
	He's nothing of...
	Of the sort.
	As a matter of fact, it's really easy to understand where Russia is coming from and what Putin is saying and what he's thinking because, and Alexander will definitely confirm this, the Kremlin puts out a lot of statements and a lot of readouts that are very specific and very thorough and explain exactly their intentions and they put them out.
	You know, daily, sometimes hourly.
	I mean, when Putin has a phone call with the leader, they put out the transcript, and it's very clear to understand how Russia sees things.
	And, you know, the Russians don't miss words.
	They're very straightforward and to the point.
	But what's happened is that the West has created this caricature of a person.
	And, you know, Putin...
	And the team around Putin, because it's just not Putin, it's Lavrov, it's Peskov, it's Shoiku.
	He has a very capable and good team around him in the Kremlin.
	They take advantage of this caricature-like image as well.
	You know, it's happened in Ukraine.
	The Russians have used this imaginary fake invasion to get a ton of concessions from NATO, from the United States, from the West.
	So, I mean, they understand what's going on as well.
	They see the media.
	They see what CNN is saying.
	They see what MSNBC is saying, what CBC is saying, and they use it to their advantage.
	They play it up.
	But it's not difficult to understand Putin or Russia or what Putin wants as leader of Russia.
	He doesn't want to recreate the Soviet Union.
	There's no need to recreate the Soviet Union.
	Russia voluntarily left the Soviet Union.
	Russia doesn't need any more land.
	God knows it has enough land already.
	They have nothing to gain from Ukraine, from an invasion of Ukraine or an occupation of Ukraine.
	Absolutely nothing to gain.
	There's no oil there.
	Russia has enough food.
	It has enough everything to survive, more than any other country in the world.
	So it doesn't need that headache.
	Russia's intentions are very clear.
	We don't want NATO to expand any further to Ukraine in much the same way, as you've said many times as well, Robert, in much the same way that you wouldn't want Mexico having Russian missiles.
	There, or China having missiles in Mexico, we don't want the same.
	If you look at Russia over the past 20 years, they've actually been very soft on NATO expansion.
	You know, NATO has expanded further and further to its borders, and it is on its borders right now.
	It's on its western borders when you look at the Baltic nations.
	Russia doesn't want a NATO expansion to the south.
	They don't want Ukraine.
	They don't want Georgia in NATO, and it's very understandable to see their position.
	And Putin has said it.
	He says, why can't you guys understand?
	He said it like about a month ago, I believe, when he was having one of his marathon press conferences, a BBC or a Sky News reporter asked him the question, and Putin was clear.
	What is there not to understand?
	We don't want NATO expanding further, especially to our southern border.
	Is it that hard to understand that?
	It really isn't hard to understand.
	They have security interests, period.
	Alexander, can you give a little bit of the history of NATO in the sense that promises that Jim Baker and others made to the Soviet Union of, hey, don't worry if you give up all your satellite powers.
	We won't be coming anywhere near your border anytime soon.
	And where the Russian historical concern comes from about Europe invading it.
	Yeah, well, let's deal with the second first because this is, of course, the root issue from the Russians.
	What they have tended to see since the 18th century, when Russia first became a major European power, is that when European states come together in groupings, what invariably happens or seems invariably to happen is that that European grouping ends up...
	Confronting Russia.
	And Russia has had to experience a series of major invasions from the West.
	It experienced it during the Napoleonic Wars, when Napoleon marched all the way to Moscow.
	And we all know what happened, but it was very devastating for the Russians.
	You can read War and Peace, Tolstoy's book.
	It describes it all quite well.
	And then, of course, there was the First World War, and then there was the Second World War.
	So the Russians, very much like the British, by the way, because the British also have these concerns.
	These two countries on the periphery of Europe have always been very wary of seeing European combinations coming together and at the same time...
	Approaching or encroaching their borders, because they've had extremely bad and devastating experiences from this.
	And, of course, the worst one of all, by far, is the Second World War, when the Germans got almost to Moscow, where tens of millions of people in Russia died, and it remains an extremely vivid memory.
	And then, of course, after the Second World War, there was the Cold War.
	NATO was created.
	As an alliance that was supposed, in the words of a British official, Lord Izmi, who became the first Secretary General of NATO, he said that the purpose of NATO is to keep America in Europe, Russia out of Europe, and Germany down.
	So it was, in effect, created to sort of secure the position.
	of certain European states.
	They are able to persuade the United States to become involved in order to keep the Russians, the Soviets, as they then were at bay, and at the same time to keep Germany under control.
	And that was NATO's purpose, its founding purpose, which is successfully achieved during the Cold War.
	At the end of the Cold War, the Soviet Union broke up as a result of major political changes which took place within the Soviet Union.
	As Alex correctly said, Russia decided that it didn't want to be part of the Soviet Union anymore.
	People tend to forget it was Russia that took the initiative to break up the Soviet Union because they wanted to pursue programs of democratization, economic reform.
	They wanted to cast off communism.
	And all of that involved.
	But at the same time, they wanted security and space on their Western borders.
	So in return for their pullbacks from Central and West Eastern Europe, with all their satellite states that Stalin had created and all these great armies that the Soviets had positioned there, and in Germany itself.
	In return for their agreement for Germany to reunify, for Germany to join NATO, they gained these promises, or they obtained these promises, but they were only verbal promises from various Western officials, Jim Baker being, of course, the most important.
	He was the Secretary of State.
	They promised NATO would not move an inch east.
	It would not come.
	Any closer to Russia's borders once Germany was unified.
	And that was repeated, by the way.
	That was reinforced in further promises, as we now know, that were given in the early years of the Clinton administration.
	And of course, those promises were then broken because Bill Clinton, for reasons which I suspect have much more to do with US domestic politics than anything else, decided to go.
	Back on all those promises and he began this process of moving NATO eastwards, closer, ever closer to Russia's borders in a way that the Russians feel violated, in fact, which did, in fact, violate the promises which they were given at the end of the Cold War and which had been essential.
	To persuade the Russians at that time to make some of the moves, which they did.
	Alex, I think this question might be more for you, but between the two of you, let me know.
	Just so we can know who Putin is as an individual.
	I pulled up an image of him on the horse because it's one of the iconic images.
	Not to be glib or make fun.
	Who is Putin?
	What's his upbringing?
	I think we all hear that he was in the KGB.
	What's his...
	Who is he?
	Where did he come from?
	What was his upbringing in order to understand maybe his interests currently?
	By the way, Viva, Putin is probably a little shorter than you are.
	I wouldn't even dare say it because I might get bigger problems than having my bank account frozen.
	Even if he is, he's broad-chested.
	He might be more ripped than me.
	I'm going to check that up, Robert, in a second.
	But yeah, Alex or Alexander?
	Like, who is he?
	What's his upbringing?
	Where did he come from?
	While I go check his height.
	Alexander's going to love to answer this question.
	And I am going to give this off to Alexander because I enjoy listening to you explain who Putin is, where he came from.
	But I just want to say one thing, what Alexander said with regards to NATO.
	Recent history has freaked out Putin.
	And has freaked out the Russians as far as what NATO has done.
	Olaf Scholz was in Moscow and he met with Putin just yesterday.
	And Olaf Scholz said, the chancellor of Germany, he said, you know, we have to do everything in our power, I'm paraphrasing, everything in our power to prevent a European war.
	It would be catastrophic.
	We can never let this happen.
	And Putin sat there and he listened to him and Putin is...
	He is a man of history.
	I mean, you know, he's very well read and he understands his history.
	And he understands his recent history.
	And he just kind of looked at all of Schultz, the Chancellor of Germany, and he said, we've already had a European war, a devastating European war.
	That's when NATO bombed Belgrade, Serbia.
	I mean, you look at a map, Serbia is in the heart of Europe.
	That was Bill Clinton.
	Bill Clinton bombed Serbia for 74 nights.
	Of course, there's a lot of reasons why did he do it.
	Many people thought it was because of the Monica Lewinsky BJs in the Oval Office.
	Other people thought he did it for other reasons.
	I'm sure it's a combination of many things.
	But nonetheless, Bill Clinton, perhaps in order to distract from his domestic issues, he launched a war against Serbia.
	And that was NATO.
	Look at Afghanistan.
	Many people think that Afghanistan was a U.S. operation.
	It was a NATO operation.
	Libya.
	I know Libya freaked the hell out of the Russians, out of Putin.
	Not only out of the Russians, but also out of the North Koreans.
	When they saw what NATO did to Gaddafi, after Gaddafi gave up his chemical weapons, they saw what they did to him, which was very, very brutal.
	And it was caught on video.
	You don't have to like Gaddafi, but catching it on video, seeing what happened to him, and then seeing Hillary Clinton.
	On 60 Minutes, laughing and cackling, we came, we saw he died, and they were laughing about it.
	That freaked the hell out of the Russians, and the North Koreans have said the same thing.
	That's why the North Koreans said, we're not going to give up our nuclear weapon projects.
	Are you kidding?
	We're going to give those up, and we're going to have a Gaddafi happen to us.
	They don't want that.
	So the Russians...
	Have seen everything that has happened in Syria, in Afghanistan, in Libya, with Yugoslavia, with Serbia.
	And when Joe Biden gives a speech like he gave the other day and he says, people of Russia, you don't have to fear us.
	We don't mean you any harm.
	The Russians sit back and they look at Biden.
	This bumbling potato head president of the United States.
	I say president.
	They look at him and they say, okay, yeah, right, whatever.
	NATO is not going to do us any harm.
	We believe you, Joe.
	No problem.
	And they know that it's all BS.
	They know it because they've seen what's happened in just the past 20 years.
	Anyway, Alexander, do you want to...
	Hold on a second.
	Before we get to Alexander, let me just share a screen for one more second.
	Now that I figured out how to do it...
	I love doing it.
	Let me bring this up.
	Vladimir Putin.
	How tall is Vladimir Putin?
	Cora.
	Why is Putin so small?
	By the way, Vladimir Putin, 1 meter 68. He's officially taller than me.
	I'm going to bring that down.
	I weigh more than him, but he's taller than me.
	Okay, sorry.
	Alexander, please tell us about the...
	Infamous Vladimir Putin.
	The infamous Vladimir Putin.
	Well, he is from St. Petersburg, and that's important, because St. Petersburg is the most Western and European of Russian cities.
	And for a very, very long time, he was politically very oriented to the West.
	He speaks German.
	We'll come to that.
	He speaks a little English as well, apparently.
	And when he became leader of Russia...
	He very much wanted to build close relations with the West, with Western Europe, with Germany, with France.
	And indeed, he was on good terms at that time.
	He wanted to be on good terms with the United States because partly he comes from this very westernised city in Russia.
	But it's also a city which suffered very terribly during the Second World War, where there was a...
	Terrible siege where something like 900,000 people died of famine.
	That's about a third of the population.
	It's a city that's very haunted and very, very, you know...
	He's scarred by war and where there's very vivid memories of war.
	And he came from a working-class family.
	They lived, as was often the way in St. Petersburg at that time.
	They lived in, you know, apartments which were divided up amongst many families.
	You know, one room would be one family, another room would be another, and they'd have to share bathrooms and kitchens and that kind of thing.
	So he had a tough...
	Start to his life.
	But he eventually got interested in sport.
	He got into St. Petersburg University, which is one of the top universities in St. Petersburg.
	He studied law there and he is a trained lawyer.
	This is something which is not very well understood because most people don't realize that Putin is a man with a legal training and a legal background and a very educated man.
	And he was recruited into the KGB, which is that typical type of Russian bureaucratic organisation.
	It was a vast, sprawling organisation, which did lots of things.
	It spied on people, it had secret police aspects, it did a lot of border controls, but it did lots of other things too.
	And eventually he was posted.
	As a lawyer to East Germany, to Dresden, where he didn't do any kind of intelligence work.
	This is a myth.
	He was never a spy, according to what people say.
	He was never a secret policeman.
	He was a lawyer who worked in the back office.
	And he was successful there.
	But when the Soviet Union collapsed, he was reposted to St. Petersburg.
	He became involved in Russian liberal politics.
	He was at that time still a member of the Communist Party, but many people in Russia were.
	But he became involved in liberal politics.
	He met a man called Sobchak.
	Sobchak became the liberal mayor.
	Of St. Petersburg.
	And he appointed Putin to be deputy mayor, which in effect meant that Putin was running a lot of the administration in St. Petersburg.
	And by all accounts, this is the chaotic time of the 1990s.
	He did it quite well.
	And when Sobchak lost an election, Putin had by this point got noticed by various people in Moscow.
	And they brought him to Moscow.
	They gave him a post in the government.
	He was then appointed to head the FSB, which is one of the agencies which the former KGB was broken up into.
	And this is the entity that basically deals with counterespionage.
	It's a kind of...
	If you like, it fulfills some of the same sort of things that the FBI does in the United States.
	So it's always dangerous to make too many analogies between Russian organizations and American ones.
	Anyway, go on.
	Because if I can make one analogy.
	So KGB is like FBI, CIA.
	And when you say that Putin was a lawyer for the KGB.
	Is he a lawyer like Clinesmith for the KGB CIA?
	Is he a corrupt individual working for a corrupt intelligence institution?
	No.
	Well, lots of corruption in the KGB.
	Lots of corruption in the Soviet Union at that time.
	Lots of corruption in Russia.
	The thing about Putin was that he was never corrupt.
	And that was one of the things about him that people noticed and why he...
	Got promoted and got trusted.
	So it was an unusual thing about him.
	And it was very much something that people noticed about him.
	He never became, he never enriched himself at this time.
	And the other thing was, what did he do?
	Well, from what I've been able to work out, what people have told me, his major issue was logistics.
	He was basically there to sort of do the contracts and to do the logistical side of things.
	He was never, as I said, involved in any kind of surveillance operations or things of that kind.
	So he's not a Clinesmith character.
	And I think that's an important point to make.
	He wasn't important enough in the KGB to have that kind of role.
	He wasn't even in the KGB for very long.
	He was somebody who did his job well.
	He got noticed.
	He went to St. Petersburg.
	He became deputy mayor.
	He was appointed by Yeltsin to be director of the FSB precisely because he was not beholden to any of the corrupt businessmen who were running things in Russia at that time, the oligarchs.
	And so he was seen as somebody who could stay neutral.
	And then, of course, There was a big power struggle in Russia, connected very much to the Yugoslav wars.
	At the conclusion of it, Yeltsin left and through processes which to this day are unclear, but in which it seems that...
	All sorts of people in the military and all kinds of other people like that basically put pressure on Yeltsin and the decision was made that Yeltsin had to go and they had to find somebody to step in.
	So they found this person, Putin, who was well-liked, well-respected.
	He wasn't seen as corrupt, but nobody expected that he would become...
	That he would still be there 22 years later.
	This is in 1999.
	And that he'd become Russia's leader.
	So he's somebody who emerged out of the bureaucracy, emerged very fast, came from Russia's most westernised city, is highly educated, went to one of Russia's top universities, speaks German because he was posted in Germany, knows the West or knew the West.
	And who had a reputation for extreme competence and who thinks and behaves like a lawyer.
	And when you see the way he interacts with Western leaders and the kind of way that he runs Russia, you see the legal training is extremely important in the way that he operates, in the way that he gets things done.
	And in the way in which he prepares his responses, you could see him in some ways very much like an advocate.
	He's very organized in the way he puts his points across.
	He's very structured and very clear.
	And that is very much, I think, a hallmark of his legal training.
	A good point by the super chatter.
	Two of the things I found most revelatory, to add on to Alexander's point about the significance of the Great War, particularly St. Petersburg, then known as Leningrad, was how impactful it was.
	There was a Russian documentary on Putin that was very interesting, where when he described what his family went through.
	You could tell it was defining to who he is, that if you really want to understand Putin, understand what happened to Leningrad during the siege, what happened to the people there, and listen to his story about his mother and father.
	It built a deep-seated patriotism, but also not a desire for war, but a deep fear of it coming to his doorstep.
	And what it can mean.
	When I took a tour of St. Petersburg, it's defining to them to this day.
	It's the Great War for them.
	Not World War I or World War II.
	It's just the Great War.
	And they have memorials where you go to football fields where people are buried under those football fields in different months.
	And it's like this one.
	And it just goes on and on and on and on.
	Take 9-11 and imagine it happening every day for three years straight and being a New Yorker.
	Just knowing the people in New York, the trauma that 9-11 visited on one day.
	Imagine that for three years and you kind of have a sense for what the impact was on St. Petersburg.
	That gives a sense of it.
	Another point as to someone who is the real sort of maybe mischievous manipulator, Mr. Born George Schwartz, now known to the world as George Soros.
	Alex, like one guy who was very happy to be very eagerly involved in Russia in the 90s.
	Who, after Putin rose, found himself kicked to the curb and Putin was one of the first high-profile international figures on the global stage to be highly critical of Soros.
	And then later on, Hungary and other countries have come along.
	Could you explain now why certain parts of Eastern Europe, like...
	Soros is heavily involved in Ukraine.
	He's all over Ukraine.
	He's very public about his role in Ukraine, of stirring up trouble, of sponsoring the Maidan coup.
	He's proud of it.
	He calls it, you know, democratic protest, revolution, all that jazz.
	Though he has an interesting definition of democracy if you ask him twice.
	But could you explain to people why is Soros hated in parts of Russia and Eastern and Central Europe?
	Yeah, the NGOs.
	That he runs.
	Everyone knows that he's the regime change guy, but it's his open society foundation and the things that they want to bring to these countries.
	And the people just don't want any of it.
	I mean, for lack of a better word, it is that open society woke kind of ideology that George Soros and his organizations, their goal is to bring that to the countries that they operate in.
	The countries in Eastern Europe, whether you are looking at Poland or Hungary or Russia, even though Poland and Russia have many, many differences, on this, they align very, very well.
	They don't want that stuff in their country, but that is George Soros.
	And George Soros, when he goes in to control the countries, because there's always some sort of financial angle or financial gain.
	He goes in there under the guise of these open society, NGO, university type of structures for where he can come in and then do his money manipulation, whatever other business deals he has going on.
	But it's those NGOs and those universities that are very destructive to the society, to the societies that they operate in.
	And when you look at a country like Russia, for example, It is a country that has rediscovered its culture and its tradition from 70 years under communism and under the Soviet rule.
	I believe that the statistics say that four churches are built, I mean, I may be wrong, maybe a day or a week in Russia now.
	I mean, it is going through a revival of religion, culture, patriotism.
	And a lot of it is due not only to Putin, but to the fact that they came out of communism and they see themselves once again on the world stage.
	They see themselves as confident and strong and they want to show that.
	They're proud of their country.
	They don't want the Saudis coming in and dismantling that again.
	They understand that.
	They see it.
	You know, when you go to Russia and they look at what's happening in the West, They look at it and they're kind of like, we've already been there.
	We've already done that.
	We don't want that again.
	We don't want that stuff anywhere near us.
	We don't want the Soros ideology, the woke ideology, the post-modernism.
	We just don't want it.
	We went through it for 70 years.
	And you'll get the same reaction from people in Russia, from people in Poland, from people in Hungary.
	I was in Poland recently and it's the same exact thing.
	They don't want any of it.
	And they all understand that.
	You know, behind it all is that figure of George Soros.
	Now, is George Soros the mastermind of it all?
	Who knows?
	But we all know that the Open Society Foundation, all the organizations that he runs, and the universities, you know, they have a lot to do with it.
	I mean, you know, Orban has pretty much vanquished George Soros from Hungary.
	And look at the hell that they're giving Orban.
	Orban's a dictator.
	Orban's this.
	Orban's that.
	You know, the European Union, of which Hungary's a part of, goes after Orban.
	And they call him a dictator.
	It's just outrageous stuff.
	But why do they do that?
	Because of George Soros.
	And when you look at all the EU MPs, who funds them?
	Who gives them the money when they're campaigning?
	Who's put them in office?
	George Soros and his NGOs.
	They always seem to be behind everything, whether it's Maidan, whether it's the election of certain officials, whatever it is, you can always trace it back somehow to George Soros and one of his hundreds of organizations.
	And someone had jokingly said in the chat, YouTube's not going to like this conversation.
	I went to check monetization status.
	We've just gone yellow-lighted.
	It might have happened before.
	But while we're there, who wants to field George Soros' history?
	Because I know it.
	I don't want to give it because I might be accused of whatever bias.
	George Soros has been accused of being a Yahtzee collaborator.
	He was a 13-year-old kid when it happened.
	But between Alex Alexander and Robert, who wants to give...
	The history, the brief history of George Soros.
	I'll do a brief one and then transfer it to Alexander.
	Soros got his education there in good London, from the London School of Economics, and maybe more than that, though he returned the favor by famously betting, making a billion dollars, sinking the British pound for a little while.
	But, you know, I mean, I did a hush-hush episode at vivabornslaw.locals.com about dear George Soros.
	I think some of you were thrown off because I said it's the story of George Schwartz because that's his birth name.
	But, you know, what I think Soros reflected in this be a thought to Alexander is a broader history of a battle between internationalism and nationalism, religion and sort of anti-religious beliefs, because the only guy that Soros hated more than Trump is Putin.
	He's been more obsessed with those two people than probably anybody in his...
	Entire sort of public career.
	And part of that is, you listen, he hates anybody that's nationalistic, just hates nationalism, period.
	Now, some of that was legitimately born out of World War II, and some of it was misplaced, I believe, after World War II.
	But the other is, he described himself.
	He said his family, though Jewish, was anti-Semitic.
	And what he meant by that is just they're anti-religious.
	And they are part of different internationalist groups.
	And it's this old dispute within Europe, which really you have the elites on one side and the working class on the other.
	But Alexander would be best suited to discuss how Soros fits into that internationalist, nationalist, pro-religion, anti-religion camps.
	Well, I will just say one quick thing about Soros specifically, which is, in some ways, I find him a much more difficult person to find out things about than I do about Putin.
	Putin is somebody who's actually very easy to trace his life, his career, to read his opinions.
	He pours out things.
	I mean, you know, as Alex said, his website churns out material all the time.
	He makes speeches.
	He's very clear about his views.
	He's not difficult to work out.
	Soros is much more difficult to work out.
	He's somebody who's lived a lot of his life, well, I wouldn't say exactly in the shadows, but not exactly, you know, right at centre.
	I'd also say something, which is that until the 90s, I, and I was somebody who, you know, was quite interested in things, but I'd never heard of him.
	I mean, you know, he was presumably a well-known financier and business person in the US, but suddenly he seems to become immensely powerful and very, very rich in ways that, you know, I don't completely understand exactly how it came about.
	But let's not talk about Taurus.
	I mean, the ideology, the ideological clash is exactly what Robert says, because we've had this major conflict in Europe.
	Europe is a continent made up of different nations and different states.
	And these nations have often fought each other.
	Some of these wars have been extremely difficult and very, very, very ferocious.
	So there is that sort of sentiment that states that nationalism, that patriotism is something to be very suspicious of.
	And not just that, but also everything that seemed to go together with patriotism.
	Because, of course, people who tend to be patriotic, tend to be religious, tend to be conservative.
	All of these things become suspect in the eyes of some people who are opposed to those things and see these as somehow threatening.
	The other thing is...
	you know, financial matters, gets...
	He doesn't like to have, let's say, regulations that might interfere in his involvement in the Russian property market, for example, or his ability to acquire shares in companies like Gazprom and things of that kind.
	And what Soros has done is that he's defined this sort of internationalist conception.
	His ideology, with all the things that go with it, with this belief that people like himself should be free to operate in the way that he likes to operate, doing things, you know, buying shares, speculating against currencies, doing those sorts of things.
	And he calls that...
	He calls this the open society.
	This is what he believes the open society is.
	And this is the ideology, if you like, that he's promoted.
	It's open for George to rule.
	There's a reason why people sometimes find the contradiction of Soros.
	In that he was a very virulent anti-communist.
	That goes back to the communists raiding Budapest, raping his mother.
	There is a history there.
	And some people are confused because he will sponsor organizations that have clear Marxist orientations.
	But he sees it as a way to...
	He has creative chaos.
	His theory of reflexivity that he borrowed from others is that you can create your own reality.
	And he says this is why his financial market planning works so well.
	One of the first hedge fund guys here in the United States.
	But the but it goes.
	But, you know, his ideology most reflected in that CNN interview where he doesn't understand someone questioning him about why he has no guilt over him watching Jewish property get looted with his is not Nazi colluding godfather.
	And he finds it weird that he won't ask the question because his father, who was an escapee himself from Russia after the First World War, believed in survival above all things.
	But the sort of best illustration of all this is that Soros, when people say, what organization do you think is best suited to really help govern the future of world problems?
	It gives you an idea of where he thinks bankers and financiers like him should run the world.
	That's what he means.
	Open society for Soros and the Soroses to rule the world.
	Open for them to rule the world.
	That's what he really means by Democracy.
	Occasionally gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
	But the other thing is, to Alexander's point, very true, he has mostly avoided the limelight.
	People have pointed out, to Alex's point, that his fund has gone up the most after he started his...
	Charities, kind of like Bill Gates, by the way.
	Magical how that can work together sometimes.
	Or the Clintons.
	Yes, exactly.
	Individual wealth just rises with their charitable foundations.
	That's a unique pattern.
	But I think that the degree, it's backfired on him because even in his home country of Hungary, they passed laws just to criticize George Soros.
	It's that kind of mindset and mentality, and the same is true.
	Parts of Poland, the same is true in parts of Ukraine, the same is true heavily in Russia.
	But that broader mindset, the other thing is, can you get to how much this is also about The EU experiment versus independent countries.
	That the EU experiment really hasn't worked the way it was pitched, particularly to the poorer parts of the world.
	I think Peter Hitchens described the EU as Germany actually won the war after all, and German domination by other means when he was arguing for Brexit.
	Famously, Soros tried to stop Brexit with lots of money spent.
	It didn't work, ultimately, because of that old British blue-collar skepticism of European engagement, involvement, and intertwinement, which used to be true here in the United States, to stay out of these foreign wars.
	But can you describe how much the background of this also is the EU, that the EU really hasn't worked in the way it's pitched or promoted, particularly to poorer countries, and yet the Soroses of the world are attached to it as an ultimate objective?
	Well, can I just say about the EU, of course, what the EU began as, or at least what it was initially sold as in the 1950s, was a free trade area, a free trade grouping within Europe.
	Old Europe, France, Germany, Italy, the Benelux countries, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg.
	And the idea was that they would all trade with each other, that it would be some kind of alliance, if you like, between French light industry and agriculture and German heavy industry.
	This was the sort of foundational message.
	And the idea was if you all wear trade together, well, that will make you much more prosperous because trade is a good thing.
	And at the same time, it will mean that there's less prospect of war.
	And it was very, very popular.
	I mean, I can remember in the 60s, my memory goes back that far, and the 70s, how very popular in Europe it was because people attributed the post-war boom in Europe very much to the...
	what was then called the European Economic Community.
	But, of course, within the European Economic Community, there was always this project that we don't actually just have a community of nations that trade with each other, with sort of trade frameworks that they have to organise.
	There was always this idea that you have to go further than this.
	You have to create a centralised structure, one with a...
	Powerful centre in Brussels, and that that powerful centre will then regulate not just trade, but increasingly politics, and will then evolve into something of a much more political nature.
	And we know that those ideas were there right from the outset, that many of the people who were involved in creating the...
	European Economic Community, the EU, wanted it to go that direction right from the beginning.
	And what eventually happened was that the machinery to create this sort of combined European political economic superstructure was completed.
	At the end of the 1990s, and launched with the start of the European currency, the euro, we have the European Parliament, which supposedly functions as a kind of parliament, and we have the EU Commission, which functions as a kind of government.
	Except, of course, that it never really worked like that, because...
	Firstly, what initially happened is that this system came to be dominated by the most powerful country within the EU, which was Germany, which for a very long time was able to run the system for its own interests.
	Even Germany, I think, is now finding that it's becoming more of a straitjacket than a benefit.
	But when you create a system like this by stealth...
	Because, as Robert said, European working classes, like working class people everywhere, like most people everywhere, deeply patriotic, very committed to their nation states, very committed to their political systems, which are, if you like, which are, you know, their mechanism for democracy.
	They would never have supported the creation of such a superstructure.
	So the superstructure was created by stealth without real democratic consent behind it.
	And it has never worked properly because it is dysfunctional, because it has never really been designed either as a proper federal state in the way that the United States is, the people of Europe.
	Don't want that.
	But at the same time, it cannot tolerate strong states and strong governments within the system because they might challenge the EU centre.
	Now, this very dysfunctional entity that the European Union has become, a little bit like NATO, it is part of its purpose to expand.
	It doesn't want to have Russia inside it because, of course, Russia is far too big, far too powerful.
	Many people are skeptical about whether Russia should even be considered European.
	So it doesn't want Russia inside it.
	It wants to include everything else apart from Russia.
	Every other European country, apart from Russia, it also wants Ukraine.
	Very much it wants to see Ukraine, part of the EU.
	And, of course, it's also become very closely aligned with that other big Brussels-based bureaucracy, which is NATO.
	If we go back to the issue of Ukraine, NATO and the EU, in creating that crisis back in 2014, worked in lockstep.
	And just as Ukraine is a NATO crisis, it's also an EU crisis.
	And at the same time, the promise that was made to Ukrainians is if you join the EU, you'll become Europeans, you will achieve German and French.
	Levels of prosperity and affluence, except of course that because this system is dysfunctional and doesn't allow governments to work properly.
	The EU itself, the countries of the EU, are becoming less affluent.
	Their economies are becoming ever less efficient.
	There is increasing lack of competitiveness.
	We've never set up any kind of successful high-tech companies.
	We have no big social media companies in Europe in contrast to the United States, for example.
	And we're losing competitiveness.
	We're losing economic dynamism.
	We have a dysfunctional system.
	And of course, it's also in need of an ideology.
	So if we come back to Mr Soros, we've, of course, to some extent, borrowed aspects of his.
	So it's a sort of peculiar structure, difficult to describe, but one which is, in my opinion, pulling down Europe.
	And which has been creating crises all over the European periphery, in Ukraine, in the Balkans, in relations with Britain, in relations with Turkey.
	Every single big country that surrounds the EU is on bad terms with it.
	Now, this will be a question for Alex, I guess.
	For those who don't know, NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
	Who's in it?
	Who's not in it?
	And looking at my notes, what is NATO's interest in the Ukraine, in Russia?
	What's the divergence with who's in NATO, who's not in NATO, and what those political, geographic, and resource interests are?
	If that's not too big of a question.
	Who's in NATO?
	Pretty much all of...
	All of Europe, as you know it.
	I mean, give or take a couple of countries.
	And those countries that are not in NATO, for example, a country like, let's say, Sweden, for example, they have certain agreements with NATO as well.
	So they may not be a member of the alliance.
	But they are aligned with NATO.
	NATO kind of goes hand in hand with the EU.
	I would say if you look at the EU as the political system, NATO can be looked at as, say, the military arm of the European Union with the United States involved in NATO, which the United States carries 75-80% of the burden.
	I mean, the countries that actually pay the correct amount to NATO's military budget are...
	A handful of countries, Greece being one of them, where I am right now, Greece is one of the countries that surpassed, I believe, the 3% of the GDP into NATO.
	Most countries, including Germany, don't even come close to that.
	But NATO is pretty much all the countries, if you look at all the countries in Europe, big or small, whether you're looking at the Polans, the Germanys, or even the smaller countries, say, in the Balkans or in these areas, they're all in NATO.
	Serbia is not, even though NATO is trying to pull Serbia in, as is the EU, but for various reasons.
	As we outlined at the beginning of the video.
	I don't think they'll ever go to NATO, given what NATO did to them.
	But Russia, obviously, is a country that is not in NATO.
	NATO, to me, is very much a business without a product at this moment in time.
	I mean, it doesn't have any purpose to exist.
	It did have a purpose.
	Back in the Cold War of the Soviet Union, and whether you looked at the Warsaw Pact and what NATO's purpose was then.
	Now it doesn't have a purpose.
	Its purpose, like Alexander said when he was talking about the EU, is literally just to expand and to exist.
	Its purpose is to find reasons to exist.
	And what was a defensive organization in the past 10, 20 years is without a doubt an offensive organization.
	It is an aggressor.
	It was on the defense.
	And that was its purpose.
	Now it is very much on the offense.
	And you saw that, as I said, in Serbia, whether you looked at Afghanistan, whether you looked at Libya, NATO is the aggressor.
	What it wants for Ukraine, it doesn't benefit resource-wise from Ukraine.
	What it benefits is geography.
	And as it expands further, whether it's Ukraine or Georgia, It threatens Russia.
	And I believe that the end goal, and there are a lot of documents out there, is to get into Russia, to break the back of Russia, to split Russia apart.
	There's maps which show Russia in four pieces.
	And those maps are out there.
	There are a lot of neocons in D.C. who think along those lines.
	We've got to get into Russia.
	We've got to get their resources.
	We've got to pillage Russia.
	We've got to get their ideology.
	We've got to strike down this new Russian patriotism, nationalism, ideology.
	We've got to knock that down.
	And NATO is going to be their vehicle to do that.
	And they believe if they can get into Ukraine and they can push eastward, then they'll have Russia effectively surrounded, which they will in a way.
	When Russia got...
	Many people say when Russia annexed Crimea, I like to say when Crimea ascended into Russia, Russia took the only piece that it really needed when you look at a map with regards to Ukraine.
	And it needed Crimea because you have historical reasons, but when you look at Crimea, it is a super tanker just sitting right there in the south of Russia.
	There was no way you could have that go into the hands of NATO and the West.
	And so they got that piece.
	The rest of Ukraine, Russia has no interest in it, except for it to be non-aligned, to not be a threat.
	NATO, they would like to move eastward, and they would like to set up shop in Ukraine and threaten Russia.
	It goes back real quick.
	It goes back to Syria as well.
	A lot of people always talk about Syria.
	Why did Russia get involved in Syria?
	A lot of reasons, but one of the reasons is when you look on a map, Syria is a 24-hour drive.
	To Russia.
	And Russia fought a very bloody war against a lot of jihadist forces in the Caucasus.
	They don't want that again.
	They don't want any of that ever coming close to them again.
	So one of the reasons they went into Syria and they demolished IS and they got Assad back in the game when he was about to be overthrown is because they don't want any of those forces anywhere near.
	Russia's borders.
	And when you look at a map, you understand it.
	Syria is not far away from Russia.
	Ukraine, obviously, is right there.
	And, Alexander, one of the things that's been completely mischaracterized in the West is everything related to Nord Stream 2. The story told in the West is that this is a Russian project, a Russian creation, a Russian initiation, critical and essential to Russia's future, so on and so forth.
	And in fact, none of that's really accurate.
	I mean, it is true that when Nord Stream 2 is online, it makes it easier to just turn off the spigot through Ukraine.
	But that's a Ukraine detriment.
	That's not a Russian detriment.
	Could you explain what some of the history is in that respect?
	It is, absolutely.
	And can I just say, it relates to some extent to some of the points that Alex was making, because one of the big issues, one of the big conflicts between the EU and Russia is that, of course, the EU were very, very keen to get European companies, European oil and gas majors working independently in Russian oil and gas fields.
	This is very much a big agenda in the 1990s and early 2000s.
	And the EU came up with what he calls its third energy package, which is basically that you have to have diversification, open competition within the EU, which means that a big company, a company like Gazprom can't have
	the jewels, if you like, in the Russian economic system, Rosneft and Gazprom, would in effect be broken up.
	And by the way, Soros...
	Just to mention him again, has been very keen on that.
	He too wants to see these big companies broken up because he wants to be involved, no doubt, in investing in these sort of projects himself.
	So that was very much part of this.
	Now, the Russians...
	Under Yeltsin, signed the third energy package, but then Putin came along and said, absolutely not at all.
	So they refused to ratify the third energy package.
	They said, we're not having any of this.
	And that was one of the things that caused a lot of the tensions between the EU and Russia.
	Well, the Russians have been supplying gas to Europe since about the 1960s.
	It's been a longstanding...
	Trade goes back to the 60s when the pipelines first started to be built.
	It became really important in the 1980s.
	Natural gas is cheap.
	Pipeline gas from Russia is cheap.
	Russia has by far the biggest reserves for natural gas.
	There are planetary dimensions.
	It's a logical business.
	It's a logical tie-up to make.
	Then what happened?
	Was that there were conflicts, first over Ukraine, because some of those pipelines that the Soviet Union built were passing through Ukraine, and there were issues about Ukrainians paying gas and siphoning off gas that were passing through the pipelines, the Russian pipelines intended for Russian.
	For European customers.
	So then the Russians started building pipelines.
	They first started to build Nord Stream 1. Then they started to build a pipeline to Europe, to Southern Europe, which is called South Stream, which was going to be built across the Black Sea.
	But the EU then said that these pipelines have to be...
	Have to be controlled.
	They have to be regulated according to the third energy package.
	So Gazprom can build them, but it can't run them.
	And the Russians at that point said, no, we're not going to do that.
	We are not going to build pipelines in that case to Europe.
	We're going to start looking for other customers.
	They started to look towards China, towards the Far East to build pipelines there.
	And then what happened was that there was this nuclear accident in Japan, the Fukushima accident.
	There's very strong green sentiment in Germany.
	The German government, led by Angela Merkel, decided that they were going to close down all the nuclear power stations.
	And that created a big energy shortfall.
	So Angela Merkel came to Moscow and she said, I need a pipeline.
	I need more gas.
	And the Russians up to this point have said, no, we're not building any more pipelines because you're going to say that they are subject to the third energy package and we're not prepared to agree to that.
	And Angela Merkel said, no, don't worry.
	We'll build this pipeline under the Baltic Sea so it won't be within EU territory until it reaches Germany itself and therefore it won't be subject to the third energy package.
	And this was extremely controversial in Russia.
	Lots of people said, you know, this isn't a good idea at all.
	We've just had the crisis in Ukraine.
	This was in 2015 that we were talking about.
	There's already been the crisis in 2014 with the issue with Crimea and all that.
	Do we really want to build pipelines to Germany?
	And Putin, who speaks German and has great feelings for Germany and was perhaps sentimental.
	He said, let's build the pipeline.
	Let's agree to build this pipeline.
	The Germans want it, so let's build it.
	And they have built the pipeline.
	And my own view, my own guess, is that there are many, many people in Russia who think it was an extremely bad idea to do that because it's caused them nothing but problems ever since.
	Because it's been harried and harassed and it's become a major issue.
	And it was the Germans...
	Who asked for it.
	It was the Germans who need it.
	They need the gas to make up the shortfall.
	And the fact that they're closing down their nuclear power stations.
	The Russians built it.
	And they need it far less.
	Because as far as they're concerned, their major gas customer is now going to be in the Far East, in China.
	They've already built one big pipeline to China.
	There's two more coming.
	One was announced just recently.
	And of course, like the United States, they've invested very heavily in LNG, liquefied natural gas.
	They're developing liquefied natural gas in the Arctic fields, and they're exporting that globally.
	So they had not wanted to build these pipelines to Europe.
	Merkel persuaded them to build this one.
	And it's built.
	It's still not operating.
	And it's the Germans who need the gas rather than the Russians.
	I want to read one chat because I don't want to pretend like I ignored it once I saw it.
	Abdi Mohammed says, first of all, NATO is a defensive organization.
	Russia is an aggressive power.
	Separate that from the second part.
	Secondly, is everyone just supposed to sit back and watch on as a genocide is taking place?
	I don't even understand the second question.
	What genocide is the individual referring to?
	I mean, I assume that the Russians somehow are...
	The only...
	Anything close to attacks on innocent civilians has been by Ukraine against the separatist republics, quite frankly, in terms of Ukraine.
	In terms of the way Ukraine is completely...
	Ukraine just signs the Minsk Accords and then ignores it.
	As to the premise of Russia aggressor...
	When under Putin has Russia been the aggressor?
	Unless you're going to focus on Crimea, where Crimea is a Russian military place there.
	They voted to join.
	And what Putin did, going back to Alexander's point about legal issues, he just tracked what they allowed the Balkans to do.
	It's like, okay, your new rule is that if the local area votes for independence or votes to join another country, they get to do so.
	Okay, I'll let Crimea do that.
	Of course, since they're all Russian there in Crimea, they said, yes, yes, yes, bingo.
	So that's what that is.
	And NATO, defensive as to who?
	Defensive as to what?
	Soviet Union's gone.
	The Warsaw Pact is gone.
	Who are they defending Europe from?
	They've been trying to come up with a new excuse to defend Europe from somebody for 20 years, 30 years.
	Maybe it was terrorism.
	Maybe it was this.
	Maybe it's that.
	Maybe this is why we have to keep getting paid and keep having a job.
	It's the problem of bureaucracies.
	They've got to self-justify.
	So NATO's always going to tell you that there's some emergency imminent need to justify why they have to get a paycheck next week and their defense contractor buddies have to get paychecks the week after.
	Who are they defending themselves against?
	I mean, this is why they won't sit down in a public debate.
	Like, that's the other aspect of all this.
	Putin will discuss it with anybody.
	Somebody asked in the chat, why is Barnes shilling for Russia?
	Well, my question to the chatter, why are you shilling for Soros?
	Because let's see who's on which side of this.
	But you look at it, Putin will sit down with anybody.
	He'll sit down with his harshest critics.
	He'll sit down with people that are loosely CIA-affiliated at NBC.
	He'll talk to anybody.
	Biden was not going to do that.
	Whereas, in fact, they won't publicly debate any of these people outside of limited, very limited forums because they can't hold up.
	They can't answer these questions.
	That's why they need a docile, collusive press.
	Now, going to a place that kind of overlaps currently, the talk is of sanctions on Russia.
	And in particular, taking them off of SWIFT and using the financial system to try to punish Russia.
	We're seeing in Canada, Trudeau is trying to use their control of the financial system through the Emergencies Act declaration to...
	Punish dissidents within their own country.
	But it seemed like Putin from early on understood that risk, did things with the ruble to limit that risk, did things in terms of stockpiling gold to limit that risk, increasingly affiliates with China, which appears to be what we're really doing.
	The West is forcing Russia to do a bear hug with China, which has their own history of animosity between each other.
	The biggest border is still shared between those two nations.
	Why is Russia not worried about possibly being any of these sanctions, number one, or not that worried about them?
	Whereas here in the West, the media pretends this will be a huge deterrent, that this will have a massive economic impact.
	It's like they buy their own briefing papers.
	And then second, how much is it going to drive Russia further into the welcoming arms of Well, the last is exactly what is, of course, happening.
	Can I just deal with a few points?
	I mean, firstly, about NATO being a defensive alliance.
	Well, I think that's a very difficult argument to sustain any longer, given the wars in Yugoslavia and elsewhere.
	And in terms of Russia being aggressive, my own personal view about this is that the Russians have been consistently reactive.
	They've never taken the initiative in any particular crisis.
	And if we're talking about particular aggression, well, we've just had today there was going to be the invasion.
	And where is it?
	We must not allow the fact that people constantly talk about Russia as being aggressive to make us think that this country is in fact aggressive.
	Bear in mind...
	That Russia is far less powerful than the West.
	Not remotely as powerful as the United States or NATO is.
	So how could Russia be logically a threat to the United States or the West?
	And what Russian leader would even conceive of launching an aggression against the West?
	I mean, I just don't really think that this is an issue at all.
	Alexander, the West is in scare quotes here.
	You don't have to attack New York City.
	You have to attack a Western interest in Europe or in wherever.
	So the West could be very broad.
	So would Putin...
	Let me just bring this one up so I can address it.
	You think he wouldn't genocide or annex any country people if it served him?
	So the West is a very broad term.
	If he attacks a Western interest...
	Why hasn't he in 20 years?
	That's the problem all these people have.
	He had plenty of opportunities.
	If he wanted Ukraine, the Maidan coup was a perfect pretext.
	He could have just gone in and taken it.
	Just like that.
	Never did.
	Why hasn't he done this?
	Some of the Baltic countries that have their own legitimate history of hostility to Russia for their own reasons.
	Why hasn't he done it?
	Why hasn't he gone into any of these places?
	All this talk, even internally, he ended many of the conflicts that Russia had.
	Now, what would be true...
	If you remove Putin, there are people in Russia...
	The alternatives to Putin are not Soros-loving liberals from St. Petersburg, the small little intellectual class that pretends they're influential.
	It's ultra-nationalist.
	People like Chernofsky.
	The guy did a campaign ad in a shower.
	That history, the generals...
	The alternatives back when elections could have been competitive in the early 2000s before Putin solidified his base.
	Those were the, or communists.
	I mean, those were the alternatives.
	Communists who think they shouldn't have given up the Soviet Union.
	That's the alternatives to Putin.
	But that's not Putin.
	Putin has had no interest in that.
	And how do we know we have 20 plus years of history to prove it?
	Absolutely.
	I think a good example, Alexander, if you can explain, because I just saw Viva put up in the chat as well.
	A good example as to how Putin operates and how Russia is non-aggressor is I saw someone say, what about Russia's invasion?
	Or its attack against Georgia.
	I think Georgia is a good case in point to see that Russia, when they are threatened or when they do have cause, they have a very specific purpose, a specific timeline set out.
	They accomplish that goal and then they just go back to how things were or they use the law and they use the legal framework.
	To get the outcome that they want, like Robert was saying with regards to Kermit.
	They used the law with regards to Kermit to get the outcome that they wanted.
	I mean, that's what they did.
	Well, it is.
	So Georgia is a really good example to outline how Russia works.
	Yeah, because, I mean, what happened?
	And I think, by the way, there's an EU.
	The EU did an investigation on this.
	And what happened?
	There was a breakaway part of Georgia called South Ossetia.
	There was a fight there.
	There were Russian peacekeepers there who had been put there by the United Nations, the Georgians.
	Fired on them.
	The Russians intervened.
	They drove the Georgians out.
	They marched into Georgia.
	And they could have captured the whole country.
	And they could have certainly taken the capital.
	Georgia is a small place.
	And they didn't.
	They pulled back and South Ossetia then broke away and Abhazia broke away.
	But they didn't try and occupy the whole of Georgia.
	That was not what they did.
	If I can just say something about Putin, the thing to always understand about Putin is he is a Russian nationalist.
	He doesn't want to go back to the kind of system where Russia is, you know, way down, running lots of other countries, trying to, you know, rule satellite states and things of this kind.
	He's perspective of this.
	It's a very common Russian perspective.
	Is that that drained Russian wealth and energy and actually acted, was against Russian interests.
	He wants Russia for the Russians, basically.
	He wants Russia first, if you like.
	He's not interested in becoming involved in Georgia, Ukraine or any other sort of place.
	I mean, that is very much his perspective, I think, on what he wants to do.
	What he wants to achieve.
	We mustn't idealise him.
	He's an incredibly tough and ruthless political figure.
	He's very, very efficient.
	He's somebody who obviously uses the law.
	And as I said, he's a capable lawyer and he thinks in a legal way.
	But, you know, we mustn't imagine that he's a soft person.
	But we mustn't...
	We must not demonize him either.
	And we mustn't fall into the caricatures of saying, you know, that he's out to conquer Europe and he leads an aggressive country.
	He is very much, as far as I can see, very much about Russian national interests.
	Teachers, I have a question for Professor Barnes.
	This is from TKUA.
	I said I would get to it.
	How does Barnes justify Ukrainians shooting separatist citizens?
	I think they wanted to probably rephrase that question because I'm obviously critical of the Ukrainian violent response to the separatist movement that was itself a response to a coup and an attack on Russian identity and Russian language in eastern Ukraine.
	As to the famous airplane incident, That's going to be the subject of a future hush-hush.
	Let's just say that the official narrative might not be the true narrative.
	Which you can find us at vivabarneslaw.local.com This typo shirt is going to be worth money one day.
	Oh, Alexander, but back to...
	How this is driving Russia, like from a just realpolitik strategic perspective that you guys highlight so often, how is this just a bad strategy?
	If you like Putin, hate Putin, love Russia, hate Russia, how the net effect of what the West is doing, Europe and the United States, is creating deeper alliances and allegiances between two countries that have often been at odds, Russia and China.
	And absolutely.
	And can I just say, again, it's important to start with Putin coming from St. Petersburg because he comes from the most Western-oriented city in Russia.
	He was very, very much, as I very well remember, when he first became Russia's president, he was very much about becoming involved with the West.
	It may surprise some people to know he actually floated the idea of Russia joining NATO.
	I mean, this is perfectly serious.
	He said, you know, well, you know, we want to be.
	We want to become a democracy.
	We want to practice capitalism.
	That's what you're all about.
	So, you know, why can't we become like you?
	Why can't we be part of the same club as you?
	Why can't we be part of NATO?
	Perhaps even one day of the EU as well.
	And they slammed the door in his face.
	They said, under no circumstances can that happen.
	And, of course, we've also, instead of that, after they've told him he can't...
	Join the EU.
	He can't join NATO.
	We see the steady move, inch by inch, towards Russian territory of NATO.
	And we see the sanctions policies.
	We see the support for anti-Russian governments in Ukraine.
	And we see more sanctions threats.
	And, of course, inevitably, what this has done is that it has made Russia look for friends.
	And there is a very, very powerful country which says, well, look, we're very happy to be your friend because we're China.
	We are the rival of the United States.
	We have problems with the United States as well.
	We're short, however, of raw materials.
	We're short of energy.
	We know that the US fleet could blockade us.
	We need your oil, therefore, because you can send it to us directly across pipelines.
	We need your gas.
	We need your raw materials.
	We need your grain.
	We will give you all the support you need.
	We will enable you to ride out any sanctions problems.
	We can provide you with microprocessors, chips, all those things.
	So let's be friends.
	Let's be allies.
	Now, a lot of Russians...
	Didn't want that because they thought of themselves as Europeans.
	But a Russia today, which feels itself under pressure in Europe, under pressure from the United States, has now come to forge what is what they call better than an alliance with China.
	And it is Russia accepting China's embrace.
	After the West rejected it.
	That is the dynamic.
	It's not the Russians going to the Chinese and asking, you know, Chinese, will you be our ally?
	It was the Chinese who pushed this over many years.
	And they've got it.
	And there was a very important summit meeting right on the very first day of the Olympics, on the 4th of February, between Putin and Xi Jinping in Beijing.
	And they came out with this extraordinary joint statement, which is a kind of political manifesto.
	It basically says, you know, this is our coming out.
	We're now better than allies.
	We are this great new team.
	They even start to talk about team, Russia, China.
	And we brought that about.
	We brought about this combination of these two very powerful countries.
	And I can't see how in any way that benefits the West to have a struggle over Ukraine and to lose the option of having the friendship of Russia.
	It seems to be one of the most misguided and misconceived things.
	And historians in the future are going to be looking at this and they're going to be shaking their heads and they're going to see how was it ever done.
	If I may just field this one.
	He's screaming upstairs.
	If I may just field this one.
	By this estimation, Viva, Canada is pretty much like the US ethnically and it has oil.
	So should Trump invade?
	Give me a break.
	First of all...
	I think a lot of Canadians would well...
	Yes, we should free Canada.
	We need to free Canada.
	We need to invade Canada.
	We need to imprison Trudeau and take back what is naturally ours.
	Without endorsing that message down there, I would say there's a lot of Canadians who say, yeah, come and liberate us so that we can actually not worry about our bank accounts being frozen because we hosted a chat.
	So, yeah, maybe not the best analogy when it doesn't work for you.
	Now, with that said...
	Thank you for the super chat.
	And Robert, I cut you off.
	Oh yeah.
	So Alex, could you speak to...
	The other thing that strikes me about Russia, aside from this really being a proxy about opposing nationalism, opposing independence, trying to support an internationalist agenda and forcing and coercing everybody into it, that it's kind of a proxy battle for all of those things, along with the grifter aspect that is clearly present, is it distracts from the country currently hosting...
	What Greece birthed to the world, the Olympics, in that we're not talking about China, in that the degree to which China is a meaning...
	And what's amazing is Blinken's approach to China is it's not woke enough.
	It's those kind of lectures.
	It's not about the ongoing economic, political threat that China is, at least as Trump saw it.
	Your perspective on how much all this talk about Russia has distracted...
	At a key interesting time, because the Olympics were being presented, what better time to talk about China?
	Is this a country we want to be in bed with?
	Is this a country we need to be opposed to?
	How many leading Democrats have economic ties or backdoor ties in the United States to China?
	I mean, there's people being indicted across the United States for illicitly spying on behalf of China.
	China is the number one reason for the demanufacturing and deindustrialization of the Midwest of the United States.
	You have all the other political conflicts.
	But we're not talking about any of that, even while the Olympics in the West, because it's all focused on this mythical war between Russia and Ukraine.
	Yeah, wasn't it Obama, Robert, that said they're going to pivot to China?
	I mean, we've been hearing the pivot towards China now for, what, six, seven, eight years now?
	And no, they've got Russia on their brains 24-7.
	I mean, Putin lives in their head.
	24-7.
	And you're right.
	China is the main competitor.
	China with Russia.
	I don't know if the West can compete with China and Russia.
	Those two combined.
	And as Alexander pointed out, it's a very good fit.
	China and Russia is a good fit.
	It was a foreign policy mistake of I mean, pushing Russia towards China is going to be seen 50, 100 years from now as the biggest foreign policy debacle that the United States or the West ever made.
	Period.
	I mean, we all understand that China is, like you said, China is the competitor.
	China alone, the West could have handled it.
	They would have had it under control.
	But China with Russia?
	I don't know if they can.
	I mean, I think China and Russia is a very, very strong team to go up against.
	And that's the fault of the West.
	Now, if I may ask that, Alex, along those lines, NATO, we know the interests of NATO.
	Who is the divergent?
	So you have NATO, and then who else is there?
	You got Russia, China, North Korea, Iran.
	Who else is there?
	Well, I mean, if you're talking about future geopolitics, I mean, India is a major player and will become increasingly so because, of course, it's got many problems.
	They're even driving India with regards to the Quad, Alexander.
	You can speak to that.
	You're right, Viva.
	They're even driving India, which was leaning towards the United States.
	Even India now is looking at the Biden administration, looking at what Trudeau is doing, looking at all these things.
	And they're saying these people are just...
	They're freaking crazy.
	Yes.
	You know, they're saying, maybe we should look at Russia and China a little bit more.
	I mean, they were profoundly shocked by the botch up in Afghanistan.
	And bear in mind, I mean, you know, India is...
	Not that far away from Afghanistan.
	It's Afghanistan's borders.
	Pakistan, India has had long-standing historic connections to Afghanistan.
	It does not want to see a jihadist government establish itself there, aligned with Pakistan, which might then do things with Indian Muslims.
	So this is a major, this is an existential issue for India.
	And they were very, very shocked by the utter botch up.
	The way in which the Biden administration mismanaged the pullout from Afghanistan.
	So that has shaken their confidence in the United States as long as it is led by this administration.
	The other thing about India is that India has had a very long-standing historic friendship with Russia, going all the way back to India's Indian independence.
	Russians and the Indians have been particularly close friends.
	And on top of that, the Indians have valued this relationship with Russia because they don't want the Russians to become so close to the Chinese that this becomes a problem for India too.
	And it's known.
	That for some time the Indians have been telling the British, and I presume the Americans as well, can you please not be so tough towards Russia?
	Because what you're doing is you're driving Russia ever closer into China's hands.
	That's weakening our own strategic position because we are losing a potential friend, which is Russia.
	Because it's aligning with China.
	China has been an adversary.
	Yes, we are concerned about China too.
	But what you're doing is you are restricting our own freedom of movement with the Chinese because the Russians are now piling up behind them.
	And it's known that the Indians have become increasingly frustrated by the fact that the British just won't listen.
	And I know this, by the way, because, you know, I've had...
	Indian diplomats who are quite open about this in London.
	It's not a secret.
	So that's one thing to understand about India.
	India is a complicated country.
	It's one that we're going to have to see how it evolves and how its foreign policy develops as it gradually finds its way as a great power, which I believe it will.
	Yeah, what's striking about, you know, wide aspects of this is we're creating alliances against our interests long term.
	But, you know, I mean, the Biden's method of pullout worked as well as the Catholic abstention method of pullout.
	The not very well.
	And the net effect of all of this, in part, has been increasing destabilized belief in the Biden administration.
	I've described aspects of this going back to the Clintons, is that we have, you know, the combination of Kissinger's lack of moral compass with a degree of sort of incompetence you normally only saw in like the sixth generation of an incestuous family.
	So you combine the two and you get what we're getting with people who aren't even doing things that are in their long term self-interest.
	Bill Gates is persona non grata in large parts of India for activities he's engaged in.
	Monsanto and other companies are also not welcome in parts of India because of things they've done.
	So, you know, there's ways we have...
	Just like Russia.
	I mean, the large aspect of where Russia is today, mindset-wise, is because of what we did in the 90s.
	And Soros was just one part of that.
	But we basically raped and pillaged wherever we could because we wanted to make the bear weak.
	And the net effect of it was people who will never quite trust us again.
	To the super chat who said Putin killed all the Russian nationals.
	If he did that, 90% of Russians would be dead because the average Russian is quite proud.
	And that was part of how Putin's success worked.
	Have you guys been surprised at the degree of ineptitude and chaos from the Biden administration's foreign policy?
	Yes, I have.
	I'll say this straight away, I have been.
	Now, we both, during the election, had, I think it's fair to say, we weren't impressed by what we saw.
	We didn't think it would be a successful and good administration.
	But I have to say that I just could not imagine that it would fail.
	On so many fronts at once that it would mishandle foreign policy so disastrously and that it would mishandle domestic policies so disastrously as well.
	Obviously, it will be humorous, but about the Biden administration coming to Canada and liberating Canada from the sort of things that Trudeau is doing.
	The Biden administration would love to do all the same things in the United States.
	It's trying to do all the same things in the United States that Trudeau is doing.
	It hasn't yet managed to do them.
	It hasn't managed to do them because there are lawyers like Robert Barnes fighting cases.
	The United States has its own constitution, not one negotiated with Britain, which enables the United States to push Americans to push...
	Back on these things.
	But, you know, this is a terrible administration.
	It is the worst one that I can ever remember.
	And, you know, there have been bad ones in the past.
	The worst one I can ever remember.
	It's authoritarian, incompetent, bungling in its foreign policy.
	It's demoralized.
	I mean, this is the other thing.
	We talk about Ukraine, you know, about the threat to Ukraine.
	Primary threat to Ukraine at the moment.
	It's the administration.
	It's talking up a Russian invasion, which isn't happening.
	The country is bleeding money.
	I mean, there was a Ukrainian official who said they're losing the equivalent, I think it was two or three billion dollars a week, which for a country like...
	A poor country like Ukraine is a terrible thing.
	All the business people are fleeing.
	Investment is drying up.
	You could see that.
	There were protests.
	They tried to organise protests today, anti-Russian protests today in Ukraine.
	Very few people turned up because people are so exhausted and so demoralised because they can see that their country is gradually being ground by...
	Stories of an invasion that just aren't happening, materializing.
	So this is terrible for Ukraine.
	And it's just another example of a foreign policy team that is utterly hopeless and a president who isn't really, it seems to me, in any effective charge of what's going on.
	Gentlemen, we're nearing two hours, which is the cutoff time.
	And I feel like we've only touched the surface of this.
	Where can everyone watching now find you guys tomorrow morning or as of two minutes from now?
	The best place to find us, theduran.locals.com.
	That's the best place to find us there.
	But of course, we are on YouTube.
	Just look up the Duran.
	Alexander Mercurius has a channel.
	Alex Christopher, that's my channel.
	We are on Rumble.
	Of course, we're on Rumble.
	We're on Bitchute, Super U, Odyssey.
	But definitely plug into our community at theduran.locals.com.
	I only had one more question for both of you to kind of finish on.
	To what do you describe your independence of thought?
	These days in the intellectual world, I think, has been slowly, steadily corrupted, particularly in the West, especially by academia, but in other parts of the world as well, where people don't think independently, that if they speak out, that they have any dissonant voice on any topic, they get...
	Bombarded with attacks.
	What led to the willingness to and interest to be independent of thought in the first place?
	And secondly, to stick with it no matter the blowback?
	Well, in my case, I come from a political family in Greece.
	Politics is very much part of it.
	And I am very, very steeped in the politics of Greece and in the classical history of Greece, the literature there, people like Thucydides.
	And I would say that being in Greece, Greece is part of the West, but we are slightly separated in some ways.
	We look at things also from the outside and we are, you know, we're pretty really, I think we are pretty realistic generally about Because we have to be.
	We're a small country, and we've had to navigate between great powers, and we've learned to do that for a long time.
	And I think that's basically where it comes from, for me.
	Alex?
	Yeah, my family is a diplomatic family, so we've moved around a lot.
	I grew up mostly in the U.S., but I would say my big red pill moment.
	It's actually very much related to what's going on in Canada and some of the statements that came out of Trudeau and Freeland.
	And that was in 2013.
	I lived through the Greek crisis with the EU austerity, and that was terrible.
	But then in 2013, when I was living in Cyprus, it was a Friday evening.
	Cyprus was having its own economic problems with the EU.
	And it was a Friday evening.
	I went to bed and I woke up that next morning and went to a coffee shop in Nicosia, the capital.
	And my mother called me and she said, did you hear the news?
	And I said, what's that?
	And she's like, well, open up your computer, get on the internet because they've gone into the banks and they've shut down the one bank and they've taken all the people's money.
	And they took the other, the big state bank, and they've shut down various parts of that bank as well.
	And so the people in Cyprus actually saw what it's like to have this big super state come in and confiscate people's money literally overnight.
	Because for various reasons, which we won't get into, Cyprus was having various troubles, economic troubles, with regards to the EU.
	And the EU solution there was to just go in and take people's money.
	So it's been done before.
	This idea that's being floated around has been done before.
	That really woke me up.
	And it wakes you up to understand that these big institutions, these governments and these big institutions, they don't stop.
	They never, ever stop.
	And something that you said, Robert, when we did our video last week, really stuck with me.
	Both you and Alexander, you said that whatever happens with what we've all been going through the past couple of years, the only way we're going to fix it is if we codify it in the law, is if we fight this thing.
	And we make sure that we put it in the law and put it in the books that all this stuff they're doing never happens again.
	Because what they did to Greece and to Cyprus, where they actually went in and took the money, they continued to do that stuff.
	The people were upset, but there wasn't enough pushback to stop these big institutions from encroaching even further into our lives.
	So, I mean, that was a big moment for me.
	And I think that's what keeps me continuing to...
	To report on the news as to how we see it.
	And they say, codify it, and then you say, never again.
	And then it happens 10 years later in another country, and everyone's oblivious.
	It's the first time this has ever happened.
	Who would have thunk?
	But it happened 10 years ago in Cyprus.
	Gentlemen, this has been beautiful.
	I still have many, many questions, so we'll have to do it again.
	if I'm lucky enough, I'll be in Ottawa tomorrow to livestream from the epicenter of the government confiscation as a reporter, not as a protester, so don't touch me, people.
	But Alex, Alexander, where can people find you?
	I think you said it already, but just say it one more time before we end this, and then we'll say our The Duran.locals.com The Duran.locals.com It's controversial, and it's beautiful, and I don't care.
	You think they're pro-Trump, pro-Trump, pro-Putin, whatever.
	Digest, discern, come to your own conclusions.
	That's it.
	They are your sources of information, and if you disagree with them, so be it.
	Robert, Alexander, Alex, stay around for one more second.
	Everyone else in the chat, when I can do it, I'm going to end this.
	Thank you all, and see you soon.

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