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Feb. 24, 2022 - Viva & Barnes

01:37:52

Russia War in Ukraine - Live with George Szamuely - Viva Frei Live

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Time	Text
	What time is it?
	It's afternoon.
	Good afternoon, people.
	Yeah, I was late.
	A couple seconds late there.
	I forgot that I didn't actually send George Samueli the link to StreamYard, so I'm hoping he got it.
	I know I sent it to him now, but it was like three minutes ago.
	Okay, people, what's new for the day?
	It seems that...
	Okay, you want to say hi and then we're going to put you down?
	He's down.
	Yeah, what's new?
	From the madness of Canada to now what the media in the West wants people to believe and fear and panic is going to be World War III, breaking out in the Ukraine and Russia.
	I'm not saying the Ukraine, in Ukraine and Russia.
	Force of habit, not a political statement, people.
	And you know what the amazing thing is?
	I don't know enough about this situation to take a concrete position one way or the other.
	I mean, I know that historically when it comes to Europe, things are complicated.
	When it comes to everything, things are complicated.
	When it comes to having Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden in power in the West, and we've seen the outright, immediate, demonstrable, bold-faced lies that they have been...
	Speaking to their own citizens, lies that are so obvious, they're in your face to see in real time that they're lying.
	When they then go out and say Putin is awful, Russia is aggressing, I mean, this is the terrible thing about lying, is that you never know what to believe.
	They might be saying the truthful things this time, or they might just be lying like they've been lying in the past.
	You got Trudeau talking about preserving democracy in Ukraine?
	Standing up for human rights in Ukraine, when he literally just broke up the most peaceful bloc party by bringing in, not the military, but a militarized police.
	You have this guy, Justin Trudeau, in Canada, desecrating constitutional rights, desecrating the Constitution itself, then saying Putin is doing bad things in Ukraine and we need to stand up for Ukraine.
	So I don't know what to make of it.
	I just know that Justin Trudeau is a proven liar.
	is a proven constitutional rights violator, is a proven unethical prime minister, two ethics breaches in his six years in office, three ethics complaints, proven demonstrable corruption, and ethics violations.
	And now he's complaining about Putin, accusing Putin of doing the things that we have just witnessed him doing in Canada in real time.
	And then we got Joe Biden.
	In as much as anyone can make sense of what he's saying, Talking about Putin like he's the threat.
	Talking about Putin like he's the type of leader who would arbitrarily detain people indefinitely with no due process.
	Says that with a serious face while there are still violent protesters from January 6th sitting in a cell somewhere in D.C. Denied bail.
	Anyhow, so that's it.
	All that I know is I've been boning up on the history because these global events are...
	An excuse, a reason.
	It's the impetus for me to try to understand what's going on over there.
	I've got George Samuelian here who is arguably but not arguably an intellectual leader in this area, in this field.
	You may not like his slant, so be it, but that does not mean that he does not have much more knowledge than a great many of us.
	Whether or not he chooses to use that knowledge for good or for ill, we'll find out.
	George, how goes the battle?
	Oh, pretty good.
	How are you, Viva?
	Well, good.
	The funny thing is the first time you came on, when I pulled up your avatar, your thumbnail, it's like, ah, why doesn't he cut his hair?
	And now like a year later, George, I think I now feel, we're on the same boat.
	This represents and reflects what I feel in my spirit at this time of humanity.
	So I now understand.
	George, tell me if the audio levels are off between the two of us.
	But George, for anyone who missed our first sidebar, overview, we'll get into some credentials just so that people can feel assured or reaffirmed in disregarding your opinion on this.
	Who are you?
	Credentials, history-wise, and then we get into you trying to make sense of this for us.
	Right.
	My name is George Samueli.
	I'm a senior research fellow at Global Policy Institute in London.
	I'm the author of the definitive book about the breakup of Yugoslavia and NATO's intervention in Yugoslavia called Bombs for Peace.
	It's published at Amsterdam University Press.
	And I have another book that I hope will be coming out towards the end of this year.
	About the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and about the abuse of international law in going after criminals, war criminals, who are against the Western powers.
	You can find me on Twitter, you can find me on Substack.
	Actually, now we'll get you to remind everyone before we leave, and I'll pin your links to the top when this is over, but where can people find you just in case we forget, but we won't forget?
	You can find me on Substack, and you can find me on Twitter.
	I think in both cases, it's just my name as one word, George Samuel.
	Okay, fantastic.
	So for anybody out there who wants to say, you wrote the book, it was...
	Call it a piece, like an actual, you know, a recognized piece on Yugoslavia.
	Does that translate into knowledge of the dispute in Ukraine, Russia?
	I mean, you would qualify yourself as sufficiently competent to comment and explain this to people, correct?
	Well, because there's a great connection between the two, because...
	When the Soviet Union was created and when Yugoslavia was created, the Communist Party that wanted to rule over the country sought to diminish the standing of the largest nation within each of these multinational republics.
	So what they did is they tried to raise and elevate all of the other Nations that were not leading nations.
	So in the case of Yugoslavia, the Serbs were obviously the leading nation.
	They were really the founders of Yugoslavia and they were of the most numerous, largest national group.
	But, you know, the communists who saw the Serbs as being kind of the most problematic, they kind of elevated the other national groups.
	So they put the Serbs on the same level of...
	The Montenegrins, the Slovenes, the Muslims.
	They even called the Muslims a nation, which is kind of a peculiarity.
	So they said, no, no, Yugoslavia is a multinational federation comprising the six nations.
	And the way they carved up the territory was obviously...
	Disadvantageous to Serbs.
	And the same thing happened in the Soviet Union.
	Obviously, within the USSR, the Russians were the largest nation.
	So the Bolsheviks kind of set about elevating all the non-Russians and taking chunks out of Russia and giving it to other nations.
	One such nation was the Ukrainians.
	And this is something Putin keeps coming back to again and again, that big chunks of Russia were given to Ukraine in the early 1920s by Lenin because they wanted to elevate Ukraine as contrary to Russia, as a rival nation to Russia.
	And then subsequently they kind of added...
	All sorts of other things to Ukraine, particularly Stalin.
	Stalin added bits of Romania, bits of Hungary, bits of Poland.
	So Ukraine suddenly became this huge country for no reason other than that the Bolsheviks wanted to elevate it.
	So when Yugoslavia broke up, the Western powers were very eager to recognize as international frontiers the administrative boundaries.
	of the republics of Yugoslavia because they didn't favor the Serbs.
	So the Serbs, the most populous nation, found themselves a minority in the other republics.
	A very substantial minority in Croatia, about 20-25%, but an even bigger minority in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where there was something like a third, and the Serbs were told, "Hey!" You've just got to lump it.
	Tough luck.
	You're just going to have to live in this independent state, which is going to be dominated by other nations.
	Something like that happened in Yugoslavia, and that's why the Western powers rushed to recognize, when the USSR broke up, the republics in those borders, the arbitrary borders that were actually created by the communists.
	And so Ukraine...
	It was an artificial state created by the communists, really had a very generously endowed territory, which the communists had endowed them with.
	And that included, of course, Crimea.
	And there was never really any reason whatsoever for Crimea to be part of Ukraine.
	Again, Khrushchev decided arbitrarily without consulting anyone, certainly not the Crimeans, just basically transferred Crimea from Russia to Ukraine.
	But the West really wanted to stick with those.
	Those are the boundaries.
	You know, we recognize those boundaries because the West thought that this would be a very favorable situation.
	George, I'll read this one just because I brought it up.
	I'm torn with what's happening in Ukraine.
	I and many of the soldiers I know are ready to fight the Russians.
	However, the situation is very complex and look forward to hearing your take on the matter.
	Gods protect Ukraine, Slava, Ukraine.
	Okay, so in order to, I mean, the geography part...
	I'm not saying this to be glib or to say we don't need to know beyond a certain point in history, but I guess for the relevant period here, this starts with the formation of the Soviet Union back in 1922.
	Before that, it's interesting for historical purposes, but not for the conflict.
	Before that, of course, it was all part of the Russian Empire.
	It was just one entity.
	The Bolsheviks then, of course, recreated the Russian Empire, but they called it the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
	And then they created a very, very complex maze of republics, autonomous republics, autonomous obelists.
	And, of course, it was all part of divide and rule, setting people off against one another.
	What we're eager on is to invent new nations, I think, again, as a way to diminish Russia's influence.
	And of course, that eventually became a serious problem when the USSR broke up because now it's all sort of broken up and people are suddenly unhappy, particularly the Russians are unhappy, at finding themselves as a minority ruled over by another nation.
	Okay, that's the interesting part.
	The Soviet Union, people used the terms, and even myself never fully appreciated it.
	It was a union of a bunch of states, but ultimately governed only by Moscow, governed only by communists, and they were, although, call them states, it was one entity that was governed from Moscow, and that happened for 80 years, 90 years, whatever.
	Some fighting back and forth during World War I and World War II.
	No, World War II, sorry.
	This is after World War I. Especially in Ukraine, where Nazi troops going over Ukraine, Soviets coming back.
	But ultimately, it was one union of states, which ultimately, nonetheless, was one communist country governed by Moscow.
	When you say it's governed from Moscow, it means that somehow the Russians dominated.
	The Russians didn't dominate.
	The USSR, because after all, the architect of the Soviet Union was Joseph Stalin.
	I mean, he ran the place from about 1925 through to his death in 1953.
	He was the longest ruling leader, and he was, of course, a Georgian.
	And he spoke with a very thick...
	Georgian accent.
	It's almost very impossible to understand it.
	So he was a Georgian.
	It was by no means dominated by Russia.
	I mean, Ukrainians and Georgians want to pretend that it was dominated by Russia, but it was certainly not dominated.
	It was dominated by the Communist Party.
	So what they had is that they had this constitution in which all these rights of the republics all the way up to secession were articulated within the constitution.
	But in reality, you know, these rights didn't really exist because everything was run by the Communist Party.
	So it was a top-down system, this democratic centralism.
	So, you know, the commands are from the top, the Politburo, you know, that's all transmitted down below.
	So they had the form of this constitution all the way up to the secession of the individual republic.
	But in practice, it was run by the Communists.
	What happened was that as the Soviet Union began to dissolve, the Communist Party kind of lost its own kind of ethos.
	It wasn't any longer...
	And then, you know, the individual republics started invoking the constitution that enabled them to secede.
	But this wasn't really about nationalism as such.
	I mean, I think it was a lot of it was just...
	About, hey, we can get a lot more goodies, probably from the West, if we just go our own way.
	And that's what happened.
	So they went their own way.
	But within their territories were all sorts of other nations and other units, political units, that were problematic.
	Like Georgia, you had South Ossetia and Abhasia.
	They certainly were not Georgians, but the Bolsheviks had shoved them in and had given them a kind of constitutional status.
	One was an autonomous socialist republic.
	Another one was an autonomous socialist obelisk.
	But they had no intention of being a part of the independent state of Georgia.
	They didn't want to be ruled over by Georgians.
	You're on mute.
	That will explain a few things.
	Just to back it up for one second, we say the misconception or the oversimplification is the USSR, the Soviet Union, was governed and dominated by Moscow.
	Now, you say not so much Soviet Union.
	It's a big damn country.
	It's massive.
	So Moscow reigning over the rest of it is not logistically possible.
	So you're saying it was governed by the Communist Party, which had its tentacles in every sub-state.
	But I guess it's headquarters or it's...
	Well, I say headquarters in Moscow.
	The capital of the USSR was Moscow.
	And, you know, that's where the Politburo would meet to have their conferences.
	But it wasn't dominated by Russians.
	That's where the misconception arises, because I think Moscow, so therefore, was ruled over by Russians.
	It really wasn't.
	The Communist Party really was not a Russian party.
	There was a separate...
	I mean, for instance, the Russian Orthodox Church was continually...
	It hit with all sorts of repressions.
	They closed down the Orthodox Church.
	They destroyed one of those beautiful Orthodox Church, the Church of the Christ of the Savior.
	Stalin just destroyed it in order to make way for a palace of the Soviets.
	The palace of the Soviets was never actually built.
	And then it was just simply an empty lock that would lay there for years and years.
	And then Khrushchev built a swimming pool there.
	After the Communists were swept out, the Russians rebuilt it, this great church, the Church of Christ the Savior.
	So, I mean, you know, if you think of Orthodox Church as so much of a part of a Russian identity, it was continually subjected to repression by the Communists.
	Okay, so then if I'm trying to make sense of this to myself, you have the Communist Party, which operates within all of these independent states, which themselves have separate...
	Call them ethnic identities, geographic identities.
	They all have separate identities which, after the fall of the Soviet Union, all become these separate countries that we now know of in Eastern Europe.
	Right, that's right.
	So it was like, you know, Stalin, who was kind of the...
	The expert on nationalities, because he was the commissar for nationalities in the early Bolshevik era.
	He was general secretary of the party and the commissar for nationalities.
	So he kind of thought, look, as long as these nations, we give them the right to use their own language, and then, you know, he said, well, it'll be nationalist in form, socialist in content.
	So it didn't really matter.
	It doesn't matter.
	You know, we can have Georgians using their own language as long as...
	They remain good communists and follow the dictates of the Communist Party, which, of course, operates on Leninist democratic centralist principles.
	So policy is set in Moscow and it's transmitted down to the local village.
	Okay, so that's now more easily understandable.
	All of these separate states, separate national identities, fall of the Soviet Union, they all become independent.
	And then some have more strategic value to others.
	But over time, some acquire more strategic value than others.
	When was it?
	Ukraine.
	First of all, Ukraine's a big country.
	I'm not sure that everybody appreciates it.
	41 million people to Russia's 142 million.
	So Russia's about less than half the size of the U.S. population-wise.
	Ukraine, bigger than Canada population-wise.
	Strategically, what natural resources, what is Ukraine?
	Well, Ukraine is, you know, is a big industrial heartland.
	I mean, the Donbass was a big industrial center in the USSR.
	It's also an agricultural, an important agricultural land.
	So it is indeed very rich in resources.
	And again, you have to ask how badly has Ukraine done since the fall of the Soviet Union that it's now One of the poorest countries in Europe.
	I mean, it's an absolute disgrace.
	And not to mention that all of the aid that is poured into Ukraine from the IMF, from the United States, from the European Union, they've poured all this money in.
	Where has it got them?
	Ukraine is one of the poorest countries in Europe.
	I think next to Moldova, I mean, it's the poorest.
	So it really has...
	It's been very, very badly run since 1991.
	And it's an unfortunate thing that in Ukraine, as it is in Croatia and Yugoslavia, the nationalism that has manifested itself, the Ukrainian nationalism...
	It's driven by hatred of Russia, just like the Croatian nationalists.
	There's not really a great deal to Croatian nationalism other than hatred of the Serbs.
	And that's kind of an unfortunate thing.
	It's like, how do they define their own identity?
	It is by hating someone else.
	And this is by no means true of all Ukrainians.
	I mean, you know, but it is true of the western part of the country, the Galician, the several Galicians.
	They really hate the Russians.
	But the people in the East, I mean, they are Russian.
	I mean, you know, they're ancestors.
	That was the part of the country that was taken out of Russia and added on to Ukraine.
	They're Russian.
	The people in the center, I mean, I think they're kind of fairly well disposed towards Russia.
	But the people in the West, you know, there's a real hatred.
	Actually, we'll get into that because, you know, being a big country, people don't necessarily appreciate the geographic differences between the West and the East of Ukraine.
	Just explain the role and influence that the Holodomor, which was the, some call it the Ukrainian Holocaust.
	Others refuse to acknowledge it.
	They call it, you know, starvation.
	The consensus is it was man-caused starvation.
	Exacerbated by Soviet policies on the Ukrainians, which explains Ukrainian disdain for Russians in current times.
	I mean, that might be an oversimplification, but could you elaborate on that?
	Well, you see, the problem is that that's a myth put about by the Ukrainian nationalists, because without question, there was horrific famine.
	In Ukraine.
	But there was horrific famine in Russia and in Kazakhstan.
	I mean, in Kazakhstan, I think the famine was even worse than it was in Ukraine.
	And this is obviously a direct result of Stalin's collectivization policy, which is an absolute catastrophe.
	And, you know, the Bolshevik or Stalin was...
	Exporting grain in order to raise hard currency.
	So they're basically just expropriating agricultural produce from the collective farms.
	And it led to horrific starvation.
	What isn't true is that...
	Stalin pursued this policy in order to crush Ukrainian nationalism.
	There's just simply no evidence of it.
	There's no evidence that somehow Stalin was more driven to punish the Ukrainians than he was to punish the Kazakhs or indeed Russia itself.
	So that's why the Holodomor thing, I think, is just a myth.
	There's just no evidence that the Bolsheviks were driven by a hatred for Ukrainian nationalism.
	As I say...
	They promoted Ukrainian nationalism.
	They were the architects of Ukrainian nationalism.
	Well, but hold on.
	The fact that it might have been worse in Kazakhstan because of the same parties doesn't necessarily mean that they didn't specifically target or exacerbate the situation in the Ukraine.
	Was it not the case that there were policies where the Stalin regime was taking food from the Ukrainians?
	I mean, if the argument is going to be that they were doing this to all the countries, so therefore it wasn't targeting Ukraine.
	Exactly.
	That is the argument, that they were expropriating everybody.
	You know, they were just simply taking all the grain and...
	Shipping it off for export to raise hard currency, part of the industrialization policy, crash industrialization policy.
	And it was terrible.
	I mean, there was no question.
	I mean, the millions died of the famine.
	But this was a policy that the Bolsheviks pursued universally throughout the country.
	But the Ukrainians...
	Under the influence of certain Ukrainian nationalists, many of whom found a home in Canada, kind of created the story that somehow this policy was driven by Stalin against the Ukrainians.
	There's just simply no evidence that Stalin had any kind of particular animus towards the Ukrainians.
	Okay, so whether or not people are going to be convinced by the argument, the argument is that...
	It was not specifically targeting Ukraine or Ukrainians, but rather Stalin was doing it to everybody.
	It might explain the same resentment Kazakhs have towards Russia.
	I'm not sure if they do.
	I presume they have.
	Yeah, there's no evidence of that.
	There's none of that animus toward Russians in Kazakhstan.
	I mean, you know, Kazakhs have been living pretty well up until recent times.
	I mean, I think in recent times, I think...
	Things haven't been going so well, and many Russians have left Kazakhstan.
	Larger, I think, probably because the Kazakhstan leadership there has also been trying to make nice with the West.
	A lot of Western money has poured into Kazakhstan, and National Endowment for Democracy, the usual cast of suspects, and what happens when you start trying to curry favor with the West, the Russians suddenly don't feel Very much at home there.
	In recent years, I think the population of Kazakhstan has become much more heavily Kazakh than it used to be.
	I'll bring this up because there was another chat that said you're lying.
	Don't argue intentions.
	People should appreciate that.
	I'm going to steelman your position.
	The argument is not that the Holodomor did not happen.
	Your argument is that it was not specifically targeting Ukrainians or ethnic Ukrainians.
	It was just targeting all of Europe and it was worse in Kazakhstan and therefore it wasn't an ethnic issue in the Ukraine.
	Whether or not Ukrainians who lived through this are going to believe that.
	I'm thinking just of an analogy.
	Hitler targeted blacks, gays and gypsies as well.
	If people use that as an argument to say it wasn't specifically targeting the Jews, therefore the Holocaust and World War II was not a uniquely Jewish thing, that's gotten people in trouble on social media.
	But that's the thing.
	There's no question Hitler had a particular animus against the Jews.
	The evidence is there.
	You read Mein Kampf, it's obsessed.
	He has a genuine obsession.
	With the Jewish question.
	Most of Mein Kampf is about the Jews.
	So, you know, there's no question about that.
	Well, I mean, you know, what's interesting about Hitler is that many of his allies were, in fact, non-Aryan.
	I mean, you know, he was a great admirer of the Japanese and the Chinese.
	And so, you know, that's another part of Hitler's peculiarity.
	And just so I really appreciate it, I'm not...
	I'm not agreeing or disagreeing.
	Your position is not that the Holodomor did not happen, not that the mass salvations did not happen, and not that it was not exacerbated specifically by policy where they were expropriating food, grain, from the Ukrainians to starve them to death.
	It was deliberate, malicious, but the argument is not targeted specifically to Ukrainians because of their ethnicity.
	People can make what they want of that thesis.
	It's up to them.
	I'll bring this up here.
	Well, okay.
	They're not really trying very hard.
	But the point is this.
	Bosnia-Herzegovina had never existed as a state.
	You know, it's a territory that had been ruled over by the Turks for centuries.
	It was then transferred towards Austria-Hungary.
	Then it was transferred into the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.
	Then it was ruled over by the Croats during World War II.
	The Ustasa regime kind of ruled over.
	Bosnia-Herzegovina, and then he became part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
	When the state broke up, the individual nations said, well, okay, we have national self-determination.
	If Croatia can go its separate way and say, hey, this is our state, and we're going to have this, then the Serbs said, well, why can't we have the state?
	We are a constituent nation.
	Not only a constituent nation of Croatia, and that was in the Constitution, that was in the Constitution of Croatia, that it was a constituent nation.
	In other words, the Republic of Croatia is made up of two nations, the Serbs and the Croats, and the same thing was the Constitution of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
	But there were three nations, the Serbs, the Croats, and the Muslims.
	But they said, hey, we have the right of national self-determination.
	Why should we have to live in a state?
	But we don't want to live it.
	We want to live in Yugoslavia.
	We don't want to live in a state called Bosnia-Herzegovina.
	And why should they?
	Okay, and without getting too diverged on the Bosnia-Herzegovina, because we need to understand the Ukraine-Russia conflict.
	So that's a bit of the history of Ukraine.
	They vote for their national independence in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union.
	It was a massive, I think it was either 85% or 93% voted for independence.
	How did they establish the borders at the time the Soviet Union fell?
	Just existing borders?
	Existing borders, exactly.
	It was the de facto borders.
	So there was no attempt to readjust borders, no attempt really to take into consideration where people were living.
	So therefore Crimea...
	Which incidentally had been, again, it had been a Socialist Autonomous Republic of Crimea, which had been a part of the Socialist Republic of Russia.
	And then Khrushchev transferred the kind of administration of it to the Socialist Republic of Ukraine in 1954.
	Again, without taking into consideration the views of the people who lived in Crimea.
	So that was 1954.
	37 years it had been a part of Ukraine.
	It had never been part of Ukraine before.
	And obviously the people in Crimea, you know, they didn't particularly want to join Ukraine.
	And, you know, they made moves several times to hold a referendum as to whether they want to continue to be a part of Ukraine or whether to rejoin Russia.
	Every time they move to have a referendum, The Ukraine authorities threatened force, and they backed up.
	Russia didn't really do anything to support the Crimeans, and so it went on through to 2014.
	The people who lived in Crimea wanted to have a say as to where they were actually going to be, which country they were going to belong to.
	And Bendy Trees, I'm not ignoring the chat.
	I just, I'm going to keep, we're going to keep, that discussion can go down a very, I mean, that's a whole separate discussion.
	So, Bosnia-Herzegovina, another day, and maybe we'll get Barnes on and we'll do another sidebar.
	Okay, so they, the independence declared on the existing borders.
	We're going to get into the breakdown of this in a second.
	Now, when the news, when the media, when you read on Wikipedia, it was, whether or not 85, 92% voted in favor of independence.
	That doesn't account for the breakdown of which, you know, specific, not demographics, but geolocations within Ukraine might have had diverging interests.
	So, break it down for us.
	I presume the east was 100%, and then the, sorry, the west was more 100%, but the more east we got, it might have been like 60-40 in smaller cities.
	And break it down, and then also Crimea, the specific interests of Crimea, independent from the east and independent from the rest of Ukraine.
	Right, that's right.
	When people say independence, what did they think was going to be independence?
	They may well have thought independence will mean a close friendship and even a federal union with Russia.
	Because remember, when there was a referendum...
	That was held in March 1991 throughout the Soviet Union as to do you want some entity to continue, some entity in which everybody is a part of, you know, some successor to the Soviet Union, a kind of a federal system.
	Overwhelming.
	I can't remember the exact numbers, but it was an overwhelming victory saying, yeah, we want the USSR to continue.
	When the people voted for independence in Ukraine, it's unlikely that they really had in mind a state that would be in antagonism toward Russia.
	And so, yeah, you know, so therefore to take that vote as somehow an indication, oh, the Ukrainians wanted to have nothing to do with Russia, I mean, I think that's wrong.
	I think it's very interesting that...
	The overwhelming number of people in the USSR voted for the continuation of the USSR in some form.
	First of all, the capital of Ukraine is Kiev.
	And that is, geographically, is that more west or more east?
	Yeah, it's more in the west, yeah.
	Okay.
	And the fighting currently that is going on is strictly in the east?
	It's in the southeast of the country, yeah, the Donbass, yeah.
	Okay, and then getting into Crimea, what's the breakdown of Crimea as to their national interests with respect to...
	Yeah, I mean, it was mostly Russians.
	I mean, again, with some Ukrainians, there were some, the Tatars.
	The Tatars had been treated rather badly in World War II because they were seen as collaborators with the Nazis.
	So they were basically, you know, Stalin just punished.
	You know, that's what I mean.
	It's like to suggest that Stalin was uniquely driven by hostility towards the Ukrainians.
	I mean, he punished everybody.
	If I may, George, I actually stopped you there.
	You say that some would suggest that they were Nazi sympathizers.
	Others are just going to say that they were Nazi collaborators.
	I think I meant collaborators.
	Yeah, they were collaborators.
	And I don't know if you said sympathizers or collaborators, but let's just take for granted.
	Collaborators, yeah.
	But that was the point.
	I mean, so then Stalin...
	You know, when these territories were recaptured by the Red Army, Stalin just picked up the populace and just dumped them somewhere.
	You know, everyone was just shipped out.
	I mean, brutal, quite horrific.
	So that was the fate that the Crimean Tatars suffered.
	Then they were kind of...
	Yeah.
	I want just to ask the cynical question.
	They're either going to be working with the Nazis, Nazi collaborators, or they're going to be working with the Soviets.
	I mean, so they will be unless they do nothing, but damned, damned one way, damned the other, because between the Soviets and the Nazis, it's not clear historically who they might, they might be pretty close in terms of historical evils.
	So you accuse them of being Nazi collaborators.
	Right, flip your eyes.
	Yeah, but the point is they were part of the...
	You know, the populace, it was a very, you know, multinational empire.
	There were many, many people who lived within the USSR.
	I mean, Stalin's view was that anybody at all who wasn't actively killing Nazis was by definition a collaborator.
	And therefore, you know, he just punished.
	Punish everyone.
	There's a reason why the prisoners of war, the famous story about how all these prisoners of war who were then handed over to the Soviets were immediately sent to Siberian labor camps because Stalin's view was any prisoner of war is essentially a traitor.
	If you lay down your arms and you allow yourself to be captured by the enemy...
	You are a collaborator.
	And so Stalin just punished all prisoners of war.
	I mean, it was a very, to say the least, a very old-fashioned view of things.
	So that was, you know, so whether it was the Tatas or the Chechens and others, they were all punished by Stalin once the Red Army recaptured these places.
	Okay.
	All right.
	So it now makes more sense in terms of the fighting between Russia and...
	Ukraine since independence, being the eastern provinces, which have, I would say, resources, not resources, sorry, they have geopolitical relevance and ethnic issues among people who, I think it's like 65% Russian on the eastern provinces compared to the West, which is much less Russian.
	Right, right.
	That's right.
	Yeah, exactly.
	But keep in mind also that what we call the West...
	It had not really been a part of Ukraine until after World War II.
	I mean, it was, again, Stalin added those territories to Ukraine.
	You know, it had been part of Poland.
	And, of course, he also had territories that had been part of Romania and Hungary.
	So he had added on all of these territories.
	You know, the most intense Ukrainian nationalism is located in areas that had not even been a part of the Soviet Union during the Holodomor years.
	So, I mean, because during those years, it had actually been a part of Poland.
	By the way, I took the headphones off because I think the echo might be coming from your end.
	So unless I have to wear those, I'm not going to wear them.
	But the echo is not that bad.
	Don't worry about it.
	Ukraine is its own country, not part of Russia, but this is the issue, right?
	Setting aside energy interests, natural resource interests, the conflict itself arises from the fact that on the eastern side, on the eastern provinces that border with Russia, there's a large portion that consider themselves Russians or support Russia, And it's sort of like, I don't want to analogize it to, you know, Quebec independence.
	And if Quebec separated, what would happen with Montreal, which is itself 50-50, not 85-50 like the rest of Quebec.
	Well, the point is that...
	You know, the Soviet Union breaks up and the existing borders are recognized as international frontiers.
	And you could more or less keep that country together as long as you had political leaders who accepted the diversity of the people who lived in Ukraine.
	And for a while that happened.
	After the Orange Revolution in 2004, the Galicians, the Westernizers, they took over and they really wanted to strip from Ukraine entirely its Russian identity.
	I mean, it is kind of absurd.
	They all speak Russian and yet Russian is not even an official language of Ukraine.
	So, you know, this is the country where basically even at home they spoke Russian.
	No, no, Russian is not an official language.
	And then when the coup took place in February 2014, it overthrew Viktor Yanukovych, whose base of support...
	What was the Russians in the East?
	So when they took it over and they immediately passed a language law in which even the little bit that they gave to Russia, you know, kind of a mini official language in the Southeast, even that they were stripping out of Ukraine.
	That was sort of the final straw.
	They said, well, this country, Ukraine, it's not one where we're going to be very happy and it just doesn't belong to us anymore.
	And I think that's what triggered the breakaway of the Donetsk and Lugansk.
	All right.
	And now explain for those who don't understand, like myself, the annexing of Crimea in 2014.
	How, why, how does it happen logistically?
	Well, what happens is that...
	It had been the Socialist Autonomous Republic of Crimea, and it did provide for, I mean, then it became the Autonomous Republic of Crimea after 1991.
	But within the Constitution, it did provide for the holding of referendums on important constitutional issues.
	So they did that.
	They held a referendum and made an appeal to Russia.
	To be allowed to join the Russian Federation, and the Russian Federation went through the process, and they themselves said, yes, we're going to invite you to join, and they joined.
	No one's really seriously going to argue that the people of Crimea objected to being reincorporated within Russia, and it is reincorporation.
	I mean, it just went back to the status quo ante.
	Before Khrushchev, you know, picked up Crimea like a sack of potatoes and dumped it into Ukraine.
	I guess the strategic importance of Crimea is obvious.
	I just want to make sure it's the Black Sea or the Caspian?
	It's the Black Sea.
	Strategic importance, obvious.
	Military importance, obvious.
	Natural resources, obvious.
	But what led up to...
	Annexing Crimea, like geopolitically, what allowed that to happen?
	Well, because, yeah, the key was, I mean, up until then, Russia had been leasing Crimea, I mean, the whole port of Sevastopol, but because of this very nationalist crowd who took power.
	Remember, these are people who seized power.
	I mean, this was an illegal coup.
	The people who were suddenly in charge in Kiev, In February the 22nd, 2014, they were the people who had lost the election.
	I mean, Yanukovych had won the election.
	He had been elected president in 2010 on a platform of maintaining good relations with Russia, neutrality as to military alliances, and to end the whole process of rapprochement with NATO.
	Gradual integration within NATO.
	That was the platform Viktor Yanukovych ran on.
	He won that election in 2010.
	He was then overthrown with the help of the West, with Victoria Nuland and her cookies and all the rest who got involved because they wanted Ukraine in NATO.
	They were not happy with Yanukovych's attempt to distance Ukraine from NATO.
	But when these nationalists came to power, it was clear to the Russians that what they're going to do is they're going to end the lease.
	They're going to end the lease to the Russians.
	And basically, Russians would have to just leave Sevastopol.
	And I think that's why I think it was just a preemptive step that you say, OK, fine.
	We're not just going to allow them to go ahead and throw us out of Sevastopol.
	We'll go through the constitutional process of reabsorbing Crimea into Russia.
	What I love is that I'm reading the chat, George, and people are impassioned in the chat in a way that I now appreciate that this conflict, and if you take a position one way or the other, is as heated as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where you take a position one way or the other.
	I've just never appreciated the degree to which this is emotionally as important to, obviously, as everyone involved.
	I didn't realize this is a divided issue.
	Locally and internationally, but I just don't think people out here in Canada, North America, really appreciate the degree to which this is a divided issue because of what we're being told by the media.
	Well, your man, or rather your woman, Freeland, if you remember, her granddad had been a Nazi collaborator.
	And by the way, everyone should appreciate this.
	A real legit one.
	These are not floating accusations.
	Explain what you know about Chrystia Freeland because she has...
	I don't.
	I know a little bit just about that, but I, you know, I bow to you, your expertise.
	Oh, I bow to the other...
	I just read...
	I just watched a video the other day.
	My wife was getting into it.
	Yeah, Chrystia Freeland has a very interesting history, a very interesting tie to Ukraine.
	You know, interesting properties, interesting investments.
	So, interesting connections to the WEF as well, which I know better, but...
	Okay, so...
	What was I going with?
	We went with Crimea, understood that.
	Now we're getting into this particular conflict, but there was one other issue.
	Just to get to one thing, people in the chat saying Ukraine is a fundamentally corrupt nation.
	We're money laundering, corrupt politicians.
	This I appreciate.
	I would ask how it's different than any other country in Eastern Europe or any other country anywhere on the globe.
	But is there something uniquely corrupt about Ukraine as relates to its institutions and its elections that people might not be aware of?
	It does seem to be more corrupt than any other place.
	I mean, you know, when you think of Hunter Biden and how they got Hunter Biden involved in Ukraine, this is a man who had never in his life visited Ukraine.
	I mean, he doesn't speak Russian, doesn't speak Ukrainian, didn't know anything about the energy industry, and yet he was paid something like a million dollars a year for one reason only.
	Access to his father.
	And, you know, here was this company that hired him, Burisma, that was going to be prosecuted.
	And the company wanted this prosecution to go away.
	And how are they going to get it to go away?
	Well, they hired Hunter.
	Hunter would then talk to his dad.
	And his dad got involved.
	And lo and behold, the case was eventually dropped.
	So it was, you know, the money was well invested.
	And, you know, this goes across the board.
	I mean, so much money has been poured into Ukraine, far more than any other country.
	And then, where is this money?
	I mean, it all went into the pockets of the likes of Hunter Biden.
	I'm just reading some chats on Rumble.
	We're simultaneously streaming on Rumble, people.
	And someone said, Viva, this is all about Biden.
	You need to dig deeper.
	Dude, we've talked about this.
	I mean, there's a lot of new faces to the channel.
	Barnes and I, in our weekly streams, have gone over this in detail.
	I mean, we've gone over...
	All of it.
	But it is true.
	Most people have not the slightest genuine appreciation for the level of the corruption and the connection between the Biden, what some call a crime family, but just the Biden family to Ukraine.
	One second, I took another note here.
	Someone said we have to talk about the Budapest Memorandum, and I don't know what it is.
	Yeah, the Budapest Memorandum.
	You see, when the USSR broke up...
	And it was a very sudden process.
	There were nuclear weapons stationed outside of Russia proper, you know, in Ukraine, but also in Kazakhstan and Belarus.
	Now, Ukraine, you know, they didn't really want these nuclear weapons, but they wanted to get some money for it.
	So, you know, they saw that, well, okay, we'll transfer them to Russia, but we want to get paid for it.
	The point is that, you know, people, there's a misunderstanding about that.
	They say, oh, Ukraine had nuclear weapons.
	Ukraine never had nuclear weapons.
	They were on Ukraine's soil, but they were always under Soviet command, and then after the dissolution of the USSR, they came under Russian command.
	So they negotiated the transfer of the nuclear weapons from Ukraine, from Kazakhstan, from Belarus to Russia in return for some mullah.
	And this was the Budapest Memorandum.
	There's a preamble there in which Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States all commit themselves to the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine.
	Again, this is always misrepresented by saying that, oh, that means that the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine was guaranteed.
	No, it's just the usual boilerplate.
	I mean, it's like, you know, you're a member of the United Nations and you subscribe to the United Nations Charter so you recognize, you know, the territorial integrity and sovereignty of states.
	But it's not...
	A guarantee in the sense, well, if anyone tampers with your borders, we will go to war on your behalf.
	So that's always misunderstood that somehow this vague saying, yeah, we're committed to the territorial integrity, it means we will go to war on your behalf for your borders.
	No, there was none of that.
	And that's been explicitly stated by the American officials who negotiated the Budapest Memorandum, that there were no guarantees issued.
	And I'll just...
	I pulled it up to read it.
	I know it's Wikipedia, people, so take it with a grain of sand.
	The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances refers to three identical political agreements signed at the OSCE conference in Budapest, Hungary, to provide security assurances by its signatories relating to the accession of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine to the Treaty of...
	Stay off these things.
	The Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapon.
	The memorandum was originally signed by the Nuclear Power.
	Yada, yada, yada.
	The memorandum included security assurances against threats or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan.
	And then people can read the rest if you want.
	And George, what's your take on what this represents versus how...
	It means nothing.
	It means that these were physically transferred to Russia, but there were no...
	Security guarantees.
	It's like all of these various agreements that are signed, international agreements, have that same essential boilerplate.
	Yeah, we are all committed to the territorial integrity and sovereignty of these states.
	I mean, if you're going to go down this path, you know, what about the Helsinki final act?
	I mean, the Helsinki final act that everybody, you know, was guaranteeing everybody else's borders.
	And of course, No one was guaranteeing any borders, which is why the West Europeans, most of the Europeans and the Americans, happily signed off on the breakup of Yugoslavia, which was a forcible breakup, even though they'd signed the Helsinki Final Act in 1975, and then they signed the Charter of Paris in 1990, all of which had the same boilerplate.
	They're all committed to the territorial integrity of all of the signatories of these agreements.
	So that's all that was here in the Budapest Camarandum.
	But there's a lot of nonsense talked about it that somehow, oh, Ukraine was betrayed because its borders were guaranteed.
	No, there was no guarantee.
	Well, it says, and I'm going to look into it a little more because when Wikipedia puts, I forget the word now, it said security assurances, and they put it in quotes.
	The question is going to be, what does assurance mean?
	Does it mean providing weapons if you need?
	I mean, that's it.
	That's the point.
	I mean, a guarantee means you are ready to go to war if somebody tampers with your borders.
	Well, that's not what's in the Budapest Memorandum.
	I mean, like a guarantee, let's say when Britain and France issued a guarantee to Poland.
	In 1939.
	That was a guarantee.
	If anyone messes with you, we go to war on your behalf.
	Security assurances.
	And people can dive deeper.
	We can only dive so much into everything during one stream.
	Okay.
	The next question was, you've got to explain Zelensky's rise to power in Ukraine.
	What it represented.
	And my goodness, is he wishing that he had stuck to acting now, possibly?
	I mean, how did it happen?
	Is Zelensky like a Trump or is Zelensky just, and people might disagree with you, or is Zelensky just as corrupt as every other politician in Ukraine?
	Well, I don't think he's corrupt, and I think maybe he meant well.
	I mean, remember, he won overwhelmingly in 2019.
	On a program of improving relations with Russia and resolving the conflict in the Donbass.
	I mean, that was his platform.
	Huge victory over Poroshenko, who had been waging the war against the Donbass.
	I mean, most of the casualties took place when Poroshenko had been president.
	So he wins, and it seems like this well-meaning person, an outsider, is going to achieve.
	You know, a breakthrough in relation to Russia and a peace agreement in the Donbass.
	He doesn't do it.
	He comes under the sway of the oligarchs, comes under the sway of all the extreme right-wing nationalists in the West, and suddenly he is no different from his predecessor.
	So, you know, he's very unpopular and he has failed.
	To deliver.
	I mean, what he was supposed to do, as I think you know and the listeners know, there was a Minsk agreement.
	There was a Minsk agreement that was signed in 2015 in which there was supposed to be an agreement between Kiev and the people in the Donbass for a step-by-step process which would facilitate the reintegration of Donetsk and Lugansk.
	It was a step-by-step process.
	There would have to be a constitutional amendment giving special status to Donetsk and Lugansk.
	There would be local elections.
	And then, when this had been achieved, the Ukraine government would get control of the country's eastern border.
	But it was predicated on negotiations between Kiev and the representatives of the people of the Donbass.
	But that never happened.
	And I think what may have been the final straw in the last few days, particularly the UN Security Council meeting a few days ago, was when the Ukraine representative said, well, we're not going to ever negotiate with the representatives of the Donbass because we're not going to give them any kind of legitimacy.
	And this is what the Russians have been complaining for years.
	You know, you are supposed to negotiate.
	With the representatives of the Donbass.
	That's what the agreement says.
	It's there in black and white.
	You don't want to do that.
	And again, this is something the Russians have complained about.
	France and Germany, which is the guarantor of this agreement, should have been putting pressure on Zelensky to, you know...
	Get with the program.
	Try to implement Minsk.
	But it was clear Zelensky had no interest in implementing Minsk.
	And it was also clear that France and Germany had no interest in pressuring Zelensky to implement Minsk.
	And what's most serious is that in the past few months, when all these people who have been phoning Putin, visiting Putin, they knew how serious the Russians were, how fed up the Russians were.
	And yet even in this opportunity...
	Didn't take the opportunity to put pressure on Zelensky and say, look, the Russians really are serious this time.
	So just announce that you're going to implement Minsk.
	Go through the process.
	You don't even have to be serious about it, but at least go through a process.
	Instead, you know, they arrogantly announced, no, we're not even going to legitimize the leaders in the Donbass.
	And tell me if I'm going to portray both sides as steel man as I can with my limited knowledge.
	Ukraine says, we're not negotiating.
	We don't have to.
	This is Ukraine.
	We've got NATO.
	We've got America.
	We've got Biden behind us.
	Go screw off Putin.
	We don't need to negotiate.
	Putin's saying, we've never agreed to the...
	There's certain states on the east that we believe ought to have been part of Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.
	They want it.
	The majority of them want it.
	Come to the table or we'll invade and then invade incursions.
	We're going to get to the incursions in a sec.
	And that's his position.
	Well, except that it really wasn't his position.
	I mean, you know, yes, of course, Russia, you know, says, hey, this was a part of, had been part of Russia before what Lenin did.
	But the fact is that Russians kind of tolerated this.
	They tolerated the breakup of the USSR.
	They tolerated the fact that so many Russians now found themselves outside of the borders of Russia proper.
	And everything would have been fine, you know, if it hadn't been for this, you know, this rabidly anti-Russian crowd who took power in Ukraine.
	And, you know, if the Ukrainians had been smart, you know, they could have gone through the process of negotiating Minsk.
	And then they would have got Donetsk and Lugansk back.
	Because at that moment, even if the Russians themselves were kind of thinking, hey, this will be nice to have...
	All of these territories are part of Russia.
	But, you know, if the Russians say, OK, well, we'll go through this Minsk process and we'll have our constitutional change and we'll have our election.
	But now you, the Russians, have to comply with the agreement.
	You have to allow us to take control of the border.
	And then that's it.
	You're out.
	And we've got the whole of our country back.
	If they'd been smart...
	They could have easily outmaneuvered the Russians.
	So the Russians just went along and, you know, they've waited patiently, patiently.
	This has been seven years since the Minsk Agreement had been signed.
	Okay, and that's the question is, you know, the why now?
	But I think I can sort of understand the why now is that, call it diabolical or call it national interest or call it justified, Putin's intent has always been...
	To regain the eastern side of Ukraine, which has majority Russians.
	I don't know if that was his intent.
	I mean, I really don't.
	And incidentally, it's not his intent now.
	I mean, he didn't say this is now part of Russia.
	He has recognized the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republic.
	So they are independent states.
	They are not part of Russia.
	The representatives of the Donetsk and Lugansk had applied.
	For entry into Russia, Russia denied them.
	And Russia is still denying them.
	They're not part of Russia.
	Are there groups that are causing violence that are not Russian, but are there Ukrainian independence groups on the east that are carrying out acts of violence?
	Because, first of all, people would ask, you know, is there no one in Ukraine that you can watch right now for journals?
	And first of all, there is.
	I'll post the link right now.
	This comes as a recommendation from Barnes.
	Take it for what it's worth.
	Everyone should always approach everything with both skepticism and an open mind.
	So you can check out someone who's on the ground.
	There will be no Viva on the streets from Ukraine, so it will be Viva in the basement.
	But there are entities within Ukraine.
	That are carrying out acts of violence against Russian interests on the east side?
	Well, exactly.
	I mean, that was the Azov Battalion.
	I mean, these are people who are, you know, they're fascists.
	I mean, these are, you know, they're Nazi sympathizers.
	They're a very nasty bunch.
	Because, you know, basically, you know, the Nazis gave them that in their, you know, well, you know, they didn't actually give them the independent state.
	They were hoping to get an independent state.
	The problem was that they actually collaborated with the Nazis.
	They welcomed the Nazi invaders and took part in some of the Nazis' most horrific crimes.
	But there's a great deal.
	Of fondness and affection for the Nazis and the Nazi collaborators among these people, among these rabid nationalists, these assault battalion types.
	You know, they put up all these statues to Stepan Bandera.
	I mean, you know, for all the most rabid Ukrainian nationalists and collaborators, you know, they put up statues for them.
	So, yeah, all these people are very, very nasty.
	This will be one of the comments you get.
	If you take a position for Israel, you're supporting Palestinian genocide.
	If you support the Palestinians, you're supporting terrorism.
	And I'm not trying to...
	This is the reality of disputes, is that there are victims on both sides.
	And in certain disputes, everybody thinks the other side is the mortal enemy.
	And I do not know in this point.
	I don't know.
	I do think that the word genocide is...
	Grotesquely overused.
	I mean, everybody's now, you know, few people are killed and suddenly you hail it as genocide.
	The problem is that this was started by the West.
	You know, the West did this.
	They declared, oh, there was genocide in Bosnia, and then they convicted all these Serbs for committing genocide in Srebrenica.
	It's very peculiar.
	You know, you execute prisoners of war, whoever, hundreds, maybe a thousand prisoners of war, and suddenly you declare it as a genocide.
	How?
	By what definition?
	I mean, there's something called the Convention on Genocide that all countries signed on to.
	Genocide is defined quite specifically there.
	And, you know, it means you're seeking to exterminate a distinct people.
	Now, so the West started it, and now others have batted onto it.
	So, you know, it's not that I thought, you know, when Putin said, oh, there's a genocide being committed against the Russians in the Donbass.
	I mean, I think, you know, it is kind of an absurd thing to say.
	The problem is that when he said it, you had Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, who then mocked Putin.
	Well, that's it.
	I mean, once you do that, you just infuriate the Russians, because they're not going to tolerate a German making light of genocide being committed against Russians.
	I mean, so Schultz just completely made a fool of himself, and in a very bad way, because it may well have contributed to what's going on now.
	All right.
	Question.
	What is Putin...
	The media in the West says Putin has declared war and is invading.
	I'm skeptical of the media in the West.
	It's their own fault.
	Now I don't even know if this is true or not.
	On your end, what is going on?
	Has Putin declared war?
	Is he invading?
	And if so, what parts of Ukraine is he currently invading?
	And for what reason?
	With what objective?
	Well, that's a very good question because at the moment...
	He's simply taking out the military infrastructure.
	He may settle for that.
	He'd been warning that he was going to take military technical measures if his ultimatum, the ultimatum he issued in December, if it wasn't taken seriously by the United States and NATO, he was going to take military technical measures.
	So he might settle for that.
	So, hey, we've destroyed all the airfields.
	We've destroyed all the air defense systems, you know, all the radar stations and everything.
	Now we can pack up and go home.
	I have my doubt that he's going to settle for that because all that will happen is, you know, they're going to start rebuilding and then Russia will have to do this all over again within two or three years.
	I think, I mean, you know, it's hard to get into his mind.
	He is very upset about the prospect.
	Of Ukraine leaving the Russian civilization.
	I mean, he's a man with a very strong history, and he thinks that these, you know, he calls them Nazis, you know, these rabid nationalists, the very pro-Western people, they are dragging Ukraine out of the Russian civilization.
	I think that's how Russians see, you know, their country as civilization.
	Russian civilization comprises Russia proper, Belarus.
	And Ukraine.
	And what's going on now in Ukraine is that they're so obsessed with EU, NATO, is that they're just losing their Russian character.
	People are growing up now in Ukraine who don't speak a word of Russian.
	So within a generation, you could have a majority of the people of Ukraine who don't speak a word of Russian.
	And I think he wants to somehow restore Ukraine in some ways into the Russian world.
	And that's why I think it's interesting that he didn't annex the Donetsk and Lugansk.
	He's sort of saying to the Ukrainians, you know, you can have this back.
	You know, maybe we can have a new Minsk process.
	You can have them back, work out some kind of a federal system, but then you would have to knock off all of this Ukrainian nationalism.
	You have to knock off.
	All of your Russophobia and Russian nationalism.
	And then you could gradually reintegrate with the Donbass and maybe reintegrate with Russia proper because after Russia and Belarus have a union state, so maybe they can have a union state involving Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.
	Now, all this is maybe pie in the sky and very much utopian, but somebody like Putin who thinks a great deal about history and is very Concerned about the idea of the diminution of Russia, Russia disappearing as a civilization from the world.
	You know, I think that's what is, you know, if you look at his speech, read his speech that he delivered this morning, he talks a great deal about that, how, you know, Ukraine is sort of moving away from us.
	It's abandoning its civilization.
	The gangsters who have now taken hold of Ukraine are really abandoning.
	You know, the essence of Ukraine.
	He's a Putin fanboy.
	Dude, first of all, appreciate what the alternative to that is.
	If you deem this to be Putin fanboy, the flip side is you're a Biden fanboy or a Trudeau fanboy or you're skeptical of all politicians and you can recognize nonetheless that when it comes to international politicians or national, when it comes to politicians on the international scale, Putin, love him or hate him, you know, devil or a saint.
	He's more well-read, more well-spoken, and probably commands a little more respect than Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden combined, multiplied by 10. Whether or not he's any more dishonest or less dishonest, politicians are politicians.
	But at some point, you can call Putin what he is in comparison to the alternatives, which are Justin Trudeau, proven liar, feckless tyrant of his own people, and Joe Biden.
	That's not my president to criticize today.
	But that's the thing.
	Putin and Lavrov, I mean, these are highly intelligent men.
	I mean, you know, whenever they speak, you know, you see there's a huge gulf between them and Western politicians.
	I mean, Putin is a man with a very strong sense of history.
	He's very aware of Russian history and Russian civilization.
	You know, he suddenly, you know, sees how perilous, you know, even the survival of Russia is.
	I mean, he pretty much says, look, Russia could have just ceased to exist in 1941.
	I mean, you know, it was touch and go had Hitler prevailed.
	And he seemed to say, OK, it was touch and go in the 1990s.
	I mean, the whole place was just simply collapsed.
	So he's very aware of the threats.
	That face Russia.
	And he lists the various threats.
	I mean, Ukraine kind of becoming completely alienated from Russia.
	And then, of course, NATO building its infrastructure right on Russia's doorstep, just in the suburbs of St. Petersburg.
	These are all things that he's very aware of.
	And things, particularly with all the other problems that Russia has, economic problems, demographic problems, that Russia could just disappear.
	And he once said, you know, something like, you know, a world without Russia is not a world that I would want to live in.
	So, you know, he's always worrying that that's it.
	Russia could just vanish.
	What I love, I brought up one chat that said, you know, everyone who's very skeptical, generally speaking, on our channel, you know, subscribers and locals, and so I'm saying this, but a lot of people just reflexively believe, you know, they hate the media, nobody trusts the media, but when they...
	Paint Putin as the demon, Russia as the aggressor.
	Everyone believes it because it's preexisted our awakening of media, you know, fakeness.
	The demonizing of Russia goes back to like 80s movies where it goes back to the 60s.
	So this part of our mental psyche is so deeply ingrained.
	We distrust the media.
	We distrust Western politicians.
	And yet whatever they say about Putin in Russia, we tend to believe because it's deeply ingrained.
	But this is not to say Putin's good.
	It's just to say, I don't think Putin is any worse than Trudeau and Biden.
	Why do we need to say that somebody is good or bad?
	I think we try to understand a political leader.
	This is a world historical figure.
	I mean, you know, historians will be writing about Putin for many, many years.
	For, you know, the next hundred years, people will be writing about...
	Putin and the meaning of Putinism.
	So we try to understand, you know, we try to analyze what he's really about.
	I mean, you know, we don't have to like him.
	He's not, you know, he's not going to be a dinner companion, although he might be quite an interesting dinner companion.
	It's like people look at Putin.
	They want to look at President Xi and Ahmadinejad and say, look, these guys are tyrants.
	And then meanwhile, you got Justin Trudeau calling in his police to beat up unarmed protesters at a block party in Ottawa.
	I'll take it.
	They're all bad.
	They're all bad.
	And especially when one liar says that someone else is lying, I'm skeptical.
	And I do.
	It's true.
	I just want to understand what's going on because these conflicts, even the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I'll have my own personal opinion, but the debate is complex nonetheless.
	And there's black and whites in every debate, and then there's gray zones in every debate.
	Russia, and you're a Putin sympathizer, so you're going to say Putin is striking military locations or infrastructure in Ukraine.
	The West is going to say he's invading, he's bombing apartment buildings.
	Here are some videos on Twitter.
	So people are going to have to make up their own conclusions.
	Well, I think that's it.
	I mean, at this stage, you know, I mean, I think what would make sense for Putin to do...
	Is to hit military targets.
	And that's what I'm assuming.
	Now, is he also killed civilians?
	Maybe.
	I mean, most wars, which start off, oh, we're only absolutely focusing laser-like on military targets.
	We're leaving civilians alone.
	It never works out that way.
	Civilians always hurt.
	Given what Putin said in his speech today, he said we're not interested in occupying Ukraine and we're not interested in hurting any civilians.
	So I'm assuming that initially he's just going to go after the military targets.
	What I think is interesting is he seems to be suggesting that he's going to go after certain individuals.
	And that, I think, goes back to my point that he thinks that maybe a kind of a new Ukraine can be born.
	Because after all, somebody had to vote for Zelensky.
	In 2019, people voted for Zelensky because they wanted reconciliation with Russia.
	So if he can take out some people from Ukraine, she seemed to be hinting at that they're going to do it, they're going to bring people to justice.
	Putin said we're going to bring people to war criminals to justice.
	And if he could take out some of these people like Yarosh, the right sector crowd, arrest them, you know, imprison them, he might think, hey, you know, public opinion might change in Ukraine.
	There might, you know, there might be a tilt against these, you know, rabid nationalists.
	So that's it.
	And, you know, he also said, well, you know, arrest the people who perpetrate.
	The most obvious question is going to be...
	Why now?
	Why not under Trump?
	And what has changed?
	Is this a question where Putin sees the West as being weakened through policy, if you want to criticize people, weakened through ideology, weakened through COVID, and now Putin feels reassured or somewhat confident that the West will not do anything meaningful militaristically in terms of responding or coming to Ukraine's defense?
	I don't know.
	I do think that Probably Putin had some hopes for Trump.
	I mean, he may have thought that, you know, Trump really despised NATO.
	He despised the whole antiquated security system in the world.
	And he may have thought that, well, maybe Trump is just going to shake things up a little bit.
	And they were obviously disappointed in Trump.
	Biden was just part of the foreign policy machine.
	It's the same machine.
	And so they weren't expecting anything from Biden any more than they were expecting anything from Hillary Clinton.
	And I think that's why they think that, you know, four years of Biden and, you know, they keep pouring more and more weaponry into Ukraine.
	So the more they pour weaponry, the more this...
	This entity, this anti-Russia, what he called it today, he called Ukraine as just an anti-Russia, heavily armed, becomes a serious security threat for Russia.
	And I think that's why he felt that, again, I'm just speculating, he made things that as long as Biden is there, things are going to deteriorate for Russia.
	Well, you know what?
	I'll ask this now.
	I just brought it up.
	Ask George if he thinks Putin will install a puppet government in Ukraine.
	I mean, nobody seriously believes or thinks even that the endgame is Putin annexes all of Ukraine.
	I mean, in theory, assuming he has diabolical goals, it would be to annex the eastern provinces, presumably where there's...
	I do think he wants to maintain them as...
	I don't think he wants to.
	Because if he were to annex them, then any kind of reconciliation with Russia and Ukraine would just be off the table.
	It would never happen.
	So that's why I think he's going to want to keep them as independent republics as a draw toward Ukraine.
	Hey, if you want your country back, then why don't you try and negotiate and see if you can recreate a state.
	That isn't driven by anti-Russian anima.
	So I think he's going to, that I think will be his role.
	And I think if Ukraine doesn't play ball, then I think he may take a bigger chunk of Ukraine.
	He might then decide, you know, even to take away Ukraine's access to the Black Sea.
	I don't think he wants to do that very much.
	But I think that's what he's doing.
	He's trying to get Ukraine.
	To, you know, basically drop the whole anti-Russia business and work together on recreating Ukraine.
	Someone had asked, you know, did Hitler stop with Poland, analogizing Putin in the Ukraine?
	I mean, I can think of obvious differences in my limited understanding of this, but George, I mean, what would be your response?
	I think I know it, but what would be your response to that?
	Well, I mean, did Hitler stop with Poland?
	Well...
	No, he didn't start with Poland, but the point is that Hitler had a specific agenda that he intended to pursue.
	He always intended to pursue that.
	But Putin doesn't have that agenda.
	Putin has no interest in ruling over people who don't want to be ruled by Russians.
	I mean, I think he's simply focused on I think Russia's role in history, Russia addressing its economic problems, Russia addressing its demographic problems, but I think also the maintenance of the distinctive Russian civilization.
	Yes, no interest.
	I mean, as it is, Russia has a problem with that giant land mass that it doesn't have enough people to populate.
	Hitler had a global domination, you know, ultra-race theory to begin with, which is not arguably different.
	It's very different.
	So, I mean, I don't think the analogy is there, but I mean, I can see how people see that analogy.
	Now, the question is this.
	So, depending on who you believe, it's either Putin strategic strikes on military and media infrastructure.
	If you're reading some of the media stuff, it's...
	Blatant, wanton attacks on civilians, and you'll have to come to your conclusion as to what reality is, given those diametrically opposing facts.
	People are talking sanctions, George, as if sanctions do anything.
	The joke in this was, when our governments in Canada were locking us down during COVID, violating our constitutional rights, in the States, people were like, we should implement sanctions against Canada.
	I was like, what good is that going to do?
	Trudy is still going to be going to his...
	I think that's what they're doing.
	It's hard to see what exactly sanctions can possibly achieve because in the first place...
	The West is pretty much out-sanctioned.
	It's already imposed wave after wave after wave of sanctions.
	There was the Magnitsky Act sanctions, sanctions over Navalny, sanctions over the Skripals, sanctions over the interference in US elections and in Brexit.
	It's just constant sanctioning.
	You know, as the Russians look at it, they say, whatever we do, we're going to be sanctioned.
	So we might as well go ahead and do what we need to do for our own security interests, because, you know, even if we don't do it, we're going to be sanctioned.
	I was going to say, whatever they do or don't do, because if you do believe that the Russians were not the ones involved in the interference in the 2016 elections...
	Which some might have good cause to believe at this point that it was actually, if there were any Russians involved, it came to the Democratic Party themselves.
	So yeah, they get sanctioned for what the Dems do by Dem politicians in the Dem-controlled government.
	Although some of those sanctions came under a Republican-controlled government as well.
	Understood.
	Okay, well, I mean, so that's interesting.
	What is the latest as of now?
	I mean, is it all out or was it a couple of tactical, call it whatever you want, tactical strikes and now there's no active...
	People's invading?
	I would think that there are going to be some...
	I don't think they're just going to stop at a few...
	destruction of some limited military infrastructure.
	What the next step is, is hard to know.
	I mean, I'm kind of...
	Right now, Putin is suggesting...
	That, you know, we'll call it off if, you know, you come to some agreement about neutrality status for Ukraine.
	And, you know, it's possible that, you know, that might not be a bad deal for Zelensky.
	I mean, Zelensky is in quite a lot of trouble himself.
	And, you know, it doesn't cost Ukraine anything to basically say, we will have a new country Neutral status.
	Because there's nothing wrong with neutrality.
	It was always a stupid move to say, oh, you know, it has to be NATO membership or else.
	Because, you know, Austria is neutral.
	No one interferes in the internal affairs of Austria.
	Sweden is neutral.
	Switzerland is neutral.
	I mean, all neutrality means you don't join any military alliance.
	You don't join, you know, in the old days, you don't join NATO or the Warsaw Pact.
	And now it'll be, okay, we don't join NATO, but we also won't join the collective security treaty organization that's run by Russia.
	That's it.
	Everything else you can do.
	I mean, so it should never have been, you know, that's why this whole thing today, it should never have come to this.
	It should always have been an easy one to resolve.
	Basically, Ukraine, Georgia, and all of the former republics of the Soviet Union just simply say, we wouldn't have...
	Neutral status.
	Well, the ones who haven't joined the CSTO, so the ones that still are neither in NATO or CSTO.
	It's like, we're going to be neutral.
	And that's it.
	And I think then, you know, Russia would be happy and then it wouldn't have come to this.
	So this was a huge blunder by the West, as was the refusal to put pressure on Zelensky to take the Minsk negotiations seriously.
	And am I just projecting my own political bias here that Putin arguably felt empowered to do this now?
	Someone made a joke.
	Trudeau saw a Yahtzee flag in a crowd of 10,000 people and decided to bring in the police.
	Putin says, oh, I saw one bad element there, so we're going to bring in the military.
	Am I projecting or do you think there's any truth to the idea that Putin, having seen the, not blunders, but abuses, failures, overreach of Western leaders, now feels empowered to say, Screw you.
	Who are you to lecture me?
	I'm going to go do what I want now in Ukraine?
	Well, I think so.
	Well, I mean, I think he's been really, really getting fed up with the West.
	And I mean, it's in all of his speeches.
	I mean, he goes through the litany of all the Western deceit, that Russia had been subjected to the promises not to expand NATO to its borders, the NATO aggression against Yugoslavia, NATO aggression of Libya.
	You know, the illegal intervention in Syria, the invasion of Iraq.
	I mean, he says this in every speech.
	And he's really just fed up with it.
	He's fed up, you know, with the Western self-righteousness, you know, about the evil of Russia, while the West is the one who is actually waging continual wars.
	Another thing that was interesting, and I don't think anyone's noticed, he talked today, About we don't want the Western values, the sort of degenerate, depraved Western values.
	I've not heard that.
	I mean, you know, he didn't specify exactly what he meant by degenerate and depraved Western values.
	We can guess what he's referring to.
	But it's an interesting thing.
	You know, he says these are not our national values.
	This is not the values of Russians.
	So it's a kind of interesting, you know, again, insight into...
	Putin, I mean, there's a civilizational conflict here.
	Now, I brought up a chat that said Tuvalu was bombing Russia.
	I don't know if it's a meme.
	I'm just Googling.
	Thus far, nobody's bombing Russia.
	So don't spread rumors.
	All right.
	Well, this is...
	Look, George, I think this is going to help people understand what's going on.
	I hope.
	In the chat, if I didn't hit anything, let me know.
	I wrote one thing.
	Oh, Jasinovich.
	I took a note down.
	I don't know who that is.
	Jasinovich?
	Yeah.
	It was someone who'd ask about Jasenovic, J-A-S-E-N-O-V-I-C.
	Oh, Jasenovic.
	Oh, yeah, Jasenovic.
	That was a day camp in Croatia, in Nazi-occupied Croatia.
	Well, if I, you know...
	Croatia was essentially an ally of Hitler's.
	It wasn't just a collaborationist power with Hitler, but it was an ally of Hitler.
	And Jasenovac was this death camp where nobody knows exactly how many Serbs were killed.
	Several hundred thousand Serbs were killed in Jasenovac.
	So it was a death camp.
	Actually run by Croats and not by Nazis.
	So in every other kind of collaborationist regimes, basically the Nazis just simply, you know, they took the Jews.
	You know, they had locals who helped them out, but they basically, it was the Nazis who killed the Jews.
	But Jasenovac was actually run by the Ustasa, the fascists who ran Croatia during the war.
	And now, I'll guess one last question, because this is all the media is talking about now.
	It's a great distraction for Trudeau.
	It's a great distraction from Biden.
	Is this as big of an international incident, an international issue, as the media is making it out to be?
	Or is this sort of more media blowing what is a localized, minimized conflict out of proportion to distract from their own woes and foibles at home?
	Oh, I think so.
	I mean, I think that it is a distraction.
	Politicians such as Biden tanking in the polls.
	Boris Johnson, who just three weeks ago was on the ropes.
	He was on the way out.
	Macron, he's got a tough re-election fight ahead of him.
	Olaf Scholz, clearly a kind of colorless, drab figure, not really very inspiring to the Germans.
	They are loving this.
	It's wonderful that they can ride.
	But of course, it's ridiculous for them to make out that this is some huge crisis because it's not a huge crisis because they've all said they're not going to get involved militarily.
	Well, if you're not going to get involved militarily, then stop pretending that this is such a huge crisis.
	It's like you've already ruled out actually suffering seriously.
	You've already said this is so big.
	But we're not actually prepared to lose a single one of our lives.
	Well, that means it's not that big.
	We've just seen in real time the Canadian government make a national issue out of the Ottawa protests.
	Talk about it crippling the economy, declaring emergency.
	We've just seen this play in Canada.
	And now I'm just saying, are they doing the exact same thing?
	It is what the media in Canada did to that Ottawa protest.
	Exactly what the media in the West is doing to this conflict in Russia.
	This type of lies and dishonesty and deceit coming out of politicians and the media, it does everyone a disservice because then you treat everything with the same skepticism and dishonesty.
	This could be the beginning of a serious conflict, or it could be an absolute minimal conflict on a border of a country that is extremely limited, but they're blowing it out of proportion.
	So they can weaponize it, distract from their own issues, and the rest of us are trying to figure out the truth in the meantime.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	They're whipping up a hysteria full of wildly exaggerated, overwrought terminology.
	I mean, you go to the truckers, Nazis, Hitler, Putin, Nazis, Hitler, and there's nothing whatever to do with any of that.
	It's a way of getting everybody glued to the set.
	And above all, it gets everybody.
	Whom are you supposed to hate?
	You're telling people, these are the people you're supposed to hate.
	You've got to hate the truckers.
	And then the same, who else do I have to hate?
	Oh, you have to hate Trump.
	All the Trumpians.
	They're also the terrible people.
	And then, of course, Putin, the Russians.
	And they're all somehow in on it together.
	There's some conspiracy tying them together.
	No one can quite understand what the conspiracy is.
	But they want to tie them together.
	These are all the people you're supposed to hate.
	This is not the same.
	It's not the same.
	First of all, it's not the same.
	The question is, is the media doing the same thing?
	If the media just lied to you and lied to everyone repeatedly over weeks about one incident...
	If you choose to believe that media now, well, that's a questionable strategy that might show your underlying biases to believe when the lying media tells you something, if it tells you what you want to believe.
	Or it might show poor judgment to say, well, I know that the media just lied to me a week ago, but now I believe that they're telling me the truth.
	Or they might be telling you the truth.
	The problem is they can't be trusted because we now know that they are chronic.
	Remorseless liars.
	That's what they do.
	They manipulate the public, and they absolutely get worked up about it.
	If you were to remind them, you know, in 1968, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia.
	They sent their tanks across the border.
	They invaded Czechoslovakia.
	They occupied Czechoslovakia.
	They removed the government that ruled Czechoslovakia, and they inserted their person into Czechoslovakia.
	The West looked on and said, hey, you know, them's the brakes.
	So we were able to live with that.
	And Czechoslovakia is a lot closer than Ukraine is to the West.
	Same with, you know, with Hungary.
	I mean, people, you know, 1956, again, Red Army went in.
	They took out the government that they didn't want.
	There were a lot of casualties as well.
	Again, they live with it, you know, 56. Three years later, Khrushchev was cavorting around with Eisenhower in Camp David.
	People could live with that.
	Well, if the West could live with Hungary and Czechoslovakia, they sure as hell can live with Ukraine.
	But it's a way of getting everyone agitated without thinking about what's really happening.
	And I want to bring this up.
	MSM lies.
	It's the onion rings fault.
	I don't get the reference, guys, so I have to go watch Putin's last interview because apparently he made a comment about onion rings.
	And that avatar, Zach D, forget what's written on the llama.
	If I'm not mistaken, that is Carl from Llamas with Hats.
	Maybe I'm wrong.
	If anyone does not know what Llamas with Hats is, YouTube it, Google it.
	It's very bizarre dark comedy, but you'll thank me later or you'll hate me later.
	George, I'm going to wind up and I'm going to bring up some of the last chats.
	Does it matter if Russia launched an attack on Canada or the UK to degrade its military capabilities?
	Would anyone call that a minor incursion?
	This presupposes the underlying fact that we're trying to assess the veracity of.
	If a lying media told you that that happened, when you know that they just lied to you the week before, would you believe it?
	Or would you think it's spun?
	Would you think it's exaggerated?
	It's how do you digest the information coming from entities that you know are lying to you?
	Because we just knew that...
	We just found out.
	Vinmin compromised by money interests in Ukraine.
	It really puts all of that back into perspective.
	Biden's threat to hold a billion dollars in foreign aid unless they fired the investigator.
	Life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards.
	Kierkegaard.
	George, let's do this again.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	It was a lot of fun.
	Thanks very much.
	You're closer to the action.
	You have much more of a deep historical understanding than I do.
	I'm trying to make sense of it.
	I think I understand it better.
	And if I think I understand it better, I think a lot of people watching can now say they understand it better, even if you don't have to have answers.
	You just have to have an understanding, the requisite degree of skepticism, the requisite degree of an open mind in order to digest the information that you're getting from all sources.
	So, George, stick around.
	We'll say our proper goodbyes.
	Everyone in the chat, thank you very much.
	Stream tomorrow.
	With a volunteer from the trucker's convoy.
	No good deed goes unpunished.
	Had his bank account frozen.
	They went after his wife's credit.
	We're going to talk about his experience tomorrow, so it should be at 3 o 'clock, I believe.
	Subject to change, but stay tuned.
	George, thank you.
	Oh, George, where can everyone find you?
	Yeah, you can find me on Twitter.
	And you can find me on Substack.
	And you can find me on RT.
	I write for RT.
	I don't know what's going to happen about that.
	But you can find some of my writing on RT.
	And above all, please buy my book, Bombs for Peace, NATO's Humanitarian War on Yugoslavia.
	Awesome.
	Thank you very much, George.
	Thank you, everyone, in the chat.
	I'll see you all tomorrow.
	George, stick around.
	We'll see our proper goodbyes.

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