Can the World Stop the Next Hitler?
Putin’s pre-announced escalated invasion and occupation of Ukraine has commenced, and it happened when we said it would: on the anniversary week of Ukraine’s 2014 uprising and the eight year anniversary of Putin’s annexation of Crimea. 2-22-22 is set to go down in history – should the future be lucky enough to have history – much as 8-08-08 did when Putin invaded Georgia fourteen years ago. The escalated invasion of Ukraine, a sovereign nation for over thirty years, is a humanitarian disaster and a profound violation of international law.
Perhaps world leaders should have been more assertive in battling the Kremlin’s multiple invasions of sovereign countries, oligarch infiltration of Western institutions and partnerships with the most corrupt Western actors, and Putin’s general disintegration into madman status! Perhaps if they had listened to the many warning signs that this situation would get extraordinarily dangerous unless action was taken – if you would like a recent list of them, please consult our archives – Ukraine would not be in a terrifying and tragic position and the entire world would not be dealing with a nuke-bearing dictator who will stop at nothing to get his way.
In this episode, we discuss Putin’s desire to rebuild the Soviet Union even if it brings mass death, Zelensky’s fierce opposition to the assault on Ukraine, the insufficient sanctions passed by the UK and the promising curtailing of Nordstream 2. We speculate on which countries may be in danger from Kremlin invasion in the future. We debunk Putin’s bullshit blatherings and analyze them in the context of the generation gap between Putin and the citizens of the countries he seeks to conquer.
We conclude our episode with an interview with Gustav Gressel, a senior policy fellow with the Wider Europe Programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Gressel is an expert on Russia, Eastern Europe, and defense policy. He discusses Germany’s termination of the Nordstream 2 project, the need for anti-corruption laws and sanctions, and how energy policy is used as political leverage in Europe. He also describes the chilling similarities between Putin, Mussolini, and Hitler.
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Kenyan U.N. Ambassador Martin Kimani:
Kenya and almost every African country was birthed by the ending of empire. Our borders were not of our own drawing. They were drawn in the distant colonial metropoles of London, Paris and Lisbon with no regard for the ancient nations that they cleaved apart. Today, across the border of every single African country live our countrymen with whom we share deep historical, cultural and linguistic bonds. At independence, had we chosen to pursue states on the basis of ethnic, racial or religious homogeneity, we would still be waging bloody wars these many decades later. Instead, we agreed that we would settle for the borders that we inherited, but we would still pursue continental, political, economic, and legal integration. Rather than form nations that looked ever backwards into history with a dangerous nostalgia, we chose to look forward to a greatness none of our many nations and peoples had ever known.
Kenyan U.N. Ambassador Martin Kimani:
We chose to follow the rules of the organization of African unity and the United Nations charter, not because our borders satisfied us but because we wanted something greater forged in peace. We believe that all states formed from empires that have collapsed or retreated have many peoples in them yearning for integration with peoples in neighboring states. This is normal and understandable. After all, who does not want to be joined to their brethren and to make common purpose with them? However, Kenya rejects such a yearning from being pursued by force. We must complete our recovery from the embers of dead empires in a way that does not plunge us back into new forms of domination and oppression. We rejected irredentism and expansionism on any basis, including racial, ethnic, religious, or cultural factors. We reject it again today.
[intro theme music]
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the bestsellers, The View From Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight, and of the upcoming book, They Knew, available for pre-order now.
Andrea Chalupa:
I am Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine, history that is unfortunately repeating today. It's a film that Putin does not want you to see and we know that because Kremlin authorities—Russian authorities, a bunch of hooligans—shut down a screening in Moscow. So, go see it.
Sarah Kendzior:
And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the United States and rising autocracy around the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
Now, if you've been listening to our Patreon bonus episodes for some time now, you would have known that Putin was going to escalate his invasion of Ukraine at the end of February or early March, and that's exactly what is happening. On Patreon, we have something called the Democracy Defender level where people can sign up there to submit questions to us. The listeners that do are very plugged in on all the stuff we talk about here in Gaslit Nation. So they were asking us very early on for when was Putin going to pull the trigger and escalate his invasion. They were on this early. Of course, the reports were saying sometime in January, sometime in February, and when we got this question from our Patreon community I responded with the obvious answer because Putin being the serial killer that he is, is obsessed with the symbolism of dates.
Andrea Chalupa:
He loves key dates. There's a sickness there. So the answer I gave on Patreon to our listeners there on the bonus episode was, Look to the end of February/early March. Why is that? Because that's the 8-year anniversary of when Putin began launching his annexation—his invasion—of Crimea. And he still has Crimea. So, that symbolism would show the West that, Ha ha ha, I still have Crimea and I'm gonna go deeper into Ukraine and I'm gonna stay there and I'm gonna seize the country back for Russian genocide, colonialism and Russian glory. Right? And keep in mind, Crimea today is a cesspool of human rights violations, just like the far edge of Ukraine is today under Russian occupation. So, Putin goes into Donbas last night, Russia time, which would be February 22nd, 2022. This date also marks the end of Ukraine's 2013/2014 Euromaidan protests known in Ukraine as the “Revolution of Dignity”.
Andrea Chalupa:
It was a popular uprising launched by an independent journalist and it started, really, as a student movement. Putin's puppet Viktor Yanukovych, the very Trumpian Donald Trump of Ukraine, swiftly tried to turn Ukraine into a dictatorship to protect himself. He passed all sorts of draconian laws. He sent in government snipers to fire on the protestors. Around a hundred people were killed. Many people were kidnapped and tortured, and Ukrainians fought on. Ukrainians fought on. And there's a lot of misinformation/disinformation out there about this uprising; people blame the West. they blame the CIA, they blame Victoria Nuland. The reality is, you know, I watched this invasion unfold in real time. Ukrainians were on their own, just like they feel like they're on their own today on the front lines of Putin's war against global democracy, where they're just considered a buffer state, a human sacrifice to protect the rest of the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
That's how they felt back then eight years ago on Maidan, Kyiv's main square. European officials came in, tried to tell the protestors, “Settle down”, US officials, too. “Let's broker some peace deals. Yanukovych can stay in power.” Ukrainians were having none of that. They wanted him gone, gone, gone, gone. So Euromaidan, the Revolution of Dignity, was successful despite the West, not because of it and anybody who says otherwise, they're parroting Putin's propaganda. He kept emphasizing these ridiculous conspiracy theories just last night in his horrific Giuliani With a Spray Tan and Hair Dye Rolling Down His Face Lunacy that we've come to be used to with Trump and his Klown Kar. It was just an absurd performance of a dictator. that's very clearly lost his mind and is isolated in a bunker.
Andrea Chalupa:
So, we're gonna get into all that. My point is if you sign up on Patreon, you're gonna get a lot more bonus episodes. You're gonna be plugged into a community that's really on top of these issues with us. It's a solidarity community. We're helping each other through this and it shapes the show. It shapes a lot of the stuff that Sarah and I think about and talk about, so sign up there to help support Gaslit Nation and keep us going. We also have a wonderful big announcement: We are launching a really exciting series with fantastic experts who are going to walk us through what's broken in America and how to fix it. We're calling this series, ‘Rising up from the Ashes: Cassandra's and Other Experts on Rebuilding Democracy.’ It's this spring. It's going to be a spring cleaning for our democracy, a spring rebirth.
Andrea Chalupa:
And we have experts from the ACLU to give us the whole landscape of all the anti trans bills that Republicans are pushing and are authoritarian scapegoating. We have experts on the Supreme Court to talk about what’s broken at the Supreme Court and what to do about that, especially in regards to the, again, authoritarian crackdown against women's rights, abortion rights, healthcare rights, people's rights, right? The whole abortion issue. We have an expert on cults to talk about the cult of Trump and the cult of disinformation and how to break through it. If you've lost someone to the cult of disinformation, whether it's the anti-vax movement, QAnon, this is a conversation that's going to guide you and help you and empower you in how to think about that and how to address it in your life. So, a whole list of experts, and we're really thrilled about this series.
Andrea Chalupa:
We've been working on it for a very long time and today we're going to launch—you'll see on my Twitter, Sarah's Twitter, the Gaslit Nation Twitter—an exclusive original poster by the artist, Nate Powell, who illustrated the John Lewis graphic novel series known as March. He also has his own exquisite book that he did called Save it for Later, which is essentially a parent's guide to raising a kid in America against a backdrop of rising autocracy. So, Nate, thank you so much for your wonderful gift to us and we'll share that original poster that Nate Powell did for our big spring series, Gaslit Nation Presents… Rising up from the Ashes: Cassandras and Other Experts on Rebuilding Democracy, launching spring 2022.
Sarah Kendzior:
Do you want to announce the…
Andrea Chalupa:
Oh, and guess what? We have another announcement! Sarah, just… We've been busy, alright? There's World War 3 and then Sarah and I are just doing stuff because it's an election year. We want to raise our kids in a democracy. We've got a major party in America—the Republican Party—that admires Putin, that thinks what Putin is doing is fantastic. So, we really don't want to live in a cheap ripoff of Putin’s Russia here in America. We would like to live in a free and open, fair, transparent society. So we've been busy with a lot of projects to try to bring people in and engage folks and fight like hell this year to hold the line. So, we're going to be having a live event, Sarah and I, with video. That's right, Sarah and I are gonna take a shower and brush our hair. It's gonna be a big deal.
Andrea Chalupa:
If you want, sign up to join us in a live Gaslit Nation hangout, that's happening on March 22nd, Tuesday at 4:00 PM Eastern Time. So, wherever you are in the world, you can sign up for that. You can get access by joining our Patreon at the Democracy Defender level or higher and on that day, March 22nd, we'll send out the link to join us and we'll be on video and God help us all. The whole point of the event is just to check in, talk about our spring series and just answer any general questions and just sort of take a temperature check on how people are doing and how they're faring through all this and the surreal times that we're in.
Sarah Kendzior:
So today we're going to run through all of the horrific events of the last few days, which are an extension of the horrific events of the last eight years, which are an extension of constant imperialistic military brutal ambitions that Russia has had for Ukraine. You obviously can go to our archives for a lot of background on this, since we've been covering this topic from the moment that Gaslit Nation launched back in 2018. Today, I'm gonna start out by just looking at two I think soon-to-be infamous speeches for world history, assuming the future is lucky enough to have history; one by Ukrainian President Zelensky and the other being the insane ravings of Russian President Putin, because I want to analyze something that I think is neglected in our conversation about how various world leaders are reacting and also how various journalists and people who maybe are not so informed about the region are responding to what's happening, which is a generation gap.
Sarah Kendzior:
We are ruled by a gerontocracy here in the US. Russia has a elderly leader in Putin, who is 69-years-old, who was born in 1952, who is also surrounded by sycophants of his generation. This is a consummate Soviet leader, a former head of the KGB who has said many times that the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was the greatest tragedy of his life and the Great Tragedy for Russia. I’m going to get into what he said in his speech yesterday which continued that theme, which is just incredible entitlement, a colonial mentality in which he wants to bring the Soviet Union and ostensibly the satellite states of the Warsaw Pact back together.
Sarah Kendzior:
There are no limits to how he will do that and he has been setting the stage for this from the moment that he took office in 1999. But then you also have, on the other side, Zelensky. And I think folks tend to, like, they don't realize quite how young he is. Zelensky was born in 1978. So this means that the Berlin Wall collapsed when he was… I’m sorry, the Berlin Wall came down when he was 11-years-old. The Soviet Union was gone by the time he became a teenager. Zelensky spent his entire life—his entire adolescence and his adult life—in an independent, sovereign Ukraine that emphasized Ukrainian language, that emphasized its own rights, its own military, its own ability to finally exist as a sovereign nation after centuries of invasion and domination by European powers, including not only Russia but also Germany.
Sarah Kendzior:
And so that is the baseline set of expectations for people from Zelensky's generation, which is also the same generation as me and Andrea. I'm the same age, basically, a little bit younger than Zelensky and we were children when the Soviet Union fell. We don't share these memories with our geriatric leadership of hiding under our desk waiting for Soviet annihilation. We expect that these countries—which were always colonized by Russia and then later by the Soviets—are independent nations. I spent most of my career before I moved back into journalism studying Uzbekistan. And if you look at Uzbekistan, the population of that country is overwhelmingly under 25-years-old, so they have only known a free and independent Uzbekistan. Not free from their own dictator.
Sarah Kendzior:
You know, they're still living under a horrific dictatorship, but even their previous dictator who emerged from the Soviet period, Islam Karimov, he would write books with names like “Uzbekistan Will Never Depend on Anyone for Anything”. This is something that for the states that escaped from Soviet oppression, even if they created their own oppressive spheres as sovereign nations, is very important. It was a reclaiming of national culture, of national language, of religion, you know, not having to have the enforced atheism of the Soviet Union. And so this is something I wouldn't say Zelensky at all takes for granted because the history of invasion and of brutality is very much in the forefront of the Ukrainian mind. They're on guard for this. But it's something that he expects. And I'm just gonna read a little bit of the speech that he gave in Munich on February 19th. We're gonna put a link to this so you can read the whole thing. It’s a very good speech.
Sarah Kendzior:
He says, “We will defend our land with or without the support of partners, whether they give us hundreds of modern weapons or 5,000 helmets. We appreciate any help but everyone should understand that these are not charitable contributions that Ukraine should ask for or remind of. These are not noble gestures for which Ukraine should bow low. This is your contribution to the security of Europe and the world where Ukraine has been a reliable shield for eight years. And for eight years, it has been rebuffing one of the world's biggest armies, which stands along our borders, not the borders of the EU.” And then later in the speech, he says, “What is really important is the understanding that peace is needed not only by us. The world needs peace in Ukraine; peace and restoration of territorial integrity with an internationally recognized border. This is the only way. And I hope no one thinks of Ukraine as a convenient and eternal buffer zone between the West and Russia. This will never happen. Nobody will allow that. Otherwise, who's next?”
Sarah Kendzior:
So basically, you know, Zelensky is not taking any shit. He's bowing to this idea that they have no right to try for NATO inclusion, that somehow that's some sort of provocative move. I mean, obviously, you know, Putin sees the existence of Ukraine as provocative. It doesn't matter, to some degree, what they do. There's no way to appease a brutal imperialist dictator other than total submission and destruction, which is what Putin wants for Ukraine. And so now I will read you a little bit of the Putin speech. We're going to discuss that in more depth because it was absolutely a mad man crazy speech.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is just a slight bit because it's all we can bear. This is Putin yesterday saying, “Modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia, more precisely Bolshevik communist Russia. This process began immediately after the revolution of 1917. Ukraine never had a tradition of genuine statehood. Ukraine preferred to act in such a way that in relations with Russia, they all had the rights and advantages but did not bear any obligations.” And then he goes on to say, “From the very first steps, they began to build their statehood on the denial of everything that unites us. They tried to distort the consciousness, the historical memory of millions of people, entire generations, living in Ukraine.” So this is all bullshit and I think Andrea will be able to break this down in detail, the historical inaccuracy. This is the grand narrative that Putin uses, in particular for Ukraine, which he hates with a particular vengeance, but he says this about the Baltic states. He includes Central Asia, former Soviet Central Asia, in this definition. We mentioned before his obsession with certain dates. He invaded Georgia on 8/8/08. Now it's 2/22/22.
Sarah Kendzior:
He sees the caucuses as another piece of land to which Russia is entitled. That's his frame of mine. And my final point on this: I have this sort of weird theory that I've developed that probably has no scientific merit whatsoever, but I've noticed it as a pattern, which is, I think that people's view of international relations and of geopolitics (and maybe of just like the broader world) is hardened when they're about 30-years-old. So when I was 30-years-old, it was the 2008 financial collapse and everything came tumbling down. And I remember that day turning that age and being home with the toddler knowing the world in one respect was ending and something darker was being born out of that.
Sarah Kendzior:
You could look at president Obama who turned 30 in 1991, a very optimistic year, a year of freedom, a year where it just seemed like the natural course of everything was toward democracy, toward justice, toward global harmony and global peace. This was the year the Soviet Union fell and I feel like that maybe shaped his outlook. It's why he underestimated the Soviet threat. And so for Zelensky, for his perspective, born in 1978, he was also turning 30 in 2008, which is the year that Georgia was invaded by Russia. So that is in his mind that this was always a possibility. This was not something out of bounds, not some sort of crazy paranoid conspiracy theory. Putin turned 30 in 1982, which was the height of the Cold War in terms of things like nuclear weapons threat.
Sarah Kendzior:
I mean, I guess not the height because there was Bay of Pigs and things before that, but this was around the time where the Reagan administration was openly declaring their apocalyptic goals. They were upping their arsenal. There was nearly nuclear devastation. Thankfully there was a Soviet military officer, I’m forgetting his name, but he recognized that what seemed like a nuclear launch from the United States during that year was not in fact that and did not retaliate, but this was a very tense, very paranoid time. It was also a time of weakness for the Soviet Union where they had geriatric leaders. They were entering a quagmire war in Afghanistan. They were about to have a series of terrible developments like the Chernobyl explosion that ultimately led to what Putin says is the greatest tragedy of his life, which is the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Sarah Kendzior:
And he was 30. He was 30 and 1982. I feel like this works. And maybe I'm just like, you know, narrowly looking into things. I could look at Andrea and be like, Oh, Andrea turned 30 in like 2012, a year of revolutions around the world. <laughs> Maybe it's informing more of her optimism and spirit, certainly spirit of resilience or something like that. And, you know, I guess you could flip it or around and find some other thing. Anyway, I'm going to shut up now because Andrea is the actual expert on, uh, Ukraine. So I wanna hear her take on these two speeches and everything else going on.
Andrea Chalupa:
I turned 30 just the other week.
Sarah Kendzior:
Oh, I'm sorry. Yes. Yeah, me too. I also turned 30.
Andrea Chalupa:
I'm tainted, I'm tainted for life. I'm turning 30 during this moment of crisis and I'll never, ever see rose again.
Sarah Kendzior:
Mmhmm. Yes. 30. Okay.
Andrea Chalupa:
<laughs> Shut up, Sarah. So anyway, look, bottom line is, dear Lord. I just want to put this out there. Ukraine is older than Russia! Ukraine is older than Russia and this whole parody of propaganda where Putin likes to say, “Ukraine does not exist” and all this other nonsense: Ukraine is older than Russia. Kyiv is the Jerusalem of the Slavs. There was a vibrant, advanced-for-its-time kingdom—medieval kingdom—in Kyiv that would marry off royal members to other kingdoms across Europe, including France and several other European kingdoms of that era. It was a significant kingdom, okay? It had advanced literacy rates for the population, pretty good rights at the time for women, there was a lot of sophistication in terms of art and culture and it was a place to reckon with. It was a big international trading zone and so forth.
Andrea Chalupa:
And Moscow at that time was just some backwater. What happened over time, centuries later, as Moscow starts getting started, it rips off the name of this Ukrainian kingdom Kievan Rus. right? Where do you think Rus came from? They stole it from Kyiv. Kievan Rus is the medieval kingdom I'm talking about. Russia got its name by jacking it, from appropriating it from Kievan Rus. Ukraine counts its culture, its national identity, its patriotic spirit to the roots of this kingdom. If you go to Kyiv today, you see giant statues of the men and women of Kievan Rus. My uncle would play games of pretending to be some warrior or some king from Kievan Rus. It's entrenched in their sense of national identity. I can't emphasize that enough.
Andrea Chalupa:
And yet, if you go to Russia, as I have, and you talk to Russians, they see Ukraine as the little brother. How the hell can you see a country as your little brother when culturally it's older than you, when you essentially sprang from it and then appropriated its own culture to justify your own greatness? Stolen valor or whatever you want to call that. So that's the line that Putin is pushing, you know, Ukraine being this resource-rich country, black earth, anything can grow, culturally significant, a cultural jewel to the Slavs. He wants all that for Russia and the reason why he wants all that is because he wants to bring back Stalin. He wants to bring back Soviet greatness because Russia's dying. Russia's dying and Ukraine is climbing up, up, up out of Russia's orbit. What people have to understand: Ukraine is fighting two wars right now. It is fighting Putin's war and it is fighting a war against corruption.
Andrea Chalupa:
Ukraine has a tremendously innovative and interesting civic society full of all types of wonderful anti-corruption reformers that are digging up dirt on a lot of bad actors and sharing that with journalists/newsrooms around the world, tracking where they hide their money, tracking where the kids of these oligarchs from across the region go to school. They're doing the Lord's work of anti-corruption reform there in that Heartland, in the hotbed of Ukraine’s civic society. Their independent journalists are absolutely tenacious. They have suffered assassinations. One of Ukraine's leading journalists was beheaded by a president back in the day. Georgiy Gongadze. When he was beheaded, it ignited the entire country and the newspaper that he founded, Ukrayinska Pravda, is still around today and it has produced generations of journalists that are carrying on his work. It's just a tremendous society of people that are surviving and in so many ways thriving against great odds and that's what Putin can't stand.
Andrea Chalupa:
Russia's dying under Putin. Ukraine is thriving through democracy and anti-corruption reforms. It's still struggling, obviously, because it's in a black hole of corruption it has to crawl out of. Zelensky is not perfect like no politician is perfect, certainly. But understand that when Ukraine fights corruption, what is it fighting? It's fighting Kremlin oppression. A major part of the war of Ukraine fighting corruption is kicking out the Kremlin, the Kremlin's maligned influence, because that's how the Kremlin keeps control over a country, turning into a captive nation, is by wielding those puppet strings of corruption; golden handcuffs, “We’ll give you a bunch of offshore accounts and Crete,” right? That’s how they buy politicians and media there and Ukraine has to expose and combat all that in order to free itself of that corruption and officially join the European Union and become a strong European Union state.
Andrea Chalupa:
That's the ultimate aspiration for Ukraine. That's the aspiration that set off Euromaidan in 2013, that popular uprising. That was a popular uprising against Putin's puppet at the time that was trying to keep Ukraine in Russia's orbit because he had been bribed with a massive, massive package. Billions of dollars, right? So keep all that in mind. That's where Putin's coming from. And the fact that he's acting the way he is, it’s scary. It's very scary and he's going to be with us for a very long time because the man is super rich and super isolated and doing everything he can to stay alive and, like any dictator, let the dictator dream of dying in power. The West has to wise up and find its moral courage to finally contain Putin because he doesn't plan to go anywhere and they cannot allow Ukraine to be a human sacrifice.
Andrea Chalupa:
Again, Ukraine is the shining light of the entire region. As Sarah was saying, you know, Zelensky, for all his faults, he's a young guy. He's a young, charismatic guy. Before he became president of Ukraine, he was a famous standup comic. He was a TV star of a hugely popular show and he brings this youthful energy. I have Russian friends who are activists who are so impressed by Zelensky. Because Zelensky speaks Russian mostly, so when he talks to Ukrainians and he gives these powerful addresses in Ukrainian, a lot of times he's speaking in Russian. And so all the Russian speakers of that region who have suffered or are suffering under Russian oppression, they hear him. And that's a big danger to Putin. This young charismatic guy who's fearless, who’s got all this confidence, who’s exciting, and he's funny.
Andrea Chalupa:
He's also really good at trolling and clapping back. And that impresses the young Russian people. So there is this generational divide and unfortunately we do have to wait off for all the old Soviet guard who, you know, in their minds, 1991 never happened. We have to wait for them to unfortunately die off over time or become replaced in a popular uprising or… But don't count on those scenarios. I think given the resources that Russia's ruling elite has, these guys plan to stick around for a while. So it's really up to the rest of the world to isolate Putin, to contain him and treat him like the terrorist that he is. The solution for of that is super stiff sanctions against the ruling elite. That means expose where they hide their wealth, wherever they hide it abroad, including for their family members. Take away whatever residency visas they have in Germany, France, UK elsewhere.
Andrea Chalupa:
Make it so they cannot go to their vacation homes. Make it so their kids cannot go to universities anywhere across Europe, because that's what they're doing. They're stealing from Russia and then they're escaping abroad to live the good life. Force them to live in Russia, keep them there and turn the little man in the bunker into the hermit kingdom. That's what needs to happen because they're not going anywhere. The Russian people are terrorized into submission. They're not rising up. The opposition's weak right now so we have to get used to living with Putin right now. And you're going to protect yourself in the years that come, you're gonna protect democracy worldwide, by ensuring these stiff sanctions against the ruling elite where they're forced to live in the Russia that they're destroying and they're not allowed to leave. Let's see how they like that.
Andrea Chalupa:
Also, that is going to create a lot more panic around Putin and it's gonna make all the stuff that he does harder. It's gonna add a lot more stress to that court of oligarchs. The stress that we saw on the faces of Putin’s Security Council members in that ridiculous meeting they had just yesterday that we talked about in this week's bonus episode. The real fear on these people's faces, the real stress, the cracks, right? Force that kingdom of oligarchs and corruption and mass death and mass terrorism and murder, force it to crack. Force it to crack. And you do that through sanctions.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. I mean, in terms of sanctions, you know, right now we're in the middle of watching how different countries and how the international community in general is reacting to these events because we've seen… It reminds me of Obama's second term with Syria, where they had the red line, where they come up with these phrases like, “If Russia invades Ukraine…” It's like, dude, they did. They invaded eight years ago and you didn't do anything and they're there now and now you're still not doing anything. And so we're having a real hard and fast test. This morning, Germany said it's going to halt Nord Stream 2. Andrea will tell you in a minute about that. We have an interview about that coming up. The UK responded with weasel words, saying, “We're going to deliver these very hard sanctions.”
Sarah Kendzior:
And then, you know, it's very minor banks. They're not going after Londongrad. They're not gutting out the rot in their own country. So of course we're all waiting to see what the Biden administration is going to do. Right now, it is 11 in the morning, Central Time, St. Louis time. That’s the time you should all measure time by. We're waiting for an announcement which will probably come before this episode actually goes up, but one thing that concerns me is that both political parties in the US still have tight relationships with either the Kremlin and oligarchs directly—this is true basically for the Republican Party—or for proxies, people like Len Blavatnik, who we've brought up many times, who have been giving money to both parties because he is a US citizen and he is legally allowed to do that, whereas his partners, people like Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch and Putin crony who we've discussed on the show many times, are technically forbidden from doing so.
Sarah Kendzior:
They go through these American proxies. And I really want to know how the US is going to handle sanctions on the Kremlin and its oligarch mafia network while they are still taking money from this network. This year, the recipient of the largest amount of money from Blavatnik is Nancy Pelosi, you know, the head of the House, the Speaker of the House for the Democratic Party. She does not need this money. She took $50,000 from him. She doesn't need it at all because she makes all of this, you know, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars from her little stock game that she's got going on.
Sarah Kendzior:
That's another story but what I'm saying is, you know, this is obviously an extremely wealthy woman who's become much more wealthy in office, who doesn't need to take money from somebody like Len Blavatnik. But it's right there. It's right there listed on her donations like a loyalty oath, like a statement of submission. Prior to 2019 Blavatnik was giving much more heavily to the GOP, in particular to Kevin McCarthy and also to a bunch of Trump cronies and so on In 2019, when the Democrats announced that they were going to be investigating the Trump Crime Cult, he switched and he gave the DCCC the largest donation ever in the DCCC's history. And suddenly, they drop all of these investigations. We don't know if the correlation is causation there. I kind of suspect it may well be.
Sarah Kendzior:
But what are they even doing taking this money? And there was such a fuss about it that they had to give half of it back. But then when the fuss died down, Pelosi went and accepted it again. The Republicans, to be clear, are much worse about this. We've gone over this a million times. They had oligarchs at Trump's inauguration ceremony. They have literal Kremlin agents, like Paul Manafort—who, by the way, everyone should be asking where he is right now, what he's up to right now—other agents like Michael Flynn, all of these people who are in what I continually call a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government. They are so deep into this.
Sarah Kendzior:
And then you have Big Tech funded by Kremlin mafia money. You have fossil fuel industries in cahoots with the Kremlin; people like Rex Tillerson of Exxon, a recipient of the Order of Friendship Medal from Putin becoming the Secretary of State. You had Mike Pompeo when he was first CIA head and then replaced Tillerson, he replaced Tillerson after meeting illegally with a bunch of Russian spies. And so this is another thing where we're having this ongoing discussion of, “What should the United States do in response to Kremlin aggression and in response to Russia invading Ukraine?” as if none of this happened. They're ignoring the fact that we had a Kremlin asset career criminal whose bankrupt businesses were rebuilt by a well documented group of oligarchs and Russian mafiosos.
Sarah Kendzior:
and then was given an image rehab by a fan of Putin, Mark Burnett, and that propelled him into a political campaign that was able to succeed in part of illicit or illegal maneuvers by the Republican Party, by the Kremlin and by an assortment of other international backers in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel. This is so dirty and they will not investigate it. They will not discuss it. You know, they're not even investigating the attack on the Capitol in depth. They're not even restoring the Postal Service. I look at this whole situation where people are like, Oh, is Biden going to protect Ukraine? And I'm like, Biden is not protecting the United States of America, not on the most fundamental level. He won't protect the Postal Service, fundamental, rudimentary infrastructure that everyone loves. He won't protect the right to vote, which is in the most severe jeopardy that it has been in in about 60 years.
Sarah Kendzior:
So I don't know what he'll do here. This is an opportunity though, because as Andrea was saying, all of this is interconnected and if you actually crack down on global oligarchy, if you crack down on these transnational mafias, you clean your own house incidentally. You end up cleaning up the United States and its own corruption in the process. So everybody should support this. This, of course, is the reason that many of our political officials do not want to do this because they don't want everybody looking at their dirty money and their dirty secrets and their dirty deals. But we are absolutely entitled to that information. We need a clean sweep, we need a transparent government and we need honest dealings, and we need that leverage removed because there is absolutely no way that Putin is going to stop with Ukraine. And I'm not just talking about possible incursions into Moldova—that's one place people are naming—possibly taking Belarus and then just saying, “oh, I'm not gonna invade Ukraine because I’ve got this.”, looking at Northern Kazakhstan as I discussed in the bonus episode yesterday, that's another place that he's had an eye on.
Sarah Kendzior:
They will continue their infiltration of Western institutions that has been going on the entire time that Putin has been in office. And that has been accompanied by assassinations abroad of people like Litvinenko in the UK. There were so many warning signs. There were so many off ramps. There were so many opportunities to address the situation. There was the Magnitsky sanctions which were supposed to be passed in 2012. If they had followed through on any of this, if they had listen to people like, say, Gary Kasparov or Bill Brower, who are very well versed in how far Putin would go and that he will continue to gut the West or be part of a group that's gutting the West from within, alongside complicit Western actors, we would not be in this situation right now. And now, unfortunately, we are. We have dug an enormous hole, a hole that goes through the center of the earth and is paved in blood and oil and dark money. So my point is, yes, this is the time to act because the time really to act was like 20 years ago, 15 years ago and you didn't do it and now we're living in a hellscape of your making. So maybe, maybe this is the time to make up for that
Andrea Chalupa:
Without further ado, we're going to play an excerpt from my interview with Gustav Gressel, a senior policy fellow with the Wider Europe program at the European Council on Foreign Relations for the office in Berlin. His areas of focus include Russia, Eastern Europe and defense policy. Gressel has worked on international security policy and strategy for the Austrian Ministry of Defense. He was also a research fellow with the International Institute for Liberal Politics in Vienna. Before his academic career, he served five years in the Austrian armed forces. Gressel holds a PhD in Strategic Studies from the Faculty of Military Sciences at the National University of Public Services in Budapest and a Master's degree in political science from Salzburg University. He is the author of numerous publications regarding security policy and strategic affairs. And just so you know, some terms you need to know for this interview include when he references LNR and DNR. What that means: LNR is the Luhansk People's Republic. DNR is the Donetsk People's Republic.
Andrea Chalupa:
Those are the two hellscapes, the Orwellian Mad Max wastelands that Putin created in his ongoing escalated invasion of Eastern Ukraine. He pulled the trigger last night to go in deeper there, bringing in more Russian military. So I'm just pointing that out because you'll hear our guest reference LNR and DNR. That is what he is talking about, these hellscapes of Russian occupation on the edge of Ukraine. Leading to this interview, we're going to play a clip of Ursula von der Leyen, a German politician, physician, and the President of the European Commission.
Ursula von der Leyen:
The people of Ukraine are bravely trying to get on with their lives, but many of them keep emergency bags by the front doors. Others have stockpiled food cans to prepare for the worst. These are not stories from the 1940s. This is Europe and 2022 and this is happening because of deliberate policy of the Russian leadership. Ukraine is a sovereign country. It is making its own choices about its own future, but the Kremlin doesn't like this. And so it threatens war. We stand firm with Ukraine. This crisis is about Ukraine, yes, but it is also about much, much more. It is also about what it means to be a sovereign, independent and free country in the 21st century. I still strongly believe in diplomacy. The trans-Atlantic community has for a long time not been so united. And our call to Russia is crystal clear: Do not choose war. But let's stay vigilant. And should the Kremlin choose violence against Ukraine, our response will be strong and united. The European commission and the EAS have been working closely with all member states to prepare a robust and comprehensive package of potential sanctions. Russia's strategic interest is to diversify its economy—its one sided economy—and to close its current gaps. But for this, they need technologies in which we have a global leadership; high tech components of which Russia is almost entirely dependent on us. So our sanctions can bite very hard, and the Kremlin knows this as well.
Ursula von der Leyen:
And on another topic, we are also ready in case that the Russian leadership decides to weaponize the energy issue. We are for weeks in talks with a number of countries that are ready to step up their exports of electrified natural gas to the European Union. We have reinforced our pan-European pipeline and electricity interconnector network. And I can say today that our models show, with all the measures we have taken, that we are now on the safe side for this winter. But one of the main lessons we have already learned from this crisis, honorable members, is that we must diversify our energy sources and we must get rid of the dependency of Russian gas. We must heavily invest in renewables.
Andrea Chalupa:
Alright. So, tell me, what are you seeing on the ground in terms of Putin launching—escalating— his invasion?
Gustav Gressel:
The Russian military is certainly prepared to advance into Ukraine. I mean, the political decision might not have been taken yet but the preparations are there. So we have, now, ground forces alone are roughly 110 battalion tactical groups—each of them about 800 men strong—that are in combat-ready formations on the border and on occupied Crimea. In Donbas, you have one very strong grouping that is positioned north of Kyiv. Then you have now obvious Russian groupings in the Donbas where you sort of have the so called “separatist forces” who are, of course, led, armed, trained and equipped by Russia. But there are also at least three Russian battalions in the Donbas who are predominantly trained in maneuvers with the local forces. And then of course you have Crimea, where we have groupings of roughly 15 to 17 battalions strong. A lot of helicopters and paratroopers that they would use are already on ships to come to the other shore to Ukrainian land, particularly helicopter assault.
Gustav Gressel:
And of course this situation is coupled with influx of particularly helicopters but also ground attack aircraft to Belarus but also to other air bases in the Western and Southern military district; attack planes that would be tasked in fighting down the Ukrainian Air Force and then combatting Ukrainian air defense systems in the first few days of a possible invasion established as a priority to then help the land forces advance, provide fire support, attack reserves that Ukrainians would send toward the battlefield and shatter and diminish Ukrainian forces before they enter contact with Russian forces. What has happened in the last hours is Putin started to recognize DNR and LNR. As I said, there are now Russian forces moving into the Donbas. What can we say this can lead to?
Gustav Gressel:
I mean, there are many possibilities there. There are forces prepared for the political decision to enact war. So the best case scenario we can have is that all these forces are just a cover to make Ukraine not react to the recognition of independence/probable annexation of these two provinces, or the Russian-occupied parts of these two provinces. But there are other scenarios feasible as well. As we've heard in yesterday's Putin speech, he disputes the right for Ukraine to exist. He thinks the current Ukrainian leadership is illegitimate. He accuses Ukraine of being an immediate threat to Russian security. He accuses Ukraine to acquire nuclear weapons and strike means to threaten or attack Russia. He claims that Ukraine would be a staging point for NATO for the case of a further attack on Russia.
Gustav Gressel:
He accuses the Ukrainian government of basically being an American puppet regime that has no domestic legitimacy. So all that is not a good sign. All that points towards a greater ambition of “reuniting” Ukraine with Russia, removing the current government, incorporating Ukraine into some sort of “union” with Russia and Belarus, and all that would be in a cast, of course, militarily with what we see across the border and might be decided upon by Putin in the coming days or weeks. The fact that Ukraine hasn't delivered a formal pretext to Putin to kind of escalate and wage should not make us rest in comfort. If there is no pretext, Russia can always invent a pretext to do what it plans and wants to do anyway.
Andrea Chalupa:
Do you think, at this point, from the unhinged Putin speech, the totally bizarre Security Council meeting where even his spy chief was stuttering in clear fear of Putin, do you think Putin at this point has lost his mind? And if so, how should world leaders around the world take that into account and act towards him?
Gustav Gressel:
Well, Merkel in 2014 said about Putin that he lives in a different world and I think that that, of course, was obvious yesterday, but it was true for some time. The coronavirus crisis has, of course, highlighted that because he doesn't talk too much with other people than his sort of core cronies and security personnel he trusts. His contacts are fairly limited and he lives very fairly isolated. His opinion on Ukraine is that it's not a real state. He’s said so on several occasions since 2010, as far as I recollect. He's rambling about NATO being an immediate threat. So, a lot of the things that Putin said actually have been said by him or his cronies before, just sort of in such a thick packet and I think in such a sort of balanced, outrageous way of lying, that was of course a new quality. But otherwise, we should know with whom we’re dealing.
Gustav Gressel:
On how the West should react: I think our friends in Eastern Europe have told us what Putin is for quite some time and how we should deal with him. And we tended to ignore him and tended to rest on more eloquent people to kind of Russianalize Russia and invent an understandable narrative to excuse Russians actions. And I mean not people like Dmitri Trenin or other Russian intellectuals to kind of rosy paint whatever Putin is up to. And that has sort of eluded especially Western Europeans to seek accommodation, to kind of think that a lot of things are just under negotiations and, if you talk long enough, you will find a decent and reasonable compromise. Of course, these illusion have been shattered by yesterday's Putin speech and these illusion bubbles have all burst away in that it is now pretty obvious and Putin basically underlined it by himself that he doesn't seek for an equilibrium or compromise or meeting in the middle somewhere, that he really believes in his own world view and in his cause of reestablishing Russian greatness and redeeming all the injustice that Russia has faced since 1991 or 1917, and that he will not stop from this mission and retreat.
Gustav Gressel:
So now what do we do? Well, the issue of containment, the issue of deterrence was always on the table. We just have to really be serious about this right now. Before that, we have often talked about deterrence, but the effective deterrence measures were then rather meager. You had isolated battalions, some were scattered on the native Eastern flank. Every maneuver we had at length debates with peace minded colleagues on whether that is a provocation or not. Now, of course, we know that Putin doesn't really need a provocation. He acts how he acts, and it's just us who put restrictions on ourselves for whatever sake. The same goes for containment. I mean, a lot of the things that are now debated around sanctions, we should have done a long time ago, for other reasons as well; energy diversification, rule of law, anti-corruption laws, banning some bad assets. I mean, this we should actually do for the sake of our own political culture, but now of course we do that in the Russia context. Fair enough. That’s fine as well. But yeah, it's not that this problem of strategic corruption and of aversion is something that is entirely new and that we didn't know before. We just maybe now recognized the size of the problem.
Andrea Chalupa:
It's really interesting that you're pointing out fighting corruption as a solution for this and energy diversification as a solution for this. You come from a military background.
Gustav Gressel:
Yeah.
Andrea Chalupa:
It seems that in the 21st century, we're 22 years into the 21st century and we've had for far too long a separation between the military, national security and the domestic fight against corruption; strengthening rule of law, transparency, weaning ourselves off of gas station dictatorship, right? So it seems that finally Putin is forcing the merger of these two things as national security defense issues.
Gustav Gressel:
If this weren't audio, but video, I could show you old Cold War maps and Soviet covert operations (as they were called then) against NATO and against Western countries. And this kind of asymmetry is basically logic from the way government functions. We, in the Western world, with democracy in place, coalition governments, most of the time, emerge parliamentary democracies, have a strict compartmentalization of policies because we have different ministries and each of them have ministers and the ministries are led by people from different parties who have different agendas, and they have all the freedom to speak out so they can lobby for their will and lobby for their interests. And that of course makes, naturally, our policies always diverse and incoherent. And if you are an opponent that’s also not as mighty but a totalitarian dictatorship like the Soviet Union—or of course now like Putin’s Russia—you can harness all branches of society for your struggle and can misuse any imitation of civil society or private entrepreneurship for political goals.
Gustav Gressel:
And that's what the Soviet Union did. And of course Putin is now much better at doing so because he didn't pretend to be a communist. And there is now sort of a much broader society beyond control and economy, beyond ministerial control, that makes the line between legitimate, private contact and illegitimate state interference much more blurred and much harder to detect right now than it was during the Soviet Union. But the general concept and principle of the struggle and why it is and how it is fought are still the same. So, I mean, there are a lot of good readings about how to fight this that came from during the Cold War,and people have just forgotten about them because it was the same struggle.
Andrea Chalupa:
That's interesting. Well, you should give us your Cold War reading list so we can remember how to fight Kremlin aggression. I want to talk about the big news today that came out on Nord Stream 2. Just to set up this part of our conversation, according to the American government news site, PBS News Hour, Germany bought 30% of all the gas Russia exports to Europe. A symbol of this is Nord Stream 2. The chancellor of Germany, Scholz, came out today saying that he's going to halt the Nord stream 2 project. Could you explain what Nord Stream 2 is and the significance of this latest news and what it might mean for Putin?
Gustav Gressel:
Yes, Germany is a major consumer of Russian gas in Europe. Russia provides a bit over 50% of the gas consumed in Germany. This oil share is set to rise because of declining Dutch and North Sea production, which will probably increase the amount of Russian gas imported into Germany, so it's a big chunk of Russian exports. And a lot of Russian State revenues rest on taxing the export of oil and gas and a lot of pipeline-bound oil is bound to Germany. A lot of pipeline-bound gas is bound to Germany. So Germany is a major market and a major source of foreign currency for Russia. That said, Russia has a lot of pipelines for that purpose. The pipeline from the Soviet era, of course, goes through Ukraine and down to Central Europe.
Gustav Gressel:
Another strand goes via Russia from Belarus. These were constructed during the Cold War. Of course, then there was the Warsaw Pact, then there was the Soviet Union. So states like Ukraine and Belarus were not independent back then and they weren’t an issue, but during the post-communist period, the pipeline transportation issue became a political issue between Russia and the transit states and also between Russia and Europe, because Russia on the one hand tried to leverage its position as a supplier, particularly in a post Soviet space, but on the other hand, the dependency of Russia on the existence of Belarus and the existence of Ukraine as a existing transit state did also restrain, at some point, Russia's action, particularly the military actions on Ukraine. So what’s striking in 2014 is the Russia-instigated separatism in Eastern Ukraine did not incorporate actually the most pro-Russian leaning cities at the time in Eastern Ukraine and the Southeastern Donbas because the north was still important for the issue of gas transit.
Gustav Gressel:
So as long as Russia needed to pump gas through the pipeline in order to earn money, it could not fully wage war without losing money by itself. Now, Nord Stream 2 and the TurkStream pipeline were constructed to circumvent Ukraine. You can basically end gas transit through Ukraine if you have Nord Stream 2 in operation. You can then sell Russian gas on the lucrative Western European markets, so it would not only be sold to Germany, the gas would then be further transported also to Southeastern Europe, to the Netherlands, to France—they even thought to sell it to the UK at some point when the North Sea gas dwindles further—and make a lot of money from that because they're big markets and they're wealthy markets, and at the same time waging full scale war against Ukraine. The Germans were reluctant to accept this narrative that once Nord Stream 2 will be up, military pressure will rise.
Gustav Gressel:
They thought that this is sort of an argument put forward by Poles and Ukrainians for the sake of their own energy interests and for the sake of keeping the transit fees and it wasn't really a valid security argument. Now with the troops alongside the Ukrainian borders that of course coincided with the finishing Nord Stream 2, the German government started to rethink and many German politicians who had just swept away these concerns by Eastern European neighbors started to, behind closed doors, reassess the position and ask themselves whether these Eastern Europeans were right in the first place. And of course now with the decision to recognize the DNR and LNR, that gave Scholz the kind of incident where he could come out and say, Pkay, we'll change plans, we'll change course, we are putting a halt to the pipeline, and kind of reverse this decision that was a bad one in the first place to allow Nord Stream 2 to be constructed.
Gustav Gressel:
I mean, they have now sort of in a very technical reason, it's very typically German in a very technical reason halted the certification of the pipeline. The pipeline is already built. It's finished. Without the certification, you can't pump through it. You can't sell gas from it. They have of course temporarily done so, so they have traditionalized this to the… or made that as a reaction to the recognition of the DNR and LNR. Technically, of course, if they would, remove this, if Russia would withdraw the recognition and remove the reason they could still reconsider admitting Nord Stream 2, but practically everybody knows that now it’s gone because the Russians will not reconsider and sort of the pipeline is gone probably for good.
Andrea Chalupa:
So does this mean that Russia then needs to still depend on its gas pipeline running through Ukraine to get gas?
Gustav Gressel:
Yes.
Andrea Chalupa:
Oh, wonderful. And so that has contained Putin's aggression in Ukraine, right?
Gustav Gressel:
Well, we’ll see whether it will because the tanks are still on the border. But it is of course a major conundrum he has to solve now because not only will he face financial sanctions if he does, he would ruin his pipeline system and he would face basically a drop in financial revenues and especially in foreign currency revenues because also the gas and oil export is a major source of foreign currency. So the course of the Ruble, the tax revenues gained by it that are pumped also into the Russian military, all that is sort of a problem he has to face now. The Chinese also have very limited abilities to help him out there because the Western Russian gas fields are bound to the pipeline system that transports them to the West.
Gustav Gressel:
You can't just sell them to East Asia on the spot because there's no transportation link towards East Asia for this gas, and especially not in the quantities that Russia would need to compensate for the European and for the German market. So, yeah, it is now a thing that, of course, annoys Putin quite a lot. I can imagine that his friend, Gerhard Schröder, or another friend, Alexander Rahr, has probably reassured him that the German debate was just hot air and that Germany for its own economic interest would never dare to cut off Nord Stream 2. I can imagine that, but now things look different and Russia has put itself into a bit of trouble. Yes.
Andrea Chalupa:
This is a different figure that just came out in the AP: With Germany getting 50% of its total gas from Russia, what can Germany do now that it's losing Nord Stream 2?
Gustav Gressel:
Well, as I said, Nord Stream 2 isn't actually needed at the time. Nord Stream 2 was constructed to circumvent Ukraine, and then to allow Russia to shut down the gas transit through Ukraine.
Andrea Chalupa:
So Germany didn't even need Nord Stream 2, they just did this because Putin wanted it? So he could go all in into Ukraine? And Germany's been fine with this, including under Merkel, for years?
Gustav Gressel:
Yeah. They have been ignoring the fact that they have been saying that, No, this is just an argument put forward by the Ukrainians and the Poles to advance their economic interests, Russia will never be so crazy to invade Ukraine. But that was the argument back in the day and this argument from the German side was horribly wrong. And yes, Nord Stream 2 is just a means to circumvent Ukraine and eliminate it as a transport country. That's the only purpose of this pipeline. Russian gas can be transported by both the Belarusian Yamal pipeline as well as the Ukrainian Druzhba pipeline network. The capacities of both pipelines were heavily underused by Russia, particularly this autumn, because Russia wanted to increase pressure on Germany to certify Nord Stream 2 quickly, so they dwindled the gas supply through these pipelines. But if Russia wanted, they of course can increase the supply of gas through these pipelines and can sell more gas than it does now with existing pipelines. Nord Stream 2 the time being is not needed.
Gustav Gressel:
One can have a debate about how that will change in the future because Germany has exited nuclear power. So this year, the last power plants will shut down for good—nuclear power plants—and it will exit coal production or the kind of electric current production from coal in 2030. And that of course will increase the demand for energy from other sources, including gas, and we can have a debate whether the existing gas pipeline network will then in the future also be able to cope with the German gas demand, but that's still at least a decade in the future and until then, Germany has time to invest into other sources and into other means of transportation for gas. So I will not jump in here and say that then Nord Stream 2 is desperately needed. That was an argument put forward by Schröder and his pals, and they did so for political reasons.
Andrea Chalupa:
Gerhard Schröder, the former chancellor of Germany who first greenlit the Nords Stream 2 project, he's an infamous Kremlin lobbyist. He's raked in hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years serving the Kremlin's interests and serving on boards. He's currently on the board of Gazprom and, I believe, Rosneft, big, big energy giants in Russia. He is just a walking, talking Putin propaganda. Very close friends with Putin. So, I want to talk about Hitler and Putin. There's a lot of troubling comparisons to the strategy that Putin and Hitler both employed in terms of propaganda warfare and inventing all sorts of excuses to play the victim and invade a much smaller country, plus just the aggression over the years, the imperialistic aggression ramping up year after year and the terrorism and the oppression at home.
Andrea Chalupa:
So with Germany's own history…And Germany, in my opinion, I've observed this in my many trips to Berlin. Germany has, I always felt, done a really good job in shining a light on Hitler's terror and how Hitler came to power. And there was this sense that it was very important for Germany to… Obviously this did not happen overnight after World War II. It was a very long process to get to this point, but at least in recent history, Germany has been working hard to learn the lessons of Nazi Germany, to ensure never again. So how was Germany so naive—and one could say arrogant, given all the warnings from Ukraine and Poland and the Baltic states, of course, and others—why was Germany so naive and arrogant when it came to the mini Hiter in the Kremlin? How did they not see parallels to their own dark past?
Gustav Gressel:
That is an interesting and fascinating question. I think there's much more to this that the Germans don't want to hear and don't want to see, but of course, it's there. On a general note, I would compare Putin rather to Mussolini than to Hitler if we’re picking historical parallels, first of all because the power position of Russia versus Germany compared to other powers back then and the kind of scale the threat poses. But also for ideological reasons because the national socialism that's often not taken seriously in Germany, especially when they say a German, when they adopt the Soviet language of describing Hitler as fascist, which he definitely wasn't. Mussolini was a fascist and Putin is a fascist. Hitler wasn't. He was a national socialist and there are doctrinal and ideological differences between fascism and national socialism that go quite deeply.
Gustav Gressel:
But without making a course on political theory and ideology, yes, there is and there are a lot of resemblances of Putin’s ideology, especially conservative German thought and some legal concepts and doctrines adopted by Hitler back then and by the Nazis back then to justify their own foreign policy expansion. And again, if this were a video rather than audio, I could,of course, show you an original example of Carl Schmitt. This is a book on spheres of influence on international law and the prohibition of interference by external powers. And this is an original one that's not his kind of doctored later versions where he tried to justify himself before history, because Carl Schmitt was not put forward to the Nuremberg trials. This is an original version where he kind of goes full in against the allies.
Gustav Gressel:
He says that all the international order is just a justification of the allied victory in World War I and that their whole concept of state sovereignty and self-determination is a joke because it was just based on the victory of World War 1 and Versailles, which is unjust, and then goes on rambling about what current international law misses as the position of [inaudible], empires who are kind of the historical founding places of all other states and who have basically created other states themselves by their history and by their power, and international law should recognize their right for predominance and should divide the international world into spheres of influence where the predominant Reich can sort of pursue order on their own terms amongst the semi sovereign colonial states because they, by the visual history and common language and civilizational sensitivity, know their neighbors best and have privileged interests there and they should not be interfered by universalist concepts, such as democracy and human rights, or disturbed in their way of dealing with their minions. And both from the rambling against the current order as well as in the consultation of how you construct an international order…
Gustav Gressel:
I mean, if you heard yesterday's Putin speech, it was all Carl Schmitt all over it. I mean, you can take, really, you can take parts of this booklet and directly compare it to Putin’s speech about Ukraine. Now, of course, this booklet was sort of the formal national socialist way of rationalizing the Hitler/Stalin pact in rationalizing the extermination of Czechoslovakia and Poland. And if you would change Czechoslovakia and Poland to Ukraine and Germany for Russia, you would end up by Putin being sort of by Putin’s speech yesterday. The problem is, exactly because of that, there were and there still are a lot of people in Germany that love and adore Putin because they have the same feeling of being sort of deprived of their natural rights and pushed into interest boundaries by the Western allies, and that sort of abstract concepts in international law can never make good for the kind of lost imperial opportunities and longing for German-Russian greatness.
Gustav Gressel:
I mean, since 1990, the Russians tried to offer the Germans the kind of co-ownership over Europe. They codified this as “Europe United” from this Lisbon to [inaudible], so keeping the Americans out. Then Germany and Russia would be the co-managers of this and can then redefine and kind of rearrange Europe to the liking of their feelings. And this was what a lot of Germans built on. They could revise the current European order and push away the restraints by it and re-erect it on different normative terms. This is why the IFD in very particular is such a big fan of Vladimir Putin, but of course also on the German Left, especially from the former German GDR, whose kind of socialist Russia-centric anti fascism gave the opportunity for a lot of Germans to continue to live in their preconcept and kind of friend and enemy/ friend and foe picture of their national socialist fathers, at the same time branding themselves with a new antifascist label where a lot of this thought has unfortunately survived and enhanced the sympathy for Putin. And the same arguments that rationalized and justified German aggression against Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939 is now put forward to rationalize and justify Russian aggression against Ukraine.
Gustav Gressel:
In my mailbox, where I get a lot of fan posts from Putin, in Germany, I see the same bullshit just popping up all over again. And as I said, the Germans really don't want to talk about this because it's somehow self embarrassing how big the resonance for Putin is and that it is a problem that exists in all political parties—of course, the least in the green party, but otherwise in all political parties. I mean, the CDU has a bit of a time advantage because the IFD has thrown away a lot of their hard liners into there. I mean, Garland or Erika Steinbach, they were CDU members just a decade ago, that sort of by all the formalities Germany has put into working up the crimes of the second world war, there is unfortunately still an ideological reminiscence of the Third Reich that has a certain echo chamber. And this echo chamber is all Putin’s.
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