Putin's Potemkin Military
In this episode of Gaslit Nation, we revisit some familiar terrain – you know, like Putin did when he decided to invade Ukraine yet again. In Monday’s bonus episode, available to Gaslit Nation listeners at the Truth-Teller level or higher, we answered questions about particular issues in Putin’s war on Ukraine: nukes, Israel, UK sanctions, and so on. In today’s episode, we revisit the history of the current conflict – since many people still do not grasp that the defense pact of NATO is not what prompted Putin’s invasion – and of the USSR itself.
We discuss the illusion of Russian military might and how Ukrainians have punctured that myth, while also analyzing the successful hybrid warfare – cyberattacks, propaganda, Western useful idiots and oligarch partners – that was put in its place. We speculate on where Putin may strike if he decides to withdraw from Ukraine and temporarily focus on other territories that were once forced to be part of the Soviet colonial empire. Andrea also breaks down the latest in the ongoing war, including new war crimes in Ukraine and arrests of journalists and protesters in Russia.
This has been an absolutely exhausting few months for us at Gaslit Nation, and lucky you, for a mere ten dollars you can see us looking exhausted in person! On March 22 at 4:00 EST/3:00 CST, you can join Sarah and Andrea at the first ever live Gaslit Nation chat for subscribers at the Democracy Defender level or higher. We will be answering your questions and thanking you for being part of the supportive and engaged community that has kept us going for all these years! If you’re interested in participating, sign up on Patreon.
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[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, a painful history that is now repeating because of Putin's genocide war on Ukraine. This is a film that the authorities shut down when a human rights group, Memorial, dared to screen it in Moscow. So go see it. You can find it on any streaming service for the most part around the world. Watch it to piss Putin off and to raise awareness of Putin's genocide in Ukraine.
Sarah Kendzior:
And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the United States and rising autocracy around the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
Our Gaslit Nation Early Show, available for subscribers at the Truth Teller level and higher on Patreon, is focused on answering questions from our listeners at the Democracy Defender level and higher. Our community comes together. They send us questions and we answer them and people are just as angry as we are, which is always nice to hear. A lot of the questions were about, How do we stop Putin? What would be most effective? So if you want to dig into that big discussion, sign up on Patreon at the Truth, Teller level or higher. And another big announcement: Sarah and I are going to be doing a live Q&A with our listeners on Tuesday, March 22nd, 4:00 PM Eastern time. You can get access to that by signing up at the Democracy Defender level and higher. If anyone shows up, that's great. If it's just me and Sarah, that's fine too. We always have a lot to talk about.
Sarah Kendzior:
Oh yes, yes we do. And on that note, I believe you had things to say, yes?
Andrea Chalupa:
Yes. Always. Let's just do a quick rundown on how the second most powerful military in the world—or at least we all thought it was—how it's currently doing in Ukraine. As we've all been hearing about, the Russian military is collapsing under its own kleptocracy. There's been all these reports that Russian soldiers are given food packages that expired back in 2015. Where did the money go for them to have all the food and all the support they need on the ground, otherwise known as logistics? Well, it turns out the guys at the top and all the way, I'm sure, along the way to the bottom were pocketing what they could and sending it to bank accounts in Crete and other places. It goes to show you kleptocracy kills. Well, what else is going on with Putin's so far embarrassing invasion of Ukraine that's made him the number one loser of the world?
Andrea Chalupa:
Well, it turns out the idiots in the Kremlin believed their own disinformation when it came to Ukraine. They believe their own propaganda. They are victims of their own genocidal stereotypes that they’ve harbored against Ukrainians, thinking that Ukrainians are just a bunch of backward country bumpkin rural folk, uncivilized, and that they're going to bring the glory of the fascist Russian world to Ukraine to civilize these Ukrainians and liberate them from their Jewish Nazi president. And they really did believe this. And in the eight years since Putin's been invading Ukraine—it started in 2014 with Crimea and then the invasions in the eastern edge of Donbas—ever since then, you would think that the Kremlin would have time to develop its intelligence of Ukraine, get a reality check on what's happening on the ground…Turns out not, when you're an authoritarian regime, when you are following in the footsteps of the sadists of the KGB.
Andrea Chalupa:
Putin was KGB and the FSB that is now the security agency of Russia. It's just a different acronym known as the FSB, but it's all still KGB. Chekist, NVVD, OTPU, whatever you wanna call them, because the sadists of the Kremlin security services over the years, since the founding of the Soviet Union back in 1922, a hundred years ago, they've always been sadists and they've always been a recruitment tool for other sadists to come out and carry out their sadism on innocent populations of people. The Soviet Union is just another name for Russian colonial genocide, all the countries that they took over where they'd have their agents and their local collaborators carry out horrific crimes against humanity to terrorize the local population, force it to submit. They'd kill off the best and the brightest. They'd weaken it internally. They'd devastate the country. That explains NATO expansion. That is where NATO expansion came from. When those Eastern European countries could join as quickly as they could, they did. They scrambled to get in. The Eastern European countries that suffered under the trauma of Russian colonial genocide, they're the ones that drove NATO expansion.
Sarah Kendzior::
It is so amazing to me that people still don't grasp this point this many weeks into this particular iteration of this invasion, but just generally speaking, I mean, we're kind of seeing this change where some of the pundits have finally started to abandon the NATO talking point because their entire justification for saying that NATO was the aggressor was saying, “Well, Russia would never invade. Why does NATO need to exist? The Soviet Union is over. Russia's not an aggressive colonizing power.” Some of them denied that Russia was an aggressive, colonizing, imperialist power to begin with, even though that's been true of the entirety of Russian history, except for the brief period between 1991 and its invasion of Georgia in 2008. They’ve finally had to let this argument go because, you know, evil NATO countries are so paranoid they think Russia will invade them.
Sarah Kendzior:
And therefore “the aggressors” doesn't hold up very well when Russia is literally, you know, dropping bombs on civilians and hospitals and maternity words in Ukraine after previously invading Ukraine. Meanwhile, the NATO countries, while fearful, are also vindicated. Estonia, Lithuania, Lavia and also the former countries of the Warsaw Pact; Poland and Slovakia and Czech Republic and Hungary and so on and so on, I think they're feeling pretty good about their decision to be a NATO. But it is still amazing to me the dehumanization of people in these countries, the fact that what they think of their own sovereignty, what they think of their own protection is considered irrelevant to so many of the pundits weighing in on this conflict. It's considered ancillary as some sort of trivial matter within a greater war between the West and Russia or the US and Russia.
Sarah Kendzior:
I really wish that people would stop. I know I said weeks ago folks need to read up on the individual histories of these countries. They need to understand these are countries with their own languages, cultures, religions, history, and that history is often of Russian invasion, genocide by the Russian army, whether it's tsarist times or Soviet times. That is the real, lived history. These are people's parents, grandparents, great grandparents, and now it's our generation. It's people the age of me and Andrea. It's the children of people the age of me and Andrea that are yet again facing this. So there is now no generation that is free of Russian invasion and aggression in the post Soviet sphere. That illusion has shattered. So please, for the love of God, listen to folks from these countries when they tell you that their very sovereignty and safety on the most elemental level is at risk and especially, obviously, listen to people from Ukraine. I'm already kind of seeing that the moral clarity and collective empathy that was generated in the early weeks of this horrific invasion starting to fade to apathy and cynicism.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, and that whole meme going around trying to pretend that Soviet history never happened, that meme people passing around on Twitter, the video of John Mearsheimer, a political scientist at University of Chicago, his arguments only work if we all pretend that Soviet history never happened, but it happened and it left generations of trauma. It reshaped the world. It was sadism. It was unchecked sadism. It was genocide after genocide to establish a Russian empire and if you want a glimpse of what Soviet history was like, look at the Russian war crimes being carried out in Ukraine today. Before we get to that, the latest on that, I just wanna point out that John Mearsheimer’s at the University of Chicago, which is a bad take factory machine. It gave us Milton Friedman who partnered with white supremacists to basically create a horrific economic ideology that everyone fell for thas now produced the worst income inequality gap in history.
Andrea Chalupa:
Nate Silver came out of this bad take factory known as the University of Chicago. There's a proud tradition at the University of Chicago to divorce yourself from humanity, to lack basic empathy and to treat human beings as chess pieces on the chess board of the world because it's so much neater that way than having to deal with reality. But reality exists and you simply cannot erase Soviet history to force an argument. And that is what that John Mearsheimer viral clip that everyone's passing around tries to do. So the anecdote to that is always to read history, to read widely, because history tends to repeat if we don't deal with the painful legacy, especially of authoritarianism. And that's what's happening now. We're stuck dealing with the unfinished business now of World War II, right? Germany's doing great because Germany was defeated and Germany had to deal with that.
Andrea Chalupa:
Germany was forced to deal with that legally. We had the Nuremberg trials. Germany was put on notice. It wasn't a process that happened overnight. If you watch documentaries, the earliest documentaries on the Shoah, it was controversial and dangerous to even document the Holocaust in the initial years after the war. It was a process. It was a forced process to force justice and accountability. It was not easy. And a lot of Nazis got away and a lot of Nazis were exploited by other powers, including of course here in the us with our space program, right? But Germany did make efforts to try to confront that brutal past and it got better and better over time, but it was not easy and it has not been perfect. If you listen to our interview with a recent German expert, Gustav Gressel, a security expert, that processes isn't even completely finished. It never can be.
Andrea Chalupa:
When you've gone full Nazi, you must always remain vigilant. So what about Stalin? Uncle Joe. Good old Uncle Joe who got to Berlin first, who helped us defeat the Nazis, right? Uncle Joe Stalin was able to do that, not just because of Russian soldiers but soldiers from Belarus and Ukraine and they did it together in the name of Soviet glory. They were shooting any soldiers that tried to abandon their ranks, deserters. They had teams of soldiers following other rows of soldiers making sure that no one deserted or else they’d be shot on site. And they were raping women along the way. There's horrific stories of Soviet soldiers raping as they entered countries heading towards Berlin. And because they were our great allies, they won the war, all of that.
Andrea Chalupa:
And the Soviet Union continued for generations, and you had all of these liberals around the world, especially in the US, who celebrated the Soviet Union as this great anecdote to unchecked hyper capitalism and corporate fascism. And they practiced this religion of “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” And so they ideologically aligned themselves with the Soviet Union. If you read Anne Applebaum's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Gulag, she talks about how academia for many years, when it came to the Soviet Union, when it came to developing political science departments, it was the academics in the West who were most sympathetic to the Soviet Union that got to access the Soviet Union and got to, therefore, build up their own privilege in academia. Therefore, because of that Kremlin propaganda coup, we've had academics, we've had our universities basically plagued by the Steven F. Cohens out there, Putin's famous apologist who is no longer with us but when he was, he was a propaganda machine for the Kremlin and would go on CNN and other places and insist that Ukraine wasn't a country, parroting the Kremlin's own talking points, right?
Andrea Chalupa:
It was those guys that were teaching new generations of Americans, new generations of Russian and Ukrainian analysts and journalists, the whole understanding of that part of the world of Eastern Europe through an imperialist Moscow lens. And it's been these dramatic moments in Ukraine’s own history—the Euromaidan, the Revolution of Dignity, and now this war—where Ukrainians have had to fight and stand up and show the world that they're not Russia, that they're not an extension of Russia, that they are their own country with their own proud history that in fact is much older than Russia, and that they have their own agency.
Andrea Chalupa:
Ukrainians are the ones that are leading the decolonization of their own history, their own understanding in the Western lens. They're the ones who are driving that and they've been doing that against this forceful, widespread disinformation machine that plagues all facets of Western society, including academia, including newsrooms which are increasingly shrinking, where journalists don't have the resources to go abroad to witness events for themselves, so they get lazy and they do what the New York Times did on the eve of Putin’s invasion dismissing some Ukrainian in Kyiv as a nationalist, even though local Ukrainians were like, What are you talking about? That guy is actually really progressive. So we're still plagued by this laziness. We're still plagued by the Moscow lens. We're still plagued by Kremlin disinformation. We're still plagued by conspiracy theories. We're still plagued by all types of people, including people who are considered leading scholars, who want to pretend like Soviet history did not happen, but it did, and we're watching it play out now today. Do you wanna jump in, Sarah?
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, I just wanna jump in with a little bit more history to add to this. You may be wondering, Why did so many people and why do so many people fall for this propaganda narrative of the Soviet Union as some sort of benevolent entity, some sort of anti imperialist, anticolonial, and then for Russia anti capitalist country when it's so clearly is the opposite?And I think a lot of it is, people took their cues from leading journalists and scholars of the Reagan era. And in the Reagan era, you did have the Reagan administration acting as this extremely militaristic, apocalyptic, right-wing American empire engaged in countless acts of corruption and hypocrisy and its enemy, of course, was the Soviet Union. It was the Evil Empire. It was what America historically used to justify its own horrific actions, whether in Vietnam or Cambodia or in certain respects Iran-Contra.
Sarah Kendzior:
There are countless examples. This was the excuse that corrupt regimes in the United States used in order to justify things that are absolutely not justifiable. The problem, of course, is that the USSR—and then really more capitalist independent Russia—is incredibly similar to the Reagan administration and just basically the worst elements of American society. What they retained from the USSR was a surveillance system, a system of oppression, of freedom of speech, free media. But what they borrowed and embraced from the West was plutocracy, incredible corruption embedded within the state. And that is why people like Paul Manafort or Roger Stone or Michael Flynn or Tom Barrack or all the way back to Roy Cohn and his sort of weird relationship with the Soviet Union, where he acted as if it was the great enemy.
Sarah Kendzior:
I mean, he was the person who basically invented McCarthyism but on the side, he had a lot of things going on and so did a lot of others. And the Soviet Union collapsing in 1981 increasingly seems like a controlled demolition by mafia-affiliated actors, white crime actors, deeply corrupt political actors who saw the potential of mutual enrichment from the Soviet Union falling apart, all the states becoming independent and therefore being able to have their resources stripped down and sold for parts. And this is not to minimize the actual movements within the regions that went on to become independent states in 1991 for independence, which had existed for a very long time and which were brutally suppressed by the USSR, which would repeatedly invade the countries of the Warsaw Pact or suppress revolutions within the Baltics, later the Caucasus, and so on.
Sarah Kendzior:
But I think that that is the origin of the confusion is that everyone is still in this ‘80s mindset, taking cues from ‘80s scholars like Stephen Cohen and somehow not being able to see the similarities between the worst of the United States and the worst of the Soviet Union and its successor states and the fact that, quite literally, they worked together. And one of the things that they birthed was the presidency of Donald Trump. I mean, I feel like if everyone could just wrap their head around this point—and there is a ton of evidence to show you this, including my book, Hiding in Plain Sight but really, like, an encyclopedia of exposes at this point—then we could get on the same page. And that page is anti kleptocracy, anti corruption, anti imperialism, anti war crimes. We should all be able to agree on this at this point and agree that both Putin and Trump and any American actor who either enabled or ignored war crimes abroad (which would include every American administration, including the Obama administration, the Clinton administrations, and others) are at best deeply flawed and at worst really complicit.
Sarah Kendzior:
I mean, I would say they all are complicit. We should be able to analyze this from a moral perspective instead of playing these weird little propaganda games that encourage people to choose a side when the sides are just gradations of bad. And within that are really good people trying to do the right thing and being oppressed—especially in this age of digital globalization—by a myriad of actors, both in their own countries and abroad. We should be able to bond together and fight that with unity and it's really sad that we haven't. Okay. My rant is over.
Andrea Chalupa:
Obviously this war was a disaster. It's proving to be a disaster for Putin. And why would he do something as crazy as this? All of his military adventures before—the second Chenya war, Georgia, Syria—he was up against much smaller opponents and in Syria he was battling essentially civilians, killing more civilians than ISIS. So now he's gone way over his skis here. This is the most ambitious military operation. It's an invasion, a genocidal invasion, but this is the biggest military crime he's ever attempted to commit. Ukraine is a massive country. It has a population of 40 million people. It is hyper alert with its military readiness. It has a population of people who are extraordinarily patriotic. It has a population of people who, as divided as they might be politically on a number of issues, they have a very proud culture of standing by each other when they're threatened by the Kremlin. They unite like a hive of bees when it comes to the Kremlin. It doesn't matter what the differences are. They're one family when it comes to the Kremlin.
Andrea Chalupa:
There's a history of that going back generations. And I write about that in my book, Orwell and the Refugees: The Untold Story of Animal Farm, how Orthodox and Catholic Ukrainians were helping each other survive being sent back to the Soviet Union under forced repatriation. So unity always exists when it comes to the Kremlin. Not only that, Ukraine has a very long proud history of insurgency efforts. So Putin should have known all that. Anybody who studies history should know that. John Mearsheimer at the University of Chicago should have known all that, but we're in this crisis because no one bothered to check in with Ukraine. No one bothered to treat Ukrainians as human beings. No one bothered to treat Ukraine as though it had any agency, and now here we are.
Andrea Chalupa:
So if you want a glimpse of what Soviet history was like, look at the Russian war crimes being carried out in Ukraine today. And I want to point out, as I keep saying on the show, there's speculation that Putin is mad, that he’s lost his mind, that COVID brain got to him…No, this is straight up KGB. This is what they've done for generations. This is who they are. There's this really great analyst out of Russia who did this whole Twitter thread that we’ll link to in the show notes for this episode about how the FSB—let’s just call them the KGB because that's what they are because they're Soviet style, through and through— the KGB under Putin has deliberately weakened the military, deliberately weakened Russia's military. Why would Putin, a staunch imperialist, a mass murdering dictator, why would he deliberately weaken his own military? Because like any dictator, he wants to die in power at a ripe old age. And who would threaten that power? The military.
Andrea Chalupa:
So he and his buddies at the KGB—I know it's the FSB, but let's just be real here—they deliberately demean the military, they keep it weak, they purge, they have the stupidest people being promoted, all to protect themselves, the security agency, the FSB, right? Because there's always gonna be that tension between the military and the security agency, and the security agency has been winning by keeping the military deliberately sort of on back-footing. And we've seen that play out in this war and how dysfunctional it is. It turns out that that KGB tactic of sabotaging your enemies is straight up self sabotage. It wasn't just what the West did that brought down the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union brought down the Soviet Union.
Andrea Chalupa:
It was a failed system that buckled under its own self sabotage and its own corruption and that's what we're seeing with Putin's war, with Putin's military. They simply cannot hold this country. They simply cannot. You have mass desertions. Soldiers are starving. You see soldiers looting stores because they're not being fed by their own military. You've intercepted phone calls with soldiers calling their family back in Russia, crying because they know they're being used as cannon fodder and they don't like it. They're seeing all of their fellow soldiers around them, fellow cannon fodder, being exploded, arms and limbs flying. They don't want that. They don't know why they're fighting. They don't know why they're fighting. You have soldiers on the Black Sea, sailors who refuse to even go into Ukraine, like “We don't wanna go in there. We don't wanna do this.”
Andrea Chalupa:
So it's a big disaster on the ground. It's a logistical disaster. They're out of fuel. The vehicles they need to refill the tanks, to repair all the big, heavy weaponry machinery, those cars are getting blasted. Ukrainian soldiers are picking these guys off. Russia has lost, in these few short weeks, around as many soldiers as they lost in all nine years of the Soviet-Afghan War. It's a disaster. And at this pace, they're barely making progress. Yeah, they've done well in the south but they're barely holding on in south Ukraine. They're barely holding on and they're still meeting fierce resistance in the south. And Kyiv is far from being encircled. Kyiv is still functioning. You have today three prime ministers from European nations—from Poland, from the Czech Republic and Slovenia—three prime ministers from the European Union visiting Kyiv today. That's how well Putin is doing.
Andrea Chaupa:
When you have three EU prime ministers paying a visit to Kyiv,just dropping through, you know, “Gonna drop in on Kyiv and see how the Klitschko brothers are doing.” That tells you everything about Putin's military might. It was all a big gaslighting disinformation campaign, saber rattling. If you listen to actual Russian experts, including a former minister of foreign affairs for Russia, they've said he's not going to use nuclear weapons. Putin's military might is a bluff, the nuclear weapons are a bluff. Why are the nuclear weapons a bluff? Because where do you think Putin has been hiding all his money all these years? Abroad! He has it tangled up, hidden up, wrapped up in all sorts of investments and bank accounts all over the world. Why the hell would he nuke his fortune? When, in his mind, like any arrogant dictator's mind, Putin in his mind is going to survive this.
Andrea Chalupa:
He's convinced that he's going somehow get through this because he is almighty Putin. So he's gonna need his war chest, his fortune that he's been squirreling away abroad, to make a grand escape or to buy off whoever he needs or to take care of his mistress, whatever. He needs his money and his money is in European capitals, Western capitals that would be nuclear targets for a Russian nuclear threat. Putin will not bomb his fortune. The nukes are a threat, just like the empty bluster of his military. It's empty. It's Putin's Potemkin military. It’s Putin's Potemkin nuclear threat. Yes, the guy's a sociopath because all the KGB are. They're trained to be sociopaths. That’sliterally the engine of terror that ran the Soviet Union for decades. But they're also self-serving and they're also driven to survive and protect their own survival at any cost even if it's killing and purging and putting some of the FSB under house arrest, because they were yes men who fed them rosey intelligence saying, “Yeah, we'll take Kyiv in a matter of days.”
Andrea Chalupa:
Some of those FSB agents that didn't have the balls to stand up to Putin are now under house arrest because of their yes men intelligence reports. So Putin is all about survival, therefore he's not going to nuke shit because he needs that money for his escape plan or whatever. That's important, right? Let's all keep that in mind. What we're seeing on the ground with the Russian military is removing the exotic Bond villain mask of Putin, a mask that Ukrainians never, ever fell for which is why they have that courage to fight Putin so fiercely because they see Putin for who he really is. The West for too long has been shaking in their boots when it comes to the big bluff that Putin has been throwing at them.
Andrea Chalupa:
So many people in the West were so scared of Putin's long shadow that they pushed this thing called the “Give Putin Respect Doctrine.” That's what we call it here at Gaslit Nation. I don't know how the hell they justified it to themselves, but you see them on TV, all of these storied Russian experts out of the glorified ivory tower think tank world in Washington DC saying, “If you only give Putin the respect he craves, all this will go away.” That's bullshit. That only got us here. Alright? So please treat Putin the way Ukrainians treat him. Think of Putin the way Ukrainians think of him. He's just that punkass neighbor who's pathetic. He's that guy in the bar who can't stop talking about his glory days playing varsity football.
Andrea Chalupa:
He's Al Bundy from Married With Children. That is how Ukrainians see Vladimir Putin. They don't see him as some sophisticated Bond villain, some exotic creature from the East, so stop it, Americans. Get on the same level as Ukrainians if you want stand any chance of finally defeating Putin's global terrorism and shout down anybody in the ivory tower think tank world, the cable news pundits who are just repeating the same tired, canned, microwave reheat talking points on this and aren't bothering to actually pay attention to what's really happening on the ground in Ukraine and what is Ukraine and what is Ukrainian history and who are Ukrainians? Because if you paid attention to Ukrainians, you not only saw this war coming, you not only saw how the West was complicit in allowing this genocidal invasion to happen, but you saw what a pathetic bluff Putin has been all this time and how he needs to be handled with strength. With strength, not buckling to his disinformation, his gaslighting, like a typical abuse victim. Don't allow yourself to be mentally abused by this guy anymore. Ukrainians refuse that so join them in that.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. I just want to say one thing here. Just, it wasn't quite a bluff because while the military is obviously much, much weaker than people anticipated, except for Ukrainians who did anticipate this, and if you don't know that, listen to our interview with Malcolm Nance and Terrell Starr from the ground in Ukraine right before the escalated invasion began, where they predicted that Ukraine would be able to hold them. It was an illusion of impenetrable strength and threat that the West bolstered by doing exactly what you laid out; by giving him prestige, by giving him money, by treating him as an equal instead of a threat that they're feeding. The West fed their own abuser and made him so much more powerful than he would've been had they recognized immediately—which they should have as soon as he invaded Chechnya, as soon as that brutal war broke out—that he was a threat to former parts of the Soviet Union, a threat to the West, a threat to global democracy.
Sarah Kendzior:
This should have been easy to figure out and particularly easy to figure out in 2006 when he killed Litvinenko on UK soil, when he killed Anna Politkovskaya for covering Chechnya and when a lot of these mafia operations really took off. But instead, they fed the beast that did manage to get quite a bit done, managed to help pull off Brexit, help get Trump into office, hack the US infrastructure, including the State Department, the DoD, the White House, obviously the DNC, we all got to hear about that. It was good at cyber war. It managed to create a blackout on Ukraine.
Sarah Kendzior:
What's interesting to me now is that now those tactics—this asymmetrical warfare, this hybrid warfare—they're failing. We haven't seen the cyber attacks that were expected. We haven't seen the kind of complicity from the West and from the United States that has been there the whole time continue. We've actually seen the sanctions that we and also people like Garry Kasparov have been calling for the whole time. And we're seeing that they work, at least in decreasing the kind of soft power, non directly military type prowess that the Kremlin has. So you really have to think, Well, why the hell didn't we do this before? Why did the West feed this beast?
Sarah Kendzior:
And I hope that the clarity of this moment, that this is how you need to respond, you cannot negotiate, you cannot treat them as an equal partner… This is a brutal invading sociopathic empire that requires isolation and sanctions on its most elite and powerful actors, many of whom have taken on citizenship in other countries and now those countries—like the UK, like Israel—they're dealing with the fallout of their own decisions. I am worried about the nukes though, I have to say. And I agree with you. I do not think he's going to nuke his own fortune and his pals’ fortune in Europe. I'm worried, as I’ve said before, that this conflict, if it fails in Ukraine, may move to Central Asia, may move especially to Kazakhstan and Northern Kazakhstan. And since Putin is trying desperately at this point to form an alliance with China, I'm worried that they are looking at Central Asia as a prize, as territory to control.
Sarah Kendzior:
And I will stress again that the Central Asian independent states, even though they are dictatorships…And you can see this now. There's a new president of Turkmenistan who is the son of the previous president, who was the dentist of the previous president who was a complete megalomaniac named Turkmenbashi who named the months of the year after members of his family and so on. Anyway, this is in my book and other things that I've written. My point is that these are what I would call, I guess, the sovereign asshole theory of politics. The Central Asian states are deeply corrupt. All but Kyrgyzstan basically have been autocracies since the end of the Soviet Union. And they vary in their extremes. Turkmenistan is the worst end of this.
Sarah Kendzior:
Uzbekistan is finally improving a bit. They've ended forced cotton picking so that you could sort of see the level that they're on. Kyrgyzstan was sort of a fledgling democracy for a while. Anyway, my point is that these are sovereign nations. They are not Russian nations. They may speak Russian, but it is because of the aftermath of colonialism, the same way that you see Spanish or French or English spoken in parts of Africa and throughout South America. That is why they're speaking Russian. And Russia may very well try to do the same bullshit that it did with Ukraine and claim this as their territory. And China, if it is aligning itself with Russia, for resource extraction may go along with this. Don't fall for this. There are people in Central Asia, particularly in Kazakhstan recently, that are rising up in protests, rising up against corruption, against kleptocracy, and fighting for their own sovereignty.
Sarah Kendzior:
Are their governments ideal? No. Does that make the people living there any less human, any less deserving of rights? No. So if the territory shifts, if Putin feels like his opportunity would be better if he moves this to Central Asia, builds up some prowess, my guess is that he will then turn around and go right back to Ukraine and try to finish what he started. Because as Andrea has brought up many times, this is rooted in a deep hatred of Ukrainian people and a refusal to accept that Ukraine as a country, as a culture, as a nation, that it has the right to exist, or that in Putin’s mind that it ever truly existed as an independent state. So I do not think he's gonna let that country go, but I think that we may be in for even worse war crimes if the train shifts to the east because of the West's apathy, because they never have cared about what he does in Central Asia. They didn't care very much about what he did in Chechnya. They didn't care very much about Georgia or even about Syria, where we were also involved. And so please, if this happens, treat every country as equals. Treat everybody as deserving of rights and sovereignty and freedom and peace. That's something that I'm fearing as more of a long term concern. The immediate concern, of course, is the barbarity of what he is doing in Ukraine.
Andrea Chalupa:
And speaking of that, here's a list of the latest Russian war crimes. Russia continues to bomb residential buildings, including in Kyiv. Russians are bombing hospitals, schools, kindergartens, orphanages. They're deliberately killing civilians, shooting them point blank when they can. Russian soldiers attacked humanitarian efforts to evacuate civilians outside of Kyiv, and this is happening across the country wherever the Russians are targeting. Russian soldiers are reportedly kidnapping and torturing mayors and a Ukrainian journalist in the south and targeting other civil society leaders. An American journalist, Brent Renaud, was killed in a Russian attack on a suburb of Kyiv. He had contributed to major outlets like the New York Times. As I mentioned, Russian prisoners of war in intercepted phone calls have confirmed that Russians are told to deliberately kill civilians, targeting civilians, including the infrastructure they rely on, the critical infrastructures like hospitals. Those are war crimes.
Andrea Chalupa:
The Hague (the International Court of Justice) is set to rule on Russia's war at the assistance of Ukraine on March 16. Ukrainian President Zelensky put out another video addressed to both the Ukrainian and Russian people. Speaking in Russian, Zelensky called on Russian soldiers to surrender. I'm going to quote from that now: “So I am giving you a choice, a chance, on behalf of Ukrainians, a chance to live. If you surrender to our forces, we will treat you the way people ought to be treated. The way you are not treated in your army. The way your army doesn't treat ours. Make your choice.” That's a pretty damn good deal considering that they're starving and being used as cannon fodder. Again, Putin cannot hold down this country. He can only destroy the country, which is what he's continuing to do. He's killing the best and the brightest. He's targeting civil society.
Andrea Chalupa:
He's targeting even Ukrainian academic experts and Ukrainian universities and Ukrainian factories. There's even reporting out of Ukraine that they're going to do mass deforestation. They want to leave this entire country in ruins. This is otherwise known as genocide. If you look at the definition of genocide, it includes the deliberate mass killing of people belonging to a state with the aim of destroying that nation. And Putin has used genocidal language for years to insist Ukraine is not a country, and that is all parroted on his propaganda machine that dehumanizes Ukrainians, says they're “subhuman”, they “deserve to die”, all of that. This is a genocide. Anybody who tries to play down and deny that this is a genocide has some agenda, and you should not accept that. You should stand up to that. That's very important now. Zelensky also praised Russian Ukrainian Marina Ovsyannikova, an employee of Russian State TV network Channel One, who interrupted the main propaganda show by holding up a sign behind the hugely famous fake news anchor.
Andrea Chalupa:
And that sign said, “No war. Stop The War. Don't believe the propaganda. They're lying to you.” She now faces 15 years in prison. How does this all play out? Well, Zelensky is going to be addressing the US Congress, just like he addressed the British government in this historic address. So Zelensky will address Congress and what he's demanding, what Ukraine is demanding, are three things. One, a no fly zone, as in Iraq. Stronger air defense. Fighter jets. Yeah. I mean, you have to protect the sky because they're mass slaughtering civilians. According to Ukraine, Russia has killed more civilians than they've killed Ukrainian military. It's a genocide. We're all just helplessly on the sidelines watching this genocide. And it's just going to get worse because that's who the KGB is. That's who Putin is. It's not just Putin that's doing this.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yes, he's the dictator. He's made his kingdom so he is surrounded by yes men. But people do support the war. A sizable amount of Russians, yes, they're pumped with disinformation but they've had access to the internet all these years, up until recent weeks. This is the entire Russian fascist state that is committing a genocide against Ukrainians. Are we just going to let them do that? That's the big question hanging over the rest of the world. I understand that there are people that aren't familiar and don't understand Putin like Ukrainians do and they're going to fall for his nuclear threats. They're going to fall for his aggression, his big bluff. But the reality is the only way to defeat a Hitler is to stand up to a Hitler. So, for the love of God, the West owes it to Ukraine because the West got Ukraine into this in the first place by allowing Putin to function like a fancy, dressed up, tailor-made terrorist. Posh terrorist Putin.
Andrea Chalupa:
They did summits with him. They let him host the Olympics. They let him host big tournaments. They invited him places. They would do joint statements with him, like Macron, who's up for election in April, French president Macron who's suddenly posting photos of him in his presidential office, all gilded, his gilded presidential office, looking scrappy with a hoodie on because he's trying to cosplay Zelensky. Boris Johnson's trying to cosplay Winston Churchill. It’s the buffoonery of European leaders who have blood on their hands from all the years that they've been tap dancing around Putin, scared of his every little move. See Putin now Ukrainians see him. I cannot emphasize that enough. And if you do, the West will be shoving planes at Ukraine because the guy is weak inside. He's weak. He's scared. He's cornered. He's at his weakest that he’s ever been because of this self-made crisis of his.
Andrea Chalupa:
And so it's never been [more] important for the West to get its together and act quickly and get Ukraine all the resources it needs to protect civilians, to create shields over these cities that are being deliberately bombed. There's a siege right now in Mariupol, a Southeastern city, a humanitarian crisis that's going to be one of the horrific, horrific moments of this war, the Guernica of this war, where people are locked inside, thousands are dying. We saw that pregnant woman that was shelled. She died and lost her baby. They're trapped inside. It's like the Siege of Leningrad. People are starving. They don't have medicines. So Putin's whole strategy is to put these major cities—including, if he can, Kyiv—under siege and starve the population out, destroy them that way, kill as many Ukrainians as he can, destroy as much of the country as he can.
Andrea Chalupa:
And meanwhile, the pundit idiots, the think tank idiots, especially those that are funded by Koch dark money, because keep in mind the Koch political network has infiltrated the foreign policy world in a very big way and you know who those idiots are because they twist Soviet history to try to justify a position of, “We gotta let Ukraine be abandoned. Don't get involved. Ooh, Putin is so scary.” Anybody who's promoting to you how scary Putin is is not on the same level as Ukrainians who are the number one force in the world and actually finally resisting this guy. If you praise Ukraine, if you have a Ukrainian flag anywhere, if you're giving money to Ukrainians, then you need to start thinking like them. You need to look to them for leadership now cuz they're the ones showing the world how this is done.
Andrea Chalupa:
And everybody else is just failing, failing morally, failing humanity, failing Ukraine and allowing a genocide to happen. That needs to stop. Get Ukraine what it needs. Let Ukraine lead. They've done so well so far. The country is a miracle, what it has survived; the genocides, Chernobyl, the generations of Soviet trauma where the best and the brightest were always targeted and killed off. And it's still standing as a nation, a democracy, a democracy that has been inspiring the world for so long, a democracy with an impressive tech industry, impressive women’s equity, with an impressive growing LGBTQ movement, a democracy. A colorful multicultural, multilingual democracy, a safe haven for Jewish around the world who pay pilgrimage to Uman, a city now under threat. You have Holocaust survivors now being rushed to bomb shelters because of the world's apathy and indifference and dithering over how to help Ukraine.
Andrea Chalupa:
And it's just easy. How do you help Ukraine? You think like Ukrainians and you see Putin the way Ukrainians do and you do what you can to close their skies. You do a partial no-fly zone just to get the civilians out. If we can put a man on the moon, we can figure out a way to do a no-fly zone in order to save civilian lives, to stop a genocide. We can do it. Okay? Western world, we can do it. Stop with the excuses. Stop with the tired talking points and ground yourself in the reality there in Ukraine and what's happening. It is a genocide and it is on all of us if we allow Putin to succeed in yet another KGB-driven genocide of innocent people. They don't deserve this and we who care about humanity and have empathy, we don't deserve to watch this either. It needs to end
Andrea Chalupa:
Our discussion continues and you can get access to that by signing up on our Patreon at the Truth Teller level or higher.
Sarah Kendzior:
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Andrea Chalupa:
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Sarah Kendzior:
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Andrea Chalupa:
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Andrea Chalupa:
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