Freedom Square
This week, we review the chaotic and horrific developments in Putin’s war against Ukraine. We cover the West finally sanctioning Russia and beginning to isolate it from positions of geopolitical power; Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons; the protests in support of Ukraine that broke out all over the world, in particular in independent states that were once colonized by the Soviet Union; the shameful and unforgivable role Kremlin media lackeys played in abetting Kremlin violence in Ukraine and Syria; and what NATO and the West should do to protect Ukrainians trying to flee to the border.
Most of all, we discuss the toll this war has taken on the people of Ukraine. While their resilience is inspiring, it is also tragic. Putin’s escalated invasion was predictable and therefore preventable. The West owes Ukraine every bit of support it can give them after decades of looking the other way while taking Russian oligarch blood money.
Our bonus episode this week, available to Patreon subscribers at the Truth-Teller level or higher, is the full 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 discusses parallels between Putin and Hitler.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky via EU translator:
We are fighting just for our land and for our freedom, despite the fact that all large cities of our country are now blocked. Nobody Is going to enter and intervene with our freedom and country, believe you me. Every square of today, no matter what it's called, it's going to be called today “Freedom Square”, in every city of our country. Nobody's going to break us. We're strong. We are Ukrainians. We have a desire to see our children alive. I think it's a fair one. Yesterday, 16 children were killed.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky via EU translator:
And again, President Putin is going to say that it is some kind of operation and we are heeding military infrastructure. Where are our children? What kind of military factories do they work at? What tanks are they going with? Or launching cruise missiles? He killed 16 people just yesterday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky via EU translator:
Our people are very much motivated, very much so. We are fighting for our rights, for our freedoms, for life, for our life. And now we're fighting for survival, and this is the highest of our motivation. But we are fighting, also, to be equal members of Europe. I believe that today we are showing everybody that's exactly what we are. The European Union is going to be much stronger with us so that's for sure. Without Ukraine, it’s going to be lonesome. We have proven our strengths. We have proven that, at a minimum, we are exactly the same as you are. So do prove that you are with us. Do prove that you will not let us go.
[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, which unfortunately is repeating in Putin's war, which is a genocide against Ukrainian people, so I strongly urge everyone to watch this film. A screening was held in Moscow. The authorities shut it down. So, see the film that Putin doesn't want you to see, Mr. Jones.
Sarah Kendzior:
And is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the United States and rising autocracy around the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
Our opening clip was Ukrainian President Zelensky addressing the European Parliament. Ukrainians risked their lives to join the EU during Euromaidan, the Revolution of Dignity, and continues to defend Europe and democracy today, showing the world how it's done. You can hear in the clip the translator getting emotional as he's passing on Zelensky’s words of war crimes being carried out in Kharkiv, Ukraine, a city of 1.4 million people that includes several universities and many young people. Our Patreon episode this week is our full interview with Gustav Gressel, a senior policy fellow with the wider Europe Programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations based in Berlin. It's an essential discussion that provides background on Europe, namely Germany's Russia policy up until the other day when the world turned upside down. There has been a revolution sweeping Europe driven by Putin, who hates revolutions. So be sure to listen to that to get background on why Europe, led by Germany, waited so long to hold Putin accountable.
Andrea Chalupa:
And finally, a big announcement, as we have been discussing…Second time we're making this big announcement: Gaslit Nation Presents Rising Up from the Ashes: Cassandras and Other Experts on Rebuilding Democracy, our spring 2022 series where we’re running must-listen-to discussions with various experts on how to save democracy. It also includes a Ukrainian journalist who has a lot to say to us here in the West. Also, if you want to hang out with us, we're having a live event featuring just us, me and Sarah hanging out. You can join that Zoom hangout on March 22nd, Tuesday at 4:00 PM Eastern Time by signing up at the Democracy Defender level or higher on Patreon. We look forward to seeing you there.
Sarah Kendzior:
Alright. So I just want to clarify, we are taping this show at 10:45 Central Time, St. Louis time, as I've said, the time by which we measure all time, and there are a lot of changing events in motion. So by the time we release this episode tonight, a lot of things will have changed. I also encourage everybody to go to the Gaslit Nation archives at gaslitnationpod.com because we have been covering this conflict for four years. We have been covering Putin's war on Ukraine. We've been covering the fecklessness of the West. We've been covering these mutual bonds of kleptocracy and corruption. And you may be saying to yourself, “Well,how is that possible? This just happened last week. This just broke out.” Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014 and has had his eye on the conquest of this region for the entire time that he has been in office. And corrupt, vulture-like politicians and corporations and institutions in the West have been content to take his blood money—the money of oligarchs, the money of mafiosos—and look the other way as Putin and the Kremlin and their partners commit atrocities all over the world, form an axis of autocrats all across the world, and launder their dirty money and their assets.
Sarah Kendzior:
This week has been very overwhelming for us. In many ways, it's been surreal to see the wishlist that we've long had, you know, recommendations that we've held and also other people who've been studying this region have held, finally be enacted; sanctions on oligarchs, the isolation of Russia from fields of geopolitical influence and also fields of cultural influence (things like soccer and Eurovision and symbolic things that mean something for the Russian people). And on that note, I want to say this right now: This is not a war on the people of Russia. They are suffering enormously. Their economy has collapsed. They are ruled by a madman dictator. Many of them, these soldiers who are being sent to Ukraine, have only known life under Vladimir Putin.
Sarah Kendzior:
They didn't have a choice in this situation and some of them are making brave choices now. They're having protests now. They're refusing to fight now. So this is about the people at the top. That's what we always emphasize on this show. This is about Putin. This is about his oligarchs. This is about his mafia partners. This is the subject that people don't even seem to want to touch. They don't even want to look at people like Semion Mogilevich, for example, the head of the Russian mafia who helped propel all these people to power and move their money around. They don't even want to talk about Paul Manafort, the Kremlin operative, currently MIA, who played an enormous role in Trump's rise to power. They're starting to talk more seriously about social media. Carole Cadwalladr, the British journalist, has been vindicated for her many, many warnings about the role that the Kremlin played in Brexit.
Sarah Kendzior:
A lot of us have been vindicated, but when you're vindicated about World War III, it doesn't feel very good. So if we sound angry during this show, if we cry during this show, it's because this is our lives. This is the lives of our children and of people we love and of a country that is showing incredible courage and incredible resilience in standing up to these attacks. And part of the reason they're resilient is because, as I said, this attack on Ukraine has been going on for eight years and contrary to popular myths nowadays, the West was more than happy to look the other way if it enabled their own greedy ambitions. They were happy to shrug their shoulders and say, “Oh, it's just Ukraine. Who cares about Ukraine?” And now everyone cares about Ukraine and that's how it should be.
Sarah Kendzior:
Everyone should care for any country that has to deal with an invasion by a dictatorial, nuke-bearing madman. Everyone should care about any people that have to suffer like the people of Ukraine are suffering now. And yes, that applies to Yemen. That applies to the Uighurs in China. That applies to the Palestinians. People around the world are suffering in these preventable war crime situations. And yes, you have a moral imperative to call that out. It is not a competition, it is a tragedy. It is a preventable tragedy. Andrea is much more informed about the nuances of Ukrainian politics than me. As she said when she introduced herself, she made an entire movie about the genocide famine in Ukraine from the early 1930s under Stalin. It is, to my knowledge, the only English language movie about this incredible crime, this genocide. Think about that. Think about public perception of Ukraine, that there is only one movie, one mainstream movie, about this major world-shifting event. That is how Ukraine has been treated. That is how it was treated up until this week, so don't forget that and give credit to the Ukrainians who have been fighting in those conditions: a combination of apathy and malice, that is what they've received. Give credit to them for refusing to back down.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, absolutely. I want to point out just to make a comparison: You know how in America when it comes time to have a big election—a presidential election, a midterm election—and everyone looks at who voted how, there's always these white women voting for the fascist on the ballot. And then how do Black people vote, especially Black women? Overwhelmingly for the candidate who is least like the fascist and will in fact stop the fascist by coming to power so the fascist can't. We've seen it with Stacey Abrams in Georgia, again and again, all of these efforts by Black women in saving the day and democracy and Americans cheering them on as though they're superheroes, when the reality is that Black women, I could imagine, are extremely tired of having to carry America's democracy on their back and save us all.
Andrea Chalupa:
And in fact, we need to be doing more to pitch in and doing more to fight. And the fight inside Black women comes from facing an existential crisis because of the authoritarianism they’ve faced in America's long history, which continues today, where parents of Black children have to give their kids special talks, special protections, as they go out in their world in their daily lives. I bring that up because people are now treating Ukrainians as though they're superhumans, which means they're non-humans. They're human people. They're human people right now carrying the struggle on a global level against democracy on their backs and a lot of people around the world are watching this with popcorn like it's a Netflix series and not real lives being destroyed and families being separated. I don't want to talk about this today, I really don't, but I'm going to because it's important.
Andrea Chalupa:
So my message to people is to center Ukrainians in this, center humanity in this, center the people whose lives are on the line. Center people like my friends who are journalists in Ukraine who are separated now from their husbands. Their husbands cannot leave the country. They're volunteering, they're volunteering. A friend's husband in Kyiv is a translator. He's a linguistic expert. He studies languages and he's a translator. He speaks seven different languages fluently, including Latin, and he volunteered to serve in the local defense of Kyiv and she's now separated from him. And she has to carry on raising the kids and doing her job—she has a demanding job—and worrying every day about her husband, who is a translator, who now has a rifle somewhere. Alright? Imagine me and my husband…My husband's a software engineer, a software engineer, and I have to say goodbye to him and he suddenly has to get rifle training and go out there and defend our city, and I have to get as far away as I can to safety with our kids and continue my life day by day… <crying>
Sarah Kendzior:
Do you need me to break in or do you want to keep going?
Andrea Chalupa:
No, so I just wanna… Hold on, give me a second.
Sarah Kendzior:
It’s okay. It's okay.
Andrea Chalupa:
Sorry…. Unfortunately, what we're seeing carrying out now in Ukraine is Putin the madman, increasingly isolated in the Kremlin. He's always been on another planet as, as Angela Merkel said accurately, but it's gotten worse, probably because of COVID, probably because he's getting up there in years, probably because he's stuck. He's made his bed and now he's forced to sleep in it. He does not have the luxury of retiring. He has to die in power, like any dictator, because he's made too many enemies along the way. So, this is his retirement plan, just to live out his life in power and try to bring the Russian empire back, starting as we're seeing, like, he's just seized Belarus. Belarus is gone. It's under Russian occupation effectively. That is because the current dictator, Lukashenko, went from hosting peace talks between Ukraine and Russia in Minsk to pleading with Putin, like, hiding behind Putin because of a pro-democracy movement across Belarus that has been challenging, bravely, the legitimacy of his brutal regime.
Andrea Chalupa:
And so Lukashenko wants to stay in power so he's completely given Belarus over to Putin in exchange for staying in power, and now soldiers from Belarus are going to be joining Putin's war. So now Putin has Russia, he has Belarus, and he's not going to stop until he has Ukraine. Putin is notoriously stubborn. He pushes deals very far. He doesn't back down. He doesn't compromise. He doesn't like to lose. And he's isolated, isolated, and he's a conspiracy theorist who right now is surrounded by other conspiracy theorists. His chief negotiator in these super fake disinformation peace talks that Russia and Ukraine recently held while Russia was bombing Ukrainian civilians, the chief negotiator on the Russian side is a Putin propagandist who has helped Putin rebuild the cult of Stalin and has promoted all these ideas of Ukraine not actually being a real country. Right? All this genocidal language, and all this genocidal language against Ukrainians—being “subhuman, they’re traitors, they should be killed, they’re prostitutes for getting all this support from NATO and the US—all this derogatory language dehumanizing Ukrainians, hate speech propaganda, all of that is carried out across Russian State TV and all Russian propaganda sites and that's been going on for years
Andrea Chalupa:
It's been ramped up in recent years and it's all done to normalize what's happening now, which is Putin's war, which is a genocide. He's not just trying to get territory and the empire back. That's part of it, but he really wants to do what Stalin did and crush the Ukrainian people. He wants to destroy Ukrainian national identity. He has his list. According to US intelligence, he has his list of leading Ukrainians across society, from politicians to journalists and so forth, and he's going to hunt them down and purge them. He's had his agents inside Ukraine for a while now mapping the place out, finding who's who. Right? They've been working on this invasion for well over a year and likely plotting it longer than that but they've been really getting the foundation ready for at least a year plus. Now it's all happening.
Andrea Chalupa:
So this would've happened whether it was Biden or Trump. This would've happened whether it was Biden or Trump, that’s important for everyone to know. And it's a genocide. It is a genocide. And that is why you see Ukrainians putting their lives on the line because they know it's a genocide. Putin is bombing museums. A museum was just hit with iconic art by a leading Ukrainian artist. There's concern about the churches that are ancient, that he's going to destroy, that are heritage sites. So he's going after a scorched earth policy. He's deliberately targeting civilians now. He's bombing buildings. He bombed a hospital. He bombed an ambulance. He's bombing schools. He's killing children. He's doing this all deliberately. He bombed Freedom Square in the heart of Kharkiv. Again, Kharkiv is a city that has 1.4 million people with several universities, many young people. I've been there.
Andrea Chalupa:
We filmed some of Mr. Jones there. It's full of this young, fun, vibrant energy and Putin is just bombing it, building there, hospital there, Freedom Square, one of the largest squares in Europe. He doesn't care. He's doing to Ukraine what he did to Chechnya, his first war that brought him to power. Right? There was all that reporting, that brave reporting by David Satter saying that Putin created a fake terrorist attack in the heart of Moscow with FSB agents or whoever planting a bunch of bombs, killing people in Moscow to justify his war in Chechnya. He went into Chechnya twice and the second time he was successful, leveled Grozny, and now Chechnya is a Putin puppet republic that terrorizes all the people that live there. They live under fear of the Chechen warlords that have autonomy in the sense that they're their own little characters, they have their own lives there, but they answer ultimately to Putin and they were sent to fight in his war in Ukraine
Andrea Chalupa:
And then Syria. If you go to gaslitnationpod.com and go to our transcripts page, you can do a search for Syria. Look how many times since the start of the show we've talked about Syria and how there were reports that Russia killed more civilians in Syria than ISIS. We talked about how Russia deliberately killed civilians. We talked about all of that and what a tragedy Syria was for the entire world and how the karma of Syria is on all of us. And I want to point that out because we've seen all of these paid propagandists for RT, Sputnik and other places resigning as though they finally found their soul. They think that that's going to atone for all the years of destructive disinformation and truth-muddling and propaganda that they spread. I want to point out that the war crimes that Putin committed in Syria were covered up and or justified by RT and Sputnik.
Andrea Chalupa:
Syria was the victim of one of the most vicious disinformation campaigns ever, one of the most dehumanizing disinformation campaigns ever, and these useful idiots who were raking in blood money and Twitter followers all this time think that they can now resign when they justified the killing of innocent people for so long and the destruction of a country for so long that is now in Russia's hands? Assad, the dictator, the butcher of Syria, got to stay in power. The Syrian revolution stood a chance at one time and Putin propped up Assad. And in exchange, now Assad is another proxy dictator for Putin and Putin now has a base on the Mediterranean, thanks to his proxy in Syria. Okay? So he's going to do to Ukraine what he did to Syria and Chechnya. We're already seeing that now, and Ukrainians are still putting their lives on the line.
Andrea Chalupa:
They've had a massive number of reserves come in to volunteer. They have fighters coming from all over. They're bravely taking on the most sadistic terrorist regime in the entire world with a track record of leveling cities to the ground, with a track record of deliberately bombing hospitals. Okay? And that's where we are now. And so the world got so excited over Zelensky and all the memes and all the videos, but once you see what Putin did to Syria carried out in Ukraine, you're going to turn away. You're going to get bored with it. You're gonna wonder, Where did all the colorful memes go? It's going to be hell on earth unleashed because that is who Putin is. He is a KGB agent. He is a Stalinist. Stalin committed several genocides. My film, Mr. Jones is, as Sarah pointed out. a mainstream film, but if I were to show you the true horror of what Stalin did in Ukraine, it would be a horror film.
Andrea Chalupa:
It would be like one of those Saw movies that are just so surreal and gross. You could not watch it. That's what Stalin did and that's what Putin is going to carry out in Ukraine today. And so I think it's extremely imp that when you have a lot of these pundits, the hipster nihilists in the foreign policy world that just want to get on TV and get published by fancy prestigious outlets, and when you have all of these random people who are just discovering Ukraine for the first time, when you have people cherry picking facts about Ukraine to justify some empty, empty argument that would only hold up if you had to pretend that the entire history of the Soviet Union doesn't exist—and let me give you an example of that: That John Mearsheimer video that everyone keeps passing around saying how this war is NATO's fault.
Andrea Chalupa:
NATO is not the issue here. That John Mearsheimer clip only works if you pretend that Soviet history never happened. But it did. That John Mearsheimer clip only works if you pretend that Putin is not unhinged and hasn't been to all these years. But he is. That John Mearsheimer clip only works if you pretend that Putin doesn't have a history going back several years—decades—of escalating terrorism against the Russian people and against other countries (Georgia, Syria, and Ukraine). So that John Mearsheimer clip is just cherry picking nonsense. He has cherry picked this, cherry picked that and completely ignores the rest. Ignores history, ignores facts, ignores the truth. It is just the emptiest thing you can imagine. The fact that people are smoking joints and watching this and getting their minds blown over it because they have zero understanding of the region and the history…Sober up. It's the biggest nonsense I've ever seen. People need to stop sharing it and people need to instead pick up books about the history of Ukraine.
Andrea Chalupa:
People need to listen to the Ukrainian journalists who are on the ground, who are risking their lives, who are begging their parents to evacuate their homes because the Russians are surrounding the city. That's who you need to be listening to right now. And if you want to know why Ukrainians are as brave as they are and inspiring the world right now, it's because of the Kremlin's genocidal history against Ukraine, a history that John Mearsheimer conveniently leaves out of his viral video that everyone's passing around to try to blame this on NATO. So I would encourage everyone to continue to prioritize the people on the ground. One uncomfortable subject I'd like to bring up, and I'm doing this because I feel that it's my role to elevate, to amplify those brave voices on the ground, especially when they've done so much for us around the world in providing an invaluable service, confronting and documenting corruption. So I'm going to share a clip now by Daria Kalenyuk, who is considered Ukraine's anti-corruption reformer. She is someone whose investigations and credible sources have helped journalists around the world and activists around the world in exposing corruption. She is a superstar out of Ukraine. We're going to play a clip from her now where she confronts British Prime Minister Boris Johnson at a press conference in Warsaw.
Daria Kalenyuk:
A woman from my team is now in Bila Tserkva. She’s there with two kids and the Russian military is all there and she's so very afraid that she will be shot. Kharkiv, the city where I was studying, was bombarded today, fully. The downtown square. So you are talking about the stoicism of the Ukrainian people, but Ukrainian women and Ukrainian children are in deep fear because of bombs and missiles which are coming from the sky. And Ukrainian people are desperately asking for the West to protect our sky. We are asking for the no-fly zone. We are seeing a response that it will trigger World War III, but what is the alternative, Mr. Prime minister? To observe how our children instead of planes are protecting NATO from the missiles and bombs? What's the alternative for the no-fly zone? We have planes here. We have an air defense system in Poland, in Romania.
Daria Kalenyuk:
NATO has this air defense. At least this air defense would shield Western Ukraine so these children with women could come to the border. It's impossible now to cross the border. There are 30 kilometers of lines. Imagine crossing the border with a baby or with two children. I'm so glad that Samantha Power is coming here to the border from the Polish side. Let her come to the border from the Ukrainian side and see that. Britain guaranteed our security under the Budapest Memorandum. So you are coming to Poland. You're not coming to Kyiv, Prime Minister. You are not coming to Lviv because you are afraid, because NATO is not willing to defend, because NATO is afraid of World War III but it has already started. And it is Ukrainian children who are there taking the hit. You're talking about more sanctions, Prime Minister, but Roman Abramovich is not sanctioned. He's in London. His children are not in the bombardments. His children are there in London. Putin’s children are in the Netherlands, in Germany, in mansions. Where are all these mentioned seized? I don't see that. I see that my family members, that my team members, are seeing that we are crying. We don’t know where to run. This is what is happening, Prime Minister.
Andrea Chalupa:
I just want to say, I know it's a big scandal being a comfortable, privileged American here in my home where I don't have bombs going off. I don't have bomb raids going off. My husband is at home. I don't have to worry about him wherever he is with a rifle somewhere, manning a checkpoint all night in the dark. I know that it's a scandal for me to dare to point out that if all signs are pointing to the fact that Putin is going Syria on Ukraine now, then there should be either a no-fly zone or a safe zone, just like there was in Syria. You want to know who I got that from? Daria, who we just heard in the clip, but I also spoke to two Syrians about it. I also reached out to two Syrians who were on the front lines of that war, who were on the front lines of the indifference from the West during all those years of atrocities.
Andrea Chalupa:
And I asked them, I said, “Would a no-fly zone help Ukraine right now?” And they said, “Yes, absolutely, but the West won't go for it because the West is so afraid to get involved. They're afraid that this is going to mean World War III.” We've already been in World War III, by the way, anybody who's just waking up to that now. I know Fiona Hill had that viral interview in Politico where she pointed out, Yep, it's World War III. I pointed that out on Twitter back in 2015, I believe, many years ago. I pointed out many years ago that this was World War III. I was in Kyiv talking to some security specialists and they were like, “World War III has already started, the West just doesn't know it yet.” We've been in World War III. This is what World War IIIlooks like in the 21st century.
Andrea Chalupa:
It's disinformation warfare. It's the hacking of minds. It's the buying off of politicians and institutions. It's the blood money deals like Nord Stream 2. It's the indifference of the West. It's caving to the threats. It's letting the tyrant be legitimized, letting the terrorist be legitimized, letting him in appear at all these conferences and host the Olympics and all these big sporting events. This is how it's been playing out. It's been with the hacking, the cyber attacks, all of it, and the massive sweeping propaganda, all the paid propaganda, the super cool photogenic hipsters who have been paid to play news anchor at RT and Sputnik. That's what World War III looks like. We're in the middle of it now. It's ongoing and Ukraine is protecting us all. So if they want a safe fly zone, if they want a safe zone, if they want to create corridors on the ground in Ukraine so civilians who are fleeing Putin’s cluster bombing of civilian areas, that's the least the West can do, is demand and enforce a safe zone so civilians can pass, so civilians can get to safety. I have friends in Kyiv who don't know how they're going to get back to the US because to leave the city is dangerous, to head West is dangerous because of all the bombing now of civilians. Okay? I have somebody…<crying> I’m sorry.
Sarah Kendzior:
Do you want me to-
Andrea Chalupa:
No, I want to finish this. I have somebody that I'm emotionally dependent on who doesn't know how he's going to leave. And so I want to say to all of you who are biting your nails over Putin's nuclear threats, biting your nails over the reports that he's unhinged and all the videos of his ridiculous speeches showing he's unhinged, I just want to say to you: Putin has always made nuclear threats. He does this all the time. It's like a knee jerk reaction to him. I do not think he's going to go there anytime soon and I think setting up safe passage somehow for civilians, enforcing a no-fly zone or a safe zone, whatever the genius minds at NATO, whatever US intelligence, whatever the whole coalition of Allies, whatever the strong European officials who are finally finding their moral courage and promoting European Union membership for Ukraine, whatever the brain trust that cares about democracy worldwide comes up with.
Andrea Chalupa:
They have to come up with something to ensure the safe passage of civilians so they can get the hell out and be safe from bombing, so there can be safe corridors just like there was in Syria. Because we're seeing now this devolve into a Syrian-style, war crime-filled nightmare. That's where it's heading now. And if you're worried about the nuclear weapons…I do think he's crazy but I do think he also has it in him to stop short of that because it's suicide. It'd be committing suicide, right? If he drops a nuclear bomb anywhere, that's going blow back on the Russian people. If he drops it in Europe, if he drops it in New York, Deripaska and Abramovich and the other guys are going to lose whatever holdings they have in New York City. I don't think he's going to go there. I think this is just posturing.
Andrea Chalupa:
So I think there can be some good faith negotiation done to ensure a safe corridor for civilians and that should 1 trillion percent be on the table because Ukrainians are asking for it. And I do not want to hear from any of the bros in the media. I do not want to hear from any of the hipster nihilists in the media clutching their pearls over this. Show me a Ukrainian on the ground in Ukraine who is saying, “Oh, no, thank you, we don't want a safe zone. No, thank you. We don't want a no-fly zone.” Show me Ukrainian on the ground who's saying that. I want to hear from Ukrainians. That is who we should be taking leadership from now because they have shamed the world with their bravery. They have shamed the world with their accountability for Putin's terrorism, with how all these regular brave people are standing up.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, exactly. I'm going to both agree with you on your view on having a no-fly zone, on the necessity of a no-fly zone, but it a less optimistic way, which is I do think that-
Andrea Chalupa:
Or a safe zone, whatever the fuck you want to call it, just get the civilians out of there safely.
Sarah Kendzior:
Exactly. And it's in part because I do think that Putin may use nukes and I think that it is difficult to negotiate with him or take any statement in good faith. Therefore, the priority needs to be protecting civilians, protecting Ukraine. Everyone keeps talking about how you have to give Putin an off ramp. “Putin needs an off ramp.” I'm not convinced that he does want an off ramp. This is a guy who has apocalyptic ambitions and has now backed himself into a corner, has destroyed Russia, has destroyed Russia's economy, is not thinking clearly in the way he was before, in a way that other long time observers of Putin and of Russia have noticed. So it's difficult to tell what he is going to do, but yes, I do think it's possible he's going to use nuclear weapons.
Sarah Kendzior:
One of my fears…I mean, I guess I'll just get this out there. I'm worried that he might not necessarily use nuclear weapons on Ukraine at first, but use them somewhere where he can just show that he is in fact willing to use them. And if I were to guess what that place would be, it would be, for example, Northern Kazakhstan where they had done nuclear tests in the past and where Putin has had an eye on Northern Kazakhstan for a long time. And actually before Putin, you know, Yeltsin had an eye on taking Northern Kazakhstan. Even Solzhenitsyn, even good Russian dissidents and writers have wanted to claim Northern Kazakhstan as their territory, which is why the capital of Kazakhstan was moved from Almaty to Astana, which literally means “capital”.
Sarah Kendzior:
That's located in the north and then it was changed to Nur-Sultan after Kazakhstan's own dictator. We've recently had all these months of protest in Kazakhstan, very violent protests, the most violent protests in Kazakhstan, where there seem to be Russian operatives making them much worse. So obviously we have to focus on Ukraine, that is the foremost priority, but I am worried that just like he basically did an anschluss on Belarus and has incorporated Belarus into the Russian military, has put nuclear weapons in Belarus (which is significant), I'm worried that Kazakhstan might be a place where he wants to test or show the world the willingness to use nuclear weapons, maybe in less of a mass casualty situation but still incredibly terrifying, incredibly intimidating, and with an eye on controlling Kazakhstan which is a strategic place between Russia and China.
Sarah Kendzior:
But again, just as we emphasize with Ukraine, I want to emphasize that Kazakh people and Kazakhstani people, including ethnic Russians who live in Kazakhstan, have been fighting for their rights and freedom for a very long time, and especially fighting against corruption, fighting against global corruption in the way that people around the world have. Over the last week, we have seen protests break out everywhere. If you live in a city, you have probably seen some kind of landmark in your city become yellow and blue, the colors of Ukraine, in tribute to Ukraine. You've seen celebrities back in Ukraine. On SNL, they had a segment paying tribute to Ukraine and saying they’re standing for Ukraine. That's all well and good. It's meaningful, but that can't be the end point.
Sarah Kendzior:
This cannot be some sort of trend where you forget about it later, where you build a personality cult around Zelensky who, while incredibly admirable, incredibly brave, is one person there. An entire country is suffering. And I think that people around the world, they see this. They're inspired by Ukraine and they're taking to the streets because of Ukraine, including in the United States but also very notably in independent sovereign nations that were once part of the Soviet Union. And in some of these cases, it's expected. You expect that there's going to be protests in Estonia, for example, which has been on guard from Kremlin aggression for its entire existence. It's actually on the forefront of cyber warfare, of fending off cyber warfare. You expect to see them in former Warsaw Pact, Soviet-occupied places like Prague, like Berlin. Where I was very interested to see these protests was in Russia, of course, where they've had, I think, record-setting protests for the Putin era against this war, against Putin’s war.
Sarah Kendzior:
Also in Georgia, in Kazakhstan (which is a dictatorship), in Azerbaijan (which is a dictatorship), and in Belarus (which is a dictatorship). So you're seeing people from these countries which were part of the Soviet Union's colonial empire—and before that, Tsarist Russia's colonial empire—standing up for their sovereignty, standing up for their rights, standing up against corruption and looking to Ukraine as a guiding light. And so Putin is going to want to stomp out both the guiding light of Ukraine and also its ramifications for all of the other places he wants to conquer. And like I said, I do think Kazakhstan is one of the ones at the front of that list. So please, watch out for that. As Andrea says, pay attention to people who actually have to live through this. Pay attention to people who are situated in these regions and who have been trying to get attention to these crises for a very long time.
Andrea Chalupa:
All that we're seeing now with the sanctions that are long overdue, sanctions that we needed several years ago because they could have saved lives in Syria and Ukraine, all the oligarchs in Putin's court being sanctioned, the who's who list which is fantastic, properties…You know, they're lining up properties and yachts and other things to be seized. You have major studios in Hollywood saying they're not going to release films in Russia. You have big sporting events, from hockey, which is a big one because Putin's a hockey fanatic and his little court of oligarchs let him win at hockey all the time. So you have the International Hockey whatever saying, “No more Russia.” You've got the big soccer league saying, whatever…I'm not a sports person you guys, can you tell?
Sarah Kendzior:
<laughs> Yeah, this is like going to be the worst show…
Andrea Chalupa:
Wherever people watch soccer.
Sarah Kendzior:
Our listener Kenny Mayne right now is just like holding his head in shame wondering why he supported us. <laughs> We're gonna need to have Kenny on to explain all this stuff.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, Kenny Mayne, the big sports guy. We are not. So, yeah, they can't play, I guess, in the European Cup. So they're just being finally isolated and that's important because Putin's Russia has to become a pariah state. The status quo no longer works. Oh, and then you have Shell and BP pulling their stakes out of big oil and gas giants, and then you have 12 Russian diplomats—AKA spies—being kicked out of the New York City consulate.
Sarah Kendzior:
Which they should have been long ago. I'm just gonna briefly break in to say all of this stuff could have happened long ago and we would've been safer for it and Ukraine would've been safer and we wouldn't have necessarily been living in this situation had people taken these proactive, very obvious measures. But go on.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah. And so there's just a long list of major companies and governments finally isolating Putin's regime and that's important because he needs to feel the consequences of this. He needs to be treated like the terrorist that he is. He can no longer be treated like a legitimate president. I think the word “president” before Putin is gaslighting. He's not a president. This guy hasn't stood in a democratic fair and free election for a very long time now
Sarah Kendzior:
For 22 years.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, so he's not a legitimate president. He's a terrorist holding his country hostage. So what's going to happen to Russians, the Russian people who are suddenly going to see their quality of life plummet because of the plummeting Ruble, because of the economic stress, because of the sanctions on the Central Bank? Well, obviously there's a very brave population of Russians who are standing up against the war, risking their lives, risking their freedom to do this. We're likely going to see more and more as information gets out there. Russian celebrities are speaking out against the war. You have Russian mothers and wives calling the hotline that Ukraine set up so they can help find their Russian soldiers, their sons and husbands who were sent off to fight in Putin’s corrupt war. You have many Russian soldiers who are surrendering, who are abandoning their tanks. There's a report that hasn't been confirmed since we started recording yet, that there was a Russian worship that refused to attack Odesa. That's a big deal.
Andrea Chalupa:
So you're seeing cracks. You're seeing all of these cracks and the severity of the sanctions needed to happen to break through the disinformation wall, the propaganda wall that Putin has been using to cage the minds of the Russian people. There needed to be some big shock to the system to help the resistance in Russia, wake up everybody else. It's going to be difficult. You're going to see the brain drain continue. And what is eventually going to happen? I mean, I do not envision a revolution like you've seen in Ukraine. Ukraine had two popular uprisings, one in 2004, the Orange Revolution that overthrew a corrupt election result: Putin's puppet, Yanukovick. And then you saw the 2013-2014 Euromaidan, the Revolution of Dignity, where Ukrainians ran towards danger, ran to Kyiv to demand that Yanukovich finally stepped down. It was a popular uprising that succeeded despite the West, not because of it.
Andrea Chalupa:
The West was trying to broker a peace deal and Ukraine said, Hell no, and they ran towards danger. They ran towards danger towards snipers, towards riot police, and they did not leave that square. They fought until Yanukovich fled the country. If you want more on that, watch the documentary Winter on Fire. So, I don't think something like that will happen in Russia. It would have to get really, really, really bad before it does. Why do I think that? I think there are people who would like that, but the pattern so far with Russian protesters has been they protest, they march—which is extremely brave given what they're up against—but they don't camp out like the Ukrainians do. They don't set up camp. They don't live out in the Arctic freezing cold for weeks/months on end.
Andrea Chalupa:
We just haven't seen that yet from them. We've seen that twice in Ukraine. We haven't seen that yet in Russia for whatever reason, but that could change. But I wouldn't say our hope is for the Russians to rise up and overthrow him. I don't see that happening because we haven't seen that yet. Navalny has sacrificed his life, certainly, and there are Russians who are sacrificing their freedom to do this. There are a lot of brave Russians and there needs to be more of a critical mass. And I think it is difficult given the severity of the situation to put so much pressure on them to do this.
Sarah Kendzior:
Mmmhmm.
Andrea Chalupa:
You know what I mean? It's like why don't Sarah and I go camp out outside Joe Manchin’s yacht and live out there in a tent and give up our families and live out in all the elements and demand that Joe Manchin stop taking Exxon lobbyist money, right? It's a lot to ask of people.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's insulting for, I think, people from the outside to ask this and like you said in the very beginning of this show, people do this in America. They're like, “Oh, Black voters will save us, Black women will save us.” It's like, how dare you? Why aren't you doing anything? You just sit there and you think that Stacey Abrams and other Black voting rights, activists—the people who are already getting targeted, the people who are already at the mercy of white supremacists and of cowardly, corrupt institutionalists and facing all of these obstacles—you now want them to go the extra mile yet again, yet again for your sorry ass. And that's the thing. You know, Andrea and I have both spent our lives, one, living in this country and watching that dynamic play out with Black Americans, with other disenfranchised groups politically.
Sarah Kendzior:
But also, it is not that easy to rise up against the dictatorship. We always encourage people to do it, but we know the limitations. I spent my career before this studying Uzbekistan and what happens is people in the West get this belief like, “Oh, Uzbeks like having a dictator. They must like it and that's why they haven't risen up against it. That's why they don't speak out about it.” The reality is they get jailed if they speak out about it, if they rise up. Or murdered or even worse—and this is critical to remember—if they don't target you, if they feel like you are so strong, you're not gonna break, you're not gonna bend, they go after your family. They go after your loved ones. This happens all the time. And I've seen a lot of activists stop their activism in reaction to this tactic.
Sarah Kendzior:
And I don't think they're cowardly. I don't think they betrayed anybody. They're frightened for their family. This is such an incredibly hard position to be in and so when people say, “Oh my God, why isn't there like a big revolution in Russia?” It's like, Well, that's why. It's because it's real life. It's not a movie, it's not a game. People have their families on the line. They have so much more at stake than money or careers or whatever it is you're thinking about. It is really a life or death situation. And so if an uprising happens, then that's admirable, that's wonderful, that's something we should help, that's something we should encourage. But you can't just lay back and make demands of people in these sorts of just unbearable situations without understanding the historical context, without understanding that a large number of the Russian population has only known Putin, can only remember him. And then before that, the car bomb ‘90s and before that, the dictatorship of the Soviet Union.
Sarah Kendzior:
I think that Putin really fears these Soviet successor states because they've opened the doors of political possibility. This is true in the Baltics with Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. It's true—although it vacillates quite a bit—in places like Georgia. It's true with the fledgling revolutions of Kyrgyzstan, which at least broke through. It kind of has had a succession of dictators, but at least, you know, it shakes things up. It shows that when you have a dictator, he might not stay in power forever. He might have to step down. That's terrifying to Putin. But overwhelmingly the one that terrifies him the most is Ukraine because Ukraine has lit this fire under the world and has not just kind of, you know, woken up or shown a new doorway into political possibility for people living in the former Soviet Union but for people in the West, for Westerners that are sick of plutocrats, that are sick of corruption, that are sick of not having their rights respected and not having politicians that actually respond to their demands or their desires.
Sarah Kendzior:
One of the things that's been blowing everyone's mind about Zelensky is that he actually cares about the Ukrainian people. He's actually listening to the Ukrainian people and he thinks that he is among the Ukrainian people. He is part of the Ukrainian people, whereas our politicians do not see themselves that way. They don't don't behave that way. And that is across the aisle. And there are exceptions, of course. There are some who do I think see themselves as part of us, as part of the voting population, who aren't just trying to take in donor money or voting money or get on TV or whatever the hell is that they want.
Sarah Kendzior:
Generally speaking though, they don't feel like they have to be accountable to us. They don’t feel like our opinion matters and that is true right now in the United Kingdom, it's true in Hungary, it's true in Poland. It's true in countries all over the world. We do not have representation. And everyone right now is envious of Ukraine in this respect—not in any other respect right now—because it seems to have real representation. It seems to have a leader, a true leader who cares. And I hope that that's true. I hope that this doesn't change and Zelensky stays the course and that there's not corruption or other things to intervene because it is opening up people's minds to what is possible and it is absolutely annihilating the excuses that Westerners give about why they can't do this and that for their people, or why they can't stop taking dark money or oligarch money or what have you.
Sarah Kendzior:
We still have two parties right now in the United States that have taken oligarch money. We've gone over this a million times. Obviously the Republicans are the worst one with Trump and basically his entire campaign or Kevin McCarthy or Ron Johnson or others. It's also Nancy Pelosi, a huge recipient of oligarch money. The head of the Democrats. It's Chuck Schumer. She is the head of the Democrats in the House, he is the head of the Democrats in the Senate. They both have taken money from a partner of a sanctioned Russian oligarch, Len Blavatinik, a partner of Deripaska and others. We're not even cleaning our own house and they say, “Oh, well, we can't, it's too difficult. It causes problems.” Causes problems? Look at what Ukraine is dealing with and look at how they deal with it. The urgency, the vibrancy, the commitment, the resilience, the refusal to give up and the feeling of, We are in this together, we are fighting for our survival and we are not going to quit. In the West comparatively right now, we have it so good, so there is no excuse when Ukraine is able to do what they're doing, that we in the West—our leadership, our officials, our institutions—cannot do the same.
Andrea Chalupa:
We're going to end there with the call to action. If you want to end Putin's terrorism once and for all, then we need to turn off the money stream that is paying for his war, his global terrorism, his destabilization against democracies everywhere. And that is by demanding that Europe and other countries stop buying Russian gas and Russian oil. Stop buying Russian gas and Russian oil. Under Putin, Russian has been dying. They don't make anything. They extract it from the earth. Their budget depends on gas and oil. So if we stop paying for it, the money's going to eventually run dry. So make that demand to your representatives wherever you live in the world. This is a global fight for democracy. Make that demand to your representatives. Just make sure that your country is not buying Russian oil and gas that are paying for Putin's war.
Andrea Chalupa:
Now, we're going to close out with this clip of a Ukrainian pop star, Andriy Khlyvnyuk, the lead singer of Boombox, singing an old Ukrainian rifleman song in front of St. Michael's Golden Dome Monastery in the heart of Kyiv. He's wearing a Yankee cap and holding a rifle having joined the volunteer defense of Kyiv. The original St. Michael's was built in the middle ages—the middle ages—and then the Soviets under Stalin, Putin's hero, destroyed it in the 1930s. It was rebuilt again in the years following Ukraine's independence from Russian imperialism in 1991 when the Soviet Union fell. Ukraine will be rebuilt again.
Closing Clip: https://twitter.com/nastyabakulina_/status/1497943191206731784
[outro theme music, roll credits]
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:
Our production managers are Nicholas Torres and Karlyn Daigle. Our episodes are edited by Nicholas Torres and our Patreon exclusive content is edited by Karlyn Daigle.
Andrea Chalupa:
Original music in Gaslit Nation is produced by David Whitehead, Martin Vissenberg, Nik Farr, Demien Arriaga, and Karlyn Daigle.
Sarah Kendzior:
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Andrea Chalupa:
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