 It happened. It actually happened. Russia launched a full-scale attack on Ukraine and, like all of you, I'm trying to process this information and I'm closely following reports from journalists on the ground, but all of this just feels so unreal. It feels like a fever dream. And if you live in Ukraine, it's got to feel like a complete nightmare that you wish you could wake up from, but this is real life. This actually happened. We're witnessing history unfold and it's going to lead to catastrophic levels of death and destruction. And it's difficult to even try to condense all of this information. By the time that I filmed this video and uploaded to YouTube, what I'm saying will already be outdated, so keep all of that in mind. I just want to point out some things that I think are really noteworthy that I think you should pay attention to first and foremost. Attacks have been reported in all parts of Ukraine. This map, at the time that I record, is outdated, so who knows what that's going to look like by the time that you see this video. The Ukraine Health Care Minister, Viktor Lyashko, is reporting that Russians are striking hospitals. Russia has captured the Chernobyl power plant. Russia has reportedly seized Snake Island, which is about 25 miles from Romania. And Romania, mind you, is a NATO state. Not good. Not good at all. So just to kind of show you what's happening here, there's a CNN reporter who's on the ground. So he was at the Antonov Airport and he's reporting as Russian troops and Ukrainian forces are in the middle of battle. Take a look at this just so you get a sense of how terrifying this is. Right in the middle of the fighting. Matthew, tell us what you're witnessing there. We've come out of the center of the Ukrainian capital Kiev. And we are here at the Antonov Airport, which is about 25 kilometers, 15 miles or so out of the center. These troops you can see over here. Stand up, Lewis. These troops you can see over here, they are Russian airborne forces. They have taken this airport. They've allowed us to come in and be with them as they defend the perimeter of this air base here, where helicopter-borne troops, these troops were landed in the early hours of this morning to take and to form an air bridge to allow for more troops to come in. You can see these are Russian forces. You can tell they're Russian. I've spoken to them already. You can tell they're Russian. They've got that orange and black band to identify them as Russian forces. I've spoken to the commander on the ground there within the past few minutes and he said they are now in control of this airport. And within the past few seconds, just before you came to us, they were engaged in a firefight, presumably with the Ukrainian military, which says it is staging a counter-offensive to try and take back this airport. That reporter is a very brave person. The people who put their lives on the line to get us this information, I mean you can't say enough about how courageous they are. Now, I don't know how Russia is going to be able to wage a sustained war in Ukraine given that their economy is in freefall, their stock market is plummeting. So I don't know how they're going to do this and that's not even taken into account the new round of sanctions that the United States and other countries have announced. Here's what President Biden said just a couple of hours before I recorded this video. We've now sanctioned Russian banks that together hold around $1 trillion in assets. We've cut off Russia's largest bank, a bank that holds more than one-third of Russia's banking assets by itself, cut it off from the US financial system. And today, we're also blocking four more major banks. That means every asset they have in America will be frozen. This includes VTB, the second largest bank in Russia, which has $250 billion in assets. As promised, we're also adding the names to the list of Russian elites and their family members that were sanctioned as well. Yeah, so things are escalating rapidly and it's just, I don't even know what to say. I'm supposed to be a political commentator and provide you with political commentary, but like all of you, I'm just watching in horror at this situation and I'm hoping that this all ends soon. Now, we're going to catastrophize here, just a forewarning, but before we do that, before we start talking about how bad things could get, they could get really bad to be clear, much worse than they are currently. But before we start talking about that, I do want to give you a little bit of hope, because there is a substantial amount of Russians on the ground in Russia who are speaking out against this imperialist war. As I said in reports, some Russians are protesting Putin's attack on Ukraine despite a total ban on protesting and immediate heavy crackdowns from riot police. Here's a gathering of about 200 in St. Petersburg. Now at the time that I record this video, about a thousand Russians who are protesting this war have been arrested and I just want to put this into perspective for you. Russia is a brutally repressive authoritarian regime, so they know that speaking out and being against this imperialist war is going to lead to them being punished harshly, but they're doing it anyway, and that really is commendable. So good on them for protesting this. Let me show you a couple of videos that have gone viral of people in various cities in Russia protesting this. Good on them. I think that the world needs to send a unified message. This is not okay. Not okay. Imperialism is bad when any country does it, and this is an unjustifiable act of aggression that is just, it has to be condemned. Now let's catastrophize a little bit because something that Putin said should stand out to a lot of people. So he made a very disturbing threat as he announced his imperialist and illegal attack on Ukraine. So, quote, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a speech announcing a military operation in Ukraine that the countries that interfere with Russian actions will face, quote, consequences you have never seen the Associated Press reported. Now pause. What do you think he means by that? The subtext is nuclear warfare. The implication is that I will use nuclear weapons if you intervene, if you put boots on the ground in Ukraine to try to fight off our aggression. Now it's not just that the countries who he nukes, assuming he were to follow through on this threat, would be damaged. Using nuclear warfare would trigger a nuclear response. So, you know, this mutually assured destruction has been seen for a while as a form of deterrence because if one country uses nukes, the other is going to use nukes. So, you both destroy each other, so there's no incentive to use nuclear weapons. But for Vladimir Putin to say that, understand what he's really telling you here. He's telling the world, I alone will choose to unilaterally end all life on the planet if you choose to get involved here and intervene because that's what would happen. If nuclear war breaks out, that's not just going to be a war between two countries that will ruin the planet. It's a very, very high likelihood that all life on Earth goes extinct, especially considering the way that nuclear war, nuclear weapons rather, have evolved. So, when we used nuclear weapons on Japan, the nuclear bombs that we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 15 and 21 kilotons respectively. This was catastrophic, but the nuclear bombs now are bigger and more powerful than what we dropped on Hiroshima. So, the Russian Tsar bomb is 50 megatons. So, Earth almost certainly couldn't survive nuclear war. So, whenever a leader starts making thinly veiled threats for nuclear war, they're telling you that unilaterally they're willing to end all life on the planet if you come at them. It is truly reckless and insane and people need to pay attention to this. Now, I want to put a cap on the catastrophizing because it doesn't seem like it's going to come to that at this moment. Things are changing very quickly. The situation is volatile, but Biden is seemingly not going to put boots on the ground in Ukraine. He is sending more US troops to Europe and Germany in particular. But at this moment, it doesn't seem as if the Biden administration is going to directly confront Russia. But things can escalate and take a turn for the worst fast. So, pay attention to that because whenever we start seeing world leaders talk about or hint at rather using nuclear bombs, they're saying they're going to end life on Earth. That's what that means. It's incredibly serious. That's not hyperbole. Now, I don't want us to start feeling sorry for ourselves and think about our own destruction and annihilation because right now our sympathies have to lie with the Ukrainian people who are going to deal with one of the worst things that you can deal with as a human being. War is awful. It's the worst thing that somebody can probably go through, one of the worst things. And they're going to be dealing with this. I mean, how many Ukrainians will be displaced? How many currently are trying to flee? There are images of traffic jams all throughout Ukraine as they try to flee the country. And we have to be ready to accept Ukrainian refugees and do what we can to help these people whose lives have been affected by this senseless and aggressive war. But some people are trying to justify Russia's actions here, which is insane. You can't justify what's unjustifiable, but people are trying to do it. Imperialism is bad, period. I feel like this is easy, right? American imperialism is bad. Russian imperialism is bad. So what I want to do is show you a couple of tweets from people who I think made really good points because now is not the time to both sides this situation or do what aboutism to justify Putin's psychotic actions. As leftists, we have to condemn imperialism and this is an imperialist war. So as C.J. Werlemann puts it, Russia killed 2 million Afghans in the 1980s, killed 200,000 Chechens through 2005, invaded Georgia in 2008, annexed Crimea in 2014, killed thousands in Syria since 2015, invaded Ukraine in 2022. But somehow, many can't speak to these facts without saying what about America, and he's right about that. You don't have to do what aboutism. American imperialism is bad, obviously. If you're a leftist, you should be against that. But that doesn't mean that, oh, well, my country does imperialism so I can't speak out against other leaders doing imperialism. Citizens don't have much control of what their governments do nowadays, especially when it comes to authoritarian dictatorship. So the Russian people, many of them are watching in horror, if not most of them, as their leader does the same thing. So that imperialism is bad. We can aggressively and unequivocally condemn that imperialism. That doesn't mean that we're endorsing U.S. imperialism. All imperialism is bad, and so the way that so many leftists are wavering and just incapable of condemning this imperialist act of aggression is mind-boggling to me. And some have tried to justify the situation by saying, well, you know, there's Nazis in Ukraine and the United States government armed Nazis. And these are facts that are undeniable, yes, but Vash made a really important point about this. He said, man, I couldn't place that familiar feeling I get when Russian fascists use the existence of the Azov battalion to justify the slaughter of Ukrainian civilians until I remembered how Israeli fascists use the existence of Hamas, and he's right. The existence of Nazis doesn't mean that every single person in that country should suffer as a result. I mean, we have Nazis in America. Is an invasion justified against us? Of course not. So, you know, we have to stop being so afraid to condemn what is very obviously egregious. This is a war that will cause inconceivable levels of death and destruction, and it's truly sad. My sympathies lie with the Ukrainian people here. This is all because of one individual. One crazy lunatic decided to do this, and he's not just doing, you know, damage in Ukraine causing death and destruction, and now he's threatening the entire world, disrupting global order, and he knows that this is detrimental to his regime. His economy is not going to survive this, and if it does, it'll be severely damaged. I mean, this is going to plunge them into a depression, most likely, at least that seems to be the case, and he's doing it anyway. So this is truly just madness. It's insane. And in no uncertain terms, we have to condemn this as leftists and not just as leftists as human beings. War is terrible. We have to absolutely do everything in our power to avoid a direct confrontation with Russia because that wouldn't end well for the human species. But of course, we have to try to prevent Russia from doing this. We have to try to get them to pull back, and that means you sanction oligarchs and Russian banks, and you try to put pressure on his regime to stop. The whole situation is really depressing, and I'll continue to follow the situation. I'm not really going to try to keep you updated. My goal isn't to kind of let you know moment to moment what's happening here, just to kind of give you an overall sense of things to pay attention to. There are really great live streams currently that you can watch. There are news broadcasts from journalists that are on the ground that you can watch right now. For me, as a political commentator, I can't really do much, then kind of echo the same sentiment that you're all feeling right now. Terror, confusion, fear, depression, I feel the same exact way. But I think that one thing that we can all agree on is that this imperialist war must be condemned, and Vladimir Putin is an absolute bloodthirsty psychopathic war criminal, and this is not okay. And anyone who's trying to justify this, they are imperialists. They are war mongers, no different than the neo-conservative war hawks in the United States like John Bolton or George W. Bush.