 Welcome to CN Live, season four, episode two, Russia hits back. I'm Joe Lawyer, the editor-in-chief of Consortium News. I'm Elizabeth Voss. After 30 years of NATO expansion towards its borders and eight years of a cool regime's attacks on ethnic Russians in Ukraine, Russia has taken military action to demilitarize and denazify the country. The world has rallied against Moscow, seeking to destroy its economy. It seems like that may have been the plan all along. Russian President Vladimir Putin fully explained the reasons from Russia's military intervention, which has been totally ignored by the corporate media. Instead, it portrays him as a madman hell-bent on conquering Europe. If you disagree with that assessment, you are, of course, his puppet. To discuss the unfolding developments and their historical backgrounds, we're joined from Moscow by political analyst Mark Sloboda. We hope to be joined shortly also from Moscow by Tony Kevin, a former Australian ambassador to Poland and Cambodia, who was posted to the embassy in Moscow in the last days of the Soviet Union. From London by political analyst and Durant editor and his dogs, Alexander McChurus. And from upstate New York by military analyst, former counterintelligence officer and UN's weapons inspector Scott Ritter. Mark Sloboda in Moscow, I want to go right to you. It's obviously we're live, so it's a very, very dynamic situation to the least in Ukraine. Said us right now, what is the situation militarily inside Ukraine? What are Russia's aims, war aims, and what is the end game? And what kind of time frame do you see? But first said, what's going on on the ground right now as we speak? So, okay, first, the war aims, which you clearly said Putin has spoken to, are to denazify Ukraine, demilitarize the country, and to ensure Ukraine's neutrality moving forward. I'm going to stop you, Mark. Alexander, can you mute yourself so we don't hear the dog? Yes, yes, yes, I will, I will, I will, yes. The dogs of war. Okay, I'm sorry, Mark, please go ahead. Yeah, that's okay. They'll set my dogs off. To demilitarize, to denazify the country, to ensure Ukraine's return to neutrality that it was at before the 2014 US-backed push, but also, of course, to protect Don Boss, the people in eastern Ukraine who have been living under a brutal military campaign to subjugate the whole country to the seizure of power in Kiev in 2014, those people at long last deserve to come out of their basements and return to normal life. The end game of Russia, as far as can be tell right now, which I think was kind of foreshadowed by the extent, the quality, the quantity of military forces that were arranged is to regime change the US puppet regime that was installed in Ukraine in 2014. And as we speak right now, Russian troops are fighting in Kiev. I mean, that's how far we have come in less than 48 hours. Where are they headed to the presidential palace? Yeah, they're heading towards the government quarters. As far as the credible reports that have come out, that Zelensky has already been moved to a bunker. I suspect that that is outside of Kiev, but that has not obviously been made clear yet. In the last few hours, we have heard increasingly insane comments out of this regime, desperate to throw its own people in the way of the Russian military forces to keep itself alive for a little longer. And it is quite evident at this point, as exactly what happened in 2014, a not insignificant portion of the Ukrainian military, particularly the border guards, et cetera, just put down their weapons as the Russian government requested, as Putin requested and did not fight. It's not to say that no one fought. And in particular, the ultra-nationalists, you know, the Banderites, they will fight to the end and beyond. I fully expect to see. That was going to be my next question. What kind of resistance is there going to be, you think, in Kiev? And I heard that he asked everyone to get Molotov cocktails or whatnot. Yeah, that's what I was talking about, the insane statements. He first, he said, everyone needs to join the military. All able-bodied men and women are drafted. You need to fight the invaders. And then he handed out guns, not only to everyone on the streets, but to the actual members of the Rada as Russian military troops began to get close to the government quarter. And then they were making pronouncements, asking people to construct Molotov cocktails and to throw it down on Russian troops as they moved through the streets, which would, of course, sacrifice their neutrality as civilians, putting them directly as military targets. However hard that harsh that might have to be, that is how they would have to then be treated. So they're desperate to find people willing to fight for this regime, at least in Kiev. This is because a large number of Ukraine's military forces were massed at the border in Donbass. And Russia has, at the same time, put forward a holding, a pinning movement of troops forward from the Donbass, and then an encircling movement around to envelop them, and has effectively pinned and trapped them so that they can't retreat towards Kiev. Meanwhile, there was a large breakthrough up from the Crimea through her son into the south, which is already peering off towards Odessa. And there was a large movement of Russian and Belarusian troops down from the north, part going towards Arkhov and another part edging over to envelop Kiev. And already, you know, less than 48 hours away, Russian troops are already in Kiev. And there has been already extensive degradation of the Ukrainian military, particularly of the infrastructure. That's what they hit first. Every Ukrainian military base that was refurbished with NATO money intended for the purpose of NATO forces, trainers, military forces on the ground in Ukraine, that was what was wiped out first. And that was a very big statement. All of those weapons that the U.S. and the U.K. sang, the javelins and so on, they were targeted first. And Russia is restricting this to military targets as much as they can, right? And there's always going to be collateral damage. But even to the military, they're being quite clear. Our war is not with you. We're not it. We don't view ourselves as war with Ukrainians. We're at war with this regime backed by the U.S. and embedded with these Banderites that seized power in 2014. Speaking of the Nazis, the Banderites, part of the operation was to target them. What do you know about the progress of that part of the mission? Yeah, that will be the forever war. Aha. Okay. Yeah, it will be very interesting to see after Kiev is taken, what the Russian forces do with West. Mark, we've lost you. Pro-Russian. There we go. It will be extremely hostile. It will be extremely hostile territory for Russia to have to occupy for any length of time there. Will they? Will they withdraw or will they lead to a very... They will withdraw. I'm frozen too now. Mark, we're going to leave you for a moment here. The Ukrainian military is trapped. Okay, there's a lot of things we can still talk about just on what you said, but we'll move on from there. Just a little bit of more background, the 2004 14 coup or a push as Mark referred to was a US-backed one. We know that from leaked conversations between Victoria Nuland, the Secretary of State, and the American ambassador that they were going to put in Yatsenuk weeks before Yatsenuk went in. And by the way, the day after the coup, the American State Department official became the Treasury or the Finance Minister, an American who got Ukrainian citizenship that same day, Yanukovych had to flee. It was a coup d'état. It's not a revolution. Revolutions are against monarchies or dictators. This was an elected government, even the OSCE certified. This is a joke, but maybe you'll bring back Yanukovych to serve out the rest of the term. No, there's got to be somebody they're going to bring to put in there. I want to go to Tony Kevin in Moscow. Tony is former Australian diplomat who was based in Moscow in the end of the Soviet Union and he was then ambassador to Cambodia and to Poland for Australia. Tony is back on a trip after a long time back in Moscow. He missed the cold weather and I think he's got a bit of that. So Tony, what is the sense that you have now being there in Russia? What is the mood of the people? Are they supporting this operation? Hello, Joe. And I'm sorry, I was late joining the discussion. No problem. It's a difficult day. Could I ask you to move the screen down so we could see all of your face? Yes, much better. Much better. Yes. OK. Thank you. Moscow and St. Petersburg, where I was yesterday, are both pretty calm. I understand from Western media that there have been small demonstrations here, but I wasn't aware of them and I don't think they're particularly critically important. However, I did watch President Putin's messages on the 18th, sorry, on the 21st, then again on the 24th. And I was struck by the intensity and the passion of the way he spoke. This is obviously very, very important to the government to have defended the people of Luhansk and Donetsk. And I don't quite know what I've missed, but I think generally one could say that the Duma is very much behind the Russian government's position. There are probably members of the intelligentsia who are distressed by the obvious major setback that they talked with the West. But I think most of them would realize the necessity of it. Right. I want to go back to Mark as he's just informed us that he has to leave us to do another interview. So Mark, we'll finish with you and then we'll get to the other guests. How we're talking about the timeframe here. They'll have to, what is your expectation for those forces? 60,000, 100,000 was impossible to know how many Ukrainian forces were on the line of separation in Donbass, because all the Western media maps just show all the Russian troops arrayed around Ukraine. But there was never any marking of any Ukrainian force. As I wrote, it was like setting up a chessboard with only black pieces. That was hidden. It was never discussed. I couldn't confirm it. I got in touch with the OSCE spokesman and he contacted the people on the ground and they said they had the mandate to count such forces, but never did. So what's going on there? We never knew exactly how many forces were there and whether an offensive was planned, whether it was beginning. I think it seemed like it was beginning with the uptick of shooting mostly inside coming from the outside, inside to the non-government area. And I think that's probably worked into the calculation of when Russia decided to move. Will they have to fight though? You say they're surrounded now. Will they surrender you think? Will they fight? What's going to happen there? Okay. So there is, in the east, there's some 60,000 forces, right? Quite specifically, even Michael, and he's at the Navy War College Assessment for the Russian military too. He's actually one of the better Western military analysts. He's worth following if you parse what he's saying. He correctly called that in April, the Russian military buildup was just deterrence against Kiev and that this buildup was something quite different. And he was starting to say that from November and that's exactly what I saw and I concurred with. But even he said, I do not comment on the disposition of Ukrainian forces as policy, because this is all about Russia, right? We're not going to open up intelligence, open source intelligence, about the people that we are backing there, meaning the Kiev regime military. So that's why that has never been done. They don't want to betray their positions or their forced disposition or anything like that. Or give out the public perception that there is a large Ukrainian military buildup on the Russian border as well. Which would just confuse the narrative as far as they're concerned. But so there was originally a buildup of about 120,000, which is half of the entire Ukrainian military. But as the Russian military advanced into Belarus and preparations for what appeared to be a amphibious landings in the south, which I believe were actually just a ruse. They haven't been followed through on to lure more Ukrainian troops down to Odessa, to the south to try to spread out Ukrainian forces more, particularly in the south to allow a breakthrough from Crimea. There's a lot of disinformation and deception going on on all sides as is normal for a military conflict. But the purpose of the Russian movement towards Kiev is a decapitation strike to try to signal to the Ukrainian military that it's over, that if you don't want to fight for this regime, you don't have to. You lay down your arms. You'll be treated with respect. You'll sign some papers that you're not going to participate anymore and you will be sent home because our war is not with you. And I suspect that at the very least 50 percent of the Ukrainian military forces will at some form surrender, but seated throughout the military, the police, the securities forces, these these far right, these Banderite ultra nationalists, they have been there and they are pushing, of course, the troops not to surrender. So there's two countervailing forces there and they will never stop. We'll see a repeat of the 1950s when the CIA was arming the remnants of the West Ukrainian Nazi collaborators for insurrection in the Soviet Union, which is one of the really big things that lit off the Cold War. That is all going to happen again. And the U.S. has made clear they have actually been training Ukrainian far right, the CIA ground branch paramilitary. It was revealed a few weeks ago. They have been training Ukrainian far right in the U.S. since 2015, because they knew this was going to happen eventually, or at least that it was a large likelihood. So they've been preparing for this and they announced already everyone in the West is going to arm whatever remnants, you know, particularly in West Ukraine, whether some faction of the regime in Kiev manages to escape there and set up another government further West. Will Russia move into the West Ukraine? That's extremely, you know, in terms of the population, much more hostile territory for Russia. The further West you go, the less pro-Russian sentiment there is. And so that's real dangerous territory for Russia and for Ukraine and for the West. And that's where you could see real danger of further Russia NATO tensions as they attempt to arm what will really, really then be exclusively far right in Western Ukraine. Well, Mark, that leads me to the question of whether this was the plan all along by the United States and NATO that they wanted to draw. If you recall what Brzezinski said about Afghanistan on the record, he said it was a trap. We set it for the Soviet Union. We armed the Mojavein. So they would go after the pro-Soviet government in Kabul. We wanted to draw the Russian Soviets in. We did. It was there, Vietnam is the U.S. And there are other examples of those traps, for April, the last day in Iraq, telling Saddam, we're not going to get involved. And then even Georgia in 2008, I think Shakhosh really thought that somehow NATO was going to come to the defense and they didn't. But was this the plan to start the offensive and then Moscow would have to decide, are we going to abandon ethnic Russians in Dumbass to this horrendous offensive? Or are we going to have to intervene? They intervened. Will this be a quagmire for Russia? Is that the danger? Is that the plan? Not only the sanctions, which are horrific now. We've seen today the Europeans, the Germans have cut off almost all business with Russia now. So the combination of the sanctions, the world, the program at the UN, everyone is condemning around the world, Russia. And the idea of drawing them into a quagmire to keep them fighting there, to ultimately bring down the Putin government and bring back somebody like Yeltsin. Okay, first of all, the West is not the world, right? We've already had positions from China, India, Pakistan, even Israel, a whole host of countries that are not going to align themselves with these sanctions from the US in the West and their other client states around the world. So do not overestimate the effect of these sanctions like all the previous rounds of 100 packages of sanctions against Russia have had. I think what you're talking about, this manufacturing of a quagmire was part of the plan. Military geostrategic thinkers who are planning these things, they never just have one plan, right? They have a plan A, a plan B, a plan C. Plan A was still to create a pro-NATO, anti-Russian state in Ukraine, to geopolitically consolidate the country in the West, but also to manufacture an anti-Russian Ukrainian nation, a persisting anti-Russian Ukrainian nation, which would mean pushing up the national identity perception of West Ukrainians up over and completely subsuming the national identity perception of Eastern Ukrainians, right? Which is what we saw with the Maidan push, with the lustration of the party of regions, the banning of the Communist Party and all other leftist parties in the country, right? And then when the opposition bloc started to get strong again, they charged that leader Medvedchuk with treason and they shut down all of the television, six TV channels, all of the media outlets representing the viewpoint of East Ukraine. East Ukraine was not allowed to have a political voice again because that would upset the political stability of the Maidan regime and that could not be done. You could not revisit that geopolitical reorientation. So that was plan A, but plan B is entirely acceptable also as a plan B from the US perspective. You draw Russia in and every Ukrainian soldier that Russia is forced to kill to bring down this regime is a Ukrainian family that hates Russia for generations to come, right? Russia still hopes to win back the other than West Ukraine, of course, the majority of Ukrainians hearts and minds, you know, in the medium to long term. And it just simply by intervening, they're gonna, it's gonna be really hard. That's why they're being as careful as they can be with targeting, trying as best they can not to hit civilians to let the military if they will lay down their arms to go and to treat them with respect because they know that this is the trap laid and they're trying their best to avoid it, but they saw no other option from a national security perspective at this point but to go in like they did when diplomacy, this last ditch diplomatic effort screaming our red lines have been crossed. Don't, you know, don't, don't do this. Don't put us in this position. It's bad for everyone. You know, they couldn't have made that more clear, but like you said, this was part of the plan. It was just part of plan B. Okay, one final quick question. Do you know, we'll go move on to Alexander. Why did Russia seize Chernobyl? I don't know enough about nuclear technology or radiation, but my only guess could be that when Zelensky said we may think of getting nuclear weapons, that Russia wants to make sure they secure Chernobyl, but it's under concrete. I don't even know if you can get it. What was the purpose of getting Chernobyl? All right, simply because the Chernobyl exclusion zone is a large area just about 55 kilometers outside of Kiev, right? And simply for Russian troops to properly envelop Kiev, they had to take that in order to, because the Ukraine had sent military to occupy that area, right? So Russia couldn't bypass those troops with their encircling maneuver without taking them out. And you saw clearly what Zelensky was actually trying to do there. He was hoping for a protracted firefight that would damage the containment facilities there. There were pronouncements released last night, the ridiculous absurd propaganda from Euro Maidan PR, that Russia is attacking Chernobyl to unleash the nuclear radiation. It's a war on Russia. All of Europe needs to come to our defense. Putin is attacking all of Europe. That's the kind of insane pronouncements. And that was one of the far-fetched plans, I think that they came up with, to hope that some damage would be done there to further demonize Russia in this whole process. But Russia knew that trap, were able to properly identify it and take out the military forces there. I don't know whether they actually took them out or got them to surrender without any damage and were able to move on to the development of Kiev. So I think that is what happened there. Okay, thank you very, very much, Mark, for your time today. Alexander McCourson-London, who is... Yes, Alexander. You've heard all this. Just can you just weigh in at any point you want? I'm sure there's plenty of time. Yeah, I mean, let me first of all start about, I think, what sentiment in Russia is and amongst various people. No, I've had various emails. I know various people in Russia. This was the one... The extract I'm going to read from one was absolutely typical. It's from an intelligentsia person's English-speaking, scientific, intelligentsia, critical of Putin. And he says to me, the situation in Donbass was really bad. As you know, my second cousin, who now lives in Greece, Athens, is from Donetsk. The family had to leave Donetsk due to the obviously dangerous situation. So we cannot condemn Putin's steps because that means that we would turn away from a part of our family. And I think that is a probably fairly widespread sentiment amongst a lot of Russians. Now, we have a very different media perspective on these things because, of course, we don't speak the language of these people. We don't speak the language of people in Donetsk and Lugansk. They talk in Russian. So in the English-speaking world, we're not close to this conflict in a way that Russians are. They all inhabit, by contrast, the same information and social media spaces. People in Russia are very familiar with what is going on in Donbass. So my own feeling is that the Russians are not enthusiastic about what's happening because this is not a country that goes to war easily. I think the overall sense is quiet support for what the government is doing. Now, that's what I wanted to say about this following on from what Tony said. Now, I'm not going to discuss military matters. I'm not a person who's qualified to discuss movements of troops and circumvent strategies and those sorts of things. What I will say is this. What we are seeing happen in Ukraine is a collapse, a total failure of Western policy. I mean, there may be all sorts of attempts to draw the Russians into a trap in Ukraine. I'm sure the Russians are prepared for any such possibility. I think this is a much more sophisticated Russian government than the one, for example, would send troops into Afghanistan all those years ago. So I think they are aware of the risks. And of course, they are extremely familiar with Ukraine, which they know far better and far more intimately than they ever knew Afghanistan. So I think they're going to sidestep whatever traps are laid for them. But the original project of a Ukraine which would be hostile to Russia, that Ukraine which was created as a result of that coup back in 2014, that is disintegrating as we are speaking. Even Zelensky is now talking about neutrality. He's talking about the fact that he's not getting the support. Ukraine is not getting the support from the West that it was promised. There's now information just coming out as we've been doing these programs that there's going to be possible negotiations between the Russians and the Ukrainians in Minsk and that the purpose presumably will be to agree terms for neutrality. So the whole project of creating an anti-Russian Ukraine ultimately perhaps incorporated in NATO is disintegrating. And it's disintegrating in a way that I think from a Russian point of view, you mentioned the criticism that Russia has come under. I think the Russian view of that criticism is that they've negotiated very hard for eight years. They've tried very carefully to talk to everybody. They've not wanted to rock the boat with the West. It didn't lead anywhere. It didn't do any good. And I think from a Russian sentiment, from a perspective, if you like, of the decision makers in the foreign ministry, in the Kremlin, in the intelligence agencies, the defence ministry, those sorts of people, I think for them this has been a liberating moment. And if finally they've gone ahead and they cast aside all the complicated diplomacy, they've been able to go in, do what they have to do. They feel strong enough to do it. They certainly feel strong enough to absorb the sanctions pressure. They don't feel, I think, especially isolated. I think they feel that the Chinese are quietly supporting them. They feel that the Indians are quietly sympathetic. Putin had a very good conversation, apparently, with Modi of India yesterday. So I think that from their point of view, difficult though this is, not something I think that they've ever really wanted to do, I think that they feel finally that they're on the front foot and they're doing things that will secure their own political space. Now, I say all of that as somebody who detests war, who was deeply troubled when I heard that this operation was underway yesterday. But the fact is it's irrefutable that negotiations, the long negotiations over Ukraine, which have lasted all those years, have led nowhere. If Ukraine is now prepared to discuss neutrality, it's only happened because the Russian army has acted as it has. Thank you, Alexander Scott. What is your take on this, what we've been discussing? Is that me? Let me say a couple of things first. We can't give the United States too much credit here. I mean, I'm an American. I've watched successive administrations carry out sophisticated national security and foreign policy schemes, most of them not to the betterment of international peace and security. But there is a national security establishment in the United States, a foreign policy establishment that has not been engaged consistently. And what I mean by that is we had the Obama administration, eight years of the Obama administration, get purged from Washington, DC, power circles by Donald Trump, who had a completely different chaotic approach toward national security and foreign policy, especially when it came to Russia, NATO and Ukraine. And so the Obama neoliberal movement, which was heavily invested in Ukraine and did have a strategy, was thrown off its game. They did not come back into power until January of last year. And they were immediately thrown a number of curveballs. So the notion that a Jake Sullivan, that a Tony Blinken, in people of this ilk, suddenly were able to, boom, come up with the most sophisticated, mind-bending national security chess game that confused the hell out of a country like Russia that's only had 20 years of consistency in terms of government, foreign policy, and national security decision-making. And faith Russia pulled them into coming into a trap is absurd in the extreme. Russia controls this timeline. Russia has set the narrative. Russia is doing exactly what Russia wants to do. There is no trap. If anything, Russia has sucked the West into a trap because Russia is, once and for all, solving the Ukraine problem. And I will also say this when it comes to any notion of a negotiated settlement. There will be no negotiated settlement. Russia doesn't come out and say, we're going to denazify Ukraine only to empower the Nazis with a ceasefire. And anybody who thinks that Russia isn't going into Levov doesn't know Russia. The only way this thing is solved is for Russia to seal the border between Ukraine and Poland, preventing any connectivity, not only that with Romania as well. Ukraine will be isolated for a moment by Russian troops. Inside Ukraine, there will be a purging of these ultra-nationalists. They will be destroyed as a military movement. They will be destroyed as a political movement. And anybody who thinks there's going to be a viable insurgency doesn't know Jack Squad about the Russian security services. Yeah, the CIA may have been doing stuff in Russia since 2015. You know who's been doing stuff in Ukraine forever? The Russian intelligence services, the Russian security services. When I went to Ukraine in 1997 to meet with Savchuk, I can't remember his name right now, about Ukraine's empowerment of weapons dealers who were dealing illegally with Iraq. I had a problem because I was meeting with the National Security Council who were very pro-NATO. And they were sitting there the whole time. I'm sitting there saying, you guys got to shut this stuff down. You can't be shipping weapons technology off to Iraq. It's a violation of United Nations Security Council, etc. And they were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we hear you. But if we do this, will you put a good word in us with the United States for NATO? I said, I'm a United Nations official. I don't do that. I'm sorry. What I can do is send a report to my boss who will surely report to the Security Council, United States as a member of the Security Council. We'll hear about all the great things you did to shut down this illegal transfer of weaponry to Iraq. But that's all I can do. No, no, no, but we need to be part of NATO. And then I said, well, I'd like to speak to your security services guys because you guys are policy makers. I need to speak to the goons, thugs, the guys who actually twist arms and make things happen, the SBU. And they said, oh, no, no, no, you can't do that. The Russians control the SBU. This is 1997. The Russians have always controlled the SBU. The Russians have always controlled everything in Ukraine. Now, it's gotten a little politically out of hand after Maidan, etc. But the notion that Russia is suddenly blind deaf dumb, Ukraine is absurd. They infiltrated the CIA's operation the moment it started. The second they start shipping people off to the United States, the Russians have the manifests. The Russians know the names. The Russians probably have guys that are being trained in the United States. So the CIA sucks at this, by the way. I just want to say that right off the bat. The paramilitary branch is literally staffed with idiots. One only has to take a look at their success rate in Iraq, where they literally went out. When I was a chief weapons inspector, used my inspection team as a front to carry out a coup against Saddam, only to find out that Saddam had infiltrated them, owned their communications. Saddam was the one, Saddam's people were communicating with them. And they might have said, execute the coup, executed 600 people, got on the phone with the CIA and Maidan and said, hey, thanks a lot for the fancy satellite communications equipment. We really appreciate your contribution to our effort. Click. And these are the same guys that went to Afghanistan and totally screwed that up. And suddenly, these incompetent goons who can't do anything right are supposed to be geniuses and setting up a counterinsurgency and unconventional warfare in Ukraine, not on your life. They will be purged. They will be annihilated. The Russians aren't playing games. Now, another reason why I want to point out that the Russians aren't playing games is take a look at what they're doing in Ukraine right now. If you study Russian military doctrine, and I've been doing that my entire life, artillery is the queen of battle, but artillery is the cornerstone of everything the Russians do. You don't go into an offensive operation until you level the opposition with artillery. What has not been in play in Ukraine today, Russian artillery? Yeah, they fire some preliminary barrages, but then that's it. They shut down. What else has the Russians not used? Electronic warfare. The Russians should have shut down everything. There should be no internet, no communications, no connectivity. That's what you do in combat when you want to overwhelm and defeat your enemy. Russia does not view Ukraine as its enemy. That's what people need to understand here. The Russians have gone in soft, as soft as you can possibly go. They fired some demonstration barrages, but then their troops approached Ukrainian soldiers, giving them every opportunity to surrender. And in the process, the Ukrainians sometimes get the drops on the Russians and the Russians suffer casualties. Imagine the United States going into Iraq. Soft. We didn't. If you were on the highway when we came into Iraq, we shot your car. We gunned you down. We blew the hell out of cities. We hit civilian infrastructure during Desert Storm. We shut down power plants. We shut down water purification. We shut down communications. The Russians haven't shut down anything, except the military targets. They've gone in soft, very soft. They've left all the communications open so that there won't be panic. The Ukrainian civilians right now can make phone calls. Imagine that. They can call their Paris. They can call anybody from an intelligence perspective. This is a nightmare for the Russians. Everybody's talking. They can communicate. They can coordinate, but that's what the Russians want, because they don't want panic. They don't want people to view the Russians as the enemy. They are willing to suffer dead Russian soldiers so that they don't alienate the majority of the Ukrainian population. That's what's going on right now. You can turn on the TV here in the United States, and it's disgusting. The propaganda that's taking place, CNN might as well be a paid adjunct of the Ukrainian Ministry of Information, the garbage that's put out there about what's going on in Ukraine. I can't tell you that I know the truth. Because no one does right now, the fog of war and things of that nature. But what I can tell you is, if you know anything about the Russians and how their military operates, you will see that there is a gigantic departure away from doctrine. And the reason that's taking place is the Russians are going in soft because the Ukrainian people are not their enemy. The Ukrainian army is not their enemy. Their enemy are these ultra-nationalist neo-Nazis who hell is about to be unleashed on them. I mean, we can sit here and say how nice the Russians are to the average Ukrainian citizen. I also know enough about Russia to know that there will be no mercy, no mercy to these as-of people. And as somebody who is a proponent of human rights, I can't say I'm thrilled about this. I believe in justice. I believe in due process. I believe people should be arrested in charge with crimes and then prosecuted in a court of law where they have full access to the ability to defend themselves from the charges put forward by the government. There may be some of these, but there will be show trials, show trials, kangaroo courts. But mostly people are going to die screaming in a back alley. There's not going to be mercy for the as-of battalion, these neo-Nazis, these people who put swastikas on their helmets, these people who worship Bandera, these people who give parades to the 12th SS Panzer Division. Their day is over. And most Americans don't understand this. My wife is from the Republic of Georgia. Not just the Republic of Georgia, but anybody who's knowledgeable about Georgia. If I say my wife is born and raised in Sukhumi, you would say, oh my God, isn't that Abkhazia? Yes, that's her homeland. And the Russians together with the Abkhaz and the Chechens urged her family from their homeland, drove them out. 250,000 Georgians refugees, 30,000 were slaughtered by these Abkhaz insurgents or whatever. She has no love lost for the Russians at all. I just got myself all worked up. I forgot where I was going about my wife and this. Oh, the point is, she recognizes that the Russians are behaving properly in Ukraine. And oh, this was my point. She's a Soviet. She grew up in the Soviet Union at times. People don't understand the absolute hatred that exists in the Soviet Union, the former Soviet and in Russia today about Hitler and the Nazis and the fascism and the ultimate expression of patriotism about what the Russians were able to do. The Soviet people were able to do to defeat Hitler and the Nazi forces. And this resonates deeply here in the United States. We think it's a joke. Apparently you have a bunch of Ukrainians come together with flags and Nazi symbols and sing howl. And we always neck shoot. You know, it's not a big deal. It's a huge deal if you're a Soviet or Russian. This resonates deeply with the Russians. And so I don't think people understand just how visceral the anti-Nazi aspect of this fight is. We hear all the American politicians, all the pundits on TV laughing it off. De-nazification, ha, ha, ha. Oh, no, no. This is deadly serious, deadly serious. And, you know, death is on a pale white horse and hell follows behind them. That's what's going to happen to the Azov battalion coming up. Anyways, I've spoken too long, too passionately. Scott, I'm not going to disagree with anything you say about what Russia is doing next because you were one of the few who actually said that Russia would launch this type of military operation inside Ukraine. There's a whole parade of people on Twitter right now apologizing for saying that there would not be an invasion. I think you even debated while we're old colleague Ray McGovern about this. And so I'm not going to argue that they will go to the Polish border where there are American troops, apparently, in Poland not far from that border. But I want to move on to the question. You raised it about the information war here, which you're absolutely right. There is extraordinary stuff being said on very moronic mainstream media in the US. A guy from the Washington Post, they have an online streaming channel. And he had a map and he said Russia wants to get as close to NATO as possible rather than, of course, asking NATO to withdraw. And then he said that he started going to Finland. Finland is next and the Baltics. So they've got this idea of this operation being takeover of Europe. And you have to be a moron to believe that. There's also, for example, yesterday, there were reports of the Russians sending missiles into populated areas of Kiev. I said, wait a minute, how could that be? Then they show a picture of an apartment building on fire, rockets hitting Kievans, the apartment building. It turns out there was some explosion in the air and they found out that this was... Ukrainians had shot down a Russian missile. And the debris from the Ukrainian action set an apartment building on fire. But it's being portrayed as the Russians. So I want to talk about that. And Elizabeth has a question about how the American people were prepared for this through what we went through in the 2016 election. Elizabeth. Sure. Yeah. I wanted to ask you all just to kind of weigh in on the way that Russiagate in the last few years has really influenced the current events we're seeing, but specifically the US's response to Russia's actions and the way it's being portrayed in the media. For anybody who wants to jump in and talk about that. I spoke too long, so I'm going to yield the floor to others so that their voices can be heard. Sure. I mean, because Australia's been probably the most sycophantic and mindless anti-Russian propaganda campaign through our media over the last week. And I found it quite impossible to get a word in each ways. The ABC spoke to me for 15 minutes, and they've used none of it, simply because it was inconsistent with the narrative that's flooding the airwaves. There's a complete lack of historical understanding, not a word about the eight years of constant morale-sapping shelling of Donetsk and Lugansk, not a word about the 13,000 victims, the 100,000 refugees created by that constant attritional warfare. And the other thing I wanted to dwell on a bit more was this denutrification question. Could Putin went in with two aims, two stated aims, demilitarisation, take out the heavy military potential supplied by the US to Ukraine, an army that was grossly, as Scott's already said, infiltrated with Nazis. And they couldn't resist the temptation to start to use it. Immediately they got it. And none of this would have happened if the shelling hadn't been stepped up a week ago on the 17th of February. And that's when it all started to move. Of course, Russia had plans ready. They always have contingency plans ready. But the Ukrainian government just walked into it with their gins. And denutrification, the second element of Putin's plan, we haven't heard much about it, although we've heard some pretty strong words from Scott just now, with which I agree completely. Let's talk a little bit about the horrible incident in Odessa, the burning of the Trad Union building in April, two months after Maidan. That was when the people of Odessa, a pro-Russian multicultural city, tried by peaceful protest to say, look, we don't like the way our country is going. And what happened? Truckloads of Nazis were shipped into the city. They were out weighed in the streets. The police stood by doing nothing. They were herded into a very symbolic building, the Odessa Trad Union Center. The building was set on fire, and about 50 people burned to death or were suffocated to death inside that fire, prevented from leaving the building by during the Nazis all around the building. Now, that has really cut right into the soul of Russia because it brings back the memories of the pogroms of World War II of the deliberate burning of Jews in the pale by Nazi, by German Nazis. Those are horrible memories, and it's quite clear that Russia remembers that all very well. And if there's going to be a first cab off the rank for show trials, it's going to be the people involved in those terrible murders because it's known exactly who they are. They've never been brought to justice, and Odessa is going to feel liberated once that happens. I don't know how long it's going to take for the Nazi vacation to take effect in Ukraine because they had infiltrated very strongly through the government. And here's another important point. They had intimidated Russian-speaking Ukrainians to the point where they were afraid to speak out. Events like that Trad Union building, events like the infiltration of the Orthodox church by anti-Russian elements. In all these ways, people were being denied a voice, told, you know, you have no role, you have nothing to say in this country. Now, all of those people now at some point are going to come forward pretty soon, I think, and say, look, this is not an invasion, this is a liberation. And I think that's going to gather steam. So I'm with Alexander Merkuris in his earlier optimism that Russia knows exactly what it's doing, and that there won't ever be a meaningful insurgency in Ukraine. I don't think it's going to happen. I'm with the invasion or the surgical strike or the special operation or whatever term you want to give to it. I'm with it. I think Putin had to do it in the end. He could see all the downside risks. He could see that the pro-Western Russian intelligence, he was going to hate this, that anybody with a stake in good relations with the West at the professional and business level, anybody running a tourist business, anybody in academic work in Western universities, all those sorts of people, were going to feel deeply threatened by this. But he knew that he had no alternative. And so I'm optimistic about the outcome of this. Elizabeth, I'll jump in and just give a quick American answer to your question about 2016. Understand the following. Americans don't know anything about Russia right off the bat. So any notion of a movement to influence the thinking of American citizens is a exercise in futility because Americans can't think when it comes to Russia. Back when I was in the military, the United States had this very well-developed program of Russian studies that we actually developed during the Second World War, not as anti-Russian, but pro-Russian. We were training, we were preparing U.S. military forces to work closely with our Russian allies. We had Russian language courses, Russian culture courses, et cetera. At the end of the Second World War, this got turned into a Cold War thing. But again, the entire premise was immersion in Russian culture, Russian history, Russian language, to properly know your enemy. Now, people can condemn all they want, the ideology of the Cold War. I do. But I will tell you this, the Cold Warriors that I worked with, the foreign-area officers in the U.S. military, I was a Soviet foreign-area officer. These guys are brilliant. They were brilliant. They knew exactly, they were seeped in Russian history so that when something occurred, they could put it in a proper perspective. At the end of the Cold War, and we had State Department officials as well, people like Jack Matlock, you will not meet a smarter person on Russia in the West than Jack Matlock. And he's not pro-Russian. He's pro-American as you get. But he's knowledgeable about Russia. And unfortunately, in the United States today, when somebody who's knowledgeable about Russia speaks out, they're accused of being pro-Russian. The fact that you know something about Russian history and you can put it into a proper perspective and give insight into Russian thinking turns you into a Russian propagandist. That's the status of play here today. At the end of the Cold War, that whole mechanism we had of Russian studies was either shut down or left to rot, taken over by a new class of people who didn't care about Russian culture but cared about business exploitation of Russia. We now have the carpetbaggers going into Russia, and Russia's studies is supporting this with superficial Russian language capabilities, but more about how we can go in and shape Russia. Instead of producing the Jack Matlocks, they produced the Michael McFalls. Michael McFall is... My wife has told me if I can't say something nice about people that say anything at all. But he, you know, when the history of this entire debacle is finally written objectively, Michael McFall will be one of the great evil people in this because Michael McFall and his ilk have played a game of shaping the American mindset about Russia to the point that we are incapable of having informed civil discourse about Russia. 2016 wasn't about fact versus fiction. Everything about 2016 was fiction because even the people that were saying the Russians aren't coming in manipulate, and I'm telling you right now, they were. Let's not pretend that Russia didn't have an intelligence interest in what was going on in the 2016 election. Of course, they did. They didn't manipulate it though. Intelligence services collect. That's what we do. I did it. Everybody does it. It's just the name of the game and the fact that the Russians kicked our butts in 2016 and got inside the DNC servers and sucked out information. Yes, but it had nothing to do with what was going on politically. The Democrats exploited Russia's intelligence success to create this fictional narrative of Putin being a puppet of Russia. So the people that were against the narrative weren't doing it from a fact-based position. They were doing it from a political position of supporting Donald Trump. And there's a difference between building a counterargument that's factually based and building a politicized argument that's all about creating narrative. And that's the way the Russian discourse takes place in the United States today. Zero facts all about manipulating narrative. Even the people who are opposed to Ukraine aren't opposed because they're talking from a position of intellectual soundness. They're opposed for political reasons. They're opposed because they're against Joe Biden. I mean, when I hear someone say that the reason should be against supporting Ukraine is because of Hunter Biden's laptop, that tells me that you're a moron and you have no idea what you're talking about. This isn't about Hunter Biden's laptop. This is about legitimate Russian national security concerns that have been laid out in great detail to the United States for over the course of the past 15 years, starting with Vladimir Putin's 2007 Moscow security speech, one of the great speeches in modern history of any political leader, followed by William Burns' and yet means, yet memorandum, mandatory reading for anybody who claims to care about what's going on, where he laid out, from the perspective of an American ambassador, brutality of the Russian argument and saying, they have a point. We should listen to them. And then we didn't. We didn't. And then Putin has given a variety of talks since then. And I know I'm coming off as a Putin sycophant, but my God, when I listen to American politicians, during the similar timeframe, we don't even Barack Obama, the great orator, Harvard train legal mind. When you listen to his speeches, and then you compare and contrast with the speeches given by Vladimir Putin, we have a child speaking to an adult. Putin is the adult. Putin lays out the history, the facts. And I'm not saying he's perfect. And I'm not saying that he's prone. He isn't prone to blowing the weight behind one line of argument. Of course he is. He's a Russian leader. So he's going to lean heavy on the Russian point. But the points he makes are extremely valid. And we have ignored them. In 2018, he stood up and explained why Russia was building new categories of nuclear weapons. Because everybody said, oh my God, he's a bad man. He's building nuclear weapons. He said, no, no, no. You guys went through from the ABM treaty. But when you did that, then you started deploying missile systems, defense systems into Europe. It threatened not Iranian missiles, which don't exist, but our missiles. And we have to say, this is a problem, especially when we're dealing with NATO expansion. We have to be worried that this is a threat. You didn't listen to me then. Are you listening now? And that's the whole thing. Putin has been speaking and speaking and speaking and ignored and ignored and ignored. In December 2021, last year, he put out two draft treaties. Everybody says, oh my God, in extreme position, that's no way to negotiate. As if the negotiations began in December 2021. The negotiations began back in 2000. 2001, it had been ongoing ever since about, why are you expanding NATO? As Byrne said, yet means yet. And Byrne's wrote that in 2009. So when Putin put out these two draft treaties, it wasn't a negotiate anymore. It was a demand. Because what Putin was saying is, I've been speaking to you and speaking to you and you've been ignoring me. Are you listening now? Yeah, we're listening, Vlad. You got our attention. You went into Ukraine. And we have to be careful and understand that we are two days into a military operation of great complexity. Great complexity. The American people don't understand foundation of this intervention. They link it to 2016 instead of linking it to 2007. And sadly, the American people aren't equipped intellectually to deal with the problem of this complexity. And if the American people aren't equipped to it, how can they hold their elected officials accountable for what's done in their name? You keep saying we want Biden to do sound policy. But Biden is a political animal. So is the Democratic Party. So is the Republican Party. So these American political machines that are supposed to do the right thing aren't going to do the right thing based upon fact-based argument. They're going to do the right thing based upon domestic political imperative. And when the domestic political imperative is driven by morons who don't know anything about Russia, who care more about TikTok videos than they do about arms control, this is what we get. We get a country where look at American sanction policy. It's, I've never seen a policy that's more about looking in the mirror and less about dealing with the reality of the world. We sanction people because we say, oh my God, if you denied me access to the following, that would suck. So therefore I'm going to deny you access to it because obviously that which I feel is important to me must be important to you. Russia doesn't operate under the same. Well, yes, I'm not saying they're not human beings. I'm not saying they don't care about human comforts and all that. Of course they do. But the notion that Russia can exist without access to the swift banking system is an absurdity. Russia can exist. Mark brought up earlier. He said, you know, the Europe isn't the world. 320 million Americans, I don't know how many million Canadians are up north. They're irrelevant anyways. Sorry, David. Europe, well another 300, 400 million people in Europe. Wow. We might get a billion people in the West. China, 1.2 billion. India, over a billion. Pakistan, hundreds of millions. When you add up the people who are not siding with the United States, the overwhelming majority of the world is not on the side of the West. But you won't figure that out by watching Western media. The world may not support what Russia's doing, but they aren't opposing it either because they recognize that the rules-based international order being imposed on the world since 1945 by the United States is a club. It's not international law. It doesn't reflect the values of the United Nations Charter. Someone please explain to me how NATO, a military alliance, can exist in conformity with the United Nations Charter. There is no role in the United Nations Charter for NATO. NATO as an organization is an abomination. Yes, it needed to exist during the Cold War because those were tough times. But since that time, there is no legitimate purpose for NATO. It's very existence. It's very actions are an insult to international law. And this is the point that Russia's been trying to make. Scott, I'm going to fetch you off there. We have some other people watching, and they'd like to say something maybe, maybe Alexander. We started with Russia. Can I just say about Russia? The state of understanding of Russia before Russia gate was bad after Russia gate, it's become far worse. Russia gate has done real damage in my opinion because it has corrupted even further what had become already a deeply polluted and very damaged discourse. And I've been listening to some things that Western leaders have been saying over the last couple of days. And my conclusion has to be, and this goes back to things of both Tony and Scott have been saying, that Western leaders collectively do not know very much about Russia. They don't understand its concerns. They don't feel that it has legitimate concerns. They talk about Russia rejoining diplomacy without in any way being prepared to take any of the steps that diplomacy would require from them to take. But they also have very one-dimensional views about Russia. I mean, I was listening to Ursula von der Leyen, who is the Chief Commissioner of the European Union, and she was talking about how the European Union is going to impose sanctions, which will make it impossible for Russia to refine oil. The idea that Russia cannot produce equipment to refine oil, anybody who is familiar with Russia knows that that is absurd. And yet that is the level of decision making and that is the level of understanding of Russia that we have today. And I think that it points to a complete breakdown in our intelligence gathering or perhaps more appropriately, our intelligence analysis. Clearly, leaders are not being properly informed or have explained to them the nature of the country that they've decided to make their adversary. And it is resulting in appalling decision making. When Scott says that talked about Swift, that Russia can't survive with, can survive with Swift, of course it can. We might have enormous problems if our economies were disconnected from Swift, but the Russian economy doesn't work with the same rhythms and methods as ours do. And once upon a time, decision makers during the Cold War understood this. They don't seem to understand this any longer. So clearly, intelligence analysis of Russia has collapsed and unfortunately, Russia gate and all that came with it has made that even worse. Okay. Marcus, back with us if you want to weigh in. Biden made a very... If you have something to say go ahead, otherwise I had a question. We were sort of in English speaking, pretty much Anglo-Saxon American group here. We haven't talked much about France and Germany, but one of the positive aspects of this whole saga for me has been the preparedness of Macron and Strauss to maintain lines of communication with Putin, with the Russian government to keep a dialogue going. And even when they're forced by overwhelming pressure to take decisions they don't want to take, obviously, I don't think Strauss wanted to suspend the second gas pipeline. He said this is a decision for the short to medium term. I thought that was significant. But more broadly speaking, I think both leaders understand the necessity of keeping Russia part of the dialogue of maintaining a process of detente. And Macron said something very wise in this context of the Ukraine crisis. He said there can be no European security without Russian security. Macron said that. And that gives me encouragement too. I think there's certainly going to be some crazy thinking coming out of the newer Eastern European members of NATO. I'm not going to embarrass them by naming them, but we know who they are. But I think at the center of European diplomacy of France and Germany, there might be a ray of light at the end of the tunnel here. There might be a bit of a disposition to start saying, well, now that this has happened, now that Russia has cut the sort of damocles and cut the Gordian knot, I'm sorry, cut the Gordian knot of Ukraine, that situation will begin to stabilize now. And there will be opportunities for us, France and Germany, to start putting things back on a decent footing of mutual respect with Russia. But certainly Russia wants to do that. And I think there are influential groups in France and Germany that want to do that. Yeah, can I just add to that? I think that is absolutely correct. I mean, if you reason to what Macron especially was saying when he was in Moscow, if he followed, if you tracked his press conference carefully with Putin, it was very clear to me. It was very, very obvious to me that he understood that the Russians have legitimate security concerns and have legitimate reasons to be concerned about the whole development of the international situation, especially the situation in Europe. Macron is certainly aware of this. He's not at the moment able to break with the Americans and the British. But of course things change. I think Macron, by the way, is extremely reflective of a lot of opinion in France amongst the French political elite. I think many of them are horrified at the way in which this whole situation in Europe has evolved over the last 30 years and sense very strongly that it's not been in Europe's interests or specifically indeed in France's interests. But it's also, I think, necessary to say that whatever clever ideas and thoughts Macron has, he's not been able to translate them into anything at the moment. Again, if you followed that Security Council discussion in Moscow on Monday closely, it was very interesting to see that Macron was coming along, coming up with all sorts of ideas, but they were all ultimately ideas about process, they were all about setting up meetings, holding conferences, having further discussions. He was never able in the end to come up with any indication that the Western powers, Britain and the United States, were prepared to come up with anything of substance. And as for Schultz, I have to say that I think he does reflect there is a diversity of opinion in Germany, but I also have to say that I think he's visit to Moscow over the course of it. He said things which were extremely ill-advised. He said that Ukraine's membership of NATO is not on anybody's agenda, and so what's the problem? I don't think anybody in Moscow is going to be happy with that. I think on the contrary, they would have felt insulted by it. And I think getting into discussions about genocide and about Yugoslavia in a place like Moscow, and then following it up with further comments during the Munich Security Conference, which appeared to scoff at Russian feelings about the situation in Donbass, I think whatever Schultz was trying to do, I think it was bound to raise Russian hackles. So I think that Schultz came across as clumsy, Macron came across as ineffectual. There are doubts about these policies in France and Germany. One day they may crystallize into something, but we mustn't assume that will happen any time soon. Thank you, Alexander. Nobody's jumping in. I know Joe doesn't like me to say. I'm just going to say one quick thing here, Joe. I know I've dominated the conversation. I apologize for that. Okay. Russia has a plan. NATO doesn't. Russia has dealt with, for the past 20 plus years, NATO expansion eastward. And if you take a look at it, as things currently stand, there's no logical way to finish this. NATO refuses. Russia said, you must go back to the 1997 boundaries. NATO said, we're not going to do that. And as things currently stand, it's difficult to come up with a negotiated settlement, but Russia's doing that by changing the geopolitical reality. One place, Mark mentioned it, but about Belarus. In August 2020, Belarus was problematic. It wasn't guaranteed that Belarus was going to be a loyal Russian ally. There was a real risk that Belarus could be plucked off by the West, etc. That ain't happening now. And it's not just that Belarus is now firmly in the Russian side. The Russians look like they are permanently redeploying the first guard's tank army into Belarus. So what you've just done is put one of Russia's premier offensive strike units on the border with NATO. Everybody keeps talking about, oh my God, the Americans are putting forces on NATO's border with Russia. Russia just countered with something bigger and better and better. Russia's going to do the same thing to Ukraine. I'm just here to tell you right now. What Ukraine is going to become is a version of Belarus. With a pro-Russian government, and while Russia isn't going to occupy Ukraine, Russia will have significant strike forces permanently deployed in Ukraine. A few people say, well, isn't that stupid? Not really, because what Russia has just done, but first of all, there's going to be a new Cold War. Instead of a frontier delineated by the Eastern and Western border, it's going to be delineated by the Ukrainian-Belarus border. It's going to become the new Cold War. Russia's ready to do this. Russia has the military forces ready. They're changing geopolitical reality as we speak. NATO now is going to wake up to the fact that it's not ready to have a new Cold War. How expensive is it going to be for NATO to regenerate the military capacity to put similar strike forces permanently in Romania and Poland? Perhibitively expensive. Something that Germany and France do not want to pay. It's a stupid way to go. How do you get NATO not to dismantle itself? Because Russia has never said you must dismantle NATO. Russia said you simply have to withdraw NATO forces that aren't native to the country that they belong in to their 1997 borders. How do you do that by having something to trade? And now Russia's going to have something to trade. Russia, in exchange for having NATO withdraw to 1997 borders, will be able to pull the first guard's tank army back to Western Russia and whatever forces they put in Ukraine back. And now you'll have a buffer zone, spheres of influence. Something Russia has said they've always wanted. NATO says don't exist. Well, guess what? NATO are going to exist. Russia is dictating a new reality. This may take decades to unfold. But anybody who thinks that the United States and Europe are driving this ship don't know what they're talking about. Mark, you want to respond to that? Yeah, I wanted to come back on a few things. There are so many great thoughts out there. I don't necessarily agree with all of them, but I'm on board like 80, 80 some percent. I think Scott is exactly right about Belarus. Belarus was a huge cell phone by the West. I mean, it was just a couple years ago that Lukashenko was flirting with Pompeo, about making a big deal out of getting one US LNG shipment in a show of defiance against Russia dictating new higher gas prices to Belarus, and which were well, well, well, well below market price. And they launched a really abortive, not fully prepared color revolution attempt against Lukashenko. And then this whole thing with this Tihanovskaya, whom even Chatham houses own polls, polling they did in Belarus only had the support of 4% of the Belarusian population. And that was an online poll in urban areas. That was an incredible cell phone, because it gave Lukashenko no more of his customary room for maneuver to play the West and Russia offer each other for better economic deals for Belarus. Now he is owned by the Kremlin. And he's fitting into the role rather well, I must say. And he was extremely upset by the fact that these color revolution attempts were in part launched at him out of Kiev and Poland. And he wanted some payback. And that is why he agreed to this Russian military deployment in Belarus to allow the close attack to Kiev, which is only 80 kilometers away from the Belarusian border. And even sent Belarusian troops in for some limited engagements on the border as well. So that was a huge cell phone by the West. And they paid the price for that. And that now Belarus is firmly much more firmly in the Western, in the Russian camp than it would have been otherwise. The idea of a guerrilla war and they're not being a guerrilla war in Ukraine. I disagree with that, particularly in Western Ukraine. And I hope I'm wrong. I hope to God I'm wrong. I don't know how much time any of the rest of you have spent in Lvov, but I've been there. And it is the level of anti-Russian sentiment just among the general population. I mean, it's the defining element of their conception of their national identity. I don't know if it's possible to denazify Ukraine. I don't think it is all possible to denazify West Ukraine. 70 years of the Soviet Union failed to denazify West Ukraine. The Atlantic Council has a head on Russia and Eurasia, Melinda Herring. Maybe you've run across her. She's one of the crazier Atlantic Council propagandists. And she recently put up on the Atlantic Council a list of her favorite eateries in Lvov. And one of them is a place where you go and it is larping. It is a theme restaurant role playing the 1930s, early 1940s in West Ukraine. And there's a game that if you come in and you order pilmini, Russian dumplings, then the NKVD, sorry, the OUN, UPA, the West Ukrainian-Nazi collaborators, they come in in uniform and grab you and take you out back and you never come back. The idea is that you're shot in the back. And that is their idea of fun. That is amusement to them. I mean, that is textbook-cited examples of exactly the material in the academic literature that is talked about as inciting and promoting genocide and ethnic cleansing. And that is entertainment in West Ukraine. I don't know if the Russian military will move into West Ukraine. If they do, I don't have positive hope by that, but I'm an eternal fatalist, so I hope I'm wrong. And the last thing I also want to disagree just a little bit on is I don't have as much hope for Europe, Macron or Schultz or God forbid, the German Green Party or anyone else. I think that they have become very adept over the years at playing Russia and even playing Putin with a good cop, bad cop routine. I think their own brand of Western European exceptionalism is baked in to the European political elite. That is just a entwined parallel with the American exceptionalism that dominates the U.S. You saw how upset they were when they did not have the proper hegemonic leader that they expect out of the U.S. during the Donald Trump years and how relieved they were when Joe Biden was back to bring the hegemony back to its proper form. One of the big things that set this whole chain of intervention off is a few months ago, Russia was refusing for several years now to have any more meetings of the Normandy format. That is France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine to implement the Minsk Accords and to settle the crisis. Russia, because all of the prior meetings had resulted in nothing and Ukraine, the Kiev regime, was not implementing the Minsk Accords at all and publicly they were saying to their own people, we will never implement them. In fact, just recently, the head of the Ukrainian Security and Defense Council, Danilov, he spoke to the press and he said openly, if we implement the Minsk Accords, it will mean the destruction of Ukraine. By that, he meant the destruction of the U.S.-backed Kiev regime in Ukraine because the ultra-nationalists, the Banderites, they would rebel. They would not accept it. They would call it Russian capitulation to Russia like they already did during several aborted attempts to even gesture towards it previously. There would be another Maidan and the division between a Kiev regime government and the ultra-nationalists that not only maintain it there with their militias and political movements but are now completely intertwined into the military, the police, the security services, they completely own the national guard, the mainstream political Maidan parties, they would rebel and the whole house of cards would come crashing down. That's why they never implemented it. Russia said if you won't even meet as prescribed by the Minsk Accords with the political leadership in Donbass, then what is the point? There's no further place to go and Zelensky refused to for years now like Poroshenko did and he even recently said, we don't even know who they are. They are just Russian proxies. So finally, after this last failed round of diplomacy, Russia has adopted the maxim to Zelensky. You're just the U.S. proxy. There is no further need to communicate with you at all. If we want to talk, we'll talk to Biden. If we don't talk to Biden, there's no point in talking anymore. We don't even know who you are. We've seen that roll out as Zelensky is making increasingly desperate cries now that he's ready to discuss neutrality and Russia's just like, yeah, whatever, we might have some meetings and we'll talk about it as Russian troops continue to move into Kiev. But just a few months ago, what helped set this all off is Russia went to France and Germany in a aborted shortened Normandy format and said, help push your U.S. client state in Kiev to fulfill the Minsk Accords. And they said flat out, no, we will not. And Russia then publicized the transcripts of them saying that. And they were furious. But that is what part of the many checks off the box that made Russia decide that diplomacy just wasn't going to work. There was never going to be any resolution that the status quo on the ground was increasingly bad for Russian national security interests as the NATOization of Ukraine was occurring, the death count in the Donbass was ever increasing. And the status quo of jaw, jaw, jaw, yeah, we'll talk about Minsk and never ever actually fulfilling it was increasingly reaching a deadline where Russia couldn't let it continue anymore. But I don't believe that the Europeans, when they say things like Macron saying, at some intellectual level, he knows that some other better intellectuals said that. And he repeats that because he knows it's what the Russians want to hear. But he doesn't internalize it himself or enact it in policy. It's just ornamental. And I think Russian Putin who has actually long fetishized Germany and hoped for good relations with Germany naively in my mind. I mean, and you just go back to the February 21st agreement. And it is no coincidence that the Russian military intervention was launched on the eight year anniversary of the breaking of the February 21st agreement and how much that really turned Putin against Europe and ended his idea that he could deal honestly with Germans. And that's why I just don't have a lot of faith that you can look to European leaders as some type of savior in geopolitical with relations over the United States. Unfortunately, I think Europe has long gone the same way in their own specific type of exceptionalism. Alexander or Tony? I accept that superior argument. All right. There's not going to be any move from Europe anytime soon. And I think, you know, whatever whether Macron has some intellectual understanding that this is a bad policy outcome and whether there's people in France who have that understanding, which I believe they do, by the way, I think there are people in France who understand that the point is, it makes no practical difference. Because as they repeatedly show over the last 30 years, they're not prepared to break with the United States. The great opportunity to have done so was after the Minsk agreement was agreed back in February 2015. If the French and the Germans had moved ahead with the Minsk agreement, you would have said, well, yes, there is a distinct European policy. They didn't move ahead with the Minsk agreement. They colluded in its sabotage. And to be straightforward about it, I don't think there's any prospect of that changing anytime soon. Maybe one day a new generation of leaders will come forward with different ideas or different political base. And there are, as I said, intellectuals and not just intellectuals, lots of people in Europe who would take a different policy line. But whatever, whether it was a tough soft cop attitude or whether there's some understanding that things are going wrong. The realities, and it is the political realities the Russians must work with, are that the Europeans on this have proved a complete failure. They've simply gone along with US policy, which to my mind has been completely misguided and misconceived as well. So the situation is going to be resolved by military means. I'm not a military person. I always find this very difficult. I saw as a child in Greece, military action being used during a coup that took place there. It's always left a certain trauma. So for me, it's always been something I've very troubled about. But you can understand the rationale from a Russian perspective. And I'm going to make one further observation, which is I think the key one, which is, of course, this has completely changed the entire political discourse. Because up to now, we've seen the Western powers, especially in Europe, but also around the world, they've been the people who've held the initiative. They've launched the wars. They've conducted the diplomacy. They've pursued the color revolution programs, the regime change programs. And now in Ukraine, which is Europe, that initiative has been rested from them. And that is something that marks a dramatic change in the global situation, the geopolitical situation. It means that the unipolar moment as it was has now conclusively passed. And it's something that I think is understood around the world, perhaps least understood in Europe and in Washington. Whereas as I said, they're coming up with sanctions proposals, which to be very clear, would have been devastating if they'd been imposed 20 years ago or even 10 years ago, but which today aren't going to be far less effective than they expect. Can I just say, I mean, one shouldn't be guided too much by sentiment in markets. But after the sanctions announcements were made in the United States and Europe yesterday, the ruble strengthened and the Russian stock market rose. And the general sentiment there was this, yes, if this is the worst they can do, well, it's not so bad. Tony, that's sorry, Tony, anything to add there? No, except I would say that the pressing aspect of all of this has been the power of Western information warfare. Somebody said NATO is very good at winning wars on paper and in the media, which they are. And a lot of that expertise, I'm sad to say, has come from Britain. And they showed it in the Skripals affair. They showed it in the machinations over Syria. They showed it again in the Navalny poisoning affair. There's this capacity now, and straight out of George Orwell's 1984, to convince your own people of the truth of the lying propaganda that you're putting forward to infiltrate that propaganda into their minds. And I remember the character of the pathetic character of Parsons in Orwell's 1984. My country's full of Parsons now. And it pains me to say it, but we have fallen hook, lying and sinker for what should be transparently false narratives. But unfortunately, we've lost our capacity to think critically. And so that's a bit of a tangent really from what we've been talking about. But it comes through very powerfully as I watch the way my country is seeing what's happening in the Ukraine at the moment. As somebody who lives in Britain, I have to endorse that completely. I too find it very difficult to accept. I mean, I remember also how much more sophisticated political discussion in Britain used to be on these issues. It is dismaying to see this. But can I just say about information warfare? Yes, Western powers, the United States, Britain are brilliant at it. They can shape narratives. They can alter people's perspectives of things. But they're also over reliant upon it. Because ultimately, you can't change facts. Now, part of my wife's family, my wife's family was from Germany, and they lived in Germany at the time when in the 1930s and 40s, they remembered the time. Germany had the most brilliant person in information warfare that's ever lived probably, the most insightful, the most brilliant. And they have told me how persuasive he was. And they continue to believe him, but it didn't stop the Russian army getting to Berlin. So I mean, information warfare can only take you so far. That's absolutely brilliant, Alexander. On that note, I'm going to ask a practical question. Probably everyone on this panel has been immediately accused of being a Russian agent or a puppet of the Kremlin, etc. As long as the moment you want to engage in debate, there is no debate. Because they'll lose on the facts, as Alexander just pointed out. So they immediately shut you down. Can anyone here offer any practical responses to that? Do we just ignore these people and then you have no discussion whatsoever? Or is there a way to respond to them? I think you try to draw on your own personal life experience, as Scott very well does, as I've tried to do in my work since I stopped being an Australian professional diplomat, to show that the other side does have credibility. And by laying my credibility on the line, which I have done, I think I've given a lot of people in my country reasons to believe, well, he might have a point because he's prepared to basically put his neck on the chopping block to say these things. So yeah, I think personal integrity is a big part of the answer to your question. It's a tough thing, though, because not everybody has the resume to back it up. I mean, you know, on Iraq, I always laughed when people said that I was pro-Saddam. I mean, I was Saddam shill. You got to remember that. I was the guy who, but I'm also the guy that went to war against Saddam. And the guy who spent seven years ticking down doors, getting weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And you know, being condemned by Saddam is literally I was the worst human being on the planet. I'm also somebody who has taken a stance against Israel's policies. But, you know, I remind people that, you know, I spent from 1994 to 1998 being the UN's liaison to Israeli intelligence. I was welcomed into Israel as a friend because, you know, I recognized the threat that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction posed to Israel. So people can't get away with calling me anti-Semitic or anti-Israel. Not with that resume. And on Russia, I just remind everybody that there's very few people that can sit down with me and claim that they have two classified accommodations from the director of the CIA for successful espionage operations against the Soviet target. I have them. Or spent a good part of his adult life training to close with and destroy the Soviet army in combat. That's my resume. So how can I be pro-Russian? I mean, I train to kill Russians. I'm pro-fact. That's what, that's the bottom line. And, you know, it's a sad state of affairs when your side doesn't have the facts line up with their argument. As an intelligence officer, it was never my job to tell my boss what they wanted to hear. My job was to put the facts on the table and let my boss make the decision. That's what it was, that was supposed to do. And that's what's happening today. And that's, that's how I do it. But it's, you know, I can come at it from a position of strength because, you know, I have a resume that does that. The problem comes with people who don't have the resume, but are armed with the facts. Because as the gentleman that Tony mentioned, facts don't matter. Alexander said the same thing. Facts don't matter. Mark knows this. Facts don't matter. Not in this discussion because people don't care about reality. When you have an American president, and I'll just leave it with this, who, you know, he sat there and gave a speech about sanctions. And talking about, you know, with a smile on his face, we're going to destroy the Russian economy. This is a lying scum. This is a guy who on July 23rd got on the phone with the Afghan president and told him, stop crying about 20,000 screaming memes coming across the border. What I need you to do is get out there and give a televised presentation on how wonderful everything is, even if it isn't true. A direct quote. The president of the United States telling another national leader to shape the narrative even if it isn't true. Because truth is not the ally of these people. And that's a problem because we come at it from a fact-based argument. We want to come at it from the point of, you know, what reality is. These guys aren't dealing with reality. They're dealing with manufacturing and narrative. And Tony and Alexander and Mark have all noted, you know, it works to a point until the rubber hits the road, till the bullets hit the body. You know, the most visceral expression of reality is a 5.54 round penetrating the skull. Because you can sit there and talk about all you want. Hey, hey, hey, you know, we're doing this. You're dead, man. That's reality. That's what's going to happen to all these idiots that are out there trying to shape narrative. Because the Russians are done with playing the intellectual game. They put the boys in the field. The bullets are hitting bodies. That's as real as it gets. I want to sound the pessimistic note on the whole info war thing. I mean, we all have facts. The facts don't matter. Even when those facts are a knowledge, they never penetrate the narrative. And I certainly don't care about our credibility. I mean, like, like Scott, I'm a US military veteran, nuclear engineering field involved in operations to my regret against Serbia and Iraq. And did my post credit the LSE, but I have no credibility. None. I am a Putin shield. Guardian articles have personally attacked me. It's the first thing that comes up on the Google five years later, because Australian national radio dared to do an interview with me. And they were attacked by the Guardian in an article that attacked me, an article that they never, of course, bothered to contact me. And of course, got several personal details wrong. But I think you all know that we are all an ineffectual fringe, right? We do not have access to any of the commanding heights. We can't argue with these people because they cannot be reasoned with and we can't reach over them. I mean, we can talk on RT and Sputnik and CGTN and Telesore and other fringe outlets, or on God bless, you know, consortium news, but, you know, its audience is fringe. Everyone out here listening is also regarded as a shield for Putin or the Chinese Communist Party just for listening to this. And the best we can do is fight a desperate rearguard action from the fringes with no hope of ever making any impact whatsoever. Because no matter what is on our resume or what facts we present, we are the fringe. And Western journalists will not engage with us. When we disagree with them, they will just immediately mute you and block you and increasingly academics do it as well. I mean, try to be RT and to get any serious academics who might even reason with you to appear on RT anymore, or God forbid, press TV or something else. It's impossible because it immediately destroys careers and you lose all credibility. So, I mean, we keep fighting the good fight, but one of my favorite quotes is that someone asked another, are you saying we shouldn't hope? I'm saying that you should remove, hope is the carrot placed in front of the mule on the cart to keep it plotting along. Are you saying we shouldn't hope? And no, I'm saying you should remove the carrot and walk forward of your own volition. I just wanted to point out that RT.com was hacked yesterday. Somebody named Anonymous TV took credit. Others have pointed out that that was unlikely to be anonymous, but maybe an intelligence outfit that's using that name. I just wanted to say that we are fringe and that's why we still exist because if you get influence, if you get power, they will do something to undermine you. So, we can stay under the radar. Alexander. Sorry. What I wanted to say is, I mean, obviously, it is extraordinarily, I mean, extraordinarily difficult to work and argue this through. And I mean, my wife works in an academic world. I don't have the kind of resume, obviously, with Scott or others to have. But at the same time, it's not so much hope. It's about succumbing to despair. I am not prepared to succumb to despair. I will continue to make the points that I am making. And when I get in front of audiences, which I sometimes do, and I lay out the facts, I find that people actually are receptive when you explain things to them that they are not aware of. It can be remarkably surprising how completely their perspectives can change. There's one person I know who is, by the way, cabinet minister, a cabinet minister in this government. And I had a discussion with him some years ago. This is before he became a cabinet minister, but he was already an MP. And we were discussing the MH17 tragedy about which Robert Parry, the great Robert Parry, wrote about extensively. And I remember pointing out to him that the Ukrainian army had book missile launchers. I didn't say that one of them had shot it down, but I said that it had. And of course, he strongly denied it. And then I proved to him that it did, in fact, have not difficult. And I can remember, you know, the way his jaw dropped and the astonishment he had. And it was something that really he had never, and as a very, very high flying MP, obviously, been exposed to before. So, you know, you can penetrate through in little ways and wait for reality to force change. And then when it comes what we say becomes useful. It's not as if we haven't been through these sort of periods in our histories before. I mean, there have been previous times when it's been very difficult to speak out. And eventually, the truth is with you, you win. That's my attitude. It's not very much to do with hope. It's to do, as I said, with not giving up to despair, despair always being a bad counselor. Just give a quick war story. I used to work for Fox News. They hired me after 2001. They became quickly disillusioned with what I was trying to say. And because I had signed a contract with them, they opted to continue the contract, but execute that part of the contract that said you can't appear on any other network. And so in effect, Fox News silenced me. And at that time, there wasn't a vibrant social media atmosphere. The internet wasn't as developed as it is today. There's pluses as minuses for this internet world because there isn't really good quality control filters out there. But what I'll say about being on the fringe right now, we're building a record that will be searchable. Everything we say, everything we do, everything we write, every tweet we send is a searchable piece of data out there that is accessible to everybody. CNN right now, what has 300,000 viewers and dropping. But what we say here, what we write in an op-ed piece, what we tweet is searchable by hundreds of millions of people. And so I don't mind being on the fringe right now because I'm in control of the narrative that I put out. I'm in control of the database that I'm creating. And I'm confident that it will have an influence on people. It's an influence that we can't directly see because it's the influence that comes when somebody whom we don't know is doing a database search and they access this. But my daughter calls me from, she's going to Georgetown University right now doing graduate studies. And she keeps, now that Russia has become a thing, these graduate students are studying things. And Google, be careful of what you say because Google will find it. But she keeps saying people are quoting you in class. I said, okay, that's pretty cool. But the point is they're going to quote all of us if what we say is fact-based and it's the quality of our argument, not necessarily the reach of the immediate venue that we've chosen. While this program may be seen by X number of people that we call French, it's there on the internet and people will search it when a topic becomes hot. And what we say here does have an impact on how people think. That's my optimistic point of view. Two pieces of news that Marcus sent, three Western journalists working for RT have resigned. It doesn't surprise me because they opposed the military operation. And more significantly, the EU is sanctioning personally, Lavrov, Putin and Shargu, Defense Minister, the Foreign Minister and President. There's a lot of talk that the U.S. was going to do that. The EU's done it first. Alexander, is this amount anything? Personal sanctions against Putin? Lavrov, etc.? Yes. I mean, as I understand it, they're sanctions against their private wealth. It doesn't prevent them traveling to the West. So diplomatic contacts will continue. It will make absolutely no difference. It will not change influence for Lavrov or Putin. In any way, it's part of this great fictional narrative, which, by the way, I know for a fact, many people, including many policymakers, believe that Putin has vast millions or billions stashed away in Cyprus, some Turks and Caicos and wherever and owned yachts and palaces and all of these sort of things. This is completely not the case, or at least not in anything like the sense that these people imagine it is, but they believe it. And of course, it's again a good example of them being swept along by their own fictions and making decisions that aren't going to make any real difference. And of course, the idea that Putin or Lavrov or Shoigu or people like the chief of the Russian general staff are going to be in the slightest bit affected or dismayed or turned from their courses by this kind of thing is just laughable. Some more symbolic stuff for a Western audience consumption perhaps. Tony, you were two weeks in Russia. Is that correct? I've been here for three weeks. I've got one week to go. Just give us a recap of who you've been meeting with and what was it like being back there again? It was terrific being back here. It always is. I find this a country of grace and charm and good manners, things that feel weird rather losing sight of perhaps in our countries. I've met the Russian Diplomatic Academy for the first time. I was very impressed with the quality of staff and students there by the finishing school for Russian diplomats. And I mean, since the Congress of Vienna in 1814, Russia has been turning up superb diplomats. They understand the importance of diplomacy and they were very impressive. The rector of the academy is the former Russian ambassador to Britain, Alexander Yakovchenko. And he went through the fire in Britain. Of course, he experienced the unpleasantness to put it mildly of the Scripov affair. He went right through years of trying to get the British government to talk reasonably about those events. But he's come out of it very well. He's a man of great good humor and charm. And he set me on up to a university in St. Petersburg where I gave my same lecture again to the University of the Humanities and Social Sciences. And I was talking about the affinities, not just similarities, but affinities between Russia and Australia. Most important of which I think is that we're both outlier countries of both Europe and Asia. So we're both in that peripheral space between Europe and Asia in different ways. But we are both definitely in that space. And so we have some good fun talking to the students about some of those things. I didn't do a lot of political activity. I mostly went to concerts. But going to concerts and operas and ballets is a wonderful way of reminding myself that Russia's about the soul. It's not about the GMT, it's about his soul. And Putin was talking about this in his later speech on the two days ago announcing the action in Ukraine. He said, look, I know there's going to be criticism of this, but we're doing this because we know what we're doing is right. And it's in our soul that we have to do this. And there's this Russian capacity to talk seriously about, I suppose, philosophical values that India sent to me. I always feel refreshed when I come here. And when I go home, I feel recharged and I'm able to get back into the fray, which we will be talking about a few minutes ago, with renewed vigor. That's good to hear. I'm going to end by just pulling out one more thing. I don't know if everyone saw Biden's performance yesterday at the White House. He said Putin is trying to reconstruct the Soviet Union. This is the line they're pushing, but more interestingly, when he was pressed, what do you think these sanctions are going to do? They didn't stop him from invading. And Biden said they weren't intended, they weren't designed to stop him from invading. They were designed to punish him afterward. So I thought that that was kind of a clue that they apparently had good intelligence this time because they did say they were going to invade, number one. But number two, that they did nothing to stop that and that they wanted him to go there. And now the sanctions are coming. Anybody want to take that on? Yeah, there was just an article out in the New York Times while we were sitting down. It turns out that several months ago, the U.S. took its intelligence of the Russian military buildup to China and said, help us stop the war. And China said, okay, we'll look it over and handed it right over to Russian intelligence. And it's just to me the delusion of these people in the U.S. State Department and so on, they arm and promote separatism in Taiwan from China and are increasingly making it a de facto embassy there. They parade U.S. military ships up and down off the Chinese coast and in the Chinese sea at least once a month under Biden's presidency. They wage an economic war of sanctions and tariffs against China, force other countries to stop doing business with Huawei and to decouple economic relations with China. But here, help us out with this thing with your close strategic partner. I can't even imagine. Does it come from hubris? Where does it come from that they think that these actions against other countries have no consequences? Again, this talk, yes, the unipolar world is ending, but we're not moving into a multipolar world. The multipolar world is stillborn because the U.S. and its European allies are trying so hard to hang on to that unipolar moment with primacy and hegemony that they're forcing it into a bipolar world again. And China and Russia and Iran and China and Russia, I mean, they've just stopped all pretenses. I mean, China-Russian relations have never been better and they're not going to get worse anytime soon. And that is the only thing that has a hope, of course, of taking it. But where does that end in a bipolar international relations alignment back on the clock tick town to nuclear destruction? I don't know, but it's nowhere good. And I'm just amazed that the U.S. thought that China would help them on this. I'm flabbergasted. I don't even know what to think. Well, let me just ask, Scott, and what is your assessment of the American intelligence in this whole operation? We saw it in the Gulf in 2000, how politicized intelligence had become. Like you said, you're supposed to just lay the evidence there to your boss. It's completely politicized. How did it perform in this instance? Well, we have to take a look at two aspects of American intelligence. The ability to collect data and then the ability to analyze and assess data. We are unmatched in our ability to collect data. And in many ways, this is a problem. A little Cold War story, we were trained during the Cold War to encrypt all our communications because the Russians and that slowed us down, actually, because it impaired us. We were slowing down our operations because of the need to protect our communication. And I had an argument with a general and I said, you know, if you study the way the Soviets collect, they suck everything in, but then there's a huge time gap between the time they collect it, assess it and connect on it. And if we're talking about tactical communications, why don't we just communicate in the clear and let them suck it all up? And by the time they act, we've already done it, we'll be faster to them, we'll be inside the decision-making loop. And a lot of people went, that's a smart way to do it because you can get overwhelmed with data. Now in the Cold War, we used to have intelligence officers. I just, again, another quick war story. I had an issue dealing with Soviet ballistic missiles. They sent me to CIA and I bounced around from office to office. When I sat down with a photo interpreter, this is a guy who had been sitting at the same desk for 25 years, looking at the same piece of ground, a rat pooped in the wrong place. He'd know it because he was intimately familiar with it. If you dealt with somebody who had, you know, intercepted communications, they knew from the, just by listening to the voice, who it was, if they had a cold, if they had too much to drink last night, et cetera, because they'd been listening to the same voice for 25 years. These guys were good. What did we do at the end of the Cold War? We shut it all down. We took all these guys and gals who'd been sitting behind death and we fired them. And we replaced them with a young crew who now became professionalized. And what professionalized means is you do six-month rotations. You become somebody who can speak the lingo, but you can't think. You're incapable of doing sound analysis. And it's only gotten worse. So now we have an intelligence community and then we've politicized it. You know, one of the things about junior analysts now, it used to be, you know, a Tom Clancy novel. You could have Jack Ryan, you know, the young CIA officer come up with a brilliant idea and ended up leading the charge because people recognized talent and they weren't afraid of it. They brought it up and they were willing to listen. Now you have a young analyst say, I think, you know, the Russians might have a point about this. Here's the data. And the middle management goes, no, no, no, man, you're out of step with what the boss wants changing. And so we can collect all the data in the world we want, but we can't turn out sound assessments. The intelligence community may have had all the information in the world about, you know, Russia's intent to invade. But you know what? They were wrong. Don't tell me they were right. Because they, anybody who was a qualified intelligence expert on Russia would have said that Russia doesn't want surprise attacks. That in order for Russia to send its military into Ukraine, Putin must go to the National Assembly and get permission because the Constitution requires it. That Putin must undertake certain actions, check off certain boxes before this happens. So when people said it's eminent, anybody who was a true intelligence professional said, no, it's not, because there's things that have to be done still. And, you know, I wrote an article for you about the tip fiddle about, you know, the fine phase deployment list. Again, it's not about the fact that he put X number of men where, what kind of men, what's the logistics support and all that kind of stuff. Did they bring up enough logistics to support an exercise? Or did they bring up logistics for an eminent invasion? We knew this. We knew that maybe their logistics was lagging because you can't put everything forward at once. You've got to time phase it in. And so any intelligence professional who looked at it and said, no, based upon the tip fiddle, they ain't going to be ready until February. So why scream wolf in December or January? Because it's political. It's political. Our intelligence services have become political. And the sad thing is, as bad as this is, and then lead up to a conflict, once the conflict occurs, especially a political conflict, because this isn't war between the United States and Russia. So, like I said, war has a way of simplifying things because bullets make their own reality. Ain't no bullets hit an American right now. So we don't have to worry about reality. We worry about fiction. We're about manufacturing a narrative. And that's what Biden's doing right now in the intelligence community is supporting this with fiction, with not fact-based reality, but fiction. So no, the intelligence, but it's not just the intelligence team, our foreign service. A foreign service officer used to be the elite of the diplomatic establishment. These intellectual snobs who knew everything, because guess what? They knew everything. There was a reason why a guy sat there in his tweet coat with his pipe looking at you with his aim as you spoke, because he had read every book in the world. He had 400 billion degrees and he knew it all because he knew it all. And you had the respect, the fact that he sneered at you. Our diplomats today are young punks. They are political thugs. These are guys who were picked to go into Iraq, not because they had insight about Iraq, as they were businessmen. Have you take somebody straight out of business school with no diplomatic experience and put them in charge of developing the Iraqi economy? Because it's politics. Everybody, look at Jake Sullivan, look at his resume. This man is in qualified run a gas station, but he's the national security advisor of the United States of America. Look at Tony Blinken. He would be fired from any desk he ever sat at in the State Department for sharing confidence. The man can't be, but he's not a real diplomat. He's a fake diplomat. He's put up there, the people they promote to ambassadors. It's embarrassing to watch. The string of people with the name ambassador after a name speaking on TV. These are ignorant people. These people are not professionals. They don't know the subject matter anymore. It's an embarrassment. The same thing with the military. We have a military staffed with general officers who spent the last 20 years destroying the United States military while lying to the American Congress about it. Are these people capable of saying anything honest before the TV? No. So it's not just the intelligence service that's gone south. It's every aspect of what goes forward as government civil service, the professional class has been politicized. And when they're politicized, it's what Alexander says. It becomes about air. It becomes about moving hot air. Who can move hot air more effectively? It's not about reality. And sooner or later, reality is going to smack them in the face, and Ukraine is an example of reality smacking America in the face. Nobody in the United States predicted what's happening right now. They can sit there and say, we invaded imminently. No. That was part of manufacturing a narrative because if you listen to the idiots, what did Biden say? By revealing the fact that Russia could invade, we will stop Russia from invading because we've humiliated Russia by exposing what they're doing. This is how these people think. It's all about moving hot air. But all that hot air got swept aside when the rubber hit the road. Reality is hitting America. And it's going to take us a while because we don't have a bench fall back on. The bench that we have are people of the same ilk with the same inclinations, politicized thinking. Go to graduate school. Look at who they let in the graduate school. To get into a PhD program about Russia today, you have to be anti-Putin. They will not let you into the program if you come at it from a jet Matlock perspective. You have to be a Michael McFall acolyte to get into the program. So we're training people who don't think they think the same way. It's not as though they think independently. They have to think the same way as the people who are giving out the degrees. It's a disgrace and it's going to be the ruin of America. Because when you deny a democracy, the ability to engage in intellectually founded discourse, it's no longer a democracy. Okay, Scott. I think we're going to end the program with that note, unless anyone has any further word to add. This is your chance. Very good. Thank you very much, Tony, Kevin, speaking to us from Moscow, having just arrived from St. Petersburg, Mark Sloboda in the south of Moscow in the forest. Scott Ritter up by Albany in New York State, Elizabeth Voss in fateful Arkansas and Alexander McQuarris in London. For CN Live, this is Joe Laura saying until next time, goodbye. If you are a consumer of independent news and the first place you should be going to is consortium news and please do try to support them when you can. It doesn't have its articles behind a paywall. It's free for everyone. It's one of the best news sites out there and it's been in the business of independent journalism and adversarial independent journalism for over two decades. I hope that with the public's continuing support of consortium news, it will continue for a very long time to come. Thank you so much.