 who recently returned from Crimea, he'll tell us what he saw, what he heard, and we also have Tamara Lawrence, she's a PhD candidate in global governance, she's Canadian, she is coming to us from London, she's on the advisory board of the Notre Dame NATO Network, and Tamara will be filling us in on the latest efforts by the US government and others to censor the debate on the war in Ukraine. With that, we're going to go to some new updates first. And Cole, you have an update, Cole? Oh, sorry, I'm just collecting my wits, Marci, maybe she should give you a update first. That's all right, welcome back to you. Welcome back to you. Well, earlier today, a dam was blown up in Ukraine in the southern part of Ukraine, and Ukraine is blaming Russia for this and Russia is saying we have nothing to do with it. Why would we blow up a dam that we built during the Soviet Union? And it's somewhat close to the Zephyrusia nuclear power plant, so there's concern about the water not being available, it's a cool plant, so that's really critical. We also know that Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said recently that he adamantly rejects calls for ceasefire, which have been issued by lots of countries in the global south, Brazil, Mexico, China, as well as the Pope, and others. So we also know that there's some good news on the horizon. And that is that the US government sent William Burns, a head of the CIA, to China to meet with his intelligence counterparts because apparently the White House is now finally a little nervous about getting up to war with China and the direction of this war in Ukraine. So that's my update. What about you? Well, just one more is that the International Summit for Peace in Ukraine convenes in Vienna this Saturday. It's a two-day international peace conference to try to talk about how to get to peace in Ukraine. And there will be a large number of in-person delegates, a number of people from Code Pink, MAPA, and other, our peace in Ukraine coalition will be going over. But it's really an international conference, largely the European peace organizations have initiated this. So we are hoping for great results out of that in terms of international unity to bring an end to this war. You can view it online. It does begin at about 4 a.m. Eastern time each day. So unless you're an early riser, you may be catching the later part of each day of sessions rather than the beginning, but it will be live streamed. Thank you, Nicole. Yes, and we'll be sending out information, links so that you can watch the live stream to our Code Pink on this Google group. If you're not already a part of that group, I urge you to join us. You can just email MAHA, MAHA at CodePink.org, or me, Marcy, Marcy, Y, at CodePink.org, and we'll add you to the group. So with that, I would just like to make a pitch for phone bankers. Code Pink is going to be launching a phone bank on Tuesdays. We will have a training session on the 13th of June, but you don't have to attend the training. We do want you to attend the training, but you don't have to in order to be part of the phone bank. So what's all this about? Okay, so what we're going to be doing is we will be calling Capitol Hill. Yes, we call Capitol Hill during Code Pink Congress. The Code Pink Congress only meets the first and third Tuesday of the month, and this phone bank operation will be all day on Tuesdays. We will provide a list of lawmakers to call in DC, and the script, of course, you can put it in words, you know, confuse it with your own voice, but we received a lot of feedback when we delivered our ceasefire petition that ran as a full-page ad in the Hill, a widely-read newspaper on Capitol Hill, and the feedback that we were getting from congressional offices was that those who want a ceasefire, who want negotiations without precondition to end this war are too far. You know, that we really need to be much louder. We need to be calling. We need to be more in the street. So this is our effort to do that, and I urge you to join our phone bank. The phone bank, rather than Maha, can put the link in the chat. You can also just email me if you want to join it, and again, you will be part of the team. It'll be great. It'll be fun. With that, let's go to the Peace and the Crane Coalition website. I'd like to just show you the ad, as well as the multiple deliveries of this ad, both on Capitol Hill and the congressional home districts. Maha's going to share the screen and take a look. Okay, so here we see Washington, DC, Chicago, Madison, exploring Milwaukee, San Francisco, San Juan, that's where Bay Area, and on and on. Downs, Philadelphia, all that you can see, you can visit this at peaceinocrane.org under news, may petition delivery. So this was organized by QuickPink and the Peace and the Crane Coalition, Massachusetts Peace Action, Roots Action, lots of organizations, and Maha, please show us the ceasefire ad or the petition for people to get an idea of what we were delivering. And I think that can be found under resources on the peaceandcrane.org website, resources and flyers, and then you can see a copy of the petition. And it's not too late to deliver this petition to your congressperson, and you can, or there we go, and so you can see it was endorsed by over 100 organizations, and we had so many people also endorsing it, such as Dr. Cornel West. He's in the news a lot. And Daniel Elger, moments on in the Vietnam women. Roger Waters, co-founder of, co-founder, I guess that's the right term of Pink Floyd, and former ambassador of the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock. That's great, we've got a lot of people endorse this. So you take a look and I encourage you to deliver this to your congress person, and ask them to publicly speak out for a ceasefire and negotiations without preconditions. What does that mean that means, let's start talking right. We don't have to say Russian troops out before we talk. You know, everything's on the table. Time to make a decision. Okay, with that, let's get started with our program. We have both Rick Sterling, who recently visited Crimea, and Pamela Lawrence of the No Tomato Network who's gonna talk about censorship. What the US is involved in now to stifle voices that question where we're going with this. So first, Rick Sterling, let me introduce him. He is a Canadian-American journalist who recently returned from Crimea. That's a peninsula located between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. Rick, we'll talk about what he saw, what he heard, as well as provide some analysis of the political situation in Crimea, home to ethnic Russians who in 2014 voted to join the Russian Federation. Having previously worked in publishing, electronics and aerospace, Rick is active in the Mount Babel Peace and Justice Center, Syria support movement and task force on the Americas. His writing is published at antiwar.com, LA Progressive and other progressive sites. So welcome, Rick Sterling. Oh, Rick, I think we need to unmute the camera. That would be good. There we go, yay, you're on. Yeah, yeah, thanks very much. I thought I would show a few photographs from both from the 2016 trip that I made to Crimea with various people, Ray McGovern and Anne Wright included, but also from the trip that I just came back from a few weeks ago. So I'll try to share the screen here. And it's disappeared. Let's see, excuse me, I thought it was all set up, but it's apparently not. Well, you're also afraid to just tell us. Yeah, yeah, I think we're good to go here now from the beginning. And can you see that now, Marcy? I see you. No. Oh, okay, all right. I guess the other option is, well, is if... You know what you can do is just talk about it and if you want to share a link or something like that. Or maybe email your slides to one of us. Right, I think we should be good to go now. Can you see it now? I think it's coming. I think it's coming. Okay, there we go, there it is. All right, good, and from the beginning. Okay, can you see that? Yes. I hope so, yeah. Sorry about that, people. But in any case, Crimea, Plashpoint and the NATO-Russia conflicted. It really is, Crimea is in some ways emblematic of the conflict in Ukraine because it comes down to the issue of... Ukraine was a multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic country with a significant part of the population of Crimea or part of the population of Ukraine, rather, being Russian speaking. In the case of Crimea, it was vastly more than that, 85 or 90% of the people used Russian in their daily life and at least 65%, it was the first language. Just briefly, 1783, Crimea became part of Russia. 1954, Crimea was appointed to fall under the administration of the Ukrainian Socialist Republic, but they were all in the Soviet Union, so it was not a big thing. And then as soon as the USSR started breaking up, the majority of Crimeans expressed the strong will to secede from Ukraine, and they wanted to stay with Russia. They became the autonomous Republic of Crimea within Ukraine. So they found that compromise and it was with the 19, where it was with the 2014 coup in February of 2014 that they made the decision they had to depart. This map shows the division I was just talking about in showing the vote for Yanukovych, the elected president of Ukraine in the 2010 election, which was monitored by the OSCE and other international organizations. But the map here, mostly it shows the division down at the bottom, of course, is the Crimean Peninsula in the dark red. The part in the red above it is the so-called Donbas and extending over and even including Odessa in Southern Ukraine. Just again briefly, there was a massacre on February 20th of 2014, the coup followed just two days later. What we learned, it was really interesting learning this time around in Crimea. I wanted to get the details of how exactly they made that transition and how they made the decision. And we learned that some weeks before that there were ultra-nationalists from Ukraine that had gone to Crimea and tried to demolish the statue of Lenin, both in the capital, Simferopol and in Yalta. And big, much larger crowds of people stalked them from doing that. Lenin, of course, was a symbol of the Soviet Union. He was also a symbol of Russia and the majority of people there recognized that whether or not they supported Lenin, they thought it was important to maintain his statue and they supported that. Following the annexation or the accession of Crimea to Russia, that's when the sanctions on Russia, sanctions on Russia really began. The West started imposing sanctions on both Crimea and Russia. Ships that used to dock at the ports in Crimea were not allowed to do that by the Western sanctions. University graduates from Crimea, there are university credentials where we're not recognized. And so really the conflict that has been unfolding and has really peaked since February 24th of last year, it really got going back in February and March of 2014. This is a picture from 2016 and it shows the city council of the capital. And these were all the elected officials. They're mostly on the right and in the back and members of our delegation on the left. But we had many meetings with city councils there and as well as in Yalta in Sevastopol. And the handshake in the back is just simple, is emblematic of what they wanted to do. They wanted to be friends with the US. They didn't see the reason for hostility and they were eager to meet with us. And of course in some people said we were violating some sanctions by the US on traveling to Crimea. We didn't know whether that was true. We didn't know that our credit cards didn't work there and there were other signs of the sanctions but the people there welcomed us warmly and all across the board people were saying they were happy with joining Russia. They had gone along with being part of Ukraine but the situation had exploded with the coup and the anti-Russia hostility that was emanating from the ultra-nationalists in Ukraine. Here we were meeting with students. Here we were Bob Spice and myself meeting with the Armenian cultural group. We, you know, the group broke up into small groups and we met with many different parties and ethnicities within Crimea. And here was Elizabeth Murray's meeting with young Tatar's. We had a fascinating meeting with young Tatar's and we learned about the history there. We learned that their decision, their full support for joining Russia. Of course, Tatar Stan is a province of Russia and Kazan City is the capital of Tatar Stan and subsequently, of course the Tatar's, historically they go back to when it was part of the Ottoman Empire and there are some of the indigenous people of Crimea and in World War II there were accusations of their complicity with the Germans and Stalin made the decision to deport many, the Tatar community to elsewhere in the Soviet Union. And one of the first things that Putin did after Crimea acceded to Russia, became part of Russia, he passed a legislation welcoming Tatar's back and making amends and Tatar is an official language of Crimea as is Ukrainian. And also the state sponsor has helped to build for mosques throughout Crimea for the Tatar community. So that was fascinating. It was also interesting to learn from the young Tatar's who were very sharp that about the role of NGOs and them buying off people within buying off opposition and of them promoting the medialist Tatar organization which was involved with sabotage of the electricity and that kind of thing. So this was, it was fascinating to hear their knowledge about the role of the kind of the dirty role of the U.S. Financing sabotage operations and sabotage groups that were going to be trying to undermine Crimea. This is a picture of myself and a couple of women who I met in a library in Yalta. And the woman on my left is Ukrainian. They're both from Ukraine. And they're both from Ukraine. And the woman on my left is Ukrainian. They're both Crimeans. But the woman on the right lives, excuse me, the woman on my left was Ukrainian. And so I asked her what did she do during the election? Did she support the reunification with Russia and the simultaneous secession from Ukraine? And she said she did not vote because her mother in Kiev felt so strongly and was so opposed to it. She said, I know I'm married to a native Crimean. I know it's for the best of Crimea, but I didn't want to upset my mother. I didn't want to upset my mother anymore. So she made the decision just not to vote. In the referendum that they held on March 16th of 2014, the statistics were 83% of the eligible voters did vote and 97% voted to the decision to secede from Ukraine and reunify with Russia. Under, and what we learned there as well is that under Ukrainian rule, there was very little investment in Ukraine infrastructure was falling apart. A lot of the good infrastructure they had under the Soviet Union and factories and very large children camps that those were falling apart were decaying. And that with Russia, when Russia came in and we were there just two years after that decision to reunify with Russia, Russia was improving the infrastructure in a major way. So the people there, despite the downside of the sanctions and other things and the hostile actions from Ukraine, cutting off some of the water supply, cutting off the electricity, despite those negative things, there was absolutely no regrets and the people that we talked with were very happy with the decision. This is a picture from just a few weeks ago and it shows a hilltop, it's hard to tell from this, but this is a hilltop, almost a small mountain top that's near Sevastopol and in this region was the headquarters of the Nazi army during the occupation of Crimea. Crimea was occupied for about one and a half years and so they had resistance action going on and we went to the resistance, the museum, the partisan museum, but in Russia there's a very different understanding, there's a level of consciousness of what does fascism mean, what does occupation mean, what does war mean? They know it very much, all of their parents and grandparents had to endure it in World War II and so there's a different level of consciousness. This sign on the right is the 7th of March, 1944, that was the day that Sevastopol was liberated. So Crimeans know war, they pass it on through the generations and they fiercely oppose it and they want peace and friendship. This is another scene from the same place that just shows a lot of young people and this was another site and the significance here is that it, this is a museum where they held submarines that could be loaded with nuclear missiles in the 1950s and the 1960s and this brings home, we forget or it's easy to not think about the possibility of nuclear war and this brought it home. They've turned this into a first class museum but it's the actual place it's a tunnel under a mountain that from one side is the Black Sea and on the other side is the Bell and Cloud of Port. This is education at that same museum. There was a class full of students that went through at the same time that we were there. And this statue is emblematic or this statue is emblematic of the fact that the hate goes one way. Russians and Crimeans do not hate Ukrainians. They consider themselves, they consider them brothers and sisters and this is a statue of a Ukrainian poet in the Crimean town of Yalta. We saw this, the sabotage actions happened when just prior to our crossing the Kurtstrait bridge on the train, this attack on a fuel depot apparently happened just a very, very short time before our train passed by the area. This is a bit of a closer view and Crimeans have the right to self-determination. Why is the West denying this? I think I say this is emblematic because the conflict is basically about people in Eastern Ukraine wanting to have their own rights and not have their culture and national identity eliminated by ultra nationalism. And it's most clear in the case of Crimea because of its unique history, but I think it all also applies in Eastern Ukraine and it was really the West that has promoted the ultra nationalism that including neo-Nazis who were spearheading the coup in Kiev in February of 2014. So I don't know if I've gone over my time or not. I guess I have a few minutes. So I'm sorry about that. Oh, that's fine. No, no, so can you hear me okay? Yeah, yeah, just one last thing. Yeah, one last point, Marcy is kudos to Code Pink. I think what you're doing is terrific. It's practical, it's important. And if people are interested in more reading the articles that my colleague Dan Kovalik and I have done, they're all posted at Andywar.com at LA Progressive and other sites. So we'd encourage you to take a look at those if you're curious. Thank you so much. Rick Sterling, journalist who recently returned from Crimea and you mentioned your colleague Dan Kovalik. He'll be with us on our call with the Peace and Crane Coalition tomorrow at 1230 Pacific 330 Eastern. So if you'd like to know more and hear more from Dan, join us then. You can find out at peaceandcrane.org. And before we go to our next guest, I just wanna put in another plug for phone bankers. Code Pink is recruiting phone bankers for Tuesdays to call into DC. We have lists of the members of the House Armed Services Committee, Senate Armed Services Committee, the squad. People, we wanna really be bringing these phones off the hook and saying stop with the weapons. This is not going anywhere good. We see escalatory trajectory here and we wanted to stop, but they need to hear from us. They must not hearing enough from us. That's the truth. All right, thank you so much, Rick. Cole is going to introduce our next guest. Sure. So next up is Tamara Lawrence. She is a member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, Welf in Canada and serves as the international convener of the Environment Working Group. She's on the advisory committee of the Notre Nadeau Network. She's on the global network against weapons and nuclear power in space and on world beyond war. And she's a PhD candidate in global governance at the Balsilli School for International Affairs at Wilfrid Laurier University. And her research focuses on the climate and environmental impacts of the military. Tamara. So good evening, everyone. It's really nice to be with you. Thank you very much to Code Pink and to MAPPA for the invitation. And I also want to applaud the great work that you're doing across the United States. So I'm in London in the United Kingdom right now and I arrived this morning. I am here for a couple of days to meet with members of Wilp UK. And I was lucky to have a couple of hours to be able to walk around central London. And as I was passing by Trafalgar Square, I got to Waterloo Place. And I noticed this very big imposing group of statues with the queen statue at the top. Her hands are in front of her open and she's holding to Reese and below her are statues of soldiers. And at the base of the statue are the words repeated, Crimea, Crimea, Crimea. And this is the statue of the guards Crimean War Memorial. And it's a statue that commemorates the British soldiers who were killed during the Crimean War between 1853 and 1856. And this was a imperial war. It had the British, the French, the Ottoman Empire and the Sardinians on one side and Russia on the other side. And it was a humiliating defeat for Russia. And it was geopolitically, of course, strategic for the British and its allies. But it made me think about the fact that the collective West has been in some form or another in conflict or at war with Russia for the past 170 years. And it's really important for us to end this conflict and to build peace with Russia. So I am on route to Vienna because I am going to be joining members of Code Pink at the International Summit for Peace in Ukraine in Austria. And I am representing the Canadian Voice of Women for Peace and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom Canada. And I am bringing the message that we want Canada and the other NATO countries to stop sending weapons, to support negotiations. And we are also advocating for a truth and reconciliation process. So I hope that you will tune in and follow this conference and that you will also pressure your officials to help end this war. So as you know, this NATO-Ukraine-Russia war is not just a conventional war with soldiers and tanks and missiles and grenades, but it is also very much an information war. And in fact, it's an unprecedented propaganda war. And this is how Noam Tromsky, for instance, has described it. And I appreciated this more when I too went on a fact-finding mission last November. I spent a month and I went from Egypt to Russia, Finland, Latvia, Poland and Romania. And I also spoke with Ukrainian refugees and I want to encourage you to do the same thing. So I am an activist, but I'm also an academic and I have been really troubled by the fact that for the past year at my university, there has been a lack of open discussion and debate about the war. There has been a lack of criticizing NATO and Canadian foreign policy on the campuses. There's a very strange silencing at our post-secondary institutions right across the country. And when I have spoken up at the university or in the media or in the streets, I have been ridiculed and I have been vilified. And over the past year, I have discovered that there's this really insidious partnership between the universities, these pro-military, pro-NATO think tanks in Canada and the Canadian intelligence services. And I've been just really concerned by this expanding but very troubling language around disinformation and disinformation has a really specific definition. It means false information that is purposefully placed to deceive and that can undermine democracy and security. And it's the universities and the government and mainstream media and these think tanks that are deploying this language of disinformation to restrict and constrict debate. So I've noticed it for instance in a few reports that have come out and I would like to share two with you. So last June, June of 2022, the University of Calgary released a report called Disinformation and the Russian Ukraine War on Canadian social media. And it identified so-called Russian-influenced accounts that are spreading what they say is disinformation in Canada. And they identified people like Glenn Greenwald, Benjamin Norton, Aaron Mate, Max Blumenthal and John Pilger. And you know that these are credible journalists that are criticizing American foreign policy and NATO and they are not spreading disinformation. But this is what the University of Calgary released. And then in March of this year, there was another report that came out called The Enemy of My Enemy, Russia's weaponization of Canada's far right and far left to undermine support for Ukraine. And this is a report that came out from the University of Regina, a think tank called the McDonald-Laurier Institute and Disinfo Watch, which is funded by the US Embassy in Canada as well as the University of Maryland. And in this report, it says that if you make the claim that Ukraine is corrupt, that NATO is responsible for the war, that we should stop sending weapons, you are considered far left and spreading of disinformation. So, but you know that there are some truth in those claims and we could debate that, we can marshal evidence for those claims. So that report came out in March of this year. The next month in April at my university, at the University of Waterloo, there was a two-day conference called The Weaponization of Disinformation in Canada. And it highlighted these reports and it brought together academics from across the country, representatives of think tanks and the intelligence services. And they were just criticizing Russia, China and Iran, but there was no self-reflexivity. There was no critique of what Canada and NATO or the United States are doing. And they were deploying again this language of disinformation. And again, it was to discredit and to restrict debates saying they were determining what is acceptable and what is unacceptable in commenting on this war. So what they are trying to do is they are trying to coordinate with the universities, the governments and intelligence services, having and singing from a common song sheet, having an approved narrative and they are trying to limit what is taking place, the research and the commentary that is taking place at the universities. So the universities in Canada are also linking with the US universities. We see this links with Stanford University, with George Mason University, the University of Maryland. And this has also led me to do some more investigation. And what I have found is that Canada's security intelligence services thesis, which is the equivalent of the USCIA, 15 years ago set up an academic outreach and stakeholder engagement project. And every year they are having workshops with academics. And I also believe with journalists on various themes. And the themes have been predominantly Russia, Iran and China. And so what I think is happening is there's this kind of this indoctrination, there's the socialization about what the narrative is going to be, what is going to be acceptable information and what is going to be disinformation. And this relates, friends, to what has come out by journalists Matt Taiibi and Michael Schellenberg. I encourage you to listen to their testimony if you didn't in March in Congress. And Michael Schellenberg talks about this as the censorship industrial complex. And I see this very much taking place in Canada and it's also taking place in Europe. And we need to pay attention to governments starting to introduce legislation to try to restrict debate on social media and at the universities and in the media, et cetera. So I just want to impress upon me, if you hear this term just information, treat it as a red flag, start asking questions. I think our university should be brave and safe spaces where we can have robust debates where we can use critical inquire, we can do investigations, we can do our research. Our university should be an important line of defense where they're protecting our freedom of speech and our democracies. But I believe that our governments and intelligence service are co-opting them and really corrupting them. So we have to stand up, speak out. We need to continue to have our community events to try to get this information to the public. I want you to be courageous and keep trying to get the information out there. I want to close by sharing two resources with you. One is this excellent new book by Jacques Beaud entitled, Operation Z, The Hidden Truth of the War in Ukraine Revealed. Jacques Beaud is a recently retired former Swiss colonel and he was also a senior intelligence officer. He worked with NATO in Ukraine and with the United Nations. You will learn a tremendous amount also about Crimea from this book, read it and share it. And of course, I also want to promote Medea's excellent book that you should read and share as well. So thanks very much for this opportunity to speak with you this evening and I look forward to your comments and questions. Thanks. Thank you so much. Fascinating. It's so important Tamara and Rick will be with us for Q&A in just a moment. I did want to follow up and say I posted a link in the chat after corresponding with Tamara I started looking into this whole issue of disinformation on the government, the Defense Department working with universities to quote, identify disinformation. And I came across this revelatory press release from DARPA which is an agency that the Defense Department contracts with and it talks about how they're organizing 14s of researchers to develop algorithms that are going to detect when somebody is spreading disinformation. This would include both videos as well as essays. And they talk about this going, this becoming going online, you know, being actualized in July of 2024. At the university, somebody asked in the chat which universities are involved. Well, with this effort, if you look at the link in the chat it talks about Purdue University, Cal Berkeley, New York University, NYU, SRI International. Anyway, I don't think it's too big a leap of the imagination to say that well, an algorithm could be developed to say, oh, if you use the words provoked in a paragraph about the Russian invasion that might be disinformation. So what's the purpose of all this? The purpose, according to the Defense Department is to de-platform those who are spreading this disinformation. And that could mean anything from, you know, being removed from a social media platform, blocked or it could be making sure, ensuring that your messages are not steamed by them. So that's what we're up against. You take a look at that link and we'll now engage with our guests for Stirling and Tamro Lorenz for Q&A. And I'm gonna ask Cole if you can start with a question and I'll take a look at the chat. Please feel free to post your questions in the chat. Sure, I will start with a question to Rick. I know you went to St. Peter's in Moscow on your trip as well as to Crimea. What is your understanding of the, or your best estimation, I guess, of the minimal Russian demands to end this conflict? What is their bottom line, their war objective? The bottom line is Ukraine cannot be part of NATO, a neutral Ukraine and stop determination for the people of Ukraine, the Russian speaking people of the Donbass as well as Crimea. So I think that's the bottom line. It's Putin laid it out very clearly in his long speeches on the 21st and the 24th, denazification, which I think means demilitarization and then the Ukraine as a neutral country that can't be used by NATO to attack it. Rick, I have a question also. What about the mood in Crimea? You hear about attacks on Crimea, you hear about US intelligence, assisting in determining targets for Crimea? What's the mood like? The mood, yeah, the mood in Crimea, of course, we were just there five days and we talked with a variety of people, but it's actually within Russia as well, the mood is very vibrant. The streets are full of people from early in the morning until late at night. The mood is positive. I think they realized that the West thought they were gonna be able to crush the Russian economy and they completely failed. The stores are stocked with goods, with merchandise, whether it's food, sporting goods stores or department stores or grocery stores. And the people are sad. I think there's a sad mood because they don't like the war, but I think the vast majority think they were forced into it and they had to do it. We did hear, I'll just say one more thing which several people in Crimea told us from their discussions with their friends and relatives who live in Eastern Ukraine is they were saying, why did you wait so long? Why wasn't Russia doing anything for all those years? After 2014, when Ukraine was bombing it. So we did hear that, that they should have acted sooner, but the vast majority of people think it had to be done and they're very sorry about it, but they believe it's essential to continue and to get peace as soon as possible. So I think the work that you're doing on demanding peace of our government really is crucial. Cool. So let me throw one to Tamara. So on this disinformation thought process that you have described, can you essentialize what is the theory that they are propounding in terms of who are the disinformator, disinformers? How do you recognize disinformation when you see it and what do they plan to do about it? Well, so they're identifying like far left, which would be us in the peace movement and the far right as people who are disseminating disinformation. So they don't want people on the right and the left challenging the dominant narrative. That is continuing this war in Ukraine until Ukraine achieves victory. So for us on the left that are calling for weapons to stop and for negotiations to take place, this really challenges the dominant narrative and they're really upset by this. So they don't want to hear from us at the university. They don't want to hear from us on social media and I am very concerned that this is going to get worse before it gets better. So there is a lot of money going in to this disinformation project in Canada, the Department of National Defense with the Social Sciences and Research Council, sure is gatekeeping who is getting money for research and the Department of National Defense is now giving a lot of money to academics that support pro-military, pro-NATO, pro-government research. So they're getting the money and there's no money for peace research at all in Canada. And as Marcy said, some of the programs in Canada are also being funded by the US government by the US Department of Advanced Research, DARPA. And so there is this coordination between the United States and Canada and the European Union. So we're seeing it not only on the campuses, like I said, but then this new legislation that is coming out of the European Union to try to restrict social media. And I think that we're gonna start seeing more sectors of our society, under these censorship, regulation, laws, pressure. So we have to keep just, keep pressing back and ensuring that we have space to have these debates and to have these conversations because it's the truth and this transparency that's gonna help us end the war. This is one of the reasons why we're calling for a truth and reconciliation process so that we can have that real conversation about what's been taking place in the war in Ukraine. Tamara, a follow-up question. Somebody asked in the chat, have you personally experienced any of these discussions for speaking out and asking pro-govern questions? Have you received any admissions from the university? Any consequences? Yeah, I have and I have had to go and see the director three times and I have also written formal letters to the Institute's council to say that we need to remind ourselves that we are a university, we're a place where we're supposed to be having dialogue and debates and we should be respecting diversity of views. We should be able to provide diversity of views. We should be able to put all the information on the table and work with it and figure out like what is the truth here? But if we're keeping information off the table, we aren't coming to the kinds of resolutions that we need to and the university really plays that important role to help the public figure out what's really going on. But the universities in Canada, the United States are really shirking their responsibilities and there's this revolving door, not just in the military industrial complex, but in the censorship industrial complex. We see the intelligence services and the government moving into the universities and taking these key positions. You've got Condoleezza Rice at Stanford University. You've got Michael McFall, who was the United States former ambassador to Russia at Stanford University. And last year, he had a symposium on disinformation and it was President Obama who spoke and who denounced Russia for spreading disinformation. So do you see how this is operating? And then you can see it being replicated in Europe. So this is why we really have to be on guard about this and we have to keep speaking our trade. Thank you. Maybe we can wrap up with one last question, Cole. We have three questions, people who've raised their hands. We might call on some of them. How about Don Smith? Don? Okay, yes. My question for Tamara is, there should be an organization of academics. I mean, like there's Jeffrey Sacks, there's, we have in Code Pink and World Beyond War, there are various academics who are agree with the Code Pink point of view that the US provoked Russia and Ukraine. Those academics should get together and coordinate their efforts to get the word out. What other academics do you know of? I mean, you must know of others. Yeah, good idea. Yeah, organize academics, right? Okay, how about Yuri? Yuri. Yeah, thank you. You need that mute. Okay, Yuri, can you unmute? But also before, okay. At some point, I think Don wanted to know if Tamara knows of anything organized amongst academics. If I can just reply to that quickly. Actually, there was an expert on Russian history at a university in Quebec who was faced with students backlash, wanting him to be expelled from the university because of a sympathy for Russia. And so academics are self-censoring because like I said, the dominant government and media narrative, and now at the universities, this dominant narrative is to support Ukraine, is to support Ukraine not to challenge at all Canadian foreign policy or NATO, so professors are not speaking out. I've had several meetings with academics privately, both with Canadian academics as well as European academics. They want to meet privately, even though they have tenure, they don't want to speak out because they don't want to have difficult relationships with their colleagues and they don't want to stick out like a sore thumb. So I'm just a lowly PhD student. I don't have very much research funding and I don't have tenure, but people are dying and I don't want to be silent and I'd rather risk an academic career than be silent about this. I want to stop this war and I want to advocate for peace. And I've said to my director, why is it? What does it say about the state of our universities and our society that if you're advocating for peace, like me, you're the one that's marginalized, you're the one that's ridiculed, that's a problem. So I'm going to continue to defend, to defend the university as a space for diversity of use, especially for championing for peace. Sounds like we need academics for free speech and international association. Okay, Cole, maybe a couple of questions and then we'll go to the last one. One more from Yuri and Mahas reminding me that we usually don't call on attendees to speak in the Q and A, but to put their questions in the chat but Yuri, go ahead for the last one, please. Okay, thank you, Cole. And thanks to Code Pink and Massachusetts Peace Action for all the great work they do. Hi there, Rick and that's Samara, my question. And both of you can answer is is there any change is, well, this is a repetitive question I've asked to Rick, but I'm curious, tomorrow's views on this, whether Ukraine will ever be the once complex, but United country once was, or is that all completely demolished because of NATO meddling in Ukraine? And because my friend Boy on the Eastern European journalist, he thinks that Ukraine will be partitioned into three countries. So you'll have Western Ukraine with Kiev as its capital, which will be aligned with the West, NATO, the EU and whatnot. And Eastern Ukraine will just either be independent, it's own independent country or just like Crimea will vote to be part of the Russian Federation. Serious your thoughts on that. And if that is gonna be the case, who's to blame, yeah, who's to blame for that? Any records, Samara, you wanna try that? I can, about eight or nine years ago, John Meersheimer predicted all this. He said, if NATO keeps expanding and keeps pressing and effectively making the Ukraine a member of NATO, unofficially, he said, Russia is going to eventually react and they're going to destroy Ukraine. He was exactly right there about the reasons and the consequences. Hopefully we can end it as soon as possible to minimize the damage. Of course, the map of Europe has changed many times. And of course, the United States has supported the breakup of many countries and in fact, they promoted the breakup of many countries. I think it's unfortunate, but it's inevitable that Eastern, the Donbass region of Eastern Ukraine is gonna go to Russia. And I hope that Ukraine can recover and rebuild in the future as a neutral country, as a bridge between Russia and the West. That's the best outcome, I think. Take a vote in the Donbass region, just like they did in Crimea. And if the majority want to be part of Russia, they should be allowed to do so. Thank you, Rick. I'm just one last question from Medea, who has joined us, Medea Benjamin, co-author with Nicholas J.S. Davies of War in Ukraine, Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, headed to Vienna for the International Peace Summit that starts June 10th and 11th. Medea, are you there? She was there. Yes, I am. Hey, Rick, I had a question about whether the people of Crimea are worried that the war is going to come big time onto their territory. And there are many people in Ukraine, as you know, who say that, oh, we can take over Crimea militarily. What do people in Crimea think? And are they afraid? The sense we got is, no, they are not afraid. And the summary of one woman was, Kiev will sooner take back the moon and they'll take back Crimea. Thank you. Okay, with that, we're gonna wrap up our Q&A and move on to our capital calling party. But first, let's unmute and thank our guests, Rick Sterling and Tamara Lorenz. What a robust conversation. Thank you. Thank you so much. Good. Bye-bye, bye-bye, y'all. Thank you. That's a great word. Yes. And Mohamed asked that you please post in the chat our action portion of the evening. This is our capital calling party. We're calling into the capital leaving messages for our members of Congress. And tonight, the message is, we want...