 I was approached by some of the other guys that stayed on. They said, uh, Jones, you did the right thing getting out when you did. We seen Macron. That's almost hilarious. What's going on? The French, I know, love the protest. And again, I'm making light of what is quite a serious situation there. We had similar with Trudeau, just completely disconnected. Had you arranged to meet people beforehand through your sort of social network? Walked into work at nine o'clock one morning and nine o'five. I've been fired. Mike, how are you, my friend? I'm very good. Thanks, Chris. Thank you very much for having me. Do I call you Mike or do I have to call you I.O.? Mike. I.O. Gray. You don't have to call me Mike. Game attack, as it used to be. No. Oh, is it your gamer name? Yeah. I wondered what it sounded quintessentially English. I.O. Gray. That was the point. Yeah, that was the point. But the I was a joke because back then it was iPad iPods or this and my buddy mortars another ex army guy. He put I mortars and I thought that was hilarious. So I just put I.O. Gray and we were just saying I everything back then it was fair a few years ago now. And was that how you started your channel was through gaming? Yeah, it was actually World of Warships back in 2015 when that was launched. I happen to be sort of doing freelance web design and any freelancer will know it's kind of feast or famine. So you had a lot of downtime and then a buddy of mine said, Hey, this Twitch thing, do you know, like people will watch you play games and pay? I was like, what? This is insane. Now I started watching and I was like, I can do better than that. So sure enough, I started streaming on Twitch and did it all did all right with this game and eventually got hired by the gaming developer whose headquarters were in St. Petersburg. And that's how I ended up in Russia back in 2018. Wow, was that a big move for you? Well, my life had kind of broken down anyway. My relationship had all gone to pot and you know, as the universe sometimes does, it just sort of gives you this opportunity and I had like an agency job and this company had hired me full time, but I walked into work at nine o'clock one morning and nine oh five. I'd been fired. They just sort of said, oh, we don't need you anymore. I was just happened to mention it on a stream while I was playing the game. I said, oh, well, I'll get back to streaming now because I've just been kicked out of my job. And then someone just said, why don't you come work for us? I started off with an idea of Paris, but then I blipped on the radar of the head office and they said, no, no, come work for us here in St. Petersburg. The issue is you have to be you have to relocate to St. Petersburg. And I thought, why not? Why not? And that was about the time of the World Cup as well. So it was electric atmosphere is incredible. You bumped into Edward Snowden and not quite. No, I think I have his contact actually. I think it would only be a phone call or two. And yeah, I'd love to have a chat with him. Yeah. I mean, he really seems like he relocated quite successfully. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm assuming he's pretty happy where he is now. I know I am. So I think he'd have a lot to say as well. Probably better than being in Guantanamo Bay or wherever they were going to send in. Let's talk about Russia for a little bit. I was very fortunate to have been there. Oh my gosh, probably around 2003, something like that. I was actually on my way to a skiing holiday for Christmas and New Year in Czech Republic. And what I always used to do was when I booked these tick these air tickets, try and get somewhere where I've never been. So I thought, hang on. Look, Czech is not that far from Moscow. So why don't I go to Moscow first? We got a train from Moscow to St. Petersburg. That was incredible. These old, they're not vintage, but you know, these sort of old style trains and you get, you pull your bed down at night and it's quite funny. We got on that train and there was a chap there, a Russian chap. He was very nice and immediately we tried a conversation. He's like Russian. No, no, no, no. Did you speak English? No. And then he just looked at us and said, Portugese. See, I'm seeing. I can't remember what it was. It's not me and the girl I was traveling with at the time we both worked in Mozambique where the language is Portuguese. And of course, during the civil war there and the uprising and did it at Russia played a big part. And as such, they had their military trainers in country, obviously, and they had to learn Portuguese, which is the second language of or the, you know, official language of Mozambique. So that was quite, that was quite funny. But if, if I had to bring back one thing other than just the incredible nest to be in Red Square. Well, just amazing, but the thing I remember about St. Petersburg was it was the most miserably cold I've ever been in my life. And you're talking to someone that's been in the Arctic and the Antarctic, as I say, as a Marine, you'd have done the Arctic training. So, you know what cold is? It was bitter. We stayed in this old, you know, like a backpacker hostel. I don't know what the building used to be, but it it was a bit like being in some old school dormant tree. There was no heating or anything. And I remember looking out the window and seeing this chap sweep in the street. So, you know, council worker, what would we call them back here, right? And he had a bottle of vodka sticking out of his pocket. And then when you issue, yeah, and when you went on the underground, which is probably the most beautiful underground in the world. Is it not the one of Moscow also has some gorgeous metro stations. Absolutely breathtaking. And the crazy thing was amongst this stunning, you know, historic architecture, every sort of 20 meters on each platform was was an off license. Yeah, yeah. And you'd sit on the train. We were obviously doing the tourist bit, but there'd be some, you know, very respectable sort of middle-aged woman in her business attire and she'd be drinking like gin and tonic at eight in the morning. I thought, oh, great. Yeah. Yeah. I had similar experience with that. Yeah. And St. Petersburg is a gorgeous, gorgeous city. It was quite homely for me being that its reputation in Russia is just always gray there. And having come from England, I was like, well, I feel right at home, rainy, gray. Then you get the summer, which is glorious. But one thing I liked about St. Petersburg was the extreme of the seasons in England, it's almost homogenous. It's that you're not quite sure whether you're in autumn or winter and they kind of blend together. And in winter's kind of become spring and you get two weeks of summer. Yeah. Way whack out the Barbie drinks and beers and then that's it. That's your summer done and you're back to autumn and gray and miserable. Whereas in Russia, it's very clearly defined which season is which, and then you have that deep winter St, Petersburg, was the first time I'd felt wind penetrate through thick jeans and not just through my jeans, but to my bones. The cold hurt the marrow of my bones. And luckily, I didn't have to walk too far to work, but I was like, good God, I've never felt that cold in my actual being as well. Like you said, you've got the wind coming off the Finnish Gulf as well in St. Petersburg. So yeah, it can be quite brutal. Moscow has a sort of gentler sort of climate and currently absolutely gorgeous and glorious here at the moment. It's just looking up because I've got a map there and I love to kind of situate myself where we're talking about in the conversation. We have an added problem here, Mike, in our summers now is, I don't know how much we're allowed to say about this, but we get a lot of aeroplanes go over, you can say. Yeah, people comment in my videos the lack of traces of aeroplanes. We don't have an airport in Plymouth, they shut it down. Okay. We're not really on any sort of essential flight route from what I understand. I mean, I'm a private pilot, I'm not a commercial pilot, but and yet within the space of sort of two hours, you can count 30 aeroplanes that have gone across and whatever it is folks that they leave in their wake and let's not get into that. It then forms this porridge in the sky as the day progresses and you lose your summer, you lose your summer. The only change, Mike, was during the lockdowns. Oh yes, yeah, I recall. Because there were no, because there were no, yeah. Yeah. Whereas here on my walk and talks when I'm out and about, I used to live just south of St. Petersburg near Pulkaver Airport. So I was on a flight path with Pulkaver is a very busy airport, even with the sanctions and the blocking of flights. So obviously, certainly a lot of internal flights coming to and from Moscow, among many other places, and you'd see them go over quite a lot, but we'd have crystal clean blue skies. People would often comment like, wait a minute, how come there's no evidence of aircraft having been in the sky behind you? I was like, I can't comment. I don't know. It just seems to be how it is here in Russia. I often try to explain to people when we were kids, you had these beautiful blue skies. Yeah. I mean, rich, like crystal blue. Yeah, I enjoy them every day. Well, pretty much every day now here in Russia. Good summer. Yeah. Good. I'm pleased for you because we've only seen that since my childhood was during the lockdown and people's minds work in an interesting way that I don't think your average person quote unquote in the street, like can make that connection that whoa, this guy is a completely different color to that which we've seen for 20 years. This milky white, you know, is even if there aren't traces in the sky, you can still see it's there as this haze. Haze exactly. So moving swiftly on, congratulations on your channel and all the work you've been doing. I know that you're an incredibly popular YouTuber and I've been following your story and your bulletins. Well, probably round about this, the time the Ukraine and Russian situation kicked off. We are going to talk about you recently having gone missing in Ukraine, okay. We'll save that for a bit, folks, but we will cover it because my heart was just like, oh my God, I've lost my bloody guess for Monday. You swine. Now, genuinely, my heart really did crash for a minute because war is serious, isn't it? You know, it's incredibly serious and when it goes wrong, as it can do, you know, for spectators and it's, yeah, just, I mean, just awful. I mean, we saw Gonzalo go missing and I think he's missing again. Is that right? Yeah, second time. I reported the first instance and indeed the second. The first time was far more Gestapo like than the second. I think they learned their lesson there from the PR front and the outcry that it caused. So then they seemingly kind of tried to follow the book and be more, I don't know, civilized about it, but even then they couldn't resist sort of just mocking him and like filming his toilet. What's that got to do with the price of bread, you know, with regards to what he was accused of. And then these books about Putin, was it a crime to read about Putin in Ukraine? It seemingly is, I don't know, but then the fact that that's a crime says a lot about that society in my opinion. So it was kind of self-incriminating by the way they're like, look, we're filming everything and we're doing this. I was like, yeah, but you're saying a lot of bad things about yourself in the process, especially given that his crime was just not towing the official party line or just saying it how he saw it, which wasn't always complementary to the Kiev regime. How did your interest start, Mike? Well, I'll be absolutely frank and honest. I was like most people in the West, even though I'd lived in Russia for a while. I'd heard the odd story maybe about some area in the world called Donbas, I don't really know what it was or where it was. Not quite frankly, didn't care to look or look further. Russian-backed separatists, whatever, a bit strange. This has kind of blindsided me a bit. And the more I looked into it, not even really asking Russians, just internet research is very clear, the path that had gone there. And then as I did speak to Russians and did more research, if we go back from 2014 and Crimea, it was quite apparent how sort of carefully the diplomatic route had been followed with Minsk Accords and then the Second Minsk Agreements. It was like Russia was crossing every T and dotting every I, making sure that under international law, they had gone by the book. But as we then saw with the sanctions war, I noticed, I was quite amused when I first arrived in Russia to see something like the MIR payment system, because we had Visa, MasterCard and this thing called MIR. And I asked my wife, what's this MIR? She said, oh, that's the Russian system. And it just tweaked in my head then. I was like, interesting that the Russians would develop their own payment system, as if they're preparing for something. She said, well, actually it was after 2014, the first kind of sanctions, where the Russians suddenly couldn't enjoy cheddar cheese anymore, which greatly boosted the Russian cheese industry and farmers. So I could see that, okay, so Russia kind of got a little taste and realized, okay, if we're going to go down this road, it's going to end up probably magnified to this degree. Let's put the systems in place, which now with retrospect, we can see quite clearly happened with both industry, economy, the central bank had clearly prepared and probably not perfectly, I don't think you could go that far, but at least put in sufficient measures to weather the storm that they would face. So there was a little clue there that then started to make sense. And this was all on the backdrop, particularly after Crimea, where Putin suffered a lot of criticism that he didn't go into Donbas straight away in 2014. Again, I'll say with the benefit of retrospect and hindsight, we could probably say that he knew Russia wasn't ready for what the West would do in reaction to that. So despite him suffering that criticism, I think Russians as well are understanding the wisdom behind that patience. It caused a lot of pain, obviously for the people of Donbas. They weren't being backed by Russia as claimed in the BBC. And this was, I think, Jacques Barthes, a Swiss intelligence officer, was tasked specifically to find out if Russia was supplying weapons or any form of support and aid to the Donbas region against Ukraine. And he concluded no, he found no such evidence of any such activity from the Russian Federation, much to the chagrin of the DPR militia and the LPR militia who were calling out and crying out for this level of support, their heads of government going to the Kremlin begging for their assistance. And this is why we've kind of reached this point today as well, where the Russia is kind of doing it properly, rather when they could have just funneled weapons in, kind of done a proxy war as NATO have done. They could have done likewise, but they chose to make sure that they ticked all the boxes prior. I think people do understand the logic behind it and perhaps the, I'm not going to say the benefit, you know, the consequences are considered and that's how we've reached this point. So I did all that research and reached these conclusions. Then it was, my YouTube channel started through WhatsApp conversations with friends back home, where I was laughing that the West would say one thing one week, and then the next week it flipped on its head. And then we were sort of like, wow, this is ridiculous. Then I'd send, you know, Russian news articles, they'd say, oh, is this true? And I say, well, I don't know, but here's what Russians are saying. And then we put the two together. And then I thought, well, I can't keep track of all these lies. They're hilarious. I need to share them. So then I thought, I'll just do like on my lunch break between work, I'll just go through some of the headlines, maybe also go to the Western headlines and see how they match up. And that's how I got going on on YouTube and learning more and more about things. I think it's good credit to people that that they want to know more. And that there are people out there that are free thinking that what do we call that humanity? Yeah, but it was quite telling, was it not, when Russia today got, you know, smacks pretty quickly in the in the opening days, where Russia today's licenses were revoked in the UK, thinking the US, or maybe there was, they were still allowed. I know people then start start having to use VPN, hence why they were coming to my channel, because then I could give them a synopsis, but also they didn't have to go through all the rigmarole of trying to access Russia today and other other channels like Rio Novosti, etc. and TAS to get this alternative side. So yeah, there was the hunger, but that was quickly, that was quickly blocked by the West. And therefore the first question is, but why? But it was very quite apparent that no, they didn't want any alternative narrative being accessible to these citizens, because they know what they've done and they're lying through their teeth and their own archives, the BBC's own archives show, this idea of laughing at Putin for saying there's Nazis in Ukraine, whereas the BBC said exactly that around 2015. They did a whole documentary on it. Absolutely. And then just suddenly it's redacted, it's just suddenly, no, don't look that way. Look this way. And then the BBC and Sky News will show Zelensky being escorted by a guy with a tortuan-cop symbol on his shoulder and is there in plain sight. So yeah, really amusing. And it was with the kind of chuckles that I was having. And it was going all right. While I was sort of off the radar at 10,000 subscribers, 50,000 I started to get a bit nervous. And then sure enough, just after 100,000, I started to get my strikes and bans. But News Guard in particular, they're upset was that I was earning ad revenue. And I don't think it was just that because in November I then said that what I'd done is I'd actually put a bulk of that money because I had a job at the time. So my needs were met. So I was putting the money to one side. And then I had this idea to do this humanitarian aid run, but have it funded by the same companies that sanctioned Russia or withdrew from Russia that are advertising on my videos. Amazingly quickly after News Guard's report was published, sure enough, the very same videos that they listed in their article, these were suddenly struck, removed, and then YouTube sent me all sorts of notifications like we've gone through this, remove this, move this. And it was just eerily fast and accurate how then they then demonetized me as well, which was specifically what News Guard's disliked that ads were showing. Ironically, the RT documentaries, I had foreseen this and they were demonetized anyway. So the ads they were seeing were actually run by Google. So Google was still profiting off, quote, Russian propaganda, not me. And I even showed the screenshots proving it afterwards. But the last video was just me on my balcony, literally just discussing the news. I didn't even show any articles or link them. And they said that was hate speech as well for literally just going through the headlines. So you can see the agenda that's running. And again, it says way more about the West than it does about Russia. If what I was saying was truly lies or anything like that, I think it'd be a very different case. But this level of attention, I find quite amusing. But yeah, it does mean I have to kind of reconsider my approach. And I get the message I'm not welcome on this particular platform. That's fine. I think you're like me, though. You're a humanist. You want the best for everybody. Every time I've done a video on this situation, there's always somebody in the comments is, was it you're a Putin apology? Yeah, that's the first gay response. I'm like, dude, I'm 53. I'm too old for all this. Yeah. I love all people. It's that simple. My theory actually is your ex military as well. I was just standard British infantry and not for that long. I did kind of the minimum service and got out with the birth of my daughter when I was young. So I'm straight from school into the infantry. And it very this was about the time of Iraq and Afghanistan. I lost a couple of friends of mine in Afghanistan. And I remember being told that you don't fight for your back then as Queen and country, King and country now. You fight for the man standing next to you. And that was kind of a big shift from when I had grown up reading Biggles and World War Two stories. You don't know, I was doing one's duty and for one's country and all this. And then it had already shifted to you have to protect your body and have his back. And then we saw the oil wars, basically people dying for US interest and oil. And then we knew it in the infantry. We still signed up for it. We were still raring to go at 18 young diamond for the spunk. But then when I lost my guys in Afghanistan, and I think I was approached by some of the other guys that stayed on, they said, Jones, you did the right thing getting out when you did. A lot of our boys came back in wooden boxes and was it worth it? Heck no. So I was the fortunate that I wasn't in the contact situation or in a deployed to a war zone or anything like that. My training was sufficiently good enough to know the hell and horror that it is that, you know, say what you like about the British army. But the training is pretty much top notch and is really good at recreating that. The first thing I learned was I was terrible at identifying where the machine gun was firing from. Wait for the crack in the thump. Okay, I still don't know where he is. And I'm probably going to get chewed up. But again, and here's my dark sets of humor sort of coming in as it often does in my YouTube videos where I chuckle at things you shouldn't point being, you know, that it's not a game. And it's not call of duty. And it's never fun. It's never glorious. You know, you have all these big stories about Wally, the Canadian sniper. Yeah, but what did he do? He ended up running back to Canada because he saw exactly the hell it is and that these guys are getting chewed up. But these are human lives that are being chewed up and ended. For what purpose? For what end? Really? It's for Lindsey Graham to say Russians are dying. That's the best money we've ever spent. Again, they're just showing themselves for who they are. The real satanic, dark, twisted individuals to even, I don't know what possessed him to say that in public, certainly on the record, I have no idea. But that kind of shows it for what it is. And at the expense of, you know, best money we've ever spent. Yeah, but it costs how many hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives and not just soldiers either. You know, these being thrown away and then these Russians as well, I've just, I've just been sitting with them on the front lines. They're having to go through all this for again, for what end, for what purpose? I was thinking the other day, imagine if Scotland, you know, Scotland, they don't really like Westminster anyway. But if Westminster started disappearing, Scottish people, do you think the Scots would just go, oh, well, we'll just take it? No, they'd probably break away. They probably go, no, no, thanks, England. We've had enough of your rubbish. We're going our own way. And then if Westminster then deploys the army and starts shelling the borders of Scotland, you can very quickly see the analogous situation that might occur there. And we've got that. These people said, no, we don't want any of your nasty rubbish. Thank you very much. We'd rather either be autonomous, or which was the first idea with the Minsk Accords and all this. And that was what they were calling for. Or eventually, they were pushed to then say, actually, no, we want to be part of the Russian Federation. I appreciate that. But as you say, yeah, I'm more keen to try and alleviate the suffering that my country or the elites of my country are perpetuating in this region at the expensive human lives. They have such massive cognitive dissonance, don't they? About the reality of what they do. I wonder what would happen if you said, look, okay, look, you can unleash this hell on Russian people or people in the Donbas. But here's the thing. In the interest of righteousness, the same hell is going to be released on where you live. Look at Bakhmur. It's leveled. It's leveled to worse than Hiroshima, or the same extent. You get your armchair warriors sat miles and miles away, only know in the mainstream media narrative and willing to support, as you said, this satanic psychopathy. I don't know. Is that too much corner duty? Yeah, I don't know if it's just laziness as well. It's like, just tell me what to think. This is what people want. And I get it. That's easier rather than actually thinking for yourself and going looking and daring to challenge. We had the health scare as well, which was a good forerunner and really showed certain people who don't want to think for themselves. They just want to do what they're told. They're paying the price, sadly. Again, human lives from the psychopaths. Bill Gates being one of them. Sorry, I'm going to come out and say it, but yeah, quite clearly one of these profited from it. And very, very happy to cause suffering and misery on people. He's not the only one, of course, these elites again, have been happy to unleash this on their own populations. They've been happy to unleash sanctions and then have it blow back in their face. Well, they're all right. Boris Johnson isn't suffering. Sunak isn't suffering. Biden certainly isn't suffering. Everyone else is, but well, don't worry about the plebs and all that. And I hate to say it, but the Russian people aren't suffering, you know, to the certainly not to the same degree as the Western people. The cost of living here is slightly elevated, of course, with inflation and things like this, but nothing from some of the horror stories I'm hearing coming out of the UK. So yeah, complete. Putin himself has said that it's becoming more and more apparent to even the West's own citizens just how disconnected the elites are to their people and their wishes. We see Macron. I mean, that's almost hilarious what's going on. The French I know love to protest. And again, I'm making light of what is quite a serious situation there. We had similar with Trudeau, just completely disconnected. Just just a pantomime. And these are supposed to be these venerated world leaders, Anna-Lena Berbock, talking absolute rubbish. And especially in Beijing as well. You want to say that stuff to the Chinese? Can you remind us what she said, Mike, for those that? Oh, yes, she was she's basically like warning, if I recall correctly, because a lot's happened since then, I think she was telling China what to do, saying that, you know, you can't back Russia and then trying to lecture them on Taiwan. And it was like, what? Okay, this is the same beer buck that said that Russia had done a 360 degree turn on its position or something. It was she's clearly not the sharpest tool in the shed. And she's effectively declared war on Russia in Germany's name, saying that we are fighting a war against Russia. Really, woman, you don't understand the international legal implications of your words here as the foreign minister of Germany. I single her out. She's just one of the whole cast of clowns that I get to chocolate. Well, I used to get to chocolate on YouTube. Do you think I truly believe it's changing my I don't say my mission and it's nothing about that. But the way that I choose to live is enlightening people. There is a very special point you can get to in your life where you see it all, and you understand it all. You might not know, I mean, you're coming out some names and that I'm just blissfully unaware, Michael, because I don't watch, you know, I just do my channel, find out what I need to know to do, say this video. People say to me all the time, Chris, do you see what I'm saying? You know, I don't watch telly. I lived off grid. I lived off grid for five years and was happiest I've ever been because I didn't read the news. I just had my caravan in the woods, got up with the sun, hunted my lunch and dinner for that day, got back, sort some wood, chopped some wood up. But yeah, built some outbuildings and stuff, helped some neighbors with renovations and things like that. Yeah, I completely understand. And then, then I kind of got back into plugging into the matrix again. So I think that enables me to to have that kind of compartmentalization, where it's like, I see this going on, but I'm not up in it. No, it can give you a lot of stress and fear. And that's his intention, to keep you in this state of, oh, my God, no, it's hence why I can laugh about a lot of it. Despite, yeah, some of the things. I just think going back to your point about these, you know, deluded people is they're only where they are, because they own their club owns the media. Yeah, they're in with the club. And that's why I think they can say things like I just said about Lindsey Graham, they say these are the ridiculous things. Jungle Joseph Burrell, him coming out with his really bizarre, almost hallucinogenic tropes. I think they, they say that in the full knowledge that what are you going to do? What is anyone going to say? Not even the population is going to rise up. You know, we got it all under control. I'm a God, untouchable. I think they're on a dodgy wicket, because like I say, I wouldn't do what I do. And if I didn't feel that we want, you know, as humanity, we've won this, everything goes in cycles. We've clearly been in a very dark one for a considerable amount of time now. And so many people are wise to it. So many people are wise to it. And once they make that connection that, ah, hang on, if I literally just turn off that mainstream media, these people lose their power, they, they, you know, no one's going to hear what Bill Gates is saying and what his crazy machinations and his very bizarre thinking are. And I see that happening more and more every day. It's, I think we still got to get across to people that even if you tune into the alternative media, you've got to stop the fear based narrative. And you've got to start supporting love highest, highest form of vibration. Yeah, absolutely. Because otherwise these leeches, they still got you folks. Their thing they do is they create fear to control you. So yes, does that make sense, Mike? Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. First of all, this, this discrimination, these creating divisions between people, okay, you're this, you're that, you're whatever. No, I'm not, I'm a human being. I'm nothing, you know, nothing more, nothing less. It's don't label me, don't give me these identities. And then we're seeing all this bickering and distraction, trying to argue about, you know, men, women, parent 123 BC, I don't know, is you're not, you're not paying attention to what matters. And that's the point of it all. And then we get down the road where we can end up with these situations like in Donbas, oh, you're, you're a Russian, you're a Ukrainian, you know, you're this side, you're that side, you're language that the words that come out your mouth suddenly, this is forbidden. And therefore, you deserve death for this or not even that just your parents were. And we've had this theme before in a certain country in Europe, which gone this way. And you said about these satanic forces, I believe, yeah, they really are feeding off the misery and suffering, certainly in this region once again, and they really get off on it, it seems. And as I've said to the soldiers on the front line, they said, you're really brave to be here. I said, no, it's not bravery. And they said, well, what is it then? I was like, that's a really good question. I had to really go inside myself. And I said, I choose anger. Anger is why I'm here. Anger that my the betrayal of my country, but more importantly, my grandfather and what he fought for, and the ideals he had and how he's, he and people like him have been sold out. And that, yeah, that's that's kind of why I'm doing what I'm doing, why I'm there and why I why I'm on the side that I'm on. I spent a day embedded with a Christian Orthodox battalion part of the whole regiment of volunteers. And I'm not particularly religious in truth, but I was amazed. It was refreshing to see people celebrating their beliefs, abiding by a code. You'll agree with me for an infantry unit to successful, well, seemingly successfully banned swearing, I thought was an excellent, excellent display of discipline. I didn't hear any cuss words while I was there amongst them. And that's quite quite an achievement, I think, for an infantry unit there. Mike, just listen to some basics here. How did you get over there? Obviously, you're coming from St. Petersburg. Is there a place you fly to? No, I drove in the Bulhanka, the Soviet classic van that I was gifted on my first trip to Donbass. A friend of mine, I asked if he had one for sale and he said, well, come to my office tomorrow about 1pm, turned up there and there's a brand new Bulhanka. A 1960s design is still true to it. And he said, there you go, that's yours to do these humanitarian runs. And I've put 25,000 kilometers on her since, yeah, November. That's incredible. And how is it then? Is there a particular place you enter the border so that you can avoid immediate trouble? Or is there really? There's a couple of border crossings you can go through. There's a Donetsk in Russia as well. Then we call it Little Donetsk. There's a border point there, Rostov. Incidentally, these are questions the FBI asked about me to a guy from America who came to visit. We took him to Donbass, or rather, John Mark Dugan did. When he got back, the FBI pulled him to one side and was asking him questions about me. He only met me for an hour. And they're asking, what vehicle did I drive? What border points did I cross at? What about my family in the UK? How did I pay money to my kids there? I thought that's interesting. The US government quizzing about a UK citizen. Very, very odd. But you're not working for them, are you, Chris? If I was, mate, could you pay me something, please? Yeah, hopefully they pay better than being a Kremlin shill, because I still haven't received my paycheck. I'll tell you what, mate, I wouldn't have time to work for the CIA or the FBI, because I'm too busy in my job with the Illuminati. Yeah, yeah, with Klaus Schwab. I remember that when I'm cleaning my garage out on my own, cussing and swearing, because it's the last thing you want to do on a Sunday. And, you know, unfortunately, folks, I can't pay someone to do. God, do all these shit jobs. God, do it all myself. Yes. So, you get there, you drive in. Had you arranged to meet people beforehand through your sort of social network or online network? Yeah, we have contacts built up through our previous visits there. Initially, we transported donations from one organisation in Moscow to another organisation in Mariupol. And then through then, we've found other causes, people, families, people in the administration as well that can help us and point us towards good causes. Like the second run was I had this idea to deliver presents to orphanages for Western Christmas, not Russian Orthodox Christmas. And we met Dienergo. He was a great guy. He was formerly the foreign minister of the LPR, but he knew all the right people to go to. So then, yeah, we bought up this itinerary of these visits, these different orphanages where we took these presents to. So, yeah, that's kind of make it up on the fly. If you like, you kind of on each trip, you then find something to do on the next trip. And then the amount of support from my audience as well. As I said, I initially had been putting just YouTube ad revenue to fund this. But then of course, people in the West wanted to get on. So then I had this kind of positive feedback loop almost. So where I then posted the videos of the trip I did, people would then contribute, which would fund the next trip. And again, you know, it carries on rolling. And again, this is something I communicate to these places and people that, hey, a lot of this assistance has actually been funded by people in the West. You are not alone. There are people who do understand the truth and do stand by your side is don't think for one minute, you know, that these governments represent these people absolutely not. No way. Is it easy to get across the border? I usually have a little, a little chat with my FSB friends. Do we have actually become quite friendly? Let's drink cognac with them at 1am once. Don't don't don't compromise anyone for God's sake. No, no, of course, no, no, they put us up in what I call the Donetsk Ritz the first, the first occasion. It was definitely not the Ritz. It was quite an amusingly Soviet accommodation. Now, yeah, I definitely have some scrutiny because I'm still a British passport holder. You know, it's completely understandable, but they're amazing guys. They're really chill. Again, as if you've been like a century or anything like that, you know, someone's just got to tick some boxes, do their job. So you just wait it out, don't give them grief. They won't give you grief. They're generally really chill guys. They're really, really good to get on with. And what is the physical landscape? Like when you, when you cross that border, do you immediately know, oh my God, I'm in a war zone or is it kind of? No, you feel like you've gone back in time. As soon as I cross the border, it's like I've gone back to the Soviet Union because of the chronic lack of investment that this region had when it was under Ukraine's control. They just relied on this, the existing Soviet infrastructure, even the old trams and things and the, the old pylons and everything. As we saw it as of style, you know, the only reason they could hold out so long was how well built the Soviet plant was and all the tunnels that have been put in. So that's, that's the first thing you notice. Then all the larders, the old me, yeah, Neva's old little larders put them around in muskviches. So these again, still people that haven't, they're on their way to of course, but they aren't quite of that consumerist throwaway culture. This is something that you repair and you keep running and you make do, make do and mend as we used to say in England back in the day, just before I was born, actually. But anyway, it was a hangover that I was brought up with. And that was what they're, they're doing now. The roads were, were I say work for the most part, they're beautiful. They're just asphalt ribbons now, gorgeous to go through, but they certainly were pretty terrible shape. And they still are towards the front lines, of course, but amazing work is being done to improve them. So actually, for the most part, it's a great standard of living better than I had in the UK when I'm there in tuna steaks and having great, great food and great life there. When you get to Donetsk, it was just usually with the background rumble of artillery, which was kind of just like thunder. It becomes thunder in the background to you, but this ever constant sort of shelling going on. And excuse me, when, like, when do you start to see signs of the wall? How does it work? Do you come across like checkpoints? Do you want to stop and check your ID? Or do you see buildings that smashed up? Yeah, yeah. I mean, when, when you get to a place like Lugansk, which were safe, yeah, you'll come across these checkpoints that get, of course, more frequent as you get closer to the front lines in the border. When you get to Donetsk, yeah, you'll find just buildings blown apart and the remnants and remains there collapsed around you. Then when you head to places like Severodonetsk, it's apocalyptic. Rubezhnoe is, again, another one. We were near Uglodar. Volovaha, I think it was another place. You mentioned about Bakhmut being almost erased. Makivka, which is a district of Donetsk, that's similar to Bakhmut. That's been fought over for years. That's been leveled almost. It's a hellscape when you get to certain places. Mariupol was, it's getting much better and they're doing very quick reconstruction there. But yeah, I think worst nightmare apocalyptic levels have just burnt out rubble. Where are the refugees going? Quite a few to Russia, in fact. But they talked a lot about, yeah, some of these refugees getting out. For the most part, Russia, as we saw with Mariupol, had these, or tried to set up these humanitarian corridors to shuttle people out and get them to the district of the Russian Federation. Even in Kherson, people were issued certificates. If you had property in these regions, you could get a certificate and get a free property somewhere else in the Russian Federation. They try and relocate you that way, which is a lot of people took up and did it like a fast-track passport system as well. So there are all the measures in place to do their best to get people to move out. But again, as people understand, especially older people, they've lived there, they've seen it all and they're just going to let it happen around them, unfortunately. And how did you meet John Mark Dugan? What's that, what's that connection? He reached out to me. He thought I was a pompous ass because I told him to book a schedule in my calendarly meeting calendar. And this was around sort of late October. He'd noticed what I was doing. I noticed I was in St. Petersburg and wanted to reach out. I think it was, yeah, when I said in a video that I planned to go to Donbas, he'd been there numerous times before. So he wanted to join forces with me. So reached out and that was about, yeah, about November time. And that's how we, that's how we linked up and got together. And he was clearly quite worried about you recently. Yeah. I'm not sure how I came. Oh, that was right. One of my team sent me a message and he said you'd gone missing. And like I say, my heart just dropped because you, you do think the worst. Was that just you were off comms off radar for a bit? Yeah. Yeah. Now it's understandable how it got to where it got to because that day we were under the impression we were doing a day trip to Solidar. To get there, see the situation. Wagner had taken it quite a while ago. So it had been de-mined and cleared, we thought. But of course, activity on this front line was hotting up then. So this was the first day I hadn't driven the Bulhanka because I'd complained the day before like, damn, these roads are terrible. I'm exhausted by the time we get to the location. I'd prefer if I can be in the car as a passenger and point the camera at the window to all these things I can't do when I'm wrestling with the gears and all the systems of the Bulhanka. It really is a multi-gym driving this thing and all the levers are in strange places. So that my wish came true. But it then meant, well, we were dropped off about 3pm. And we were just told that the request had been put up the chain of commands for approval, for us to get there, and also a transport to come and pick us up and take us on further. What we didn't know is that due to the situation, you could then only go under the cover of darkness. It's in the 3pm. Oh, great. Well, it doesn't get dark till 10. As we approached, this is about south of Bach. We were told we had to switch everything off on the phone. Airplane mode, disabled GPS, because Ukraine is tracking these SIM cards and if they identify Russian or foreign ones, they'll then strike at that location as best they can. So that was one question to me was what are you filming on? If it's your phone, then you need to do all this stuff. I have a DJI pocket that I also use. So that was why we were completely dark and went off. So our contacts, of course, as we discussed before we left at 9am, expecting us back in the evening. So yeah, John then didn't hear from us. The guy that dropped us off, he waited about a couple of hours, but he left at 5pm, so there was no return there. We had to wait. Darkness came along, no transport arrived because the action had got so bad that even the general of the unit we were hosted by, embedded with, he'd had to be evacuated, pretty pronto out of this area. So we fell down the list of priorities as one can expect. So we were treated to an evening in the basement of an unfinished building. It wasn't destroyed or bombed, it was just one of these uncompleted projects on the front lines overlooking Bachmund, which was surprisingly comfortable. They had a little space heater in there. They put some sort of silver reflective stuff around the walls so it wasn't like being in a cave. They'd injected all that expanding foam under the cracks so that it was kind of airtight. Even had a little gym in there, a little speaker going on, a nice book collection. And all this, this was kind of staging posts for R&R, so the units would rotate through. So we were close, but not right on the front lines. And then of course the next morning, the guy came from Donetsk and picked us up so late afternoon. So it was a good 24 hours that we were completely off comms. But despite the artillery going off around inbound and outbound, we weren't really in terrible danger or anything. It was just that I think John was a bit too quick. And he went public probably a bit sooner than he should have done because it did look a little bit bad for the guys who were looking after us. So then on some of these big channels like Slavyangrad, bless them, which is also read by a lot of Russians to then put out that I'm missing when my guy had just dropped me off and he was like, what the hell? The next day, he's driving, getting messages from these people like, what the hell happened to these guys? He's driving them back now. What the hell? So yeah, he got a bit of a shtick for that. The previous day we had been sort of, we were trying to get an interview. This was with the Orthodox Christian Battalion. We were trying to get to the front line to interview one of the guys who was literally in the trenches. And we came under rocket fire as we were approaching, had to get back. So I think because I told John that he was kind of worried that I'd driven the bullhunker over an anti-tank mine or something like that. So I get why John panicked a little bit. Is there a hit list? I've heard these words associated with you or is that all just some? Yeah, there is unfortunately, CIA backed, even with Langley Virginia as its address, Miratvorets, it's called Miratvorets.center. They post pictures of dead Russians on the home page, and they even have young children, teenagers, journalists who are listed there. They'll dox you. So they'll post all your information, your address. Faena Savankova, she was a young writer, about 12 years old, 13 when she was first put on this hit list. His hit list, Darya Duguna was on, and then they marked liquidated when she was murdered. Same with Tatarski as well being another one. I think Roger Waters is on there as well, Pink Floyd. I think Tucker Carlson was added there along with Jackson Hinkel among others, but I earned my place there not long ago. So yeah, I've been put on this Ukrainian hit list where they'll mark you for death and then... Talking of the old internet then, I've noticed on Twitter lately it all seems to have gone to bloody ratchet. You're getting shown photos of, I think it's like both Russian and Ukrainian, depending on who the Twitter poster is, and they're showing them with a drone hovering overhead, and you see the person in the trench move a little bit and then you see them look up and they realise there's a drone. Without getting too graphic, folks, if you're sensitive, just don't listen for 20 seconds, but this guy looks up, the drone comes down, he bloody catches it and throws it away, but too late. I'm not sure what I can say here, but let's just say he realises the old Grim Reaper is very close at that point, and he picks up his own rifle and I think you can work out what I'm talking about, folks. But there are all these crappy bot profiles, if you know these just some random obscure emblem or something. I just didn't know if you might have some insight into that, Mike. Again, anyone commenting on that? Just all a bit sad, you know? Yeah, it is and it's actually quite terrifying. When I think back to my training, we were focused on Stagg looking out in front of you, it wasn't really a consideration to look above, and that, obviously, I see similar footage on Russian channels and no, I'm not inclined to celebrate that because I find that deeply terrifying. This is a problem though, isn't it? War, it's just playing on young people's naivety and vulnerability and stupidity and all from the safety of their keyboards back wherever they are in the world. They'll never have to live with the consequences. I doubt they consider that's a husband, father, son, brother, or anything like that. Unfortunately on this trip, I lost my friend, Alexey Oblasov. He died. He succumbed to his wounds after I think about 19 days in the coma. I met him on my first two trips, and this was a guy you could have had a cushy press job, but as you said, this is my homeland. I want to be on the front lines. We tried to convince him, you're using a microscope to smash a nail in because he was really good with mechanics and electronics and things, so he had a better role he could have fulfilled in our opinion, but there was no convincing him. He was 47 years old and anyone else can surely relate. If your home neighbors, friends, family are suffering, being disappeared by the government and you decide to take a stand and then they send the army at you, well, you're probably going to pick up a gun and you're probably going to want to join the boys who are in the front lines. Sadly, there's a high risk that you won't come home, and unfortunately in Alexey's case, he was one of them that lost his life. The sad thing is looking at it from a holistic perspective, none of them know who they're really fighting for. No, this is where I mean, in the very localized view, this is their feeling. Well, what else am I supposed to do? Just sit at home or pretend it's not happening? It's on their doorstep. This is different to the keyboard warriors on Reddit in the Reddit battalion. What did they do early on? They flew over there like, hey, yeah, let's get stuck in and then soon realized that, no, it's a meat grinder, as sort of Eakin said, and then they trod it off back home. Some of them lost a few bits of themselves along the way, and I can't say I have much sympathy for the war tourists who did that and these mercenaries, but I'll give them benefit the doubt that they succumbed to propaganda. They learned the hard way, but they had that luxury of being able to jog on home, whereas these guys, it is their homes that are under fire and under attack, and they're doing the only thing they feel they can do. To have any self-respect, it's a bit like Britain in the First World War and the Second World War, you're given a feather if you're on the bus as a coward. I think, yeah, that's pretty much the same situation that we see for these people. It's the big club, folks. They control everything until you start to see it. This is what we give into our kids, until you understand how finance works. You don't have to get it to any deep level, understand the ancient European banking aristocracy rather. My thing, Mike, is you're a lovely bloke, clearly. If I walked into a bar, me and you would be chatting within five minutes, swapping email addresses, friends for life. If there's a Russian chap next to us, he's going to be in the conversation. We're going to be fascinated to meet him, learn about his homeland, etc. Likewise with the Ukrainian. I've done it with the Ukrainians as well. If a Ukrainian walks in that door, he's just the same. Like recently, I ran a race in the Sahara. There was 1,180 people entered. Do you think anyone there had any hate for the two Russian competitors? Or I don't remember off the top of my head if there were any Ukrainians, but no, of course not. We're there for a beautiful experience. It's called life. You get one crack at it. Well, certainly in this set of molecules. There's no time for hate, no time for it. The sadness is that this hate is all being controlled. In fact, yeah, I didn't hear any such dark things. It was kind of this sort of sad acceptance of the situation as it is. Respect for the enemy, which is healthy and wise to keep there. But just this understanding that even their enemy is almost a puppet and being forced to do what it's doing. Yes, when you look back at the history, I mean, even just as far back as the Second World War and you see, it all starts to get complicated when you think that Ukraine had like the whole regiments working alongside the Germans. And I'm not judging if I'm... It was a documented fact in history. Yeah, and then you could see that it was the red peril from the East that everyone was and then you fast-forward, even though ironically, it probably would be in Ukraine's interest to exploit this big brother on the East and all the trade deals that they could do and really bump their standard of living economy, whatever we're going to call it. But then of course, you've always got the thing, yeah, we want to wear Levi jeans and drink Coca-Cola. Yeah, have McDonald's. Yeah, I'm being silly here, but that's what the old jokes were, wasn't it? Back in, was it like a Lexi sail in the young ones? Oh, symbol of free West, Coca-Cola. And you can see that, why people felt that, hey, we've got a president here and he just doesn't want to throw us completely in with Europe. He's saying that actually, there might be someone over the other border that could really do us a lot better. Mike, it's complicated. I'm so grateful you've come on the show. I just want to leave with just say one thing, friends, I hope you got from this, this is a podcast about love, a love of humanity and wanting it. If all you got from this is like, I take a side or Mike, I'd be a bit disappointed, but no doubt that that's the notion of, oh, that's a side effect of very strong mainstream media and a bit of indoctrination there along the way, especially for maybe those of us been in the military. But let's just get to a point of love, folks. Mike, absolutely brilliant. Stay on the line just so I can thank you properly, but thanks for giving us your time. Glad you made it back out of your communication silence. Thank you very much. And as you know, you're always welcome to come back on the show and I look forward to that. I'll be delighted to. Thanks, Chris. Friends at home, massive love to you. As always, if you could like and subscribe, but be really, really kind of you, click the notification bell because apparently these seem to get turned off again. And we'll see you soon.