 we're back, we're live. This is politics for the people. And sometimes it's politics domestically, sometimes it's politics internationally, and today it's international, and it's about Ukraine. You can see all our shows on Ukraine, by the way, on our playlist, Crisis in Ukraine. We have, oh, gosh, dozens and dozens of them, including this week, even lots of them, including shows with people who are in Ukraine or have just come out of Ukraine, including people who are expert, you know, and what is going on there. And today we are joined by Tim Apachele. He's an expert in pretty much everything. Welcome to the show, Tim. Thank you, Jay. I don't know what to say about that introduction. Thank you. We're calling this, this is willful and intentional mass murder. Is the coalition doing enough to stop it? Okay. And we know the coalition cares. They make public statements all the time. But let me go to the title question. First of all, is this willful and intentional mass murder? You know, in Iraq, we talked about weapons of mass destruction. And now we don't seem to be talking about those weapons, but we have mass destruction. What do you think? Have we lost track of what it is to have mass destruction? No, we haven't lost track. We're gathering evidence in every place where the Russians have been where teams are going in there and gathering evidence against genocide, against crimes against humanity. This is a mass execution of the Ukrainian people. And I think that is one of the reasons why the EU and United States and NATO have coalesced so quickly. We recognize they're seeing things that we saw back in World War II, but I wasn't around. You weren't around. But these are the things we read about in our history books. And it's something that we can't afford to stand around and twiddle our thumbs and say, gee, it's happening all over again. As you said in a previous show, never again, but that never again is happening again. And I'd like to see the EU and the United States do a whole lot more, a lot faster, but least thank God they've coalesced and we don't have dissension amongst the 27 EU states to take action against Russia and Putin. So to answer your question, yeah, it is mass destruction, mass elimination of human life. You know, whatever nomenclature you put on it, I think World War II is instructive because it was evil. I mean, you could call it whatever name you want, but it's very clear it's evil. Everyone will agree on that. And World War II, Hitler was evil. Whether or not you knew exactly what was going on in those death camps, you knew that what he was doing was evil. You know, Gestapo, it was evil. And so if you are doing something evil, the world finds out about it, A, the world gathers together against you, B, and your troops, if you look at troop morale, your troops are more dedicated to ridding the world of evil than your troops are in proliferating evil. And I think that's what's happening now, but we haven't seen the results of it yet. We have this general who probably, you know, familiar with the old Russian technique, as we discussed yesterday, about shooting him in the back if they ran away from the front lines. That's a little Russian thing that happened in World War II, and probably in World War I as well. Or they shot him in the front if they retreated. Yep. So they, you know, you had no choice, but you had to go to war, and you had to be brutal. Now, if we had a war crime right now, I'm just curious, and you were the Russian general, or you were Putin, and we charged you with murder, and mass destruction, and atrocities, and war crimes, what would your defense be? Well, I don't want to get in the head of a monster, but obviously he's going to say things like, A, your evidence is not credible. You made this up. That's the telltale sign of a narcissist, sociopath, psychopath. That's the first thing to do is refute everything that's against you. We actually saw that earlier in the administration here. Secondly, he said, come and get me. How are you going to catch me? Third is the Russian people love me. They will protect me. And further, I suppose, and we've heard this, you guys did the very same thing yourselves. Yeah, the what about isms. Yeah. Right. What about you? Okay, so I guess to me, I feel, and I wrote a little commentary about this, and you can find it on our commentary channel, which goes this way. They invaded. They have conducted themselves badly. Their troops have conducted themselves badly. It's all on television. And it's hard to think that all the people on television are faking it, and all the commentators are lying about it. I mean, that is the commentators for credible channels. I do not include Fox News, because I don't think they're credible at all. And then there were jurisdictions in the world, which will take these cases. It's probably a debate in the United States about the law. We haven't been particularly cooperative on conventions around war crimes. But there are states in Western Europe that would take these cases, and they recently did in the case of a Syrian general charged with war crimes. And finally, Russian assets have been stopped. They've been frozen. And in other words, if I file a lawsuit in France, for example, I hope France stays straight on this, seeing the election. That would be a really bad development if Marine Le Pen were won. But if France stays straight, France would be a good jurisdiction, I think, to file a claim because there are Russian assets in France, presumably frozen under the sanctions. And the plaintiff would say a family member of someone who's killed or raped or tortured would have assets against which to collect. And of course, furthermore, whether the trial is in front of a judge, as it might be in France, the civil law system is different, or a jury like England, for example, the question would be an old tort law question, what's it worth? What's the pain in suffering? And it's an interesting question. Put me on that jury. The question is, how much is torture worth? How much is a day spent in pain and agony worth? How much is your life worth? How much is your child's life, your wife's life, your mother's father's life? What's that worth? And then when you add the possibility of sudden jurisdictions of punitive damages, which are in the US conventionally, there are three times trouble damages, or more. There could be more. Yeah, statutes provide for trouble damages in some circumstances, but punitive damages can be anything a jury awards. It could be astronomical. So if I'm the judge or the jury and I have the opportunity to award damages for torture, not only the damages of dying or losing a day of the pain and suffering, but the punitive damages intended to discourage the defendant from doing this ever again, the sky's the limit. And it's not billions I submit to you, it's trillions, if it gets that far. It should get that far. But you know that Putin is going to try to settle war crimes. Justice is going to try to settle the sanctions. So if there comes a time when we have serious settlement discussions, and he's not capable of that right now, then those things will be on the table. So I can just tap onto something you just mentioned here, and that is damages. It's not just damages for the current generation, it's damages for the future generations. And I do a lot of genealogy and I've seen, you know, generations in war and the effects of that, and, you know, alcoholism and things that just kind of creep down the ladder into other generations that haven't been born yet. It's amazing. But it's it's the point is war creates damages far, far greater than the current generation affected by it. Well, think about this. You know, it's really an eye-opener to think about this. Suppose these cases did proceed. And suppose, you know, damages were claimed for the immediate, you know, harm, but also damages for future generations, damages for, you know, buildings and institutions and, you know, points of culture, if you will, in a given country. And it could be shown circumstantially and directly that the Russians intended to destroy these things, intended to unleash their armies, their Chechen armies known for brutality, to to rape and murder people and throw them in trenches. Intentional. And there are huge damages and punitive damages possible. And their assets that have been frozen are all, you know, scooped up for the benefit of those those victims. That's a huge amount of money. But more than that, I'm taking I'll take your hand and I'll double it. What this means is that the world will see you can't get away with this. The world will see that you want to invade your neighbor and do this kind of mass destruction, mass murder. You are going to pay. Your country, your people, your government, your fiscal policy is going to pay. And that should be a never again, don't you think? Should be. I'm reminded that really it's taken Germany more than one generation to outrun the scorn of the world for what the Nazi regime did to the world and to their own fellow Germans. It's taken at least two generations to kind of get past that. It comes up in conversations all the time. And I'm sure if I'm a German, I'd probably get tired of hearing about it. And these current generations are tired of hearing about it. But guess what? The Russian people will maybe be in the same seat because of this invasion, this war crimes against humanity and genocide, they are going to have to live with this. And it's not going to be the current generation that says, well, we didn't know anything about it. It doesn't matter if they know anything about it. The fact that they were alive during the time of Putin and Putin's war crimes, they own it. And it's unfortunate. Maybe it's not fair for those who claim that I had nothing to do with it. I didn't want it and I wanted out of it. But by the fact they're Russians and they lived during the time of Putin and their Russian citizens, they're going to have to deal with this horrific event that's taking place right now. And I guarantee you they're going to get tired of it. Yeah. But you know, the argument, they're going to say I had no control over that. He was a dictator. He did what he wanted and he would have put me in jail if I even spoke against it. That doesn't make them outrun scorns. Sorry. That's right. That's right. They're going to be pariahs. The whole country will be a pariah for a long time. Whatever happens here, it'll be a pariah for a long time. Let's talk about, in connection with mass destruction, in connection with atrocities and war crimes and violations of human rights, let's talk about some of the weapons that they have brought in. And I mean beyond this brutal general they got and beyond the Chechnyan soldiers, the troopers they brought in, who are known to be brutal, who may be the ones conducting the rapes and the murders and the assassinations and the exportations or deportations. I'm just wondering if we can just take stock of some of the brand new weapons that the Russians have been talking about and what they signify in terms of the intent of the attack? Well, I think some of the weapons aren't necessarily brand new. There's definite evidence against cluster bombs. They use a cluster bombs in a civilian population. These are heinous weapons that are designed to explode just above the ground and scatter and in multiple forms of ammunition. And it's a horrific bomb. And to be unleashed against a civilian population is well, it's one of the things that's going to be collected as evidence as war crimes against humanity. There's more. There's the bomb that sucks the oxygen out of the atmosphere and you can't breathe and you die or have serious damage to your lungs and body. I forget what you call that. It's like a hypothermic weapon. That's an anti-personnel weapon. That's not really a military weapon at all. There are these new landmines that operate on sensors. You don't have to step on the landmine anymore. It could be 10, 20 feet away and it will sense your presence, got an electric sensor in it and it will blow up when you're close enough when you're in range. That's not only is that an anti-civilian. And they're spreading them. They're dropping them on the roadways where they are, Maripole and elsewhere. But it's going to be there. Mines have a legacy feature. They're there until somebody removes them. Very hard to remove these and they destroy the place because you can't go in and fix it. I don't know what the technique is. I'm removing a sensor. A lot of them use rats, rodents, believe it or not. Trained rodents. Throw some cheese on it. No. But again, to my point, is that war affects generations beyond the current generation. Then of course, all the dismemberment. It's not just the dead. It's the wounded. And that legacy that carries throughout the lives and impacts the society and the burden of taking care of those that are disabled. So these things aren't just in the immediate scope of carnage against humanity. That's what makes them crimes against humanity because they're ever foregoing and giving to other generations and other expansive populations. And he's got the hypersonic missiles now that can reach all the way across Ukraine, which he has used on Lviv. And I don't know. There's a whole bunch of other things where he's broken through the ceiling. It's more directed at civilians. It's more directed at killing many civilians at the same time. It isn't terribly important. And the psychological war continues. I don't know if I sent you a copy with Zarkolyn at Times yesterday about how they have spies in the Baltics and the Balkans, which they pay out of the Russian embassies there. They pay the money to use social media and to support Russia and the war. I mean, it's just part of the hybrid war, if you will. As they paid to have them in the United States as bots and hits on Facebook and Twitter. Yeah. So I mean, he's doing everything he possibly can, not only in the kinetic, but in the hybrid. And got to give them credit for being clever. But at the end of the day, he also is clearly evil. I mean, to a lot of people. So the question is, are we getting tired of this? Is Biden getting tired of it? Are the EU countries getting tired of it? Are they really going to follow through on their promises? I mean, I was just listening to a thing on national public radio. It was a piece from the Economist that produced peace. And it was an interview with an official from Finland who said, you know, before we didn't care to join NATO, but now we really think we should. And Sweden, you get the same thing. And so there's a certain vector here pointing to greater rhetoric and probably greater commitment by the EU nations. By the same token, though, you have Marine Le Pen. And she would make friends with Putin. She is friends with Putin, just like Trump was. And she would pull back on helping Ukraine. She's made that as a public statement. And she's running close to Macron, which means there's a lot of people in France who would go along with her. And so you're not sure whether the thermometer is pointing right now. Do you have a sense of where this is going? Is Biden stronger than he was, weaker than he was, the same as he was? Is Putin stronger, weaker, the same? And what about Europe? I'm also looking at also similarities. Similarities between how the EU and the United States have handled reacting towards Putin as the good Republicans did with Trump. They knew that Trump was, you know, saying and doing horrible things and implementing his policies in horrible ways. And they failed to speak out because their own political heinies were on the line. And they didn't want to jeopardize their own political well-being. So they kept mum, they kept silent out of self-interest. And then I saw people in the society keep mum about what Trump did and said because their 401Ks were on the line, and they didn't want those to be sacrificed. So they kept mum. Well, now we look at the EU, we look at the United States. You know, if I ratchet too fast, too hard on the economy, the short-term pain and the population's reaction to the short-term pain of economic pain will be too much. And then my political heiny will be on the line and they'll adversely react to that. You mentioned Le Pen. Well, she's pushing short-term gains for the economy and saying that any sanctions against Russia is going to cause pain for Europe. That's the tax she's taking. And Macron's saying, no, we have a monster here and we need to unify against this monster, and we're effective as a unified group. So it's the short-term pain of the economy that's thwarting a real unified and forceful action against Putin. And once the population could say, fine, let's sacrifice, let's take the pain, this guy's a monster, he's Hitler 2.0, he's Pol Pot, he's Stalin, and he's never going to go away. So either deal with it now or deal with it later. We have to deal with it now. So that calculus still needs to take place. But the more that Putin does to threaten the population, like send up a nice EBM as a saber-rattling on a nuke warfare, people are going, hey, this guy is out of control. He has to go. Okay, let's sacrifice, let's take some of that pain now because we're going to take a lot more later if we were inactive and we were apathetic. You think his threat of the ICBM is a mistake? Huge. You just unified all of Europe. You now put them on the road to saying, fine, we've banned coal. Wow. But we're going to have to ban gas, natural gas, and its fuel. We'll take the pain because there is no winning a nuclear winter. We all die, we all perish. So let's get together and say this guy's a mad dog and he's not messing around. So take the pain now, sacrifice now. That's very interesting you should say that because at the outset, Putin was rattling nuclear sabers and suggesting in his own motion that he was a nuclear power and that he might use nuclear weapons if the thing escalated. Now there's a certain amount of rhetoric that's going on that says, we're calling his bluff. As you just said, he's not really capable of that. He won't do that. But what I get is that maybe people are getting wise to him. Maybe they're saying, he's cried wolf one time too many. We don't believe him anymore. Well, he's incrementally ratcheted up the atrocities of war and the crimes against humanity and genocide. So at what point do you say, once you cross the Rubicon of that boundary line, you're lost. You're in a territory that the world cannot just ignore. And I think that's what's happening. They're going, okay, he's crossed the line. He is now, how do you negotiate from what he's already done? How do you negotiate a peace settlement? How do you negotiate him as an ongoing neighbor of Europe? Who has to go? Who makes settlement agreements and then breaks them regularly every time. Not once in a while, but every time. Well, okay, it's a subjective thing. Well, let me ask you a question, Jay. I'd like to ask you a question. What makes this incursion, this invasion, the war crimes against the Ukrainian people somewhat different or anything different than what happened in Aleppo, Syria, or Grosnia, Chechnya? Those were war crimes too in the making. It was the same MO. The only thing that's different is this time the world knows in detail. This time the world has cameras there, taking it real time. In Syria, no, not even now, no. And one of the reasons is if you're a journalist in Syria at the height of the festivities, I mean the atrocities, you'd be killed. You'd have a terrible time. It wasn't a safe place for a journalist or a cameraman. But now the way things are working out in Ukraine, it's a safe place, safe enough for them to be there, although some of them have been injured, were killed. The bottom line is it's way different now because communications is different, because the internet is different, social media is different, and it's the West. They're capable of talking to each other and they're capable, for many reasons, of an enlightened view of this and an enlightened view of his pathology so far. But my question is, a lot of this is subjective and it goes day to day. And the French farmers are mad at Macron so they conflate the issues, this happens, right? And they support Le Pen because she's nice at her farmers, you know? And all kinds of bizarre connections like that. So what you have is, it's claudoscopic, it changes all the time. And the question is, I'm put to you, is really very mechanical. It's very matter of fact, it's very factual. Is the West doing enough to help Ukraine win? In all the facts and circumstances that we know, that we study, that we see every day, is it enough to help? We know that Ukraine can't win by itself, okay? Reality. It needs help. It asks for help. It's specific about what it wants and needs. But are we, that is the coalition, giving Ukraine enough so that it can win? A definite no. And I say that because you could deliver all that, you could, you can commit to all the $800 million you want, be it yesterday or, you know, a couple weeks ago. You can commit to all the military hardware, but it's the logistics of getting it to them fast enough. Not talk about it, not plan for it, but deliver it. And the delivery is not taking place fast enough. The logistics is not taking place. They need this stuff now. Maripole, I mean, those four guys that are stuck in that steel plant, I'm pretty sure they need help now. Not on the drawing board, not in debating in Congress, not in the warehouses somewhere in Germany. They need the equipment delivered now. And I think logistics is not as fast as it could be to help the Ukrainians thwart the invasion of this new second front of Russian invasion. Why is the logistics not fast enough? I mean, I read an article, one part is they're worried about stingers going on the black market and then ending up in the hands of other countries because there is not boots, American boots on the ground to verify that it's getting to the endpoint. So they're worried about it's being sifted off and maybe we'll end up somewhere in the Middle East. So there's a hesitancy, if you will, because you can't verify the delivery of weaponry. Interesting point. So, but they are hesitant. I mean, what you just said to answer my question is the failure of the logistics is that the coalition is hesitant. It's being too careful. They're dragging their feet. They could do it faster, but they're not. They're correct. And I'm sorry, but if Ukraine is going to stop this second wave, they're going to need everything now. I mean, yesterday actually, not now, but yesterday. And I understand why Zelensky is tearing his hair out, making comments like, I feel like living a day of groundhog, deja vu. I keep saying the same things for the weapons I need and I get a lot of head nods, but I don't get the weapons. The poor man is going nuts. Yeah. The dynamics, you'll agree, are different in Europe. In Europe, the implications of a fight with Russia are so much more proximate. Here, we're thousands of miles away, even east coast. And so in the US, there's more of a political thing. And we still have, and I'm sure you have noticed as I have, we still have the Trump legacy, which is, you know, burning Rome, which is burning our Congress, which is burning our Supreme Court, which is burning divisions in the street. And who knows? I think Putin probably exacerbates that with his social media tricks. But the bottom line is our government is dysfunctional. And so, you know, political, political implications are always relevant and important. And whatever Biden does, he's probably got one eye on those implications. At the same time, Tim, I'd be interested in your thought about this. If he blows it, and he's the leader of the coalition, no question about it. If he moves ahead, they move ahead. If he doesn't move ahead, well, they may or may not move ahead. But if he loses this, like he did in Afghanistan, that has political implications. He will, he, they will, the GOP will attack him mercilessly for blowing it. They're hanging back now as a group. They're waiting for an opportunistic moment to attack him. And if something bad happens in Ukraine, I'm telling you now here in public, I'm telling you, they will attack him with everything they have and make him look really bad. And he will look really bad, because it's kind of up to him to get these weapons in to support Zelensky. What are your thoughts? Well, you mentioned that the GOP will show no mercy to Biden. I would say that history will show no mercy to Biden. This is a paramount point in world history, European history, that if it's not handled properly now and stopped now, we will have Putin on the front doorstep of Europe for decades, well, decades to come. I don't know how long he's going to live, but his movement and his philosophy will permeate and it'll be an aggressive force from Russia in the Baltic states. He won't stop. He won't stop with Ukraine. And so now's the time to have him sent him back packing. And I do believe that Biden needs all the support from the United States public. And the GOP, we're in a war, whether we'd like to admit it or not, we're in a huge proxy war. And I remember that both sides of Congress used to unify over when we're in a wartime situation. Damn the politics, damn the polarization, we're at war. And I remember watching Congress when Zelensky was on a Zoom screen and there was unanimous applause for what his words were. Where is that feeling? Where is that sentiment? Stop criticizing Biden, get behind him for this war effort. And if you don't want to do that, which a lot of GOP don't, because they still think that Putin could do no wrong, because Trump says Putin could do no wrong, get off that, get off that bandwagon. You're going to look bad in the next year or two. You're going to look, sorry to say, but you're going to look quite un-American. So get away from the Trump philosophy and develop one for yourself. And that is support this war effort that the United States is currently involved with. And let's get Biden the sense of confidence that he can be the leader that we need and get this stuff going and get it going faster. What about the media? I mean, public opinion is so clear that it's affected, if not reflective of the media. And the media is dancing off, and there's so many issues. I mean, they got it all going on, all these priorities shifting every day. And I think they perceive that the advertisers are not going to pay as much for hot news from Ukraine as they did a few weeks ago. And they are heading off to other fields, other pastures, other scandals, if you will, scandals all over the country. And I think people do follow that. And they see the priorities perhaps differently than you just identified. And I offer you this thought, that if Biden is going to have strength on this, if he's going to exercise strength, A, he has to make it the major thing on his agenda every single day. And he has to get people to put it on their agendas. And somehow he has to get the news media to put it on their agendas and make it a national initiative somehow where we all realize, just as you said, that this is a war in which we are directly involved. Some people have said it's World War III already now. It is a fight for the liberal global order. And as Zelensky said himself, he is doing our work for us. We should therefore support him with every possible support. So I see is a war between autocracy and democracy. I'm sorry. This comes down to that simple basic concept of dictators versus democracy government or a republic, not just a democracy, but a republican form of government. But I will say to the media, they get really the greatest applause for risking their lives to document these atrocities and getting in there during the shelling and verifying and documenting attacks on hospitals and orphanages. And so I give them a lot of credit. But yes, with all war, people become desensitized. And it's almost a human reaction that I can only handle on a daily basis so much carnage. And I think that's the difference between media of the 1950s and 60s and 40s where you saw a media account maybe on the radio during the dinner hour, or you saw Walter Cronkite in Vietnam during the dinner hour. You didn't see it and could been exposed to it 24 hours a day if you had CNN or the BBC or any other credible news source on documenting over and over again the atrocities because the human psychic you'd only handle so much. Yeah, true. And people get tired of it. They get fatigued. They're used to a revolving news cycle. And we're going through that now. Worse yet, there are people in the middle of the country and the base who couldn't give a rip about what happens in Europe or Ukraine. So you start for them with that. And then you add fatigue for everyone else. And I wonder what your thoughts are right now about public opinion. Where is the needle in the hinterland in the cities about this issue? Is it enough to motivate Biden to do all that he needs to do? I think the answer is yes. The public sentiment is I think the majority of this society is well in the camp for Zelensky and Biden's efforts. I think if you were to do a nationwide poll on those points, Biden's going to come out quite well. You will still have your 33 to 35% detractors no matter what. They're still followers of Trump, his philosophy, and that his love for Putin is never ending. That 35% will remain constant. President Biden needs to put that aside and say, I am a wartime president right now and I'm forging ahead. And like Churchill, we shall never surrender. And we need to be that country to say we're not surrendering to the 35% of a detractors. We need to get these weapons to Ukraine and we need to do it faster and not be hesitant about it. You're totally right. He has to be a wartime president. He has to take the mantle regardless of what they think in Cincinnati. It shouldn't matter. He's got a global obligation now. It goes beyond the ordinary cycles of presidents and public issues. This is really critical to the global world order. I think Biden can see himself as a wartime president and I'm not sure he does yet. Right. On the other hand, he said this morning that he didn't think that the Russians would win, that Putin would lose this war. So his head is in the right place to make that statement. Now he's got to follow through with all the promises and the leadership in Europe. And the logistics. Yes. And the other thing is that the press has to keep on covering it. They can't fail. They can't flag. They can't get tired. They have to keep on telling us. They have to also recognize what you and I have been saying, that it is a battle royal and it affects everyone in the world. And that's why think tech is going to continue to cover it, Tim, as much as we possibly can, as often as we possibly can, as proximate as we possibly can. And I really appreciate your coverage on what's now America and your participation on politics for the people and your comments today. Thank you so much. Thank you, Jay. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.