 Now it's a question, what's going on with Russia? Anyway, now come it's failing in Ukraine and what is going on with Putin? What is in his mind? So we don't know for sure, but we can certainly speculate. And Carl Ackerman joins me for this discussion on history is here to help. Welcome to the show, Carl. Thank you, Jay. Always a pleasure. So we have a whole bunch of things that have happened in the recent past. Starting maybe three weeks ago, we saw all these articles and all these newspapers and we heard all this news about how the Russians were losing in Eastern Ukraine. And that was interesting. And I chalked it up myself to American weapons and maybe American advice and counsel. But it's more than that. It's the whole Ukrainian army. It's the way they come together, their collaborative thinking together and their determination to protect their country. The same time, it also seems that Putin is his overshot himself. He's out of his comfort zone. He can't get people to go along with him. He can't get the troops motivated. He can't win. And at some level, his army has given up. And here we are. And of course, this troubles him very greatly. He's kind of a guy who's, when he's cornered, like any good psychopath, when he's cornered, he doubles down. He's been doing that all the while. And so I wanted to explore with you what all of this means. How strong really is the Ukrainian army? How strong is the EU? How strong is American and Joe Biden's support for the Ukrainians? And of course, how strong is Putin? How strong is Russia? And that'll be the first six hours. And after that, why did you, oh, and I wanna add that I've been watching your friend, Tim Snyder, in his lectures on the creation of Ukraine as a country. It's very interesting, you know? I mean, originally it was the Vikings, for God's sake. It was the Vikings. And Waldemir was a Viking hero. And that's where Vladimir and Volodymyr come from. So interesting, you know, that you wouldn't have expected that at all. So it's got a rich history for sure, rich and basically unhappy. Lots of pogroms, lots of anti-Semitism, lots of killing in the war. But here we are with an apparently democratic country which seems to have its act together, which seems to have the support of Europe and the US as against a country that is, you know, a pariah to use the term that so often you. So let's look at Putin first. Where is he on the continuum? Does he have any real leg to stand on here, historically and sociologically? Historically, no. You know, the original Rus or the original Russian state as it were was really a Kievan state. So and, you know, it looked like, you know, if you were around around 800 in the common era or, you know, AD as people sometimes say, you would know that Kiev was a, you know, bustling economic entity, you know, trading with Byzantium, you know, the second Rome. And, you know, so, you know, historically, we be, we, Jay, you and I have discussed this historically really the Ukrainian state occurred before the Russian state. And it was only because the Mongols coming in in 1240 that decimated Kiev and people started migrating northward. And you were absolutely right. The Vikings came down and they, you know, had names like Ryrik and Oleg and things like that and established themselves, you know, sometime in the seventh and eighth centuries. And then under a Prince Vladimir, they adopted both, you know, the Greek Orthodox church and which later became the Russian church and of course the Cyrillic script, which has driven every Russian student crazy at least for the first month because, you know, if you take a word like pectopah, P-E-C-T-O-P-A-H, you soon realize that Russian letters look very similar to sort of the Western Latinized letters, but pectopah and Russian is restaurant. So, you know, they're P, you know, R-P is there R, et cetera, et cetera, R-H is there N. So, you know, things become very confused. But anyway, so there's no historical like this stand on. As you and I have discussed, Vladimir Putin is a great, he follows in the tradition of a great 19th century Slavophile. He believes in a greater Russia. He was, you know, heartbroken when the Soviet Union fell in 1991. Remember in 1989, he was in that East German embassy, you know, destroying documents. So, you know, this is a guy who only can be described as President Macron described on CNN earlier today as, you know, there's a psychological issue here and Putin, Vladimir Putin really wants to, you know, take over the old Soviet empire and Macron interestingly called it a colonial venture. And so, you know, I don't think there's any stopping him. The danger here is, as you mentioned at the beginning of our talk today, Jay, is that he is, you know, a form of psychopath in the sense that he's going to do whatever he wants to do. He's not going to listen to other folks. And he has, you know, one agenda and the agenda is to take over the Ukraine. Does that mean that we may be looking at perhaps a tactical nuclear strike? I think we're pretty close. I think that, you know, if the demonstrations continue in Moscow as they're doing, one must remember what happened during the Vietnam War when Richard Nixon was forced to capitulate because there was so many people in the United States that were against the Vietnam War. And I mean, not that, you know, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger weren't trying to solve the issue as best they could, but there were a whole lot of people opposed to them. Unfortunately, in Russia today, those people who protest get put in jails and are treated horribly, but including, you know, women basketball players who are accused falsely of doing things, but we won't go there. But the point is that Putin's in his last rope and the reason, and I'll stop after this statement, the reason for the EJ, for the Ukrainian victories is not a difficult one to figure out. I mean, of course they're brave and we're all Ukrainians or anyone who is in support of democracy is Ukrainian, but, you know, going back to the American Revolution, when you're on someone else's soil and you're the foreign invader and all you want to do is take over, that's a bad position to be in. And unless you're willing to, you know, overwhelm people with superior military might, and unless you're very organized. And, you know, the British Empire, which was in a much better position to put us down in the American Revolution, failed. And it's, you know, every country that tries to do this eventually will fail. I mean, look what happened to the United States. I mean, we weren't trying to colonialize, but in Afghanistan and also the former Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Don't forget, yeah. Yeah, in Vietnam was, you know, a great example. And, you know, we weren't the first to do it. It was the French. We should have learned from the French and the NBN Fu, but we didn't. So, I mean, there comes a point where any rational leader would cut and run. And Russia, you know, pulled out of Afghanistan, you know, but it's not pulling out here. And he's doubling down and he's threatening nuclear weapons. And, you know, I mean, anybody rational around him would say, Vladimir, it's time to cut it, you know, find us a way out, make a settlement. Who knows what? Just get out. You know, putting 300,000 young Russians in conscription and having them march into the maw and come back in body bags, already 80,000 young Russian boys have been killed. You know, it's just, it's not a good idea to continue that. He's got people who are very upset with him, including oligarchs from around him, including a lot of people who have left Russia in opposition to what he's doing. Is, when does he get the message? Is it never? Yeah, I don't think that he, you know, I don't think he's truly a Democrat small D. I don't think he's listening to anyone. You know, one of the things that you and I have talked about is that, you know, with the old polar bureau in place, you had a whole bunch of other voices. You know, you had the party secretary like Mikhail Gorbachev, the last one, but you had a whole bunch of people who were counseling the party secretary and a whole bunch of people surrounding him. And so in this case, you know, I mean, Vladimir Putin is acting, you know, much like Stalin did or, you know, Vladimir Lenin, you know, that he's a ruthless totalitarian leader, but, you know, with the semblances of democracy and that he was elected. Will that prevail? Let me throw one factor on the screen for you. Here's a picture of a Russian soldier and you can see how young he is. You can see how unprepared he is for war. You can see the fear in him and you wanna bring 300,000. I mean, this is a few weeks, maybe a couple of months ago, they're going to be younger now, the conscripts. And I mean, it touches your heart even to see this kid being thrown into a completely unnecessary violence, a violence without a benefit to anybody. And so the people back at home in Russia, they know this kid and this is their kid. They're not gonna support him at all. It's a big factor. That's why, you know, thousands of people have gone into the streets to oppose him. Can he still pull it off? Well, I don't think so. And we have Vietnam War, which you and I saw directly. I may be older than you, Jay, so I based it when I was 18. And that was when the draft reoccurred and you were drafted on the basis of your number in a lottery system. There used to be for the middle class and upper middle class a way to avoid it through student deferment, but that ended. And so depending on when your number hit, mine hit in 72 when we were still fighting, luckily I had a high number and I wasn't drafted. I didn't have to go and fight and I probably would have been a nurse of some form. You know, I didn't want to kill people, but that's a whole nother issue. But the- Well, the question is a sociological one and a political one. Will the people of Russia who have been hammered with propaganda for the past couple months, past several months, and who are afraid of their leader Putin, will they tolerate this? Or will they rise up? Well, there's still mass media uttering propaganda the way people did in the United States and under Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon. And so there's a message being thrown there. The difference, of course, in the United States is that we had many messages being given and many reporters who were becoming anti-war themselves after seeing what was going on and trying to present the war fairly, you know? And the Russians aren't getting that. And most people, most Russians, from what I've seen in my many trips there, have, you know, just adhere to what's on television and talk about it. But the problem is now that you're having thousands of men come back in body bags and you're having people leaving the country, both by plane and by car. And it's not that it's the entire country or the quote-unquote silent majority that's doing this, but, you know, this affects people, you know? And no matter what your propaganda says, if people are not being able to, you know, equate what's going on on state media with what they're seeing with their friends and their neighbors and their children, especially in grandchildren, then that's a problem. That picture that you had was so reminiscent of the average age of the Vietnam War veteran, I mean, fighting man being 19 years old. So we had a similar sort of situation and it's, I don't see there's any kind of negotiation. Interestingly enough, the French president was on CNN today and he was talking about his encounters with Vladimir Putin and he just said, Macron said, look, you know, this is a psychological issue now. I mean, he was implying there's no more negotiation possible. It's very difficult. And I think he's right on that. And then Anthony Blinken today spoke at the United Nations. And I would say that that speech, everyone should take a look at because it is the best indictment of Russia overall and what has been happening since February of this year that could have been summarized in a short period of time. He was really quite eloquent and to the point. And, you know, if I may draw from one of our great American reporters and authors, I mean, Thomas Friedman was saying this a month or two ago that, you know, one of the outcomes that he did not want to see was, you know, Vladimir Putin pushed into a corner, which he is now and rightfully so because he feared the tactical use of nuclear weapons. Now, he's definitely in a corner. He's got people rioting in the streets. He's got the sanctions all over him. He's so everyone's calling him names and saying he's a pariah. His Europe is coming together more than he expected. The United States is helping more than he expected. His army is really not doing well. His supply lines aren't doing well. The outcomes for them aren't doing well. He is definitely in a corner. And if you say that he's the guy who runs it no matter what, then we have to ask the question, will he, you know, I guess the first thing is, I think he will conscript 300,000 young men. And I guess the question from that is, will they make a difference? Because they're untrained, they're draftees. You know, they don't have necessarily, they don't have the support or the equipment to do the job. I don't know where he's going to get that from. I don't know how he's going to train them. So that's my first question. Will the 300,000 conscripts actually change the calculus here? No, that's the quick answer. It's not going to change the calculus because you have a divided upper echelon of the military. And from what I have been hearing is, and reading is that Vladimir Putin is trying to give, you know, advice to his generals on the ground. And where have we seen this before? Nicholas II did the same thing and that outcome was revolution in Russia. So that's not a very good outcome. Oh, that leads to the most interesting question of the day. Carl, is revolution possible now? I don't think revolution, but I think regime change is possible. I think that there may be people in the upper echelons of Russia that say, hey, this guy's got to go and somehow remove him. I think it's going to be difficult. And Jay, one of the things that we discussed on this, remember we had this whole discussion about Dvornikov and how he, the man from Chechnya was going to go in and save the day. Well, obviously not. That was several months ago. So again, it goes back to the notion of, you know, the Kranians now have, you know, drones where they can target people. They have, you know, military weapons. The entire West is there. And this is before the hard winter months where the Germans will have to face some problems in terms of their fuel and things like this. But, you know, it's interesting what, you know, President Macron said today is, you know, he didn't mention this in a large way, but I caught it. And he said, you know, we're not as susceptible because we have nuclear power. And that was an interesting comment, giving all the problems that, you know, nuclear plants have had, including the most recent accident in Japan. But that is a solution. It's not probably the best solution you want for any local, but it is a solution to not depend on Russian oil. And it's, you know, a fairly clean form of energy unless there's a meltdown and then you're in trouble. You know, like, and of course, we still have the nuclear reactors in Russia, which are always happening in Ukraine, which are, you know, Zephyrusia, which is going to be another outcome. They don't have to use bombs. Putin doesn't have to use bombs. All he has to do is sabotage that plant. And then you have an attack on all of Western Europe. Indeed. And that's not good. But, you know, it's, you know, we've been talking about this, you know, since February, Jay, and it's very enlightening and heartening to see how far the Ukrainians have come. And it's also another, you know, another sort of large support internationally for democracy in the European countries coalescing together and supporting democracy. And I think, you know, to put this into a larger landscape, I mean, the, you know, I don't want to get into the political realm too much, but, you know, the unauthorized and unambiguously coup-like mentality in the United States of Donald Trump also is coming under a lot of fire right now. So I'm very optimistic about our future now because Ukrainians are winning and Donald Trump is facing a lot of lawsuits. And I don't think you have to be a Republican or a Democrat or an independent to realize that, you know, our former president was involved with a lot of shady things. And so the overall concept of this, and of course he was a friend of Putin. And so that gives you an, I mean, you know, if you're a friend of the North Korean president and you're a friend of Putin, where does that put you in terms of the world and also in terms of your position in history? Yeah, well, but speaking of optimism, are you optimistic about Putin's threats to use weapons, even if just tactical nuclear weapons? Because that could be a domino's effect action. In other words, you start with one, even a little one. Before you know it, somebody else is thinking about what to do with nuclear weapons. And before you know it, you have a guns of August World War I kind of domino's effect. How optimistic are you about that? Well, you know, it all depends on whether of letting mere Putin is suicidal or not. Because if he launches nuclear weapons in any form that's possible, the United States is a very powerful country and it has a very powerful nuclear arsenal. And I think that the, you know, the reprisal on the part of the United States, and if letting mere Putin understands the state of his military and the state of the United States' military, and this is what's nice about being the strongest military nation in the world, although China is rapidly challenging that, but not completely, then there's real problems. And I think, you know, he would lose support, which he has lost somewhat already, support from China and also from India. And I think those are major checks on his use of nuclear arsenal. But you know, the difficulty is that he talks about it. And you know, American diplomats, French diplomats, Chinese diplomats, Indian diplomats would never discuss this. So, you know, you always have to give that 10% chance of him actually carrying this out. I mean, I'm not certain that he's willing to divorce himself from the entire world because that'll mean no trade with India, no trade with China. If he launches this, then it's really, it's a new ball game. And the ball game, he's gonna lose heavily. I mean, you know, words, you know, I mean, you know, normally what you do in a situation like this is you retaliate by focusing on the person who sent it, i.e. Moscow, so, and you know, where he's staying. And so, you know, the words, that's not a scenario, I think that he wants to face, unless he is so ideologically inclined and he wants to commit suicide. That's the only, so I mean, you know, I don't think he's suicidal, I think he's smarter than that. You know, one scenario that interests me is that if he let go on a practical nuclear weapon, it would change, in my view, the calculus. And the first place it would change the calculus, even before a return strike by anybody, in Western Europe or the US is his own people. And I can imagine the man or woman in the street in Russia saying what, now this, you know, conscription of sanctions, our economy is in tatters, he's affected, you know, our food supply or supply lines, all our, you know, retail, you know, opportunities, now this, and I would, if I were in the street, I would be encouraged to come after him. I would be encouraged to rise up. And the question is whether that would take place before a return strike or the people who might otherwise do the return strike, whoever it is, would wait and see how the Russian people reacted and maybe play the propaganda game, you know, first. What do you think? I, you know, that's a possibility, Jay. I think it's a very thoughtful approach. I suspect knowing the American military and President Biden that there would probably be immediate reaction, you know, I suspect. I don't know, but I think that would be prudent. I don't think you can wait too long. I mean, I think that also, you know, for all the good and all the really deliberate thoughtfulness of President Macron, America is really the person that is sometimes put in the position of cleaning up, you know, and taking action. But I think that, you know, there might be a strategy that, you know, a pretty direct and a pretty direct hit on the Russian soil itself might solve a lot of the issues. But, you know, best not to have that scenario, you know. It could be everybody let go. Once we hit nuclear, it's, you know, it's a no-win scenario for anybody being alive in the world today. And it's tragic because, you know, one of the things that I always go back to is the 2014, I think it was 2014 agreements with the, in Minsk where the Ukrainians gave up their nuclear weapons in order to preserve the commitment by Russia never to invade. That's very ironic, isn't it? It is. And I think that, you know, if the Ukraine does join NATO, a solution to this never happening again is to put nuclear weapons to give the Ukrainians, you know, nuclear weapons so that this will not occur ever again. Because it's, you know, once someone is of a nuclear capability, the way France is, the way England is, the way Italy is, then you have a, you know, you have a choice about doing anything too aggressive because there are nuclear weapons there and they could be used in last resort. You know, unfortunately, you know, my wish is that nuclear weapons would be wiped off the face of the earth, but I don't think that's possible. And by the way, you know, there were articles written in foreign affairs about tactical nuclear weapons in the 60s, you know, by, one was written by Henry Kissinger. So I mean, you know, I mean, it's not that far off, but you know, luckily Kissinger and other people came to the realization that any kind of tactical nuclear weapons would lead to the destruction of the world and its resources. Well, what's the difference between a tactical weapon and a bigger weapon? Once you start throwing them at each other, then, you know, you have the environment and people die by the millions and it turns into something out of Mad Max at Thunderdome. But let me ask you this though, nothing happens in a vacuum and the world stage now, Putin is on it and Putin's announcement of his 300,000 conscripts, Putin's threat again of nuclear weapons. It's felt around the world and I'm sure that any country that has supported him in the past is going to have a reaction even as recently as two weeks ago, Xi Jinping in China said, yeah, I'm not so sure I want to support this guy. It sounds like he's a loose cannon or something. I'm going to change my support level for him. And I think they're India, I think probably the same thing. Africa, a lot of the countries there, Putin has bought him off somehow. He's bribed them to support him, even in Latin America. But query, you know, if Macron says he's a pariah and he's got psychological issues, that's also on the world stage. If Biden criticizes him the way he did a couple of days ago, that's on the world stage. If this is all in the context of the United Nations meeting going on in New York right now, or at least in recent days, query, how does the world feel about this and assuming the world reacts as you and I would and Xi Jinping has, query, how does that affect Putin? Does that change it for him? Well, I think that the United Nations today was very interesting because Secretary Lavrov came in only for a couple of minutes and there was no Russian representative hearing these speeches from the French ambassador from, you know, from Secretary Blinken. You know, so I don't think there's any question even among the Indian leadership and the Chinese leadership that Vladimir Putin has, you know, really gone way too far. The question is how you resolve all of this and, you know, the question came up, you know, to President Macron. You know, do you think that there could be negotiations now? And I'm not sure that President Zelensky with them winning battles, you know, on Ukrainian territory that he would be too interested in in settling things at this point. And well, and perhaps he shouldn't because, you know, Russians still occupy Ukrainian territory. So I think that I don't see a win here for Russia. I don't see a long-term win. I don't see, I think more territory is going to be absorbed back into Ukraine. There may be short-term victories for Russia. But, you know, I mean, not only when you invade, do you have to be able to win battles, but you have to be able to hold on to the territory. And, you know, that's a huge expenditure. And so, you know, I just, you know, it was a silly notion to invade to begin with, silly from just a purely pragmatic point of view. We're not going to talk about the morality and the ethics of doing this because that was, you know, horrendous and killing people for more territory. And as I mentioned earlier, Macron calls it a colonial venture. And I think that's not a bad term. I remember maybe a neocolonial venture, you know, trying to reformulate the Soviet Union. But I just, you know, it's just, it was just incredible. And J.I. I'm rereading war and peace right now. And, you know, Tolstoy has sort of a dim view of warfare and what goes on during warfare and, you know, what goes on in the greater Russian society. Well, it's happening. You know, it's not a repeat of history, but it's sort of like, haven't we learned, you know, and hasn't, hasn't, hasn't Putin learned. And I, you know, I think, you know, this is really, some way you can think of this as sort of the last grasp of Soviet man, you know, he's trying to preserve what was the night was the 20th century version of the Soviet Union. And it's, it's, it's just crazy. But I want to, I want to talk a little bit about your allusion to Tom Snyder, if you don't mind. Is that okay, Jay? Yeah, sure. You know, Tom Snyder, and this is true and I hate to category a lot of people because the right does this and I don't think it's necessarily always true, but I think it's somewhat true. And I think when you have left leaning or even farther left professors talking about nation states, they often don't discuss what nation states were replacing. And of course, in modern Europe, you had, you know, the Christianity and the Catholic Church and that's what helped people together in the Middle Ages. You know, if you can call it holding together. And with the nation state, you also have to have allegiance primarily to your country, not to the king or queen. And so, you know, when you lose divine, divine right monarchy as with the English revolutions and things like that, you begin to get statehood. And of course, the early Russian and Ukrainian version of this was, you know, very driven by Kyiv and princes and things like that. And then, you know, after the move northward, they went to is ours. But I would maintain that you really didn't have a Russian state until in the true sense of the word until after 1861 when the when you have the emancipation of the service. So, you know, I think Tom Snyder, what interests what's interesting about Professor Snyder and I give him a lot of credit for this is to challenge his Yale students to think of the nation state is not the end at all because it was a historically formulated drive. And just like, you know, Joseph Campbell talks about foundation this across countries. I think Professor Snyder is doing a wonderful job with his students and asking the right types of questions. And just as an aside, Jay, when I was watching that one responded video that you sent to me on number two in his series, he was lamenting the fact that someone had their cell phone hidden under their notes and stuff. You may remember that slight mention. And, you know, when I was going to graduate school, there was a Renaissance historian named Stephen Greenblatt, who's had a joint position at Princeton and and Berkeley and you still couldn't see him in the New York Review of Books and he's really an expert on the Renaissance. And I remember him lambasting a student who was having the daily California. This is, of course, at Berkeley and reading it while he was lecturing and stopping his lecture and telling the student to put it away. So, but, you know, I kind of lamented today is when professors had to tell people to stop reading as opposed to fooling around with their cell phones. So, Carl, I want to be helpful here. The fact is that Tim Snyder, who's written a couple of books about tyranny and others, other things, he does put his lecture about Ukraine on on on YouTube. I think it's right next to ours, you know, and every every class he videotapes and he puts it on YouTube. So that's, you know, that this is good and and we're going to put this on YouTube and we'll see what the students have to say. Carl Ackerman, a PhD in European history, helping us understand what's going on with Putin and Russia and Ukraine. It's an ongoing question that's as what's his name? Tim Snyder said, if there's one word, one concept that defines history, it's the word change, change versus continuity. I would agree with that. Thank you, Carl. Thank you so much for coming around. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you, Jay. And you get that men should knighted men should by everyone in the world and everyone watching this because you were tremendous, Jay Fidel. Thank you, Carl Ackerman. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching this book, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at think.kawaii.com. Mahalo.