 the state's sponsor of terrorism. You just put this antagonistic performance out of thin air. Even the US, who have such a legal mechanism, have refrained from applying the label to Russia. Biden has argued that doing so could impact future efforts to negotiate a peace deal. The European Parliament, instead of pursuing peace and an end to this bloody war, award us killing tens of thousands, decimating European industry and jobs, creating soaring inflation and an unprecedented cost of living crisis. Instead of any effort at diplomacy to remedy this disaster, you have voted to call Russia names. What's worse, NATO is one of the most blood-renched terrorist groups to curse dessert. It has murdered millions of human beings. The idea that any representative of a NATO member state would label anyone else a sponsor of terrorism before calling out their own state is absurd. Get out your notebook. Welcome to CN Live, Season 4, Episode 11. What's next for Ukraine? I'm Joe Laurier, the editor-in-chief of Consortium News. And I'm Elizabeth Boss. The war on Ukraine began in 2014 as a civil conflict when Russian speakers in the east of the country resisted a coup that overthrew a democratically elected president. The post-coup state launched a war against the resistors for eight years, which Russia entered nine months ago on February 24. It was an expansion of the war that could easily have been prevented. A peace accord was never implemented by the Western Bacchia regime. Instead, NATO armed and trained Ukrainian forces that included extremist groups began amassing at the conflict line with the east and poised for an offensive against the Dombas. Peace treaties Russia presented to the U.S. and NATO last December that would have seen NATO deployments of troops and missiles in Eastern Europe rollback were ignored, even as Russia spoke of a technical military response. The U.S. got the invasion it wanted and needed. Without it, it could not have launched its economic information and proxy war on the ground designed to weaken Russia. Make no mistake about it, this is a U.S. war against Russia. Ukraine is simply the stage on which it is being acted out. However, the war is not going according to U.S. plans. The economic war intended to bring down the Russian government has backfired with dire economic circumstances and growing popular discontent in the west instead. The information war is being lost outside of territories controlled by the west, which comprises the vast majority of humanity, and the war on the ground is not being won. But the war hasn't gone according to Russian plans either. Moscow sought negotiations with Ukraine almost immediately upon entering the war. In March, they had a deal in which Ukraine would remain neutral and Crimea would be recognized as Russian and Dombas is independent, but Western leaders wanting to bleed Russia scotched it. A restrained invasion in so far as invasions can be restrained is now on the verge of a major Russian offensive. It is being preceded by widespread Russian strikes against power infrastructure, raising trouble in questions about the effect on civilians. Despite continuing propaganda in the west that Ukraine is winning the war, European and American leaders know that what they are, what they know what they're facing, freezing Ukrainians and Europeans and the looming Russian offensive. This has led to talks about talks to end the war, but is it now too late? Is Russia committed to reabsorbing all of Captain the Great's Imperial conquests in Ukraine or will keeping Ukraine out of NATO recognition of Crimea and Dombas as part of Russia and withdrawal of NATO's forward deployments of men and missiles at Eastern Europe still be enough for Russia? Is the U.S. and NATO still committed to a long war in the vain hope that will bring down the Russian government? To discuss these issues, we welcome in Moscow, Mark Slaboda, international relations and security analyst and U.S. Navy veteran and nuclear engineering. We also welcome in Canberra, Australia, Tony Kevin, retired Australian ambassador to Poland and diplomat in Moscow. The show is produced by Kathy Vogan. Thank you, Elizabeth, and welcome, Mark and Tony, to the show. I'd like to begin by just looking briefly at a recent incident that happened when a missile struck in Poland killing two farm workers there. Immediately, Ukraine blamed Russia and the Associated Press, United States Newswire, quoted a single U.S. intelligence source also saying Russia was responsible. But within just a few hours, President Joe Biden said it was an errant Ukrainian missile, not Russia that had fired it. Poland agreed. But Vladimir Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, continued to say it was Russia. That led to an article in the Financial Times, which is, according to unnamed Western sources, saying that they were pretty annoyed with Zelensky for continuing this lie. That led to speculation that Ukraine may have fired this missile on purpose as a so-called false flag effort to draw NATO into the war as NATO, of course Poland is NATO territory, or that it was an errant missile. These are the two theories. And I want to propose to both of you, Mark and Tony, I'll start with you, Mark, about whether this, in fact, can be both. That it was an errant missile by Ukraine. But then, when it landed there, rather than take the blame, they decided, as so many people have, from Hillary Clinton on down, to blame Russia for everything. And it also had the benefit of maybe drawing NATO in. So I want to ask you that, Mark, what do you think happened? And also to discuss the two lessons that we learned from this incident. One, that depending on the White House seems still committed to avoiding a NATO-Russian war, despite whatever neocons are saying in the administration. And also, we learned something about the mainstream media in the U.S. that the AP ran this story with only one source, which broke the rules of the Associated Press, one unnamed source, the needed two. But a memo from the AP extraordinarily was linked to the Washington Post, which showed that an editor there said that she couldn't imagine that a U.S. intelligence could be wrong about this. So they went with one source. That editor has not been fired. Only the reporter was fired. We don't know the editor's name or the source's name. So, Mark, let's talk first about this issue about false flag or errant missile. Could it be both, as I'm postulating him? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, even if it was an errant air defense missile, an S-300 interceptor, even if that was the case, then certainly the Kiev regime did everything they could to exploit the situation. You have to understand that a great deal of the civilian damage that is often reported about during the Russian airstrikes, be those of the drone variety, the Goran II, or be they of the Russian caliber cruise missiles, a great deal of the civilian damage is actually due to abortive Kiev regime air defense attempts. And we have seen that repeatedly. In fact, the New York Times just ran a story in the last week admitting that an apartment building in Kiev that was hit during recent strikes was the result of an errant U.S. supplied Nassim's air defense missile. So this is a regular occurrence where their own missiles, their own air defense is what is actually hitting the rare instances of residential buildings being hit. And we've seen that repeatedly. However, simply the strange trajectory that would require this air defense missile to go so far away in the opposite direction from the incoming missile that would have been targeted to such an extent and travel so far across the border in the Poland tends to make me believe that this was an intentional false flag. I find it very hard to believe that an S 300 missile would make that, not that they would miss and not that they would cause damage, but that they would make that curious flight into Poland. Go on. I would just like to say that, well, first of all, it is clear that the U.S. very easily could have used this situation to deny that it was an air defense missile to say that it was a Russian missile. The Western press would never report otherwise and they would never question it. It could very easily have been used for a U.S.-led intervention by a coalition of the willing, meaning probably Poland and Romania, into Western Ukraine. It was not, which means that the U.S. is not ready to intervene in Ukraine directly, not here, not now. I'm not rolling that out for the future. I see plenty of signs that I think the U.S. has contingency plans in place for that if things should go south for the direction of the conflict, but that may be a year or two down the line. Obviously, they were not willing and they're not ready to do that now. The very public slap of their client Zelensky in Kiev when he wouldn't go along with the line that actually admitted it, and we know that that line now is the launching of missiles that could be used to start World War III because that is what was really on the line there because I see no way that a U.S., a NATO intervention into Ukraine would not lead to World War III of some form or another. I mean, there's plenty of people that say we're already in that and those are fair arguments. So you're saying, I don't think it's hard to believe that Ukraine would try to spark a NATO-Russia conflict, which could lead to what you're saying, but the idea that you're not ruling out that the U.S. and NATO could at some point intervene, as you say with Polish and Romanian troops, that's extremely troubling. So this was just a one-off situation where the U.S. pulled back, where Biden immediately pulled back from this, but you're not ruling that they could. What scenario would lead them? You say if the war goes south. I mean, if Russia goes south towards Odessa, is that what you're saying? Yes, exactly. That's exactly it. And we heard a report from CBS on the ground in Romania with the 101st Airborne Division there, a light easily deployed mobile force. And they were quite specific talking to the commander there that they are not there on a peace deployment, that they are there on a combat deployment, and they are there waiting for the call on a moment's notice to go into Ukraine, into conflict with Russia. That was all very open. And further, in that discussion, CBS very particularly, and I would say peculiarly, drew attention to Odessa, which is Romania is fairly close there, and that there is the potential for, I would say, the certainty at some point of a Russian move on that city, although that has certainly been put farther into the future now with the Russian withdrawal from Harrison City and the bridgehead that they had on the west side of the Nipro. So that is the scenario. The scenario is that the war goes south for Kiev. Russia looks poised to take all of east Ukraine and to move towards Odessa, which would remove their last major port city and cut off, make them a landlocked state. Whatever Ukrainian, West Ukrainian, Rump state would be left at that point. And that point, I see US Polish forces very easily be moved into West Ukraine and into Odessa as a human tripwire force, not altogether dissimilar from what Russia did in Syria by putting their troops on the ground in 2015 on the eve of a planned US military intervention there and say, what are you going to do now? Are you going to attack our troops there? I see that that is the scenario. And while I don't think that Russia would act militarily against a Western US and Polish intervention into West Ukraine, I don't think Russia ever wants to go into West Ukraine. I mean, everyone does hate Russians. I mean, quite unlike the scenario in east Ukraine. And the potential for insurgency there would just be, it would be insane. It would be suicidal. So I think Russia would make a lot of noise. I mean, they would rhetoric out the ears, but they wouldn't do anything. On the other hand, a US occupation of Odessa, which is widely seen as a Russian city founded by Catherine the Great and with a Russian-speaking, Russian-leaning population there and the strategic value of the port on the Black Sea, which Russia will never allow the US to have even in proxy. That is the nightmare scenario for me because Russia, I think, would feel compelled to ignore the human tripwire nature of a US force there and go anyway because they would see it as an essential national security measure at that point. That is the scenario I see. The other potential scenario, of course, has already been outlined by General Petraeus several times, General former director of the CIA who has openly called for a Western intervention in Ukraine. This was also highlighted by the Polish foreign minister and several other officials in DC that a Russian use of a weapon of mass destruction, the old canard, be that a chemical weapon, be that a dirty bomb, be that a tactical nuclear weapon, which is, I have to say, something that Russia would never do in Ukraine. They would never use a nuclear weapon on Ukrainian soil. The only way Russia would use a nuclear weapon against even an invading NATO force is if they presented a serious state-threatening existential threat to St. Petersburg or Moscow, right, if it went that far. That is the only scenario where Russian would resort to nukes over a conventional attack. Even if they were driven out of Ukraine by direct NATO forces, they would not use a nuclear weapon in NATO. That would almost assuredly be a false flag that is the signal, the red line signal that is now being sent to Kiev just as the chemical weapon red line was sent to jihadists in Syria by the Obama administration. We have seen for the last three months now Zelensky's forces shelling, launching kamikaze drone attacks on the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, particularly targeting to spend fuel containers there in an exact attempt to create such a dirty bomb scenario and an international incident. Would they go one step further and release a dirty bomb, claim it was an errant TACNUK, or could they get hold of a small tactical nuclear weapon themselves? I believe that there is every possibility that that could happen. It would be blamed on Russia and that would give the US, Poland, the UK, whoever the green light that they felt they needed to justify an intervention and a direct conflict with Russia. That is the other scenario. The potential for it has been laid down. Obviously they're not ready for that scenario yet, but let's say that five months from now Kiev is under threat from half a million Russian reservists and volunteers who have been called up and begin a big winter offensive. Suddenly that scenario doesn't seem as unlikely. So let's move now from Moscow to Canberra or Australia. We have Tony. Kevin, Tony, a lot to chew on there. Do you see any of those scenarios working out? Can you envision Romanian and Polish troops, for instance, engaging with Russian forces around Odessa? Not really. I think that the recent discussions which have been well publicized, in fact, if not in content between Nicholas Burns and his opposite number in Moscow, the CIA chief, and also Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser and his opposite number in Moscow, have certainly established pretty clearly what both the American and the Russian red lines are. And I don't see any sign of an American red line over Russia taking Odessa. If there is one, I'd like to know where it's been recorded. If Russia's army decides that they wish to and they can take Odessa, I believe they will. It's just a question of when. The American forces in Romania are essentially there as a deterrent against a wider war and to reassure the Eastern European allies. The polls have made pretty clear that they haven't puffed, but they really don't want to get into a big war at this point. And Zelensky's lost an enormous amount of credibility over the last two or three weeks. The boy who tried wolf too often and went on begging for weapons, more weapons, more weapons. So I feel a little bit reassured by the outcome of the the missile strike in Poland incident because it's shown in the world that when the chips are down, Biden will take the advice of his army of general general Milley. He will take the advice of his national security chiefs and he'll ignore the advice of his State Department, which is all very encouraging in the interest of peace. So I come back to the question of what Russia's short term plan in Ukraine, pretty obviously they're weakening seriously and to a point which cannot be repaired in peace time, sorry, which cannot be repaired in wartime. They're weakening Ukraine's electrical energy infrastructure in a huge way. And this is affecting all of Ukraine, not just the KF, not just Lviv, but even down as far as Odessa, because the deaths of people have had to give up their electricity to feed power into the rest of the country. All of this, of course, as the Russian Peskov in Putin's office has been making clear, is directly aimed at reducing Ukraine's war-making capacity, but it's also having the effect of seriously damaging the livability of all of the Ukrainian major cities to the point where the mayor of Kyiv, Klitschko, has been virtually begging the people of Kyiv to leave the city to get out, to go to the country, to go to places where they have some ability to sustain themselves in terms of eating and food, because obviously living in high rises in Kyiv is becoming completely untenable. People can't walk up 12 flights of stairs every day carrying water and fuel. People can't start little fires in their apartments to try to keep warm. This is just impossible. I know that Russian people and the people of Kyiv are largely Russian people, survived the siege of Leningrad under incredibly tough conditions, but this is really not comparable, because we don't have a Russian army on the gates of Kyiv and we don't have a national struggle going on, as there was between Stalin's Russia and Germany's Hitler. I think the Ukrainians in Kyiv must be extremely conflicted now, keeping their heads down, trying to survive this nightmare. They would turn on a dime to another leadership if there was some way of removing Zelensky. That may have come a little bit closer. I know I'm in a minority here. I think most people are talking about there being a long war. I continue to hope that it might be a little bit shorter than that. The last thing I'd like to say before we go on with the conversation is, well, I've lost it, so let's go on with the conversation. Mark, could you respond to that where Tony said he didn't think that Russia would be stopped if they tried to take Odessa, for example? Well, I mean, it depends on the amount of political will and the course of the war. I mean, first of all, it's not such an easy thing to do. As of right now, the way the battlefield is layout, Russia would now have to make a contested crossing of the sniper under fire, which is not an easy thing to do. We've seen multiple river crossings by both sides in this conflict result in heavy casualties on whichever side was doing the attempting under fire. This is a difficult thing for any military to do and in the scale that it would take to even surround Odessa, much less storm it, it would be a very significant military unless that attack came from the north and Kiev would have to fall or be surrounded before that could happen. That may be a long way off. Could Russia be stopped if the Russian government and military was dead set on it? No, but that might take years. It is not something that would ever happen overnight. Could they be stopped by the US? Again, I'm not saying that a Western intervention is going to happen. I say the potential for it has been late and quite obviously they've chosen not to do it now. But like I said, as things go south, there will be pressure from many people in Washington. And I think Tony is exactly right. The biggest warmongers in the Biden administration are Blinken and Sullivan, the State Department and the National Security Advisor, which is rather odd, of course, that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense have to be the moderating voices often calling for diplomacy in the Biden administration. But that was also true of the Trump administration once Pompeo was in there. So maybe it's not that unusual for a US administration for the Secretary of State to be the biggest warmonger in a US administration. There will be under pressure at that point to save some kind of rump Ukraine. And they have laid the possibility for it. But I think that would be a long way off in a conflict as well. But certainly there's voices calling for it. There's voices in Poland. There's voices in the UK. There's voices in the US. There's voices in Romania. And we just have to hope that those voices do not become the dominant ones. But everything I see is militaries are always making contingency plans. And certain pieces have been put in place to allow that decision to be made if it is made further down the line. So there's that there. But it's a long way to the course of that conflict, that point in the conflict. I think that we are at a pivot point now. I think we've pretty much seen the high watermark of the Kiev proxies counter-offensives. They've exhausted their manpower. They've taken incredible casualties. They've exhausted pretty much all of the Western arms that they've gotten. All of the old T-72 sent by Poland, most of them have expired at this point. And I mean, the whole point of Russia's assaults on the Ukrainian electrical infrastructure, the whole the primary purpose of it is not to make the civilians of Kiev miserable. All right, that the point is military. It is tactical. The point is to inhibit the Kiev regime's military logistics, their ability to move people, military gear, ammunition, fuel, everything they need to make war around the country, around the different fronts at any time. Because the way that is done is by railroads. This is big, huge territory that we're talking here. Roads are simply not a sufficient way of moving military forces around, either physically in their size and in their endurance, or in the amount of fuel that would be inquired for militaries to crawl around on road networks. So everything has to be done by trains. And the trains in Ukraine, as in Russia, are powered by electricity. You take out the electrical infrastructure and it's very curious. You have to take a look. Ukraine has a Soviet legacy electrical grid, right? It is very robust. It has lots of redundancies. It's not something that is easily taken out. But even so, Russia is targeting primarily substation transformers, things that can be repaired. Now, the Kiev regime will soon lose the ability to repair them because as of right now, the only country that makes those transformers and some of them are upwards of 200 tons. I mean, these are not small things, right? They're not something that's in the back of your computer. Russia is the only one who makes them. They will soon lose the ability to repair them. But they can be repaired somewhere down the line. Russia is not targeting turbids, right? They're not targeting something that would forever destroy the Ukrainian electrical infrastructure. They're making very targeted strikes. They know that system. They built that system. And they're taking that system apart as they feel is necessary primarily to inhibit the Kiev regime's military logistics. And we've already seen the effects of that. And we're seeing it right now. The Kiev regime moved a large number of forces south towards her son somewhere between 40 and 60,000. And they are having a very, very difficult time now trying to redeploy those troops elsewhere as Russian forces on the other side of the Nipro now have already done. If there's a race to move forces to another front, it's already been one. And that's been one because of the problems that Russia is creating for Ukrainian military logistics via the electrical infrastructure. Now, of course, there is a secondary consideration to make the lives of the Ukrainian people so miserable that they either leave the country to Europe or they seek to maybe not overthrow the Zelensky regime in Kiev, but at least to destabilize it. That would be an extra consideration. But I don't believe that that is the primary reason that it is being done. If I could come in at that point, there are a couple of things I'd say. First of all, Russia continues to have effective air superiority over Ukraine, despite the fact that the Kiev regime can occasionally put a plane up in the sky for a while. It really doesn't mean anything. Secondly, Russia can move forces up and down the Nipro River all the way from Kerson up to Zaporizhia. They could cross the river anywhere if they have the right sort of air support making a bridgehead on the other side of the river. And a lot of the Russian forces in that area of southern Ukraine are experienced in the use of air power, in other words, paratroopers. So to my untutored non-military mind, I'd say it would be very easy for Russia to choose a point at which to cross the Nipro to establish a bridgehead with experienced paratroopers to build the pontoon bridges very quickly, to get the troops across, and to start moving around to Encircle Odessa. I think all of that could be done very rapidly when the ground freeze is solid, that Russian tanks can move across the river on a pontoon, and can really go anywhere very fast. And when you look at the map, the distance from the Lower Dnieper to Odessa through Mikhailov is not huge. The other thing I wanted to mention was that there are reports in recent days that there's a new wave of mobilization taking place in Ukraine by the Kiev regime, which involves very ruthless and complete mobilization of combat-worthy men from the Russian-speaking parts of Kiev controlled Ukraine. Interestingly, the men in the Levov area, sort of the nationalist heartland, don't seem to be being affected by this mobilization. It's basically creating more Ukrainian-Russian-speaking cannon fodder to go up against the forces of the Russian side. And one can imagine how Ukrainian Russian-speakers on both sides of the line of contact feel about this. It's going to, I think, suddenly have a hugely stabilizing impact. And we know from Russian history, and Ukrainians are Russians mostly, that front lines can collapse very quickly once the morale is broken for whatever reason. The famous scenes in Dr Zhivago, when the willingness to fight of the Russian forces suddenly collapsed because they had a belly full of the sort of leadership they were getting. I keep missing the third point I want to make. Oh, yes, it's this. The terrible scenes we've seen in the last week or so of torture of Russian prisoners of war by Ukrainian armed forces wearing various kinds of Nazi insignia in among their blue and yellow bands have gone all over Russia. These were not obtained surreptitiously. They were broadcasted very proudly. And of course the Russians picked them up. They've shocked Russians to see their soldiers being treated this way. Just simply, you know, surrendered soldiers lying on the ground simply shot as they lay appalling stuff. And one has to ask, what was PF doing in publicizing these photos? And the answer, I think, is in the usual way, thinking we want to go to the Russians into doing the same thing back to us. And then because we have control of the information system, basically, we'll turn this on Russia and say that they're cruel to Ukrainians. So far, thank goodness, Russia's resisted that temptation. The discipline in the Russian army has been so good, as it was back at the time of Butcher way back in March, that they have not responded in kind. And I don't think they will respond in kind. And so there are the beginnings now of a sense of revulsion in the more conscience driven parts of the West. People are starting to say we really need to have these apparent atrocities investigated. That won't happen, of course, that will be blocked in various ways. But once again, I think it shows that the moral side of the war is turning towards Russia's advantage. And as the ground freezes, as the as the 200,000 or plus forces and complete their training and move into divisional lines in the front, as Sorovkin chooses where he wants to put it, pleases on the chessboard. And as urban life in Kiev and in Kiev occupied Ukraine continues to deteriorate. I don't see this war going any other way, but in a Russian victory. And it may be rather sooner than later. That remains my view. Tony, you mentioned the deteriorating living conditions in Ukraine. And I wanted to ask as well, though, about how whether this war is going to play out in terms of Europe and the U.S. domestically kind of reaching a breaking point in terms of a so-called dark winter. How bad do you think it's going to get? Your thoughts and also remarks on that. Well, I don't think the U.S. is going to suffer at all. The U.S. does well in world wars. The U.S. economy always does well in world wars, because it's basically a military driven economy. And but I do think there'll be profoundly bad consequences in NATO Europe, in all of NATO Europe. And the people are more and more getting out in the streets, more and more becoming anxious. Alternative type parties, leaders are coming forward, I see in Germany the alternative for Deutschland Party, which has been portrayed rightly or wrongly as a neo-Nazi party. I don't know whether that's true, because these days, the power of Western information warfare is such that anybody can be called a neo-Nazi. I mean, they got rid of Jeremy Corbyn, who was probably the best labor leader in Britain for decades. They managed to get rid of him. Everybody kept as of. Excuse me, Tony. Everybody can be called a neo-Nazi, except as of Italian. No, they're not. They're not nice. You see, they're just fellows who like to wear funny, funny badges on their uniforms. They're really nice guys. But to continue, they didn't do very... Marine Le Pen didn't do all that well. But now we've got a rightist leader in Italy, Miloni. And so I think Europe's in for big changes over the next few weeks. And by the time mid-winter hits in January, it's going to look a very different map of Europe. Mark, did you want to comment on that at all? Yeah, I agree mostly with Tony in this case. As the West tries to push forward with their absurd oil price cap plans, we may see the price of oil and thus of gasoline rise further in the United States. And Americans, of course, are very temperamental about having to pay more at the pump, but nothing too serious. Certainly nothing on the scale that Europe is facing. In fact, there is just a lot of talk in the European press in the last couple of days about a subsidy war with the United States, because now with the threat of the energy prices for energy intensive industries in Europe, they're all having to close down. They can't keep up. And a number of them are looking at relocating to the United States, where energy prices will be relatively cheaper. And these are big companies, and there is a substantial number of them, steel manufacturers, chemical manufacturers, some of Europe's biggest companies. This has been reported on by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times. And now the EU is desperate not to lose those, right? They're facing complete deindustrialization at this point because of the energy prices that we'll be facing, that European economy, their products will be so uncompetitive in global prices compared to, say, Asia, which is now getting even cheaper, reliable Russian energy that the Europeans had until a few months ago. And this is going to cause incredible damage. So they're trying to subsidize their own companies to keep them from going to the United States, and they're calling it a subsidy war, which, I mean, is something, it tells you, I think, a way that the more economically inclined European elite community is starting to see things unfold, where they realize that Europe is going to be one, much poorer, and two, they're going to be more dependent on the United States than they ever even have been before. Joseph Burrell, the EU high foreign policy, Makdi Mak, he made an incredibly racist, neocolonialist comment in the last month where he called Europe a garden that we have built, and the rest of the world is a jungle with high growth capacity, meaning those Africans have lots of kids, don't they? It's just so incredibly offensive, the terms that he put this in. And he was saying, he was using it actually to say that we can't just build a wall around our beautiful garden, we have to go out into the jungle. And what he was effect saying, the jungle needs to be pruned, and that's what we're out there doing. At the same time, he finally said something that I've been saying for months now, been saying since February, since the very conflict broke out with this great decoupling that is going on, is that Europe, to a very high degree, their prosperity, this garden that they built over the last few decades was built on cheap, reliable supply of Russian energy, and they've lost it. And that garden is now gone. It's welcome to the jungle, Joseph Burrell, because now you're with everyone else. So the decades of European prosperity are over. Whether the businesses fold, whether they go to the US, whether they have to be subsidized by the European taxpayers, whatever, it's all relative. They can't save the prosperity that they've had in one form or another. And there is going to be massive political instability in Europe over the course of this winter. But we've already seen this shuffling game, this center-right, center-left game already come in. And in Italy and Sweden, both center-right parties took power that are conveniently, of course, pro-NATO and pro-US position on Ukraine. And so nothing has really changed foreign policy-wise. There are a few other places in Europe where more dramatic change is possible, France, of course, being one of them. But it's still unlikely. We've seen in the United Kingdom, as Tony said again with Jeremy Corbyn, who was in the most absurd and sick way painted as an anti-Semite, not even because he was a leftist, but because he would have challenged US-led Western hegemony foreign policy orthodoxy. And that cannot be allowed. And the same thing is why Marine Le Pen will never be allowed to take leadership in France, not because she's right or far right. She's not really. But because she would question the foreign policy course of France with NATO in the US, and that cannot be allowed. It just won't be allowed. So there will be political instability. There will be economic chaos. But I think Europe will, by and large, muddle through it. But I do think that we are going to see a decrease in the amount of arms, and in Europe's case, aid being sent to Ukraine, not because of any necessary lack of political will, but simply because they're running out of things that they can send without significant deterioration of their own armed forces. We've seen these monthly, sometimes bi-weekly arms packages that the US is providing, the Kiev regime, and they are getting smaller, and they are getting qualitatively less. One of the big things, this has been called by many people rightly, it's an artillery war. Right? It's in many ways a World War I style heavy artillery trench fortification warfare of an incredible extent. And for that, you need artillery pieces and you need artillery shells. The Kiev regime, as of June, by their own deputy defense intelligence speaking to the Guardian, pointed out that they're firing five to six thousand artillery rounds a day. While Russian forces, according to them, are firing fifty to sixty thousand artillery rounds a day. And by June, Russia had destroyed all of the Kiev regimes, existing quite substantial numbers of artillery. And they were completely reliant at that point already on the M777s, the other artillery pieces that the West was providing them, which depended entirely on 155 millimeter NATO standard rounds, right? The existing 152 millimeter wouldn't work in them. So the West has simply run out of artillery shells. You see that the number of those 155 millimeter rounds, artillery shells, has gone to nothing. The US is desperately trying to get South Korea on the other side of the world to donate a hundred thousand artillery rounds to the Kiev regime. But even if they do, that's still only twenty days supply. What do they do when that runs out? And you've seen in these packages, there's nothing, there's nothing more on that scale. And it's the same thing when we're talking other weapons. US has promised the Kiev regime eighteen more high-mars to replace the ones that Russia's been destroying. The only problem is they have to be built. They're on contract with a backlog. They'll get them in a few years, right? We're seeing the demilitarization at this point. It's long. It's slow. It's not sexy. And it's not driven or reacting to the headlines in the Western mainstream media. But Russia is demilitarizing not just the Kiev regime at this point. They're demilitarizing NATO. And the US right now produces thirty thousand artillery rounds a year. Thirty thousand artillery rounds a year. Russia is firing fifty to sixty thousand artillery rounds a day. That is industrial warfare. And the US, their military industrial complex, the whole West, is not militarily prepared to fight an artillery heavy land-centric war in Europe right now. They've already reached the limit of their capabilities without cutting very deeply into their own military stockpiles and forces. And you're starting to see those weapons peter out. And when they do, then what happens? There is, I guess, the potential for some type of diplomacy at this point at that point. But I don't believe that the Zelensky regime will or is capable of any type of surrender. I think even if he was willing to, then the Banderites that are as thick as flies in that regime would simply take over. They would stop with the puppet. The state within a state would rise up. And I think the US would continue to support them in whatever way they could because they will fight this conflict to the last Ukrainian. We've heard from Mark Milley say that they believe their rules-based order is at stake in Ukraine. Meaning US led, Western global hegemony. They believe that's on stake here. Russia believes their status as a great power and potentially their existence as a state is at stake here. Neither side is going to go back down. And ultimately, at some level, the US position is so cynical, I believe among many of the top people, decision makers making decisions in Washington, that if it is inevitable that Russia is going to win, they want as many Ukrainians as possible to die in that process. Because ultimately, in one form or another, Russia will have to govern that territory after the conflict is over. And every Ukrainian boy, whether he wanted to fight this military or was conscripted, who dies is another Ukrainian family that whatever they thought beforehand now hates Russia forever. That is the long-term US goal here, not just to weaken Russia but to make Ukraine to permanently separate Russia and Ukraine in the minds of the Ukrainian people forever. And at least in Central Ukraine and West Ukraine, I think this was pretty much always the case, that has succeeded extremely well to a much higher extent than I thought was possible in February. If I could make a couple of points following on from that. If one applied that sort of logic to Germany in 1945, one would ask, where was the residual German hatred of Russia after that very brutal ending to a very brutal war? Answer, it disappeared. There were a few maybe emigre groups in South America and so on. But significantly, Germany turned its back on the nightmare of that war. And I believe the same thing would happen in Ukraine. I think most people know when they're forced to fight, they're forced to fight. And they're actually being shot in the back by Ukrainian Nazis if they don't fight. And that's been well documented in recent weeks. In a funny sort of way, this could all end well. The Russians don't have to occupy the Western Rump State. I believe they would leave that little hotbed of Ukrainian Nazi sentiment well and truly alone. But if they do have the whole seaboard and if they have the Central Ukraine industrial bills around Krivoi-Rog and so on, they've got the part of Ukraine that matters. And they will have ended the threat of an existential strike up from the soft underbelly of Russia that America has been building in Ukraine. So I think it's looking pretty good for Russia. The other thing I wanted to say was it hasn't really been trench warfare, hand-to-hand combat in the trenches and so on. It's been highly mobile artillery warfare. And as Marks explained very well, the Russians have the edge in terms of the munitions, the artillery to fire them. And it's an extremely mobile artillery. I've been watching lots of the Russian military reports on video. And it's hit and run. You fire your missiles once you know where the enemy is. And then you quickly get out of the way until they've worked out where you are. And you just keep moving around very quickly. And the result is in the casualty figures. The Ukrainians have taken at least 80,000 casualties, which is terrible. And the Russians have taken far less, by all accounts, much, much less. Maybe not by a factor of 10, maybe by a factor of six or seven, but it's in that range. And so it isn't having the same impact in Russia that it's having in both Ukraine and in the West. I mean, the Christmas lights are on in Moscow as we speak. People are celebrating the winter festivals that go on pretty much from the end of November to the end of January. It's a happy time in Moscow. The loss of the liberal intelligentsia, large parts of it, who fled to the West, is a loss that Russia can handle pretty well, because the parts of the intelligentsia that matter to them are the technical and the business intelligentsia and the scientific intelligentsia. They're not moving. And the loyalty to the government has just gone up and up and up. There's a real risk, and it's not a risk, it's already happened, that the West has become so indoctrinated by its own information warfare that it no longer sees what's real and what isn't real. I really think that people like Ursula von Lyon and this German foreign minister and the Blinken and the people around Blinken they're living in their own indoctrinated fantasy world. Now, fortunately, as we've said, there are still our voices of reason in the United States, the defense establishment, and I put a lot of faith in their continuing to call the shots. Mark, you've said that this is basically, this is the battle between multilateral world or multi-polar world and U.S. dominance. And if you look from that point of view, the U.S. will not be interested in any peace talks. However, when you see the political instability that you are predicting for Europe and the looming Russian offensive, could that be the basis for these talks that we've been hearing about possible negotiations? Where do you stand on this issue? Does the U.S. really have any interest at this point in Ukraine entering into negotiations when they stopped them back in March, when the war could have been perhaps ended right then, but far less casualties and loss of life and damage? Or does the U.S. going to have to continue to push this war to try to bleed and overthrow Russia? Or do they, the Russian government, do they realize that that is a lost cause, that this will not lead to the toppling of Putin, for example? Where do you stand on this issue of whether there are, whether the U.S. is serious about negotiations? I'll mention this as well. The story about Jake Sullivan and his remarks about putting out the idea that there could be talks happened just before the U.S. midterm elections. And I wondered at the time whether that had anything to do with that, because the war Republicans who wanted negotiations, that became an issue in the campaign. And there was a group of progressive Democrats who put out a letter asking politely if Biden would negotiate. And Nancy Pelosi stopped that, and they had to withdraw the letter. So that, I wonder if that was the timing of that talk of negotiations? Or is there real serious factions in the U.S. that realize that the game's up, there's too much instability going to happen in Europe? Russia's offensive is on the way, and maybe it's better to cut their losses and talk now. Yeah. So first of all, I don't think there were any Republican voices calling for negotiations. There were a few Republican voices raised hesitantly and then backtracked that there wouldn't necessarily be a blank check with arms. There might be some more accountability. But I see broad bipartisan consensus in the U.S. outside of a few voices on the right or left that are easily whipped into line. I don't see any popular U.S. sentiment against the war. There certainly isn't enough suffering to override the fourth estate propaganda machine. I don't believe there's any sentiment in the Biden administration for serious negotiations. Again, possibly aside from the Pentagon because they know what's coming and they know that actually now would be a high watermark where the Kiev regime would have much more leverage than they might have later. But I don't see pieces, any kind of possibility here. I don't see. I think that this will have to end. There will be diplomacy only at the end of an enormous and unquestioned battlefield victory. I do not think the Kremlin believes it can trust the U.S., the collective West, in negotiations of any sort. They've already seen both Minsk accords never intended to be fulfilled. They saw the January 21st agreement ripped up back in 2014 and just forgetting that it was ever agreed to or existed. They saw the U.S. pull out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty, the INF treaty, the open skies treaty, the JCPOA with Iran. I don't believe that Russia believes that negotiations with the U.S. and that's the only one that they could make negotiations with. Negotiations with Zelinsky, with the Europeans is pointless. They understand that and they also understand that there's no point in negotiations with the U.S. Negotiations will come after the battle is won and new facts are created on the ground even if that takes years to accomplish. I believe it will take years. In fact, I don't think it will ever end. I think there will always be a period of instability even if Russia say massive offensive manages to surround and force the surrender of Kiev. You will see a shadow government set up in West Ukraine or in Poland if necessary and West Ukrainians will never stop the struggle. I don't think they, the primary component of their national identity conception of what it means to be a Ukrainian is to hate Russian and Russians and East Ukrainians who don't hate Russians. If five decades of the Soviet Union couldn't get the banderism out of West Ukraine, there's no way that anyone is going to do that in the modern day. I don't think this will ever end completely. It may end periodically. There might be ceasefires. There might be temporary treaties. This Ukraine that is the perverial Humpty Dumpty falling off a wall, you can't put it back together again. It will never have the borders it once had and those borders will be bloody probably for the rest of our lives. Tony, you want to weigh in on the question of negotiations? We've been joined by Scott Ritter. Scott, hold on a moment. Let's listen to Tony and then you will bring it in. I'll just quickly respond to that. Antagonism between neighboring states that have had a bloody history does not necessarily entail continued violence and bloodshed. I mean there's this concept of a cold peace. You've got a cold peace between Russia and the Baltic states, for example. There's a lot of hatred of Russia quite clearly in those Baltic states. They're having Nazi-style torchlight processions. They're taking out joint war memorials. Horrible stuff's happening. But the frontier is operating normally. People are going forwards and backwards. Trade is taking place. Even tourism is taking place. Family tourism. People have a way of working around these hostilities and I think there's a bit of a risk of over dramatizing things. Civil wars end and people get back to sort of working arrangements even if they don't like the people on the other side of the border. I mean paradoxically now the west is building a new iron curtain around Russia. The west is building a new iron curtain. Where it goes is not quite entirely clear in Ukraine, but an iron curtain there will be. To that extent, I agree with Mark. But I think that Russia could very happily live with this. And as Mark said, they have decided that the west is completely untrustworthy and completely not capable of negotiation in a serious way. And so they're basically circling the wagons around Russia in a very effective and safe sort of way, avoiding the risk of nuclear warfare by keeping lines of communication open at the levels where it cuts. But we are looking at a bifurcated world. The difference being that it's almost as if America and its European satellite will be the minority on the defensive as Stalinist Russia was on the defensive in the post-1945 Cold War. The roles have reversed. And meanwhile, Russia will be exploring new opportunities of taking part in the globalized world with new payment systems, new trading systems. And getting on with life very nicely. Thank you very much. Scott Ritter has joined us from New York State. And Scott, thank you for coming in. We've been discussing various aspects of what's next for Ukraine, including, as you just heard now, the prospects of negotiations. I think Mark's taken the position that you did in the article you wrote for Consortium News that Russia is not interested in anymore. They were at the beginning of the war. But that's gone. And we have talked about the political ramifications in Europe. And what we haven't discussed yet is the looming, in great detail anyway, looming Russian offensive. Give us your generalized view of what you see coming next in this next phase of the war. We're in the total Russian victory phase. Russia has been slow to start. The West has never fully comprehended what the special military operation meant. We tried to mirror image our way of fighting war, especially using the 1991 Gulf War as an example. Total war up front. We never understood how the Russians felt about Ukraine. We mocked Putin. We mocked every Russian who spoke about the sense of a Slavic brotherhood, why they wouldn't go in full speed. And we've pumped tens of billions of dollars of military assistance and financial assistance, sustaining a Ukrainian government that should have collapsed sometime in late spring, early summer. Russia now has, it's like a very heavy ship. You know, trying to get a ship to change its direction is difficult. And yet we've succeeded in getting Russia to change its direction. And I think it's all over, except the death, the shouting, the destruction, the screaming, the blood, the tears. But it's going to happen. It's inevitable. Russia made its point clear back in December. And I just invite everybody to reread the draft treaties that Russia put on the table on December 17th, NATO and the United States. These were draft treaties. These weren't suggestions. These weren't haphazard thoughts. This wasn't Lavrov scribbling something down on a napkin at midnight. These were well-coordinated, well-thought-out positions by Russia that said, you have pushed us into a corner and this is it. This is our final go. You want to avoid a war right here? And they begged, told the West, read this, sit down, discuss this. Let's talk this seriously. If you don't, it will be a military technical solution. Now that's just Russian for war. But again, the Russian war was an SMO, the hands behind the back. We ignored them. Russia's never taken those proposals off the table. Those proposals, I believe, are the end game. This is why I don't believe there's going to be this cold peace. I don't believe there's going to be a Western Ukraine. If Russia allows a Western Ukraine to survive after this, then Russia has lost the war. If Russia allows a cold peace to survive after this, then Russia has lost the war. Russia's victory is the treaty they put on the table in December. A new European security framework that respects Russia's national security interests, respects the fact that Russia has a legitimate interest in what goes on on its borders. The difference between today and what happened during the Soviet times in terms of counterinsurgency is called Chechnya. The Russians know how to win counterinsurgency campaign. They have done it. Chechnya is the example. If anybody had looked at Chechnya back in the 1990s, they would have said that it's far worse than anything that exists in Western Ukraine in terms of hatred of Russia, violence, etc. Look at Chechnya today. That is Western Ukraine in the future. Russia is going to destroy the Banderists. Russia is going to crush the Western Ukrainian nationalism. That is the only way Russia gets victory, and the only people to blame are the West. This is not Russia's fault. Russia didn't want this war. Russia was looking for a peace on the 1st of April that would have been very unsatisfactory to Russia. Very unsatisfactory because it would not have resolved any of the issues. That's how much Russia wanted to avoid the war that's getting ready to happen. This is a slow mobilization. Russia is slow to anger, but we talk about the hatred that Western Ukrainians feel towards Russia. I'm not going to say that Russia hates yet, but I keep rereading Rick Atkinson's trilogy about the American Army in World War II. They talk about how this conscript military of people that really didn't want to fight. They weren't true believers in taking on Nazi Germany. These are guys who wanted to stay home, live with their families, but they got mobilized. Then they went to North Africa, and they got jerked around. They had a little casserine pass and incompetent leadership. Then they went to Italy, and by the time they landed in Normandy, this was an army that was ready to kill, wanted to kill because they recognized that killing Germans was the only way to get home. Russia is getting to that point right now. They're tired of this game. They're tired of what the West is doing. They're tired of the lies. They're tired of the deceit, and they're getting to the point where they're ready to kill because that's the only way this gets resolved. This is a horrible place to be in because it means just that people are going to die. The people of Ukraine right now are suffering like they've never suffered before, and that suffering is not going to end. Tony, I respect you, but there's not an iron curtain. It's a rusty curtain. It's a corrupted curtain. The iron curtain is when everybody is unified. The iron curtain is when you have European unity speaking together in a concerted voice. There is no European unity, and whatever they're constructing is collapsing even before they get it up. The foundation is rotten. I mean, you think the French and the Germans, they're starting to wake up that the enemy isn't to the east. The enemy is to the west. It's not the Russians that are destroying their economy. It's the Americans destroying their economy. The Americans are stealing their industries, jacking up prices, destroying everything, and only now are they starting to wake up. The rest of Europe is woken up too. The only people that are unified are the lemmings that live in Poland and the Baltics, who seem all too content to be running towards the Russian cliff. And sooner or later, I think that Europe, the rest of Europe is going to say, go, run, jump off the cliff. We're not joining you. There is no European unity. And again, Russia did not want this situation. Russia didn't ask for this. This was not a Russian objective. Vladimir Putin is not sitting there in the Kremlin at night saying, how can I destroy Europe? This is not a master Russian plan. This is European incompetence, really large. This is American ignorance. This is a combination of the collective lunacy of the West playing out in real time. So, you know, the only thing that's disconcerting about all this is because of the incoherence of the Western approach. It's hard for us to say, what does the West want? That's the one thing. We know what Russia wants. There is no question about Russia wants. They want a new European security framework that protects them from the vagaries of the West. What does the West want? We don't know. That's the problem. They cannot articulate this. They certainly don't want peace because they could have had that. But they don't want war either because they understand what the consequences are. So, they're bouncing around between, in that middle ground here, sacrificing every Ukrainian possible. What's happening to Ukraine is a war crime. A war crime perpetrated by the West, not the Russians. Allowing an entire nation to evolve into the sad state that it is today. I am sickened when I see the lines of women lining up for water. Why is that happening? Why? It's not Russia's fault. Yes, you're going to say, Scott, they blew up the infrastructure, blew it up because the West insisted on pumping in tens of billions of dollars worth of modern weaponry that slaughtered Russian troops on the front line. Russian troops didn't want to get into this kind of fight. But they're there now. 200,000 Russians are showing up on the battlefield in the next month. That's 10 to 15 division equivalents. And Ukraine's got nothing, nothing to stand up and take them on. Russia is getting ready to steamroll. The day of the soft approach is over. God help the Ukrainian troops that are in front of them, because they're all going to die. Sorry, you wake me up at this early in the morning, Joe, you're going to get some emotion. I don't know what you'll be like afternoon after you've had some coffee. Felicia, I think you made yourself clear. Mark, you're in Russia right now. What do you think of what Scott just said? Well, I think he should be giving the morale boosting speech to Russian reservists who have been mobilized before they go into battle. I agree with a lot of Scott's broad points, but I'm not quite as optimistic or triumphalist. I think that Russia has all the pieces there. But there is a lot of room for a lot of mistakes that a lot of mistakes have been made already. And I foresee some type of Russian victory at the end of this, but I don't think it will be quite as total or triumphalist. And I think the path there will be bloody and costly. I remember people saying when Lissichonsk was liberated or fell, depending on your point of view, severed an S in Lissichonsk. Oh, that the momentum is there and the Kiev regime is defeated and Bakhmut would fall in a couple of weeks. And we're four or five months on. And those fortifications in Bakhmut, they've been reduced, they've been chipped away at and they're being surrounded. But the ability of the Kiev regime to get its conscripts and its volunteers to continue to fight in the most egregious circumstances when they're facing a 10 to one artillery disadvantage and a lack of even the most basic military supplies sometimes is incredible. Especially when a lot of those conscripts are East Ukrainian boys and girls that don't or did not buy into the whole Ukrainian, particularly West Ukrainian nationalist scene. I simply don't think that it will be quite as one sided or thunderous. I see the same general path. I just see it being a lot tougher. And the end result will be not quite as one sided. I mean, there is a victory, but what does a victory look like? For me, I would be extremely happy with a victory that ended with East Ukraine liberated. At this point, there's very little options except having it absorbed into Russia. But I'm not even sure that that much will be done. Harkov, Dnipropetovsk, these are big cities with lots of fortifications surrounding them even requiring hundreds of thousands of troops. And I don't believe that a political settlement can be forced on Kiev. How many waves of mobilization will Russia require? Two, three more? I don't know. But even with what Russia has called up so far, that still barely brings Russia to parity with the amount of forces that the Kiev regime has already mobilized, roughly some 700,000. They've taken heavy casualties, but they've largely been able to replace them piecemeal with conscripts along the way. And I believe that Russia has escalation superiority in this. They have an industrial complex. They have a population that is five times what Ukraine is. They have a military and a military industrial complex geared up to fight this type of war the way the West isn't and will not be. But that doesn't mean that it is going to be easy because of all of those advantages. And like I said, there have been a lot of mistakes made up till now, particularly not calling up the reservists from the very beginning, but there will be mistakes made in the future as well. I think that the biggest mistake was made in those first seven months of the war when Russia was not prepared to fight the war fully as a total war on Ukrainian infrastructure. And I think that when Mark speaks about the valiant defence of the Ukrainians and the very, very slow advance through the central Donbas warfront, I think we need to say in all fairness that most of that period of time, Ukraine still had pretty free passage of munitions, weapons of ammunition to the front with the exception of a few well publicised, if you like, raids on trains coming through. It was an open passage to the front. That's no longer true. The war on Ukrainian infrastructure which really has only been going for three or four weeks now is progressively wearing down Ukraine in capacity to resist. So it's a different war now. I think I'm probably closer to what Scott was just saying than to what Mark was just saying on that. And on the point where Russia has to occupy all of Ukraine, certainly Russia could occupy all of Ukraine at the end of this war and certainly they could impose the sort of draconian policing of the whole of Ukraine to suppress the Bandera rights in a very effective way. That may be the outcome or there may come an opportunity for peace at something less than that. I have an open mind on that. Let me just, if I can just say some, Mark, here's my here's my issue. I have no mistakes were made. You know mistakes were made. We all know mistakes were made. And we also know that the Russian military is continuing to make mistakes. They're not perfect. We need to knock them off the 10 foot tall pedestal and understand that it's not, you know, the Soviet military wasn't perfect either. They had the debacle of the Winter War. They had the debacle of the 1941 campaign. They had the debacle of the 1942 campaign. They had the debacle of 1943 up until the point they launched this massive counterattack, which in itself was a horribly inept, sloppy approach that achieved victory only at great cost in Russian lives and equipment. And they continued to be sloppy all the way up until the end of the war. Mistakes were made on a daily basis by the Soviets, but they had momentum on their side. And this is what I'm saying. On the front line now, let me build up on what Tony said. I talked to Atti Aladinov the other day. I don't know what you think about him, Mark. I know he's a Chechen. I know he's got issues and such like that, but he's a combat leader. He's on the front line in his troops. We're the ones responsible for the liberation of Severodonetsk, or at least participated in the liberation of Severodonetsk, et cetera. When he speaks of listening to, you know, the radio traffic of the troops in front of him, he says, you don't, you don't hear Ukrainian. You're English, you hear French, you hear Polish, a lot of Polish, an awful lot of Polish, as if in the only people they're fighting right now are the Polish mercenaries. Thousands of them, tens of thousands of them on the front line. So I would say that, you know, these conscripts that you speak of, and again, applaud the courage of the Ukrainians who continue to fight under horrible conditions. But I don't think the conscripts are the ones that are doing the bulk of the fighting anymore. I think they hold the line. I think they used to plug the gap, but the hard fighting is done by non-Ukrainians or, you know, Ukrainian troops that have been trained and equipped by NATO, not these rapid mobilizations of conscripts. And as Tony said, the day of the free ride, meaning all that equipment just flows from the, from the border with NATO to the front line in relative free, that's over. That's done. So when I look at, you know, force strength ratios, I see Ukraine burning. Its burn rate is quite high. Its replenishment rate is quite low, and there's really no, there's nothing out there that says that's going to change. The Russians, meanwhile, you know, yes, Bakhmut hasn't fallen yet, but what did we expect? Russia went in with insufficient military resources. We know this now. This is why the 200,000 wasn't sufficient. This is why the Ukrainians were able to launch their counteroffenses in Karkov and in Karasov. And only now are the Russians consolidating these defenses. They brought in, you know, 87,000 of the mobilized, and they've used them to plug the gaps. So yes, I would say that there's a relative parity that's been achieved on the battlefield now. And left to its own devices, Russia would grind through a very slow, laborious bloody victory with the resources has now. 10 to 15 division equivalents are showing up on the battlefield, and Ukraine's got nothing, nothing to replace it, nothing to counter it, nothing. They're getting weaker while the Russians get stronger. I don't know what the Russians have been playing. I don't know what they're going to do with these troops. I don't think they're going to plug the defenses because that's already been done. I think these troops are going to go on the attack. And I think the attack, you don't have to be too creative. Even a silly Marine like myself can come in and say that once we punch through the Ukrainian defenses, they've got no major reinforcements out there to meet us. And those that they do bring up, we will destroy piecemeal with artillery and air power. Meanwhile, Ukraine, the country is shutting down. Ask me what the desire of defending Karkov to the death is on the part of the Ukrainian civilians that are there freezing the death right now. What is their, what is their desire to die for the motherland? You don't have to take Karkov, you just have to surround Karkov. And, well, I thought I had sound, but I didn't. I think that this war is going to be very bloody, very violent. It's going to boggle the mind, boggle the mind of everybody in the civilized West, because as bad as Ukraine's been up until now, it's going to get worse. It's going to get worse on a scale that we're not accustomed to. Because when the Russians break free, I just bring up, all I can envision, Mark, is the destruction of Army Groups Center in 1944, the Germans, holding that line, holding that line, holding that line, holding that, boom, the Russians have broken free. And then it's over. They're running, they're getting slaughtered. There's not going to be Russians taking prisoners. They're not going to sue prisoners. They're not going to execute them like the Ukrainians have. They're just not going to take them. They're just going to roll over them. As you run away, you're going to get machine gun down. As your vehicles move, they're going to be blown up. The Russians are just going to keep moving, keep the momentum, because this is what they've realized. You can't be nice to the Ukrainians anymore. There is no nice. There is no soft approach. It's the hard approach. It's the destructive approach. And if the Russian generals aren't thinking this, if this isn't in their minds, and they've been to the schools, I know their schools, I've studied their schools, I know their doctrine, I know what they've been taught, if they're not doing this, Mark, then what do we got? Then Russia deserves what it gets. It's going to get the sheet, because the only way to victory for Russia is to accomplish that new European security framework. Anything short of that is a loss. Russia didn't do all of this just to have a cancerous, vanderous Western Ukraine sitting there creating the potential for forever war. Russia didn't do this to strengthen NATO. Russia didn't do this to consolidate European will. Russia did this for a new European security framework, which requires a new dynamic, which can only be one of the most decisive victory possible against Ukraine. There can't be a viable Ukraine after this, whatever exists has to be something defined by Russia, not by the Ukrainians. Will Kiev be captured? I don't think so. I think what will happen is Russia will appoint a new government in Kiev, and that new government will be the one directing surrender and overseeing this, and then we'll see. Again, Western Ukraine, I only brought up the Chechen model because I'm saying that Russia does have a model of successful counterinsurgency under very difficult conditions. I'm not saying that's what Russia is going to do in Western Ukraine. I don't know because Western Ukraine is going to require another phase of mobilization. See, I think Russia can achieve a decisive military victory with the mobilization it has. I don't think Russia can achieve the classification of Ukraine with the current mobilization. There's going to have to be another mobilization, and are the Russian people up for that? We don't know. I mean, these are big questions. Has Putin prepared? You're right. The speech I'm giving right now is a speech the Russian general should be giving to their troops and Russian politicians should be giving to the Russian people. Where is this? Where is the Roosevelt moment where Putin stands in front of the crowd and tells them, we are at war. Get ready for war, lighten your belts, purge your souls, get the women out there singing songs. I want the death surges sung everywhere because we're going to die for Russia. There's not that. There's this very calm, everything's okay. Everything's not okay, guys. It's not okay. The West has mobilized inherently, but they have mobilized. And if Russia doesn't mobilize in return, it's going to be sloppy. That's why in my heart of hearts, I look at them. All the pieces are there for a Russian victory. All the pieces are there. If the question is if the Russian chess master is going to show up and start moving them, or are we going to get the third grader coming in just moving around. I'm hoping that the chess master show up. And I don't mean that because I'm desperate for a Russian victory. I'm not. I'm desperate for peace in Europe. And unfortunately, the only path to peace right now is a Russian victory because other than that, there's a problem that's going to go on as Tony alluded to. This could go on for decades. And that's not a good thing when you have nuclear weapons. You can't leave this thing unresolved with all these nuclear weapons out there, especially when we're not negotiating like we should be. I mean, I wish William Burns the best of luck in getting the Russians back to the negotiating table. But as Mark and Tony both have alluded, there's no trust. An important part of arms control is the concept of trust but verify. You can't verify that which you don't trust in the United States and Europe they're no longer deserving of because they've lied on everything they've ever done when it comes to Russia. And the only way they're going to stop lying, frankly speaking, is to be defeated. I don't mean America surrenders. I personally wouldn't allow that to happen without giving my life. I'm not going to let my country be defeated to that level. But America has to realize that the day of the American singularity is over. And it's not Russia that's going to have to make them realize that it's Europe. Europe's going to have to grow up and recognize that this war is being fought for the sole benefit of the United States, that the United States is not only willing to sacrifice the last Ukrainian, but to the last German factory, the last French factory, the last Italian factory that we're willing to gut Europe for our own benefit because that's what's happening. We are literally gutting European industry. We are gutting the European economy to our sole benefit. And Europe needs to wake up and recognize that. And when they do that, Europe will be willing, I believe, to sit down at the table and work with Russia to get this new European security framework, inclusive of something that replicates the ABM treaty, something that replicates the INF treaty, something that, more importantly, replicates the conventional forces in Europe treaty, the idea of demilitarizing Central Europe. Imagine that. We did it once. We could have done it again, except NATO fumbled it. NATO said, now we're going to let the Baltic Republic to join us and their militaries won't be counted as part of this CFE treaty, which is insanity for Russia. The new European security framework, I think, is actually the pathway to peace, not only in Europe, but to create a sense of stability around the world. Maybe it's an example that China could look to with Taiwan. Who knows? But it isn't going to happen unless Russia wins militarily and Europe begins to decouple itself from the United States politically and economically. Yeah. Well, I think there's a lot of truth in that. And I think that there's a lively debate going on in Russia, where one hears, you know, obviously in a Russian accent and using Russian terms, the source of arguments that's got some been giving us right now. Putin, of course, has been the guy in the middle, Peskov is wringing his hands, trying to sort of ride the, ride the tiger through all this. Russia is becoming more nationalistic. I think it has to do. And the sort of the sentimental liberal intelligency of you that Russia's, you know, got to somehow get back to being European again. I think that's gone. Really, it's gone. And I think it's a good thing for Russia that it has gone because Russia is a multicultural country. It's got important Asian elements in its, in a ethnic makeup. It, it runs further east into the Pacific than my country, Australia does. There are parts of Russia, which where the sun rises earlier than in Australia. And it has to really seize its destiny with both hands as a world nation, as a great cultural world of its own, to have real pride in itself. There's so much to admire in Russia. And Ukraine has been allowed to become a cancer eating away at the Russian sense of itself. And the cancer's got to be lanced. The boils got to be lanced. It's being lanced. I hope that sort of beacon is the right man to, to lead Russia to whatever is defined by Russia as a total victory. And Scott's obviously articulated his view on that very well indeed. Mark, anything to add? Yeah, I would just say, well, first of all, I, I am praying for a Russian victory and I could care less about peace in Europe. In fact, peace and stability in Europe is the last thing I want at this point. They, their political elite wanted to make the Russian people suffer with their sanctions war so much that they would rise up and overthrow their government. Well, I want the same thing for the European people. I want them to suffer so much to freeze and go hungry and lose their jobs until they rise up and overthrow their governments. And a lot of people will be very upset when I say that, but they weren't upset when their own politicians said that about the Russians. And my wife is Crimean and I have family all over East and South Ukraine and they all want the same thing, but there's a lot of political concern in Russia right now. Not that the war shouldn't be fought, but that the Kremlin doesn't have the political will to see the war through to the bitter end that it needs to be brought to. The biggest fear that people have here is that there will be another Minsk accord style agreement. It's something that is mocked and something is debased, but the, the threat that the Kremlin, Putin not being, shall we say, Putin enough to, to move past that is something that is constantly on not just the, you know, the experts, the, the nationalist, but is on common people's tongues here. They want, there's people getting on TV saying that those Christmas lights that Tony was so interested in in Red Square should not be on this year. How can we be celebrating? Why aren't we sacrificing more to see this done faster and more thoroughly? And there's a lot of sentiment of that here. I don't think that a Russian victory lies ahead without a total military taking, liberating of and occupation of at least all of Ukraine up to the Nifer and the South. And that's going to take more than 500,000 troops, which means there will have to be multiple waves of mobilization going forward. And I don't think that any end to this conflict can be brought about until the regime in Kiev is completely torn down. If it relocates to Lvov, fine. It can be hit with cruise missiles from, from the rest of Ukraine to Lvov from now to the, the end of infinity as far as I care. But the, while Lavrov and Medvedev have both earlier said the words regime change just this week, Peskov, when Tony just alluded to, said that regime change wasn't in the plans in Kiev. And when I hear things like that, and when I see that Russia is still only planning on spending 5% of their GDP winning this conflict when the, they're facing the entire, you know, at least military stockpiles of, of the West. I still wonder if the Kremlin is taking this seriously enough and whether they're willing to see this all the way through to an end that will finally end it. I hope so. I desperately hope that Tony is right and that it will be over faster rather than longer. And I desperately hope I'm wrong and that the total smashing victory and the complete ripping up of Banderism that Scott alluded to is in the future. I'm just always a fatalist and a pessimist and it's, it's done me well as an analyst till now. I always start off on the absolute worst possible scenario and allow myself to be talked a little bit back from that edge with select facts. So I am at, I don't really believe in hope. I know where this ends. I just don't know if the Kremlin has the political will to see us through to there. And that is the only thing that could provide political instability in Russia as if people start to feel that, that the Kremlin doesn't have that will. Because after Harkov and after especially her son where the Kremlin had just said, this is Russian land and these are Russian people and then they're now seeing those Russian people being shot in the back of the head on the streets of her son by the cleansing operations. That upsets people here. And they want to see action and I expect to see action with this big Russian counter offensive, which we will see or offensive sometime this winter. I don't see where you put 300,000 new troops onto the board that would make a decisive difference if it's not to go for Kiev at this point. And to go, not that 30,000 troops that was part of a largely a shocking OSI operation that worked in the South but went terribly wrong around Kiev in the beginning of the conflict. But 300,000 troops should be just enough to surround Kiev, take Zhitomir, Sumi to allow Kiev to be completely surrounded. And if not force an end to a conflict, then force an end to the regime in Kiev at least and everything to the east of that. Mark, short of destroying Banderism, which it's very difficult to destroy an idea if you kill a lot of people. What about Scott's idea of actually getting these two treaties that were put forward by Russia last December to end on? That's never going to happen. That's never going to happen. I mean, not in the next 20 years, I mean, because the West will not be defeated here, right? I mean, they will be defeated, but not they themselves, just their proxy will be defeated here. They will never agree to a peace on Russia's terms. They still believe they have the right and the duty, the moral duty to be the world hegemon that is that is intrinsic in the ideology. And it's not just American exceptionalism at this point. It's it's Western exceptionalism because the Europeans, the Australian political elite, they all they all have that same virus that they they truly believe in their own moral and political superiority at this point that the world would be better off if it was run by them. This definitely ends in a new Cold War of one form or another. But of course, China and Taiwan is right around the corner. This is just a warm up for that. And we heard that just this week from US Strategic Command, that this is a warm up for Taiwan and China. And the multipolar world, it's still born. It won't exist, because we're being pushed by the US push here, the attempt to overthrow the government in Iran that's going on right now, the coming gigantic naval battles around Taiwan and the South China Sea into a new bipolar world that Russia and China and Iran and everyone else feel themselves, despite all of their political and social and cultural differences pushed together just to survive. Tony, if you have something to say, you're closer to that theater of battle than any of us. Yeah, well, I continue to be an optimist about the good sense of Asia Pacific people. We just saw a very successful G20, successful in the sense that the West wasn't able to act in its usual hegemonic way of past years, corralling the lower lines into an anti-Russian, anti-Chinese coalition behind it. None of those things happened. The West actually left Bali humiliated, and I was very pleased to see that. There's a resilience about the Asia Pacific region, and there's a rationality with both Chinese, mainland Chinese and Taiwanese Chinese share that rationality. I think East Europe is just a crazy place, it's full of crazy people, crazy fanatical people. Whereas you don't get that kind of crazy fanaticism in the Asia Pacific region, you get a pragmatic, hard-headed, cool, well, Singapore's the model, China's the model, South Korea's the model. I've got great faith in Asia to avoid the craziness that's coming out of Eastern Europe. Scott, you heard what Mark said that he didn't think there's any chance of this treaty going through, and it would require the Europeans, as you said, to kind of break with the United States on this. So what is your response to what Mark said? Well, first of all, Mark's 100% correct if the current political and economic elite stay in power. They will never agree to this. This is why we're in the situation we are right now, because they're incapable of common sense, they're incapable of logic, they believe only in the pursuit of the American NATO singularity. The rules based on national order must be preserved at all costs. Mark, I'm not appalled, I applaud your bloodlust. I didn't realize you had that in you for the European people. I know what they were trying to do to Russia, I just didn't realize that you were so hell-bent on doing the same thing to them. And guess what, Mark? I think it's going to happen. And what I mean by that is not this winter, but I think this is a multi-phased thing. I think Russia achieves its military victory, but political victory won't be achieved until next winter. Why do I say that? Because, again, the Europeans are just, I tried to take economy 101 in college and it just befuddled me. That's why I went into Marines, because it's much more easier for me to do what Marines do than it is to think through the complexities of not just national economies, but global economies. But hey, I'm smart enough to know that if you're going to build up your strategic gas reserves, that which keeps you alive in the coldest months of winter, and you say you don't want Russian gas, but while Russian gas is available, you buy as much of it as possible to build up these reserves as possible so that you don't have to bankrupt yourselves on liquid natural gas, and then you say we're not going to have any more Russian gas, then all those reserves you had are going to shrink down over the course of this winter, then it's going to come time to fill them up for next winter, and now you don't have cheap Russian gas to do that. You have the expense of liquid natural gas that you can't afford, therefore you're not going to be able to build up these reserves. Next winter is when Europe breaks, Mark. Next winter is when you're, I think you're going to see the beginning of what I call a revolutionary transformation in Europe, where people are going to wake up to the fact that the current political and economic elites do not have their best interests in mind, and if it doesn't happen this winter, I think you're going to see a hot summer of discontent rolling into a winter of desperation in 2023, and that's where Europe breaks. See, I do believe that the outcome is going to be a new European security framework treaty, but it can't be negotiated as you mentioned with the current political and economic elite. There needs to be a revolutionary transformation in Europe, and I think the pieces are in place for that to occur, but this is why Russia can't have, I'm going to watch my language here, Joe, because I respect your audience, a half-baked approach towards this conflict. Because if Russia leaves this conflict unresolved, then they create an impetus that gives the political and economic elite in Europe the ability to motivate, intimidate, whatever you want to say, the population into staying the course. If Russia presents Europe with the inevitability of a European NATO-slash-defeat in Ukraine, I think you're going to see demoralization. Similar, Mark, you talk about the demoralization of the Russian people through the incomplete victim. Put yourself for a second in the shoes of the Europeans, and the Americans. We've been told that we're going to send all this money and these resources off to Ukraine to have this wonderful, glorious defense against the evil Russians, and yet we're looking at it and we're losing. We're not winning, and we're looking at the difficulties we have here at home. We're losing faith, too. The Europeans are definitely losing faith. The bloodlust isn't there in Europe right now. They don't want to hurt Russia as much as you want to hurt them. I think we're seeing a shift in the paradigm of how the European dynamic is working. The connectivity between the governed and the government is starting to fray. The key to causing that to totally break is, I believe, through the economy. Again, I'm a Marine, not an economist, so if somebody wanted to jump up that smarter means they say, Scott, you're wrong, I'll accept that. But I just think that knowing what happens here, I'm looking at my gas bill. Marine and I are looking at our heating bill, and we're not even using that much heat. It's a mile, and we got it. And literally, it's gone up 80 bucks a month and it's going higher. Inflations impacting mortgage rates, everything. We're looking at our paycheck, and we're looking at the bills coming in, and we've seen just in the last several months, our monthly cost of living expenses have gone up over $1,000 a month. That's $12,000 a year, and my income isn't rising. I'm sitting here going, if this is happening to me, it's happening to everybody else, too. This is an economic crisis, and believe me, when you're looking at your bills saying, I got these bills, I got the limited resources. The last thing you're thinking is, let's send more money to Ukraine. This is why I think the Republican victory in the House is important, not because the Republicans aren't as Russophobic as the Democrats, they are. The Republicans actually understand how you can exploit the discontent of the masses to their own political advantage, and that's what it's all about. It's not about believing in anything and all that. No, it's about political power, but the key to retaining political power is to exploit the discontent of the American people about what's happening right now, and I think that's going to happen in Europe. One last thing, if I may joke, I think, Mark, you've hit on something that all Americans need to hit on. You may not have realized you hit on it. I'm not doubting your ability as an analyst. I'm just saying that I'm looking at how America views Russia, and we are influenced heavily by what I call the Putin whispers. These are the Fiona Hills and the Angles Stents and all these other people who have written book after book after book about the autocratic nature of the Russian leader. He's a dictator and evil man. He controls Russia with his maniacal puppet master thing, and as a result, we don't understand anything about Russia. I don't claim to be a Putin expert, but I do know that Vladimir Putin was an accidental president, meaning he stumbled into the presidency as opposed to desiring the presidency or spending his life seeking to get there. I do know that he spent a lot of time, he inherited a mess, a Russia that was not just economic freefall, but political freefall. The system of government of this massive country was complex to say the least, and he had to come in and he is still, I believe, dealing with the consequences of that. The idea that Vladimir Putin is this all-powerful dictator is just so far removed from reality, that there is a complexity to the Russian nation that we don't understand in the West, and because we don't understand it, sometimes we take a look at what we say is Kremlin indecisiveness, and we're unable to, because it confuses us, because Putin is this dictator. Why is there indecisiveness in the Kremlin? How could there be indecisiveness? He's a dictator, for God's sake, be Stalin-like, put your fists down, stomp your feet, two millions of people, open up the gulag, do something, Vlad, but he's not. Why? Because I think it's far more complicated. I think the relationship between the Kremlin and, for instance, the governors is far more complicated than we in the West could possibly understand. We don't understand the transition that took place from state-controlled industry to these joint stock industries that they have today, which function like a state-like enterprise, but there's a capitalist reality to it, meaning they need to actually make money. They can't just sit there and live off of the funding of the state. Russia is so complicated, so very complicated, that we don't understand it. And if we don't understand it, we come, Joe, I've talked about this before. I've used this as my basic simple Marine Corps mantra. If you don't define a problem properly, you can't come up with a solution. Because if you haven't defined the problem, what you're trying to solve isn't the problem. You're solving something which means you're solving nothing. We can't define the Russian problem. We don't know what Russia is. We don't understand Russia. We don't know what makes Russia tick. We've simplified it into the form of one man, Vladimir Putin, who, yes, he's been in power for 22 years now, but Russia's far more than just one leader. It's more complicated. We don't understand it. So we hit all the wrong levers. And the danger here is because we don't understand Russia. When Russia starts to coalesce into something that's different politically in terms of their center of motivation, etc., this is why I listen to Mark very carefully, because he's there. He has his finger on the pulse. And I'm very interested in what's happening inside Russia right now, because I think, because we don't understand what Russia was, I'm talking about even as recently as last year, we can't understand it. We can't define this transformation that's taking place in Russia, because there is a transformation taking place in Russia. It divorced itself from the West. This 20 to 30% of the Russian economy and the Russian population that we're intertwined with the rest, that divorce is almost absolute now. And there's a war, I believe, going on inside Russia for these people to just say, are they going to pivot to the East? Are they going to become a political opposition? Are they going to try and gravitate back to the West? And I think there's a war inside Russia right now to win these people over one way or the other, but we don't understand that conflict. And then when this war, when this internal conflict is resolved, there's going to be this new Russia that we still won't understand. And if you don't understand Russia, how can you sit down and negotiate with Russia? This is one of the big problems I think we have in the West right now is we don't know Russia, we don't understand Russia. Therefore, we don't know what to do with Russia. Mark, I just want to quickly say that despite being an old leather neck, I think you sell yourself short. I think you have an infinitely higher degree of understanding of the Russian economy, of global commodity, and markets, and global trade, and economics in general, than anyone in the Biden administration does. Well, that's not a very high bar. Not saying very much, is it? I can't even compliment if I ever heard one. So, Scott, you talked about a need for radical political change in Europe in order for this treaty to be accepted, except you need the United States to be part of this. These treaties were shared with NATO and the US, not with the European Union. So, you would need the same political transformation in the United States, wouldn't you? I don't think we're going to get the political transformation because I think the Democrats and Republicans are so deeply entrenched. I mean, you would literally have to have a grassroots revolution that swept everything aside, similar to what we did with King George, to have that kind of revolution. I don't see that in the cards. The American people, we're not revolutionary right now. We're consumers, baby. And as long as you feed that consumption, we will wrap ourselves in a comfort and we'll just be happy to sit here and let the Republicans and Democrats do whatever they want to do because we're that big of a loser. The issue isn't revolutionary transformation. The issue is the momentum of America. A lot of people forget that this current globalism of American version of globalism, which is we control everything, not globalism where it's shared, is a relatively recent phenomena. It came after the victory in the Second World War, where we sort of inherited the world because we weren't invaded. We weren't bombed. We had a functioning economy and we were able to be the engine of democracy even though that's not really what we were. But the true instinct of America is isolationist. We want to be in isolationist. What does America first mean? America first doesn't mean that America dominates the world. America first means that we take care of our own. And I see with the current Republican victory in the House, a trend away from this neoliberalism, neoconservative of global dominance to an America that is going to come in amongst itself, turtle up and be more isolationist where we're going to at least try to solve as much as any Republican or Democrat leader could ever do, the internal problems. And we see that. Look at what Biden's doing. The definition of American isolationism first starts with not just American exceptionalism abroad, but American exceptionalism at home. We are literally stealing the jobs from Europe. We're sucking the lifeblood out of Europe because it's America first. America's turtling up. And that's been opened the door. The key to the negotiation in Europe is to get not Macron because he's not... Mark, I've learned a new Russian word. It's not, I don't know the Russian word for it, but adequate. I always thought adequate. If someone said you're adequate to the task, I always thought that was sort of like an insult because the Marine Corps, I don't want to be adequate. I want to be exceptional. I want my boss to write on my fitness report. He is exceptional. But if my boss wrote he is adequate, it meant he's sort of born, he's dull. But the Russian interpretation of that is far different. If you're adequate, because I had some Russians call me adequate, I'm like, what am I doing wrong? Like nothing, adequate is good. You're adequate to the task. So we need European leaders who are adequate to the task. Macron is not an adequate leader. Neither is Schultz. But France and Germany are the key. Why? Both are starting to recognize the need for an independent European security alliance that's liberated from the United States. I think there's a growing recognition that NATO is little more than, and my dog is chiming in because he agrees with me, NATO is little more than an extension of American national security policy. Europe's going to have to come up with its own agency. And that's what I think Russia's going to be negotiating. This new European agency, its post-revolutionary agency, where Europe is looking out for Europe's interests, and that's best served by a new European security framework. No, it's a European security framework, meaning keep America away. I think Scott just raised a really good question. Let's assume a total Russian victory. Does NATO survive in its current form, a total Russian victory? No. NATO is fracturing as we speak. NATO is falling apart. I mean, there's a greater chance, to be honest, of NATO members going to war with each other than there are of NATO going to war with Russia. I think there's zero chance of NATO going to war with Russia because everybody understands the ramifications of that. There's a huge chance of Greece going to war with Turkey, France joining the Greeks to fight the Turks. There's a big chance there. We see animosity between the Germans and the Poles. We see animosity between the Hungarians and virtually everybody. The Serbs are unhappy. Kosovo is still a cancer in the center of Europe that could explode. NATO unity, it's deeply fractured. This is why I say the greatest threat to for war in Europe isn't Article 5. Read Article 5. Article 5 is a voluntary opt-in. There is no automatic, we line up the troops and suicidally march to the battlefield. Article 5 is, oh, you are attacked. We're going to consider whether or not we want to get involved and maybe it'll be military. Maybe it'll just be us saying, geez, you shouldn't have been attacked. Article 4 is the most dangerous article in NATO. Article 4 is where they get together and view outside threats. It's not about somebody attacking NATO. It's about NATO imposing its will militarily on an outside problem. This is why what happened with that S-300 missile landing in Poland is so dangerous because Poland was talking about Article 4. Article 4. Unfortunately, the adults in the room said no because they know what the consequences are. Every time NATO has gone to war, it's been Article 4. Serbia, Article 4, Libya, Article 4, Afghanistan, Article 4. If they go to war in Ukraine, it's going to be Article 4 because it's going to be about NATO imposing a no-fly zone or a humanitarian cord or something in Western Ukraine which they are obligated to defend. That's the threat. I don't think NATO survives. First of all, NATO is, how can you survive the double defeat of Afghanistan? We're also focused on Ukraine right now that we forget that just barely a year ago NATO suffered one of the most embarrassing defeats in its history, Afghanistan. The defeat didn't come from the Taliban beating NATO. The defeat came from America abandoning NATO. So there's a huge deficit of trust in NATO with the United States. And believe me, America is going to abandon NATO again because now we've gotten NATO to plug into Ukraine. When Ukraine collapses and tens of millions of Ukrainians come pouring across the border, are they going to be coming to the United States or are they going to be coming to Poland, Romania, France, Europe? It's a European problem. And we're going to sit there and say, that's your problem. Europe is going to go, but you caused this. You made this happen. You did NATO expansion. You told us it was all going to be okay. You told us sanctions would work. And Europe's basically looking down and realizing that America is Voldemort writ large. We are Sauron. This isn't the United States. This is Mordor. I'm here throwing in all my Lord of the Rings and stuff just to be cool here. But the point is America is evil. And Europe's recognizing this. I believe Europe is going to wake up to this fact that they're going to be left holding the bag. That bag is, I forget, I saw some, correct me if I'm wrong, to fix Ukraine right now. They're talking $350 billion in just basic infrastructure repair alone. And that number is going to skyrocket now. So we're looking at over a trillion dollars, I believe, when this is all said and done, Ukraine is a trillion dollar basket case. And that's just infrastructure. Then we have the political thing. What do you do? Because the nationalism has been injected mainstream into Ukraine right now, at least in terms of the government. And that nationalism linked to bandarist ideology. It's mainstream. People keep saying, where are the Nazis? Where are they? They're everywhere. They're the entire government's Nazi. The fact that the Ukrainians can execute Russian prisoners of war so egregiously. And nobody in Ukraine is going, time out, that's bad. Shouldn't be doing that. That's not what everybody's going to do. More. More. Give us more. Give us more. I mean, it's become a blood sport. You're going to execute Russians, murder Russians, murder Russians. And it's not just the closures. Look what they're doing in Keroson. It's millions. Now, we saw this in Butcher, but nobody wanted to admit it in Butcher. Everyone wanted to pretend it didn't happen. We wanted to blame the Russians, even though the evidence was right there in front of us. It's happening right now at large. And yet people still are saying, oh, no, Butcher was Russia. Oh, no, no. Butcher was Ukraine. It was the precursor to what's going on right now. Clayton opens modern of Russians, prisoners of war, civilians, et cetera, which is the mindset that these guys have. This is a corrupting influence. I mean, because say what you want about NATO. I mean, and I'm not a big fan of NATO, but NATO is still premised. It's a military alliance that is built on the backs of military professionals like myself, like what I used to be. And I'm not going to sit here and pretend that I'm some fuzzy kumbaya singing peacenik. I'm not. You go to war against somebody that I'm involved in. I'm going to slaughter you. I'm going to kill you. I'm going to eviscerate you. I'm going to win the conflict, but I'm going to try to do it in compliance with the rules of war, the law of war, international humanitarian law. If you put your hands up, I take you prisoner. I bring you back. Yes, I'm going to give you a little rough treatment early on to get some intelligence out of you, but I'm never going to hurt you. I'm just going to make you think you're going to get hurt. Then I'm going to turn you over. You're going to get your medical care, your food, putting the camp in the fed. You're going to communicate with your family. It's all going to be done right. That's how we fight war. Well, maybe not in Iraq, or maybe not in Afghanistan. Okay, that's how we used to fight war, but it's how we should fight war. The Ukrainians, it's a cancer. It's infecting NATO because we have American troops that are on the ground right now. I know we don't want to admit it, but we have American troops on the ground who are working with these people. We have Americans training these people, Europeans training, and the guys you're training are going to the frontline and committing war crimes. They're committing war crimes, so you legally are now part of the problem. We're providing support and use the shell civilian infrastructure in Donetsk unapologetically. The Ukrainians don't even try to deny it anymore. They just keep pounding the rounds downrange. We in the West are the same. This is infecting everything. It's a cancer, and at some point in time, our military is going to say no more. At some point in time, either that or we're going to go to the dark side. But I believe actually when a person takes an oath in the Constitution of the United States and they're trained on the laws of war, that look what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. The United States recognizes now that what we did was wrong. I'm not talking about invading. I'm talking about how we treated prisoners, how we did. There's a consensus that we lost, we got off the path, that we were wrong, we lost our moral compass, and we need to bring it back. So the military today is doubling down on training people about the morality of war. I'll always love that term. There's nothing moral about war. It's about me killing you, but the morality of war. But now Ukraine is destroying everything we say we stand for, everything we stand for, and NATO can't survive. NATO is a military alliance, and the key to that military alliance is the United States. And I know people are going to roll their eyes when I say this, but the American military does have a moral compass. We do have a moral code. We do have principles. And what's happening in Ukraine right now is a frontal assault on all of that. And I have a hard time believing that we're going to come out of this conflict. After Afghanistan, after Ukraine, I don't think there's a NATO. I don't think NATO survives. I think Europe's going to say enough is enough. We need to find our own European security agency. And we come back to what I said about Macron. It won't be Macron. Macron's talked about it, but he's inadequate to the task. They're going to need an adequate European leader which may arise after this revolutionary transformation, I believe, is going to take place between this winter and next winter. That answer your question, Mark? Yeah, I just say one thing. Assuming a Russian victory, it's not the American or the European taxpayer that is going to have to pay to rebuild much of Ukraine after this is done. It's the Russian taxpayer. And in the more sober moments here, that question is raised. How the hell are we going to do that? Million-dollar question. I mean, this is where Putin, the leader, has to get up and go. My understanding is on Crimea. When Russia absorbed Crimea, that was not budgeted, meaning it wasn't a strategic plan, our eight-year absorption of Crimea plan, where we set aside resources. It was absorbed and became a political problem because if you absorb Crimea, you take responsibility from Crimea and you got to fix it. And so they went out to the different governors and that, I guess, certain sectors of Crimea were allocated to different regions, and then a region took it upon itself to reallocate their own internal budgets to help rebuild Crimea. That's my understanding. I see you're saying I'm roughly correct. The same thing happened with the business. They say the wealthy elite, I don't want to call them oligarchs because they don't really have any political power anymore, but Putin called all the oligarchs into the Kremlin and basically shook them down and said, you're going to help us pay to rebuild this. You're going to donate some money. But rebuilding Ukraine is... That's a much bigger task. It's going to require more than a shakedown of the Russian economic elite. It's going to require a genuine tightening of the belt of all of Russia. And this is why it's so important that Putin get the buy-in of the Russian people in this conflict because it's not just about winning the war, it's about managing the peace. How do you rebuild Ukraine so that it can be an effective part? You don't want Ukraine... One of the things that has harmed Germany is the approach they took towards reabsorption of East Germany after unification, and they created a lot of political problems. You don't want to... Again, I'm an American, so what do I care? But if I'm a Russian, I don't want to suddenly become responsible for not just the... What is it? 8 million people that they are now new Russian citizens. But I mean, that number could go up to as many as 20 million if they complete the Mobile Orocea. You don't want 20 million disenfranchised, disaffected, economically suppressed people in your country. You want them to be seamless with everybody else. In order to do that, you can't use the West German model, which was, we will make no sacrifice and we'll treat the East Germans like this, this cheap labor, cheap this, cheap that, cheap this. And there's a lot of political resentment today if you look at German politics. Russia is going to have to tighten its belt, but you can only do that if you tell the people upfront, this is what's going to happen. This is how we achieve... No one has told them that upfront. Yeah, no, that's a problem. To raise a broken, devastated Ukraine, East Ukraine, up to Russia's living standard, it's an impossible task. Well, it's got to be done. Beijing, investment, please. Belts and Roads, baby, Belts and Roads. Yeah, well, I mean, that's a very important point. China will help pay for all this. And I also come back to the very rapid recovery of Russia and Eastern Europe after 1945. I mean, who would have dreamt it was possible to rebuild Donbass so quickly after 1945? The Russians, as a people, have this enormous capacity once they believe in something, even under a ruler like Stalin, to achieve incredible miracles of reconstruction. It'll happen again. They won't have a leader like Stalin, I hope. I hope that Putin will continue to be the leader, God willing, for many years to come. But whoever they have as leader, there's this Russian capacity. You see it in Mariupol now. You saw it in Crimea very quickly after 2014 to just get things done. And it's the spirit of, you might call it, the motherland, collectivism, whatever you want to call it. That this is the job we have to do together. Russians do not waste energy on the sort of internecine interparty struggles that the West wastes energy on. They get on with the job. Mark, what is happening in Mariupol? Sorry, what is happening in Mariupol? Is it being reconstructed? Is Tony over-amanticizing this Russian capacity? It is. It's just the reconstruction that's occurring so far, of course, is limited. I mean, it's still relatively small scale. It will grow. But what they've done so far, it's a nicer apartment than I have. I mean, it's just still just the beginning. As of stall is going to be the key. Are you ever going to get that back up and running? Not like it was. No, they're talking about making it a hipster park now. They're going to have to do something because that industry is gone and that was one of the cornerstone foundational industries of the economy of that region. I think that's half the problem. Again, now we could come back. I've spoken too much, Joe. I apologize. But you got my brain working early in the morning, which is always a dangerous thing. We talk about how we don't understand Russia. Mark, the Ukrainian economy, it was a Soviet economy. Then the Soviet Union broke up. Now it's a Ukrainian economy, but it doesn't work by itself. It was never designed to function as this insular thing. There's always been this shadow economic relationship between Ukraine and Russia that the West has ignored. The whole concept of Viktor Yanukovych's pivot to the European Union was unrealistic from the start because of how do you get this economy that's so plugged into Russia, the pivot. But now we look at it. It was always underdeveloped. What I mean by underdeveloped is, as of stall didn't change fundamentally from the Soviet times to what it was at the end, Russian industries changed dramatically. Dramatically. If I went to Vodkinsk today, I would not recognize Vodkinsk. I would not recognize what's going on inside the Vodkinsk factory association in terms of the modernization. There's a word I'm missing in modernity. They've made upgrades. Modernization. There's a word. That's too many syllables for Marine. But the fact is Ukraine was already decrepit. One of the things that scared the Russians about absorbing Crimea was one thing because they had the naval base and all that stuff, but Donbas itself. You just can't readily absorb that without a cut. Even though all the people like, we're Russian, we're Russian. Yeah, but you're not because you guys are still in Brezhnev era. You're still dealing with this whole Soviet infrastructure. And as of stall was part of that. But the costs that are going to be required, this is what West Germany ran into East Germany. The cost of bringing East German industry up to Western standards so that it could be absorbed and continue to make the West competitive was prohibitive. And it's going to be 10 times so for Ukraine, even under a, let's say the war didn't happen. Let's just pretend the war didn't happen. And the Ukrainians went, we want to be part of Russia again. That would have been economically prohibitive for Russia to absorb Ukraine. And even if all the Ukraine, let's say the Western Ukraine has got brainwashed overnight and they went, we want to be Russia. You still couldn't be because Russia couldn't afford to absorb you because you were that bad off. And now we've taken that, which was untenable economically to begin with. And maybe, maybe we've done them a favor by bringing it down to zero. We don't have to worry about converting ancient industry. You're just going to build it from the ground up. But how do you rebuild it as of stall? How do you rebuild? You brought up nephrotrophs. Did I say that right? I stumbled with that word some time. That's exactly what the Circov clan and the finance ministry were saying in 2014. We can't take Don Boss. Do you know how much it would cost to bring it up to Russian standards? And anyway, there's a sentiment now that I'm not sure if it will play out, but that in whatever rebuilding of Ukraine or what part of Ukraine takes place, that it will not be reindustrialized so that it can never present the threat again. Sounds like the plan they had for Germany. Yes. How'd that work out? I think on that note, if you might call this a morning here in the United States or an evening in Canberra and an afternoon in Moscow, it was a tremendously interesting discussion. We only scratched the surface. Hope you guys will come back again soon. Maybe different hours so that those of us on the east coast of the U.S. don't have to get up when it's still dark. But I want to again thank Tony, Kevin in Canberra, Mark Sloboda in Moscow, Scott Ritter in upstate New York, Elizabeth Voss who joined us from Fayetteville, Arkansas, and Kathy Wogan, our producer in Sydney, who is going to sign us off. And until next time, this is Joe Lawyer for CN Live. Thanks again for joining us. We'll see you soon. Bye-bye. Thank you so much.