 which Russia denies. Video and photographic evidence appear to show destruction to civilian targets, but it's not clear if this was intentional or returned fire to populated areas where Moscow says extremists are operating from. Russia says it has no intentions to occupy Ukraine, but it's unclear how long Russian forces would have to remain to pacify the country. Will the continuing arming of Ukraine and CIA training of guerrilla units mean the U.S. is intending to bog Russia down in a quagmire? Is the U.S. intention to give Russia its Vietnam, the way the U.S. gave the Soviet Union its Vietnam in Afghanistan? There are open calls for domestic capital for regime change in Moscow. In the past week, the economic war against Russia was intensified with the sanctioning of its central bank and the removal of many Russian banks from the swift international banking system. What impact will the sanctions have on Russia and world economy? Meanwhile, Western governments have shut down English-language Russian media, while the BBC continues to broadcast in Russia. The Moscow Times, very critical of Putin, continues to publish, but the radio station Echo of Moscow has been shut down by Russian authorities. Our guest is Mark Sloboda, a former U.S. Navy nuclear engineer, a political analyst and radio host. He joins us from Moscow and we're hoping to be joined later by Scott Ritter, former U.S. Marine's counterintelligence officer and U.N. weapons inspector. Mark, I got to ask you to lay out what's happening on the ground now. If you could just maybe give a brief recap of what the first week looked like, where we're at now and how do you know this? Because there's widely different interpretation of what's going on right now. It looks like the Western media is relying a lot on what the Pentagon is telling them and when you can get a Russian-English language site, there's not a lot of news coming out of Russia. Of course, they're not going to reveal what their plans are, but for me, I find it very hard to believe any report coming out of the ground. I just don't have a clue, so I think you have a better understanding. Could you lay out briefly what's happened over the past week and where we are at now? Yeah, first of all, just let me correct you. Just because in the last few hours, BBC is no longer up their website in BBC Russian, is no longer accessible in Russia. Them, Medusa, Deutsche Well, a counterreaction against RT and Sputnik being taken off in the UK, the EU, and so on. Germany banning RT and Sputnik and so forth. The medias are being shut down solidly on both sides, though, as has happened from the beginning of this, it is the West who has always taken the first shot because they don't trust you to hear an alternate perspective, an alternate worldview on things and make up your own minds. And then Russia has always been the reactive, the quid pro quo on that score, but they have certainly not been slack. And it is becoming increasingly hard to hear a pro-Western voice in Russia without, now you will even need a VPN to hear a lot of it. So it is shutting down understanding of each other's positions quite solidly on both sides, though. I would say, hi, Scott. Thanks. Yeah, Scott has joined us. Thank you, Scott. So I would say the first week, everything okay? You're breaking up a bit, but let's try to go forward. Okay. So I think the assessment lies somewhere between Putin saying that everything is fine and going according to plan. And the Western media, we're relying mostly on the Twitter war and the statements out of the Pentagon, and the Russian is bogged down or they're losing the war or they've got low morale or they're suffering heavy casualties. It's somewhere in the middle there. In the first two days of the conflict, first of all, it was not the conflict that anyone thought was coming because the Russian military is not fighting like the Russian military. The Russian military is an artillery-heavy, fire-heavy force that fights in combined arms maneuver extremely effectively. They're designed to fight NATO on the plains of Europe and to be able to take a lot of air strikes and take down a lot of fighters and strike back. The Russian military has barely used its artillery at all. The Russian Air Force has almost entirely sat out this fight. There's a slight uptick in the last few days, but it's only a fraction of their capacity. For the first few days, there was only about 30% of the gathered 150,000 force sent into Ukraine. It seems that there was a plan to engage the Ukrainian, the Kievan military in the east, pin them down in the Donbass, and then make several insertions from the south from Crimea, from the north in the area towards Kharkov, the second largest city in the northeast, the second largest city in Ukraine, and then most importantly a decapitation strike at Kiev. They sent small units, basically racing. It has been described, I think, accurately as a thunder run along Ukraine's roads to seize key intersections and motorways while trying to avoid cities. Meanwhile, there was an attempt to seize control of an airport outside Kiev that would be able to provide an air bridge to bring troops in rapidly. The idea was to take out the political regime in Kiev quickly, hoping they could do that with a minimum of resistance and catch everyone essentially by surprise, because quite obviously Zelinsky, at least from his public statements, was going by the assessment that it wasn't going to happen. That risky maneuver, it was a risky maneuver, it didn't work out. It went south. I don't say it was a complete catastrophe, but it seems that Russia took some casualties and it didn't work. There was some readjustment. The other fronts were going fine. There was a huge outbreak in the south from Crimea up into Herzog and Zaporizhia in the south, and the engagement in the east worked fine. There's heavy fighting in Harkov. But don't listen to what the Pentagon is saying or certainly don't listen to anything Kiev is saying, because from the story of Snake Island to the ghost of Kiev to anti-war FSB agents, everything coming out of Kiev is rather desperate and frankly quite humorous even, except for the circumstances, disinformation. Casually counts any. I have not really seen them say anything that is accurate so far. Meanwhile, the Russian Ministry of Defense has essentially ceded the information war completely to Kiev. They are just going on silence mode. They have made very few statements at all about what's going on. In English, listen to US military experts who are above the partisan political fray. I'm going to tell you the names of a few of them that I watch very closely. Michael Kaufman, he is at the Center for Naval Analysis, the Russian military analysis unit there, and he's at the Center for New American Security. He's also a senior fellow there. He has some great pieces out. I sent them earlier to you, Joe, and from the military assessment to his view, his article on the view of the motivations and the launching, I think he's been dead on. I started watching him early on last April, when there was also a Russian military buildup and the whole world was talking invasion. He and Rob Lee, the next one I'll talk about, they called it right. They said it was a buildup to the Turkiev from launching an assault on Don Boss at the time, and he was dead right on that. They were dead right, and they were going against basically the entire rest of the pundit talking heads in the media and so on. But when he started seeing this buildup in November, as Scott and I were watching it, they came to the same conclusion that it was qualitatively and quantitatively different, and that it looked like it at least was intended to provide for the option of the real thing if negotiations failed. The other person you want to watch is Rob Lee. He is a Ph.D. student at Kings, but he's a former Marine like Scott, and he's already recognized as a huge Osint expert, a pretty good judge on what's going on. He's been picked up by the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and he's also an Alpha Fellow. They work together actually at least online quite a lot. Bill Rogio at Long Word Journal also I think has the right assessment. What they have all said is that the Russian military is doing their absolute most to a cost of losing Russian lives inhibiting a quick military victory or at least a quicker military victory to avoid not only civilian casualties but casualties in the Ukrainian military as well. They hope to meet light-risk resistance because in 2014 the entire Ukrainian military collapsed. A large portions of it defected. Even Radio for Europe Radio Liberty admits that 75% of the Ukrainian Navy either defected to Crimea, Russia, or just quit. They refused to take orders from the new regime that had seized power at the time. I don't think that they quite understood for some reason, maybe there was some wishful thinking in the Kremlin, how successfully in the intervening years the new regime has purged particularly the lower officer ranks and made sure they're filled with people that are much more beholden to the West Ukrainian ultra-nationalist view and have a very hard hatred rather than any sympathies towards Russia. Also the Azov in the right sector while they retain their discreet as neo-Nazi death squads, retain their discreet military units and political formations, paramilitary units, they are also integrated throughout the police, the military, the security services, the mainstream political parties and they're quite open about this. They're quite proud of how much they have done this. It went to the extent that the founder of the right sector Dmitry Yurovich was appointed military advisor to the head of the Ukrainian military last year. A, you know, a Banderite fascist, an unrepentant neo-Nazi who talks all the time about spreading his conservative revolution beyond Ukraine, beyond Russia to the rest of Europe as well. What could go wrong, right? What could go wrong? But anyway, because they are seated throughout the military, they're spread out, they basically serve the function as kind of a fascist political commissars and they fight to keep the conscripts in line and fighting. They control what information they have access to. They don't have mobile phones and they've seen enough videos of so far horror videos that I believe are credible of what happens to deserters, conscripts who are deserting. So Russia course corrected to a large extent after going to this extent to avoid casualties to a certain degree. But it is very, very far from an American style shock and awe. They are not using their artillery. They're not using their air force. They're not even using their electronic warfare because they want as much as possible to get out the message to Ukrainian civilians, get out of our way. We're not here to fight you. We're here to fight the regime. And they say the Nazis. I prefer to call them, you know, a little more accurately, the Banderite fascists. But it's hard to explain that to a Western audience who isn't schooled on the history of fascism in West Ukraine. And you'll hear, there's no question that Kiev is winning with the power of the Western mainstream media behind it, that Kiev is winning the information war, the meme war, the disinformation war, you know, the sympathy war. I mean, there's lynch mobs all over the West, just against Russian stores. And Disney's Anastasia has been removed from Disney plus. I mean, and Russian breed cats are no longer allowed in international cat competitions. It is a full scarlet letter crucible style Salem witch trial, you know, Neo McCarthy, Joe McCarthy is very smiling somewhere in hell, laughing his sick ass off. But on the ground, Russia is slowly, but I mean, I say slowly, only in the sense that we expect wars to happen at digital speed for some reason now, all right, at Twitter speed. But in Iraq, it took the US military what 40 days to get into Baghdad. In in less than a week in three to four days, Russian forces were already cementing themselves in position to surround Kiev in the suburbs. And that's what they continue to do and build up now. Basically, the entire southeast coast of Ukraine from the sniper to the Donbass is now in Russian hands. The only holdout is Mary Opal, which is Azov's headquarters, which is now completely surrounded. And unlike in the rest of the country, they they're the kid gloves are off because of Azov. And they're trying to get civilians out of there. Azov, of course, is not letting them go. There was supposedly a deal reached with Zelinsky in the second round of negotiations last night to open civilian humanitarian corridors. Thank God. But I seriously doubt from what I have heard from people on the ground there. Dino Brian, who is an independent journalist in the Donbass, he's reporting he has friends in Mary Opal. He says that Azov is not letting them out. They hate the people there. They hate the people of East Ukraine because people of East Ukraine hate them because they're Banderites. They're Nazi collaborators, you know, or they worship the Nazi collaborator grandfathers and so on. They were put there specifically to repress them because originally Mary Opal had gone with the rest of the Republic. And once Kiev took it back, they put Azov there to keep it under control. And there has been, again, I think there's enough credible internet evidence of atrocities to certainly warrant real war crimes, massacre investigations in Mary Opal. But Mary Opal is the only holdout in that coast. And from there, they will move on to Mikhailov, which Russian troops are entering now, and Odessa. And then what is left of Ukraine, you know, or the Kiev regime at that point will be a landlocked country. Meanwhile, Kiev is surrounded effectively. They're still letting civilians out. Strains are still departing almost, you know, hourly to West Ukraine to take people out who don't want to be there. Meanwhile, there's heavy fighting in the suburbs of Harkov. But there's hope that humanitarian corridors there will be open to get people out who don't want to be there as well. But everything that I've seen out of an increasingly desperate and sounding, quite unhinged Zelinsky, he released all the criminals from prison, just opened the prisons up to anyone who would fight Russians, violent crimes, anything. He asked civilians to take up arms. They handed out tens of thousands of guns to anyone who would take them. And the predictable amount of looting and killing has erupted in Kiev and elsewhere in the country lawless. Right now, there certainly is credible evidence that right now anyone who is caught looting is just shot on sight. They're just shot in the streets. It's pretty martial justice right now in Kiev and elsewhere. And again, a lot of it is the fault of letting these criminals and flooding the streets with weapons. And he went further and they handed out instructions on their media and everywhere for civilians to make Molotov cocktails and throw them down on the Russian troops as they come by. And that, of course, is sacrificing their non-combat status and making them targets. But that's the goal, to put as many bodies between the regime and the Russian troops as possible to make it more of an atrocity to help try and draw in a Western intervention. The more pressure that the media puts on the governments, the more horrors that they can report, the more bodies that are civilian bodies that are laid out, the louder they can drag this on, then there is ever increasing pressure on Western states to act. Let me stop you there. There's many other topics to get to, but I want to get Scott in here. You've just heard Mark lay out his assessment of the first week and where we are now, and we're going to talk about what could come next. But Scott, do you want to know how you feel about what Mark said? Do you have a similar analysis? What have you seen over the first week and where we're at now? I'm actually far more supportive of the Russian narrative. I don't give the Ukrainian narrative any weight. We're witnessing a CIA MI-6 run information operation. The Ukrainian government is totally, the information coming out of the Ukrainian government is totally controlled by this operation. We have CIA operatives bragging about this on social media, recently retired covert operatives who say, yeah, I'm speaking. We're doing this. They want us to come back. Now, you have to take that with a grain of salt, but no. I've done this before. I've participated in information operations and I've watched them unfold. I know how this is done intimately. I know what I'm seeing. I'm seeing a very sophisticated information operation that has two purpose. First of all, no one in a position of responsibility thinks Ukraine is going to win this war. No one in a position of responsibility thinks Ukraine is winning this war. No one in a position of responsibility thinks that NATO is going to intervene on the side of Ukraine. There's two objectives here. One objective is targeting the Russian domestic audience. If anything's come out of this, and I'll tell you that somebody who's been interesting to watch unravel during this entire conflict is Michael McFaul. He's really become a symbol of pathos. He's a pathetic individual. Through trying to explain why he's not the bad guy, he's all but admitted that the policy of the United States has been for some time regime change in Russia. Now, we all knew that. We all knew they wanted to get Putin out. Anybody who saw what the reset was, the reset was an embrace of Dimitri Medvedev in the hopes that Russia would see that by supporting Medvedev over Putin that they could have better relations with the West. Well, Russia wasn't playing that game, but it's more than this. They talk about democratization. McFaul has all but admitted that the entire pro-democracy movement funded by the West had as its purpose regime change. So these regime change people, and remember, it's a program run by the CIA. It's run by the political action covert branch of the CIA. They do this all the time. If they're not just propaganda, they are actively conspiring to remove the Russian leader. What they're trying to do right now is to create a narrative of defeat in Russia of hopelessness in Russia. And a large part of the sanctions game that we're seeing right now is bluff, bluff, go in strong, talk about the pain, target the oligarchs, tell the oligarchs you have no choice but to take down Putin. Tell the mothers you have no choice but to go in the street. It's hopeless for you. It's hopeless for you. It's hopeless for you. And some people are a little bit perturbed, myself included, but that's just because I'm a data-driven guy and I don't like to examine situations where there's a complete data set over here and an incomplete data set over here of the silence of the Russian government. But I think the Russian government, you know, their silence is not a sign of weakness. It's a sign of strength. They don't care. They don't want to engage in a propaganda war. They're letting reality unfold on the ground in Ukraine as we speak. This is one of the most decisive military victories in modern history. There was a Russian general gave an interview yesterday who said, when the book is written on this, people are going to be studying this for decades to come as, you know, how to do an operation like this. This is how it's supposed to be done. He said something interesting that goes along with what Mark said. He said, we are applying the tactics of Syria. Now in the West, oh my god, that means you're surrounding Aleppo and destroying it. No, the tactics of Syria are to go in, surround and talk. Look how they drove the jihadists out of Syria into Idlib by surrounding, by talking, by getting them to go on buses and leaving. That's how they won the war. They didn't destroy everything. I mean, the truth is obvious to all who study the truth, but the propagandists are out there. So one thing is this regime change dream that they have for Russia. And again, because the narrative being pushed here in the West talks about how badly the Russian people are suffering, they are. And, you know, how the oligarchs are being targeted, they are. How the ruble is collapsing, it is. How the Moscow stock market is paralyzed, of course it is. And therefore, they draw the conclusion that Putin is vulnerable and he will be overthrown. He isn't and he won't be. That's just the statement of fact. The second thing, and this is the far more dangerous, well, let me go back to the Putin thing. To show you the extremes here, Lindsey Graham is a U.S. senator who is well read into the strategic objectives of the United States. And you can tell that the man is extraordinarily frustrated because he knows the truth, that our policy is failing, that Putin is actually becoming stronger. Didn't they learn about Saddam? Saddam Hussein in 1991 at the end of the Gulf War was at his most vulnerable. I mean, the man was on the verge of taking the 75 cent solution in the back of the head. And that's the cost of a nine millimeter bullet that one of his generals was going to put because he had failed across the board. What kept Saddam alive were sanctions. Saddam Hussein was able to take the pain of the Iraqi people and instead of having it absorbed by him, turn it around on those who were issuing it. And Russia's going to do the same thing. You know, there is an intellectual class in Moscow and St. Petersburg who are going to cry. They always cry. You know, the pro-western liberals. Oh my God, we're suffering. Oh my God, it's Putin. There's the rest of Russia, the real people. And they are putting up with this nonsense. They're not crying. They're tightening their belts to them. This is their version of the great patriotic war. They will step up. They will do what's necessary to ensure that Russia emerges victorious. That's the majority of Russia. That's the majority of Moscow. But the West only gives an echo chamber. They're a little wimpy liberal elite who cry in their teeth. And I don't mean to be too mean, but you know, we're talking about people dying right now. So I really don't have too much sympathy for the feelings of these milk toast individuals. Now we go to the most dangerous aspect. Oh, well, Lindsey Graham. Lindsey Graham, last night, tweeted, where's our Von Stauffenberg? Where's he mentioned somebody else, you know? But basically he was saying, you have to assassinate Putin. A sitting U.S. Senator on the Armed Services Committee is asking for someone to assassinate Putin. I mean, that is A, despicable. B, it's a sign of desperation because Lindsey Graham is reading the real intelligence and he knows what's really going on. And he understands how badly we're being beaten as we are being. And I don't want to use bad language, but it's there's a term that begins with the B and you slap somebody. That's what's happening to us right now in the West. We are being B slapped by the Russians. And you know, to their credit, they're not dancing in the streets, but they're they're winning this thing across the board. But the most dangerous thing about this propaganda is what's going on. You saw last night when the Russians moved in on the on the nuclear power plant to take it over. And there is every reason in the world to do this. You have these neo-Nazi fanatics right now who know they've been beat. And all you have to do is go into the spent fuel pool and pull out a couple of those highly radioactive fuel rods, grind them up, mix them up in a barrel full of explosives, and you got a dirty bomb. And, you know, when when extremists tend to go down, they try to go down taking as many people with them. And the Russians are very concerned about some sort of nuclear terrorism on the part of these views. So you take over the nuclear plant to prevent this from happening. You also want to investigate whether or not the Ukrainian government and cahoots with others had been seeking to put in place some sort of plutonium extraction. Zelensky spoke into the Munich conference about nuclear weapons. Maybe we'll withdraw from the MPT. Maybe we'll pursue nuclear weapons. If you're rushing, you can't take that sitting down. So, look, the United States sort of sees this nuclear power plant on day one. I mean, it's just a normal military objective, plus you control 25% of the electricity generation as of Ukraine. So, but this this normal military operation took place in which the Ukrainians resisted. And in a in a firefight, an administrative training building was caught on fire. The entire world went crazy. CNN, all the major media networks prompted by Zelensky and the CIA operation, saying that this is going to be five times worse than Chernobyl, and we have to have a no fly zone imposed. This is Zelensky's last hope, a no fly zone, something where NATO comes in with aircraft and creates a safe zone for the operation of his government and the restoration of rule. NATO wisely has resisted this because they understand what the reality is. But as we speak, NATO has already invoked chapter four. Poland and the Baltic States have made Ukraine a chapter four issue, which means there's constant discussion about how Ukraine impacts the national security of these four nations and what NATO can do to assist them. Because this humanitarian crisis increases, and it will, they're already overwhelmed with refugees. They're going to be even more overwhelmed with refugees. It will become a humanitarian disaster. They'll be screaming for a humanitarian buffer zone in western Ukraine. And as the Zelensky government flees Kiev, as they will, as most of them already have, and try to set themselves up in Lvov, which is the the the heart of the cancer of this Bandera movement, there can be no denazification of Ukraine without the Russians purging Lvov. And this general who talked about this thing, he said, understand, we don't stop until we get to the western border of Ukraine. There is no Russia saying we took Kiev and its victory. Victory is only achieved when there is denazification, and denazification can only occur when Lvov has fallen and Russian troops control the western border of Ukraine. As this occurs, there's going to be more and more pressure brought to bear for some sort of NATO-EU intervention in western Ukraine. And this is where the propaganda becomes dangerous because democracies are not controlled but motivated by their constituencies. And if through this propaganda, the constituencies rise up and demand action of politicians who will lose their position should they choose not to act, you may see some sort of insanity ensue. And what I'm hoping is that the Russians don't overreact, that the Russians recognize that this is going to happen, and that they just simply extend the, excuse me, bitch slapping that's been going on to whoever tries to come into western Ukraine and crush them like the bugs they are. But it's a very dangerous thing. The West thinks that it can go into western Ukraine, and that's the danger of this propaganda operation, because it is designed to create an article for generating a scenario that gets NATO in western Ukraine to preserve some sort of aspect of Ukrainian autonomy. Well, Scott, there's this information war going on. It's very hard to determine who's telling the truth and who isn't. How are you able to do that? How are you coming to your analysis, based on what kinds of information? Well, I mean, for instance, I come to my analysis about information operations run by the CIA, by the fact that I have intimate knowledge of what an information operation looks like. No, I don't mean that. I mean, what's going on on the ground right now. Okay, well, on the ground, we have a dearth of information. Let's just be honest about that. What we get is overwhelmingly from Ukrainian sources, etc. However, as a military professional, you study military history, and let's start with certain things. When armies, and the Ukrainian army was a very large, very well-equipped, and very well-trained, and well-led western-style military. We're talking about a military of over 200,000, with another 200,000, 300,000 people in potential reserve, not a small military. It's engaged a very professional Russian military that had deployed around 200,000 troops along the border, not all of whom have actually, small percentage of whom were committed to actual combat operations. When you look at casualty rates in World War II, when the, you know, at Normandy, you know, the casualty ratio is around one to 1.2, one to 1.4, even on the eastern front where the Russians were fighting these giant battles of annihilation. The casualty ratios are one to 1.4, one to 1.8, one to two. Meaning, for every dead Russian and a big victory, you have 1.8 dead Germans. The casualty ratio right now is one to six. For every dead Russian, there's six dead Ukrainians. This is a route. This isn't even close. This is annihilation. It's hard to come by those kind of figures, though, isn't it? By how many dead they really are on the Ukrainian side or on the Russian side? Russians say 458 or 98 or something. 498. Yeah. I have no reason to doubt the Russian figure. Ukrainian say they've got 3,500 Russians dead. But really, where are the bodies? Yeah. Mark, let me bring you back in, Mark. Scott said that in Russia, where you are, that's why I'm asking you this, that there's still solid support for Putin. I heard of Paul who said 70% of Russia is behind Putin, and that it's only, as he called him, these Milktoast liberals, pro-Western liberals who are complaining right now. What is your sense being there right now? Is there information coming over the television and other sources in Russia about the conduct of the war, the television pictures of what's going on? What is your sense of the mood in Russia now? There is plenty. First of all, plenty of information about the war. Originally, it was mostly cast as a special operation in Donbas, and in fact, they're essentially trying to prevent anyone in the media from calling it anything other than a special operation. I mean, a war, an invasion. Myself, I use the term intervention because that's what Americans use when they go into a country. Of course, as far as they're concerned, whenever anyone else does it, it's an invasion. But the information is tightly controlled. It's one-sided. But Russians also are very adept at using the internet, which has always been a pretty free zone. And even with the recent actions against, I mean, in the last few hours against BBC and Deutsche Well in Medusa, there's still a whole world of information out there that they do have access to. And Telegram, the mobile network, it's like WhatsApp. It's a mobile-driven network. That's how a lot of information is spread, at least for anyone under the age of 45. And it was used extremely successfully. Well, I mean, ultimately it failed, but to galvanize opposition in Belarus during the recent attempted color revolution during Lukashenko's great election there. And it was also used very successfully going back to the Maidan. So those who want information are getting the point of view that they want to hear. I'm not quite as triumphalist as Scott, but I'm a fatalist by nature. So I'm willing to concede that I may be wrong on that regard. But there is greater resistance to Putin than just the liberal class. I hate calling them, that's what they call themselves intellectuals. I haven't met very many of them, but I consider very intellectual or intelligent in any way to be fair. But there is also what is often called the Moscow business class. These are a lot of people that work in Western or Western-style companies in jobs like cosmetic production or IT or so on. And they're mostly apolitical, but they're much more vulnerable to Western perceptions, particularly with the huge propaganda war that's being waged by Western media and governments right now. And they do not love the Russian government. They have just mostly stayed out of the political sphere. But right now they're trying to make a big deal out of large numbers of Russians fleeing the country because supposedly there was going to be a martial law today. I haven't heard any martial law. I think that was another obvious, another piece of Kiev regime, CIA ops that I'd never actually paid any credits to. But certainly a lot of people did. There was even Western journalists getting out of Moscow, tweeting as they got onto planes because of the coming martial law. There is a tightening down here, but it is not that bad yet. So the numbers I have seen come from government pollsters that have always been really accurate before, WCIM. And the approval rating of Putin as of the launch of the operation was 71%. And that was a 11, 12-point uptick from what it had been, a rally around the flag effect. So the exact opposite of what is being talked about by the Western media and commentary about how Russians will react to this. There was another poll out today talking specifically about approval of the special military operation as the Russian government calls it. And that puts the specific approval of that at 68%. Now, I do want to see the opposition pollsters, Lovada, which have mostly been above board. And up until now, their numbers, you have to watch the way they word their questions and their analysis of their own political analysis of their own numbers is usually garbage because they are the pro-Western liberals fringe that Scott talks about. But their methodology has been above board and pretty untouchable up till now. I want to see their numbers, they should be out sometime later this week and compare it to the government numbers, up till now they have never parted by more than a one to three percentage points. And I want to see where that is now. But I do not get the sense that there is huge opposition to this. I think the majority will support it, maybe not quite 68% as time goes on. As more Russian boys come home in body bags, that number will go down, support will go down, but success will breed popularity, will breed approval as well. So it's a time game. The sanctions, however, are going to be bad. These are extreme sanctions. The oligarchs are already turning, several of the oligarchs. I hate calling them oligarchs because really, they are not oligarchs like the US has now. They are not Elon Musk or Zuckerberg who actually have incredible political power. In Russia, they were stripped of political power by Putin in the early 2000s. They are rich people that are consulted, extremely rich people, but they don't own politicians anymore. The majority of the Russian people hate them because they regard them as having gotten their wealth through rigged auctions and the like in the 90s and the social contract that was made with Putin was you get to keep your dirty money, but you get the hell out of politics. People here don't like them very much. When you hear about calls, oh, we're going to take this yacht away from this billionaire Russian people are like, or we're going to kick the rich Russians out of London. Well, most of the ones that are already there are the ones who have fled charges in Russia and have been given political asylum just for bringing money into the city of London when they never had a political care in the world before. That is only helping drive money back to Moscow. I fully applaud cracking down on the money route there. But the attacks on the central bank, the paralyzing of the central bank, the stock market is effectively dead. I do expect that as things start to develop, there will be severe unemployment in the country. I know the oligarch the rich aluminum tycoon Deripaska was coming out saying that the war must end and that the coming recession is going to be three times worse than 1998. I don't think it's going to be that bad, but when I hear anyone who knows theoretically more about business than I do, it makes me nervous and I live here. So I'm nervous. I know intimately that some businesses that are being denied Western imports that they need to make their products and so on have already found alternate suppliers in China who say, well, we can get that out the back door. We can import that for you and play middleman. Or we'll be more than happy to make it from scratch and import substitute if we get a bigger share of that. There's a lot of business going on. There's a lot of connections being formed. Russian companies are opening accounts in Chinese banks left and right. A lot of trade with the one is already going on. But it's going to take time for the amount of transition and the Chinese will be able to cover a lot. And it's not just the Chinese because Pakistan just signed big wheat and gas deals. Imran Khan was here talking about the excitement going on. India refused to implement sanctions despite U.S. pressure on them. There's only one country so far in ASEAN. Singapore is the only one that accepted sanctions against Russia. But the U.S. will try to apply secondary sanctions now on anyone who does do business. Well, Mark, I read that the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the New Development Bank in Shanghai that they both stopped doing business with Russia. What is that about? That is the headline. Read into what they're saying. They are reviewing sanctions against Russia to protect the bank. But that does not mean that China is turning on Russia or something like that. It is a temporary pause to basically find ways around it. China is fully on board with Russia. There was a story in the New York Times about how the U.S. a few months ago came to China with the intelligence about the Russian military buildup and they said, can you help us stop this? And the Chinese are like, okay, could you give us that information? And they turn around and they gave the money right to Russia and said, this is what they know, change your plans. I mean, it's absolutely ludicrous to think that I don't know what they're thinking in Washington, that they think after the sanctions and tariff war, the parading of military up and down China's coast and the South China Sea, the ever-increasing arms sales and promotion of separatism in Taiwan, that China would somehow side against their strategic partner, effective ally now? I think they just wanted to be able to say China didn't do anything to stop the war to blame China as being part of this because they obviously knew what the answer was going to be. I want to talk about the economic situation in a second, but I want to go back to learning how we know what we know is going on on the ground. A couple of examples, there was very early, I think the second day after the intervention began, there was an apartment building near an airport that was struck and immediately we heard that that was the Russians had hit it and then we later learned that Ukraine and both sides said this, so that's how I know something happened. On both sides, I mean that the Ukrainians had hit with an anti-missile, missile they knocked down this Russian missile and the debris hit the building and in Harkiv we saw the destruction of this square in front of that administrative building. What was that incoming fire? We never know whether this was a return fire from the Russians or whether this is a deliberate attack. How do we figure this out? Okay, I think first of all, the number of strikes on civilian buildings has been, you know, you can count them on hands. When you have a military operation of this size and you can count the number of times a civilian building is hit, right? And there have been plenty of, you know, credible oscent coming out of Ukrainian forces positioning themselves in residential buildings and firing down on Russian troops and at which point they do make it a legitimate target. So Mark, you and Scott, I think both agreed that what's being misinterpreted as a failing operation by Russia is actually the way it was planned, which is to go very slowly and delicately in this and to surround cities and talk as Scott said. So there's two meetings already between Belarus, in Belarus between Ukraine and Russia. Have the Russians been telling them if you don't surrender now that we have your city surrounded, then there's going to be a really ugly war coming? Yes. Oh, yes. I mean, that's been quite clear. And they've made clear their demands that one demilitarization, Ukraine will not be allowed to have any type of military into the future that could present a threat to Russia, whatever happens. Russia, the second thing they're demanding is de-nazification. I don't, that is the debanderization. I mean, they can't really do that to Ukraine. I mean, that would... Okay, well, technical difficulties. Maybe you should go ahead, Mark. Union didn't accomplish. Let me go to Scott. Maybe you should shut your video off, Mark. Maybe if you shut your video, I'll probably get your audio better because it's breaking up. Yeah, they can't, you know, it needs to be... Go ahead, Scott. Scott, you agree with that that the Russians have told the Ukrainians on those two meetings have warned them what could happen? And I take the Russians at face value. Let's put it this way. My assessment of Russia and its government to include its president, because I'm not somebody who believes that the nation of Russia is encapsulated into a single individual. I'm somebody who has studied how Russian policymaking is done, that it's literally from the ground up and a very well-coordinated thing. Unlike the move into Crimea in 2014, which was very spontaneous and lacked the kind of detailed planning which caused the Russian government to have to make modifications to its plan that were economically painful to absorb Crimea. Everything about what's going on right now has been planned. Now, we all know that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. So I'm not saying that the Russian plan is the gold standard and everything's working fine. But what I'm saying is the Russians entered this with an objective. And the objective was not a negotiated solution with the Ukrainian government. You cannot have denazification, you cannot have demilitarization with the Zelensky government still in power. The Zelensky government is the personification of pro-bandera movement. They've allowed the Banderites to infiltrate every aspect of their government. And the military under Zelensky has become a de facto proxy of NATO. And when we say demilitarization, what they mean is the deconstruction of every aspect of NATO infrastructure inside Ukraine. And then the third condition which Russia has made is neutrality. The neutrality of which I would say is up for discussion, not in terms of letting them be pro-NATO. But I think Russia might be inclined instead of having a neutral Ukraine after all of this, they have a pro-Russia Ukraine. So neutrality might be off the table now because I think Russia at this point in time, especially at this stage in confrontation with the West, would prefer Ukraine to look more like Belarus than a Ukraine that looked like Finland. So there is no negotiation. What they're trying to do is give the Zelensky government a graceful exit off stage rather than come in and do the painful thing which is forcibly extricate, eliminate, annihilate, liquidate whatever term you want to use that's going to happen to Zelensky to show him the exit door and say, please leave. We will make this as painless as possible for you. And to work with Zelensky, and this was the important thing that came out of these second negotiations, to increase the humanitarian relief available to Ukrainians caught up in the fight. And fortunately it seems as if the Zelensky government has agreed to that. But there is no negotiation here. Those pathetic little characters who come to the table aren't equals. They aren't equals in any sense of the word. The Russians are treating them with respect. But these are not equal parties. When they speak, Russia's not listening. When Russia speaks, they had better be listening because that's the reality is unfolding on the ground as we speak. That is the reality. And you see this with an increasingly unhinged Zelensky. When you look at his pathetic performance before the camera yesterday, that was the performance of a man who knows the end is near. He knows the truth. He knows his troops can't communicate. He knows that his command and control is fractured. He knows that his brigades are being surrounded and annihilated in the east as we speak. He knows all of this. So he's unhinged, totally unhinged. Whereas Putin, on the other hand, sits there calmly and gives you the facts. And there's no yielding in Putin. You don't see in Putin any of the Emmanuel Macron hand-ringing or the pathetic table pounding of a Boris Johnson or the shouting into the television screen of a Joe Biden. The West is unhinged. The West is totally unhinged. Whereas the Russians are just business as usual. Well, Mark, let's go back to the economics of trade. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay. It looks like there's going to be two separate financial and economic systems that are shaping up. That the West is hurting themselves because before there was a global economy that the U.S. pretended to at least run and the U.S. dollar was of supreme importance. And now it looks like with India and China and Russia together, the Eurasian system will have to develop if these sanctions remain, and they most likely will for the foreseeable future. What does that world look like to you? Yeah, I think we're seeing the end of globalization as we knew it. I think we're seeing the end of the global internet as we knew it. I'm calling it the great decoupling, unnecessary decoupling, and it will be from the West against a Russian-Chinese-led bloc that will possibly include much of Eurasia with India being the wildcard, which way they end up in all of this. The unipolar world is over. I don't think there's any question of this is just the last of many final nails in its coffin, but the multipolar world is stillborn because of U.S. attempts to hang on to hegemony at all costs, provoking Russia, China, Iran, with this containment and military provocations on their own borders and attempts to isolate them from the economic system. And so that we're pushing, the U.S. is literally pushing again and again for the creation of an anti-Western bloc. They have created the Sino-Russian alliance. They did it. Putin certainly didn't want that when he came into power in 2000. He was a Westernophile. He wanted integration with the West economically and security and politically. He had no huge love for China then, and he had no hatred for the West at all. In fact, he loved Germany. He's always been quite naive, I think, and trusting towards Germany, but the U.S. created him. The color revolutions, Iraq, Libya, Syria, all of this, the turning of Russia away from NATO, but particularly the color revolution in the meddling in Russia's own politics. That, of course, really has hardened him over the years against the United States. Now the view from Moscow is that Russia is at war with the West and has been for some time. I mean, an economic war is a war. A war of covert regime change is still a war. I heard today, for the first time, East European Journal, I think it's being also promoted by professors. They're talking deputinization of Russia. They're talking putting loyalists on trial. Loyalists are the majority of the population. Those type of words are begging for World War III is what they're begging for. They're completely unhinged from reality in Russia. But just to suggest it, of course, those are the type of things when the British Foreign Minister talked about regime change in Russia. Russia elevated their nuclear alert status as, yeah, calm down with that. So the other big thing that I worry about right now as a flashpoint is the West is sending mercenaries, security contractors into Ukraine to fight. Czech, Slovakia, they're already doing it. Croatia already has some 200 on the ground. And they're approving of volunteers that want to go and fight. I don't know how else it is possible for Russia to take that, except as a declaration of war on the Russian Federation when this is supported and arranged by Western governments. And they're sending them into a blood bath. I mean, Russia has thermobaric weapons and Su-34 fighter bombers here. And there would be poorly organized, uncoordinated, largely untrained foot soldiers. I mean, it would be to get them killed to create provocations and incidents in West Ukraine. And they are flooding West Ukraine with weapons, with manpads, anti-aircraft, handheld anti-aircraft weapons, and anti-tank missiles. They're not going to change the course of the war, but they are going to create a bloody insurgency. I don't think it's giving Russia their own Vietnam, because that's already old. You could say they want to give Russia their own Afghanistan because of the recent US failed attempt to occupy Afghanistan. It's going to cause so much death, but that's what they want at this point. They want to make Ukraine ungovernable for Russia. And they can do it, I think, particularly in the West of the country. I don't see how Russia is going to occupy West Ukraine. I really don't. But from what Putin has recently said to Macron that he intends to take the whole country, I don't know if that's a maximalist statement that he's willing to come down on for some kind of West Ukrainian rump state or not. But that is another thing that scares me, because the insurgency there, the level of anti-Russian sentiment among the people in West Ukraine is in the 90s, maybe in the mid 90s. So this great decoupling, first of all, the internet is going to be divided. It's already being forced on Russia, and China already was a little bit separate of their own accord. They were smarter that way. But again, this is a salvo fired by the U.S. with their complete control of the Western tech giants from Google, Facebook, Twitter, everything. They cut out Russian media from their platforms in its entirety, and the response is going to be that Russia will shut them all down. I probably won't be able to communicate you with you on Twitter or something very much, very long into the future, at least without a VPN, and we'll see how well that works. But the walls are coming up, and it's not only going to come up here. It'll come up here first, this part of the world, Eurasia, the Russian-led block. They'll have their own internet. China will still have their own separate internet. I expect the West, larger West, will have their own internet. But eventually, the Arab world, with their different cultural values, is going to want their own internet separate from the West after seeing what the West can do with it. I'm worried about things like Microsoft launching, working with the U.S. government and launching a update that will shut down every computer in Russia using Microsoft Windows. That's a possibility. It would really inhibit their business going forward in the world outside the West, but those are things that are at least options that are being discussed by serious people. I don't know how bad it's going to get here, but it's going to be bad. The way to survive it is autarky, not just Russia, but Russia and China and the rest of Asia. There has to be a complete economic decoupling. There has to be a great decoupling so that the West can never do this to Russia again. They're pulling out all the weapons. After this, the end of the dollar as a global reserve currency is the time that that is going to take place in will drastically shrink. Russia and China's Swift network alternatives, Mir and Kips, I'm not sure about the pronunciation on that, are already being interlinked, but it still will cause loss of disruptions. The biggest Russian automaker, Lada, just was forced to shut down production today because they relied entirely on Western semiconductor chips. Russia has a very small semiconductor chip market, and actually China is not much bigger. There's been a lot of talk in recent months as this was coming into view that Russia and China need to work together very quickly to develop their own semiconductor alternatives because that will also affect the Russian military production. Taiwan has a huge semiconductor sector, don't they? Taiwan and Singapore are both on board with cutting Russia out of the global semiconductor market. It is going to cause a lot of problems here. That in particular, that was one of the nuclear options that was employed. I think that Russia will survive this, particularly with Chinese help, but I also don't think it's going to be easy. Again, as the body bags come home and the weather from the war, its successful conclusion to insurgency in the west of the country, to jobs being lost, the business class will be furious that they can't get their Apple iPods or whatever they are, the iGarbage. Ikea had their last day here in Moscow, yesterday open, and the store was flooded with people. I mean, it was like Black Friday, desperate to get their last taste of really garbage-cheap furniture that I would never put in my house, but there is a Western-influenced middle class here that is much bigger than just the liberal class. We're talking maybe 20% of the country, all total, that has been apolitical at this point, but could become more political. It still won't give them enough to overthrow the Russian government, but it will cause domestic instability exactly like Scott said that the US wants here. Young people, they are not people who grew up in the Soviet Union, they are people who use Instagram and TikTok for most of their lives. They are extremely susceptible to being turned. There will be domestic political instability here going ahead, but I don't think it's going to government-threatening. Scott, let me ask you now about the issue of whether there can be an insurgency. As you said, Zelensky, you think he's defeated, his only hope is that NATO in some way comes to his defense, not directly by intervening, although he'd probably want that, but by supplying fighters and material to bog down and bleed Russia for years in a insurgency in the West, where the center of neo-Naziism is, as you said. Is that the way you see it? There will not be an insurgency of any meaningful character. I'll tell you why. First of all, with all due respect to the current people who live in the world today, they're wimps. We don't have hard people anymore, not in the West. We have soft people. We don't have people that like to die. We have people who like to live, and that's a good thing. Living is good, but it creates a desire to not sacrifice yourself in a futile cause. European cities used to be leveled as a matter of course in the world then end. Now one, and I'll tell you this, as somebody who actually participated in the strategic planning of a strategic air campaign against the nation, which I did during the Gulf War against Iraq, I will tell you that any concept of leveling war crimes charges against the Russians is absurd. The Russians have taken a very measured approach to targeting, and I can guarantee you every single strike they make, they have the intelligence right up available to say why they did it. And if this ever went to trial, which it won't, they'll just be able to answer by saying we had a military necessity based upon the fact that those idiots put this piece of equipment here, or those broadcasting out of here, and they willfully put the civilian population at risk. We went in and told the civilians to leave. Anybody who stayed behind is collateral damage. And the reason I bring that up is there isn't going to be, again, everything we see on TV now is an information operation from the Ukrainians. I mean, I'm tired of seeing 23-year-old girls tell me how willing they are to sacrifice their lives in the cause of great Ukraine. If you're so willing to sacrifice your life, stop talking on TV, go to the front line and die already, because they're not willing to sacrifice their life. They're willing to make a political statement to a camera. But when it actually comes time to do the deed, it's one thing to make a Molotov cocktail. It's another thing to actually hucker up and say I'm going to go out on the street and I'm going to expose myself to throw this knowing that the last person who did it had their body shredded by 30 millimeter automatic fire. I mean, that's the reality of war. And it's hitting home to these people. They're seeing what's happening when you stand up to the Russian military. You die. You don't die pretty. It's not a Hollywood movie. Oh, and I get to make a speech before I go, your body is gone, man. There ain't nothing to put in the ground. There won't even be a closed casket. So this is the reality of war. So the concept of the Ukrainian people today, these westernized pumps are going to somehow sacrifice themselves for what Zelensky may have already fled according to the head of the Russian Duma. He's gone. What are they fighting for? Now we talked about an insurgency. The CIA has been training western Ukrainians and eastern Ukrainians in what's called unconventional warfare operations since 2015 under the Obama administration. One thing I can tell you about the CIA operating in Ukraine and Russia is they are the sloppiest people the world has ever seen. They suck at operational security. The fact that we know about this proves that they suck at operational security. Okay. So, you know, if we didn't know about it, if we're wondering is the CIA doing this, they might have a fighting chance. But the fact that this is a broadcast and the CIA has admitted its own failing saying that they don't know what the guys they brought from Ukraine to the United States to receive this training are loyal or not. What they do know is that a number of the guys who went back died because they were identified and eliminated. The Russians are controlling the CIA operation in the same way that the Iraqis controlled the CIA covert activity in 1996, the top of Saddam Hussein. The CIA ran this massive program, had hundreds of Iraqis recruited ready to rise up and kill Saddam. And then at the magic moment, the Iraqis who had infiltrated it identified everybody, killed everybody, got on the phone and thanked the CIA for the provision of outstanding communications. That's what the Russians are going to do this pathetic little CIA operation. They've already rolled it up. It doesn't exist. And whatever exists is designed for the Russians to track who's coming in. These mercenaries, you want to know what their fate is? Go back and take a look at the fate of mercenaries who went into Angola in the 1970s. Pathetic little tough guy wannabes who dressed up like soldier and got captured by the Cubans in Angolans and executed. That is their fate. The Russian generals have already said so. The best thing that's going to happen to you, they said, is that you will be treated as a criminal. That's the best thing that's going to happen to you. The worst thing that's going to happen to you is what should happen to them. I catch you, I line you up against the wall and I shoot you immediately with a little summary thing saying, are you an American? Yes. You're here to fight against right? Yeah. Pull the trigger, boom, dead. That's what the law of war allows. And that's what will happen to them. There won't be an insurgency. Yes, people will say one or two people popped up, fired one of their javelins or their N laws or they threw a grenade in and all that. That's not an insurgency. The last time there was an insurgency in Western Ukraine was from 1945 to 1953, 55 approximately. CIA backed German organized group. 250,000 Ukrainians died. 23,000 Russian security forces died. That's how Russia handles insurgencies. This is in Afghanistan. This is Ukraine. So I don't think there's going to be insurgency. I think the Russians have prepared for this. I don't think the Ukrainians have the will to fight. I don't think Ukraine will, you'll see that all these heroes in Lvov will flee to Poland. They might be fleeing now. They don't want to die. Nobody wants to die. These aren't heroes. These are not heroic people. They're thugs. The Azov battalion are thugs. They're killers. They're rapists, but they're not heroic fighters. So Scott, what kind of timeframe do you see Russia pacifying the entire country all the way to the Polish borders, you said? And will it require urban warfare? We're already hearing stories of urban warfare, street battles. Well, it's not real urban warfare. Real urban warfare, it'd be over by now. You know, the Russians have, one of the things I've learned by studying the Russians is they're very clever. They actually have created a unit recognizing the reality of warfare in Europe today. It's the assault engineer regiment. And the assault engineer regiment's sole job is to pound a path through an urban area so that mechanized forces can rapidly pass through. When I say pound a path, I mean pound a path. They will destroy everything in their path. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. They chew up a battalion. That battalion is replaced. The next battalion comes in. They sacrifice the regiment to basically put a path through the city. That's not happening right now. So there's no real urban warfare. If I think the Russians don't want to go into Kiev, I would be surprised if there was a battle for Kiev. I think the Russians will surround Kiev. I think Russians will give Kiev the Syria treatment and say, good luck eating. We control all your electricity. We control your water. When you guys are tired of being cold, hungry, and everything thirsty, come to us and we will solve this issue. I think the Russians have already identified the government that's going to take the place of Zelensky. And they're going to leave much of the issue of governing to this government. This isn't going to be an occupation in the traditional sense. This is going to be the annihilation, eradication of the nationalists in Western Ukraine. And then Russia will secure the border and turn the rest of it over to the internal police of the new Ukrainian state, who are equipped with all the names of everybody who's ever said anything. All these idiots out there with this right here is a suicide pill. If you're an idiot, insurgent or nationalist. Every time you get on your little phone and do something, the Russians are sucking it up. They got all your data. They know who you are. They geo-located you. When the time comes, they will hunt you down and kill you. That's why there won't be an insurgency. The CIA could have, if they'd done it truly covertly, probably left some stay-behind units that would have been isolated and killed. But right now, no, this is again part of the propaganda that's coming out. Insurgencies are very difficult to organize, very difficult to sustain. They tend to die violently. And I will tell you right now, anybody who thinks you're going to be a brave Western Ukrainian insurgent, better have picked the grave plot already, cut a dug and put some fake body in there because your body will never reach it. Your body will be scattered all over the force of Western Ukraine. Do you think this could be over in a month? Yes. In a month. Look, I think that the defeat of the Ukrainian military is happening as we speak. Military defeats are deceptive in nature. To give you an example, the defeat of Army Group Center in Russia, German Army Group Center in Russia in 1944. You had German units fighting on the front line, grinding the Russians down, grinding them down, grinding them down, grinding them down. And suddenly, there wasn't anything left. And the German unit cohesiveness broke and the Russians poured through. The grinding down has already occurred. We're on the cusp of the pouring through stage. And it'll be slower than normal because the Russians are not interested in a war of annihilation. They would prefer to process Ukrainian prisoners rather than kill Ukrainian soldiers. So there will be a little bit of a, there will be a self-regulated pace put in here to give the Ukrainians a chance to surrender. But the war's over already. It's finished. Are you surprised by the degree of the resistance that the Ukrainians have put up so far? I think, first of all, the degree of resistance has been highly exaggerated. The Russians have admitted, several generals have admitted that they put that two things happened. One, the soft approach of going in and trying to negotiate opened them up to being killed. We saw in Karkov, one of the Spetsnaz units that went in to negotiate was isolated and destroyed by the Ukrainians who operated in bad faith. The Russians have also said that they've had a couple, you know, who is that girl, Lynch? Jessica Lynch, remember Gulf War, they've had a couple of Jessica Lynch moments. What that means is the seventh transportation company equivalent of the Russians went out for a drive thinking, we're just driving to link up with the next unit, maybe took a wrong turn, maybe got ahead of themselves and found themselves in Ukrainian territory where they were annihilated. You know, so these things have happened, but you haven't seen, you know, the defeat of the Russian military on the battlefield. No one's come in and shown me, I've seen columns destroyed, but no one's shown me a Russian tank littering the battlefield with Russian bodies all over the place. I have seen that of the Ukrainian army. I've seen where they stood up and fought and they've been totally obliterated. So, you know, when you say resistance, you know, I'm not, again, denigrating the courage of those Ukrainians who have fought, they have true resistance. You require absolute command and control and unit cohesiveness and that's lacking right now on the Ukrainian side to the extent that they're fighting. It's only because the Russians have allowed them to live to fight. The Russians could solve almost every single military problem by pulling back and just pouring in the artillery that they have. That's normally how they solve a solution. So, when you come up and you probe and you find a Ukrainian military position, pull back and annihilate it, obliterate it. And they're not doing that because they don't want to go down in history is the guys who have alienated every single mother in Ukraine by killing their son. They want to give the Ukrainian men a chance to surrender and go home. So that, you know, I think most of the Ukrainian resistance is either from the fanatic Azov units in Mariupol and elsewhere or because the Russians are allowing the Ukrainians to resist more than they should allow them in a normal combat situation. Mark, do you agree with that assessment? There probably won't be a battle for Kiev, for example, and other things that Scott just said? Yeah, I hope there's not a battle for Kiev. I don't know yet because I don't know Zelinsky's willingness to surrender. I believe that he will go to Lvov and then to the west and hang out with Juan Guido and Svetlana Tihanovskaya before that. But it's, I mean, maybe they can take up an apartment together. But that's not certain. And I believe there are Ukrainians that do believe in the Maidan, a number of certainly the Banderites, the ultranationalists, but also some liberals as well, some Ukrainians that, you know, believe in the Western orientation of their country that will fight, whether, you know, the military command, how much of that follows that line of thought, I really don't have any way of knowing. But there has been significant resistance thus far around Kharkov. That's not to say that there has been complete resistance. I caught one message out of the Pentagon saying some units are resisting effectively. That, of course, entails that some units probably aren't resisting at all and some units are not resisting effectively. But that some are as well. And I think, personally, I believe that the Ukrainian military is resisting more than I thought they would, you know, again, beyond the ultranationalists, which is not to say that there is total resistance. I disagree, you know, I do disagree with Scott on the question of the insurgency. And it's something that really, something I really, really worry about. And I don't know where it ends. And I would disagree the last time we saw an insurgency in West Ukraine was 2014. And they overthrew the Ukrainian government. But that said, the Ukrainian government was naive and stupid and completely unwilling even to drive protesters off a main square that they could have done it any single day, any single time up until the actual Yanukovych standing down the police because of the February 21st agreement. So, but they have had eight years of NATO military training, flooded the country with arms. And then again, we've seen how well NATO NATO military training played out in Iraq when ISIS came and the Iraqi military threw down their arms or the Afghani military folded up to the Taliban within quite a couple of days. So it is difficult to say. Let's see here. Oh, the other thing I wanted to mention before was about the nuclear. There was actually two nuclear incidents already because there was Chernobyl, of course. And the goal there was to create a nuclear scyops incident to try to force the West to intervene. You put a few Ukrainian soldiers or battalion members in these locations and have them fire on the Russian military that really couldn't leave them behind. One for the approach to Kiev at Chernobyl and the other one here simply because it's, such a large power station and it is a vital security object. And then you force Russians to come in and fire. And then you try to claim that Putin is trying to destroy Europe by blowing up nuclear power plants. It's absurd, of course, but everything that is absurd is being believed by millions and millions of people right now in the West, the vast majority of their populations. So that type of crude propaganda works. Thankfully, both times, actually in the case of Chernobyl, there was exactly that talking situation where the Russian military and the Ukrainian troops were there, agreed to jointly provide security for Chernobyl. Something that, of course, is not reported in the Western media at all. In the second plant in Zaporizhia, just in the last 24 hours, the small number of troops that were there were eliminated. And there was a small fire that resulted in an educational building outside the perimeter of the main conflict complex, but that was quickly put out and Russia is in complete control. But that was an attempt at a nuclear psi-op. And both times, even Zelensky's own Twitter account, not that he is using it, of course, but his team, his people, the CIA, I'm certain is right there with the SBU with him or whoever is running his account. And both times, they were immediately crying about Russia is trying to destroy nuclear power plants and it's an attack on Europe and the West needs to intervene now. It's all attempts to put political pressure on Western governments. Thankfully, hopefully, the US military heads are generally not dumb people. They're usually military scholars and hopefully they will adequately resist political pressure that even Joe Biden may not necessarily resist. Even if they try a Tony Blinken special false flags as we saw in Syria to get Western intervention there? Yeah, I hope so because what is the alternative? There already is a Russian no-fly zone, right? To install a US no-fly zone where there is a Russian no-fly zone means directly attacking the Russian air force in an area where Russia has S-400 and a whole other network complex air defense system already set up specifically to deter the US from doing that. I mean, eventually the US could gather and throw enough air force into the field to defeat Russian air defense and air force, but it would require pulling air force out of the Pacific to assemble a force of that size. It would not be easy and it would be a pyrrhic victory. So I know the military is not that insane, but some of our politicians obviously are. So let's hope that they can balance each other out on that accord. Now, Mark, if you heard Scott say that he thought Russia would move all the way to the Western border with Poland, that means capturing Lviv. But as Scott pointed out is, and you did 90% anti-Russian and large percentage extreme right, if not completely fascist, would it require something in the end like Grozny to take that? Yes, I think that in order to take Lviv off like that, it would require massive artillery of Lviv off to the ground. And I don't think that that is the way you end insurgencies. It's not 1945. It's 2020. And I think that that creates a, if they didn't hate Russians before, then they certainly all do now, you know, when they've lost family members. I don't. Go ahead, Scott. I don't want. Grozny, where's the vaunted Chechen resistance today? It doesn't exist. It's in Italy. Yeah, they don't exist in Chechnya. I'll tell you that. I look, I'm not, I'll say a couple of things just to defend myself. One, I've never said that I'm anti-war. I've always said that I'm pro diplomacy, but I don't want to come off as too bloodthirsty, but there's a time and a place for killing. And I believe that when the Russians were fighting the Chechen extremists, they needed to die. I think when anybody's fighting a jihadist in Syria, they need to die. I will not shed tears for them. Al-Qaeda, slaughter them like dogs. And these Nazis in Western Ukraine, I don't care about them. And neither does Russia. And, you know, I also believe when you have a hate-filled ideology like that, the only solution is the extreme solution. A denazification means denazification. There's no half measure here. Now, they may not have to destroy all of Levov to do it. They will surround Levov. They will give the Nazis every chance to flee to Poland. There won't be any Nazis alive in Western Ukraine when this is done, just like there's, you know, Shamil Baiseev's followers don't exist anymore. They've all gone to heaven. They're with the virgins, man, because the Russians took care of them. It was bloody. It wasn't easy, but it was decisive. That's why you have 40,000 Chechen fanatics marching in Ukraine today in support of Vladimir Putin, because they won that insurgency, the Russians. And I am convinced that the Russians don't play, they don't, they don't quit an operation halfway through. They don't play, you know, this isn't a kid's game in the playground. This is real. This is as real as it gets. And they made the decision to invade Ukraine, which is the ultimate decision, one which I wish they had made a different decision. You know, I wish they had found a given, allowed this thing to play out even more, but you knew they weren't. When they met with China on February 4th and entered that 5,000 word agreement, which basically was a declaration of war against the unipolar system, they made the decision that they were divorcing themselves from the West. That's why I laugh when you, I don't mean to be mean to the, to the business class in Moscow, but they're self purging. You know, one of the big difficulties Russians always had in terms of engaging effectively with China is this pro-Western business class. These Western intelligentsia who are married to the idea of Russia being connected to the West. Well, thank you, Joe Biden. That's what, that's what Vladimir Putin's saying right now. You just made this divorce the easiest divorce in the history of divorces because they can't blame me. You did it. You ended this. And there will be no going back. And that's why I think the pain will be less than some people project because the pain the people are projecting is built, premised on the notion that we're going, that Russia is going to reconstruct its connectivity with the West. No, that's over. Russia is compelled to go East and China and India. Look, they talked about the Trans-Eurasian Economic Partnership. This is a real deal. It's not fake. There's more people in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization than exist in the European Union. And, you know, combined, their economies have more economic growth potential than, than the West. And when Russia finally pulls the trigger on its counter sanctions plan, which it hasn't done yet, the pain will be, I just went and bought gas today, just a little anecdotal story. $4.19. I went into pay and the guy said, you're damn lucky you came right now because we actually are right in the process of reconfiguring our pumps to $4.39 a gallon. And he said, you know, and that price is probably going to go up to $4.50 by tomorrow. And Russia hasn't done anything yet. When Russia finally counterattacks on the economic front, it will be surgical, it will be decisive, and it will be painful. And, you know, so the West is going to be screaming louder than any Russian, I believe it will be screaming pretty soon. You know, look, Mark, I'm not in Moscow, so I apologize if I'm coming off a little callous. You know, I got relatives in Moscow. I've got, I've got leading-heart liberal relatives in Moscow who are as anti-Putin as they get. And they are angry, they are sad, they are upset, they are scared. And under no circumstances am I trying to be unsympathetic to their plight, because it is a real plight. And if I ever put on my human hat... I'm not sympathetic to their plight, I live here. But if I put on my human hat, you know, I will come off a little bit softer than I am right now. But I got my geopolitical hat on right now, and I'm just talking about hardcore reality. And the hardcore reality is the West has committed suicide in the name of going after Vladimir Putin. And Vladimir Putin's not going in, going away anytime soon. And I think the Russia we're going to see emerging from this is a Russia that has decisively pivoted to the East and will never again pivot West, not in our, not in our lifetime. I do. I agree completely with that. I agree completely with that. This is like, I've been calling it the great decoupling. But I also think that the country that I'm going to be left in is going to be, how does Russia rebuild Ukraine after this war? What has to be rebuilt, which will still be significant, even if they don't have to level cities, while it's under the effects of these sanctions? I don't know how they do that. Belton Road Initiative, Chinese Silk Road. Not, not quickly. I mean, it will be decades. I support, you know, the Russian government. I personally support Putin. My wife is Krami, and I have family in Donbass. I'm not a liberal Democrat. How could I do otherwise? But at the same time, I don't necessarily want to live in a more conservative, non-communist version of the Soviet Union either. I hear you. My wife is Georgian from Sukhumi. Her family was ethnically cleansed by a pro-Russian insurgency. She despises Vladimir Putin. She despises the Russians. I share much of her animosity towards that. But again, that's my human half. I step back and put my geopolitical hat on, and Russia hasn't done anything wrong here from my, I mean, they didn't make it to Ukraine, but I think they should have, I think Putin made a huge mistake by not going in in 2014, when all of this would have been, you know, Russia would have gotten off with just the first round of sanctions to the same extent. There would not have been a Ukrainian military at all. The Banderites would not have half, not even a quarter of the size of their cadres and the political influence in the country that they do now. The party of regions could have just been reinstalled in the country. It was a huge mistake because they thought it would collapse on its own, but, you know, the US did not allow that to happen. They made sure and they purged the country of all the political voice of East Ukraine for the last eight years. I mean, the idea is that, you know, we can talk about which one of our countries is a real democracy. I would not say that the Russian political system as much as I support it is a vibrant utopian democracy, but then again, I'm not much of a fan of American oligarchy and the corporate-backed, you know, political parties of power there either. But Ukraine is, for the last eight years, has been something on another level removed from both of those, you know, where if you oppose the government, you are at best beat and if not end up suicided or driven out of the country. So I think that the US has forced Russia down this path and they see no other option at this point and some mistakes have been made. I support this intervention despite all the horrific consequences because I agree with what is obviously the Russian government's assessment that the cost of not doing anything now is higher in the long term is higher than the cost of doing what they have to do now for security, for everything. And I think this decoupling is necessary, but that doesn't mean that I look necessarily forward to all the changes in life that are going to result from that. And I don't know where this ends and there's a lot of insane politicians in the West. And while I trust, I largely trust the US military brass. I don't think I trust the Polish military brass or politicians in the slightest. And what happens in such an incident? Where is... I think there's a growing recognition in Washington DC that we have elevated the Polish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian position to a far degree greater than they warrant. And that if left to their own devices, they would gladly have NATO go into a war with Russia. I mean, these are some very unstable people. They don't recognize... I mean, again, the humanitarian enemy says every human is equal. Everybody has an equal right to live and breathe and do what they want. The geopolitical guy in me says, if Lithuania really thinks that a mother in Poughkeepsie is willing to sacrifice her son on the Swalke plain, they're high as a kite. That there is no justification for the death of a single American in Eastern Europe. This is not World War II. Russia, Putin is not Hitler. This is insanity. And yet, because of NATO, we've given these Pomeranians equals, say, with the Rottweilers. And it doesn't work that way. They don't get the hunt with the big dogs. I mean, that's just the reality of this. So I think at some point, NATO is going to have to wake up to this reality that their expansion came with an inherent suicide pill. That is, they were a pack of Rottweilers. They were Dobermans ready to pounce. And they brought in these Chihuahuas and these Pomeranians who bark loudly but can't bite. And they're going to pick a fight with a Caucasian teepdog, ever seen the size of one of those things? Or the Russian bear even. So no, this is stupidity personified. And I've listened to the Polish politicians. And right now, again, we're in a dangerous situation where, because of the information warfare going on, these extreme positions get beefed up and echoed to be given more weight than they deserve. But we have American generals who are schooled in the art of war, who are schooled in reality. They've whispered words of wisdom, and Donald Trump's here before telling them, do not bomb Iran because that will start a conflict we can't prevail in. And I'm sure they're whispering in Biden's ear, do not get involved in a ground war in Europe because we simply lack the resources to do this in a non-nuclear fashion. I mean, the US has sent everything they can send right now. There's nothing left for us to send unless we are willing to mobilize here in the United States. But we don't have any more F-35s we can send unless we strip the Pacific. The more F-35s we send, the weaker we get because it sucks as an aircraft. That's the other reality they really don't want to get into. I don't think there's anybody in the United States who wants to see what happens when you put an F-35 up against the Russian equivalent because we've produced this women. A lot of our military is that way too. We spend billions of dollars on equipment that just doesn't work. So I think the US military is whispering words of wisdom. And I think at some point in time, once the book is written on what the Russians did in Ukraine and the West wakes up and realizes they've been subjected to this massive propaganda campaign, that'll take some of the appetite out of some of the air out of the tires of NATO expansion and the viability of NATO. I actually think nations like Finland might think twice about joining NATO. I don't know what Russia's intentions are with Finland. I don't know when Russia says we will respond militarily if that just means that we're going to beef up our forces on the border and you're going to have to deal with it. Or they're going to come in and finish the Winter War. If they're out there going to finish the Winter War, that would be silly. But the Finns have to understand that their economy is like every other Western economy. It runs on a razor thin margin of efficiency. And when you have to start to divert hundreds of billions of dollars to build up a military to confront a Russian threat that doesn't exist, it only exists because you made it exist, maybe they'll think twice. So right now, people are responding emotionally. But once reality is established, that reality will be, I believe, a decisive Russian victory in Ukraine. Once that reality is established, people have a chance to chew on it for a little bit. I think sanity will prevail. I honestly hope it will. I just talked about, you know, Microsoft. And as soon as I got done that segment, my wife frantically texted me, Microsoft has just canceled all new sales and services in Russia. And my wife is begging me how to, well, I shut off updates to her laptop. But I'm still trying to figure out how to shut off updates to Windows Office. And I don't have a clue. So I know how to operate a Rickover nuclear reactor, but I don't know how to. Is it all Control-F7 or something like that? I don't know. You have to leave in three minutes. Is that correct? Yes. So let me ask you one last question. Since you're in the US, we've seen this complete insanity, the barring of Russian cats and firing Valerie Gaggov, the Munich conductor. I mean, it's as if the pressure on ordinary people, you must stand up and say something. I mean, in Gaggov's case, the conductor, he didn't say anything and they punished him. He's not for something he'd said, which may have been in politics saying, I support the war, but he said nothing. And they fired him. It will never be repaired. In Australia, a young Australian on a live TV show spoke up, asked a question. He was humiliated and kicked out of the studio. Where does this go? And how does this end? This kind of absolutely horrible hysteria against ordinary, innocent Russian people inside Western countries? Well, the United States has always been susceptible to this. I mean, we did it against the Japanese in World War II and Germans were one. Yep. The more and then the sad thing is, you know, we claim to be a nation of principle, nation that values human rights, nation of freedom of speech, freedom of expression. We claim to be a nation that possesses intellectual, the intellectual capacity to engage in an informed debate, dialogue, discussion about issues that where there is no easy solution. That's what supposedly gives us our superiority in the world. None of that is true. None of this is true. We've exposed the reality that we are as xenophobic, ignorant and hatefield as Nazi, as the Germans in the 1930s. We are susceptible to state-sponsored propaganda as anybody. We're no better than the people we condemn for their actions in the past. And we have to be careful because there is a fine line between ginning up hatred to cancel people and ginning up hatred to kill people. And America needs to be very careful that we don't go down the route where instead of just throwing white paint on a Russian restaurant, a mob breaks down the door and starts stringing up Russians. I mean, I'm ashamed of my country right now. I'm ashamed of it because I always used to say that the United States stood for something and that we were imperfect in an imperfect fashion, trying to still do the greater good. We're no longer trying to do the greater good. We've lost, we are heading towards the greater evil and the American people are cheerleading this effort. The fact that no one can just take a pause and say, well, let's just a second. Are we being, just ask the question, are we being subjected to an information operation? Should we be taking everything coming out of Ukraine at face value? We can't even enter a debate. If you tried to have a discussion today where you introduced as a piece of evidence William Burns 2009, February 2009 memorandum, NET means NET. And to say, I just want to read to you what the U.S. Ambassador to Russia said, who's currently the CIA director today. So he's not as though he's a nobody in the history. Let's read what he said. If you tried to say that on national TV today, you'd be shut down as a pro-Putin apologist. So using the words of an American ambassador, who is currently the director of the CIA to explain the position makes you a pro-Putin apologist, that's the state of play in America today. It's a very dangerous thing. It's very, you know, I don't want to use the word frightening because I'm not scared. I'm just, I'm disgusted. I'm literally infuriated, disgusted, enraged. And I'm not somebody who's going to lose a friendship over this, but I've just told some of my friends just to shut up already when they say, you know, we stand for Ukraine. I said, I don't want to hear it. We're not for Ukraine. Which Ukraine, which Ukrainians do you stand for? Me, I don't stand for any Ukrainians. I stand for America. I stand for my country doing the right thing. And if the Ukrainians live up to the standards that we as a spouse, and I'm all for supporting them, but right now Ukraine doesn't, Ukraine doesn't factor into any American geopolitical strategy other than that designed to diminish Russia. Therefore, I have no use for Ukraine right now. And I apologize to the Ukrainians who are suffering because I don't want you to suffer, but you've been played like fools. And, you know, ultimately history will be the final judge. And I think history is going to be written very soon on Ukraine. And, and it's also going to be written on the United States and how the United States comes across in the pages that are being written right now is shameful. It's not America's finest moment. And frankly speaking, I don't know if American democracy can recover from this, because this is, you know, this is feeding into a, Joe, we've talked about this in the past that the deeper partisan divide in America today, where we no longer have the ability to engage in intellectual discourse about anything that's black and white, good or evil. And, and with the case of Russia, it's, it's fallen into that category. And I don't know if sanity is ever again going to prevail. And on that depressing note, I have to sign off. Well, thank you very much for your contribution today. Mark, we'll give you the last word then. See here. Well, I could ask you a question if you need it. Yeah, please. Well, Mark, Scott mentioned the word diminish, diminish Russia. There was in the last communique out of the White House in the last phone conversation between Putin and Biden, there was the readout from the White House, and he said Russia will be diminished if they invade. And I think that is the whole purpose of this operation, why I believe the West, I could be wrong why the United States wanted Russia to invade. So they could apply the sanctions, this world condemnation, as we've seen at the General Assembly, as we've seen at the Security Council, the world is told as, as, as Scott was just describing this insanity going on in the US and in other parts of the world against Russia, that diminishing Russia was what this was all about. And I think you'd have to go back to Brzezinski to see how important Ukraine was to him to try to weaken and push Russia out of Europe, basically, and being a power. Yeah, I think that it was at least the plan B, make your right, and it was a plan A. And that's what they intended all along. If not, then when they failed to get the anti Russian, the, you know, the manufacture of an anti Russian Ukrainian nation to, to contain Russia, then, then, you know, the, the diminishing of Russia is certainly acceptable. And I don't see where in anything but the long term, we come out of this and that is not the result. These economic sanctions are going to be crippling, of course, they're going to be, everything is going to be relative because I hate to tell everyone out there, but, you know, get ready, because if we do not have a global depression coming, then we certainly have a global recession that is going to be significant. I watch what is happening to the price of oil, to the price of wheat, to the price of coal, to the price of aluminum. There are every, the price of oil already, you know, over $120 a barrel, everything is skyrocketing because of the extent of these sanctions against Russia. And at this point, it's effectively against Russia and Ukraine and a number of other, you know, CSTO states or, or Eurasian Union states whose economies are significantly tied in with Russia. The Kazakh Tengri is dropping like a rock, right? Count, you know, their natural resources, you know, the same thing, Belarus is subject to the sanctions. You're taking a huge portion of the commodity supply of the world. Russia's, you know, number one or number two on oil, number one on gas, number one on wheat, number one, when you do all of that and you take it out of the market in a time when there is already very difficult market conditions, you know, with, you know, prices were already rising and so on. You're disrupting global distribution and supply chains all over the world. This does not end well for anyone. So we can only at the end assess where it ends up and what, you know, what the relative damage is at the end of that. But I don't know where this ends anymore. I don't know where the bottom is. And that scares me. I'm scared right now. And I can't ever remember saying that before in my life. I mean, not only the military, but, you know, the economic apocalypse that is long, you know, yawning, not just for Russia at this point, but, you know, for a good portion of the world. Inflation, high inflation and high gas prices at the pump in the U.S. at the, you know, low end of the scale means starvation in Egypt and North Africa and revolutions and more political destabilization around the world. Sub-Saharan Africa, I don't even want to think about. So this is a watershed moment. I mean, this will be a moment that is talked about in history and, you know, international relations textbooks. And you will look back on this moment in your lives and wonder how we all got to this place and how things could have been done differently. I know that John Mirzheimer and George Kennan and John Matlock and Stephen Cohen and others warned about what the consequences of going down this path would be. And still here we've all walked step by step into it. And again, I don't know where it ends. And I'm usually pretty good at forecasting these things. I'd give my track record against any other top analysts and figure I've come out ahead in the past few past decade or so. But this one, I don't know where we're going, Joe. And all those brilliant Americans who knew Russia collectively better than the entire country were ignored and marginalized now. And we see the American public being told a story in the media that excludes what happened in 2014, but excludes eight years of war in Ukraine against Donbass, that this is a war that's been going on and that Russia has entered, not started, as Putin said. And the American people will never be given that. And if you tried to tell and you've tried, you are shut down. Mark, my last question, as an American living in Russia, do you think in your lifetime you'll ever see a repairing of relations between your country and the one you're living in? Okay, so I mean, actually, I'm a dual citizen now, because I took Russian citizenship a few years ago. And the only reason I didn't give up my U.S. citizenship is because it would cost too much. You have to pay to get rid of your U.S. citizenship, a fairly significant amount. And I can't explain what's going on to my parents. They would ask me, I know, I've had conversations before, why is Putin butchering children in Ukraine? And that's despite the fact that my wife is Crimean and we have family all over Eastern Ukraine. And they believe that we, me and my wife, from Ukraine, are we're the ones suffering from Putin's propaganda, not that they're suffering from U.S. propaganda. So if I can't explain that to my own parents, what are the hope of relations? I haven't been home in 20 years, you know, to where I grew up. This is home to me now. But I don't expect to get back there anytime soon either. I don't ever see it happening. And the only thing I worry about is we've already lost, we're already losing, you know, in the next weeks, we'll be losing as Russia takes counter reactions against Google and Facebook and Twitter. I'm going to lose all of those. Are they going to figure out a way to make me lose Skype as well? And Zoom? Possibly. And I don't know how connections, I don't think connections can ever be restored from this. I think this is, again, if we want to use the new Cold War, actually, the Russian head of the Foreign Intelligence Office, Naryshkin, the SVR, said that it's not really possible to talk about a new Cold War, because we're already in a hot war. Well, Mark, I'd like to end it there. But just a bookkeeping note, you mentioned some sources that you rely on at the beginning. And some of our readers have asked if you can provide contact for them. I've already done, yeah, I've already used everything. All right. Thank you very much, Mark, for your time today. We appreciate, as depressing as it all is, we appreciate your hearing from you. Hey, I hope I'm wrong. Mark, Cassandra, Slavota signing off. Okay. And this is your Laura Fisien live signing off. Thank you for joining us, and we'll be, again, revisiting the Ukrainian situation soon on CN Live. For our producer, Kathy Wogan, for Mark Slavota and Scott Ritter, goodbye. 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