First President of Russia from 1991 to 1999
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10 episodes with yeltsin
6 episodes with yeltsin
8 episodes with yeltsin
6 episodes with yeltsin
3 episodes with yeltsin
10 episodes with yeltsin
3 episodes with yeltsin
2 episodes with yeltsin
2 episodes with yeltsin
The Fall of Communism: Top-Down Collapse and the Legacy of Violence in Modern Russia Professor Sean McMeekin The final segment discusses the collapse of communist regimes in 1989, contending that these regimes generally did not fall because of a rising from the bottom. Instead, the collapse was largely top-down, driven by the disappearance of Soviet coercion or inside palace coups, such as the one that overthrew the Ceaușescus in Romania or the mutiny that lined the armed forces up behind Yeltsin in Russia. In modern Russia, there is a hybrid system that includes statism, control of media, and nostalgia for the Soviet period and Stalin's legacy as a "builder" and "conqueror," but it has jettisoned Lenin and full communism. The core thesis reaffirmed is that extreme violence is the predicate for the communist vision.
Former CNN Moscow bureau chief Jill Dougherty talked about her experiences covering Russia and Russian Presidents Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin. She spoke at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Former CNN Moscow bureau chief Jill Dougherty talked about her experiences covering Russia and Russian Presidents Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin. She spoke at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this episode, we discuss the rising backlash to last week's comments about Nick Fuentes, the distinction between personal judgment and deplatforming, and the broader question of what ideas belong in public discourse. We explore the failures of remedial education across major universities, the collapsing academic standards that allow students to advance without basic literacy and numeracy, and the systemic incentives that push institutions to “get students through” rather than educate them. We examine the roots of the public-school crisis, the role of property-tax funding, the constraints of unionized pay structures, and why market incentives and genuine school choice may be the only workable path forward. We also revisit lessons from the Soviet Union, grocery-store abundance, and what markets reveal about human flourishing in ways central planning never can. 00:00 Introduction and Overview 01:19 The Camino Story and Unexpected Love of Hiking 05:03 Walking Ancient Roman Roads with Modern Tech 07:50 Criticism, Free Speech, and the Nick Fuentes Debate 13:24 Where to Draw the Line on Platforming Extremists 14:49 The Difference Between Preference and Censorship 18:43 Foolishness of the Week: University of Arizona AI Prompting Class 20:13 College Remediation and the Math Skills Crisis 23:08 The Collapse of Writing Standards in Higher Education 24:31 Why Students Aren't Being Educated Before College 29:08 Public Schools, Property Taxes, and Unequal Outcomes 33:53 Why Money and Teacher Quality Don't Correlate 35:34 School Choice, Competition, and Market Incentives 37:02 Why Centralized Solutions Don't Work in Education 39:50 Markets, Feedback Loops, and Real Accountability 46:11 Closing Thoughts and Listener Send-Off 47:33 Aftershow: Khrushchev, Yeltsin, and the Grocery Store Lesson 53:51 The Power of Markets: Food, Abundance, and Freedom Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
In 1989, Boris Yeltsin walked into a Houston supermarket, and walked out ready to end an empire. What he saw in Texas that day would shake the foundations of the Soviet Union. * On the Very Special Episodes podcast, we tell one incredible story each week. Follow us down a different rabbit hole every Wednesday. Special thanks to composer Evan Mack for letting us play a clip of “Make Your Move,” from his original opera Yeltsin in Texas. Learn more at evanmack.com. And thanks to Yelena Biberman for sharing her story. Check out her excellent podcast How to Kill a Superpower. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
In 1989, Boris Yeltsin walked into a Houston supermarket — and walked out ready to end an empire. What he saw in Texas that day would shake the foundations of the Soviet Union. * On the Very Special Episodes podcast, we tell one incredible story each week. Follow us down a different rabbit hole every Wednesday. Hosted by Dana Schwartz, Zaron Burnett, and Jason EnglishWritten by Dave RoosSenior Producer is Josh FisherEditing and Sound Design by Jonathan WashingtonAdditional Editing by Mary DooeMixing and Mastering by Josh FisherResearch and Fact-Checking by Dave Roos and Austin ThompsonVoice Actor is Tom AntonellisOriginal Music by Elise McCoyShow Logo by Lucy QuintanillaSocial Clips by Yarberry MediaExecutive Producer is Jason English Special thanks to composer Evan Mack for letting us play a clip of “Make Your Move,” from his original opera Yeltsin in Texas. Learn more at evanmack.com. And thanks to Yelena Biberman for sharing her story. Check out her excellent podcast How to Kill a Superpower. We've got a mailbag episode coming later this month. Got a question for Dana, Zaron, or Jason? Email us at veryspecialepisodes@gmail.com. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
We've done shows before on how contemporary America resembles late-stage Soviet society. But none quite as intriguing as with the Russian-born, US-based journalist Mikhail Zygar. In The Dark Side of the Earth, his new history of the Soviet Union's demise, Zygar underlines the moral exhaustion of its citizens. People no longer believed in anything, he reports on the collapse of this vast Euro-Asian empire. And that's the analogy Zygar makes with contemporary America which, he suggests, is equally exhausted. From the Soviet Union to the United States, a descent into a morally bankrupt nihilism defines the end of empire. Zygar even identifies the idealistic Obama with Gorbachev and the pugnacious Trump with Yeltsin, implying that a self-styled Putin-like “savior” lurks in the dark shadow of the American future. 1. Putin's Russia is worse than the Soviet Union The Soviet Union had dozens of political prisoners in the 1970s; Putin's Russia has thousands. Putin threatens the West with nuclear weapons far more aggressively than Soviet leaders ever did. What we thought was a victory over totalitarianism proved short-lived—Putin has built something more oppressive than what collapsed.2. The 1991 coup failed because of one woman History turns on ordinary people, not just great men. Emma Yazov, wife of the Soviet Defense Minister, spent three days crying in her husband's office, demanding he withdraw tanks from Moscow and resign from the junta. On the third day, he did. Her belief in democracy defeated the KGB and the Soviet military.3. Soviet citizens stopped believing after 1968 The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia killed whatever faith remained in communism. Afterward, Soviet people became perhaps the most cynical on earth, practicing “internal immigration”—pretending to participate in official life while living secret, clandestine private lives. When no one believes in an empire's ideology, collapse becomes inevitable.4. Solzhenitsyn's ideas shaped both Putin and the American New Right The author of The Gulag Archipelago evolved from Soviet dissident to fierce critic of liberal democracy. He wanted to preserve the Soviet empire by replacing communist ideology with Orthodox Christianity—precisely what Putin is attempting now. His attacks on Western liberalism's “weakness” and “woke culture” have found new audiences among American conservatives.5. Dick Cheney's approach to Soviet collapse enabled Putin George H.W. Bush and James Baker believed preserving a democratic Soviet Union would create a reliable partner. Dick Cheney disagreed, preferring “15 little dictatorships instead of one mighty Soviet Union.” Cheney's view prevailed. Without a Marshall Plan for post-Soviet states, Russian nationalism flourished, and Putin portrayed the collapse as Western conspiracy—the foundation of his power today.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe
In 1989, Boris Yeltsin walked into a Houston supermarket — and walked out ready to end an empire. What he saw in Texas that day would shake the foundations of the Soviet Union. * On the Very Special Episodes podcast, we tell one incredible story each week. Follow us down a different rabbit hole every Wednesday. Hosted by Dana Schwartz, Zaron Burnett, and Jason EnglishWritten by Dave RoosSenior Producer is Josh FisherEditing and Sound Design by Jonathan WashingtonAdditional Editing by Mary DooeMixing and Mastering by Josh FisherResearch and Fact-Checking by Dave Roos and Austin ThompsonVoice Actor is Tom AntonellisOriginal Music by Elise McCoyShow Logo by Lucy QuintanillaSocial Clips by Yarberry MediaExecutive Producer is Jason English Special thanks to composer Evan Mack for letting us play a clip of “Make Your Move,” from his original opera Yeltsin in Texas. Learn more at evanmack.com. We've got a mailbag episode coming later this month. Got a question for Dana, Zaron, or Jason? Email us at veryspecialepisodes@gmail.com. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
In 1989, Boris Yeltsin walked into a Houston supermarket — and walked out ready to end an empire. What he saw in Texas that day would shake the foundations of the Soviet Union. * On the Very Special Episodes podcast, we tell one incredible story each week. Follow us down a different rabbit hole every Wednesday. Hosted by Dana Schwartz, Zaron Burnett, and Jason EnglishWritten by Dave RoosSenior Producer is Josh FisherEditing and Sound Design by Jonathan WashingtonAdditional Editing by Mary DooeMixing and Mastering by Josh FisherResearch and Fact-Checking by Dave Roos and Austin ThompsonVoice Actor is Tom AntonellisOriginal Music by Elise McCoyShow Logo by Lucy QuintanillaSocial Clips by Yarberry MediaExecutive Producer is Jason English Special thanks to composer Evan Mack for letting us play a clip of “Make Your Move,” from his original opera Yeltsin in Texas. Learn more at evanmack.com. And thanks to Yelena Biberman for sharing her story. Check out her excellent podcast How to Kill a Superpower. We've got a mailbag episode coming later this month. Got a question for Dana, Zaron, or Jason? Email us at veryspecialepisodes@gmail.com. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
In this Garage edition of The Court of Public Opinion, Jeremy Cordeaux dives into the growing tension between equality, government overreach, and Australia’s shifting political landscape. From historical parallels between Whitlam-era apartheid sanctions and today’s debates over race-based policies in Victoria, to reports of hospital triage favouring patients by racial category, Jeremy questions the rise of “stealth” preferential systems. He also highlights major blowouts in South Australian government projects, ongoing CFMEU corruption scandals, and bizarre national stories—from Queensland schools teaching the wrong exam topic to copper thieves disrupting train networks. Plus, a look back at important events in history, celebrity birthdays, and a preview of Friday’s show with Johnny Mack. A fast-moving commentary spanning politics, culture, and the downright strange. Whitlam government’s 1972 sanctions on apartheid South Africa Comparison to Victoria’s treaty policies described as modern “apartheid” Hospitals allegedly triaging patients based on race Discussion on the Voice referendum and claims of “getting it by stealth” Bob Hawke’s comments on heritage and equality Cuts to aged-care in-home support packages Government programs costing more due to profit-driven providers Queensland schools teaching the wrong Year 12 ancient history topic Rise in copper wire theft across Australia affecting trains and infrastructure Preview of guest Johnny Mack performing “Come What May” Blowouts in SA infrastructure projects including the Women’s & Children’s Hospital CFMEU corruption allegations and political inaction Nick McKenzie’s reporting and alleged home break-in Promotion for Rising Sun venue and Jim Elder auctions Historical “on this day” rundown (Republic referendum, Yeltsin, Harry Potter, etc.) Celebrity birthdays and notable deaths See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
6. The Dictatorial Power of Putin and the Unification of Ukraine Post-2014. Serhii Plokhy (Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University) focuses on the unilateral nature of decision-making in the Kremlin regarding the 2014 invasion. The decision to annex Crimea and fragment Ukraine was made by Vladimir Putin and his security chiefs during an all-night meeting on February 23–24, 2014. This process confirmed that Russia operates as a dictatorship, transitioning from the hope of Russian democracy under Yeltsin to the current reality where Putin's power is rooted in the super-presidential constitution established in 1993. Putin initially gained public support through brutality in Chechnya. While Ukraine was traditionally viewed as split between Eastern and Western orientations, Russia actively exploited these linguistic, cultural, and religious divisions in 2014 to justify the takeover of Crimea and the initiation of hybrid warfare in Donbas. Crucially, the professor emphasizes that the shock of the 2014 conflict had the opposite effect desired by Moscow: it unified Ukrainian society far more than it had ever been before. Moscow's biggest error in planning the 2022 invasion was proceeding under the assumption that Ukraine was still the divided country it had been in 2014.
Our guest today is Sergei Davidis, a Russian lawyer, human rights activist and leading member of Memorial. Sergei Davidis has extensive experience in organising various human rights initiatives and political protests in defence of democratic principles in Putin's Russia. In 2010, Davidis founded the programme in support of political prisoners, which operates within Memorial, a programme he heads to this day. He is also a Memorial board member.In December 2021, a few months before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation ordered the shutting down of Memorial, Russia's oldest and largest human rights organisation. On 3 March 2022, Davidis appeared as a witness for the defence in the trial of Aleksei Navalny. On 4 March, security forces raided and ransacked the organisation's Moscow office. A few days later, due to the increasing risks and virtual impossibility of continuing his work in support of political prisoners in Russia, Davidis decided to leave the country with his family. He currently lives in Lithuania. Together with his team, they track the number of political prisoners in Russia, organise support, and maintain a register according to the stringent standards adopted by Memorial.This podcast was recorded on 25 September 2025.Other platforms where you can find our podcasts include: Podcasts.com, Spotify, iTunes, and Amazon Audible.My Questions1 Could you tell us about the history of your project. When did Memorial decide that it was necessary to keep a record of all those individuals you consider to be political prisoners?2 How do you define political prisoners? As you know, other organisations use other terms – for example Amnesty International refers to ‘prisoners of conscience'? What is the difference?3 How many political prisoners are there in Russia at the moment?4 My understanding is that under Gorbachev, all political prisoners were released and there were none under Yeltsin. When did political prisoners first reappear in Russia?5 Two new laws in particular were introduced at the very start of the war criminalising ‘discrediting' the Russian military or spreading ‘fake news' about the Russian military. Could you explain the difference between those two laws and the differences in punishments?6 read that some individuals are given ridiculously long terms in prison for an action which even in terms of Russian legislation would seem to be a minor offence – for example 13 years in prison for donating a small sum to a Ukrainian charity. That is far more than someone would get for murder. How do you explain that?7 Russia these days has a whole range of laws criminalising individuals and organisations, for example the foreign agent laws, the laws branding organisations as extremist or as ‘undesirable'. How far are those convicted under these laws represented among those you classify as political prisoners?8 To what extent is criticism of the Russian leader – Vladimir Putin – criminalised? Are people in prison simply for speaking out against Putin? That would tell us a great deal about the regime, given how focused it is on the personality of the leader?9 If we consider Russia as an authoritarian state, in terms of the numbers of political prisoners in the country and the severity of the sentences, how does Russia compare with other authoritarian countries?10 Your colleague Oleg Orlov was imprisoned for calling the regime ‘fascist'. Do you agree with that classification?11 How much harder is it to do your work, based outside the country?12 To what extent are you able to gauge the impact of your work, both inside Russia and internationally?
Vladimir Putin casts a shadow over our lives, but it wasn't always that way, there was a time when the West was in love with Putin, so what's happened? Today Tony and his guests Mark Galeotti and Anna Arutunyan unpick the man from the myth.They discuss how Putin was shaped by a tough childhood in Leningrad, his KGB years and formative time in East Germany, how he rose through the political ranks in the 1990s as a ‘everyone's favourite bag-man', until he was hand-picked to be Yeltsin's successor. At first President Putin restored order and wealth to a chaotic Russia, but he also built a system of fear and cronyism around him, similar to a Medieval court. They argue that once he could have been remembered as a stabiliser, instead he is now viewed as a paranoid strongman, whose need for control has dragged Russia into repression and conflict.Hosted by Sir Tony Robinson | Instagram @sirtonyrobinson Producer: Melissa FitzGerald | X @melissafitzg With Mark Galiotti | X @MarkGaleotti Honorary professor at UCL and director of the consultancy Mayak Intelligence, Mark has been studying Russia since 1988 and was banned indefinitely from it in 2022.‘Downfall: Putin, Prigozhin, and the fight for the future of Russia' (Ebury/Penguin, June 2024)'We Need to Talk About Putin: How the West gets him wrong' (Penguin, 2019) Anna Arutunyan | X @scrawnya Russian-American writer who spent two decades as a journalist in Moscow, where she wrote for The Moscow News and other publications around the world. She served as senior Russia analyst for the International Crisis Group before leaving Russia in 2022 and is the author of five books about the country, its politics, society and its wars. She is currently associate director of Mayak Intelligence and lives in the UK. ‘Rebel Russia: Dissent and Protest from the Tsars to Navalny' (Polity Books, May 2025)‘The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia's Power Cult' (Interlink Books, 2014)Follow us: Instagram @cunningcastpod | X @cunningcastpod | YouTube @cunningcast -------If you enjoy this podcast please do share it and leave us a rating or review. Thank you, Love Tony x Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Ghost turns his focus to Jules Kroll, the man once dubbed the “CIA of Wall Street.” The episode traces Kroll's rise from cleaning up corporate graft in New York to building Kroll Associates, a private intelligence powerhouse that hired ex-CIA and FBI operatives and shaped global investigations. Ghost unpacks Kroll's ties to NewsGuard, its role in blacklisting independent media, and how its lead investor funnelled money into firms like Flashpoint that work with the FBI to target so-called “domestic extremists.” The discussion connects Kroll to Robert Maxwell, one of the last people to meet with him before his death, and to 9/11, where his firm ran World Trade Center security after the 1993 bombing. Ghost also highlights how Kroll's reach extended into Russian asset hunts under Yeltsin, kleptocrat cases from Marcos to Baby Doc, and the creation of a corporate intelligence industry built on secrets. With references to Trump's pause on FCPA enforcement, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and the blurred lines between private intelligence and government psyops, this chapter reveals how deeply Jules Kroll's shadow runs through finance, geopolitics, and narrative warfare.
The story we've been told is simple: in February 2022, Vladimir Putin woke up one morning, decided to invade a peaceful, democratic Ukraine, and launched an “unprovoked war.” That's the official narrative. But history is never that simple.From the 1990s onward, Moscow warned that NATO expansion into its backyard was a red line. Gorbachev and later Yeltsin were assured that the alliance would not creep eastward. Yet step by step—Poland, Hungary, the Baltics, talk of Georgia and Ukraine—NATO advanced. To Washington, enlargement was “stability.” To Moscow, it was encirclement.The real break came in 2014. Ukraine's elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, leaned toward Moscow on trade and energy. That was unacceptable to Washington and Brussels. When mass protests erupted in Kyiv, the U.S. wasn't a bystander. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Senator John McCain both appeared on the ground, cheering the crowds. In a leaked call, Nuland infamously dismissed Europe's hesitance—“F*** the EU”—while handpicking who should form the next government. To Moscow, this was regime change with CIA, State, and USAID fingerprints all over it.The revolution ousted Yanukovych and installed a Western-leaning government. Overnight, Ukraine shifted from Moscow's orbit to Brussels'. What followed wasn't peace. In Donbas, the Russian-speaking east rose in rebellion. Kyiv responded with force. Shelling, rockets, and artillery fire turned towns into rubble. Between 2014 and 2022, more than 14,000 people died in a grinding low-intensity war. For people in Donetsk or Luhansk, the war didn't begin in 2022—it had already been burning for eight years.This backstory matters because it reframes 2022. Putin didn't invade a neutral neighbor out of nowhere. He acted after decades of ignored warnings and eight years of bloodshed in the Donbas. Was the invasion brutal? Yes. Was it unprovoked? Hardly.Critics will call this “carrying water for Putin.” But acknowledging how the West lit the fuse doesn't absolve Moscow of blame. It explains why Russia saw the stakes as existential. When Ukraine amended its constitution to commit to NATO membership, Moscow heard one message: eventually, U.S. missiles could sit 300 miles from Moscow. For a nuclear power that lost 27 million lives in World War II, this wasn't abstract.The West believed sanctions would collapse Russia's economy and that Putin would face regime change. Instead, Moscow built its own military-industrial base, deepened ties with China, India, and the BRICS bloc, and weathered the storm. Far from isolating Russia, the war accelerated a global realignment away from dollar dominance.Meanwhile, Ukraine—brilliant engineers, fertile farmland, energy transit routes—has become a pawn. Western politicians invoke democracy while oligarchs, defense contractors, and energy interests profit. Hunter Biden's Burisma board seat was not an outlier; it was a symptom of how entangled Washington had become in Ukraine's internal affairs.This isn't a defense of Russia's invasion. It's a reminder that wars don't appear overnight. They build. They escalate. They ignite only after a fuse has been laid. In Ukraine, that fuse was NATO expansion, the 2014 coup, and the long, bloody stalemate in Donbas.The world didn't start burning in 2022. We just finally saw the explosion.
Informativo de primera hora de la mañana, en el programa El Remate de La Diez Capital Radio. Hoy hace un año: La OCDE sitúa a España entre los países donde los salarios reales caen más desde la pandemia, un 2,5% …y hoy hace 365 días: Canarias se mantiene un año más en el grupo de regiones de la UE con peor renta per cápita. Hoy se cumplen 1.233 días del cruel ataque e invasión de Rusia a Ucrania. 3 años y 126 días. Hoy es jueves 10 de julio de 2025. Día Internacional de The Beatles. El 16 de enero es el Día Internacional de The Beatles, para los fans que consideran que el día de la inauguración del Cavern Club, lugar en que hicieron su debut John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison y Ringo Starr, es la fecha que se debe considerar como día oficial de la agrupación. Existe también la fecha del 10 de julio, considerado también como el Día de Los Beatles porque fue el 10 de julio de 1964 cuando la banda regresa a Liverpool triunfante de su gira estadounidense, justo para rodar la premiere de su película A Hard Day's Night. 1908.- Estalla en Guinea una insurrección contra España. 1925.- Inauguración de la Ciudad Universitaria de París, creada por iniciativa del filántropo Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe. 1927.- El general José Sanjurjo, jefe de operaciones, da por terminada la guerra de Marruecos. 1956.- La Cámara de los Lores británica rechaza la abolición de la pena de muerte, aprobada en la de los Comunes. 1964.- Mary Quant presenta la minifalda. 1971.- El rey Hasan II de Marruecos resulta ileso en un atentado durante un fallido de golpe de Estado. 1991.- Borís Yeltsin es investido presidente de la Federación Rusa. 1997.- El concejal del PP en el Ayuntamiento de Ermua (Vizcaya) Miguel Ángel Blanco Garrido es secuestrado por ETA, que amenaza con matarle si en 48 horas sus presos no son trasladados a cárceles vascas. ETA cumplió su amenaza, al no ceder el Gobierno al chantaje. 2012.- El Eurogrupo concede a España 30.000 millones de euros para sanear la banca. 2018.- El juez del Tribunal Supremo español Pablo Llarena finaliza la instrucción de la causa del "procés" catalán y declara en rebeldía a los huidos. santos Cristóbal, Amalia, Rufina y Segunda. Netanyahu y Trump abordan la liberación de los rehenes israelíes y un posible alto el fuego en Gaza. Feijóo ve "cosméticas" las medidas de Sánchez y le insta a "confesar", ayudar a "devolver el botín" y convocar elecciones. Los socios de investidura respaldan a Sánchez aunque no descartan elecciones "si escala" la corrupción. Sánchez defiende su rechazo al 5% del PIB en defensa y Feijóo le acusa de "mentir". Coalición Canaria le pide a Sánchez una "cuestión de confianza o vamos a las urnas" El Gobierno de Canarias publica en pleno verano la convocatoria de ayudas a la compra de vivienda para jóvenes. Podrán acogerse a estas ayudas jóvenes de hasta 35 años que hayan adquirido una vivienda completamente construida y destinada a su residencia habitual y permanente. Canarias eleva el control de las universidades públicas con la aprobación de la Ley de Consejos Sociales, aunque sin el consenso del Parlamento El texto que adapta la normativa canaria al marco de la Ley Universitaria sale adelante por mayoría, con los votos en contra de Vox y la abstención socialista. El Estado mantiene la oferta de 400 plazas en Madrid para menores refugiados acogidos en Canarias. Migraciones prevé que a finales de julio podrá empezar el traslado de 250 jóvenes solicitantes de protección al campamento Canarias 50, en Gran Canaria. La consejera de Sanidad de Canarias reconoce errores en la gestión del banco de sangre y anuncia cambios. Esther Monzón niega, sin embargo, que haya desabastecimiento en los hospitales de las islas pese a la abultada caída en las donaciones. Día Internacional de The Beatles. Yesterday.
Bienvenidos a La Diez Capital Radio! Están a punto de comenzar un nuevo episodio de nuestro Programa de Actualidad, donde la información, la formación y el entretenimiento se encuentran para ofrecerles lo mejor de las noticias y temas relevantes. Este programa, dirigido y presentado por Miguel Ángel González Suárez, es su ventana directa a los acontecimientos más importantes, así como a las historias que capturan la esencia de nuestro tiempo. A través de un enfoque dinámico y cercano, Miguel Ángel conecta con ustedes para proporcionar una experiencia informativa y envolvente. Desde análisis profundos hasta entrevistas exclusivas, cada emisión está diseñada para mantenerles al tanto, ofrecerles nuevos conocimientos y, por supuesto, entretenerles. Para más detalles sobre el programa, visiten nuestra web en www.ladiez.es. - Informativo de primera hora de la mañana, en el programa El Remate de La Diez Capital Radio. Hoy hace un año: La OCDE sitúa a España entre los países donde los salarios reales caen más desde la pandemia, un 2,5% …y hoy hace 365 días: Canarias se mantiene un año más en el grupo de regiones de la UE con peor renta per cápita. Hoy se cumplen 1.233 días del cruel ataque e invasión de Rusia a Ucrania. 3 años y 126 días. Hoy es jueves 10 de julio de 2025. Día Internacional de The Beatles. El 16 de enero es el Día Internacional de The Beatles, para los fans que consideran que el día de la inauguración del Cavern Club, lugar en que hicieron su debut John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison y Ringo Starr, es la fecha que se debe considerar como día oficial de la agrupación. Existe también la fecha del 10 de julio, considerado también como el Día de Los Beatles porque fue el 10 de julio de 1964 cuando la banda regresa a Liverpool triunfante de su gira estadounidense, justo para rodar la premiere de su película A Hard Day's Night. 1908.- Estalla en Guinea una insurrección contra España. 1925.- Inauguración de la Ciudad Universitaria de París, creada por iniciativa del filántropo Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe. 1927.- El general José Sanjurjo, jefe de operaciones, da por terminada la guerra de Marruecos. 1956.- La Cámara de los Lores británica rechaza la abolición de la pena de muerte, aprobada en la de los Comunes. 1964.- Mary Quant presenta la minifalda. 1971.- El rey Hasan II de Marruecos resulta ileso en un atentado durante un fallido de golpe de Estado. 1991.- Borís Yeltsin es investido presidente de la Federación Rusa. 1997.- El concejal del PP en el Ayuntamiento de Ermua (Vizcaya) Miguel Ángel Blanco Garrido es secuestrado por ETA, que amenaza con matarle si en 48 horas sus presos no son trasladados a cárceles vascas. ETA cumplió su amenaza, al no ceder el Gobierno al chantaje. 2012.- El Eurogrupo concede a España 30.000 millones de euros para sanear la banca. 2018.- El juez del Tribunal Supremo español Pablo Llarena finaliza la instrucción de la causa del "procés" catalán y declara en rebeldía a los huidos. santos Cristóbal, Amalia, Rufina y Segunda. Netanyahu y Trump abordan la liberación de los rehenes israelíes y un posible alto el fuego en Gaza. Feijóo ve "cosméticas" las medidas de Sánchez y le insta a "confesar", ayudar a "devolver el botín" y convocar elecciones. Los socios de investidura respaldan a Sánchez aunque no descartan elecciones "si escala" la corrupción. Sánchez defiende su rechazo al 5% del PIB en defensa y Feijóo le acusa de "mentir". Coalición Canaria le pide a Sánchez una "cuestión de confianza o vamos a las urnas" El Gobierno de Canarias publica en pleno verano la convocatoria de ayudas a la compra de vivienda para jóvenes. Podrán acogerse a estas ayudas jóvenes de hasta 35 años que hayan adquirido una vivienda completamente construida y destinada a su residencia habitual y permanente. Canarias eleva el control de las universidades públicas con la aprobación de la Ley de Consejos Sociales, aunque sin el consenso del Parlamento El texto que adapta la normativa canaria al marco de la Ley Universitaria sale adelante por mayoría, con los votos en contra de Vox y la abstención socialista. El Estado mantiene la oferta de 400 plazas en Madrid para menores refugiados acogidos en Canarias. Migraciones prevé que a finales de julio podrá empezar el traslado de 250 jóvenes solicitantes de protección al campamento Canarias 50, en Gran Canaria. La consejera de Sanidad de Canarias reconoce errores en la gestión del banco de sangre y anuncia cambios. Esther Monzón niega, sin embargo, que haya desabastecimiento en los hospitales de las islas pese a la abultada caída en las donaciones. Día Internacional de The Beatles. Yesterday. - Wladimiro Rodríguez Brito | Perspectivas del Sector Primario en Canarias. En esta sección, contamos con el análisis y la experiencia de Wladimiro Rodríguez Brito, geógrafo y profundo conocedor del territorio canario, que nos ofrece una mirada crítica y reflexiva sobre la situación actual del sector primario en las islas. - El Contrapunto | Economía, Sociedad y Opinión Crítica. En esta sección semanal, la economista Cristina A. Secas y el periodista Francisco Pallero unen sus voces en un diálogo dinámico y plural sobre los temas que marcan la actualidad social, económica y política. Desde el análisis riguroso de los datos hasta la interpretación crítica de los hechos, "El Contrapunto" ofrece una mirada complementaria —y muchas veces divergente— que enriquece el debate público. Con claridad, experiencia y sin rodeos, Cristina y Francisco confrontan ideas, examinan decisiones políticas y desmenuzan el impacto real que tienen sobre la ciudadanía. - No pueden perderse este nuevo programa de Tiempos interesantes de la mano de jose figueroa garcia y el letrado , economista y experto en criptomonedas Esteban García acerca del último gran escándalo cripto en España, un escándalo que sigue mayoritariamente siendo ignorado al igual que otros por los medios de comunicación en general, el escándalo Nimbus, una estafa con presuntos participantes de altos vuelos. Conectados a La Casa Blanca, el Vaticano y hasta el Banco Mundial. - Un programa apasionante de Tiempos interesantes de Jose Figueroa Garcia con entrevista a David Suárez Dorta investigador y autor del libro , Historia del esoterismo en España. Un experto en la materia y gran divulgador en habla hispana.
Send us a textAndrew Weiss, Vice President for Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, reveals how Vladimir Putin rose from mediocre KGB officer to Russian leader through a series of accidents and opportunities rather than strategic brilliance or espionage expertise.• Putin was a mid-level KGB officer who never achieved high rank before being chosen as Yeltsin's successor precisely because he seemed controllable• The image of Putin as a master spy was deliberately created as propaganda but has been mistaken for reality by many in the West• Russia's centralized governance and territorial expansion tendencies predate Putin by centuries• Putin's relationship with oligarchs transformed them from independent powers to dependent vassals• After 2014, Russia actively cultivated relationships with fringe political groups across Europe and America• The 2022 Ukraine invasion backfired by strengthening NATO and Ukrainian resolve• Putin believes he can outlast Western support for Ukraine by exploiting political divisions• Understanding Putin as he truly is rather than as he portrays himself is critical for formulating effective policy• The book uses graphic novel format to make complex Russian history and politics accessible to wider audiencesVisit bookclues.com for more information and commentary on this interview and other book discussions.
Sara Gutiérrez y Eva Orúe se conocieron en Moscú cuando era el gran foco informativo del mundo. Allí proyectaron un viaje transformador donde decidieron qué hacer con sus vidas. Esta historia comienza hablando de un ojo —un ojo muy concreto— y termina hablando de periodismo, de escritura, de entrevistar a los líderes que cambiaron el rumbo de la historia. Sara, de Oviedo, y Eva, de Zaragoza, se conocieron comprando esquís, se fueron a vivir juntas, y para hacer el Transiberiano se marcaron como objetivo decidir qué hacían con su vida. A su alrededor, un país en transformación, donde reinaba la escasez y la picaresca, un lugar aparentemente inhóspito y hermético donde estaba pasando todo, donde estaba terminando la Historia, para empezar de nuevo inmediatamente. Aquí puedes suscribirte a la newsletter de Fuera del Radar. Y aquí puedes escuchar el resto de nuestros podcast. Gracias por escuchar.
Unparalleled Access: CNN journalist Jill Dougherty spent 30 years inside Russia, witnessing Vladimir Putin's rise from KGB officer to global adversary. In this interview based on her book, "My Russia," she shares unique insights, from covering Gorbachev and Yeltsin to the Ukraine war and surprising personal encounters. Understand the man behind the power, the historical context, and the future challenges in this pivotal region.Links:"My Russia" BookJill Dougherty WebsiteWatch on YouTubeJoin the Newsletter_Produced by Podcast Studio X.
In this episode of the Journey of My Mother's Son podcast, I talk with Christian Ray Flores. Christian was born in Moscow, Russia to a Chilean father and a Russian mother. The family moved to Chile when Christian was nine months old. During the 1973 military coup of Augusto Pinochet, Christian's father, Americo Flores, was arrested along with thousands of others and spent time in one of the infamous concentration camps. His mother Larisa and two children went into hiding under an assumed name and with a fake Argentinian passport. After Americo's release, the family spent some time in a UN refugee camp and was granted asylum in Germany, moving to Munich. After living in Germany and Russia, Americo and Larisa moved to Mozambique, at the government's invitation, which was recruiting international professionals after a mass exodus of Portuguese upon the nation's independence. Christian learned four languages by age nine: Russian, Spanish, English, and Portuguese. After his parents' divorce, Christian returned to Russia with his mother and sister in 1983. Christian got a master's degree in economics in 1991 from the RUDN University in Moscow. In 1993, Christian released his first single in Russia and became an instant success, winning awards like Generation ‘93 and Ovation in 1996 and playing nationwide. Back-to-back top ten hits culminated in his number one single, "Our Generation" – an anthem of freedom and change. It became a song widely used as the anthem of Boris Yeltsin's election campaign. Christian campaigned for Yeltsin as part of the Russian version of Rock the Vote, credited to giving Yeltsin the youth vote and victory in the campaign. After moving to the US in 2004, Christian worked for the international charity HOPE Worldwide, serving as a country director for Latin America, focusing on health care and education in nine different countries. He also developed and directed the Positive Choice education program, implemented around the US and internationally in Mexico, Jamaica, Indonesia. Christian co-founded a production company, Hollywood World, in Los Angeles with his wife, Deb de Flores. Hollywood World allowed international artists to work with top Hollywood producers and directors. Among other projects, Christian did voice acting for the English and Spanish versions of Masha and the Bear, a popular animated TV series. After moving to Austin, Texas, Christian and Deb co-founded (with Brandon Knicely) Third Drive, raising millions of dollars for startups and creating digital media projects for emerging businesses, public personalities and non-profit organizations. Christian speaks to audiences in the US and internationally, hosts the Headspace with Christian Ray Flores podcast and YouTube Channel dedicated to success in career and calling Headapace newsletter. His short film Dance With Me was selected to several international film festivals, and its title song was released on all major music platforms. In the first days of the war in Ukraine, the Ascend Mission Fund launched the Ukraine Relief Network, serving refugees in Ukraine. Christian and Deb personally visited Ukraine in September 2022. In 2022, Christian and Deb launched the Xponential career coaching program for high achievers. Christian and Deb have been active in Christian ministry in the US, Eastern Europe, and Latin America for two decades. They lead The Tribe, a community of faith in Austin, Texas. Ray frequently speaks to different audiences in the US and overseas. They are also active in philanthropy through their charity Ascend Mission Fund and projects like the Ascend Academy in Mozambique that lifts children out of poverty through developing character, communication, and computer skills. To find out more about Christian, you can check out his website at https://www.christianrayflores.com/.
The dudes are back, although Sean couldn't join for this episode. Jason and Varn talk about some of the logic here, the limits of trying to pin down conservatism right now, and why politics is so frustrating. No, we didn't speak much about Dugin... but we are doing this to remind everyone that we will.Send us a message (sorry we can't respond on here). Support the show
Send us a textIn this episode, we look at three major stories that all happened in the early summer of 1992. 1. H. Ross Perot decides to enter the race for President after getting over 200,000 signatures to get him on the ballot in Texas. When he decides to enter the race he is polling in first place ahead of both President George Bush and the Democratic presumptive nominee Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton. It is a story that shakes the political class to its core as it heads into the Convention season2. Boris Yeltsin comes to Washington D.C. and meets with President Bush and they begin negotiating an Arms reduction deal that would see the Nuclear arsenal of both countries not cut by a third but to a third of what they had at that moment just after the Cold War had ended. It was a major achievement for George Bush that is lost often in the retelling of the 1992 election. Plus this segment will also give you a feel for a State Dinner if you have never witnessed one. 3. Senator Al Gore of Tennessee is selected by Bill Clinton to be his Vice Presidential running mate. It would be a ticket made up of youth and it will signal a sea change in the generational leadership of the country. Both men are in their mid forties, Gore 44, and Clinton 45, and both men are from the South and that will help undercut President Bush in what had been his strongest geographical base of support in the country. It is a big moment in the 1992 campaign, just as we head into the conventions for the two major political parties in America. Questions or comments at , Randalrgw1@aol.com , https://twitter.com/randal_wallace , and http://www.randalwallace.com/Please Leave us a review at wherever you get your podcastsThanks for listening!!
Send us a textIn over a thousand years of Russian history only one man can lay claim as having been elected directly from the people. His name was Boris Yeltsin. He is the man who pushed the Soviet Union over the cliff and then became the leader of the fledgling Russian Federation. He stood on a tank in defiance of a coup that was trying to seize control of the nation from the President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev, and while that coup failed to topple Gorbachev, it in effect, stripped all the power away from the USSR President and all the real bonds of the republics that held it together. By the end of 1991, the various republics of the old Soviet Union had declared themselves independent and Yeltsin got together with their leaders of those republics to form a new Federation, leaving Gorbachev and the Soviet Congress with no real country to rule. The Politburo would meet one last time to debate the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This all occurred as one man rose to power in the Russia and it would be him who would lead Russia up until the start of the 21st century . In this episode we look back at him, Boris Yeltsin, and how he rose to the position of President and how he did as the new nations leader. Questions or comments at , Randalrgw1@aol.com , https://twitter.com/randal_wallace , and http://www.randalwallace.com/Please Leave us a review at wherever you get your podcastsThanks for listening!!
Mark Galeotti is a historian, an essayist, a podcaster, and the author of many books including "A Short History of Russia: How the World's Largest Country Invented Itself, from the Pagans to Putin."------------Book Dan to do an interview or a meeting------------Keep Talking SubstackSpotifyApple PodcastsSocial media and all episodes------------Support via VenmoSupport on SubstackSupport on Patreon------------(00:00) Intro(01:00) Czarist Russia at the beginning of the 20th century(03:50) The Russian Revolution(08:00) World War I and The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk(11:52) Lenin and Stalin(17:00) The Great Terror(21:02) Russia during World War II(28:15) How close were the Nazis to taking over the Soviet Union?(29:50) Russia and The Cold War(37:05) Why Soviets no longer believed in Marxism(39:35) The life and rise of Vladimir Putin(45:35) Putin, Yeltsin, and the turn of the century(51:56) How do we misunderstand the modern Russian government?(55:05) Alexei Navalny(59:20) The war with Ukraine
Teasing the release of his forthcoming book Provoked, Scott Horton returns to the show to talk about the disastrous role of the US in Russia's transition from communism to capitalism. He also discusses the open American interference in Yeltsin's 1996 reelection.Mentioned in the Episode and Other Links of Interest:The YouTube version of this interview.The Libertarian Institute. Scott's archives.Scott's previous BMS appearance on Waco.Details for the 2024 ExPat Money Summit.Help support the Bob Murphy Show.
Send us a textOn the third day the Coup collapses. This is that story. From the moment the three people perish the coup becomes a trainwreck. At one point they go back to work out a deal with Gorbachev and nothing works. By the end of this day, Yeltsin has emerged as the man who saved the Soviet Union, for the moment anyway, and Gorbachev is on his way back to Moscow, but it is clear to the world that everything has changed. As the Coup collapsed, the many different Republics declared themselves independent and by the end of the week it appears the Soviet Union is on the verge of collapse itself, which will occur later in 1991. Questions or comments at , Randalrgw1@aol.com , https://twitter.com/randal_wallace , and http://www.randalwallace.com/Please Leave us a review at wherever you get your podcastsThanks for listening!!
Kicks off with listener mail about refinancing given the recent interest rate reduction. Doogles covers a post about universities being debt factories. Skippy is loving the anniversary of Boris Yeltsin's visit to a Texas grocery store. Doogles walks through Marty Zweig's rules of investing. The episode wraps with Nike getting a new CEO and Microstrategy's continuing Bitcoin escapades.Join the Skippy and Doogles fan club. You can also get more details about the show at skippydoogles.com, show notes on our Substack, and send comments or questions to skippydoogles@gmail.com.
About the Lecture: The National Security Archive, based at George Washington University, has pioneered the use of the Freedom of Information Act to open classified U.S. files, and then to match those American primary sources with newly opened (and often now closed) archives in the former Soviet Union and countries of the Warsaw Pact. This presentation will draw on materials from the Archive to shed light on major events of recent history, such as the last “superpower summits” (between Gorbachev and Reagan, and later Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush), the miraculous revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe, Yeltsin's turn to authoritarianism in Russia in the 1990s together with the “market bolshevism” (Peter Reddaway's phrase) of economic reform, what Gorbachev and Yeltsin heard from Americans and Europeans about NATO expansion, nuclear follies from Semipalatinsk to Pervomaysk, and the existential threats to humanity (nuclear and climate) that make the U.S. and Russia “doomed to cooperate” (in Sig Hecker's phrase). About the Speakers: Tom Blanton is the director since 1992 of the independent non-governmental National Security Archive at George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org). His books have been awarded the 2011 Link-Kuehl Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, selection by Choice magazine as “Outstanding Academic Title 2017,” and the American Library Association's James Madison Award Citation in 1996, among other honors. The National Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame elected him a member in 2006, and Tufts University presented him the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award in 2011 for “decades of demystifying and exposing the underworld of global diplomacy.” His articles have appeared in Diplomatic History, Foreign Policy, The New York Times, and the Washington Post, among many other journals; and he is series co-editor for the National Security Archive's online and book publications of more than a million pages of declassified U.S. government documents obtained through the Archive's more than 60,000 Freedom of Information Act requests. Dr. Svetlana Savranskaya is director of Russia programs (since 2001) at the National Security Archive, George Washington University. She earned her Ph.D. in political science and international affairs in 1998 from Emory University. She is the author, with Thomas Blanton, of the book The Last Superpower Summits: Gorbachev, Reagan and Bush, (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2016), and editor of the book by the late Sergo Mikoyan, The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis: Castro, Mikoyan, Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Missiles of November (Stanford: Stanford University Press/Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2012). Dr. Savranskaya won the Link-Kuehl Prize in 2011 from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, recognizing the best documentary publication over the previous two years, for her book (with Thomas Blanton and Vladislav Zubok) “Masterpieces of History”: The Peaceful End of the Cold War in Europe 1989 (Budapest/New York: Central European University Press, 2010). She is author and co-author of several publications on Gorbachev's foreign policy and nuclear learning and the end of the Cold War, and numerous electronic briefing books on these subjects. She serves as an adjunct professor teaching U.S.-Russian relations at the American University School of International Service in Washington D.C. (since 2001).
Ambassador Robert Gosende served as a diplomat in the US Foreign Service from the early 1960s to the end of the 1990s.From his childhood in Massachusetts to the highest levels of diplomacy, his life story is filled with adventures and challenges - and historic moments. His career intersected with some of the most important places, people and events in the second half of the twentieth century, including Libya just before Qaddafi, Poland during the Cold War, Somalia during Blackhawk Down, South Africa during Apartheid, and Russia during Yeltsin's rule, plus positions in Washington and terms as diplomat-in-residence at Harvard and Georgetown.To mark the 100th anniversary of the Foreign Service, Ambassador Gosende is in conversation in several episodes on The Roundtable with Jim Ketterer, regular Roundtable Panelist and Senior Fellow at the Bard Center for Civic Engagement.
Ambassador Robert Gosende served as a diplomat in the US Foreign Service from the early 1960s to the end of the 1990s.From his childhood in Massachusetts to the highest levels of diplomacy, his life story is filled with adventures and challenges - and historic moments. His career intersected with some of the most important places, people and events in the second half of the twentieth century, including Libya just before Qaddafi, Poland during the Cold War, Somalia during Blackhawk Down, South Africa during Apartheid, and Russia during Yeltsin's rule, plus positions in Washington and terms as diplomat-in-residence at Harvard and Georgetown.To mark the 100th anniversary of the Foreign Service, Ambassador Gosende is in conversation in several episodes on The Roundtable with Jim Ketterer, regular Roundtable Panelist and Senior Fellow at the Bard Center for Civic Engagement.
Ambassador Robert Gosende served as a diplomat in the US Foreign Service from the early 1960s to the end of the 1990s.From his childhood in Massachusetts to the highest levels of diplomacy, his life story is filled with adventures and challenges - and historic moments. His career intersected with some of the most important places, people and events in the second half of the twentieth century, including Libya just before Qaddafi, Poland during the Cold War, Somalia during Blackhawk Down, South Africa during Apartheid, and Russia during Yeltsin's rule, plus positions in Washington and terms as diplomat-in-residence at Harvard and Georgetown.To mark the 100th anniversary of the Foreign Service, Ambassador Gosende is in conversation in several episodes on The Roundtable with Jim Ketterer, regular Roundtable Panelist and Senior Fellow at the Bard Center for Civic Engagement.
Ambassador Robert Gosende served as a diplomat in the US Foreign Service from the early 1960s to the end of the 1990s.From his childhood in Massachusetts to the highest levels of diplomacy, his life story is filled with adventures and challenges - and historic moments. His career intersected with some of the most important places, people and events in the second half of the twentieth century, including Libya just before Qaddafi, Poland during the Cold War, Somalia during Blackhawk Down, South Africa during Apartheid, and Russia during Yeltsin's rule, plus positions in Washington and terms as diplomat-in-residence at Harvard and Georgetown.To mark the 100th anniversary of the Foreign Service, Ambassador Gosende is in conversation in several episodes on The Roundtable with Jim Ketterer, regular Roundtable Panelist and Senior Fellow at the Bard Center for Civic Engagement.
Ambassador Robert Gosende served as a diplomat in the US Foreign Service from the early 1960s to the end of the 1990s.From his childhood in Massachusetts to the highest levels of diplomacy, his life story is filled with adventures and challenges - and historic moments. His career intersected with some of the most important places, people and events in the second half of the twentieth century, including Libya just before Qaddafi, Poland during the Cold War, Somalia during Blackhawk Down, South Africa during Apartheid, and Russia during Yeltsin's rule, plus positions in Washington and terms as diplomat-in-residence at Harvard and Georgetown.To mark the 100th anniversary of the Foreign Service, Ambassador Gosende is in conversation in several episodes on The Roundtable with Jim Ketterer, regular Roundtable Panelist and Senior Fellow at the Bard Center for Civic Engagement.
Ambassador Robert Gosende served as a diplomat in the US Foreign Service from the early 1960s to the end of the 1990s.From his childhood in Massachusetts to the highest levels of diplomacy, his life story is filled with adventures and challenges - and historic moments. His career intersected with some of the most important places, people and events in the second half of the twentieth century, including Libya just before Qaddafi, Poland during the Cold War, Somalia during Blackhawk Down, South Africa during Apartheid, and Russia during Yeltsin's rule, plus positions in Washington and terms as diplomat-in-residence at Harvard and Georgetown.To mark the 100th anniversary of the Foreign Service, Ambassador Gosende is in conversation in several episodes on The Roundtable with Jim Ketterer, regular Roundtable Panelist and Senior Fellow at the Bard Center for Civic Engagement.
On the late Dmitri Furman's account of post-Soviet Russia. Patreon Exclusive: for the Reading Club, join for $12/mo and get access to ALL Bungacast content, incl. 4 exclusive, original episodes a month We continue our discussions along this year's themes (rise and fall of nations; Russia past and present) by tackling Imitation Democracy: The Development of Russia's Post-Soviet Political System. Why has there been a revival in interest in the late Soviet and early post-Soviet period? And in the global 1990s in general? What does it really mean to be without-alternative? Why didn't democracy take hold in Russia? And why did it become an "imitation democracy" and not something else? How was Yeltsin a disaster? And what was Putin's appeal? Does 'Putinism' actually exist? Is it interesting or novel in any way? What happened after Furman's death and Russia's turn to "violent parody of the West"? Readings: Imitation Democracy: The Development of Russia's Post-Soviet Political System, Dmitri Furman, Verso Imitation Democracies: The Post-Soviet Penumbra, Dmitri Furman, New Left Review (pdf) Imitation Democracy: Perry Anderson writes about Dmitri Furman's analysis of Russia's post-communism, Perry Anderson, London Review of Books Listening Links: /114/ Reading Club: The Light That Failed - on the end of the "Age of Imitation" /270/ Russia vs the West ft. Richard Sakwa - on the endgame to war in Ukraine; and /271/ Russia vs the West (2) ft. Richard Sakwa - on the post-Soviet landscape /410/ Reading Club: Deutscher's Stalin - On Isaac Deutscher's classic Stalin: A Political Biography /421/ Who Are the Wrong Ukrainians? ft. Volodymyr Ishchenko - on post-Soviet Ukraine, from Maidan to war Music: Éva Csepregi, "O.K. Gorbacsov", Hungaroton , WEA, High Fashion Music, Dureco
When the President of Russia abruptly decided to quit and transfer power to an unknown former KGB agent, it surprised everyone including the United States. What event was making headlines all over the world that when the leader of a nuclear superpower suddenly resigned, it WASN'T the top story? Find out on this episode of Top Fold. Top Fold is dedicated to, "All the news that would have been". What does that mean? That means that on 9/11, or when the Hindenburg exploded, or Elvis Presley died, headlines were replaced and stories fell below the fold. What event happened that was huge but wasn't talked about because something else monumental took the headlines? The name of the podcast comes from a combination of "TOP Story" and "Above the FOLD"-TOP FOLD.Original music by David "Beezer" Wagler.Sources for Season 4 Ep6https://www.cbsnews.com/news/yeltsin-resigns/ https://www.history.com/news/soviet-union-leaders-orderhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Gorbachev https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Yeltsinhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_KoNZkf-2k KGBT 4 Archives - Valley Residents Prepare For Y2K (December 28, 1999) Albersons Grocery Store)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/Y2K-bug/ https://time.com/5752129/y2k-bug-history/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/features/y2k071899.htm
Putin was a working class outsider who rose through the ranks to the Country's top job. Once at the top, Putin consolidated his position by eiminating opposition and giving Russia a strategic economic advantage. Xi was a Princeling who ended up on the wrong side during Mao's time. But Xi believed in Mao and came back, aspiring to be Mao 2.0
Find me and the show on social media @DrWilmerLeon on X (Twitter), Instagram, and YouTube Facebook page is www.facebook.com/Drwilmerleonctd FULL TRANSCRIPT Announcer (00:06): Connecting the dots with Dr. Wilmer Leon, where the analysis of politics, culture, and history converge. Wilmer Leon (00:15): Welcome to the Connecting the Dots podcast with Dr. Wilmer Leon. I am Wilmer Leon. Here's the point. We have a tendency to view current events as though they occur in a vacuum, failing to understand the broader historical context in which most events take place. During each episode, my guests and I have probing, provocative, and in-depth discussions that connect the dots between current events and the broader historic context in which these events occur. This enables you to better understand and analyze these events that impact the global village in which we live. On today's episode. The issues before us are, what are the three steps leading to war, and what's the real story behind the so-called Uyghur genocide or oppression in China? My guest today is a peace activist, a writer, a teacher, a political analyst, KJ Noh. KJ, welcome to the show. Speaker 3 (01:22): Thank you. Pleasure to be with you. Wilmer Leon (01:24): So in talking with you yesterday, you had expressed this concept that there are three steps leading to war. You talked about an information war, you talked about shaping of the environment and provocation. As we look at what's transpiring between the United States and Russia, as we look at what's transpiring more specifically between the United States and China over Taiwan, walk us through these steps and how these steps apply to where we are today. Speaker 3 (02:03): Yes, this is exactly what is going on. So the first thing to understand is that before the US goes to war, there is an information campaign, which we can understand as both manufacturing consent and stirring up people's emotions to demonize and to other the opponent. And so we see that very, very clearly in China. That's been ongoing for many years now. But if you look at all the polls, everybody is convinced that China is a threat. So the first step is information warfare, which is the pre kinetic sube dimension of war. The second dimension is shaping the environment. The US never likes to go to war without shaping the environment first. So in order to do that, it wants to weaken the adversary and it wants to bring as much force to bear as possible against its opponents. So we see that right now with the United States. (03:08) It's created a vast set of alliances against China, Aus Jaas, JAAS, the Quad, NATO plus, and then you can see that there is the first island chain, which it has completely militarized, and it is prepositioning supplies, materials, troops, all along it, including troops, right on Gman Island of Taiwan, which is less than three miles from the mainland. So you see the constant shaping of the environment. Also, you will see preparations for war in terms of massive military exercises. You see this in Korea, which spent 200 days out of the past year in constant military exercises. You see the military exercises all over the Pacific, which are essentially nonstop. And then the last step is the provocation. That is you want to provoke the other side to fire the first shot. You want to wrong foot them so that then you can build on all the demonization and the ally building that you've created and then use that as a ally to start the war. (04:25) And we see these provocations happening more and more frequently. We see the provocations by the Philippines against the Chinese overtaking their boats, trying to cut them off and seeing if they'll get rammed. You see the provocations on the Korean peninsula where there's this constant in your face provocation against North Korea, threatening to decapitate, sending the message to Korean troops to shoot first and report later, shoot, first report later. And you see the provocation, as I just mentioned, in Jinman Island where you have US special forces troops parked permanently three miles away from the Chinese mainland. Imagine if the PLA stationed Chinese troops on Key West or Galveston Island or the Farone Island just right up against the nose of right up against the US coast. Would that be considered provocative? I would think so. And so essentially we see all these three steps happening, the information warfare, the hatemongering, the shaping of the environment, the very, very deliberate shaping of the environment for war, and then the constant provocation. So this is why I think that we have to be very, very careful that it will just take one small misstep in this minefield for something to go off, and that will create a chain reaction that will affect the entire Pacific. Wilmer Leon (06:06): So we saw in the seventies, we saw Nixon go to China. Henry Kissinger helped to orchestrate that entire process and a development of a reproach mon with China. And one of the objectives of that was to be sure that China stayed on our side of the equation as the United States was still involved in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. When we got to, I think it was the Obama administration, that's where this whole idea of the pivot towards China started to manifest itself. What, first of all, do I have my history? And then secondly, if so, what is it that or who was in the American foreign policy elite that decided that this pivot needed to take place? Speaker 3 (07:09): Yeah, that's a really, really good question. I have to go back to a little bit of the history. You absolutely are about Nixon. Nixon tried to peel China off away from the Soviet Union as part of their Cold War strategy, and then they engaged with China, and then they dumped Taiwan, which previous to that had been considered the legitimate China, but they were always hedging, so they always kind of had their foot partially on Taiwan because they didn't want to give it up completely. Wilmer Leon (07:43): They who Speaker 3 (07:44): The US establishment didn't want to give it up completely as a US outpost. And so they always kept a little foot in there. And so this is what they call strategic ambiguity. But the official line was the one China policy. The Shanghai communicates essentially there's only one China. The PRC is the legitimate government of China. Taiwan Island is a part of China, and any issues between Taiwan province and China are to be resolved amongst themselves. The US is going to withdraw troops, it's going to withdraw arms, and it's not going to be involved. That was the agreement, and that was the foundation of the relationship between the US and China. All of that is now completely dissolved. It's gone. There is no defacto one China policy anymore. But who started this war? That is the $64,000 question. In 1992, Paul Wolfowitz, the NeoCon Mino, Greece, he wrote a document called the Defense Planning Guidance Document, and essentially it was declaration that the United States would be the uni polo global hegemon, regardless, and at any measure, uni polo global hegemon simply means that it would be the boss of the world and it would take any measure, it would go to war, et cetera, as necessary. (09:12) This document, the defense planning guidance document, became the project for a new American century. The project for a new American century was unquote disavowed, but it's simply mutated, and then it was picked up again by a group of people at Center for a New American Security. And those two words, new American, they are not a coincidence. The CNA or Center for New American Security is a kind of a reestablishment of the neocons who started pen A. And so you see this entire chain of ideology continuing from Wolfowitz and the people around him, the neocons around him, the Cheney, Wilmer Leon (09:57): Dick Cheney, Speaker 3 (09:59): Yes, Wilmer Leon (10:00): Richard Pearl, Speaker 3 (10:01): Richard Pearl, all of these neocons, they simply bequeathed their legacy onto a younger group of neocons, the neocons who are associated with the Center for New American Security. Wilmer Leon (10:13): In fact, let me jump in. I'm sorry. Just really quickly on the pen side with Wolfowitz and Pearl, I think Scooter Libby, when George HW Bush was in the White House, that crew came to him and wanted to promote all of this rhetoric. He referred to them as the crazies and said, and this is from Ray McGovern who was in the White House at the time with the CIA said, get these crazies out of here and keep them away from me. And I think it was George HW that by pushing them out, that moved them to Form P NAC and all of that. Speaker 3 (11:02): Absolutely. And remember, these crazies also wanted to go to war against China in the early two thousands. So it was actually, and Wilmer Leon (11:12): They also wanted Bill Clinton to overthrow Saddam Hussein. They sent, and folks, you can go and look on the, you can Google this and you can pull up the letter and see all the signatories to the letter. They sent a letter to Bill Clinton when he was president, asking him to invade Iraq. And he said, no, Speaker 3 (11:35): Exactly. And then nine 11 happened, and the Pen Act document actually said, we need something like a Pearl Harbor in order to be able to trigger our plans. And so then conveniently, nine 11 happened, and then Iraq was invaded. But anyway, these crazies never went away. They went into various think tanks, but one of the key think tanks is CNAs, which is an outcome. It's a kind of an annex of CSIS itself, one of the deep state think tanks. And starting 2008, they drew up a plan for War against China specifically. There's an organization called CSBA, which is, it's a kind of a think tank. It's a procurement and strategy think tank associated with the Pentagon. And it was once again, related to another deep state think tank inside the Pentagon that does long-term strategic planning. And they came up with something called Air Sea Battle, which is the doctrine of war against China. (12:48) So since then with Air Sea Battle, air Sea Battle is actually, it's derived from Air land battle, which was the doctrine of war against the Soviet Union, which is why it has a similar resonance to it. And that itself was derived from the Israeli doctrine of war from the Yom Kippur war where they did massive aggressive strikes deep inside their opponents infrastructure. And that became Airland battle. Airland battle was never used against the Soviet Union, but it was used in Iraq, in Kosovo, et cetera. Colloquially, it's known as shock and awe. And they created a shock and awe version for China called Air Sea Battle. And that was developed in earnest starting around 2009. And then remember 2012, the US declared the pivot to Asia. So this is the Obama administration. They essentially declared in so many terms that we are going to make sure that China does not develop any further. (14:06) We're going to encircle China, we're going to station troops in Australia. It was declared in Adelaide. We're going to encircle the entire, essentially it was a plan to encircle China all along the first island chain from the corals to Japan, to Okinawa to Taiwan Island along the Philippine Archipelago, and then all the way to Indonesia. This very, very deliberate plan to encircle and to escalate to war against China. 2008 and 2009 was really the turning point, because it was the time of the change. It was the global financial crash, and the people who engaged with China, they engaged with China under the conceit that China would essentially be absorbed into the US capitalist system. That is, it would become a tenant farmer on the US capitalist plantation. Wilmer Leon (15:11): That's what they tried to do with the Soviet Union. Speaker 3 (15:13): Exactly, exactly. Wilmer Leon (15:15): Under Gorbachev, Speaker 3 (15:16): Exactly right. Yes. So we would become a tenant under the global US capitalist plantation, or it would collapse. That was what they believed. And then in 2008, the Western Catalyst financial system collapsed on itself, and it turned out that China was not going to collapse. It was actually incredibly strong, incredibly resilient, and they actually had to go hat in hand to China to beg for support, in order to prop up the system and then to do a controlled demolition on the backs of the working class here. And so when that became clear that China was not going to collapse and it was not going to be subordinated, then the DCAS came out and explicit doctrine of war started to be prepared. This is what I referred to as Air Sea baffle. So that doctrine of war was created inside various think tanks, CSBA, and then supported by css, CNAs, et cetera. (16:18) And then when the Obama administration transition, those plans were simply kept alive with CNAS, and some of it was incorporated into Trump's strategy, but Trump had neo mercantile tendencies, so he was not as aggressive as they would like him to be. And then when Biden came back, the pivot to Asia was rebranded as the Indo-Pacific Strategy, and it's gone full tilt since then. So we see this constant escalation, as I said, the information warfare, the shaping, the environment, the exercises, the alliances, the prepositioning, and then we see the constant provocation. So we are well on the way to war. Henry Kissinger said that we were in the foothills of a cold war. No, we are high up in high altitude and very, very close to kinetic war. Wilmer Leon (17:14): I think I said when I made the reference to Russia that that's what they try to do with Gorbachev, but I think it was Yeltsin to Gorbachev is where all of that financial intrigue was taking place. And I think it was Gorbachev who realized the danger on the horizon and shifted the game plan on the United States, which is why one of the reasons why Gorbachev Gorbachev had to go leading us into where we are now with President Putin. But that's another, I hope I have again, that history, right? Yes, (17:50) Absolutely. So with all that you've just laid out, and before we get into some of the specifics about the info war, as all of this is going on, what we also have is the de-industrialization of the United States and the offshoring or outsourcing of American manufacturing to China. So how do you, on the one hand, offshore or outsource your manufacturing, particularly as a capitalist economy, going to China in search of cheaper labor to make more profit, but then at the same time, you're planning to go to war with the people that are manufacturing a whole lot of the stuff that your country consumes? Is that a good question? Speaker 3 (18:53): Yeah, no, it's absolutely valid. I mean, it's a very, very good point. That's the core contradiction. The US has outsourced Wilmer Leon (19:00): Needs, and by the way, the country that you go to buy your bonds so that your economy can stay afloat. Speaker 3 (19:07): Absolutely. Absolutely. Right. So not only has China financed the United States and supported or propped up the US dollar as the global reserve currency, but also the US exported its industrial base to China because it thought that it could simply exploit the hell out of the Chinese worker at the cost of the US worker, Wilmer Leon (19:33): The sick man of Asia mentality, and we can just play these Chinese people for fools. Speaker 3 (19:38): Exactly. Exactly. So exploit the hell out of them, make a killing, and then eventually China would be completely absorbed into the US capitalist system, or it would collapse, right? It was either collapse or be absorbed. This is what Bill Clinton believed. So that was the plan, except that China developed on its own terms, and it showed that not only is it possible to develop that it doesn't have to become subjugated to the west, to the western institutions, that's when the daggers came out. But now there is the contradiction that on the one hand, the US wants to go to war against China. On the other hand, it's significantly, it's so deeply enmeshed with Chinese industry and the Chinese economy that it is not easy. And so it's trying this very delicate operation of what they refer to as de-risking, but it's really decoupling, and they're trying to separate themselves from China as you would try to separate conjoined twins. (20:43) Except the problem is that China has the beating heart, the beating heart of the industry. So if you separate that out, then you're going to give yourself a lot of problems. And so they have not thought this through, but these are people who are not known for their clear thinking. As I said, they're neocons, they're neo neocons, they're crazies. They are drunk with power. They do not want to give up their power and their dominance over the planet, certainly not to China, and they would rather end the planet than see the end of their hegemony, of their dominance. And that's the really dangerous moment that we're in. I've referred to it as a drunk who as the bar is closing and your credit cards are being rejected, you've struck out with everybody. You're just spoiling for a fight, a fight. You're not going to go home without a fight. And that's currently what it looks like right now. Wilmer Leon (21:44): So the first element of the three that you mentioned is the info war. So we're being told that President Xi is an authoritarian. We're being told that China has stolen American manufacturing secrets and has exploited American manufacturing processes. We're being told that China is trying to take over Africa. There are a number of stories that get repeated ATD nauseum, very little if any evidence to support them. But this is the info drumbeat that you keep hearing on M-S-N-B-C and CNN and Fox News. So let's start with the G is a authoritarian, and he's the dictator of China. China is a communist country, and therefore everything is evil that comes from China. Speaker 3 (22:48): Yeah, I mean, this is warmed over Cold War rhetoric. It's essentially a red scare plus yellow peril, right? I mean, we've heard this stuff before. I mean, if you go to China, you realize that there's nothing authoritarian about it. Actually. You feel much freer and much more at liberty to do what you want and to be who you are than you do here. It's not at all an authoritarian state. It's simply the US plasters, the label authoritarian against any country that it doesn't like and where it's usually planning to go to war against. So that is a very, very clear signal. I mean, just from a kind of statistical polling standpoint, the Chinese government is the most popular government on the planet. It ranks in the 90th percentile, and this is Wilmer Leon (23:42): High 90, I think 96 was the last number I saw, Speaker 3 (23:47): Something like that. Yes, certainly in above 90 percentile. And this is from Harvard University, correct? With longitudinal studies. So clearly they have the trust and the full faith of its people. Wilmer Leon (24:01): Repeat that, because most people, when they hear, I know this, when I say that to listeners or if I'm in conversation and I say, well, when you poll the Chinese people, they back their government at around 96%. And of course, the response I get is, well, of course they would, because that's Chinese polling, and that's Xi telling them what to think. And if they don't do what Xi tells them to do, then they wind up missing. Speaker 3 (24:30): No, no, no, that's sorry. Yeah, I mean, it's good. It's what people think, but first it is not Chinese polling. It is US polling, it's Harvard University doing this over a longitudinal study, I think over 10. It's over a decade, maybe 15 years long. And so it's us polling, not Chinese polling. The second thing is that over 150 million Chinese travel abroad every year, they travel all over the world. They go as tourists, they go as students, et cetera, and then almost every single one of them goes back home. You would not get that in an authoritarian state. You think that if you live in a prison or a concentration cab that you go free and then you come back of your own volition? No, that's not possible. It's absurd. So as I said, the Chinese travel all over the world, and then they simply come back because that's where they want to be. (25:34) So this notion that Chinese are authoritarian, that it's an authoritarian state, nobody's allowed to do anything that's completely fault. It does contrast, for example, with the east block where it was very, very difficult to travel abroad, and once when people did travel abroad, they did defect. That much is true. That is certainly not the case with China. As I said, 150 million people travel abroad and then go back home. So that is a lie from top to bottom. I mean, of course you have a few people who defect. I think the defection rate from China is about the same number of people who defect from the United States. So if you want to, oh, really? Wilmer Leon (26:16): Yes. Speaker 3 (26:16): Okay, Wilmer Leon (26:17): I didn't know that. Speaker 3 (26:17): Yes. So it's about the same. So it's a kind of a net zero. So anything that says otherwise is usually an exaggeration or a misconstrue of the actual numbers Wilmer Leon (26:30): To this idea of authoritarian, and I was just thinking about this as you were talking. I think one of the great misnomers is the conflation of a planned economy versus an authoritarian government. I don't think I'm off base to say that China is very, very focused on planning its economy, and that makes it very nimble. That makes it, in my opinion, easier for the government to shift as world economic dynamics shift. Also, because it doesn't have predatory capitalism in China, corporations in China and the Chinese government that owns corporations, they reinvest their money into their economy as opposed to into stock buyback programs and high executive compensation packages. Hence, we wind up with a lot of technological advancements coming out of China, which to a great degree is what is scaring the hell out of the United States government. Yeah, Speaker 3 (27:49): You're absolutely right. Yeah. So the Chinese system is planned, but it's planned in a very rational way. Most of the leaders are unlike the United States, most of the leaders in the US are lawyers or failed business people in China. Most of the leadership are scientists and engineers, and they go through an incredibly complex vetting process where they have to show their capacity and show their ability over and over again before they even reach to the level of becoming a city or a province governor. And then from there, it just gets harder and harder. So you really make sure that the top people are leading. And then there's a system where there's a constant process of feedback and consultation with the people. So the government makes sure that it's doing what the people wants. And so it's planned Wilmer Leon (28:42): In political science. That's the Easton model, I think James Easton model of the feedback loop, how effective governments are supposed to function. They implement policy, they get feedback from the populace on how that policy is being implemented. They then translate that into better policy. That's the eastern model of called the policy feedback loop. Speaker 3 (29:18): Yes, exactly. There's this policy feedback loop, and once again, as I said, the Chinese leadership are scientists, so they do this thing called a trial spot. What is when they have a policy, they try it out in one city or one area, and if it works, then they scale it up and they try it again in a larger province on a larger scale. And if it works, they scale it up even further, et cetera. So it's a very kind of scientific method that they use called trial spots where they're essentially using the scientific method and a vast system of feedback and consultation in order to see if something works or not. That's why they're, for example, creating sustainable cities, sustainable energy generation, mass transit, et cetera, all sorts of public goods. But the problem with this is that the Western concede is that if it's not liberal capitalists, that is if you don't let the capitalists do whatever they want to, this is an infringement on freedom, and that's the framing that they use. (30:23) If you don't let the predatory capitalists do anything and everything, they want to, you have infringed upon their freedom. And so that's where this authoritarian trope comes from. The thing to notice once again is as you do this extensive planning, what you get to do is you build out the foundations, and those foundations are in public health and in public housing and infrastructure and transportation and education. Once you build out all of those foundations, then you can build up real human capacity, and then you build up a real powerful economy. And so for example, if you look at the 20 largest corporations on the planet, the majority of them are Chinese. But the other thing about those large corporations is the majority of them are state owned corporations. That is to say they're owned by the people. For example, the largest banks in the world are Chinese banks. (31:25) How much do the leaders of these banks make? Well, they make probably they wouldn't make enough to rent an apartment in San Francisco, maybe two times, three times max, what their average income of their average worker is, as opposed to Jamie Diamond, who makes 18,000 times what his lowest workers make. And so it's a very, very different system where you bring up the highest most qualified people. At the same time, you do not reward them for greed. You do not reward them for, with exorbitant pay, essentially, you give them a decent salary, not an exorbitant salary, but a salary, which is good enough for a decent level of standard of living in China. You may give them an apartment and you may give them, there may be a canteen where they can get discount meals, but that's about it. But it's understood that you are going to really work to improve your country, serve the people, serve your countrymen, and then make a better society. (32:39) And you see this real kind of whole society effort to improve the country, which is why over the last 30, 40 years, wages have flatlined in the United States, but wages in China have gone up anywhere five to 10 to 15 times for your average worker, for your average blue collar worker. I mean, they see their lives improving, and also you see the bottom being lifted up where they essentially ended poverty. You go to China, you will not see any slums. I mean, it's kind of astonishing. You go to almost any city in the world, you will see homeless. Or if you don't see homeless, you will see slums in China, you will see neither. And in the past few decades, they brought 850 million people out of poverty. 850 million people were brought out of poverty. This is the world's greatest economic accomplishment in the history of the world. (33:43) And essentially, they show that poverty is a policy choice. You don't have to have poor people. The Bible says the poor will always be with us. No, it's not true. It's an ideological choice, and you can end poverty in a country, and for all of these reasons, by showing that a planned economy where there's reasonable and systematic feedback can have deliver better results. This is why this example is why the western liberal elite class feels the need to destroy China because it cannot have that example, cannot have an example, which puts the lie to the massive exploitation and mystification and deceit that this system is built on. The suffering that we undergo on a daily basis is not necessary. Wilmer Leon (34:45): I want to go back to the point. China has brought 800 million people out of abject poverty over about what? The last 10 to 15 years Speaker 3 (35:03): Over the last, I would say over the past 40 years. Okay, 40 years ago, China was poorer per capita than Haiti. Wilmer Leon (35:14): That's poor. Speaker 3 (35:15): And now there's no comparison, right? Wilmer Leon (35:17): The United States has on the upper end, in terms of what the government numbers are, not 800 million unhoused, 800,000, Speaker 3 (35:32): Yeah. Somewhere in that range. Wilmer Leon (35:34): And so me being from Sacramento, California, you go to north side of Sacramento near the American River near the Sacramento River, people living under bridges, you go to Oakland, people living under overpasses, you go to San Francisco, people living under overpasses, people can't even afford the middle class in San Francisco, can't even afford to rent an apartment that people that work in San Francisco can't afford to live in San Francisco. Okay, pick a city, Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia. Pick one. You see people standing in the medians of intersections with signs and cups begging for money. 800,000 people homeless in the United States. We can't fix it, but China brings 800 million people out of poverty. Folks do the math. Speaker 3 (36:37): Yeah, I mean, it's pretty astounding. I mean, the 800,000 homeless is probably an under count because it's hard to count. Wilmer Leon (36:44): Sure. That's why I said it's a government number. Speaker 3 (36:47): Yes, it's a government number. But even without looking at the homeless, think about the fact that 60% of the people in the United States do not have $500 to their name. That means if they get a flat tire, if they need to change their tires, fix their car, or get a parking ticket, they are in real trouble, right? I mean, there's just no margins. And so the vast majority of working people in the United States are struggling, and they see no light at the end of the tunnel at the same time that they expect their children to have even worse conditions. No longer housing is no longer, nobody can think of housing anymore. Now its cars are no longer affordable. Right? When I taught in community college, I was told that 80% of the students were housing insecure. When I taught, most of the students would come to class and they couldn't focus because they were hungry. (37:52) I mean, you have adjunct professors living out of cars. So this is the level of ridiculous, absurd maldistribution of wealth that you can do everything right, work your rear off, and still end up with nothing, just barely be treading water if even that. And on the other hand, you have a country like China where if you work, you will see your life constantly improving from year to year. On average, your worker has been seeing their wages increase 8% every year for the past 20, 30, 40 years. I mean, that's astounding. Wilma, have you had an 8% increase in your salary for the past 30 years? Wilmer Leon (38:45): Can't say that I have. Speaker 3 (38:48): You must be doing something wrong then. Wilmer Leon (38:50): I can't say that I have. Let's move to element number two, shaping the environment. What are the techniques and what are some of the tangible elements that we can point to in terms of shaping the environment? Speaker 3 (39:05): Okay, the first thing about shaping the environment is creating alliances. So the US is creating multiple alliances. That's alliance between the United States, Korea, and Japan. I refer to it as jackass or jackass. You see the alliance between Australia, the United States, uk, to prepare for war, nuclear war against China, Aus. You see the Japan, Philippines, US Alliance, and the South China Sea jaas, which is once again unthinkable as it is with Korea, that the colonial dominator, Japan would be creating a military alliance with the colonized. But all of this is mediated and midwife by the United States. And then you see NATO coming into Asia. So already when the US does military exercise in the Pacific, you see the LFA flying over. You see NATO exercises. You see that Korea is linking up to the NATO intelligence system, B-I-C-E-S, bcs. And that Taiwan is getting the link 16 tactical data link, which allows the US to create a common tactical and operational picture of the Warfield in order to create what they refer to as a transnational kill chain. (40:29) That is, you're using all of these countries for combined joint all domain command and control. It's simply one large military machine, all of these different countries together. So that's one part of shaping the environment. Another part of shaping the environment is pre-positioning troops, pre-positioning material, and also doing these constant military exercises and escalating to industrial war footing, which is what they are talking about. They're saying the US has to shift immediately to an industrial war footing. Certainly South Korea and Japan are already expected to do this. The plans to use shipyards in Korea for to repair us battle damage, and then the constant escalation into what I refer to as the third offset. The third offset is that China has the capacity to respond. If the US and the US has over 300, probably close to 400 bases right around China, China has the capacity to fire missiles and keep the United States at bay. (41:50) It has the Don Feng missiles that are very, very precise. And the US offset to that has been to disperse its troops all around the first island chain, prepare for island hopping, prepare for Ace agile deployment, and essentially to attack China through diffused, distributed, dispersed warfare. All of this is preparation. And then the other way, which is traditionally the environment is shaped, is through information warfare and economic warfare, trade warfare, tech warfare. The idea is that you are going to try and try to create as much disruption inside China itself, create as much descent inside China itself, and also try and degrade its economy before you go into war. Ideally, you want to level sanctions on it before you go in, but in the case of Russia, for example, they will level sanctions after the war starts. But the idea is to degrade the economy and the will to fight, and the capacity to fight as much as possible so that you enter into the battle with an unfair advantage, an overmatch. (43:12) The analogy that I sometimes think of is that when a matador goes into the ring to fight a bull, what they've done is they've drug the bull, they've starved it, they've beaten it, they've dehydrated it, et cetera. And then you go to war, and then you have this theatrical presentation of how you've dominated the bull. In the bull fight, usually the US tries to do this kind of degrading before it enters into war. So for example, it sanctioned Iraq for a decade before it blew it up into smithereens, et cetera. So you see all of these things happening in terms of the hybrid war, the preparations, the alliances, the exercises, the prepositioning and the military preparation. Wilmer Leon (43:58): In fact, the sanctions regime that you've just talked about as it relates to Iraq is exactly what the United States has been trying to do with Russia, has been trying to do with Iran has tried to do with China. And what the reality that the United States now finds itself dealing with is that sanctions regime has forced those sanctioned countries to establish relationships amongst themselves and relationships amongst themselves. So they've entered into trade agreements. They've entered into the bricks, for example, the Chinese development Bank. There are a number of elements now where China and Russia have developed trade agreements, have developed defense cooperation agreements. So really what the United States has done through this sanctions regime is really shot itself in the foot because what it thought it could do with economic pressure and other types of sanctions has actually created a much bigger problem than the United States ever could have imagined. Speaker 3 (45:15): Well, I mean, the US has sanctioned what something close to one third of the countries on the planet or something approaching that. I mean, the idea is that it's simple. A sanction is like a siege. It's like you're building a wall around a country. The problem is if you build a wall around a country, you're also building a wall around yourself, and eventually you're walling yourself in, which is what the United States is doing here. And so with the financial sanctions, with the trade sanctions and economic sanctions, essentially it's strengthening China, Russia, Iran, and the countries of the global south, and it's weakening itself. And so that is the contradiction there. But they don't understand that, and they think that they're still capable of destroying, for example, Russia. I mean, they still believe that they almost brought Russia to its knees, and it's just a matter of applying a little bit more pressure. They're not reading the situation directly. But yes, this is what they want to do, and they consider this to be part of shaping the environment. Wilmer Leon (46:24): And one quick example of that is the whole chip sanction where the United States figured that it could cripple the Chinese economy from a technology side by prohibiting China's access to high processing chips. What did China do? They figured it out. They make their own and better than the ones that they were getting from Taiwan. And an example of that is the Huawei made 60 telephone. A lot of people in the West think that the iPhone is the greatest phone on the planet. No folks, it's a phone that we can't get in the United States. It's the Huawei mate, 60 plus, which not only is a cell phone, but is a satellite phone as well. Speaker 3 (47:15): Yes, it's an extraordinary piece of technology, incredible engineering, and it just goes to show that when the US tries to sanction China or even a single Chinese company by putting it in a choke hold, and its CFO, China just responds with even greater strength and better technology. So it's not happening. It's not happening to an individual corporation, and it's not going to happen to China in general, which is why the US wants to pull the trigger on war. I think there's a part of the NeoCon elite that are so desperate, they see that kinetic war is the only thing that it's the only Trump card that they have left. Wilmer Leon (48:00): And I've been saying for a while to Jake Sullivan and to the Secretary of State, to the President, be careful what you pray for because you might get it even with the hypersonic missile technology. I want to say that, what was it last year or about a year and a half ago, the United States War gamed against China 25 times and lost 25 times. Speaker 3 (48:38): Yes, each time it lost and it lost faster, and then eventually they had to deposit all kinds of hypotheticals that didn't exist in order to give themselves some kind of pretext of winning. Clearly, if they do the math and if they do the simulations, it's not going to work out for them. But the really dangerous thing here, and I'll be very, very honest here, the dangers is that because the US no longer has overmatch and none of these offsets work, it's going to go back to the final first offset, which is mass a bigger bomb, which is to say that they're going to go nuclear on this war and going nuclear against another nuclear power is a very, very bad idea. The US is doctrine of counterforce, which essentially argues that in order for us to prevail, we have to strike first with nuclear weapons. (49:30) That's the idea. It's not counter value. Counterforce. We strike with nuclear weapons first. We knock out as many nuclear targets as possible, and that way we come out ahead and we can shoot down anything that's left. This is the US nuclear position, the nuclear posture. And this is very, very dangerous because it's clearly an act of madness. But as I said before, the ruling, ruling elite, the imperial elite believes that they signal that they would rather see the end of the world than the less than the end of their power, than the end of their domination. Because for them, the end of their domination is the end of their world, not the end of their world, but the end of their world, and they're very happy to bring down the rest of the world with them. Wilmer Leon (50:21): Provocation is the third. We've talked about the info war. We've talked about shaping the environment. And now the third element is the provocation. And we are seeing this play itself out damn near daily, right before our very eyes. And thank God that President Rai in Iran, that President Xi, that Kim Jong-un in North Korea and President Putin, thank God that these are sensible, sensible people that are not reactionary and engage in knee jerk responses to provocation. Because if they weren't as thoughtful as they are, we'd be in a much, much different world circumstance than we are right now. Speaker 3 (51:12): I agree with you. I mean, I think it's the sober sanity of US opponents, which is keeping the world from exploding into war. Just as during the Cold War, it was Russian officers who understood US culture and for example, understood that when there were signals of a nuclear attack being launched, they also understood that the World Series was happening at the same time, and they thought it was unlikely the US would launch a nuclear attack during the World Series. But this is predicated on the idea that you have cultured intelligent, calm people who are able to make clear distinctions. And we see that in RACI and President Xi and President Putin, who are very, very measured in their responses. And they're not seeking war. They're seeking diplomacy and peace. And you can see that there is a constant attempt to provoke them and to demonize them and to trigger war, but they understand that time is on their side, and these are the mad thrashings of a dying empire, and their approach is not to engage. (52:34) The problem is that the provocations become even more extreme, more and more extreme as they become more and more desperate. And there's another piece of the information war that I didn't touch on, but I think it's worthwhile touching on, is one of the key tropes of information warfare is that the other country is a threat to the people of your country. Not simply a threat, but an existential threat, A WMD type of threat, a genocidal threat. We saw that WMD type of language when it was alleged that Covid was a Chinese bio weapon, which somehow was being paid for by the United States. So that doesn't make any sense that research was being funded by the United States. So how is the US funding that research for China to attack us? Nobody seems to be able to explain that piece, but so they're WMD type allegations, and then the China is genocidal in intent, and this is most commonly demonstrated by the allegations of a genocide happening in Xinjiang. Now, just to go over the facts, there Wilmer Leon (53:51): Is, wait, wait a minute. Before we get to that, I want to touch on one thing you mentioned not firing the missile. And I want to say that that was a Russian technician, Vasili arch, about what, 65 years ago, who was looking at his radar screen, saw what most would've perceived to be an incoming nuclear missile from the United States on his screen. And the protocol was you got to push the button. And he, to your point, said, wait a minute. This doesn't make sense right now. This might be a mistake, and thank God he was right. It was a mistake. I wanted to make that point because you kind of glossed over that point. But it's very important for people to understand how perilous the circumstances are that we're in today. Speaker 3 (54:55): Absolutely. I mean, there were so many close shaves during the Cold War, and they're even more now, and the world owes a debt of gratitude to vestly ov. I think he's one of the unsung heroes of world history, but we can't rely on the fact that there will always be a vasili arch of a patient measured, well-informed, educated person on the other side who exercises prudent caution. There's no guarantee of that. And everything that we are doing on our side is simply escalating the danger that that will not happen and that this could end in a nuclear conflagration. Wilmer Leon (55:41): Final point on that, then we'll go to the Uyghur issue. And that is, that's one of the points that President Putin was making about NATO and why his perception was a uk, a Ukraine in NATO means NATO missiles in Ukraine, which means his response time to a message of incoming would be cut more than in half. And he was saying, we can't do that. You can't put these missiles on my border and cut my response time from 16 or 17 minutes down to seven minutes. That means if my system say incoming, I got a button to push. I don't have a phone to pick up. I don't have questions to ask. I got a fire on receipt. Speaker 3 (56:37): Absolutely, yes. Launch on warning, Wilmer Leon (56:39): Launch on warning. Speaker 3 (56:41): Yes. And that's exactly the danger. And this is why this was so important that by bringing NATO right up into Ukraine, the Soviet Union, well, Russia lost all of its strategic debt that it had no cushion with which to make a rational decision. And that is a very, very dangerous thing to do against a nuclear superpower that you have designated as an official enemy. So yes, it's absolutely correct, and this is both the danger and what we are seeing replicated in against China. Once again, the US used to have nuclear weapons in Taiwan Island. Right now, they're probably preparing more nuclear weapons, certainly the tomahawks that are being prepared for Japan or nuclear capable, they can carry nuclear warheads. And if you take US troops and place them right three miles from China's mainland, I mean, you've essentially said that you either have to preempt the attack or you are going to be annihilated. So that is the danger here. Wilmer Leon (57:58): The other great myth, one of the other great myths is the genocide of the Uyghurs and the oppression of the Uyghurs who are a group of Chinese Muslims in a region of China. And also if they're not being genocided, then they're being put into reeducation and concentration camps. Where did this myth come from? Speaker 3 (58:28): It was started by a guy called Adrian Zant, working for the victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which is extreme far right organization, fascists, Nazis, anti-communist, who essentially have it on their banner head to destroy communism. Adrian ZZ himself believes that it is God's mission, his mission from God to destroy Chinese communism. And he essentially pulled those figures and those facts out of, pardon my French, his rear end. And so initially, so Wilmer Leon (59:07): Actually French kg would be ass, he pulled those data, excuse my French, out of his ass. Speaker 3 (59:14): I think the French word is true or football. Wilmer Leon (59:20): But Speaker 3 (59:21): Yes, the BBC asked him to do the research. He said, I can't do it. And then they offered him more money, and then suddenly all of a sudden he was pulling numbers out of his rear end. Apparently there were perhaps a few dozen people that were interviewed. A small percentage of them said that certain things happened to us, and then they extrapolated that, and all of a sudden we have 1 million, 2 million, 3 million, 5 million, 7 million uighurs either in concentration camps or being genocided. Okay, Wilmer Leon (01:00:00): So how does that jive with the population of Xinjiang, which I think is the western part of China, which is where these folks are supposed to be. Speaker 3 (01:00:09): There are about 12 million Uyghurs. And so if you had even a million that had been disappeared or in concentration camps, you wouldn't have a functioning society. You would have almost every adult male in prison. And that's certainly not the case. 200, 250 million people visited Xinjiang last year, and it was fine. The people in Xinjiang were doing fine. It's a vibrant, multicultural society that is thriving and happy, and anybody can go there. You and I could go there. Anybody listening to this podcast could go there tomorrow. You don't even have to. A visa. China allows Americans to go to China without a visa now for a short period of time, and you could go immediately to Xinjiang and see for yourself. But essentially the fact is there is no Chinese genocide happening in Xinjiang because there's not a single shred of credible evidence. Let me emphasize that. Not a single shred of credible evidence. This is the only genocide in history that one has no deaths. Nobody can point to a body, no refugees. Wilmer Leon (01:01:24): Well, that's, they've been disappeared. They've been taken up by the mothership, and I guess they're floating around in the nuclear. I mean the, what do you call this? The nebula Speaker 3 (01:01:38): In the fifth? Wilmer Leon (01:01:39): Yeah, they're in the nebula somewhere, Speaker 3 (01:01:41): Right? Right in the fifth space, time war somewhere. But look, there are five Muslim majority countries. China has borders with 14 countries, and Xinjiang itself has borders with five Muslim majority countries, very porous borders. If there were any credible oppression, you would see massive refugees going to all these countries right next to it. But it's not. Instead, what you see is preferential treatment of the Uyghurs. For example, they were exempt from the one child policy. They had two, three, sometimes more children. They received preferential treatment in school, admissions and employment. The population has increased sixfold since the start of the PRC, and the life expectancy has increased 150%, and you can look high and low and you will see no hate speech and no tolerance of hate speech against Muslims, and no messages or rhetoric targeting the group whatsoever. In fact, the organization of Islamic Corporation, which represents the rights of 2 billion Muslims in 56 countries, commended China for its exemplary treatment of Muslim minorities. (01:03:00) So this is completely and totally fraudulent. There are 24,000 mosques in the region. People live their own lives, they speak their own language. And then here's the contrast, or here's the test case, because when you want to make a proposition, you also want to make a test group against that. Okay? In Gaza, there is a real genocide happening, either sheer unspeakable, barity and atrocity, the daily massacre of men, women, children, infants, starved to death, unimaginable privation and starvation and suffering, and compare that. And nobody can get into Gaza, right? Nobody can get into Gaza. Anybody can get into Xinjiang any day of the day or night. So really this fraud about Xinjiang being some kind of genocide, this is as much a signal of the dying empire as the real genocide in Palestine, it's foundationally mating, and it's a foundationally violent lie, but it's the other side of the same coin that is you are enabling and covering up a real genocide while you were fraudulently concocting a non-existent one. But the thing we have to understand is the invention of a false genocide cannot cover up a real one. Those of us on the right side of history, we know what to believe and we know how to act, and we know who's responsible, who's covering up what and why they're doing it. Wilmer Leon (01:04:53): And the United States is also trying to foment another genocide in Haiti. So there's a false one in Xinjiang. There's a real one in Gaza, and there's another one on the horizon in Haiti, and thank you United States because it's our tax dollars that are fanning the flames and funding all three kj. No, my brother. Thank you, man. I really, really, really appreciate the time that you gave this evening and for you coming on connecting the dots, because as always, kj, you connected the dots, man. Thank you for joining me today. Speaker 3 (01:05:39): Thank you. Always a pleasure and an honor to be with you. Wilmer Leon (01:05:43): And folks, I want to thank you all so much for listening to the Connecting the Dots podcast with me, Dr. Wiler Leon. Stay tuned for new episodes every week. Also, please follow and subscribe, leave a review, share the show, follow us on social media. You can find all the links below. Go to Patreon. Please contribute. Please, please contribute because this is not an inexpensive venture to engage in. And remember, this is where the analysis of politics, culture, and history converge, talk without analysis is just chatter, and we don't chatter on connecting the dots. See you again next time. Until then, I'm Dr. Woman Leon. Have a great one, peace and blessings to y'all. Announcer (01:06:40): Connecting the dots with Dr. Wilmer Leon, where the analysis of politics, culture, and history converge.
Find me and the show on social media @DrWilmerLeon on X (Twitter), Instagram, and YouTube Facebook page is www.facebook.com/Drwilmerleonctd TRANSCRIPT: Speaker 2 (00:14): Welcome to the Connecting the Dots podcast with Dr. Wilmer Leon. I'm Wilmer Leon. Here's the point. We have a tendency to view current events as though they occur in a vacuum, failing to understand and to truly appreciate the broader historical context in which most of these events occur. During each episode of this program, my guests and I will have probing, provocative, and in-depth discussions that connect the dots between current events and the broader historic context in which they occur. This will enable you to better understand and analyze the events that impact the global village in which we live. On today's episode, the questions are why are American neocons hell bent on starting a conflict with Russia? What's going on in Ukraine? Who was Alexi Naval? And is NATO really still relevant? For insight into all of this let's turn to my guest. He's a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. (01:31) His most recent book is entitled Disarmament In the Time of Perestroika, he is Scott Ritter. Scott, welcome. Thanks for joining me and let's connect some dots. Well, thanks for having me. And first of all, I have to say I love the name of your show in the intelligence business, connecting the dots is what we do. You never get the full picture. You get little pieces of information, and the question is, how do you connect them to get a proper narrative? So I like the idea. Well, thank you, Scott. I appreciate that. So the answers to each of these questions I think could be a show of their own, but let's start with in 2024, why are neocons so afraid of Russia? I mean, when we go back to this nauseating ongoing narrative, Hillary Clinton blamed Russia for hacking into the DNC server. No evidence was presented, but the narrative held and continues to hold in spite of scientific empiric evidence. (02:39) To the contrary, the whole Russiagate fiasco, even now, representative Mike Turner from Ohio, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, he warns that Russia may be developing a space-based weapon that can target US satellites, NBC reported on the 19th of this month, alarming new warnings about Russia held zapper erosion. Nuclear power plant may be on the verge of explosion. These are just a few examples and we'll get to the specifics of each of these in a few, but just these are just some overarching examples of example, this Russia phobia. Why? Well, I mean, let's just look at historic examples. At the end of the Second World War, we had built up this economy that was a lot of people forget that before the Second World War happened, we had a thing called the Great Depression, and our economy was not the healthiest in the world, and we used global war as a way to mobilize our economy, to get it up to war footing. (03:48) And there was a recognition that with 12 million guys coming home, we needed jobs. And if we tried to transition back to a civilian economy, we ran the danger of going backwards instead of forward. So we had to keep this military industrial complex up and running. But to do that, you need an enemy, you need a bad guy. Therefore, we have the Iron Curtain, Winston Churchill's, Fulton, Missouri speech in, I think 1946, the creation of nato and then the Red Scare. I mean, Russia has always been communism back then. Not just Russia, but communist China was always the perfect boogeyman to say, Ooh, danger lurks. We therefore now have a justification to militarize our economy and back this up politically by pointing to this threat. Back in the fifties, we had the bomber gap. You remember that? (04:52) Read about it little before my time, but I got you. Yeah, I mean, we weren't around back. We're old Wilber, but we're not that old. But yeah, the idea of, I think the Russians took, had like a dozen bombers, but on a military parade, they just flew them over and over and over again in a circle over Moscow, and the people on the ground looked up and said, oh my goodness, there's a whole bunch of bombers. And so the CIA used this, the Congress used this to justify building more American bombers, even though once we got our satellites up, we went, there's only 12. There's not that many, but we never told the truth. Then there was the missile gap. John F. Kennedy was responsible for that one too. The Russians have missiles. We have to build missiles, missiles, missiles until we found out that they didn't have the missiles. (05:40) But it didn't matter. We continued to build them anyways, and this led to the Cuban missiles crisis, which scared the live and you know what out of everybody and got us on the path of arms control, at least trying to contain, but we still called them the threat. That's all that's happening here. I can guarantee you this Wilmer, the neocons aren't looking for a war with Russia because as politically biased as they are, as fear mongers are, they're not suicidal and they know what the consequences of a war with Russia would be, but what they're doing is they're pushing it right up to the cusp of conflict, especially now when you have an American society that's sort of waking up to the fact that we're spending a lot of money over there when we need to be spending a lot of money back here at home, and people are starting to ask questions. (06:30) So the way that you avoid answering these questions is to create that straw man that threat, the Russian threat. The Russians are evil. You said it perfectly. They interfered with our election. They're doing this, that and the other thing, and therefore we must spend 64 billion in Ukraine even though we can't spend $64 million in Flint, Michigan. I mean, it's this sort of argument that's going on, and this may seem as a somo or a juvenile question, but how dangerous is this? World War? I was to a great degree, started on a fluke. It is in many instances or in many minds attributable to the assassination of Archduke Fran Ferdinand. But that in and of itself isn't what started the war. There were a number of skirmishes and a number of tensions that were going on in Europe, and this was really just the spark that led to World War I. (07:33) If my understanding of history is accurate. So do we find ourselves now, whether it be Russia and Ukraine, China and Taiwan, North Korea and South Korea, I mean the United States, what's going on in Venezuela as the United States is interfering in the Venezuelan elections? There are a number, of course, we've got Gaza in the Middle East, so we've got our hands, we're smoking at the gas station and smoking at a lot of gas stations. I'm going to steal that, by the way. I like that analogy. Just letting everybody know I'm using that from now on. Look, first of all, there's no such thing as a sophomore question. The one thing I learned, and I learned this from guys who are 20 times smarter than me, that the only stupid questions, the one you don't ask, you don't ask, but you're a hundred percent right. Barbara Tuckman wrote a book, the Guns of August, I think it was a PO prize winning book about how we got to World War I. (08:38) And one of the key aspects to that wasn't just the different crises that were taking place, but how people responded to that and the thing that made World War I inevitable, even though everybody, if you read the book, everybody in the summer of 1914, nobody wanted war. Everybody believed it would be avoided, it was just suicidal. But then they got into this cycle of mobilization, mobilizing their societies economically and militarily for conflict because that's just what you did when you had a crisis. But it's okay, we're just mobilizing and we're not really going to war. What scares me about today is there's a recognition on the part of everybody that war would be suicidal, that we don't want this, but look at what we've done. We built up the Ukrainian military from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands and got it equipped, organized, trained to go to war against Russia. (09:44) What do you think we were doing in Ukraine from 2015 to 2022 when we were training a battalion of Ukrainian soldiers every 55 days for the sole purpose of fighting Russians? This helped trigger a conflict. It got Russia to respond. Then we poured more money into Ukraine. What did Russia do? Mobilize People need to put on their hats and go, wait a minute, that's a word we don't want to hear. Russia mobilized not just the 300,000, but the process of mobilization continued to where they trained 450,000 volunteers since January 1st, just for everybody who's wondering what's going on in Ukraine, I know that's going to be later on question. Russia mobilized 53,000 volunteers. This is at a time when Ukraine's thumping people on the head and takes 'em to the front because nobody wants to fight. 53,000 Russians volunteered to go fight in the war since January 1st. (10:42) They're coming in at 1000, 1,500 a day. And let me reiterate, that's not press gangs like they're using in Russia. G roaming the villages taking the men and now women from the streets and putting them into the military. That's not conscription, that's volunteer. And let me make this following point, it's even more interesting than that. It's not a bunch of 22-year-old red meat eating young men who are looking for adventure and romance. The average age of the Russian volunteer going in is about 35 years old. He's married, he has a family, and he has a job. It's the last person in the world that you'd expect to volunteer to go to a war zone. And yet they're doing it because they love their country, because they say we have to do that. What's going on right now is an existential struggle for the survival of Russia against the collective West, which again speaks to the danger of mobilization because Russia is a nation that is mobilizing and has the potential to mobilize even more if necessary. (11:55) And this should scare the heck out of everybody in nato because right now you have nato. What's NATO talking about doing Wilmer mobilizing. They're talking about mobilizing. You have everybody in NATO saying, well, they never say, well, since we kicked this hornets nest and the hornets are now coming out and stinging us, maybe we should stop kicking the hornet's nest. They don't acknowledge the role they played in building the Ukrainian army to trigger this, but what they're saying now is, oh, because Russia now has mobilized and is defeating the proxy army that we built. We have to mobilize in turn. And you have Brits talking about general mobilization, Germans, and what this does. Now, you're a Russian. You're sitting there going, huh? They're talking about mobilizing. Well, if they do that, what do we have to do? I mean, Finland just joined nato. We really don't care until they put on Russia's border, pardon on Russia's border, on Russia's border until they put NATO troops there. (12:50) Now Russia has to say, well, we didn't want to do this. But to give you an example, we keep the determinants mobilized. Wil Russia was compelled to create a new military district, the St. Petersburg military District, because Finland joined nato. There wasn't a St. Petersburg military district. Russia didn't have 70,000 combat troops on the finished border until Finland joined nato. Now, Russia has built mobilized Wilmer. They've put in 70,000 frontline troops divisions ready to march on Helsinki. Not because they wanted to, but because they were compelled to by the mobilization. Bringing Finland and Sweden into NATO is a form of mobilization. What we have here is we are moving in the wrong direction. We are accumulating military power in Europe, and at some point in time you're smoking at the gas station and it's going to go, I'm going to have to use that one, Scott. That's pretty good. (13:51) Feel free. So this time last year, Ukraine was on the front page of every newspaper as of the morning of that we're taping this conversation. I don't see Ukraine referenced. And let me suggest folks, Reid, I don't know if you've read Nikolai Petro and Ted Snyder's piece to end the war in Ukraine expose its core lie. Let me read two quick paragraphs. This is how it opens. The essential argument used to avoid negotiation and continue support for the war in Ukraine is based on a falsehood. That falsehood repeated by President Biden is that when Putin decided to invade, which we can debate that word, he intended to conquer all of Ukraine and annihilated its falsity, has been exposed multiple times by military experts who have pointed out both before and after the invasion, that Russia could not have intended to conquer all of Ukraine because it did not invade with sufficient forces to do so. Scott Ritter, well, look, that was my argument all along. I kept saying they're only going in with around 200,000. Ukraine at the start of the war had around 770,000, and I went, the normal attack defender ratio is supposed to be three to one in favor of the attacker. And Russia's going in with a one to three disadvantage. (15:21) Why? And the answer was because they weren't trying to occupy Ukraine. They were trying to, oh no, it's because Russians can't do math. Well, that too, I mean, I must be Russian because I'm not very good at math either. But my military math was like, this isn't adding up. But Russia's goal is to get 'em to a negotiating table. But I also then when Russia mobilized, because I basically said that Russia's going to have to get 500, 600,000 men to stabilize the frontline just to stabilize the frontline. And they mobilized to do that. And then people said, well, they're going to go on to Odessa. And I went, if they go on to Odessa, they're going to need around 900,000 guys to go on to Odessa and take those things. Russia's got about 900,000 guys there now. So they have enough troops to do that. (16:09) But to go on to Poland, they're going to need about 1.5 million guys. They don't have that. And to go from Poland to Germany, they're going to need around 3 million guys. It's just basic military math. I mean, I could bore you all day about how I come up with these numbers, but it's the logistics of war. It's the scope and scale of the fronts, how to protect flanks, how to sustain offensive operations. The math doesn't lie. I'm pretty good with those numbers and Russia doesn't have it. And here's the thing. We know this. I mean, there's, look, I was a major and I only was a major for a little while. The main part of my military life was spent as a captain. Now, captains are pretty cool, but we're not seniors. We're not the most senior people in the world. So I admit that my perspective was a captain's perspective at senior headquarters. (17:01) I saw the big picture, but I know enough to know what it takes to move troops. I was part of moving 750,000 troops into the Middle East. I know what a tip fiddle is, time phase deployment list, how to surge things in. I planned a core sized operation and had to plan on the logistics sustainability of that. I'm pretty good with the numbers. And so are the people in the Pentagon who are more senior than I am. People who see the bigger picture in more detail. They know what I'm talking about too. And they know no matter how much you talk up somebody, you're only as good as your logistics. I mean, you can have the Lamborghini, but if you ain't got the gasoline, you don't have anything. You have a piece of metal sitting in your driveway, but you got to have the gas and you got to have the gas sustained. (17:53) You got to be able to maintain it, fix it. Lamborghini's brake. You got to have people trained to drive the Lamborghini. We can talk the Russians up all we want to about this, that and the other thing. But the bottom line is they're only human and they can only do that which is physically possible to do. And they don't have the troops to invade NATO to drive on nato. It's a 100% fabrication on the part of these people to justify their own mobilization. But everybody knows that Russia can't. Right now, Russia has sufficient troops to take Odessa to take cargo, to take Nikola, to take nepa, Petros, that's it. They can't do anything more than that. If they want to drive on Kiev, they're going to need another 300,000 troops up in Belarus that they don't have right now. So people just have to put on their thinking caps and think rationally. (18:46) But right now, rational thought isn't in the cards. Apparently, you know a hell of a lot more about this than I do. You speak the language, you listen to the broadcast, I listen to you and other folks, but when I keep hearing statements about what Russia is going to do, the one thing that I never hear following that is evidence to support the position Russia wants to take over Europe. Europe, I've never heard President Putin say that. I've never read anything coming out of Russia that says that. All I hear is Nikki Haley and Joe Biden and Kamala there. There's a litany of folks that'll tell me that, but I haven't seen them present one video of President Putin standing at a podium or taking off his shoe like Stalin and pounding on the podium saying, I'm kicking your, and the other point is, 80% of what I see is defensive, not offensive. Here's another one you might want to use. Don't start nothing, won't be nothing. And it seems as Joe Biden would just shut the up. (20:14) You using my language? I want to be a Marine. Marine. So, okay, you get my point, Scott. Well, here's the thing. If we go back to the January, December, 2021, January 22 timeframe, the US government's running, going, Russia is going to invade, Russia is going to invade. Now, they may have had some intelligence about Russia moving up, logistics and all that stuff, but I said, Russia won't invade right now. They said, why? And I said, because Russia is a nation and the Russian government is ruled by law. Believe it or not. It's their law. It ain't our law, but it's their law. And there are things that have to happen before you can talk about an invasion. I spelled it out. I said, first of all, Russia will not operate in violation of the United Nations charter. So they will have to come up with a cognizable case for invasion. (21:12) And right now, the only one they have is preemptive self-defense. But to get preemptive self-defense, Russia will have to form a security relationship with the Doba, a formal security relationship, which will require the doba to not only declare their independence, but for Russia to recognize that independence. And then once Russia recognizes that independence, then Russia will have to go through, the President will have to go to the Duma, the Duma will have to approve something, go to the Senate, and then the Senate takes it back to the President, who then signs it. And then, and only then can we talk about military intervention. Now, this can take place in a short period of time, but I can promise you guarantee you that Russia ain't crossing the border until that happens. And if we're not seeing that happen, then there will be no military intervention and everybody's like, oh, scout up. Well, everything I said is 100. That's what happened in February. Russia began the process. Now, they did it in a very compact period of time, but every step that I said had to be taken was taken. Why? The rule of law. Putin is not a dictator. Putin is governed by the rule of law. He is not permitted to do things on a whim, and it's the same thing. If he wants to. (22:30) Russian troops cannot operate outside of the border of Russia without the permission of the Duma. He would have to go to them constitutionally, say, Hey, I'd like to send troops to Poland because he can't just send troops to Poland. And then the Duma would say, why are we doing this? What is the threat? And normally, the only reason to justify it is Poland attacked us, so we have to wait for that one. And that's the thing. In order for him to do anything to begin mobilizing, he can't just, why didn't he have 300,000 troops already mobilized to go into Ukraine? Because to justify the mobilization, you need legal justification. He didn't have it, didn't have it, couldn't go to the Duma, couldn't justify it. None of the steps that would be required for Russia to attack Europe are in place. First of all, it's not in Russia's doctrine, their entire approach, and you hit it on the head, their defense. (23:33) Now, the Russians are very good at the counter offensive, so if we attack them, Russian defensive doctors is to receive the attack, to destroy the attack and then to counter attack, and you counter attack to destroy the political center of the beast that attacked you. So yeah, if you want Russian troops in Warsaw, if you want Russian troops in Berlin, attack Russia. But otherwise, don't worry about it because it isn't going to happen. Don't start nothing. It won't be nothing. Won't be nothing. I like it. Alexi Navalny described as, and this is the description, the dominant Western narrative described as Russian President Putin's most formidable domestic opponent fell unconscious and died at polar wolf, Arctic penal colony. Biden described him as a powerful voice for the truth. What has happened to Navali is yet more proof of Putin's brutality. No one should be fooled. Well, the first thing is, if that was true, then what does this say about Biden's unyielding support for genocide in Gaza? What does that say about his brutality looking at the thousands, tens of thousands that people have fought, but that's not the point. If you could quickly unpack the myth of Alexi Navalny and the alleged poisoning and all of that stuff to kind of dispel this myth that Putin has assassinated his most formidable domestic opponent. (25:25) Okay, first of all, we have to understand that the United States government has been in the business of trying to control Russian politics since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The decade of the 1990s was premised on an American policy of promoting democratic reform inside Russia. But what it means by that is by creating institutions that are controlled by the United States and banking and well, money is everything. And what we did in the 1990s is we started using non-governmental organizations. We'd set up these civic societies, these groups for furtherance of democracy, and then we would fund them through various fronts like the National Endowment for Democracy, which in 1983 was created to take over the covert political action functions of the CIA and make it more overt. The US Congress created it, funneled money to it. There's a democratic branch, there's a Republican branch they filter money in. (26:28) The whole idea is again, to create fund, so-called democratic institutions that will lead to the restructuring of a society the way we want it to be restructured. The United States did that in Ukraine in 2014 with the, well, well, we did it before that. If you remember back in the early two thousands, we did a color revolution in Serbia. It was a very successful color revolution, and so we use that as a template that would then repeat it in Georgia, and then we repeated in Ukraine, remember 2004, 2005, the Orange Revolution. What a lot of people don't realize is that we were actively trying to do a color revolution in Russia in 2007, 2008. Why that time period? Again, I don't want to bore people, but this is very important. Vladimir Putin became president end of 1999. He won an election in March of 2000 constitutionally. (27:24) He got to run for two terms, those two terms. It became clear that he was not going to continue the Yeltsin policy of doing whatever the United States wanted to be done, that he was going to try to reform Russia in a Russian image, which we didn't like. So we were pouring money into Russia through these non-governmental organizations for the purpose of carrying out a color revolution in 2007, 2008. The way we were going to do it is in 2007 was the parliamentary elections. The idea of that 2007, 2008 period was that Putin couldn't stand a third term as president, so he was going to do a swap with Dmitri Veev, who at that time was the prime Minister. So Putin was going to become prime minister. Veev would become president, but for this to happen, United Russia, which was Putin's party, had to win the parliamentary election. (28:10) If the opposition could deny United Russia the majority, then Putin couldn't become Prime Minister, and if Putin couldn't become Prime Minister, then vie was vulnerable as president and you could pick him off and suddenly you've swept Putin out of power. This is literally the stated objective of the United States, and we started pouring money into Russia to promote this. One of the guys that got caught up in this was a young lawyer named Alex Navalny. He started working, it's CIA all the way. Look, the CIA trained some people. One of them was this Y Guinea albo. She's a journalist, but she went to Harvard, got groomed by the CIA, whether she knew it or not, but she left the balling, went to Yale. Well, later on, yes, he went to Yale in 2010, but Allach comes in in 2004 and she sets up this political parlor. (29:05) Now she comes from Harvard, she got her PhD. She comes to Russia. The first thing she does is sets up this political parlor funded by British money coming from oligarchs funneled to her through British intelligence. And this parlor attracts these young people, including Navalny, and their job is to create a youth movement that can lead to a color revolution. That's his whole thing. Bottom line is it failed. It failed miserably. But Navalny was identified at that point in time as somebody with potentially started this anti-corruption campaign when mid became the president mid said, I'm against corruption. Naval went good. Let me help you. And he jumped on this thing. He got picked to go to Yale in 2010 where he was groomed by the CIA for what purpose. The next target was, okay, we couldn't stop Putin from doing the swap in 2007, 2008. What we can do now is keep mid in power. (30:01) We can prevent Putin from coming back into office in the 2012 presidential election. Remember Hillary Clinton working the opposition, Michael McFall going in there. It's a big deal. And the volume, he became the front man for this. He went to Yale. He got dipped in, greased by the CIA and he got sent back to Russia. He's a CIA asset, straight up funded by British intelligence trying to overthrow or prevent Putin from coming back in power. Well, what's that thing? If you don't start nothing, there won't be nothing. Don't start nothing. Won't be nothing. Well, Navalny, I mean, before he went to Yale, he spent a summer in Kiro, which is a province about 800 kilometers northeast of Moscow. He got involved in restructuring the timber business, and it looked like he might've done some things that weren't so good. Normally that would be ignored, but he comes back and he immediately starts attacking the interest, the economic interest behind United Russia and Putin. (31:04) And so you started something, okay? So they opened up a criminal case against him, and now you have this situation where Navalny is trying to make himself relevant. And look, he had some traction early on. He ran for Mayor of Moscow and he got 27% of the vote. That ain't bad, but he didn't have any traction outside of Moscow. He couldn't get the kind of numbers necessary to win, but he was a pain in Putin's side. So they started legal, this legal stuff against him, and it ended up in him being convicted of a fraud and embezzlement, some people call it politically motivated. There's no doubt it was politically motivated, but that doesn't mean that the crime didn't take place. He got a suspended sentence. He's on parole. Basically, they did this to keep him from running. They said, because you're convicted, you can't run for office. (31:52) Something needed to happen. And so in 2020, he was poisoned, but he wasn't. Again, I don't want to get too much down the conspiracy track, but let me just put it this way. His medical records clearly show that he wasn't poisoned by Novak. This was a setup to get him out of Russia where he had been effectively neutered over into a safe area, and we know that he landed in Germany, he was flown into Germany, had a miraculous recovery by December. He wait a minute, had a miraculous recovery from Nova Chuck, which from my understanding is one of the most dangerous nerve agents created. I've read. It's so dangerous. It really can't even be used. The story was that he was poisoned at the airport. They poisoned his tea before he got on the plane. No, no. They poisoned his underwear in his hotel room. (32:45) No, no. But wasn't that afterwards, because the story changed. The story changed a couple of times. That's my point that they said that they poisoned his tea in the airport. If I understand it, if you were to put Nova chuck in a cup of tea damn near everybody, at least in that area of the airport would be dead. Then they said, oh, they poisoned his water bottle on the plane. Nobach is so toxic that if they had done that, everybody including the pilot would be dead. Then they poisoned his underwear. The story kept, and this is also interesting to me, is that during all of these changing of the stories, Russia kept saying, send us the toxicology report so that we can investigate this. No toxicology report was ever presented. Yeah, again, I'm not a big conspiracy guy. I don't like it. I am Hamm's razor kind of person. (33:48) But the problem is, CCAM razor points to this because we did get the toxicology, not the ones that the Germans and everybody were saying prove Novare, Wilma, you're a hundred percent right. This is the most deadly substance on the planet, but apparently it can't kill anybody. And by the way, whatever the new name of the kgp is, they're pretty good at assassinating folks as is the ccia. A, if they want you done, cancel your distance and cancel your five bullets. Five bullets in the front of your body tends to do it. You don't have to mess around with Novak. Okay? Yeah. I mean, just look. A Ukrainian pilot, a Russian pilot defected earlier this year to Ukraine and had two of his crew members killed as a result. I mean, he's a murderous traitor in the eyes of the Russians. They just found his body in Spain with five bullets pumped into the front of it. (34:45) That's how the Russians get you. They don't go around doing this Novak stuff. But the point is this Nozek was a manufactured event. It didn't happen. What the German doctors who treated him released the blood work and everything. It showed that Navalny had a whole bunch of different health issues, some serious health issues, and he was also, they found evidence of antidepressants, which is okay. I'm not attacking him, it's not a problem, but it looks like he deliberately overdosed on antidepressants to generate the result that happened so he could be flown out. This was a pre-planned event. I just want everybody to understand that, that Navalny deliberately overdosed on antidepressants to generate a medical crisis that then got him flown out of Russia, because remember, he's on house arrest. He can't leave, but they got him out. What's the first thing that happens after his miraculous recovery? (35:42) They fly him to Germany to a CIA safe house where a film crew comes in and they produce two feature length documentaries in one month, one month, including elaborate computer generated graphics, the whole thing. He claims that he came up with the idea while he was recovering from his and wrote it in a feverish in October, November. Wilmer, I've made a documentary and I'm making one right now. I can guarantee you they didn't get it done in a month. This was prepackaged by the CIA and British intelligence. And then he was, everybody's saying, stay in Germany. And he went, no, I'm going back. Why? Again? In 2021, these election cycles matter. In 2021, Putin was going to change the Constitution so that he could continue to run for office, and he changed the length of the term from four years to six years. He was restructuring the government and everybody who was anybody, including myself, looked at it and went, he's basically guaranteeing that the West will never subvert Russian democracy by doing this. (36:49) He's iron proofing it, bulletproofing it. So the last chance to get rid of Vladimir Putin was to disrupt this effort. Navalny was picked as the guy to do it. Navalny job was to go back to Russia stand trial, and while he's standing trial, they're going to release these documentaries. The first one was called Putin's Palace, which was supposed to expose the corruption of Putin and everything, and the idea that it would generate so much unrest inside Russia that Navalny would be acquitted, put in, become the presidential candidate to oppose Putin. That was the dream. The problem is the people coming up with that didn't understand that Navalny had no support in Russia, never could never get it outside of Moscow. You couldn't get 5%. You might get 12% in Cabo, but that's it. You're not going to win election with 12% support. The numbers I saw for him was about somewhere between two and 5%, more on the 2% side. (37:44) Nationwide, like I said, there's certain bubbles in there where you could get support, but nationwide, he wasn't going anywhere on this. So he goes back and the Russians, what's that? Don't want nothing. Don't start nothing. The Russians know exactly what's going on. I mean, look, Pesco, who's the pre spokesperson in October of 2020, he said, we know what's going on. Navalny is working with the CIA. We know this. We know everything. So they brought him back and they knew what his plan was. They knew what he was supposed to do. So they quickly turned just really quickly because that's what President Putin said to Tucker Carlson when he talked about it's good that you applied to the CIA and that they did not accept you. He was sending a message. I know who you are. I know what you do. Yeah, well, so here's the deal. (38:39) The Russians said, we're not playing this game anymore. We've letting Navali do this stupid stupidity because he's irrelevant. But now you're playing, playing a serious game of messing around with our democracy. So we're just going to end it. The vol, the hammer's coming down, boom, nine years, boom, 30 years, you're in jail for life. Goodbye. Get out of here. Now they did that, and then a lot of people just came out and Bill. Then the Russians turned around and said, okay, we know he's your spy. Do you want him back? We'll trade him for a guy that we want back from Germany. Now, here's the part that gets conspiratorial two days before he died, minute before you get there. Isn't there also footage of Navalny or one of his representatives, but I think it's him talking Tom, I six, about money, about how much money he's going to need to sustain this democracy movement in Russia. (39:38) 2012, Navalny deputy met with a member of MI six in Moscow. Again, how did they get the video? Because the Russians know everything. I mean, when people are sitting there going, Evan Sitz isn't a CIA spy. He couldn't be. I just want to tell you right now, ladies and gentlemen, the Russians have him on film talking about this, about receiving the documents. It's conspiratorial. Putin was very clear about it. He's a CIA spy and Navalny, the Russians know who was paying for him. They know this. So they're sitting there going, we want to give them back. But that's the last thing. The ccia A wants. Why? Because then they have to admit that we're messing around in Russian politics politic. They can't. So this is the part that, this is what I firmly believe, because I believe that Navalny was induced by his handlers to deliberately overdose on depressants in 2020 to get him out, to get involved in the CIA operation to come back in and disrupt the election. (40:37) That is clear. Two days before he died, he was visited by his lawyer. Some people say that his wife was there as well, and they brought medication that's documented. Have you seen Godfather two so many times? I can't tell you how many Freddy five fingers. Freddy. Five fingers. Okay, so Tom goes to talk to Freddie five fingers. You just take a nice warm bath, you slit your words, nice warm bath, open up your veins with the woman. The family will be taken care of, throws the cigar away, shakes his hand, and it's understood. Navalny daughter got a free ride to Stanford courtesy of Michael McFall. Navalny wife now has been appointed. I mean, she was at the Munich Security Conference ready to step in before he died. He died. The script comes in, boom. She's now the new figure of the opposition. She's not tainted by crime. (41:32) She's at Navalny. That's a headline in the Washington Post today. Yeah, she's the new face of the opposition because Navalny had been neutered by the Russians, but as long as he was alive, he was a problem for the CIA. So Freddy five fingers, that's all I'm going to say. He was told Your family will be taken care of. All they have to do is lie in the tub and open up my veins, and it's a quiet, painful day. He overdosed on the drugs they gave him. He went for a walk and he died, didn't come back. His family's taken care of, and that's what I believe happened. I believe that the CIA knocked this guy off in prison. He took a long walk on a very short pier. Yeah. (42:20) So you've got Alexander the Butcher, sarky Ky, the commander of Ukraine's Ground forces. Since the start of the military operation, he is now the new military chief after Emir, Zelensky replaced zany in this leadership shakeup. What does that tell us at this stage of the game? What does that type of move tell us? Are they transitioning now to another phase of this process, recognizing that the war is lost? Again, everything has to have a setup because nothing happens in a vacuum. Ukraine is called the greatest democracy in the world. We know that's not true, but it's called the greatest democracy in the world by America. We overthrew it in 2014. Yes, we would know. But the key aspect of democracies is civil military relations, meaning that the civilian is the commander in chief, and the military always obeys the orders. Let's look at American history. (43:32) George McClellan, Abraham Lincoln McClellan was the commander of the army of the Potomac, and he thought he knew how to win this war, and Abraham Lincoln disagreed and fired him. And McClellan said, sir, yes sir. And he resigned because civil military relations, that's what you do. McClellan went on to challenge Lincoln in the elections and lost, but he didn't launch a coup. That's not what you do. Douglas MacArthur, during the Korean War thought he knew how to win the war, wanted to drop atomic bombs on China. Harry Truman said, Nope, that's not how we're going to do it. And they met in Midway, and Truman fired him, and MacArthur went, sir, yes sir. And he resigned. That's what civil military relations supposed to be in a democracy. Zelensky met with zany, who's the commander of the Ukrainian Armed forces, and he said, I don't like the fact that you're articulating policy that goes against what I want. (44:31) I want to be more aggressive. I have to go out and sell this conflict to the West, and I have to sell it, that we're going to regain all the lost territory. And you, as the general is supposed to say, sir, yes, sir, but you've gone out and given interviews behind my back saying it's a frozen conflict, a stalemate. I can't do that. You're fired and solution. He said, no, I'm not. And Zelensky went. Zany said, not only am I not fired, but here, let me show you this. Here's my picture. Given a medal to a right sector, Nazi from the organization, said, they're going to hang you from the deck, and if you ever go against this, and behind me is a picture of step on Bandera and the right sector flag. Go ahead and fire me now. Zelensky, you're a dead man walking. (45:14) And when Zelensky started calling people up saying Aslu saying no, one of the people he called up was Ky, who said, I just want to tell you right now, Mr. President, myself and the entire Ukrainian general staff support slu, you fire 'em. We come marching, it's over. And now Victoria Newland, and everybody's back there going, can't do this, guys. We're supposed to be giving 64 billion to the world's greatest democracy. We're against coups, and you're getting ready to launch a coup. She flies in panic, and so she cuts a deal. She explains to everybody, if you do this coup, we can't support you. It's over, and then you're all going to die. And the generals realized that, and they went, yeah, we understand that. Zelensky realized that. So zany stepped aside, Zeki took over, but understand what happened. It's a coup. There's one man in charge of Ukraine today, and his name is not Mir Zelinsky. (46:07) His name is Ky. He's the commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and they're calling the shots. How do we know this? Because within days of him coming in, he said, we're going over to the general defensive. He's calling the shots. Zelinsky said, we'll never leave at vca. KY came and said, get 'em out. Pull 'em out, red, destroy the line. We're going to be pulling back the military's in charge. And now you have some interesting things because the coup we didn't want to happen may happen because the nationalists are all upset. And there's talk about driving on Kiev right now. The Nazi nationalists are you're talking about, yeah, the Nazis, the N right sector guys who became Ovv, who now have renamed themselves. They're the third assault brigade, and everybody's going, there's no Nazis in Ukraine because there's nothing called the Azov, except the Nazis are so stupid. (47:03) They say, nah, third of assault brigade we're azo. And they do it right on camera, seeling all this kind of stuff in the West, everywhere. Oh, no, we don't want to see this guy's just calling himself the third assault brigade. But no, the Nazis are there. They're upset. It's a mess right now. But America, I'm just telling everybody's this, right? There was a coup deta in Ukraine. The generals are in charge. Zelinsky is a figurehead right now, but the people calling the shot is the military. Now, that's a new reality. I just want to quickly take a step back and to the point you were making about Navalny, to those that think what you're saying is fanciful and crazy, the United States did a similar action. They didn't kill him, but they did a similar action in Venezuela with Juan Gudo. The United States told the world that Juan Gudo was the president of Venezuela, even though Nicholas Maduro is the democratically elected president. (48:11) And when Gudo failed, now the United States is trying to do the same thing with a woman named Marina Machado, and she has been convicted by the Venezuelan Supreme Court as having worked with, I think it's Peru, against the interests of Venezuela. So the Venezuelan Supreme Court said, because you've gone outside the country and tried to overthrow this government, you are no longer qualified to be a candidate for president. The United States is trying to ignore the, dictate the decision of the Venezuelan Supreme Court and put this woman in place. Anyway, I bring that up just to show that what you have talked about in terms of, now I forgot the guy's name, Naval, Naval, Navalny, the United States is doing this in doing this, a number of places, and Venezuela is the most recent. But yeah. How about President Diem in Vietnam? Well, we can go for people going, well, this is fanciful. (49:19) This is out of a guys. We do it all the time. All the time. When leaders become inconvenient to the Sharan, the Sharan, the Sha Saddam Hussein. I just want to remind people, one of the more interesting, I was involved with a lot of defectors, Iraqi defectors in my time as a UN weapons inspector, and one guy that I interviewed many, many times was Wafi Samara. He was the head of military intelligence for Saddam. He ended up being in London and run by the Brits. So I'd go there and the MI six would take you to a safe house, and Wafi would come in and we'd have long conversations, and I tried to extract information from him that could lead to good inspections. But he just sat there and he talked about how the US intelligence would fly in, because the place I wanted to inspect was a specific office with a specific safe. (50:13) And he said, Hey, when you're in that safe, if you go down to this drawer, boom, you might find some photographs that you recognize. And I said, whatcha talking about? He goes, that's where we kept the American Spy satellite photographs that were given to us by American Intelligence officers who came in and sat in that conference room right next to it. You'll see it when you go in there. I did. And we met there, and they would brief us on the spy satellites, give us the newest signals, intelligence laying out the Iranian ground forces, and they helped us plan the chemical weapons attacks against the Iranians in 1988 and afa. We had this wonderful relationship. He gave me the names of all the guys that he worked with. What I'm trying to say is, ladies and gentlemen, there was a time in 19 88, 19 89, where Saddam was our boy. (50:58) US intelligence was there. Then Saddam became inconvenient. He fired scud missiles at Israel, which is a capital crime, and we ended up going to war removing them and having him hung by the neck until dead because his continued survival would've been inconvenient for America. Let me just make it as clear as this. Navalny had become inconvenient because the Russians were sitting on, the Russians never go public about anything, and their words mean everything. And when Pesco said, in October of 2020, we know what the CIA is doing, the cia, we know who he's working with. We know what's happening. It meant they know. They know everything. They have all the financials, they have all the videotapes, they have everything. And the US knew it too. That interview with Tucker is very telling. He said, I'm not going to talk to Biden. There's really nothing for me to say, but he says, our special services are talking. (51:58) They're talking the language of the special services. Having been in the special services and engaged in those kinds of conversations, they're very frank, because we don't have to play games. When you sit down with somebody and they know what your background is, we don't have to pretend. We talk about human recruitment, we talk about technical surveillance, we talk about the tools of the trade, we talk about the language that we know is going on. And so when the special services of Russia sit down with the special services of the CI and say, we know exactly what you guys did. You met here, boom, boom, boom. We got the goods. He's your boy. Do you want him back? And the CIA went, Nope, we don't want him back. We're going to have a lawyer visit him. And again, it may sound something like that, a movie. (52:40) But remember, Hollywood gets its greatest cues from reality. Frank Pan, angel, Freddy, five Fingers, Freddy, five Fingers baby. Favorite scene in the world. And it's real. I mean, I'm giving away my article, but I'm writing an article that this is going to be explained in great detail, and I talk about Freddy Five Fingers. So the next point here that I want to get to with you quickly is Mike Turner, Republican of Ohio, chair of the House Intelligence Committee. He's warning that Russia may be developing a space-based weapon that could target US satellites. And a lot of the narrative that's surrounding what he said over last weekend is that now Russia has violated, there were some treaties I think signed in the mid eighties that the countries agreed that they would not militarize space. But what seems to be left out of this conversation is that I think when the United States announced the Space Force that was militarization of space, therefore the treaty that they now want to wrap themselves in and call foul based upon, really the United States has already violated it. (54:00) So go ahead. Well, the treaty is the 1967 treaty, the outer space Treaty 67. Okay? And it talks about, it doesn't say demilitarization. What it says is that space should be used for exclusively peaceful purposes and that nobody should deploy nuclear weapons in the space. Now, what Turner has to show the stupidity of Mike Turner and these people. Apparently there's raw intelligence. That's the term that's used, and that's an important phrase. Finished intelligence is when I collect information, I corroborate it with different sources. You connect the dots, I connect the dots. That's right. Bingo. Good job, Wilmer. And you connect the dots, and then you write up an assessment that it's fact-based. But here's the important thing. You disguise the sources of information because if you're going to release finished intelligence to a congressman or Congress, they do what politicians do. They talk. They bring in somebody, Hey, read this. (55:05) You're not supposed to write about it, but wink, wink, read this. And they go, oh my God, the Russians are going to put a nuclear weapon in space. What are we going to do about it? Okay, finished. Intelligence gets leaked all the time. Everybody does it. The president on down. It's just the name of the game in Washington dc. Raw intelligence though, is almost never leaked. Why? Because raw intelligence means we haven't protected the source. So Turner released raw intelligence. He released a raw intelligence report to Congress. He put it in the reading room and said, everybody needs to come and read this thing. Now, a lot of people did, a lot of people didn't, but it created a storm because he issued a public statement, which means the media now, because he knows how the game's played. Now, every reporter worked their salt in Washington. (55:55) Dcs found their congressional sourcing. What the hell is on that report? And people started talking. So what we do know now is that the Russians are developing an anti-satellite capability that incorporates a nuclear device designed to generate an electromagnetic pulse that can shut down all of our satellites in outer space. Now, why is this important? Understand this. Turner released his report on Wednesday, knowing that on Thursday, the gang of eight, four senators, four Republicans from the Intelligence Committee, the leadership was going to meet with the White House National Security Council about this very report and talk about it. So why would you release it when they're already going to talk about it? What are you trying to do? (56:42) On Wednesday, the day he released his report, SpaceX sent up a Falcon Nine rocket with two satellites. These satellites were experimental missile monitoring satellites, part of a constellation of satellites that the United States started deploying last year. We deployed 28 of them last year. It's going to be a constellation of hundreds. It's sort of like a militarized starlink. And the purpose of this constellation is give America total control over the informational domain. That means that we communicate faster, we navigate, we can target, we can collect. We've militarized space. And the Russians have said, they've written reports to Secretary General saying, Hey, this is a violation of the outer space treaty. You're militarizing space. You're creating an advantage at a time when you say you want to strategically defeat Russia, remember, that's the American objective. And the Russians are saying, if you do this, you could launch a first strike against us, and we might not be able to respond. (57:45) You're getting a unilateral advantage here, and if we do go to war, you're going to have this total control over intelligence, collection, communications, et cetera, that gives you an operational and tactical advantage. We can't allow this to happen. So what the Russians did is they developed a weapon. They haven't deployed it yet, but it's a weapon that it will go up. And in one winding flash of a moment, that doesn't threaten any life here in America. It's not like they're going up there with a giant dirty bomb. It's going to be a neutron type device, a small device that's geared towards emitting radiation, the pulse, and it's going to blind the entire in an instant shut down this entire satellite network. But here's the important thing. From Turner's perspective, the entire American military approach to war depends on this. If we don't have this satellite thing, we put talk about putting all the eggs in one basket, we have literally put all the eggs in one basket. (58:44) Everything we do depends on this. If you shut that satellite network down, ladies and gentlemen, we can't go to war. We can't go to war. It's over. And Turner knows it. So what Turner's trying to do is say, guys, why are we investing all this money? This is going to go on for years when we know the Russians can undo it. This is stupid. We need to either get involved in arms control to prevent this from happening, or we need to come up with a backup plan because these satellites ain't going to work the way you want 'em to work when you want 'em to work. That's noble. But here's the problem. He released raw intelligence, which means the Russians now know how we collected it, and at a time when we need to have continued access to this stream of reporting. Now more than ever, let's imagine that the president says, Hey, what are the Russians up to today on that satellite thing, the thing we've been monitoring, you guys came to me and you said, Hey, boss, we put a, I don't know how they did it. (59:49) We tapped a cable and now we're listening to the conversations of these guys. Oh, wow, that's cool. Okay, but boss, we can't talk about, we can't mention the following words because if we mention the following words, the Russians will know what conversation we listen to, and then they'll stop communicating. Well, raw intelligence gives you those words. It wasn't finished product. Mike Turner compromised his source. We will never listen to them again at a time when we actually need to be monitoring this to come up with a strategy. Remember, let's say we want to do the right thing for once in our pathetic lives as Americans, and we say, maybe it's time we do engage in meaningful arms control. This is when we need to know what Russian intent is. How far along are they? Are they going to deploy this? Is this something that the Russians are doing to get to the negotiating table, or is this something that the Russians are going to keep, no matter what, what's going on, it affects our negotiating strategy. (01:00:44) We don't know now because Mike Turner released the raw intelligence to do an honorable thing to get people, he knew that they were going to sweep it under the rug. He knew that the Gang of eight and the White House were just go, Nope, we're not going to worry about this. We're going to keep deploying the satellites. And he's going, that's stupid. But now we are blind. And that's why I call it Turner's folly. I mean, trying to do the right thing. He did the absolute wrong thing. And now at a time when we need to have this intelligence, it's not there. I know there's a lot of people out there that thinks intelligence is a bad word, and it's been misused throughout history. There's no doubt about that. But I'm here to tell you right now that collecting information of this nature is absolutely essential to the national security of the United States because you want our leaders to be informed about the potential threats that exist around the world. (01:01:32) And there's a need for intelligence, not Iris. I'm not talking about violating American constitutional rights. I'm not talking about, I'm saying there's a need for people like me who did it honorably. It's a tough job. It's a dangerous job. Sometimes you have to do things that you wouldn't want to talk about at the PTA, but it's the reality of the world that you have to go out there and you have to get this information so that your leaders are informed so they can make the right decisions. And Mike Turner has cost us that information at a time when we desperately need it. Final question for you. And that surrounds nato and Donald Trump's comments about nato, and there seems to be an awful lot of furor about his talking about defunding NATO and all this kind of stuff, when all that I can read and understand is that NATO is now really obsolete and that it's a money laundering scheme. (01:02:26) Yeah, let me put it this way. There's a foreign minister of Lithuania Landsburg out there, and he's, I mean, Lithuania, the Baltic countries, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, they're making a lot of noise right now about Article five and how it's essential that NATO must come to the collective defense. But Lithuania is talking about, for instance, blockading Coing grad, the Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea. They're talking about sanctions. They're talking about a whole bunch of stuff that could lead to a war with Russia. And they're saying, that's okay because we're nato, and NATO will protect us. (01:03:05) The American people need to understand that Lithuania has a population of 2.8 million. The greater East Coast megapolis from Boston to Washington DC is 50 million people. Do you really think that we're going to sacrifice 50 million people to defend 2.8 million people who are kicking a hornet's nest right now? The answer is no. And that's the bottom line about nato. The American people are waking up to the fact that NATO is not about defending Europe from the evil Russians, NATO's a suicide pill. Because you have nations like Poland, you have nations like Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, that think that because they have this NATO shield behind them, they can behave aggressively to Russian and not have any consequence to it. If they start a war against Russia and a blockade of Coing, grad is an act of war, Russia will respond militarily. And now if you're Joe Biden, it's a sacred thing. (01:04:04) Every inch of NATO soil is sacred. Article five is a sacred, no, it's a suicide pill. It's a trap having poodles trying to get the rottweilers to fight. NATO is an organization that has outlived its usefulness. Donald Trump, he's not the most eloquent person or the most articulate person. And there's a lot about him that just cannot be supported 100%. But I'll tell you right now, he's speaking the mind of many Americans when he says, we ain't doing this anymore. We're not paying your bills. We're not going to be there for you. When you want to kick a hornet's nest. We don't want to get stung. So you're on your own, and that's what's going to happen. I am predicting that nato, it may not last 10 years. It's out. It's on its way out because it's, here's the thing. Remember we talked about mobilization at the beginning? (01:04:56) We talked about mobilization. It's funny to watch the schizophrenia that exists in people like Jan Stoltenberg who stutters his way through everything. Russia is evil, and we must must stand up through Russia. NATO must do, but we cannot afford to mobilize right now. We have no money. Our industry is no longer working, and we don't, but America will pay for it because NATO is a, I mean, it's going back and forth. NATO can't mobilize right now because they don't have the industrial base to mobilize. Not only that, nobody wants to be part the British who are out there. Boris Johnson doing that ridiculous thing. Lance Corporal Johnson reporting, sir, we're going to mobilize the people. First of all, Britain has two aircraft carriers. They built for, I forget how many billions of dollars they can't get out of port because they don't work. They build a whole bunch of new frigates, brand new modern frigates to defend these aircraft carriers, but they don't have enough sailors. (01:05:51) So in order to get the sailors on these new frigates, they have to retire frigates that are still good. So they're military. We're going to fight the Russians. I mean, you hear this British general, we're going to be on the front lines of the next war with Russia, with what? Your military's 72,000. Right now, you can't fill up a soccer stadium, and in five years it's going to be 56,000. Nobody wants to join the British military anymore. Nobody's joining the Navy. Nobody's joining anything because the youth of Europe don't believe in Europe. They don't believe they're not willing to give their lives for this pathetic little enterprise called Europe or nato. So all this talk about 300,000, this, that mobilize. It's all talk. And that's the good news is it's all talk. The better news is I think NATO's done because you used a word that's very important. And normally, as I said, I shy against conspiracies, but NATO's a money laundering scheme, that's all it is. It's an employment vehicle. I mean, I have to be careful. I have relatives that work for nato. They're not Americans, and thank God, I mean, one's married to my sister. So I like the fact that he has a paycheck. It keeps my sister fed and a roof overhead. (01:07:07) But the jobs not a real job. None of NATO's a real job. It's just an employment vehicle for a political economic elite that automatically fallen on these ES because that's what NATO is. It's a sinecure for people just to sit there and collect a paycheck doing nothing. If I have the chance to speak to President Biden, and I know he watches the show regularly, I would have to ask him about the sanctity of NATO that he holds so near and dear, if you believe in NATO to the degree that you do, Mr. President, why did you engage in an act of war as in blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline? Why did you engage in an act of war against a NATO country that being Germany? Because by doing so, article five, the other NATO countries are supposed to respond to Germany's defense in a manner in which they see fit. (01:08:10) So I guess the fact that they didn't respond means they didn't see a manner that they see fit. But I don't hear anybody asking that question. Why? If NATO is NATO and it's sacrosanct as it is, why did you engage in an act of war against a NATO member? That's my final question, Scott Ritter. Well, I mean, it's a great question, but here's even an equally relevant one. Why did the German chancellor stay silent at the press conference in February when the president said that if Russian and invade Ukraine, I'll take out Nord stream. And when he was asked the question, but it's German, how could you do that? It'll get done, I promise you. And Olaf Schultz is sitting there going, not saying a word, not saying a word. So how can you, I mean, the thing about Article five is it has to be invoked by the person attacked. (01:09:05) And Germany never once said, we've been attacked because they were there when it was designed. Olaf Schultz knew all along that this was going to happen because Germany's not a sovereign state. And that's the thing about NATO that people need to understand. It exists only for the United States. It's the exclusive tool of the United States. It exists to promote American national security interests. And this is why when you have Latvia and Poland now believing that NATO's there for their interest, no, it's not. NATO doesn't exist for anybody's interest, but our own. And as Europe wakes up to this reality, they're going to realize that we don't need to be part of NATO anymore because it doesn't benefit us. And there's a lot of talk now about a European security agency and things of that nature. Yeah, and President Putin asked, I thought, a very relevant as we look at, so people say, well, why did the United States blow up nato? (01:10:05) Well, I mean, blow up Nord Stream basically to de-industrialized Germany de-industrialized Europe, and have the Europeans start buying natural gas from the United States and other things. Putin during his speech said, well, you realize they didn't destroy the entire Nord stream pipeline. There is one pipe that can still transmit gas. Why don't you open that up? He said, there's the ability to send gas through Ukraine. Why don't you open that up? There's the ability to send gas through Poland. Why don't you open that up and haven't heard an answer? But that's, you want the best answer. Go ahead. I'll just say this. I grew up in Germany and the car that I loved, I was in love with the Porsche nine 11 SC Turbo, rough modified, and well, guess what's happening. Wilmer Porsche is moving its production to the United States. Michelin, the French Tire company. Michelin has shut down, I think two tire plants in Germany, and they're moving them. (01:11:15) I don't know where they're moving, but they're moving 'em out of Germany. I know that. Can you imagine a Porsche plant and a Michelin plant? I tell you what, there's going to be a new car in my driveway pretty soon. It's going to stay made in the USA on it, but that's what's going on. We've de-industrialized Europe to our benefit. And again, we come b
In this Podcast episode, the David Satter, a renowned journalist and authority on Russia, highlights the brutality and dark history of Stalin, the rise of communism in Russia, and the KGB's role in Soviet history and its use of psychological programming and much more. This episode covers Satter's extensive career, from his days reporting in the Soviet Union to his unique position as the first Western journalist banned from Russia post-Cold War, due to his critical reporting. Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Introduction to Soviet Reporting and Psychological Novels in Russia 00:03:02 - The Bolshevik Revolution's Impact on Russian Society and Ideology00:06:00 - Communism's Influence and the Red Terror in Soviet Russia00:09:58 - Lenin's Ideology and the Role of the Intelligentsia in Soviet History00:13:02 - Stalin's Regime, War Communism, and the New Economic Plan00:16:22 - Religion, State Ideology, and Marxism in the Soviet Union 00:19:03 - Dialectical Materialism and Mass Psychology in Soviet Ideology 00:22:01 - Transition to Bolsheviks and Lenin's Influence on Marxist Theory00:25:26 - Stalin's Leadership and Soviet Repression Techniques00:28:00 - KGB's Role in Soviet Society and the Psychological Impact of Repression00:31:16 - Fear and Challenges in Soviet Society and Reporting in the Soviet Union 00:34:00 - Control of Information, Public Perception, and the KGB's System00:37:33 - Impact of Stalin's Reign, Humor in Soviet Dissent, and Anti-Soviet Sentiments00:40:25 - Risks of Suggesting Reforms and Lack of Freedom of Expression 00:43:10 - Mental Oppression in the Soviet Union and Summary of Soviet History 00:46:04 - Economic Situation and Black Market Dynamics in the Soviet Union 00:49:02 - The Rise of Oligarchs and Mass Theft during Privatization 00:52:04 - Gorbachev's Policies and the Impact of Glasnost on Soviet Society00:55:05 - The Shock of Truthful Information and the Fall of Soviet Ideology 00:58:30 - The End of the Soviet Union and the Rise of Yeltsin and Putin 01:01:10 - Transition to Post-Soviet Russia and the Failure to Establish a Law-Based State 01:04:05 - The Emergence of Gangsterism and Criminal Ties in Post-Soviet Russia 01:07:02 - The Plight of the Russian Population and the Rise of the Oligarchs 01:10:00 - The National Income Fall and the Overall Impact on Russian Society 01:13:02 - The Ideological Imprint on Minds and the Shock of Truthful Information 01:16:22 - The Fall of Soviet Ideology and the Rise of Political Orthodoxy 01:19:03 - The Destruction of the Soviet Union and the Emergence of Free Information 01:22:01 - The Transition Period Post-Soviet Union and the Rise of Gangster Capitalism 01:25:26 - The Reconstruction of the Economic System and the Rise of Criminal Oligarchs 01:28:00 - The Impact of Lawlessness and Corruption in Post-Soviet Russia 01:31:16 - The Legacy of the Soviet Union and Its Long-Term Effects on Russian Society
As Americans opened their Christmas gifts 32 years ago, the beleaguered president of a superpower on the other side of the world endured a unique humiliation. Mikhail Gorbachev, whose open mind and magnetism had captivated Western publics after coming to power in 1985, announced his resignation as leader of the Soviet Union. The nation-state he had tried to reform into something better was swept into the dustbin of history. December 25, 1991: Gorbachev was gone; the country he led no longer existed. The moment was celebrated in the West. But if democracy and market economies were on the march as the curtain fell on the Cold War, their advance halted in Russia during the disastrous Yeltsin years of the 1990s. In this episode, historian Vladislav Zubok, who was born in Moscow in the 1950s and witnessed the rise and fall of perestroika and glasnost, takes on a provocative question: what if some kind of union had survived the tumult of 1991? A proto-democratic, voluntary confederation with decision-making authority devolved to the now former Soviet republics? The question matters today. A revanchist, chauvinist Russia under Vladimir Putin seeks to dominate its neighbors. Western commentators worry about the fate of the "liberal world order" and the waning of U.S. hegemony just a generation after they appeared triumphant.
#Russia: How did Yeltsin pick Putin to be president in 2000? Rebekah Koffler, former DIA intelligence officer and author of Putin's Playbook: Russia's Secret Plan to Defeat America, @GordonGChang, Gatestone, Newsweek, The Hill https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/12/08/putin-announces-russia-presidential-election-ukraine-war/ https://www.foxnews.com/world/putin-2024-why-he-almost-certainly-win-another-term-retaining-presidency-till-2030 1900 Petersburg
In 1998, Russia's President Boris Yeltsin shocked the nation with a last-minute decision to speak at the reburial of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, 80 years after their murder.“We must end an age of blood and violence in Russia,” he said, as he called for the country to face up to the crimes of its communist past.Lilia Dubovaya, a reporter for the state news service, told Robert Nicholson about the emotional weight of the day. A Whistledown production for BBC World Service.(Image: President Yeltsin at the reburial of Tsar Nicholas II. Credit: Reuters)
The new series of Fascinating People, Fascinating Places launches on 5 January 2024 with new episodes featuring the man who caught Saddam Hussein, the lawyer for the 9/11 mastermind, and much more. But in the interim, I am replaying five episodes that were selected by listeners as the best content over the last few years. If you're new to the show now is the time to catch up. If you're a long-term listener here is a chance to revisit some of the fan favorites. Shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I had the pleasure of speaking with WSJ veteran David Satter. He was expelled from Moscow due to his investigative work that indicated Vladimir Putin came to power on the back of terrorist atrocities committed by the FSB but blamed on Chechens. In this episode, he shares a compelling story that supports his claims. On 13 September 1999 Gennadiy Seleznyov speaker of the Duma announced to the Russian parliament that a terrorist attack had hit the remote and hitherto unremarkable city of Volgodonsk. The bombing did occur but not until 3 days later. But it was this incident in conjunction with other bombings that set in motion a series of events that salvaged the reputation of President Boris Yeltsin and laid the stage for his protege Vladimir Putin to come to power. But Selezynyovs apparent clairvoyance wasn't the only indication that something more sinister was afoot. And many people believe the second Chechen war was launched on the basis of a false flag attack concocted by Vladimir Putin. In this episode, I talk to the acclaimed journalist David Satter – formerly the Moscow correspondent for The Financial Times, and special correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. He was the first investigative reporter to detail what he believes was a bloody conspiracy to bring Putin to power. Aside from his journalistic work, David Satter has written five books about Russia including Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union which was adapted into a documentary film, and more recently he authored The Less You Know, The Better You Sleep: Russia's Road to Terror and Dictatorship under Yeltsin and Putin. In December 2013, he was expelled from Russia having been accused of violating migration laws. A claim that he denies and has been widely derided. Like many before and since his real crime appears to have been His actual offense appears to have been his efforts to expose the true nature of an opaque and sinister regime. Music and Sound: Pixabay Guests: David Satter (on Wikipedia)
Episode 28 of The Reed Morin Show is a podcast interview with David Satter, the man who exposed Vladimir Putin for his role in the 1999 Russian Apartment bombing. These bombings solidified Putin as the defacto leader of Russia, at a time where his ascension to power was quickly falling apart. David Satter, a journalist, author, historian, and foreign policy expert –– who is widely regarded as one of the world's preeminent experts on Vladimir Putin / Russia. In December 2013, after years of exclusive reporting on Putin's crimes against humanity, David became the first Western Journalist ever banned from Russia (by their government) in the post-Cold War era. From 1976 until his banishment in 2013, David spent the majority of his time living in the Soviet Union (which later became Russia) while working as the Moscow Correspondent for the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. He is perhaps best known as the first researcher who claimed that Vladimir Putin and Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) were behind the 1999 Russian Apartment Bombings, the 2002 Nord-Ost Siege, and the 2004 Beslan School Attack. Over the past 2 decades, David has authored 5 books on Russia / The Soviet Union. Furthermore, he is also a Senior Fellow at both the Foreign Policy Research Institute & The Hudson Institute –– as well as a Visiting Scholar at Johns Hopkins. **Timestamps** 0:00 - Introduction: Unraveling Putin's Rise and Russia's Political Shifts 1:30 - The Near-Miss Tragedy and Putin's Ascent to Power 3:45 - Early Years of Vladimir Putin: The Making of a Leader 5:10 - Analyzing the Collapse of the Soviet Union 7:20 - Yeltsin's Presidency: Corruption and Crony Capitalism 9:35 - Vladimir Putin's Strategic Rise to Power 11:50 - The 1999 Apartment Bombings and Political Impact 14:15 - FSB's Role and Public Reaction in Russia 16:40 - Global Response to Russian Political Events 18:55 - Media Silence and Political Cover-Ups in Russia 21:10 - Putin's Election and the Strategy Behind It 23:30 - Corruption, Power, and Overlooked Russian History 25:45 - Deciphering Russia's Current Political State 26:00 - The Devastating Impact of Economic Collapse in Russia 28:15 - The High Death Rate and Social Despair in 1990s Russia 30:30 - The Tragic Consequences of Neglected Public Services 32:45 - Yeltsin's Failing Policies and Public Discontent 35:00 - The Dangerous State of Public Morale in Russia 37:15 - Putin's Opportunistic Rise Amidst National Crisis 39:30 - Analyzing the Shift in Global Political Dynamics 41:45 - Putin's Strategy in the Middle East and Its Implications 44:00 - Future of Russia-West Relations Post-War 46:15 - The Militarization of Russia and NATO's Response 48:30 - The Impact of Ukraine's Alignment with the West 50:45 - Changing Russian Ideology and the Role of the West 53:00 - The US and Russia: Learning from Soviet History 55:15 - Encouraging Critical Thinking in the Face of Mass Psychology 57:30 - Conclusion: Reflecting on Russia's Political Journey and Future Prospects
This week we discussed a book about the collapse of the Soviet Union and guess what, it wasn't the result of the United States' efforts to defeat the Evil Empire. It's much dumbe rand worse than that.Serhii Plokhy. 2015. The Last Empire : The Final Days of the Soviet Union. New York: Basic Books, A Member Of The Perseus Books Group.Head over to our Patreon and join for $2 a month to hear the whole episode and join the Discord to take part in the discussions.Support the show
It's October 1st. In 1994, Russian President Boris Yeltsin is set to stop off for a diplomatic visit in Ireland. But when his plane lands on the tarmac at Shannon Airport, Yeltsin refuses to get off. Jody, Niki, and Kellie discuss Yeltsin's reputation for heavy drinking and boorish behavior, how that played into this incident, and what may have really happened on that plane. Sign up for our newsletter! We'll be sending out links to all the stuff we recommended later this week. Find out more at thisdaypod.com This Day In Esoteric Political History is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. Your support helps foster independent, artist-owned podcasts and award-winning stories. If you want to support the show directly, you can do so on our website: ThisDayPod.com Get in touch if you have any ideas for future topics, or just want to say hello. Our website is thisdaypod.com Follow us on social @thisdaypod Our team: Jacob Feldman, Researcher/Producer; Brittani Brown, Producer; Khawla Nakua, Transcripts; music by Teen Daze and Blue Dot Sessions; Audrey Mardavich is our Executive Producer at Radiotopia
What is the path to peace for the war in Ukraine? Is America still powerful enough to impose global order? The US has just 4.1% of the world's population, while the BRICS countries have 41.5%. In this conversation with economist Jeffrey Sachs, we discuss the origins of the conflict in Ukraine and NATO enlargement, US-China relations, and the decline of US dominance.Jeffrey Sachs is Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, Sachs has been Special Advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General. He was an economic adviser to Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Former President of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma. Sachs was twice named among Time magazine's 100 most influential world leaders, received the Tang Prize in Sustainable Development, the Legion of Honor from France, and was co-recipient of the Blue Planet Prize. He is Co-Chair of the Council of Engineers for the Energy Transition, and academician of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences at the Vatican.Sachs has authored and edited numerous books, including three New York Times bestsellers: The End of Poverty (2005), Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (2008), and The Price of Civilization (2011)."The US signed several statements in 2021 confirming that NATO would enlarge. Russia massed troops on its border and put on the table a draft US-Russia security agreement on December 17th, 2021 based on no NATO enlargement. The Biden administration formally replied that it was not willing to negotiate over that issue in a response in January. Then Russia invaded on February 24th, 2022. Four weeks later, Zelenskyy declared that Ukraine was accepting of neutrality. In other words, the initial Russian invasion brought Ukraine to the negotiating table, and during the second half of March, with the Turkish government being the mediators, Russia and Ukraine hammered out a peace agreement. Incredibly, the United States blocked it because the United States told the Ukrainian government: you fight on.The basic point is the US has 4.1% of the world population. So how could it presume to be the world leader? You know, the US is a powerful country. It's a rich country, but it doesn't run the world, and it should not aspire to run the world. That's a kind of madness, and the US ideology for a long time has been that the US should run the world.It's, to my mind, unbelievable. But then again, I've spent most of my career outside the US seeing the other 95.9% of the world. And I know that the other 95.9% of the world doesn't want the United States to run the world. It's not against the United States. It just says: let us have our own part of the world. We don't want you running the world. We don't want you deciding what our government is, who we are, how we rule ourselves. You know, you're just one place. And this, the United States leaders don't understand. They're very arrogant. They're very ignorant because of the two big oceans. They're very unaware of the history of other parts of the world. And we end up with this arrogant and naive and dangerous foreign policy because, there's no doubt the United States is rich and powerful, and it makes lots of weapon systems. And I'm 68 years old and the United States has been at war almost every year of my life from Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia and Nicaragua, Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria and Libya, and now Ukraine. Come on, give it a break."www.jeffsachs.orghttps://sdgacademy.orgwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Summary Calder Walton (Website, Twitter) joins Andrew (Twitter; LinkedIn) to discuss the 100-year intelligence war between the United States and Russia. Calder is the author of the new book, SPIES. *EXTENDED SHOW NOTES & FULL TRANSCRIPT HERE* What You'll Learn Intelligence The epic clash of intelligence systems Russia's assassination program then and now The roots of Putinism China as “the Soviet Union on steroids” Reflections Cold War 2.0 Could it have been otherwise? And much, much more … Quotes of the Week My conclusion, unfortunately, Andrew, is that looking at this large sweep of history that we have, not so much a Putin problem today, but a Russia problem. And the Russia problem has been persistent over a hundred years, which is why it makes me very cautious about speculation … Unfortunately, it seems to me that the Putin and the people he surrounds himself with in the Kremlin are all cut from this very similar cloth as he is. Resources SURFACE SKIM *Headline Resource* SPIES: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West, Calder Walton (Simon & Schuster, 2023) *SpyCasts* Ukraine & the Alliance with NATO's Assistant Secretary General for Intelligence David Cattler (2023) Ukraine & Intelligence: One Year On with Shane Harris (2023) Becoming a Russian Intelligence Officer with Janosh Neumann (2022) The Spies Who Came in From the Cold with Chris Costa and John Quattrocki at the Pritzker Military Museum & Library in Chicago (2022) Dealing with Russia with Counterintelligence Legend Jim Olson (2022) CIA Legend Jack Devine on Countering Russian Aggression (2012) *Beginner Resources* Putin's Revisionist History of Russia and Ukraine, I. Chotiner, New Yorker (2022) [Short article] Has Putin's war failed and what does Russia want?, P. Kirby, BBC (2023) [Short article] The Cold War Explained in 15 Minutes, YouTube (2021) [15 min. video] *EXTENDED SHOW NOTES & FULL TRANSCRIPT HERE* DEEPER DIVE Books Russian Intelligence, K. Riehle (NIU, 2022) Putin's People, C. Belton (William Collins, 2021) Between Two Fires, J. Yaffa (Duggan Books, 2020) The New Cold War, E. Lucas (St. Martin's Griffin, 2014) Primary Sources The Putin Files, CBS (n.d.) Memorandum of Conversations (Rise of Putin) Clinton with Putin (2000) Clinton with Putin (2000) Clinton with Yeltsin (1999) Clinton with Yeltsin (1999) Clinton with Putin (1999) Madelaine Albright with Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov (1999) Clinton with Putin (1999) Clinton with Yeltsin (1999) Oral Histories U.S. Ambassadors to Moscow John Huntsman (2017-2019) John F. Tefft (2014-2017) Michael McFaul (2012-2014) John Beryle (2008-2012) Alexander Vershbow (2001-2005) James F. Collins (1997-2001) Thomas R. Pickering (1993-1996) Jack F. Matlock (1987-1991) *Wildcard Resource* Putin Strikes: The Coming War for Eastern Europe A two-player board game where one commands the Kremlin's forces and the other an international polyglot force. Trippy or what? *EXTENDED SHOW NOTES & FULL TRANSCRIPT HERE*
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