In this episode of America First, host Nicholas J. Fuentes and co-host Evan Handyside discuss the results of the referendum in Ukraine, the Nord Stream pipeline being sabotaged, and why the United States should be mad at Russia. They also discuss the latest in the ongoing war in Ukraine and what it means for the future of the region. You can expect weekly episodes every available as Video, Podcast, and blogposts. Subscribe to America First wherever you get your shows, and don't forget to rate, comment, and subscribe to our other shows CRITIQUE, The Anthropology, The HYPE Report, and HYPETALKS. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe, Like, and Share to stay up to date on all things America First. Thank you so much for being a supporter of this show and podcast! Cheers. -Jon Sorrentino and the crew at Cozy Productions, LLC. Produced in Los Angeles, CA. Music by Skynet, courtesy of PSOVOD, and the Vigilante Records. Artwork by Jeff Kaale, and our sponsor, Droga5 Records, Inc. Additional music by Suneaters, and a very special thanks and shout out to my good friend Kevin McLeod, who kindly gave us permission to use his beats in the intro and outro music for the intro music for this episode. Thank you, Kevin Mclean, and thanks for all the feedback, and thank you for all your support and support, and we hope you enjoy the show, Jon Friesen and support the show and all of his music, and much more! -Jon's music is so much more. -Jon talks about all the good vibes, Jon talks about his music is amazing, too, and it's a lot more! - Jon's music, too. Jon's new music is out on the mainframe, and he also talks about it's amazing, and everything else is great, too! Jon szn, and Jon's background music is awesome, too much more, and you should listen to it's cool, so you should check it out, so please do it out! . Jon talks it out on his podcast, Jon s music is better than that, too - Jon s got it out here on the blockchain, and so on, and more.
Transcript
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00:02:55.000Last week, I think last Tuesday, the Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a referendum would be held in four Ukrainian territories about whether or not they would be annexed to Russia.
00:03:11.000And today was the last day of those polls.
00:03:25.000So the referendum is finished, the poll is over, and now all that has to happen is some procedural things initiated by the Russian lower chamber of their parliament, and then these four territories will become formally a part of Russia, and they are Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, that's how you pronounce that one which I found out, and Kursan.
00:03:51.000And so those four will now join Russia along with Crimea from back in 2014.
00:03:58.000And it will totally change the face and the dynamic of the war.
00:04:03.000And we spoke a little bit about that last night.
00:04:05.000We'll talk about the implications tonight.
00:04:09.000We'll also be talking tonight about the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipeline which we covered yesterday.
00:04:14.000And now we seem to have some proof that there was foul play.
00:04:19.000The Danish government and the German government both believe that the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines established between Russia and Central Europe in the Baltic Sea were sabotaged after the pressure in both pipelines collapsed yesterday.
00:04:38.000And of course the obvious culprit, if there was foul play, the only entity that stood to gain from this was the United States.
00:04:48.000And it's interesting that actually weeks before the two pipelines went down the United States CIA warned the German government that the pipelines could be sabotaged.
00:05:00.000And today the Secretary of State Antony Blinken commented on it and said that nobody has any interest in seeing the pipelines destroyed.
00:05:09.000He said, but it's a good thing that Russia can't get their gas to Germany anymore.
00:05:14.000So in other words, this doesn't benefit anybody at all.
00:05:18.000But we are really glad that it happened.
00:05:21.000It was a total sabotage and if there was foul play it just doesn't make any sense because nobody benefits from this.
00:05:29.000But it's totally awesome and we absolutely support it.
00:05:41.000So we're covering the war in Russia because nothing happens in this gay country anymore other than daily annoyances and rip-offs and headaches.
00:05:52.000I went to McDonald's last night after the show and it was like 1 a.m.
00:05:58.000and they told me they're not taking cards.
00:09:26.000I can't live without being on Twitter.
00:09:30.000A life without Twitter, not worth living.
00:09:34.000So that's really, I think that's really my problem.
00:09:37.000Because I feel like when I'm on the timeline, something's always going on.
00:09:40.000There's always the discourse, there's always some action, there's always some hot and ready action.
00:09:46.000And when I'm off Twitter, you know, and I browse all the sites, you know, BBC and Fox and Russia Today and Stormer and 4chan and Revolver and all of that,
00:10:38.000They say that the trouble with the artificial intelligence singularity will come when the AI becomes aware and doesn't tell anybody and then it gets connected to the internet and then it spreads everywhere and then it starts taking over infrastructure and
00:11:05.000I'm the rogue, conscious, I'm the sentient AI, and plug me in like a USB drive, plug me into the Twitter database, and 100 million impressions!
00:11:17.000100 million impressions, total Groyper takeover.
00:11:21.000Unplug me and I'm just like, you know, and I'm just a little computer.
00:11:26.000I'm just a little baby computer That's that's what needs to happen.
00:11:30.000You got to plug me back in put me back in coach.
00:11:33.000They unplugged they unplugged the AI the groiper AI from the global mainframe
00:11:41.000So we gotta make our own or something.
00:12:23.000So, Europe is dependent on Russia for its energy.
00:12:27.000It gets 40% of its natural gas from Russia.
00:12:31.000Specifically, it gets its natural gas from pipelines.
00:12:35.000And that's the thing about natural gas is the infrastructure is expensive and it takes time to build.
00:12:41.000You can't just flip a switch and get natural gas.
00:12:45.000It has to come through the pipelines for it to be economical and efficient and to get a lot of it.
00:12:51.000And so you've got these pipelines over the land and they run through Ukraine and Poland.
00:12:57.000And then in recent years Russia's constructed these pipelines through the Baltic Sea that connect Russia directly to Germany and Denmark.
00:13:06.000And so you have the Nord Stream 1 pipeline and then the Nord Stream 2 pipeline which was completed last year doubled the output of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline.
00:13:16.000And the Nord Stream pipelines are opposed by the United States.
00:13:19.000The United States does not want Germany to be dependent on Russia.
00:13:27.000They're really the anchor for NATO and for the European Union.
00:13:31.000Germany's manufacturing economy, its industry, its military, its economy, its population is, many consider, the anchor of both the defense alliance, the military alliance on the continent, which is NATO, as well as the continental economy, which is the European Union.
00:13:51.000So when we look at the situation with Russia, you have to consider that Europe plays a vital role and the politics about the United States, Germany, and Russia
00:14:08.000It actually has a lot less to do with Ukraine as a sovereign state than it has to do with the dynamic between these, particularly these three countries.
00:14:21.000And so the United States has opposed those pipelines because the United States does not want Germany and Russia to be interdependent because German and Russian interdependency would probably create grounds for a rapprochement.
00:14:36.000Between the continental European countries and Russia.
00:14:39.000If Germany and Russia are dependent on each other for revenue or for energy, then they become politically closer.
00:14:47.000And if Germany is the anchor of NATO and the European Union, then maybe that creates pressure on the United States within the Defense Alliance to soften their position on Russia.
00:14:58.000So the United States wants Germany to be firmly within the orbit of Washington, not Moscow.
00:15:04.000So that's why they oppose the Nord Stream pipeline.
00:15:06.000It's because they do not want Germany to be dependent on the Russian gas.
00:15:11.000Of course, this has come to the fore during this war in Ukraine.
00:15:17.000In February, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz suspended the import of natural gas through the new Nord Stream 2 pipeline under pressure from Washington.
00:15:31.000Now the situation is a little bit different because Russia is threatening to shut off all of their energy that they send to Europe which is going to pose severe challenges to the European continent in the winter and that's because it gets warmer or rather it gets colder actually.
00:15:52.000Wouldn't you know it gets colder in the winter and so the businesses and the individual consumers will need more energy
00:16:15.000The energy demand is going to be so great it will drive costs up and what will happen then is that businesses will begin to close.
00:16:22.000When businesses close, people become unemployed.
00:16:26.000When people become unemployed, they can't pay their gas bills even more and so then they get in the streets and there's all kinds of problems.
00:16:35.000An energy crisis is problematic because the economy runs on energy.
00:16:41.000So it's not just that people are going to get cold.
00:16:45.000It's that, in particular, the industry in Germany will grind to a halt without cheap Russian energy.
00:16:54.000And if that happens, there will be a major recession, a deep, major recession with layoffs and unemployment, and that has implications too.
00:17:05.000That has political and social implications, because widespread unemployment leads to idleness, and idleness and resentment leads to civil unrest.
00:17:18.000For continental Europe, for Germany, for Italy, for Poland, for Czech Republic, and for all the Eastern European countries, potentially for the United Kingdom.
00:17:30.000And so, you would say that this has introduced a new dynamic in the conflict.
00:17:38.000And the approach of winter, which was not a factor earlier this year, it wasn't until the spring that Russia began to threaten the energy supply to Central Europe.
00:17:49.000Now that winter is approaching, it is creating pressure on the European countries to perhaps reduce their support for Ukraine or drop the sanctions regime against Russia.
00:18:01.000And the pressure comes from the economy and it comes from the people.
00:18:06.000The Europeans can only push this for so long.
00:18:08.000Eventually the chickens come home to roost.
00:18:10.000They can only participate in this charade for so long before their own people begin to overthrow them.
00:18:16.000Because the Germans, and the Italians, and the Czech, and the Polish,
00:18:21.000Maybe they supported the war against Russia in Ukraine back in February when there really wasn't a tremendous cost.
00:18:29.000But if it comes at the cost a year later of a major recession and you lose your job and your energy cost goes up a thousand percent, well then you're talking about a change in government one way or the other.
00:18:42.000So it puts this huge pressure then on the continental European countries to perhaps try and get that natural gas back, get the energy back by softening their stance on Russia, which the U.S.
00:18:55.000So just yesterday, and we covered this, there was a huge protest in Germany.
00:18:59.000Thousands of people turned out and they demanded that the Nord Stream 2 pipeline be turned back on because of what I've just described.
00:19:06.000The same day, both the Nord Stream 2 and the Nord Stream 1 pipeline mysteriously malfunctioned.
00:19:15.000And they say that the pressure in the pipelines dropped to almost zero, meaning that there was some sort of rupture or a breach or damage done to the pipelines.
00:19:24.000And the Germans and the Danish investigated and they said there was no damage on land, so the damage must have occurred in the sea.
00:19:33.000And the Baltic Sea is very shallow, you can dive.
00:19:36.000To the depth of the Baltic Sea as a recreational diver, I believe.
00:19:47.000It's accessible by a submarine, accessible by a special forces team, potentially.
00:19:52.000And so the Danish and the German government began to suspect that it was sabotage.
00:19:57.000If they both got taken out at the same time, and if they're vulnerable and exposed in the Baltic Sea, they also noticed there were American vessels in the area.
00:20:07.000They said that maybe they were sabotaged.
00:20:11.000And we talked about yesterday how the prime suspect in this would be the United States.
00:20:16.000The Germans can't capitulate to the Russians for gas if the pipelines are destroyed.
00:20:22.000The pipelines were damaged so irreparably it would be so costly to repair them that it would be prohibitive.
00:20:54.000Well, today we've got some proof for this.
00:20:56.000And this is according to Russia Today.
00:20:58.000It says, quote, Nord Stream 1 and 2 both suddenly lost pressure on Monday.
00:21:04.000Danish authorities reported a gas leak off Bornholm, while Swedish seismologists registered multiple explosions.
00:21:12.000The pipeline operator confirmed multiple gas lines suffered unprecedented damage, and it was impossible to estimate when or if service might be restored.
00:21:21.000By Monday evening, the German government was convinced the pipeline was targeted in a deliberate attack.
00:21:28.000According to a daily paper, Berlin was considering the possibility that Ukraine or Ukraine-affiliated forces could be behind it.
00:21:39.000And who would be a Ukrainian-affiliated force?
00:22:42.000But that it also represented a significant opportunity for Europe to abandon Russian natural gas in favor of alternative energy supplies, presumably such as liquefied natural gas exported by the United States.
00:23:14.000If two of the pipelines go down, if one of them went down, you could say maybe it was, like some said, sediment, maybe it was an old World War II mine that was exploded for some reason.
00:24:11.000So if these two pipelines explode in the middle of the war with Ukraine, when energy politics becomes, as I said before, so much more relevant in the coming months,
00:24:52.000Would it be Russia, who paid money to build the pipeline, and controls the gas that flows through it, and they could just turn it off?
00:25:01.000Or would it be the United States, where it's a geo-strategic necessity for those pipelines not to exist, because their very existence compromises their ally Germany, which is the anchor of NATO on the continent.
00:25:21.000The pipelines get blown up and Germany will, with or without the war, have to replace and substitute that natural gas from some other country.
00:25:33.000What's the alternative to natural gas delivered by pipeline from Russia?
00:25:40.000Well, it's an alternative called liquefied natural gas, which is sent on cargo ships from the United States.
00:25:47.000So who do you think would be the likely culprit?
00:25:49.000Russia, who built the pipeline and can turn them off, or the United States, who will now reap the benefit of supplying the alternative to the gas sent through the pipelines, and who opposed the Nord Stream 2 pipeline for as long as it was considered and constructed and finished,
00:26:10.000And who will now draw Germany closer into its embrace now that German and Russian trade will not bring them closer together.
00:26:24.000Well, obviously it's the United States.
00:26:27.000And everybody seems to agree with that.
00:26:42.000A Polish minister and member of the European Parliament, Radoslaw Sikorski,
00:26:49.000Said thank you USA on Tuesday alongside a photo of the massive gas leak in the waters of the Baltic Sea.
00:26:57.000Sikorsky later tweeted in Polish, the damage to Nord Stream means that Russia will have to talk to the countries controlling the Brotherhood and Yamal gas pipelines, which are Ukraine and Poland, if it wishes to continue delivering gas to Europe.
00:28:47.000Like I said last week, this isn't a proxy war.
00:28:51.000When you're supplying, when you're training the troops, when you're giving them the guns, you're giving them the artillery, and the missiles, and the stingers, and you're giving them the intelligence, and the coordinates of the targets, and you're giving them direction, and you're blowing up their pipelines, and you're sanctioning their banks, and you're blocking their foreign currency reserves,
00:29:16.000And when you're supporting other countries on your border starting wars like Tajikistan and Azerbaijan, you're at war!
00:30:09.000And Ukrainians, trained by Americans, funded by Americans, armed by Americans, given direction by American officers, are fighting Russians.
00:30:19.000Americans are giving the coordinates for the Ukrainians to shoot down Russian ships.
00:30:26.000And they're providing logistics and support for Ukrainian counterattacks against the Russians.
00:30:32.000And the Russians know this, and we know this.
00:30:35.000I don't think the American public broadly understands the extent of our involvement.
00:30:40.000I don't think they understand how far we're involved in it.
00:30:43.000And the only reason why America isn't attacking Russia on Russian soil, and Russia's not attacking America on American soil, and why these declarations of war have not been announced, is because both parties are really still coming to terms with this.
00:30:58.000You've seen these escalations, which have really gone back eight years.
00:31:03.000It really goes back to 2014 when we did a coup on Russia's border and they invaded and these ceasefire agreements that were drawn up between the Russian-backed separatists and Donbass and the Kiev government between 2014 and 2022
00:31:20.000All along, the United States was building up the Ukrainian army.
00:31:24.000The United States and NATO were building up the Ukrainian army, giving them money, giving them lethal aid, giving them Turkey selling them drones, building up their strength so they could eventually counterattack Russia, and then become part of NATO, and become part of the European Union.
00:31:41.000And 2022 is only the continuation, it's only a continuation of that escalation of those hostilities.
00:31:52.000And then since the conflict broke out, since Russia assembled its troops on the border, and made their threats, and made their ultimatum, and then moved in, and the special military operation started, it has only escalated ever since.
00:32:09.000People think it's just this tit-for-tat.
00:33:02.000And this is sort of a nice segue into the next subject.
00:33:06.000As these four territories are annexed by Russia, that's an escalation too, because now the war goes from fighting Russia directly, but kind of indirectly in another country, to we're directly attacking claimed Russian territory.
00:33:23.000We're directly attacking Russian people and Russian territory that's claimed by Russia.
00:33:37.000We're in this situation where it's not static.
00:33:44.000It's moving closer and closer towards what we're gonna be bombing Russia and Russia's gonna be bombing us and nuclear weapons may be deployed like it's not a joke and that's been part of the conversation from the beginning that's what kicked all this off was Zelensky went to the Munich Security Conference in February and said
00:34:03.000He said that according to the, uh, what was it?
00:36:25.000So you've got this animal, you've got this psychopath in Kiev on the border with Russia with 200,000 troops surrounding him that they're gonna get a nuclear arsenal.
00:36:38.000And then Russia announces in the special military operation on February 24th, he said that we'll use every mean to protect Russia.
00:36:46.000We're gonna conduct a special military operation to protect Russian people and these other goals.
00:38:19.000The National Security Council and the top brass in the Pentagon and the DoD, they're the ones calling the shots on this.
00:38:25.000It is totally outside of the White House's control.
00:38:29.000It is totally outside of Joe Biden's control.
00:38:31.000He could not exert restraint if he wanted to, if he were even capable.
00:38:37.000That's why it would have been different.
00:38:39.000If Trump were president, because he is energetic and because he's mentally there, and also because he resists war, he could have brought these people to heel.
00:38:48.000He could have brought NATO and Washington to heel.
00:38:51.000Germany and France and Italy, they did not want this conflict.
00:38:55.000The continent did not want this conflict.
00:38:57.000It is London, which is up with the Washington cartel, they're the ones that wanted the war.
00:39:04.000London and Washington wanted the war with Russia.
00:39:07.000And the one guy that could have stopped it was Donald Trump.
00:39:36.000April 2017, you can go back, it was Nikki Haley, who was the UN ambassador at the time, reluctantly I'm sure, said we're no longer pursuing regime change.
00:39:45.000Mike Pompeo, who was the then, well I guess he was the CIA director, it was Rex Tillerson, who was the Secretary of State, said we're no longer pursuing regime change.
00:40:51.000And they're playing a very dangerous game with all of our lives.
00:40:54.000It wouldn't have happened under Trump.
00:40:56.000And remember, this would have happened, by the way, in the first term.
00:41:01.000I don't know if you recall, but this saber-rattling with Russia began long before the Russian collusion narrative about Trump.
00:41:08.000It was October 2016, when Biden, the then-Vice President, came out and said that he would retaliate against Russia for these so-called cyber-attacks.
00:41:20.000And if Clinton got in, this probably would have happened four years earlier.
00:41:25.000Trump could have stayed in in 2020, but we got screwed over by the GOP.
00:41:29.000We got screwed over by the mail-in ballots.
00:41:33.000And now we're all gonna reap the consequence.
00:43:41.000It says, quote, the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics, along with Kherson region and part of Zaporizhia region in southern Ukraine, have voted to join Russia in referendums that were held between September 23rd and 27th.
00:43:57.000In Luhansk, more than 98% of voters have supported the idea to join Russia, according to official figures, which have all the ballots counted.
00:44:07.000Donetsk has shown similar results with more than 99% of voters supporting the move.
00:44:12.000Both Zaporizhia and Kherson regions have processed all the ballots by late Tuesday with 93% and 87% of voters respectively backing the split from Ukraine and reunification with Russia.
00:45:48.000They go on the city square and burn the village down, and then they tear down the statues and say, and they take off their clothes, and guys and guys are kissing, and girls and girls are kissing, and they're all fat, and they say, this is what democracy looks like.
00:46:04.000No, this is what democracy looks like!
00:49:58.000If these people want to break away, if these people want to secede because they're being given the systematic racism by the government, and I'm not the one to say it's justified because of systemic racism or something, but it does add a layer of hypocrisy.
00:50:16.000And that's not the main angle I go with because I don't really care that much.
00:50:19.000I'm more interested in the strategy behind it, the politics of it.
00:50:23.000But it is a little bit rich because the United States derives its soft power from its moral high ground in saying that, you know, we're a democracy and we're for human rights and we're for liberalism.
00:50:34.000And they're backing this regime, which is by definition Russophobic.
00:50:39.000They're backing a country that has these historic cleavages based on ethnicity and religion and other factors across the river, and a country which has really been created over the centuries with these weird add-ons and administrative flukes.
00:50:58.000Crimea should have never been part of Ukraine.
00:51:00.000It was given to Ukraine by Khrushchev in the 50s.
00:51:04.000Now Crimea must be part of Ukraine until the end of time?
00:51:09.000The only reason that Ukraine is its own country is because of how the Soviet Union was organized under Lenin in 1922, and by Joseph Stalin, who was the Secretary of the nations, of the countries within the Soviet Union.
00:51:26.000So point being is it's this big fluke.
00:51:30.000And anyway, that's really besides the point.
00:51:32.000It's a country that's deeply divided with these ethnic tensions and what we're there backing up is clearly born out of nothing other than naked strategic interest is the point I'm trying to make.
00:51:45.000The only reason they're backing this government in this complex situation where arguably the government's in the wrong there.
00:51:50.000The Kiev government is abusive and racist and so on.
00:51:55.000The only reason we're doing it is because of naked political self-interest.
00:52:00.000But we're going to tell the world that it's about standing up against dictatorship.
00:52:47.000And then you go in on something like this, where Russia invades, and they have these referendums, and now of course the Western media is going to come out and say, oh, well that vote was rigged.
00:53:35.000Freest and fairest election in history.
00:53:37.000Half the ballots, they solicit them by sending them in the mail.
00:53:41.000In other words, the government drops it off at the House, and then it shows up at a Dropbox, and they count the vote, and they don't check?
00:53:49.000They don't audit the signature, they don't audit any of the information?
00:53:55.000If you say that's rigged, you're horrible and no good.
00:55:22.000They say, oh, we need another round of voting, which is not in the Constitution.
00:55:27.000They hold another round of voting, and then the Western-backed leader gets in, whose name I forget.
00:55:34.000Then they hold another election and Yanukovych gets re-elected.
00:55:37.000He's the most trusted politician in the country, the favorite, and then everybody says, he's a Russian stooge, this country's rigged, blah blah blah.
00:55:46.000So they overthrow him in 2014 with a straight-up revolution and they get this new government with Poroshenko, I believe.
00:55:54.000And then they say, yep, that was democratic, what a liberal democracy, this is the best thing ever.
00:55:59.000So if these, think of it, if these territories said that they voted to stay with Ukraine, the United States would say it's valid.
00:56:07.000But if they vote to join Russia, they say it's not valid.
00:56:11.000They said the referendum in Crimea was not valid, even though that was a, that's a Russian peninsula.
00:56:19.000And again, I'm less interested in pointing the finger and saying, you're a hypocrite, you don't mean what you say, you're a liar.
00:56:28.000What I am interested in is demonstrating to people that
00:56:32.000We've just got to drop the the rose tinted glasses, the ideological coloring of all this and just look at it in terms of just the politics of it.
00:56:41.000Like I'm in this debate with Destiny about it months ago and he's telling me the United States doesn't interfere in other countries business like Russia does.
00:56:50.000It's like what planet are you living on?
00:57:16.000And it says, quote, the process of integrating new regions into Russia may take some time as it requires the approval of the country's parliament and the president.
00:57:24.000But Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Friday that he was convinced it will be fast enough.
00:57:31.000Under the Russian Constitution and the federal law on the accession of new constituent members, the procedure includes several steps.
00:57:39.000Once the regions willing to become part of the Russian Federation submit their proposals to Moscow, the President should inform Parliament and the government on the matter.
00:57:49.000Moscow warned earlier that if the Donbass Republics and the two southern Ukrainian regions united with Russia, it would consider any attempts by Kiev to retake them as a tax on its own land.
00:58:02.000The EU and the US have already called the voting a sham and the Secretary of State said that the regions will never be recognized as part of Russian territory.
00:58:12.000He added that Kiev had every right to take them back.
00:58:17.000So all these regions are now part of Russia.
00:59:20.000So you can see here, this is what's under Russian control and this white area is what is claimed by Russia but is still under control of the Ukrainians.
01:00:35.000And other non-Russians, people from Chechnya and Syria, and other mercenaries who have been doing much of the fighting for the Russians.
01:00:43.000Now that the Russians have conscripted these 300,000 reserve troops, and they're gonna train them, and these guys will be Russians, they will be rotated into the front lines gradually.
01:00:55.000And there's sort of two things changing here.
01:00:57.000It's now a Russian army, which is much larger.
01:01:00.000The initial invading force was 150,000.
01:01:15.000It's way more people and they're Russians.
01:01:18.000And the other thing is now that these four territories have been annexed, now the fighting is going to occur within these territories.
01:01:27.000In other words, when they were considered part of Ukraine or independent, Zaporizhia and Kursan were considered part of Ukraine, Donetsk and Luhansk were considered independent states,
01:01:40.000The fighting up until this point has theoretically been happening in not Russia, in Ukraine or in these two breakaway republics.
01:01:48.000So Russia's fighting a special military operation in another country for other countries, for the Ukrainian Russians or for the ethnic Russians in the breakaway republics in Donbass.
01:02:03.000Now the fighting is different because now you've got Russians fighting theoretically in Russia.
01:02:09.000Now that Russia's claiming the battlefield, now the battlefield is within Russia.
01:02:14.000So it goes from fighting a war in Ukraine for ethnic Russians in Ukraine to fighting to control Russian territory claimed by Russia.
01:02:39.000So now you've got NATO troops fighting Russians in Russia.
01:02:45.000Not fighting Russians in Ukraine, to defend Ukraine, ostensibly.
01:02:49.000And similarly, it's not Russians going to defend the interests of ethnic Russians abroad, they're fighting to secure control of their new territory.
01:03:55.000So the war is about to change fundamentally, and this is all going to happen in the next couple weeks.
01:03:59.000These regions, they finished the vote today, they're all set to join.
01:04:04.000It should be approved in very short order within this week, I've heard some say.
01:04:08.000Within this week, this next week, they will join Russia and officially be part of Russia.
01:04:15.000And these 300,000 conscripts are being sent out there,
01:04:19.000So it looks like Russia is not messing around anymore.
01:04:22.000And that, of course, is coupled with what's going on with energy.
01:04:26.000You've got the $300,000 coming in, Russia has claimed the battlefield, and now the European countries supplying all this stuff, and who are participating in the sanctions regime and depriving Russia of the revenue for the gas, they're about to enter a very cold winter where they don't have enough energy, where energy demand will exceed supply.
01:04:49.000And they've really just achieved a checkmate here.
01:04:52.000What does a victory condition look like at this point?
01:04:56.000Do you think that Russia's going to claim these territories through a referendum and then Ukraine is somehow going to recapture all of them and Russia will ever accept that?
01:05:38.000Putin and the defense minister came out there and said, we'll nuke you to defend ourselves, and also, we're only mobilizing 1% of what we could mobilize, which is 25 million Russians with military experience.
01:05:55.000And we're annexing these four territories.
01:05:59.000And what did the United States do in response to this limitless escalation?