00:00:52.000More than 200,000 protesters gathered in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv today, furious over the government's refusal to sign a trade agreement with the European Union.
00:01:01.980Police use tear gas and clubs to beat back demonstrators who surrounded President Viktor Yanukovych's office.
00:01:08.120They are demanding his resignation, saying the government is corrupt and too tied to Russia.
00:01:13.260The United States stands with you in your search for justice, for human dignity, for security, for economic health, and for the European future that you have chosen and that you deserve.
00:01:29.180After those deadly protests, the government firing back, the president tonight is in hiding, and just look at the images coming in now.
00:01:35.320Families wandering the grounds of his luxury home outside the capital today, taking turns playing on his private golf course, helping themselves to his golf clubs.
00:01:43.260And now the former prime minister is now freed from prison where the president had put her, reaching out to her supporters right there.
00:01:49.940Ukraine's billionaire presidential candidate Petro Poroshenko has declared victory.
00:01:55.320An exit poll suggests he got enough votes to avoid a potentially divisive runoff.
00:02:01.140A comedian with no political experience has won the first round of Ukraine's presidential elections.
00:02:06.840Vladimir Zelensky came in comfortably ahead of the incumbent Petro Poroshenko.
00:02:11.920They'll face a runoff vote in three weeks.
00:02:14.700Volodymyr Zelenskyy's win is a political game changer.
00:10:39.040So we're doing these tales of regime change and we're walking through, you know, why it was, at least in this first part, that the U.S. was so focused on Russia.
00:10:48.760And I guess my point is it wasn't the U.S. in, you know, in the wake of the Cold War.
00:10:52.640It was the Clintons and it was NATO and the idea that NATO would actually become this new sort of international force for Brussels, for this globalism, which is the system of globalism is what we're talking about.
00:11:08.020They didn't have the name for it back then. And that NATO would become essentially the military force in any country that didn't want to go along with this, like the Balkans or Yugoslavia, was basically smashed, was smashed under NATO force and was told that they had to go along with this.
00:11:22.860Now, people might say I'm crazy, but Mike, does this follow with what we see in terms of history?
00:11:27.920Actually, it's exactly what George Soros wrote in a book called The Future of NATO in 1995,
00:11:36.540as exactly what NATO's role in the world should be, as the institutional force that would be capable of effectively dominating the 21st century
00:11:51.780and serving to essentially route out political opposition inside of post-Soviet Europe.
00:12:02.380This is written about, if you go to some of my, I think there's videos on my X timeline breaking it down,
00:12:09.840but if anyone just goes and looks up George Soros' The Future of NATO,
00:12:13.980I believe it was 1995 that he wrote that, it may have been 93, but I think it was 95.
00:12:18.720Well, and Benz, we should even say, and I'm remiss for not even saying it at first, that it's out of this sort of post-communist soup, this milieu, this is where Soros comes from.
00:12:30.060This is where Soros gets his power in this—and Soros becomes probably the first oligarch that the Clintons begin to work with.
00:12:39.120There's others, Viktor Pinchuk and a variety of others, but he arises out of Hungary, and he says, I'm going to work with the West.
00:12:45.780I'm going to work with the Clintons to create a new system.
00:12:50.380This is where George Soros originally got his power from.
00:12:54.740And so to understand Soros the way we talk about him today, you've got to go all the
00:13:12.060I have it on my X timeline, but it's George Soros openly bragging that the Soros Empire was built out of the ashes of the Soviet Empire and that as the Soviet Empire receded, the Soros Empire picked up the pieces was his phrase.0.99
00:13:31.040And this is quite literally true. The assets of the Soviet government and the European governments that were under Soviet effective vassalage were quite literally sold off to the George Soros Management Fund.
00:13:49.480This happened inside of Russia. It happened in Ukraine. This was done in tandem with USAID
00:13:57.800in the United States, as well as institutions like the Harvard Institute for International
00:14:02.520Development. But it was the George Soros Open Society Foundation that played a key role in
00:14:10.680actually breaking up the Soviet Union inside of Hungary, inside of Poland, inside of Romania.
00:14:19.480And this was done in tandem with the U.S. government, with the National Endowment for Democracy, with USAID, with the U.S. embassies in the region.
00:14:29.160The same way that in the United States, Soros incubates these student groups and young people and unemployed people and criminals.
00:14:38.600The same was done in the 1980s, and you can argue that it had a positive result on the world in that case.
00:14:50.080Whatever your view on the morality of the tactics used was, there was brutal Soviet domination in those countries.
00:14:58.500But the fact is, what ended up happening was power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
00:15:05.700And Soros absolutely corrupted these countries, and we are now living in the aftermath of it as these rule of law programs were set up.
00:15:13.020And let me just point this out, too, because there's a lot of people that I see when they encounter some of these histories, they'll say, wait a minute, so Soros was a good guy at first, et cetera.
00:15:23.200Well, it's almost like saying that you have communism, but then you also have globalism, and neither of them are actually producing freedom.
00:15:33.060And they are not open societies, as George Soros calls them.
00:15:37.980They are, in fact, a different form of totalitarianism.
00:15:43.980It is shadow communism that is put under the guise of globalism and the guise of the World Economic Forum.
00:15:50.320And they create all these supranational institutions and organizations to be able to claim that this is the new freedom.
00:15:57.760But we know, we know from the fruits of it that it is not freedom.
00:16:01.660So just because you were against the Soviet Union doesn't mean you're not peddling a new form of communism.
00:16:07.020It's almost like, you know, it's almost like the difference between the communism and the democratic socialism, if you will.
00:16:12.980Right. No, that's exactly true. There's nothing open about the open society concept.
00:16:19.280When you dissent, look how fast the system snaps shut around you.
00:16:23.840Just today, as we're recording this, it was announced that multiple journalists inside the European Union have been sanctioned for merely suggesting that Russia was going to win the war.
00:16:38.700These are journalists for simply having an opinion about the war.
00:16:42.800There's nothing open about the open society.
00:17:12.840Now, and Ukraine was the crown jewel of these maneuvers because Ukraine has $14 trillion worth of natural resources.
00:17:23.580It is the gateway between East and West.
00:17:26.040It is the main point of transit for gas, natural gas's entry into Europe.
00:17:32.380It has unbelievable quantities of wheat and agriculture and arable land.
00:17:38.320It has the third largest petroleum reserves in all of Europe.
00:17:45.180It is just an incredible bounty, as well as hosting the only warm water port to Russia through the Black Sea and Crimea.
00:17:55.120So tactically, if you want to control Russia, having control over Ukraine gets you there.
00:18:01.380That's in Russia, $75 trillion worth of natural resources.
00:18:04.900And for a brief time, the United States foreign policy establishment had a kind of vassal state control over Russia in the early to mid 1990s at the same time that Ukraine was having its so-called opening.
00:18:20.180Now, there were two color revolutions that were done to Ukraine, first in 2004 through the Orange Revolution, and then again in 2014 through the Euromaidan Square Revolution, which is now being rebranded as the so-called Revolution of Dignity.
00:18:37.860But if you go to BBC News and you look at the before and after pictures of the Euromaidan square,
00:18:47.240I think nothing quite shows in such vivid colors as the before and after pictures
00:18:53.800of what the square around the parliament building of Ukraine looked like
00:18:58.300before and after the George Floyd-style protests that were galvanized by John McCain
00:19:05.240and by Mike Mike we're coming up on a quick break but that's exactly where we're going to go in the
00:19:10.760very next segment Jack Posobiec Mike Benz the shadow over Ukraine tales of regime change
00:19:17.940in the very early morning unidentified shooters opened fire on the protesters
00:19:24.360and on law enforcement tensions were very high and both sides were furious
00:19:30.700All right, Jack Soker back with Mike Benz, shadow over Ukraine, tales of regime change.
00:19:37.640Benz, talk to me about the Maidan revolution.
00:19:41.460There's a lot of people who have heard about this.
00:19:43.600There's a lot of people who have, you know, heard reference to it.
00:19:47.900But what was it like going back to really the end of 2013, beginning of 2014, when all of this kicked off?0.86
00:19:55.620If folks remember the scale and scope of the terror that happened during Black Lives Matter in the summer of 2020, imagine if that Black Lives Matter lawless mob going around looting, throwing Molotov cocktails in police cars, burning down police precincts.0.80
00:20:18.620Imagine if that had actually toppled the U.S. government and installed, without an election, a new head of state in America.0.85
00:20:27.960That is what was done in Ukraine in 2014 in the Maidan Square.
00:20:33.600Now, what had happened was there was a tug of war in Ukraine between the U.S. government and Ukraine's democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych.
00:20:45.320Viktor Yanukovych was not a Russian vassal leader.
00:20:51.400Russia at the time was split between a largely Ukrainian ethnic, more pro-EU, pro-Euro-Atlantic axis west, and a Russian ethnic, more pro-Russian east.
00:21:14.060And the two basically demographic blocks of the country resulted in there being a mostly middle-of-the-way president in the form of Viktor Yanukovych, who tried to play nice with both sides.
00:21:30.860That is, while the still-maintained gas transit and a sort of cozy economic relationship with Russia, still signed multi-billion-dollar deals with every manner of Western company, including a $10 billion deal with Chevron, partnered with Naftagas, the main gas giant in Ukraine, which is responsible for most of Ukraine's internal revenue.
00:21:58.960a $10 billion gas deal with Shell, the British petroleum giant, as well as many others.
00:22:06.780But at the time, the U.S. government, as well as the Brits, were trying to pull Ukraine into an economic treaty
00:22:14.520that would have foreclosed on effectively any economic activity with Russia.
00:22:21.100And the terms of this were very brutal on Ukraine.
00:22:24.760And Ukraine rejected this deal in late 2013, about December 2013, after dragging its feet for a long time about who it was going to go to prom with effectively in terms of its economic pact.
00:22:42.400Either the West or Russia ultimately decided to sign this economic deal with Russia.
00:22:49.760And within two months of that, the Americans and the Brits organized probably the most significant, other than 9-11, you could argue, the most significant event in 21st century history geopolitically, which was the Maidan Square Revolution, which set in motion the war we are now in today.
00:23:15.860And Ben, let's also point out, let's name some names here, because this wasn't just happening in a vacuum.
00:23:23.400You had people like Victoria Nuland handing out cookies.
00:23:26.140Hillary Clinton was, of course, fanning the flames of this all along as she was.1.00
00:23:30.380She'd stepped down from the Obama administration, but, you know, really setting all this in motion and then then working to run for president.
00:23:38.140So she was extremely blank. Jake Sullivan, who someone was there.
00:23:41.820Tony Blinken, who someone was involved.
00:23:43.460But we look at some of the names that are on the ground.
00:23:46.080It was a little bit bipartisan, wasn't it, in terms of Americans who traveled over there?
00:23:55.380There's footage you can look up of him actually recording out of his window in Ukraine
00:24:02.060as the Ukrainian rioters were taking over the parliament building in the square.
00:24:08.720You can see him looking out his window.
00:24:10.800and they appear to be toasting to it, him and Chris Murphy, the senator from Connecticut, I believe.
00:24:19.740It was very much a bipartisan thing, as is not uncommon in these regime change operations.
00:24:27.440This is how you have institutions like the National Endowment for Democracy on the ground
00:24:31.260with both of its political cores, the NDI for Democrats, the IRI for Republicans,
00:24:38.520The National Dental for Democracy was set up by the CIA in 1982, 1983, and was even defunded by Congress in 1984 for being too much of a CIA front.
00:24:52.020But you had economic stakeholders from the donor class of both parties who had a vested interest in taking over Ukraine, in buying it up, in privatizing its assets, in taking control of its natural resources.
00:25:10.460And this is quickly what was installed in the post-2014 Ukraine government.
00:25:15.600You mentioned Victoria Nuland, who at the time was the assistant secretary for Europe and Eurasian affairs at the U.S. State Department, as well as Jeffrey Pyatt, who at the time was the head of the U.S. Embassy in Kiev.
00:25:26.720And Victoria Nuland bragged on tape that in December 2013, as she's standing in front of a sign for Chevron and Exxon Mobil, she's literally right in back of her are signs for Exxon and Chevron.
00:25:46.200as she's talking in 2013 about the USAID funding Ukrainian civil society institutions to the tune
00:25:56.800of $5 billion. Now, those are assets. That's called capacity building. Think of it like
00:26:04.580raising a mercenary army, $5 billion, which goes a very long way in a low GDP country like Ukraine
00:26:12.160towards being able to bribe people, towards being able to mobilize people to take action.
00:26:18.040This is what Jeffrey Sachs, the Harvard economist now at Columbia, said when he was brought to
00:26:26.220Ukraine as an economic advisor in the immediate aftermath, the week after the Maidan coup,
00:26:32.900that he was taken around to tour the Maidan Square and was told about how USAID had
00:26:40.620effectively bust in protesters to the capital. This was a playbook that worked very effectively
00:26:50.320in Serbia. You can watch a documentary called Taking Down a Dictator that was produced,
00:26:56.380I believe, by PBS, which shows in granular detail how these operations are logistically
00:27:03.640coordinated. They were showing the operation because they were celebrating it. But of course,
00:27:09.420If we call it out and are critical of it, they will claim that we are conspiracy theorists and none of it happened.
00:29:15.420Well, so on the topic of the intelligence state, the New York Times actually published
00:29:21.680that the very morning after the Maidan Square toppled Viktor Yanukovych and installed Yatsenyuk
00:29:33.040in Ukraine, he was not elected. The new head of state was literally selected
00:29:38.580in a joint phone call by Victoria Nuland and Jeff Pyatt, who in very explicit terms
00:29:45.520picked the next president of Ukraine, not the Ukrainian people. But the very next day,
00:29:52.180the New York Times, as they published in a piece, I believe it was last year or two years ago,
00:30:00.540they published a reconstruction of Ukraine's intelligence state. They did this as the
00:30:07.480funding for the CIA was potentially under pressure in Ukraine. But what they said is that the new
00:30:14.040head of Ukrainian intelligence walked into the building of Ukraine's intelligence center
00:30:21.460the day after the coup was complete, and the lights were off, and documents were scattered
00:30:28.600everywhere. And the first thing he did is he placed two phone calls, one to the CIA chief of
00:30:36.000station and one to the MI6 chief of station in Ukraine. And a three-way partnership was struck
00:30:44.420the very day after the coup to rebuild Ukraine's intelligence state from the ground up as a
00:30:50.700three-way partnership between Ukraine, the CIA, and MI6. So not only did the Obama administration
00:31:01.100and the British government overthrow the democratically elected government of Ukraine.
00:31:05.980But then they immediately took control through the CIA and MI6 of the intelligence services
00:31:13.740in Ukraine from the ground up. Now, it's important to, I guess, get a granular view of the terror
00:31:23.080that takes place during the key moments of a color revolution. Not only was $5 billion
00:31:30.460dollars funneled to the right sector mobs and protesters who took to the streets in ukraine
00:31:36.980what is what you also had sanctions hold on hold on what what is right sector when you mention
00:31:43.460right sector who are they what do they believe well the the problem is i think you're probably
00:31:50.900getting to is that many of these elements have been associated with nazi elements in ukraine
00:31:56.360And it was and but but the right sector was is essentially a hard right nationalist movement in Ukraine that comes out of this anti-Soviet milieu.
00:32:09.180There was a kind of Nazi versus communist civil war playing out in not just during World War Two, but in the aftermath is there was a struggle between hard right elements in Europe and hard left elements in Europe.
00:32:26.360And in the same way that the U.S. government backed Islamo-fascist elements like the Mujahideen and Al-Qaeda and ISIS, when it's geopolitically useful, the U.S. government also supported factions like the Azov Battalion and hard right elements.
00:32:46.940Wait, wait, guys, I just want to, I, oh, no, sorry, finish the answer.
00:32:50.620of the right sector in Ukraine, because they were so virulently anti-Soviet, it was deemed
00:32:58.120as being useful as a battering ram to take down Ukraine's democratically elected government as
00:33:04.760a pro-Russian government. And the only thing I wanted to add is that, so, you know, for folks
00:33:12.400watching these episodes, Mike hasn't seen the other, you know, go pull back the fourth curtain
00:33:17.480here a little bit to break the fourth wall, as they say. Mike hasn't seen the other episodes
00:33:21.460because that's exactly what we talk about in those episodes as well. So and in fact,
00:33:27.700the one in Afghanistan was to take out the Russians. And so we took this element that we0.92
00:33:34.380said, oh, this can be a good, useful proxy for us, a proxy group. And yes, they may have these
00:33:40.280these radical Islamic beliefs, but who cares? Let's prop them up and fund them and arm them1.00
00:33:46.540and we can use them against Russia, and then we can do the same thing.0.88
00:33:50.320And by the way, all of this, just go look at the timeframes.
00:33:53.660This was happening almost concurrently with the Operation Timber Sycamore,
00:33:58.180which is going on in Syria, where you're seeing the same elements go up against Assad,
00:35:02.120And they never considered what the secondary consequences or effects might be.
00:35:06.560I just wanted to pause. Sorry, Mike, didn't mean to break your your flow there, but it's it's just so endemic.
00:35:12.520And here you pointed out, even when you haven't even seen the other episodes.
00:35:16.320Oh, I'm glad you bring that up, because that was part of the strategic calculus.
00:35:20.000Operation Timber Sycamore. Yes. The CIA operation to arm effectively ISIS and Al Qaeda elements who are now in power today.
00:35:31.220Mohammed al-Jelani was literally a ISIS and al-Qaeda commander being trained and funded by the Central Intelligence Agency during Timber Sycamore, was from 2011 to 2016.
00:35:44.580And part of the strategic calculus around Ukraine was to weaken Russia's economic muscle so it couldn't support Assad.
00:35:52.460This is part of the economic deprivation strategy.
00:35:56.720It was Russia was providing S-300 and S-400 air defense systems, which made a bombs over Baghdad campaign not feasible in Syria in the way that it was in Iraq.
00:36:10.940But what was happening in the Maidan Square was a you had 90 percent of Ukrainian media, 90, 90 percent of Ukrainian media institutions were funded by USAID.
00:36:26.940So the media inside Ukraine was all telling these people, your government is illegitimate.
00:36:33.700These these these riots are mostly peaceful protests.
00:36:38.200Of course, they were armed. There were snipers shooting people.
00:36:43.000There were everything was set on fire.
00:36:46.240It looks like it looks like a total incineration of the main parliament square.
00:36:52.140That was if you look at the before and after pictures, it's just it looks like Minneapolis, what was done to the the capital city of Ukraine at this time.
00:37:04.100Now, meanwhile, everyone was being psyoped and gaslit into these into the idea that these were being these were peaceful protests or mostly peaceful protests.
00:37:15.200And that cudgel, the idea that these were peaceful protests, which they absolutely were not in the same way that the George Floyd riots were not, was used as a economic cudgel.
00:37:26.740There's a very important linchpin to framing violence as being peaceful protests, because that means if a government cracks down on the protests, that can now be contextualized as a human rights violation because they are peaceful.
00:37:43.380And this is exactly what the U.S. government did to Ukraine.
00:37:46.740As it was funding the riots, the U.S. government threatened sanctions on the democratically elected government of Ukraine
00:37:55.200if they fought back, if they used police or military security forces to defend itself from the riots the U.S. government was funding.
00:38:04.120It was a hostile coup. It was a hostile coup, and it needs to be described in that way.
00:38:13.380As the brutal war between Russia and Ukraine rages on, fierce fighting persists across
00:38:23.440multiple fronts. In a grim milestone, recent reports indicate that over one million lives
00:38:30.760have been lost since the conflict escalated in February 2022.
00:38:36.420Jack Rosovic, we're back here. Tales of regime change, shadow over Ukraine. And so
00:38:42.840I want to fast forward now in our final segment to where we're currently at. So, look, I've had
00:38:49.500the opportunity of a lifetime, and I want to say I'm honored to be considered to have the ability
00:38:57.340for the Trump administration to have a front row seat to history in the making. Secretary Besant,
00:39:05.060Secretary of Treasury, took me on a train all the way to Kiev, night train to Kiev,
00:39:10.020and traveled with him to meet with Zelensky at the presidential palace of Ukraine
00:39:14.820to be able to talk with him the opening stages of Trump's attempts
00:39:19.520to end the current Ukraine war regarding the mineral deal.
00:39:22.780Then President Trump himself asked if I would accompany the Air Force One
00:39:28.500on the way to the Anchorage Accords, the sit down with Putin
00:39:33.620that was held in Anchorage, Alaska, the first time a Russian president
00:39:37.620has ever set foot or any Russian leader has ever set foot in Alaska, even going back to the time
00:39:43.600when Alaska itself was under Russian control, Russian imperial control. And these negotiations,
00:39:52.840as they've been progressing, as they've been continuing, that we need to understand that
00:40:00.280when we're talking to the Russians, now this is key, this is key. When I say we, I mean the0.77
00:40:04.920Americans. We need to understand that this is their perception of events. Now, you can disagree
00:40:12.860and you can say, well, you know, you know, Russia shouldn't have done that and they shouldn't look
00:40:17.800at it that way. And that's fine. But you need to understand this is the perspective from which
00:40:23.080they are coming. And if you disagree and discount and disavow their perspective, then guess what?
00:40:30.120You won't have any idea what you're doing. You won't be able to come to any solution.
00:40:35.940So, Benz, I'll bring you back in here. When we talk to the Russians, when the U.S. is going through these negotiations, these are still the red lines for the Russians when it comes down to it,
00:40:47.300Because they don't want to see something like this happen again, where Ukraine could then be used as a launch pad for either a direct invasion or military attack, obviously, into Russia, or even worse, another Maidan-style revolution being launched in a place like Moscow or, say, St. Petersburg, where we remember that the original Bolshevik revolution all the way back to 1917 was a German battle.
00:41:17.300revolution, a color revolution, if you will, that started in St. Petersburg.
00:41:23.660Well, that's exactly right. And it was during the Obama administration that USAID was kicked
00:41:27.920out of the country. The National Endowment for Democracy was kicked out of the country
00:41:32.100precisely for fomenting color revolutions, tactics inside of Moscow. The U.S. government
00:41:39.280was supporting Alexei Navalny, who was organizing riots inside of Ukraine. He was even
00:41:47.280brought to the Yale Jackson School, the Maurice Greenberg World Fellows Program. Maurice Greenberg
00:41:53.880was asked by Bill Clinton to be the Central Intelligence Agency Director. This is literally
00:41:59.640a CIA incubator program that we brought over. Hillary Clinton openly promoted this activity
00:42:08.360as Secretary of State inside of Russia. You had the U.S. government funding through the National
00:42:13.900Endowment for Democracy, the Pussy Riot street protests. Pussy Riot was this music group that0.70
00:42:20.600was trying to incite violent protests against Putin inside of Russia. She met with Anthony
00:42:29.680Blinken at the U.S. State Department. They were supported directly by the U.S. Embassy,
00:42:36.660by the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA front. That's what contemporaneous with the
00:42:43.360Ukraine coup. But Russia is obviously not going to forget this. This is existential for the
00:42:49.380Russian government, as it would be for any reasonable government. I am all for U.S.0.88
00:42:55.060influence and global leadership. But when you fight this dirty, when you stoop to these tactics,
00:43:02.160there is blowback. There is always blowback. There is global resentment. And the people
00:43:08.180on the streets remember it. To this day, Jack, when we mentioned Black Lives Matter
00:43:13.980and the terror that we all felt in the summer of 2020, we are now over five years past that,0.89
00:43:19.720and it still feels like a fresh memory. You can imagine what that feels like for the people of
00:43:26.680Ukraine, for the people of Russia in the aftermath of that, and the aftermath created that situation
00:43:34.060we're in now. What happened after 2014, after the Maidan Square coup was a counter coup. The entire
00:43:41.420eastern half of the country broke away, did not respect the newly installed voted government,
00:43:47.820which was not voted on. So Luhansk and Donetsk declared themselves breakaway republics. This
00:43:53.740would be like, for example, if Black Lives Matter toppled the U.S. government and installed
00:43:59.820like, you know, Letitia James or something as president without a vote if Florida broke away
00:44:06.060and Texas broke away. And and then Crimea voted in a Democratic referendum to to join the Russian
00:44:15.740Federation formally. This would be like, you know, Florida and Texas deciding that they are now a part
00:44:22.600of, I don't know, Hungary or Poland or something as a way of creating a kind of. Here's here's
00:44:29.160Here's one of the ones that I like to say, let's say somehow, all right, you know, somehow like Texas gets taken, you know, breaks away from the United States and then maybe elements of another country come in and form a socialist revolution there and the socialists take over.
00:44:51.660And I know I know people are saying it wouldn't happen. I get it. But, you know, then they come in and they say, oh, we're going to be signing a deal with the Chinese and the Mexicans so their military can come into Texas.
00:45:04.220The United States would never allow that. They would just never allow that. No serious leader would allow something like that to ever occur.0.99
00:45:12.580They would say this is Texas. This is ridiculous. That is our territory. It has been our territory. We fought for that territory.0.99
00:45:18.940And the Russians, when they look at Ukraine, they say we fought for this territory and lost how many millions in World War Two when they fought to defend Ukraine and push the Nazis out of Ukraine.
00:45:31.620To your point, that's why there's so many of these leave behind groups in in Ukraine in the first place.
00:45:37.500And also there could be an interesting we could do a whole episode on who exactly was funding those leave behind groups and working with them in those places after World War Two, because may have some interesting elements that people might not like to know who was working with the neo-Nazis after 1945 all across Europe.
00:45:58.660But the point being is that's how the Russians see it.
00:46:02.540And if we want to approach these negotiations with any degree of understanding what the other side is trying to say,
00:46:10.660we have to understand that this is their perspective.