RFK Jr. The Defender - July 08, 2023


Next Level Censorship with Aaron Maté

Topics
FBI censors Twitter accounts FBI censorship requests to Twitter
Hosted by
Robert F. Kennedy
Mentioned
Joe Biden Zelensky Mitch McConnell Bill Taylor Tony Blinken Aaron Maté Donbass Lindsey Graham Adam Schiff Sergei Savoko Robert Kagan Stalingrad Maidan Trump Obama George Bush Victoria Nuland Hillary Clinton Sergei Lavrov Carl Gershman and 8 more
Violence In France and Ukraine with Col Douglas Macgregor Murdering the Bees with Dr David Carpenter

Episode Stats


Length

28 minutes

Words per minute

178.73

Word count

5,055

Sentence count

335

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

14

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In 2019, Aaron Maté was awarded the Izzy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Independent Media for his coverage of Russiagate in The Nation Magazine. He was previously a long-time producer of Democracy Now. He s done extraordinary reporting on the Ukraine. And he broke a story that actually involves the FBI and the Ukrainian security agency, the SBU, to censor U.S. journalists and others who criticize the Ukrainian government's policies in the Ukraine war. And he tracked down the man in charge of the censorship project. Aaron Matiello is a writer who publishes at Maté Substack and co-hosts the podcast, Pushback. He s a contributor to Real Clear Politics and the podcast Useful Idiots. In 2019, he was awarded The Izzy Award, for outstanding achievement in independent media. He was also a long time producer of The Nation magazine and has worked at The New York Times, CNN, and The Los Angeles Times. He is a regular contributor to NPR and The Huffington Post, and he is a frequent contributor to The Daily Beast. He's been featured in the New Yorker, The New Republic, and has been featured on CNN, NPR, and other publications. Alex Blumberg's Hot Water, and is a host on the podcast New York Magazine's Hot Girl Problems. His name is Aaron. Thanks to his reporting and his reporting on Russia and the Ukraine, and to his friends at The Daily Caller. and The Daily Wire, and the Weekly Standard, for helping to break the story. the story he broke the story about the censorship efforts of the FBI s cooperation with the Ukrainian intelligence agency, SBU. The SBU and its efforts to censor critics of the opposition to the Ukraine s government. Thank you for your support, Aaron! and for your honesty and your support of the story, and for being brave enough to share it with the world. You can reach Aaron here: . Thanks also to: for his reporting, for the podcast Pushback with Aaron to do the story and for his work at Pushback With Aaron and the Podcast Pushback , and for all the work he did to make this podcasting about this story and more. for all of his support and for this podcast, in this podcast. - - Thank you, for being a friend of the podcast and podcasting - for all his support.

Transcript

Transcripts from "RFK Jr. The Defender" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, I've got another intrepid journalist with us today.
00:00:04.000 Aaron Maté is a writer who publishes at maté.substack.com. 0.71
00:00:11.000 Also, he's the host of Pushback with Aaron Maté and co-host of the podcast Useful Idiots. 0.86
00:00:17.000 He's a contributor to Real Clear Politics.
00:00:20.000 In 2019, he was awarded The Izzy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Independent Media for his coverage of Russiagate in The Nation magazine.
00:00:28.000 He was previously a long-time producer of Democracy Now.
00:00:31.000 He's done extraordinary reporting, very, very useful reporting on the Ukraine most recently.
00:00:39.000 And he broke a story that actually where he is one of the stars of this story.
00:00:44.000 He's not only the writer, but also the subject of a story where the FBI And correct me if I'm wrong, Aaron, the FBI was cooperating with the Ukrainian security agency, the SBU, to censor U.S. journalists and others.
00:01:02.000 I think there was 163 people on the list that the Ukrainian government wanted censored.
00:01:07.000 Who were criticizing U.S. policies in the Ukrainian war.
00:01:11.000 So this is like, this is just a new pioneering new territory of censorship, which is, of course, what we all knew was going to happen once they knew they had the power to censor stuff.
00:01:24.000 This is kind of the logical conclusion that they get to go to war and nobody gets to criticize it.
00:01:30.000 So tell us what happened.
00:01:31.000 Yeah, I mean, I thought if I was listening to the Biden administration that we're fueling this proxy war in Ukraine to defend democracy.
00:01:38.000 So I guess this means now that their definition of democracy means censoring views that criticize the proxy war, because that's what happened here.
00:01:46.000 In March of 2022, so just weeks after Russia invaded, the FBI sends Twitter an email and says, we're attaching a list that we've received from the SBU, the Security Service of Ukraine, that's the premier Ukrainian intelligence agency, for your review.
00:02:04.000 And the FBI says that these accounts are suspected by Ukraine of spreading, quote, fear and disinformation.
00:02:10.000 And the attached list from the SBU is a bunch of Twitter accounts.
00:02:15.000 And the SBU says in a note, please block these accounts and also give us their user data, which means that the SBU via the FBI is asking Twitter to hand over the private information of these Twitter users and they're asking Twitter.
00:02:28.000 And that would mean their date of birth, their phone numbers, and their email addresses.
00:02:33.000 And on that list are a bunch of accounts, including mine.
00:02:37.000 And also a number of other, there's journalists who are from Russia.
00:02:41.000 They work for state media there.
00:02:43.000 There's Russian politicians.
00:02:44.000 There's Ukrainians who are being very critical of their government.
00:02:48.000 A few of them are now in exile.
00:02:49.000 One of them was a senior official under Yanukovych, the former Ukrainian president who was ousted in 2014.
00:02:56.000 And Twitter, in response to this, says, okay, we'll take a look, but just so you know, We have to flag the fact that this list includes Canadian and American journalists.
00:03:04.000 And they mentioned my name as an example.
00:03:06.000 And they basically say, we're not going to suspend journalists unless you can prove they have some sort of deceptive tie to a foreign government such as Russia.
00:03:14.000 And the FBI responds and says, yeah, no, sorry, we have no proof of that.
00:03:18.000 And that's what happened.
00:03:20.000 And Twitter, you know, I'm thankful they didn't follow through on the request to suspend me.
00:03:23.000 But the question is, why is the FBI, our domestic law enforcement agency, why are they assisting a foreign government trying to censor people, including journalists?
00:03:33.000 I didn't realize that that was part of the FBI's mandate, but apparently it is.
00:03:36.000 Yeah, and actually, you did a great job of tracking down FBI agent Kobanitz, who was in charge of the censorship project.
00:03:45.000 And how'd you do that?
00:03:47.000 And what was his response to your queries?
00:03:51.000 Well, it's interesting.
00:03:51.000 I mean, his email address is in that email, so that wasn't hard to contact him.
00:03:55.000 But he is detailed to the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv.
00:03:59.000 So he's working out of Ukraine.
00:04:01.000 And apparently, as a part of his job functions now, he's passing on censorship requests.
00:04:05.000 And so I wrote him a bunch of questions.
00:04:07.000 And my first question was, did you vet this list of accounts before you passed it on to Twitter?
00:04:12.000 And after Twitter told you that this list included journalists and, you know, we're supposed to have something called the First Amendment, Did that spark any reflection on your part, any revision of your policy of assisting in these Ukrainian censorship efforts?
00:04:26.000 He did not respond to me.
00:04:28.000 The FBI responded to me after a while.
00:04:30.000 It took a while to formulate a response.
00:04:32.000 And they said, thank you for your questions.
00:04:34.000 We don't confirm the veracity of our correspondence.
00:04:38.000 So they also declined to answer my question as to whether or not this is now normal for them to assist a foreign government.
00:04:45.000 I know when my father ran the FBI that every FBI agent had to take an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States.
00:04:54.000 Do you think that's still part of the regimen over there?
00:04:58.000 That's a great question.
00:05:01.000 Last I checked, the First Amendment was a part of the Constitution.
00:05:05.000 And look, I mean, it'd be fine to me if there was a debate about this, if the FBI would come out and say, hey, this is what we're doing.
00:05:14.000 It's so important to us to censor people on behalf of Ukraine that we're going to do this. 0.99
00:05:19.000 And at least it was publicly known.
00:05:20.000 But the fact that we have to find out about this through leaked documents, that's a problem.
00:05:24.000 And there's no debate about this whatsoever.
00:05:25.000 And if you look at the media reaction to this story and other stories from the Twitter files, we've so normalized this culture of censorship that nobody cares.
00:05:33.000 It doesn't matter anymore now that the FBI is helping a foreign government censor people, including journalists.
00:05:39.000 Let me move on to another shocking story, which is Anthony Blinken's speech in Finland.
00:05:47.000 Talk about what that means for the future of our forever war.
00:05:53.000 That was a very scary speech.
00:05:55.000 I mean, Blinken's job title is supposed to be our top diplomat.
00:05:58.000 But when it comes to Ukraine, he does no diplomacy.
00:06:00.000 He spent the first six months of Russia's invasion refusing to even speak to his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov.
00:06:08.000 You're supposed to be a diplomat, and diplomats do diplomacy, so why wouldn't you want to engage with your Russian counterpart to end this war?
00:06:15.000 But the answer to that question is because Blinken doesn't want to end the war.
00:06:18.000 They want to fuel it.
00:06:19.000 They want to continue it for as long as possible to, in the words of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, weaken Russia.
00:06:25.000 And Blinken, in his speech in Finland, laid out his vision basically for this war, which is perpetual conflict.
00:06:31.000 He spoke out against the possibility even of a ceasefire.
00:06:34.000 He said that would basically be unacceptable.
00:06:37.000 And the blueprint he laid out for Ukraine is just Ukraine becoming increasingly militarized, no peace treaties with Russia.
00:06:44.000 And even if when this phase of the war ends, which it will have to eventually, because I mean, I could be wrong.
00:06:49.000 I'm not a military expert, but it doesn't look to me like Ukraine's counteroffensive will yield much in the way of big gains.
00:06:56.000 I mean, that's exactly what the Pentagon privately assessed as well, as we know from leaked documents.
00:07:00.000 And so Blinken is basically saying that No matter what happens in this phase of the war, there will never be a peace agreement with Russia.
00:07:07.000 We'll just have perpetual conflict.
00:07:08.000 And the best way to deal with Russia is to make sure that Ukraine is armed to the teeth. 0.83
00:07:13.000 So further integrating Ukraine into NATO's military infrastructure and just basically using Ukraine as a military proxy on Russia's border.
00:07:23.000 Yeah, let me read sort of a section of there.
00:07:28.000 Blinken's policy is to fight the war to the last Ukrainian in order to weaken Russia, which is a geopolitical ambition of the neocons in the White House for the past two decades.
00:07:43.000 Would you agree with that assessment?
00:07:45.000 Oh, I absolutely do.
00:07:47.000 In the words of Carl Gershman, who's the former head of the National Endowment for Democracy, just a few months before the coup in 2014 in Ukraine, Gershman wrote an article in the Washington Post saying that Ukraine is the biggest prize in the struggle against Russia, and that if Ukraine can be pulled into the U.S. orbit, that might redound to regime change in Russia, overthrowing Putin.
00:08:07.000 And lo and behold, shortly after that, you had the Maidan revolution break out in Ukraine.
00:08:12.000 Initially, peaceful protests against corruption and calling for integration with the EU.
00:08:17.000 But that was basically hijacked by a group of far-right forces in Ukraine who turned that into a violent coup.
00:08:23.000 And they were backed, as we know, by the U.S. Victoria Nuland was caught on that tape plotting who would be the next Ukrainian leader.
00:08:29.000 The U.S. was very instrumental in backing that coup.
00:08:33.000 And because of that neocon policy of trying to basically use Ukraine's divisions as a tool to weaken Russia, now we're in the war we're in now.
00:08:42.000 And there were so many opportunities to avoid it, but it was that neocon policy that sabotaged it.
00:08:47.000 There's something called the Minsk Accords, which I know you've talked about.
00:08:50.000 That was the pact reached in 2015 to end the civil war that began in Ukraine as a result of the 2014 coup.
00:08:57.000 Because after this coup government took power, their first legislative effort was to ban the Russian language effectively, to basically make it no longer possible for it to be recognized as an official language of the state.
00:09:09.000 And people living in the ethnic Russian areas of Ukraine and the Donbass and other areas saw that as an affront on their culture.
00:09:18.000 And meanwhile, you had talk of Ukraine joining NATO, which was unacceptable to Russia.
00:09:24.000 So they went and seized Crimea because Crimea is the home to their most important naval base.
00:09:29.000 And then you have this war in the Donbass breakout where people are resisting this new government and they get backing from Russia.
00:09:35.000 And to end that war, you had the Minsk Accords, which Ukraine never fully implemented because the far right wouldn't allow them because the Minsk Accords were premised on granting the Donbass some limited autonomy, basically recognizing their cultural rights as ethnic Russians.
00:09:49.000 And that wasn't acceptable to the far right of Ukraine.
00:09:52.000 Even Zelensky, when he was elected on a peace mandate to implement the Minsk Accords, basically, he couldn't do it because the far right threatened him and they had the backing of the bipartisan establishment in the U.S.
00:10:03.000 So and plus you have also meanwhile, you have, as you've talked about, NATO expansion and the placement of these missile sites in Poland and Romania that the U.S. says are there to defend Europe from ballistic missiles from Iran, which everyone knows is a joke.
00:10:19.000 Iran is not going to send missiles into Europe.
00:10:21.000 Those missile sites are there to threaten Russia.
00:10:23.000 And a refusal by the Biden administration shortly before Russia invaded in February 2022 is why I think we're in this mess we're in today, because Russia put out these proposals That could have led to some serious negotiations, not the US accepting all of Russia's demands, but at least some constructive talks.
00:10:38.000 But Blinken and Biden refused to discuss even the core issue of NATO expansion.
00:10:43.000 They wouldn't even talk about it.
00:10:44.000 So when you won't even talk about these core issues that are existential to Russia, you're bound to have a conflict.
00:10:50.000 And that's what we have now.
00:10:51.000 You talked about Zelensky running on a peace platform and one of his promises, and of course he won 70% of the vote because people in Ukraine wanted peace.
00:11:02.000 And one of the planks of that platform is that he promised that he would sign the Minsk Accords.
00:11:07.000 But after he got into office, he pivoted on that promise.
00:11:11.000 And it seems evident that pivot was the result of pressure from the ultra-right nationalists in the Ukraine.
00:11:19.000 In collusion with the neocons in the White House, but do we, I mean, we can connect that dots just logically, those dots logically, but is there any other evidence of U.S. intervention to sabotage the Mexican courts?
00:11:32.000 There is William Taylor, who is the former top US official in Ukraine.
00:11:37.000 He came to be known during Trump's first impeachment when Trump was impeached for pausing some weapons to Ukraine while Giuliani was pressuring them to investigate Joe Biden.
00:11:48.000 William Taylor gave an interview to the Washington Post recently on the anniversary of the Russian invasion.
00:11:53.000 William Taylor recounted meeting with Zelensky in the summer of 2019.
00:11:58.000 Zelensky was trying very hard to figure out something called the Steinmeier formula, which was named after the German foreign minister who was trying to revive the Minsk Accords that had been stalled for so many years.
00:12:08.000 And Zelensky was reading some document to try to figure out how he could get on board with this, how he could sell it to the Ukrainian public, and how he could get it past the Ukrainian far right, basically, because that was his biggest obstacle.
00:12:19.000 And William Taylor recounts how he took Zelensky aside and said, you don't want to do this.
00:12:24.000 This is a terrible idea.
00:12:26.000 It doesn't make any sense.
00:12:27.000 And that was reflecting what the position of the U.S. was.
00:12:31.000 Vaguely, they would say, yeah, we support Minsk.
00:12:33.000 But every time there was an effort, To implement the Minsk Accords, the US would block it, as William Taylor's example illustrates.
00:12:41.000 And Zelensky is a perfect example.
00:12:42.000 As you said, overwhelming mandate.
00:12:44.000 People from all parts of the country voted for him because he was going to end the war.
00:12:48.000 And he talked about it.
00:12:49.000 He talked about making sacrifices.
00:12:50.000 But the response from Ukraine's far right was, in the words of one battalion commander who said, Zelensky says he's prepared to lose his popularity or his ratings.
00:12:59.000 No, he will lose his life.
00:13:02.000 And he will hang from a tree if he betrays the Maidan revolution.
00:13:06.000 That was the message.
00:13:07.000 And the US, as the crime sponsor of Ukraine, could have come in and said, no, we have Zelensky's back.
00:13:14.000 We're going to support him on his election mandate.
00:13:16.000 We're going to end that war. 0.95
00:13:17.000 And they didn't.
00:13:18.000 They, in fact, put pressure on Zelensky to abandon the Minsk Accords.
00:13:22.000 And that's why, when Trump was impeached the first time, there was so much...
00:13:26.000 If you would listen to people like Adam Schiff and others during the impeachment trial...
00:13:32.000 Adam Schiff was saying stuff like, we have to aid Ukraine so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don't have to fight Russia over here.
00:13:38.000 And that the struggle against Russian proxies in Ukraine, which meant ethnic Russians inside the Donbass who are acting on their own, with Russian support, but still out of their own volition.
00:13:49.000 They weren't puppets of Moscow.
00:13:51.000 That for Adam Schiff, this was so important to keep that war going.
00:13:55.000 That was a message to Zelensky that the US did not have his back when it comes to implementing the Minsk Accords.
00:14:00.000 And that's why there's all these people that we never hear about in the US, but Zelensky had a close friend and partner in his comedy years who was from the Donbass.
00:14:11.000 And after Zelensky was appointed, he appointed his friend, his name is Sergei Savoko, to a commission for dialogue with the Donbass, to promote unity, healing with the Donbass, promote peace.
00:14:21.000 And so his friend Savoko unveiled his platform, and he couldn't finish his speech because members of the Azov Battalion attacked him during his speech.
00:14:30.000 And shortly after that, Zelensky...
00:14:32.000 I think we never did.
00:14:50.000 Back in 2001, we associated the neocons, the Victoria Newlands, etc., and Robert Kagan's, the people who drove the invasion of Iraq, this catastrophic invasion of Iraq with the George W. Bush administration.
00:15:05.000 They started out, the neocons kind of started out as Democrats because the big new Brzezinski came out of the Carter administration.
00:15:12.000 He's kind of the father, the godfather of the Neocons, but they were solidly Republicans by 2001, by the Iraq invasion in 2002. 0.57
00:15:21.000 And then they were kind of ejected from the Republican Party and became pariahs and political exiles.
00:15:28.000 And they reappeared in the Trump administration little by little, and then later on, and a little bit in Obama.
00:15:38.000 And then in full force, they made their reappearance in the Biden White House.
00:15:44.000 Which is consistent because Biden was always kind of a warmongering president.
00:15:48.000 He was one of the few Democrats who really led the charge during the Iraq War.
00:15:52.000 My uncle was fighting him at that time on that, although he liked Biden personally.
00:15:57.000 Biden was a warmonger.
00:15:59.000 But now they're not only in the White House, but you're seeing in the upper ranks of the Republican Party people like Mitch McConnell.
00:16:06.000 And Lindsey Graham have made these very, very extreme statements recently about what our purpose is, very revealing statements about what our true purpose is, basically admitting that it's a proxy war.
00:16:20.000 It's our war with Russia, and we're using Ukrainian bodies and U.S. weapons to fight the war. 0.93
00:16:27.000 Yes.
00:16:28.000 I mean, Lindsey Graham famously said last summer, he said that as long as we give Ukraine support, they will fight to the last person.
00:16:35.000 So he's openly bragging about using Ukrainian lives to fight Russia.
00:16:39.000 And Mitch McConnell said something similar recently as well.
00:16:43.000 well, he said that arming Ukraine, quote, is a far cheaper way in both dollars and American lives to degrade Russia's ability to threaten the U.S.
00:16:52.000 So he's showing right there in invoking American lives, his contempt for Ukrainian lives, because he's saying that we don't have to use any American lives because it's Ukraine who is dying for us.
00:17:03.000 And it's so much it's so much cheaper for us.
00:17:05.000 And that's a reflection of how he views Ukrainian well-being and their lives as cheap.
00:17:11.000 They're expendable.
00:17:12.000 And this is out in the open.
00:17:14.000 And yet we're supposed to believe that these same people care about Ukrainians and are in this to help defend Ukraine when they're openly displaying so much contempt for Ukraine and Ukrainian lives.
00:17:24.000 And when McConnell says that this will degrade Russia's ability to threaten the U.S., McConnell knows that Russia is not going to invade the U.S. Russia doesn't want to fight the U.S. because everyone knows He knows that when Russia and the US fight, that's the end of humanity that triggers nuclear war.
00:17:40.000 What he means is that we can use Ukraine to degrade Russia's ability to threaten US hegemony, because Russia is a nuclear power. 0.53
00:17:47.000 It's a huge country.
00:17:49.000 There's all this derisive talk of it just being an oversized gas station, basically, but it's more than that.
00:17:54.000 And it can threaten US hegemony in Europe, certainly where Russia is, and also in the Middle East, because in Syria, Russia intervened on the side of the Syrian government after the U.S. was spending billions of dollars to fuel a dirty war aimed at regime change, similar to the regime change operation in Libya.
00:18:12.000 And that's why people like Lindsey Graham and Senator McConnell want to have a proxy war against Russia. 0.70
00:18:17.000 They don't like people who can deter U.S. hegemony.
00:18:20.000 And that's why they can speak with so much contempt for the lives they're sacrificing toward their goals.
00:18:26.000 And you also had these cynical statements during the Finland show that revealed that the Biden administration is mostly concerned with the president's legacy and with his reputation and that they feel,
00:18:42.000 the White House now feels, this is what they told Politico, that if they don't succeed in regaining the territory that Ukraine has lost to the Russians, which is never, of course, going to happen, That it's going to blacken President Biden's administration.
00:19:00.000 Yeah, the headline in Politico was, White House anxiously watches Ukraine's counteroffensive, seeing the war and Biden's reputation at stake.
00:19:10.000 What does this work have to do with Biden's reputation?
00:19:13.000 Are we supposed to continue filling a proxy war against a nuclear armed power for the sake of preserving Biden's reputation?
00:19:19.000 It's such a reflection of how this is not about defending Ukraine and Ukraine's well-being.
00:19:24.000 If this was about defending Ukraine, then the U.S. would have got on board with the Minsk Accords and would have spoken reasonably with...
00:19:31.000 The Russia about a pack that can respect everybody's security.
00:19:35.000 But Washington doesn't care about that.
00:19:37.000 They see Ukraine as an instrument to bleed their adversary. 0.89
00:19:41.000 And that's why they can admit that they're watching this counter offensive, not because they care about Ukraine, because they care about Biden's global reputation.
00:19:47.000 Here's something for The Washington Post.
00:19:49.000 This is by Karen DeYoung, veteran correspondent for The Washington Post.
00:19:53.000 And she writes this, quote, Now notice here how completely absent in Biden's goals and what he needs from this counteroffensive, Is Ukraine and Ukraine's well-being and defending Ukraine.
00:20:22.000 It's all about showing US strength and leadership, showing that this can be done with bipartisan support.
00:20:29.000 All this is domestic considerations and it's all premised on the notion that the US should be a global hegemon, a global superpower, leading everyone, showing strength.
00:20:39.000 And what strength means in reality, it means using other people to die for you, strictly to hold on to your hegemony.
00:20:47.000 It sounds basically like what a mafia don would be concerned with.
00:20:50.000 A mafia don is concerned with their reputation.
00:20:52.000 People have to be scared of you so that they can fall in line and they see you as strong.
00:20:55.000 And that's pretty much how international affairs works.
00:20:58.000 And I see this, all this is Biden basically acting as the global mafia don.
00:21:04.000 And now things are not going so well because as was predicted, Russia has overwhelming military advantage because it's right there.
00:21:12.000 It's on the border with Ukraine.
00:21:13.000 It's a huge power.
00:21:14.000 They have a consistent industrial base that can manufacture the weapons they need.
00:21:19.000 And by the way, back when Obama was refusing to send weapons to Ukraine, Against the pressure of people like Blinken and Biden, Obama was saying that, you know, this is crazy because Russia always has the advantage here.
00:21:32.000 So even tactically, it would be nuts to engage in a war with Russia over Ukraine.
00:21:37.000 But yet that's exactly the policy that his colleagues who served under him are now carrying out under Biden.
00:21:44.000 I watched with my family, there's a new, these really wonderful new documentaries out.
00:21:49.000 I don't know if it's on Netflix, but it's colorized documentaries from legacy footage from World War II. And it's all the great battles of World War II. And one of the battles that we watched the other night was Stalingrad.
00:22:03.000 One of the most brutal battles in history, and there's sacrifices everywhere.
00:22:07.000 That the Russian people made to save Stalingrad.
00:22:11.000 You look at that and it is impossible to imagine that the Russians would ever back down in Ukraine. 0.59
00:22:18.000 They were literally sacrificing millions and millions of Russians who essentially happily went to their death in the motherland. 1.00
00:22:26.000 This is, as you point out, an existential It's a battle for the Russians.
00:22:31.000 For us, nobody in the United States, we have no strategic interest in the Ukraine, zero.
00:22:38.000 And people in the United States can't even find Ukraine on a map.
00:22:42.000 You know, we have a strategic interest in Mexico and Canada, parts of Latin America and the Caribbean.
00:22:48.000 We have no, and then, you know, in ports around the world, we have zero strategic interest in Ukraine.
00:22:54.000 But for the Russians, the Russians have been invaded three times through the Ukraine.
00:22:59.000 Yep, that's right.
00:23:00.000 They are not going to let that country all into the hands of a foreign, hostile army like NATO. Yeah.
00:23:11.000 Which, you know, to think, to sort of hoodwink the Ukrainians into going into this war, believing that the United States and NATO would win the war for them when they were really just burning up the flower of Ukrainian youth in a slaughterhouse. 0.72
00:23:27.000 The cruelty and the cynicism of this strategy is really breathtaking.
00:23:32.000 Here's what you write about, Blinken.
00:23:34.000 You say the U.S., Blinken said, will help, quote, build a Ukrainian military of the future with long-term funding.
00:23:42.000 The American people signed on to the $113 billion that they sent over there because they thought that was going to be the end of it.
00:23:48.000 He's now talking about, it looks like $113 billion a year or ever.
00:23:54.000 Hmm.
00:23:54.000 We have long-term funding, a strong air force centered on modern combat aircraft, an integrated air and missile defense network, advanced tanks and armored vehicles, national capacity to produce ammunition, and the training and support to keep forces and equipment combat ready.
00:24:14.000 And meanwhile, NATO leaders are envisioning, quote, an Israeli-style security agreement for the Ukraine that would give priority to arms transfers and advanced technologies.
00:24:25.000 So this is really kind of a, this is literally a forever war.
00:24:30.000 This is like what they, what we did, I guess what we did with the Russians in Afghanistan, where you fight a, you know, a 20-year war. 0.82
00:24:39.000 Yeah, that's the model.
00:24:40.000 I mean, Hillary Clinton invoked that model early on in Russia's invasion. 0.79
00:24:44.000 She spoke of the Afghanistan model as something to emulate.
00:24:48.000 And it's so sad.
00:24:49.000 I mean, look, Ukraine's a very divided country.
00:24:51.000 There are people, there is a strong constituency that certainly hates Russia, wants nothing to do with it, and wants to be fully a part of the West.
00:24:58.000 And fair enough.
00:24:59.000 And that's their right.
00:25:00.000 But the problem is, Ukraine also has people who do identify with Russia.
00:25:04.000 And even now, you still have polls showing that there's a lot of people that don't want to be a part of NATO. That's even after Russia invaded, which I was very struck by.
00:25:14.000 But it's always been divided.
00:25:15.000 So the answer when you have a divided country is not to try to force it into one camp or the other.
00:25:20.000 Don't try to force it into Russia's camp. 0.74
00:25:22.000 Don't try to force it into the US camp.
00:25:25.000 And Russia, at least officially, and maybe they were playing some sort of game that I'm not aware of, but their proposal for Ukraine was neutrality.
00:25:35.000 And that was once even enshrined Ukraine's concept to be neutral.
00:25:38.000 That was a value that Ukraine followed for a very, very long time.
00:25:42.000 But it's the far-right nationalists of Ukraine who've never wanted neutrality.
00:25:46.000 And because they've had the backing of the US, they've been able to, I think, play a really negative role and help bring us to where we are today.
00:25:53.000 And for Russia, you know, in terms of the historical memory they have of losing tens of millions of people in the Second World War.
00:25:59.000 I mean, now that's compounded by the fact that it is just true.
00:26:02.000 There is a neo-Nazi component inside Ukraine's far right.
00:26:05.000 It doesn't mean that Ukraine's a Nazi government.
00:26:07.000 It doesn't mean that Ukraine's a Nazi state.
00:26:09.000 Like numbers wise, they're a pretty small contingent, but they have power.
00:26:12.000 contingent, but they have power.
00:26:13.000 However, after the 2014 coup, there were fascist forces empowered by that.
00:26:13.000 After the 2014 coup, there were fascist forces empowered by that, the Azov Battalion.
00:26:18.000 The Azov Battalion.
00:26:19.000 That's a neo-Nazi battalion that's incorporated into Ukraine's armed forces.
00:26:19.000 That's a neo-Nazi battalion that's incorporated into Ukraine's armed forces.
00:26:24.000 Congress, a few years ago, passed a bill banning US assistance to the Azov Battalion.
00:26:24.000 Congress, a few years ago, passed a bill banning U.S. assistance to the Azov Battalion.
00:26:29.000 We've totally forgot about that.
00:26:29.000 We've totally forgot about that.
00:26:31.000 Foreign Policy Magazine, the heart of the U.S. establishment, they published an article shortly after the 2014 coup and said, the uncomfortable truth is that a large part of the people who brought the new Ukrainian government to power and who are now a part of it are fascists.
00:26:45.000 It's just a reality.
00:26:47.000 It doesn't mean that that's Ukraine as a whole, but that is a force inside Ukraine that Russia feels that it has to deal with.
00:26:54.000 And it's a tragedy that Russia went to this step of invading Iraq.
00:26:59.000 I wish Russia could have found some other way to do this. 0.98
00:27:02.000 And I think the burden, the proof is on Russia to show that they had no other choice but to invade. 0.61
00:27:07.000 And so I don't excuse Russia of culpability or responsibility, but that doesn't mean we can't look at our own role and what we could do to bring peace.
00:27:15.000 And after spending years now using Ukraine as a proxy for a neocon policy, there has to be, I think, for the sake of the planet, a change, of course, because this is just not sustainable for everybody, for anybody.
00:27:27.000 Let me ask a last question, just out of curiosity.
00:27:31.000 The Ukrainian forces have been decimated.
00:27:34.000 I mean, we hear that 350,000 soldiers have died in the front line.
00:27:38.000 Is there anything left of the 8th Battalion?
00:27:40.000 Because that was their, you know, that was their front line shock troops.
00:27:44.000 They must have suffered terrible, terrible casualties.
00:27:47.000 Not my area of expertise in terms of military stuff, but I do know that they were on the front lines in the fight for Bakhmut, which Russia, via its mercenary Wagner force, recently conquered.
00:27:59.000 So I know that they were fighting there, and I assume if they were fighting in Bakhmut, which was a mass casualty event, I have to imagine that they took a lot of losses there.
00:28:07.000 Aaron Maté, can you tell us where our listeners can find you?
00:28:10.000 You can find me at thegrayzone, thegrayzone.com, and at my substack, maté.substack.com.
00:28:16.000 And Robert, thanks so much for having me.