00:00:17.000He's a contributor to Real Clear Politics.
00:00:20.000In 2019, he was awarded The Izzy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Independent Media for his coverage of Russiagate in The Nation magazine.
00:00:28.000He was previously a long-time producer of Democracy Now.
00:00:31.000He's done extraordinary reporting, very, very useful reporting on the Ukraine most recently.
00:00:39.000And he broke a story that actually where he is one of the stars of this story.
00:00:44.000He'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.
00:01:02.000I think there was 163 people on the list that the Ukrainian government wanted censored.
00:01:07.000Who were criticizing U.S. policies in the Ukrainian war.
00:01:11.000So 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.
00:01:24.000This is kind of the logical conclusion that they get to go to war and nobody gets to criticize it.
00:01:31.000Yeah, I mean, I thought if I was listening to the Biden administration that we're fueling this proxy war in Ukraine to defend democracy.
00:01:38.000So I guess this means now that their definition of democracy means censoring views that criticize the proxy war, because that's what happened here.
00:01:46.000In 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.
00:02:04.000And the FBI says that these accounts are suspected by Ukraine of spreading, quote, fear and disinformation.
00:02:10.000And the attached list from the SBU is a bunch of Twitter accounts.
00:02:15.000And 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.
00:02:28.000And that would mean their date of birth, their phone numbers, and their email addresses.
00:02:33.000And on that list are a bunch of accounts, including mine.
00:02:37.000And also a number of other, there's journalists who are from Russia.
00:02:49.000One of them was a senior official under Yanukovych, the former Ukrainian president who was ousted in 2014.
00:02:56.000And 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.
00:03:04.000And they mentioned my name as an example.
00:03:06.000And 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.
00:03:14.000And the FBI responds and says, yeah, no, sorry, we have no proof of that.
00:03:20.000And Twitter, you know, I'm thankful they didn't follow through on the request to suspend me.
00:03:23.000But 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?
00:03:33.000I didn't realize that that was part of the FBI's mandate, but apparently it is.
00:03:36.000Yeah, and actually, you did a great job of tracking down FBI agent Kobanitz, who was in charge of the censorship project.
00:04:01.000And apparently, as a part of his job functions now, he's passing on censorship requests.
00:04:05.000And so I wrote him a bunch of questions.
00:04:07.000And my first question was, did you vet this list of accounts before you passed it on to Twitter?
00:04:12.000And 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?
00:05:20.000But the fact that we have to find out about this through leaked documents, that's a problem.
00:05:24.000And there's no debate about this whatsoever.
00:05:25.000And 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.
00:05:33.000It doesn't matter anymore now that the FBI is helping a foreign government censor people, including journalists.
00:05:39.000Let me move on to another shocking story, which is Anthony Blinken's speech in Finland.
00:05:47.000Talk about what that means for the future of our forever war.
00:05:55.000I mean, Blinken's job title is supposed to be our top diplomat.
00:05:58.000But when it comes to Ukraine, he does no diplomacy.
00:06:00.000He spent the first six months of Russia's invasion refusing to even speak to his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov.
00:06:08.000You'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?
00:06:15.000But the answer to that question is because Blinken doesn't want to end the war.
00:06:19.000They want to continue it for as long as possible to, in the words of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, weaken Russia.
00:06:25.000And Blinken, in his speech in Finland, laid out his vision basically for this war, which is perpetual conflict.
00:06:31.000He spoke out against the possibility even of a ceasefire.
00:06:34.000He said that would basically be unacceptable.
00:06:37.000And the blueprint he laid out for Ukraine is just Ukraine becoming increasingly militarized, no peace treaties with Russia.
00:06:44.000And even if when this phase of the war ends, which it will have to eventually, because I mean, I could be wrong.
00:06:49.000I'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.
00:06:56.000I mean, that's exactly what the Pentagon privately assessed as well, as we know from leaked documents.
00:07:00.000And 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.
00:07:08.000And the best way to deal with Russia is to make sure that Ukraine is armed to the teeth.
00:07:13.000So further integrating Ukraine into NATO's military infrastructure and just basically using Ukraine as a military proxy on Russia's border.
00:07:23.000Yeah, let me read sort of a section of there.
00:07:28.000Blinken'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.
00:07:47.000In 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.
00:08:07.000And lo and behold, shortly after that, you had the Maidan revolution break out in Ukraine.
00:08:12.000Initially, peaceful protests against corruption and calling for integration with the EU.
00:08:17.000But that was basically hijacked by a group of far-right forces in Ukraine who turned that into a violent coup.
00:08:23.000And 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.
00:08:29.000The U.S. was very instrumental in backing that coup.
00:08:33.000And 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.
00:08:42.000And there were so many opportunities to avoid it, but it was that neocon policy that sabotaged it.
00:08:47.000There's something called the Minsk Accords, which I know you've talked about.
00:08:50.000That was the pact reached in 2015 to end the civil war that began in Ukraine as a result of the 2014 coup.
00:08:57.000Because 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.
00:09:09.000And people living in the ethnic Russian areas of Ukraine and the Donbass and other areas saw that as an affront on their culture.
00:09:18.000And meanwhile, you had talk of Ukraine joining NATO, which was unacceptable to Russia.
00:09:24.000So they went and seized Crimea because Crimea is the home to their most important naval base.
00:09:29.000And then you have this war in the Donbass breakout where people are resisting this new government and they get backing from Russia.
00:09:35.000And 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.
00:09:49.000And that wasn't acceptable to the far right of Ukraine.
00:09:52.000Even 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.
00:10:03.000So 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.
00:10:19.000Iran is not going to send missiles into Europe.
00:10:21.000Those missile sites are there to threaten Russia.
00:10:23.000And 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.
00:10:38.000But Blinken and Biden refused to discuss even the core issue of NATO expansion.
00:10:51.000You 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.
00:11:02.000And one of the planks of that platform is that he promised that he would sign the Minsk Accords.
00:11:07.000But after he got into office, he pivoted on that promise.
00:11:11.000And it seems evident that pivot was the result of pressure from the ultra-right nationalists in the Ukraine.
00:11:19.000In 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?
00:11:32.000There is William Taylor, who is the former top US official in Ukraine.
00:11:37.000He 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.
00:11:48.000William Taylor gave an interview to the Washington Post recently on the anniversary of the Russian invasion.
00:11:53.000William Taylor recounted meeting with Zelensky in the summer of 2019.
00:11:58.000Zelensky 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.
00:12:08.000And 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.
00:12:19.000And William Taylor recounts how he took Zelensky aside and said, you don't want to do this.
00:12:50.000But 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.
00:13:18.000They, in fact, put pressure on Zelensky to abandon the Minsk Accords.
00:13:22.000And that's why, when Trump was impeached the first time, there was so much...
00:13:26.000If you would listen to people like Adam Schiff and others during the impeachment trial...
00:13:32.000Adam 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.
00:13:38.000And 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.
00:13:51.000That for Adam Schiff, this was so important to keep that war going.
00:13:55.000That was a message to Zelensky that the US did not have his back when it comes to implementing the Minsk Accords.
00:14:00.000And 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.
00:14:11.000And 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.
00:14:21.000And 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.
00:14:50.000Back 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.
00:15:05.000They started out, the neocons kind of started out as Democrats because the big new Brzezinski came out of the Carter administration.
00:15:12.000He's kind of the father, the godfather of the Neocons, but they were solidly Republicans by 2001, by the Iraq invasion in 2002.
00:15:21.000And then they were kind of ejected from the Republican Party and became pariahs and political exiles.
00:15:28.000And they reappeared in the Trump administration little by little, and then later on, and a little bit in Obama.
00:15:38.000And then in full force, they made their reappearance in the Biden White House.
00:15:44.000Which is consistent because Biden was always kind of a warmongering president.
00:15:48.000He was one of the few Democrats who really led the charge during the Iraq War.
00:15:52.000My uncle was fighting him at that time on that, although he liked Biden personally.
00:15:59.000But 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.
00:16:06.000And 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.
00:16:20.000It's our war with Russia, and we're using Ukrainian bodies and U.S. weapons to fight the war.
00:16:28.000I mean, Lindsey Graham famously said last summer, he said that as long as we give Ukraine support, they will fight to the last person.
00:16:35.000So he's openly bragging about using Ukrainian lives to fight Russia.
00:16:39.000And Mitch McConnell said something similar recently as well.
00:16:43.000well, 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.
00:16:52.000So 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.
00:17:03.000And it's so much it's so much cheaper for us.
00:17:05.000And that's a reflection of how he views Ukrainian well-being and their lives as cheap.
00:17:14.000And 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.
00:17:24.000And 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.
00:17:40.000What he means is that we can use Ukraine to degrade Russia's ability to threaten US hegemony, because Russia is a nuclear power.
00:17:49.000There's all this derisive talk of it just being an oversized gas station, basically, but it's more than that.
00:17:54.000And 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.
00:18:12.000And that's why people like Lindsey Graham and Senator McConnell want to have a proxy war against Russia.
00:18:17.000They don't like people who can deter U.S. hegemony.
00:18:20.000And that's why they can speak with so much contempt for the lives they're sacrificing toward their goals.
00:18:26.000And 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,
00:18:42.000the 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.
00:19:00.000Yeah, the headline in Politico was, White House anxiously watches Ukraine's counteroffensive, seeing the war and Biden's reputation at stake.
00:19:10.000What does this work have to do with Biden's reputation?
00:19:13.000Are we supposed to continue filling a proxy war against a nuclear armed power for the sake of preserving Biden's reputation?
00:19:19.000It's such a reflection of how this is not about defending Ukraine and Ukraine's well-being.
00:19:24.000If this was about defending Ukraine, then the U.S. would have got on board with the Minsk Accords and would have spoken reasonably with...
00:19:31.000The Russia about a pack that can respect everybody's security.
00:19:35.000But Washington doesn't care about that.
00:19:37.000They see Ukraine as an instrument to bleed their adversary.
00:19:41.000And 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.
00:19:47.000Here's something for The Washington Post.
00:19:49.000This is by Karen DeYoung, veteran correspondent for The Washington Post.
00:19:53.000And 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.
00:20:22.000It's all about showing US strength and leadership, showing that this can be done with bipartisan support.
00:20:29.000All 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.
00:20:39.000And what strength means in reality, it means using other people to die for you, strictly to hold on to your hegemony.
00:20:47.000It sounds basically like what a mafia don would be concerned with.
00:20:50.000A mafia don is concerned with their reputation.
00:20:52.000People have to be scared of you so that they can fall in line and they see you as strong.
00:20:55.000And that's pretty much how international affairs works.
00:20:58.000And I see this, all this is Biden basically acting as the global mafia don.
00:21:04.000And now things are not going so well because as was predicted, Russia has overwhelming military advantage because it's right there.
00:21:14.000They have a consistent industrial base that can manufacture the weapons they need.
00:21:19.000And 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.
00:21:32.000So even tactically, it would be nuts to engage in a war with Russia over Ukraine.
00:21:37.000But yet that's exactly the policy that his colleagues who served under him are now carrying out under Biden.
00:21:44.000I watched with my family, there's a new, these really wonderful new documentaries out.
00:21:49.000I 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.
00:22:03.000One of the most brutal battles in history, and there's sacrifices everywhere.
00:22:07.000That the Russian people made to save Stalingrad.
00:22:11.000You look at that and it is impossible to imagine that the Russians would ever back down in Ukraine.
00:22:18.000They were literally sacrificing millions and millions of Russians who essentially happily went to their death in the motherland.
00:22:26.000This is, as you point out, an existential It's a battle for the Russians.
00:22:31.000For us, nobody in the United States, we have no strategic interest in the Ukraine, zero.
00:22:38.000And people in the United States can't even find Ukraine on a map.
00:22:42.000You know, we have a strategic interest in Mexico and Canada, parts of Latin America and the Caribbean.
00:22:48.000We have no, and then, you know, in ports around the world, we have zero strategic interest in Ukraine.
00:22:54.000But for the Russians, the Russians have been invaded three times through the Ukraine.
00:23:00.000They are not going to let that country all into the hands of a foreign, hostile army like NATO. Yeah.
00:23:11.000Which, 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.
00:23:27.000The cruelty and the cynicism of this strategy is really breathtaking.
00:23:54.000We 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.
00:24:14.000And meanwhile, NATO leaders are envisioning, quote, an Israeli-style security agreement for the Ukraine that would give priority to arms transfers and advanced technologies.
00:24:25.000So this is really kind of a, this is literally a forever war.
00:24:30.000This 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.
00:24:49.000I mean, look, Ukraine's a very divided country.
00:24:51.000There 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.
00:25:00.000But the problem is, Ukraine also has people who do identify with Russia.
00:25:04.000And 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.
00:25:15.000So the answer when you have a divided country is not to try to force it into one camp or the other.
00:25:20.000Don't try to force it into Russia's camp.
00:25:22.000Don't try to force it into the US camp.
00:25:25.000And 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.
00:25:35.000And that was once even enshrined Ukraine's concept to be neutral.
00:25:38.000That was a value that Ukraine followed for a very, very long time.
00:25:42.000But it's the far-right nationalists of Ukraine who've never wanted neutrality.
00:25:46.000And 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.
00:25:53.000And for Russia, you know, in terms of the historical memory they have of losing tens of millions of people in the Second World War.
00:25:59.000I mean, now that's compounded by the fact that it is just true.
00:26:02.000There is a neo-Nazi component inside Ukraine's far right.
00:26:05.000It doesn't mean that Ukraine's a Nazi government.
00:26:07.000It doesn't mean that Ukraine's a Nazi state.
00:26:09.000Like numbers wise, they're a pretty small contingent, but they have power.
00:26:31.000Foreign 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.
00:26:47.000It 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.
00:26:54.000And it's a tragedy that Russia went to this step of invading Iraq.
00:26:59.000I wish Russia could have found some other way to do this.
00:27:02.000And I think the burden, the proof is on Russia to show that they had no other choice but to invade.
00:27:07.000And 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.
00:27:15.000And 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.
00:27:27.000Let me ask a last question, just out of curiosity.
00:27:31.000The Ukrainian forces have been decimated.
00:27:34.000I mean, we hear that 350,000 soldiers have died in the front line.
00:27:38.000Is there anything left of the 8th Battalion?
00:27:40.000Because that was their, you know, that was their front line shock troops.
00:27:44.000They must have suffered terrible, terrible casualties.
00:27:47.000Not 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.
00:27:59.000So 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.