The Auron MacIntyre Show - August 07, 2024


WTF Happened to the Ukraine War？ ｜ Guest： Charlemagne ｜ 8⧸7⧸2024


Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 2 minutes

Words per minute

167.44342

Word count

10,467

Sentence count

605

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

37

sentences flagged


Summary

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

What happened to the Ukraine War? Why did the world stop paying attention to it? And why has it been so important for the global order to shift their focus away from what was supposed to be the defining conflict of our time?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 We hope you're enjoying your Air Canada flight.
00:00:02.320 Rocky's Vacation, here we come.
00:00:05.060 Whoa, is this economy?
00:00:07.180 Free beer, wine, and snacks.
00:00:09.620 Sweet! 0.95
00:00:10.720 Fast-free Wi-Fi means I can make dinner reservations before we land.
00:00:14.760 And with live TV, I'm not missing the game.
00:00:17.800 It's kind of like, I'm already on vacation.
00:00:20.980 Nice! 0.94
00:00:22.240 On behalf of Air Canada, nice travels.
00:00:25.260 Wi-Fi available to Airplane members on Equipped Flight.
00:00:27.200 Sponsored by Bell. Conditions apply.
00:00:28.720 CRCanada.com.
00:00:30.500 Hey everybody, how's it going?
00:00:32.160 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.
00:00:33.980 I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.
00:00:38.220 So you guys probably remember there was this war.
00:00:41.140 It was going to be the war to end all wars. 0.85
00:00:44.020 It was this existential conflict.
00:00:46.540 Vladimir Putin was going to march his way across Europe, destroy democracy, end the liberal world order.
00:00:56.320 All of this was just terrible.
00:00:58.000 We had to send hundreds of billions of dollars over there to save Ukraine from this.
00:01:02.740 And it was the most important conflict of our lifetime or any lifetime.
00:01:08.900 And then we just stopped hearing about it.
00:01:11.140 It completely disappeared from the news.
00:01:13.320 No one seems to care anymore.
00:01:15.160 I've heard every once in a while, if you're watching the Olympics and the Ukrainians involved, they'll reference it.
00:01:19.880 But otherwise, we basically have heard nothing about this conflict for a very long time.
00:01:25.620 And if you're like me, you're probably thinking to yourself, hey, whatever happened to this world war, this war that was going to be the most important thing we could imagine, the battle of our lifetime?
00:01:36.060 How did it just vanish and disappear?
00:01:38.380 I mean, I assume the war is still going on.
00:01:40.940 Maybe we should learn something about it.
00:01:42.840 So joining me today to fill us in on whatever happened to the Ukraine war is the great YouTuber Charlemagne.
00:01:49.880 Thanks for joining me, man.
00:01:51.400 Hello.
00:01:51.780 Great to be back again.
00:01:52.860 Thank you.
00:01:53.820 Of course.
00:01:54.340 Always a fantastic time talking to Charlemagne.
00:01:57.180 We're going to dive into the background.
00:01:59.820 Why was there this huge shift away from attention on the Ukraine war?
00:02:05.880 What is the status of the Ukraine war?
00:02:08.640 Is it winnable by either side?
00:02:10.640 What would be the fallout?
00:02:12.520 And why has it been so important for the global order to shift their focus away from what was supposed to be the defining conflict of our time?
00:02:22.740 But before we get into all that, guys, let's hear from today's sponsor.
00:02:27.260 Universities today aren't just neglecting real education.
00:02:30.320 They're actively undermining it.
00:02:31.680 And we can't let them get away with it.
00:02:33.340 America was made for an educated and engaged citizenry.
00:02:36.880 The Intercollegiate Studies Institute is here to help.
00:02:39.700 ISI offers programs and opportunities for conservative students across the country.
00:02:44.880 ISI understands that conservatives and right-of-center students feel isolated on college campuses
00:02:49.960 and that you're often fighting for your own reputation, dignity, and future.
00:02:54.400 Through ISI, you can learn about what Russell Kirk called the permanent things,
00:02:59.060 the philosophical and political teachings that shaped and made Western civilization great.
00:03:03.960 ISI offers many opportunities to jumpstart your career.
00:03:07.080 They have fellowships at some of the nation's top conservative publications like National Review,
00:03:11.420 The American Conservative, and The College Thinker.
00:03:13.860 If you're a graduate student, ISI offers funding opportunities to sponsor the next great generation
00:03:18.640 of college professors.
00:03:20.180 Through ISI, you can work with conservative thinkers who are making a difference.
00:03:24.080 Thinkers like Chris Ruffo, who currently has an ISI researcher helping him with his book.
00:03:29.060 But perhaps most importantly, ISI offers college students a community of people that can help them grow.
00:03:34.120 If you're a college student, ISI can help you start a student organization or a student newspaper
00:03:39.300 or meet other like-minded students at their various conferences and events.
00:03:44.020 ISI is here to educate the next generation of great Americans.
00:03:47.320 To learn more, go to ISI.org.
00:03:50.460 That's ISI.org.
00:03:53.600 So Charlemagne, you know, we're in this scenario right after COVID,
00:03:58.680 where you thought that the elites would calm down.
00:04:01.520 They wouldn't want to stress the system.
00:04:03.060 The global world order had flexed a lot of muscle trying to suppress its citizens.
00:04:08.240 In many cases, it had destroyed its own economies through the constant lockdowns.
00:04:14.540 And I, for one, you know, was still kind of on the academic agent wagon of,
00:04:20.240 okay, well, the global elites are still in control of what they're doing.
00:04:23.000 So they're certainly not going to put us through a massive stress test of the system right away again.
00:04:28.240 But then we had the Ukraine war,
00:04:30.240 and it became important for every Western nation to go ahead and dedicate their entire military output to the defense of this nation.
00:04:39.340 We were told that the Russian army was going to march its way all the way through Western Europe.
00:04:46.400 It was going to conquer the entire continent.
00:04:48.120 It was critical that the entire West dedicate itself to this defense.
00:04:53.340 The media was going on and on about this 24-7.
00:04:57.400 And we were assured that Russia's defeat would be very quick. 0.98
00:05:01.340 Joe Biden told us that they would just manipulate the currency.
00:05:04.300 They'd bankrupt the country.
00:05:05.740 They'd isolate them from global trade.
00:05:08.460 And this would be over in a matter of months, a story we've heard many times when it comes to any given war.
00:05:13.960 But slowly over time, it became clear that maybe this would be a more protective conflict.
00:05:18.400 And we had to go ahead and fork over hundreds of billions of dollars.
00:05:22.420 We had to fund Ukraine's retirement pension system for their government.
00:05:26.800 You know, just a massive amount of funding went into this.
00:05:29.660 But we were assured, again, that Ukraine was, their victory was inevitable. 0.99
00:05:34.260 The Russian spirit was broken. 0.95
00:05:35.920 They were taking ridiculous losses.
00:05:37.780 And it was only a matter of time.
00:05:40.020 And then slowly but surely, this war just started to drop off the radar.
00:05:45.800 We heard less and less about it.
00:05:47.740 The news had always been shaky and unreliable.
00:05:50.220 It was a vast amount of propaganda from both sides.
00:05:52.560 But especially, obviously, here in the West, we got a lot of propaganda about how Ukraine was going to turn the corner at any moment.
00:05:59.660 But they just never seemed to get a foothold.
00:06:02.680 And now the war has just entirely disappeared from the media.
00:06:08.520 I don't think anyone talks about it pretty much at all at this point, except when it's time to once again beg for money.
00:06:15.240 So for most people, there's just simply no news about what's going on.
00:06:20.960 For the people who aren't aware, what is going on?
00:06:24.840 What is the status of the war?
00:06:26.360 Are the Ukrainians just about to turn the corner? 1.00
00:06:28.740 Are the Russians on the edge of victory?
00:06:31.060 What is the general overview of what is happening on the ground?
00:06:36.440 Okay.
00:06:37.180 Well, that's definitely a big question to answer.
00:06:40.120 In general, the war is in its, I would say, middle phase where Russia is slowly demonstrating its advantages, 1.00
00:06:47.680 especially in military material, and is beginning to push most parts of the front toward taking control of the entire four oblasts that they've annexed, especially Donetsk and Luhansk.
00:07:01.760 So we're seeing now a turnabout where instead of the Ukrainians either holding or in some cases making small advances like they did in last year's spring or summer offensive, 0.62
00:07:13.400 it's now the Russians who have the momentum and that momentum is accelerating, particularly after the fall of the fortress city of Dievka in March of this year.
00:07:23.000 And so it's quite clear at this point that the Ukrainian capability to launch offensives against the Russians is basically exhausted.
00:07:32.560 And, you know, as our own General Patton said, no one ever defended anything successfully.
00:07:37.320 You attack, you attack, you attack.
00:07:39.460 And if the Ukrainians can't attack anymore, except in very limited capacities, they're not actually going to be able to defeat the Russians and push them out of their country. 0.83
00:07:48.220 Whereas on the Russian side, the Russians are gaining an increasing amount of territory and inflicting an increasing amount of casualties on the Ukrainians.
00:07:56.620 So if you just look at the numbers and you project current trends into the future, the Ukrainian army is probably going to be at the breaking point.
00:08:04.620 Let's say another, we're on day 870 or something like that right now.
00:08:09.860 Let's say in another 870 days, the Ukrainian army is probably going to be at its breaking point, if not before then, or there could be a peace arrangement.
00:08:16.660 But that's where things are trending.
00:08:18.100 It's trending toward at least the minimum Russian victory where they successfully take the Kherson, Zaporizhia, Donetsk, and Lugansk Oblast that they've formally annexed into the Russian Federation.
00:08:29.160 So what is the key factor that is allowing the Russians to make this consistent headway? 0.89
00:08:40.100 I know we've seen a lot about the Ukrainian forces.
00:08:43.400 Obviously, the plan of most Western nations was to kill Russians until every Ukrainian man was gone. 0.73
00:08:50.560 From what I've heard, they're drafting up to very above middle-aged men, very hard to find men anymore to staff the army.
00:09:01.720 You also sent me a lot of information about just the munitions deficit, just the fact that they were not able to continue to shell on a regular basis the way they had been able to previously, which was making it difficult for them to be competitive.
00:09:17.740 Is it just they're just missing out on both men and munitions at this point?
00:09:22.900 It's mostly the much-vaunted 155-millimeter shell, which is sort of the backbone of Ukraine's artillery.
00:09:30.740 In any given war, artillery amounts to about 80% of the total casualties.
00:09:35.640 So it's really what makes or breaks an army in warfare.
00:09:39.580 Now, a few years ago, in 2023, actually, even, the Ukrainians, especially while they were on their counteroffensive, were firing more artillery shells per day on the key combat areas than the Russians.
00:09:53.820 But now the Russians have pulled way ahead in that sphere.
00:09:56.840 So current metrics, at least from March, place it at about 2,000 shells per day from Ukraine and 10,000 shells per day from Russia being fired.
00:10:07.060 And that may sound like a lot, but it's not compared to older wars like World War I, where millions of rounds were expended in a month.
00:10:15.880 Now, basically what this amounts to is that Russia is going to be able to kill far more Ukrainians than Ukrainians are able to kill Russians. 0.77
00:10:26.240 And this is not just a linear problem, but it's more like logarithmic or geometric, because when you're firing more and more shells, that snowballs into other advantages in terms of how you can use your own infantry, right?
00:10:40.040 So as Russia continues to pull ahead in artillery production and use, the Ukrainians are going to suffer more and more casualties.
00:10:49.160 As that article I sent you references, the quote in it was, let me see if I could pull it up.
00:10:55.500 Yes, a source from Ukraine's general staff provided Reuters with the information that when Ukraine was firing, 10,000 shells per day, between 35 and 45 Ukrainian soldiers were killed daily and about 250 to 300 wounded.
00:11:10.420 But when the daily fire fell to half that, more than 100 Ukrainian soldiers were killed per day and at least 1,000 were wounded.
00:11:16.680 So we can see that, according to this source, when the amount of shells being fired by Ukraine halved, the number of killed and wounded by Ukraine or on Ukraine's side went up far more than double, right?
00:11:31.280 So this is a big problem for Ukraine, and it's not really one they can solve because their primary source of shells is from the West, from the United States of America in particular.
00:11:39.920 And we basically expected, our elites expected that they would be able to ramp up production of 155 millimeter shells and other munitions in order to defeat the Russians.
00:11:53.700 You know, the Russian economy was going to collapse.
00:11:56.460 You know, we were just going to spin up all of these factories and outproduce them.
00:12:00.480 But actually, that's not what's happened.
00:12:02.560 The United States has not even doubled its 155 millimeter production since 2022.
00:12:08.020 In 2022, when the war started, we were at 20,000 shells being produced per month.
00:12:12.960 And now we're only at about 36,000 or so.
00:12:17.260 And remember, I just mentioned that Russia in its key combat areas is firing 10,000 shells per day.
00:12:25.480 And the United States is only producing 36,000 per month.
00:12:29.360 And you can do the math there.
00:12:30.740 And this is why Ukraine's shell expenditure of 125 millimeter has decreased all the way down to 2,000 per day.
00:12:38.520 And this is just really the key metric is the Russians can use their artillery far more than the Ukrainians can, which just gives them every single advantage in modern warfare. 0.90
00:12:49.580 You know, it's kind of a boring way to look at it because people like to talk about drones and ISR and hypersonic missiles.
00:12:57.280 But what it comes down to is artillery, the same as it's always been, especially over the last hundred years since the major advancements in artillery in World War I.
00:13:06.420 So this is always the problem, I guess, of being used as a pawn in a proxy war is that you don't actually own your supply lines.
00:13:17.700 You're not responsible for or you don't have control over the actual munitions that are coming into your country.
00:13:25.640 And is this really a demonstration yet again of the failure of Western logistics?
00:13:32.820 It feels like there was serious errors made, obviously, with the pandemic.
00:13:37.800 The fact that we didn't have all kinds of medical supplies.
00:13:41.080 We recognized that we didn't have the ability to produce antibiotics or all these other things that were necessary in the middle of a medical emergency.
00:13:48.980 And then obviously the trade was heavily disrupted, everything else that came from that.
00:13:53.480 And now we recognize that you not only do we not make enough of a lot of this stuff, but we don't even have the ability to really create the capacity in any kind of realistic timeline.
00:14:06.300 So America signs itself up basically for this proxy war, and now it doesn't have the ability to actually produce the type of munitions necessary to fight it.
00:14:16.780 This isn't really a heartwarming thought when you have a Western alliance that is pretty clearly trying to gun for some kind of conflict with Iran at this point.
00:14:27.440 Yeah, it seems to be, although I'm skeptical that any such conflict with Iran will happen.
00:14:33.240 But in either case, yeah, you're right.
00:14:36.100 I mean, what this is demonstrating is the Americans don't have the capability to spin up their military industrial complex to compensate for expenditure in an actual war.
00:14:47.220 I mean, we have a huge stockpile.
00:14:49.200 The exact amount is unknown, but we have our own stockpile of 155 millimeter.
00:14:53.580 So we haven't just dumped all of our munitions into Ukraine and have none left for ourselves.
00:14:57.420 But that said, if we were in a direct peer conflict, the same effect would apply.
00:15:02.440 Current production projections, and maybe these are also projections in another way, is 60,000 rounds a month by 2025 and 100,000 a month by 2026, which is still not enough to match what Russia is currently expending.
00:15:20.420 Now, of course, they're digging into deeper stockpiles.
00:15:22.560 It's not like they're manufacturing 10,000 rounds a day or something insane like that.
00:15:27.360 But those stockpiles are going to diminish on our side as well if we were engaged in a full-scale war.
00:15:33.100 So, you know, that's what, four years?
00:15:36.220 So from 2022 to 2026, we can only 5X our 155 millimeter production.
00:15:41.720 I mean, this is not a rate of spinning up your industry and your military-industrial complex that's acceptable.
00:15:50.020 You know, for all the money we're actually spending on military, it looks like in the key war-winning areas, we're not up to speed, which is, of course, our own industrial capacity.
00:16:01.280 You know, we have all of these high-tech planes that cost billions of dollars each, literally, you know, some of them are going to Ukraine now.
00:16:07.900 The F-16s are finally going there.
00:16:09.940 And these are important.
00:16:11.100 It's important to have the highest technology you have available.
00:16:15.820 But this stuff gets expended early on, especially.
00:16:19.440 You know, we saw this in Ukraine where Ukraine basically can only use its air force defensively against Russian missile attacks at this point.
00:16:26.700 Because when you deploy these assets, they are countered by manpads and other things like that, and they get shot down.
00:16:33.300 And then you're back to, you know, you're back to this meat grinder style of warfare where it's infantry supported by artillery and tanks on the ground.
00:16:41.400 And it's not some magical world of hypersonic missiles and jets flying around and, you know, Star Wars level stuff.
00:16:48.040 It's war as it always has been, and it seems like our industry is not up to speed in terms of being able to fight that war.
00:16:56.600 What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue?
00:17:01.120 A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door.
00:17:07.840 A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool.
00:17:12.300 Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered.
00:17:16.460 Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders.
00:17:21.340 Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply.
00:17:24.120 Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver.
00:17:26.600 So is this a, this feels like a consistent failure, again, of many Western militaries, particularly the United States military.
00:17:36.740 You know, whether the troops themselves have the capability, it seems that the tactics are dictated almost by a defense industry-led model of expenditure on, like you said, these extremely, you know, these fancy weapon systems, planes, these kind of things that are exorbitantly priced.
00:17:56.320 But we consistently fall down on kind of these nuts and bolts stuff, the meat and potatoes.
00:18:02.460 We don't have just the basic supplies, the basic capabilities on the ground or in artillery.
00:18:09.300 Everything is concentrated into the newest tech.
00:18:12.840 It's making sure that we have the fanciest weapon system available out there or the right aircraft, when often it's just the necessity of being able to lob artillery or kick in a door that we lack.
00:18:23.820 Yeah. And you, you see this touted about on Twitter and stuff too, videos about how ineffective our military is now.
00:18:33.360 And, you know, one might think that that is exaggerated the extent to which, you know, you just have too many, you know, women in the military.
00:18:40.560 You have entire, I saw a video of an entire platoon of women being trained or quote unquote trained the other day. 1.00
00:18:48.540 And, you know, that's, that's good for a laugh, but it's also serious, right?
00:18:51.800 I mean, if you talk, I know a good number of people who have served in the military and so do you, I know.
00:18:58.100 And what these guys will tell you is, is basically our special forces are effectively now our regular forces and the regular forces are there just kind of collecting a paycheck.
00:19:08.080 And when it comes down to it, we might have, you know, 30,000 at most effective combat troops.
00:19:15.240 Okay. So Ukraine and Russia each have more than 10 times that currently deployed in this war.
00:19:21.180 So we don't have the personnel to fight a war like Ukraine is doing right now. 0.90
00:19:25.420 Even if we wanted to get involved in that conflict, people talk about, you know, oh, are the Americans going to send troops over there?
00:19:31.740 That's never going to happen because we don't have the troops available.
00:19:34.200 And it takes like six months to deploy an armored division overseas.
00:19:38.740 That's just never going to happen.
00:19:40.240 So on the other hand, and this is, this is an aspect of the war that's really not talked about enough.
00:19:46.920 The Russian armed forces now have two years of experience fighting in a modern fifth generation war.
00:19:53.360 And they have over 500,000 troops deployed in Ukraine now.
00:19:57.180 Okay. So Russia as a nation is now developing that institutional memory of how to fight a modern war.
00:20:05.380 And to be fair, the Russians have been fighting, you know, border conflicts for, for a long time now in, in other places as well.
00:20:13.180 But this is, this is a much bigger war, right?
00:20:15.080 And now they're developing that institutional memory and that on the ground experience among the soldiers and the NCO officer corps.
00:20:23.520 You know, how do we, how does one actually fight a war like this, where you have drones overhead that can potentially see everything?
00:20:30.620 Everyone knows what everyone's doing at all times on each side and that sort of thing.
00:20:34.480 They know how to fight this now.
00:20:36.040 And Americans don't, because we have zero institutional memory of modern war.
00:20:40.540 I mean, if you, if you really think about it, when was the last time the United States was involved in a war like this?
00:20:47.680 It wasn't even the Iraq war, because in Iraq, you would have soldiers deployed on a base.
00:20:53.380 The base was effectively safe.
00:20:55.520 And then they would go out, fight the Taliban, fight the Iraqis, you know, whomever. 0.73
00:21:00.120 And then they would return back to base in Ukraine.
00:21:02.740 It's not like that in Ukraine.
00:21:03.880 They are under threat of being shelled or killed constantly.
00:21:07.600 If you're a Russian soldier in there, right?
00:21:09.440 You're just in some dugout in a bunker and you could be killed at any moment.
00:21:13.780 In, in the last major war, quote unquote, the Americans fought for really the last 20 years in the desert.
00:21:19.300 It hasn't been like that.
00:21:20.560 We weren't against peer competitors.
00:21:22.180 The last time we really fought, even, even in Desert Storm, right?
00:21:25.160 That war was just a snap of the fingers effectively.
00:21:27.520 So it's been decades at this point and all of the institutional memory on how to actually fight a war.
00:21:32.920 Those guys are now retiring or they just have, you know, desk jobs in the Pentagon or something.
00:21:38.400 Whereas now Russia has probably the most effective military in the world in terms of actually fighting a peer conflict on the ground.
00:21:47.060 And that's a really bad position for the United States to be in.
00:21:50.360 And it's a position the elites have rather stupidly put us in.
00:21:54.000 Yeah, I want to talk a lot more about that because I think the effect that this war has had on kind of the Russian standing in the world, the American standing in the world and the message it sends to people about kind of the ability to flex on the United States is all incredibly important.
00:22:11.880 But before we get to that, guys, let's hear from job stacking.
00:22:14.980 Hey, guys, let me tell you about today's sponsor, job stacking, more paychecks, less hustle, working from home.
00:22:21.140 That's what job stacking is all about.
00:22:23.060 If you're a remote or hybrid worker looking to maximize your earning potential, then consider joining the job stacking mentorship program.
00:22:29.240 The program is designed by Ralph Halza, the creator of job stacking, to help you successfully implement a strategy that will allow you to collect multiple paychecks from different jobs without burning out or getting caught by employers.
00:22:40.500 Job stacking has already helped many people double or even triple their incomes.
00:22:45.100 Luke Hill, a financial analyst living in the UK, has used job stacking to stack three different jobs and went from making $5K a month to $15K a month.
00:22:52.660 But job stacking isn't just about increasing incomes.
00:22:55.980 It's also about helping our guys gain more independence by no longer being a slave to debt or a single employer who hates their values.
00:23:03.200 Andrew Gustafsson, a credit analyst from Australia, is now stacking four salaries, which he has used to pay off his personal and student debt and buy a home for his family.
00:23:13.340 If you don't currently have a remote job, no worries.
00:23:15.920 The program is also designed to help you land remote jobs so that you can go ahead and get started.
00:23:21.460 So if you want to double your income and stop relying on a single paycheck from a woke employer, go to job stacking dot com slash start now.
00:23:30.220 That's job stacking dot com slash start now and book a call with Rolf today.
00:23:37.280 So like you were saying previously, Charlemagne, the fact that Russia has gotten several years now of experience in fighting a modern war as where the United States is now often, like you said, retiring or sometimes pushing out.
00:23:52.120 Many of the people who have any experience in a conflict at all, much less a fifth generation war really sets people's minds to the fact that we are in a precarious situation when it comes to any kind of geopolitical conflict.
00:24:06.760 There's a real irony in the fact that I think the United States in many ways originally thought that they were going to be funding the destruction of the Russian Federation.
00:24:16.520 Right. They thought that they would be sending Ukrainians in there, destroying them slowly through this war of attrition, draining the Russian military capability and ultimately winning a victory by neutering what Russia can do. 0.85
00:24:31.020 And instead, basically, America has in many ways spent hundreds of billions of dollars creating a training scenario in which Russia could level itself up to the point where it may be the most combat effective large scale force that's currently existing in the world order.
00:24:49.340 Yeah, that's, you know, it's difficult to say exactly what the goals of this war were, because the regime is so opaque and schizophrenic.
00:25:01.840 You know, I kind of, I view this like any war, you have your minimal and you have your maximalist aims.
00:25:09.100 I mean, it does seem to be based on what our politicians and the, you know, global leaders in these NGOs state is that, you know, basically they want to dismantle the Russian Federation.
00:25:22.460 Now, that would, that would be like your maximalist end rate.
00:25:25.040 But they also talk about regime change in Russia pretty openly, which is, you know, a step down from actually dismantling Russia itself.
00:25:33.040 Obviously, that hasn't been achieved.
00:25:34.780 I think a lower order goal of that was at least the destruction of the Russian armed forces.
00:25:40.420 Now, obviously, a lot of material and people have been lost, but we can see that the Russians have not, after two years of conflict, more than two years of conflict now, they have not lost their fighting capabilities.
00:25:53.680 At the very least, the United States has achieved sort of a baseline goal of separating Europe and Russia. 0.96
00:26:01.740 Europe has been convinced, basically, to put all of its old Soviet stocks into the war in Ukraine, which they're going to have to replace with the NATO standards.
00:26:12.220 So, effectively, Europe has no real way of going back to a different standard.
00:26:19.140 They're now stuck on the Western standards that are led by the United States.
00:26:23.040 And, obviously, Europe has been significantly detached from Russia in terms of its trade and its energy relationships.
00:26:31.020 You know, of course, we have the Nord Stream pipeline.
00:26:33.840 Germany was definitely getting too close to Russia for the United States' liking.
00:26:37.840 So, in terms of, like, what the Western elites wanted to achieve and what they did achieve, they, at the very least, detached Europe from Russia and really bumped Europe one step down on the great power potential ladder.
00:26:51.000 Because they simply cannot act independently of the United States because the European peninsula simply does not have access to the resources it needs to develop itself as a great power.
00:27:05.780 It has to trade with the outside world.
00:27:08.200 And the United States has cut that off.
00:27:10.280 So, this war has at least achieved that. 0.92
00:27:12.880 Going a little back to what we were talking about before, you know, when this war started, the United States shipped over these HIMARS missiles, if you remember, you know, this being talked about.
00:27:27.700 And this really was a game changer.
00:27:30.020 There's these long-range missiles.
00:27:32.300 And what they were able to do is hit Russian buildups of, you know, munitions far behind the lines, pretty much the entire area of Ukraine.
00:27:41.560 Because the range in these things were enough that the HIMARS missiles could hit literally anything in the Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine.
00:27:49.060 Now, they can still do that.
00:27:50.640 But, at this point, 50% to 70% of HIMARS missiles are jammed and fail to hit their targets.
00:27:57.720 So, the Russians have learned how to counter our high-tech weapons. 0.93
00:28:02.580 We have taught them how to use electronic warfare against us.
00:28:06.980 Now, of course, we can take what we've learned there and try to develop countermeasures to that.
00:28:12.360 But the fact is, we've now given the Russians the ability to jam a lot of our high-tech missiles. 0.81
00:28:19.260 I mean, this is a less high-tech example.
00:28:21.740 But you also have the Excalibur, which is this modified 155-millimeter shell that's guided.
00:28:27.620 And when it was first deployed, its hit rate was 70%.
00:28:31.460 And now it's all the way down to 6% from electronic warfare.
00:28:34.920 So, the Russians are now countering all these high-tech munitions that we were using against them to allow Ukraine to prevent the Russians from launching any major attacks.
00:28:46.320 But now that's over.
00:28:47.940 Now, the Russian electronic warfare is to the point where they can safely build up resources for offensives because those resources are not simply going to be noticed by, you know, American ISR and then hit by a missile that's, you know, going to hit with a, you know, if you have a 50% hit rate, you fire two missiles, right?
00:29:08.000 And then you're going to hit the thing.
00:29:09.440 But that's not the case anymore.
00:29:10.740 So, has this shift really redefined the speed of this war?
00:29:17.580 Because I think, obviously, we always get the promise from politicians that wars will be quick and that, you know, we'll have this thing wrapped up in six months is the classic cell line of every war that ends up becoming a massive slog.
00:29:33.700 But I think a lot of people looked at the technology.
00:29:36.620 They looked at what they thought was a mismatch in certain areas.
00:29:39.700 And they expected that one way or another, whether it was the Ukrainians getting enough technology from the West or whether it was the Russians overwhelming the Ukrainians with manpower and munitions, that ultimately, whenever the dam broke, this thing would be over quickly one way or the other.
00:29:59.260 And instead, like you said, we've seen several years of constant shelling and people being kind of locked in place in many scenarios.
00:30:10.700 Are we seeing the creation of a new trench warfare due to the capabilities of or the ability to dismantle many of the capabilities here?
00:30:19.040 What kind of long-term projection?
00:30:21.720 I know there's a lot of guesswork here, so no one's going to bring this footage up and hold you to it.
00:30:27.360 But is there a projection for how long you think it would be to simply secure, like you said, for Russia, the territory that it wants to annex?
00:30:36.440 Well, the front line has not moved very much over the last year, especially close to two years at this point.
00:30:47.140 And well, this idea of trench warfare tends to be overused because when I hear trench warfare, I think of World War I and you have these trench systems that are literally across the entire country of France.
00:31:02.520 The type of trenches or entrenchments that are built are built on strategically defensible positions, and they're not this giant connected network.
00:31:15.180 You know, it's smaller trenches, smaller dugouts that you build in order to protect yourself from, you know, like airburst shells and stuff.
00:31:23.080 And yes, there are trenches, but it's not like World War I where you just have this giant line of people in a trench the entire frontage, which is, you know, 500 kilometers or something like that.
00:31:32.520 And because then they would all just get killed by artillery, right?
00:31:35.520 So the trenches are spotty.
00:31:38.300 They're disconnected.
00:31:39.520 They're spread out over tens of square kilometers.
00:31:43.040 You know, if you have a brigade stationed in some part of the front, their entrenchments are going to be spread over many square kilometers.
00:31:52.240 And, you know, especially in this war, it seems like tree lines help, especially because they provide cover from drones.
00:31:59.600 That's the key, right, is neither side has enough artillery to simply incessantly bomb like every square inch of the frontage, right?
00:32:08.960 So you still have to find where your opponent is and then hit that target with something.
00:32:15.500 You still have to make precision strikes in this war.
00:32:18.120 It's not like World War I where you're just sort of indiscriminately bombing one area with thousands of shells for, you know, hours or something like that.
00:32:25.980 So we're not in a trench warfare like World War I.
00:32:30.480 You know, in any war, you're going to have entrenchments.
00:32:33.520 So I think that analogy is very much overused.
00:32:36.740 What we are seeing, though, is just it's infantry on infantry combat, armored combat, artillery shells, artillery duels.
00:32:43.820 You know, one side has an artillery piece.
00:32:46.260 Your artillery tries to locate and destroy that piece of artillery.
00:32:51.100 It's that sort of thing.
00:32:52.300 It's it's exactly it's you can think about it like if you've seen, you know, a World War II film, it's probably a lot more analogous to that than what you would see in World War I, what you would imagine in World War I.
00:33:03.320 Right. And it's not this it's it's more high tech because you do have these, you know, handheld drones that are providing intelligence for you on an individual level.
00:33:15.940 Right. Like there are these drone operator. 0.70
00:33:18.140 I forget the name of the unit, but Russian has Russia has a unit that effectively is teams of drone operators that go out and scout and try and locate something for the Russian artillery to sight in on and destroy.
00:33:33.060 Right. So this this is this is a new aspect because you didn't you didn't you wouldn't have that in previous wars that happened.
00:33:40.380 And that's really the key difference is drones. And it's it's less these videos of, you know, drones with a small munition attached to it that flies up and blows you up.
00:33:50.500 Right. That happens. The main impact, though, of drones is being able to see the battlefield.
00:33:55.600 You can literally just see for kilometers, which means nothing can be built up and mass.
00:34:02.580 And this is one of the main problems the Ukrainians had in their counteroffensive last year is how do you put together an offensive that's going to require hundreds of vehicles and thousands of men and concentrate it in an area that's like 10 kilometers wide and not be completely obliterated?
00:34:21.800 Well, they did get obliterated. Right. Because it's extremely difficult to do that when both sides can just see everything that the other is doing.
00:34:29.880 So the combat is doesn't happen with massed units. It happens with with small platoons moving about taking one trench at a time.
00:34:38.660 This is a very this isn't a sort of big offensive, big arrow warfare where you have like armored columns driving for tens of kilometers.
00:34:46.440 You'll have four or five vehicles drive into a neighborhood, drop off a few dozen troops, drive out quickly before they get hit by something.
00:34:56.120 You'll have trench raids where, you know, a platoon goes into, you know, a neighboring trench that might just be, you know, 50 meters away.
00:35:05.840 Try to take that that sort of thing. You're not seeing these massive movements of armies because it's impossible in the current paradigm.
00:35:13.260 So that almost perfect knowledge that that elimination of fog of war has really reduced the effective unit size because you can't you can't mass anything of any real import in any given time, because if you do, you'll end up losing it pretty quickly because the target is simply too large.
00:35:32.840 And it's obvious to the actors. Do you think obviously we can't read the minds of kind of the current Russian intention, but do you think that it will be enough for Putin to to control the regions that he has formerly annexed?
00:35:51.140 I mean, obviously, the kind of propaganda was always, well, you know, Putin's just going to conquer the entirety of Europe.
00:35:59.220 He's going to sweep the entire map. That was never going to happen.
00:36:02.840 That was always a joke. But there was some indication at different points that he might seek far more Ukrainian territory if it became possible, if it became something available to him.
00:36:13.240 Do you think the weakening the obvious inability of the United States or other states to go ahead and project power emboldens him to make decisions to capture more territory?
00:36:23.780 Well, it's impossible to say anything definitive on that, obviously.
00:36:28.360 But, you know, I think my my read of of him is that he remains fairly conservative in his territorial ambitions for Russia, as he always has been.
00:36:39.240 I would be surprised if, you know, peace negotiations do take place within the next six months or so that the Russians would seek anything other than the four oblasts they've officially annexed into the Russian Federation.
00:36:53.360 At minimum, they, you know, they're not going to de-annex those territories, right? According to Russian law, these are parts of Russia now.
00:37:01.040 So at minimum, that's going to be the war aim, which is actually fairly minimal. It's 10 to 20 percent of Ukraine's geographic territory, something like that.
00:37:11.000 So it's a fairly small part of the of the country, mostly the Russian speaking parts of the country.
00:37:15.740 It's certainly possible that the Russians will wish to annex the Kharkov oblast, and it's certainly possible that they will seek the city of Odessa as well, which would, of course, landlock Ukraine.
00:37:29.700 I think it I think his ambitions and the Russian ambitions will really depend on, you know, how how quickly the Ukrainian lines continue to collapse.
00:37:40.240 If the rate we're currently seeing accelerates over the next six months, especially the Russians will actually get pretty close to annexing the territories they've claimed in the Donbass, at least Donetsk and Lugansk.
00:37:53.020 Right. And if they're able to do that, it's possible that, you know, excursions into Kharkov oblasts might result in that being annexed as well.
00:38:03.580 One one thing I see happening potentially is a peace negotiation might look like this.
00:38:09.840 The Russians will say, OK, well, we've officially annexed these these four oblasts, Kherson, Zaporozhia, Donetsk and Lugansk.
00:38:18.100 You have to give us those because we've taken them. Right. Even if we don't control all the territory, this is our minimum.
00:38:26.100 Also, the other oblasts in Ukraine have to have a vote on which country they want to go in. Right. 0.97
00:38:32.340 And so Russia could annex Odessa without firing a shot simply by including in part of the peace negotiations that, you know, this oblast is each oblast is going to vote on whether or not they want to join the Russian Federation.
00:38:45.220 Just like before, there's a good chance that these Russian speaking oblasts like Odessa and Kharkov would actually vote to join the Russian Federation, especially considering the state of Ukraine.
00:38:58.000 I mean, even regardless of how you feel about Russia or Ukraine, it's like after what's happened to the country of Ukraine, I mean, which which country would you want to want to be a part of if you're like on the border of Russia and Ukraine and you're given the choice seems pretty obvious.
00:39:14.440 So I think people a lot of people seem to believe that the Russians are going to have to actually militarily take all the territory that they may end up possessing.
00:39:24.840 That's not the case. Right. This is a war of attrition, not a war of terrain.
00:39:29.060 And the goal is to defeat the Ukrainian army and destroy its ability to fight, basically.
00:39:36.340 And we've we've seen at this point that the Ukrainian army is no longer capable of launching offensives.
00:39:42.340 They're getting close to the point where they're no longer capable of defending for any significant amount of time in an area that that has not been long fortified.
00:39:52.360 The city of Avdivka, which was taken in March, that city was in Ukrainian hands for 10 years on the front line.
00:40:00.160 Right. That is a 10 year stronghold that is built up with concrete.
00:40:04.140 The entire city is a fortress, whereas after Avdivka was taken, the ones have now advanced past that dozens of kilometers because the Ukrainians don't have the advantage of fortifications. 0.96
00:40:15.200 They've designed for 10 years to stop an enemy army from from taking the territory.
00:40:22.420 I mean, for example, the way the Russians took Avdivka ultimately, at least one of the major breakthroughs was they tunneled something like a kilometer through an old sewer line and sent several platoons of men.
00:40:39.260 And I think it was around 100 men or something like that behind Ukrainian lines.
00:40:43.620 And this sort of opened up a vector of attack on the surface.
00:40:47.060 Right. So that was the kind of stuff that the Ukraine that the Russians had to do to break through the fortress city of Avdivka, despite their many advantages. 0.91
00:40:56.040 You know, that's like something you'd see in a movie. Right.
00:40:58.480 But that's not the case anymore.
00:40:59.780 Now they are just moving across open terrain because the only fortifications the Ukrainians have are these earthworks. 1.00
00:41:09.060 Right. They don't they have some older fortifications left, but mostly it's earthworks now.
00:41:14.160 And these earthworks have been built up over two years for the most part, at most, and not 10 years.
00:41:20.140 So anyway, to get to get back to the question, we're seeing now the Ukrainian army losing the ability to actually hold on to any particular given territory that the Russians persistently attack for very long.
00:41:35.640 And eventually what this is going to result in is the entire line is going to start moving at an increasing rate.
00:41:43.200 And that's going to start as you see that rate increase, that's going to signal the actual collapse of the Ukrainian armed forces.
00:41:51.240 And they're not going to fight all the way back to the Dnieper River. Right.
00:41:54.400 It's not going to be the Russians fighting all the way to Kiev for 100 kilometers.
00:41:59.220 Eventually, the Ukrainians are going to have to throw in the towel because wars don't end with one side 100 percent wiping out the enemy army.
00:42:07.860 Right. That never happens. At some point, the enemy army has to decide, OK, we we can't win this war.
00:42:13.720 We were now going to come to terms. And you kind of want to do that when your army is still intact. Right.
00:42:19.920 So it would not surprise me if the Ukrainians sought negotiations while their army was still somewhat intact,
00:42:27.040 because that allows you to negotiate better terms.
00:42:29.840 Whereas if you're obviously an entirely defeated and it's just a matter of time, well, why why would the enemy why would Russia not at that point see maximalist ends? 0.54
00:42:40.840 You know, it would be like if we look at, you know, World War Two, for example, and you look at 1944 or 45, it's like,
00:42:48.620 why would the Russians come to terms with the Germans at that point, given that they're obviously going to completely overrun things? 0.95
00:42:54.360 Whereas, you know, if you look at something like 1943, where, you know, the Reich was at its greatest expanse at that point,
00:43:02.140 they're in a much better negotiating position. Right. The Germans would have been, even though they had effectively lost the war at this point.
00:43:08.880 And that's kind of the position that Ukraine is in, is they've they've effectively lost the war,
00:43:12.900 but they can still fight and make the Russians pay a heavy price. And that's a card they have on the table.
00:43:18.040 You know, although the Russians, although the Ukrainians will inevitably lose the war,
00:43:23.700 if current trends continue as they are, and we have every reason to think they will,
00:43:27.900 they still have that card on the table to say, OK, look, you could beat us in another two years,
00:43:33.100 but you could save 100,000 lives if you, you know, don't take any more than you have now.
00:43:39.600 Something like that. Right. So the war is going to come to some sort of negotiated settlement at that point.
00:43:44.620 It's not going to be a total wipeout of of the country, Ukraine or something absurd like that.
00:43:50.160 And that's that's why the front line has not moved, because the war is not about taking all the territory,
00:43:57.120 you know, one step at a time. It's about defeating the enemy army.
00:44:01.460 And part of that is taking terrain because you have to fight the enemy where they are
00:44:06.580 and make the battlefield more tactically disadvantageous to them. Right.
00:44:11.800 So taking Avdivka is tactically disadvantageous to the Ukrainians because now they can't fight 1.00
00:44:17.460 in highly fortified areas. Now they have to fight in areas where they're going to suffer more attrition.
00:44:23.280 Right. That's the point of taking the territory. It's not the territory as such.
00:44:27.100 It's to make it easier to inflict more casualties on the opponent.
00:44:31.120 I guess the question becomes how much of that decision is really in the hands of the Ukrainian?
00:44:39.300 As we've said, so much of their military capacity comes from the West, depending on who's telling the story.
00:44:46.400 Zelensky is almost entirely an artificial plant created by the CIA.
00:44:50.900 I mean, how much organic power does he really have? How much decision power actually rests in the hands of Ukraine officials?
00:44:59.500 And how much of this is really all ultimately a decision that's made by NATO or the United States or some other kind of foreign seat of power?
00:45:09.100 Well, we don't even really have to speculate on this much because given that Ukraine would lose the war in probably a month or less
00:45:17.480 if supply from the U.S. stopped and other Western countries, the United States can effectively dictate whatever it wants.
00:45:25.600 And I mean, there are times, too, when the Russian Ministry of Defense calls up our Pentagon
00:45:30.740 and tells the Americans to get the Ukrainians to stop doing this thing, which might it's usually like attacking Russian territory.
00:45:40.080 You know, the Russians will literally call our Pentagon, tell them, hey, you need to tell your guys to stop firing into Russian territory or bad things will happen.
00:45:50.260 And then that happens. Right. And then a few months later, the Ukrainians will will do it again. 1.00
00:45:54.540 I mean, this is the kind of thing that's actually happening here.
00:45:56.980 So the Americans are in charge here. Right. 0.99
00:45:59.220 Like Zelensky is on paper in charge. But the thing is, the Americans are the ones providing everything he needs to continue the war. 0.67
00:46:07.920 If they stop, it's over. So who's in control here?
00:46:11.840 Obviously, Zelensky is not running things.
00:46:14.540 Now, the flip side of that, the ultimate control over the situation lies with the Ukrainian armed forces or the armed forces of Ukraine, as they're officially called.
00:46:23.440 Because, you know, we don't know, at least I don't know much about their internal politics within the army itself.
00:46:31.940 But one would imagine that at some point the army is going to have enough of this.
00:46:37.060 The population is going to have enough of this.
00:46:39.640 Like, you know, the writing is on the wall.
00:46:42.280 We're not going to keep fighting and dying in this pointless war.
00:46:44.960 So I think Zelensky's time is numbered, you know, either way.
00:46:50.440 So we could see the Americans decide, OK, this is enough.
00:46:53.900 Or we can see the Ukrainian armed forces decide that, OK, this is enough.
00:46:58.320 We're not we're not fighting this this war anymore.
00:47:00.780 We need to come to terms because, you know, this isn't like an existential war where, you know, Ukraine can't surrender to Russia because Russia is then going to, you know, wipe out the entire country or something like Ukrainians will understand that, you know, OK, we can come to terms and we can survive and, you know, maybe be a rump state that joins NATO or something.
00:47:21.940 But we're not going to get wiped out.
00:47:23.280 That's not existential, right?
00:47:24.780 Like some other wars have been and how the Americans treat wars, right?
00:47:28.300 Russia is a power that can actually be negotiated with by the Ukrainians. 0.87
00:47:35.360 So is the lesson here, I mean, you know, obviously just speculating, but this is the lesson I would learn if I if I was a foreign power is really that the, you know, the NATO or the Western alliance is is simply a force that has to be survived for sure.
00:47:51.940 And so I think it's a sort of amount of time because the majority of its power comes from very expensive technology and the ability to basically concentrate media attention.
00:48:02.660 You have, you know, once you lose that media attention, once you lose that momentum that comes from that initial burst of propaganda, all of the financial and and other essential assets that kind of are attached to that, the the the the more willingness to invest in the war and, you know,
00:48:24.660 the upfront technology that is slowly kind of countermanded by the Russian forces, really, you end up with just a trickle of in a war of attrition.
00:48:35.900 And then the entire war kind of falls in the favor of something like like like the Russian Federation.
00:48:42.740 So you have this scenario where, yeah, there's this massive upfront blitz from the West, from NATO, from anyone aligned with the United States.
00:48:51.280 But after, you know, six months to a year, the American public, the American media lose interest, the funding dries up, the munitions dry up and the kind of forward thinking technology, the very expensive technology that's being deployed in the field gets countermanded in some way.
00:49:10.760 And then you end up in a scenario where you can you can really mop up what's left of the forces that the the West has encouraged to overextend themselves.
00:49:21.620 Yeah, I mean, the United States has no credible means other than the nuclear arsenal with with which to threaten Russia.
00:49:28.840 I mean, we can't threaten Russia in a conventional war.
00:49:31.400 This war just demonstrates that. 0.74
00:49:33.120 I mean, the logistics of of sending American troops to a European front alone are insane, let alone the actual events on the ground that we've seen over the last two years.
00:49:47.160 Anyone who looks at this is going to realize that, yeah, this is this is not possible.
00:49:51.640 Right. Even if something crazy like Poland was the jumping off point ready to attack attack Moscow. 0.94
00:49:58.900 Poland has a massive military at this point.
00:50:02.480 They have a huge air force.
00:50:03.600 But despite all of that, we know that that would be utilized to its greatest extent in the first few months or year of the war.
00:50:12.660 And then you would be back to a more conventional type of war with a much more limited amount of high tech equipment.
00:50:20.620 Now, that's still happening.
00:50:22.000 Right. One of the reasons I haven't touched on that Russia is doing well, too, is they're they're launching cruise missiles attack.
00:50:28.100 Like attacks every few weeks or months against Ukraine, usually in these massive bombardments of dozens, I think even up to 100 missiles sometimes.
00:50:36.460 And they hit targets across the entire country, you know, even close to the Polish border.
00:50:42.100 And Russia is is manufacturing about 130 to 100 cruise missiles a month.
00:50:48.140 Right. Which is basically close to their burn rate.
00:50:51.380 So Russia has the capacity to continue to develop high tech solutions as well in order to strike deep into Ukraine. 0.86
00:50:59.760 So that is a part of it, too.
00:51:01.020 It's just relying on that completely is not an option.
00:51:05.200 Right. And we've seen that the the Western powers, especially the United States, relies far too heavily on its high tech gadgets and sort of gigantism.
00:51:13.580 Right. Like with our aircraft carriers, you know, we saw this happen in the First World War where gigantism took hold in how fleets were built as well.
00:51:23.180 But this war is demonstrating that that sort of thinking is not applicable in a long war.
00:51:29.460 You're not going to win by having, you know, some sort of uber weapon like your V2 rockets or whatever.
00:51:35.360 Right. These things can have some effect, but it's not how the war is won.
00:51:38.900 And Russia has shown the West that it can fight a conventional war.
00:51:45.460 And the West has demonstrated that it doesn't it doesn't have the capacity to supply logistically a conventional war without breaking itself.
00:51:56.700 So.
00:51:58.220 I think a lot of people, like you said, have difficulty finding any reliable information on this.
00:52:04.300 I'm I'm even seeing in chat people saying, no, Ukraine just launched a massive massive offensive and they land and they're they're they're threatening the Russian homeland at this point.
00:52:16.660 You know, so so what is the validity of that and where do you go to find what you feel is reliable information on what's actually happening right now?
00:52:27.160 Yeah, I figured someone would bring that up.
00:52:29.220 I mean, yeah, the Ukrainians just use their special forces to launch an attack toward Kursk. 0.95
00:52:34.780 Kursk is 100 kilometers away from Ukraine.
00:52:37.660 They've launched they've attacked seven kilometers in.
00:52:40.340 This is not even as far as they've gone before.
00:52:42.560 We see these raids every few months.
00:52:44.640 This is not a sustained offensive.
00:52:46.320 It's just a raid.
00:52:47.580 It's going to be overturned in a week or two, as it always is.
00:52:51.100 So, you know, that's the answer to that in terms of, you know, where to get information from.
00:52:55.460 You know, for most people, if you're not if you're not interested in, you know, military history and this sort of thing in general, I think one of the best sources is actually from Austria by a colonel named Marcus Reisner.
00:53:12.220 This is a good source.
00:53:14.780 Austria is, you know, quote unquote, a neutral country.
00:53:18.380 They're not in NATO, at least.
00:53:19.700 And I find Marcus Reisner from, well, this will be hard to pronounce, but it's the Osterreichs Bunzir YouTube channel.
00:53:27.940 Basically, Austria, its military has a YouTube channel and they do English language videos.
00:53:36.560 This colonel produces these excellent presentations every few months to give you an update.
00:53:41.620 So, I would actually, you know, check that YouTube channel, Osterreichs Bunzir, Marcus Reisner, that's R-E-I-S-N-E-R, I think. 0.76
00:53:53.500 And, you know, check out his videos and you'll get a decent update every few months.
00:53:57.420 The last one was two months ago, titled The Russian Momentum is Back.
00:54:01.540 He provides really well-balanced information.
00:54:05.120 And I think that's really all the average person needs is, you know, every few months get some info from a well-balanced source.
00:54:12.300 Any Western source, like, or American source, like the Institute of the Study of War, Institute for the Study of War or something, this is just nonsense.
00:54:21.220 Other source I really like, and this is more for people who want to deep dive, is I really like this YouTube channel titled The Operational Art of War.
00:54:30.860 Run by a Canadian guy known as Jimmy Thomas.
00:54:36.120 He's a staff college graduate from Canada, and this is his area of expertise.
00:54:44.100 So, to the extent I really know anything about the details of how modern war is fought, it's mostly due to his work.
00:54:52.560 And he's sort of doing a history of the war while it's still going on using Google Earth.
00:55:01.080 And he is looking at images of the battle around Kiev and, you know, providing his own takes on what he believed happened in that battle.
00:55:12.280 This is really interesting stuff.
00:55:14.140 So, that's Operational Art of War on YouTube if you want to really understand the details of how modern wars are thought about from an operational perspective, from an actual staff officer's perspective.
00:55:28.040 And it also gets into the history of war.
00:55:30.340 Excellent. I know that you're doing a lot more writing than you are YouTube at this point.
00:55:38.000 So, before we go to the questions of the people, can I let people know where to find your work?
00:55:43.560 Yes. I have a blog, charlemagne.substack.com.
00:55:47.440 It's titled Neo Reactor.
00:55:48.740 I just published a really long paid piece on the Suez Canal crisis, which I think is something understudied, a pivotal turning point in the 20th century between America, Europe, and Great Britain.
00:56:02.600 So, I recommend checking that out.
00:56:04.540 I've got a free preview of that as well.
00:56:07.720 And, of course, a lot of my writing is for the Old Glory Club's substack.
00:56:12.100 That's oldgloryclub.substack.com.
00:56:14.480 You can also find our website, theoldgloryclub.com.
00:56:18.520 If you go to our events tab, we have a display of eight or so videos describing the conference we had a few months ago that you had attended, of course.
00:56:30.560 So, if you're interested in sort of hearing about that, you can check that out as well.
00:56:35.640 Excellent. All right, guys.
00:56:36.840 Let's head over to the questions of the people.
00:56:39.760 Robert Weinsfeld says,
00:56:41.960 Yeah, it's interesting to think about that, but, you know, I think Carpathia to Hungary or, you know, I'm sure there are some polls who would love to have Lvov back.
00:57:07.580 But I think this gets into sort of Hearts of Iron 4 map game stuff.
00:57:11.680 I mean, could that happen?
00:57:13.240 Yes.
00:57:14.220 I do not think that's going to happen.
00:57:16.060 I think the country of Ukraine is going to remain mostly intact, sans whatever the Russians end up annexing.
00:57:24.200 But we won't rule it out for sure.
00:57:26.560 Can you explain, for those unfamiliar, what the oblast designation is?
00:57:32.640 Is that like a state?
00:57:34.140 You know, what?
00:57:36.660 It's...
00:57:37.180 Provinces?
00:57:39.560 Yeah, more like province.
00:57:40.840 It's not a state.
00:57:42.040 The American state is kind of a unique concept.
00:57:44.760 But, yeah, it's basically analogous to a state, sans the fact that American states have a, you know, well, we're supposed to have a high degree of sovereignty in American states.
00:57:55.720 But that's what an oblast is, yes.
00:57:57.840 Before the 1860s.
00:57:59.460 Yeah.
00:57:59.940 Let's see.
00:58:01.860 Life of Brian says, what do you think of the Duran?
00:58:05.300 They're a great channel to watch daily.
00:58:07.340 I mean, they have interesting takes.
00:58:09.020 They're definitely a bit Russia biased and definitely hype up the capability of Russian victory much more.
00:58:18.880 I mean, the way I look at this war, again, is, you know, I've studied World War II a lot.
00:58:24.240 And I think most people who study that war sort of realize that the war was lost for the Germans in 1941 when they failed to take Moscow, right?
00:58:33.600 But the war continued all the way till 45.
00:58:36.960 And the greatest extent of German conquest was in 43, right?
00:58:41.780 Which is interesting because their territory expanded to the greatest extent halfway through the war.
00:58:46.900 But if you look back on it, you sort of realize that materially it had already been lost, right?
00:58:52.280 So people tend to freak out when you're like, oh, the Russians are.
00:58:56.380 You keep saying the Russians are winning. 0.95
00:58:57.960 When are they actually going to win?
00:58:59.020 It's like, well, there's the point at which Ukraine can no longer win the war.
00:59:04.040 But that doesn't mean that the war just stops there, right?
00:59:06.840 It still has to be fought to its conclusion.
00:59:09.780 So the Duran tends to overhype, I think, that conclusion a bit.
00:59:14.940 But they're a fine channel.
00:59:16.040 And Gabby of Lindbergh says, maybe our weapon systems aren't that bad.
00:59:22.540 The same people who rolled over to Russia irregulars were at least able to put up a fight eight years later.
00:59:31.400 Is this sort of referencing the beginning of the war?
00:59:36.700 The same people who rolled over to Russian irregulars?
00:59:41.320 Yeah, I can't say I'm familiar.
00:59:46.400 Yeah, I mean, when the war began in 2014, it was the Ukrainian military was very, very small.
00:59:52.180 And irregular forces in Donetsk and Lugansk sort of, well, they held up the Ukrainian military for many months before the front lines solidified to where they are.
01:00:03.780 I mean, obviously, the American weapon systems are superior to what Ukraine would be able to provide itself. 0.92
01:00:11.260 No one's arguing that fact.
01:00:14.140 Yeah, it's certainly a upgrade.
01:00:15.940 But, you know, this is just the classic problem that America has run into in many different scenarios, and particularly here.
01:00:24.060 It's not that the weapon systems aren't impressive, at least in some way, but that in a protracted battle, you know, the just attrition involved means that these, you know, high tech, high maintenance, very expensive systems tend to slowly lose their advantage to more conventional forces.
01:00:43.860 Oh, I see what he's saying now.
01:00:45.620 He's saying that Russian irregulars were able to take over a large amount of the Donbass in 2014.
01:00:54.260 And the fact that against the full might of the Russian army now, the Ukrainians are able to hold up the Russians is demonstrating that our weapons are adequate.
01:01:05.460 So, yeah, I agree with your response there.
01:01:09.200 I mean, if you're interested, too, in this this subject of what the Ukrainian military has had over the last several years, there's a series of yearly publications that come out.
01:01:24.540 I will I'll search for it on my computer and then and then remind you that at the end of the stream.
01:01:30.460 Excellent.
01:01:31.340 All right, guys.
01:01:32.020 Well, we're we're going to go ahead and wrap things up, actually.
01:01:34.820 So, OK, well, I just found it.
01:01:37.600 It's called the military balance.
01:01:39.060 If you if you are really interested in military capabilities, check out the yearly publication, the military balance.
01:01:45.740 It goes it's hundreds of pages, goes through every country.
01:01:50.120 Fantastic.
01:01:50.980 All right, guys.
01:01:51.660 Well, like I said, make sure to check out Charlemagne's work.
01:01:54.380 He does amazing work, as you can probably tell from his appearance here.
01:01:58.180 So check out his channel.
01:02:00.000 Check out his sub stack.
01:02:01.020 Check out the old glory club.
01:02:02.280 And of course, if it's your first time here, make sure you subscribe to this YouTube channel.
01:02:06.820 Go ahead and click the bell and the notifications, everything so that you can make sure you catch these streams when they go live.
01:02:12.620 If you'd like to get the broadcast as podcast, make sure that you subscribe to the Oren McIntyre show on your favorite podcast platform.
01:02:19.900 And if you'd like to pick up my book, The Total State, of course, you can do that on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million or your favorite local bookstore.
01:02:26.740 Thank you, everybody, for watching.
01:02:28.200 And as always, I'll talk to you next time.