Zelenskyy Unmasked | Guest: Ben Swann | 4⧸17⧸24
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
193.4299
Summary
Ben Swan is the creator of a new documentary about the Ukraine war and Vladimir Zelensky, the man responsible for bringing that country to the brink of civil war. In this episode, Ben and I talk about the history of the Ukraine conflict, the motivations behind the conflict, and the role of the media in covering it.
Transcript
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Like that woman over there with the Italian leather handbag.
00:01:03.700
And I wanted to talk to him about all of this background
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especially conservatives on the right, we saw Russia
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the more it seems like that moral black and white
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And that doesn't mean that Russia isn't doing something bad
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but it seems like there are far more interests involved
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than just the ones that have been described to us
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We still view the world through the lens of Rocky IV.
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And Ukraine, they're smaller and they're little
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The problem is the longer you watch what's happening,
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the more you see that actually Ukraine's not a democracy
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and whatever they were before Zelensky took power,
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is actually what Vladimir Zelensky is doing to Ukraine.
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He's the one who's getting rid of political parties.
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And the biggest problem with it is that our media here,
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Now, listen, you and I are probably gonna share
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at least in one view throughout this conversation today.
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Whenever I see every politician in the United States
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I think most people don't understand the history
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it really helps people grasp then what's happening now.
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Universities today aren't just neglecting real education.
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America was made for an educated and engaged citizenry.
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The Intercollegiate Studies Institute is here to help.
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that shaped and made Western civilization great.
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at some of the nation's top conservative publications
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Through ISI, you can work with conservative thinkers
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where Vladimir Putin went on this long diatribe
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A lot of people fell asleep in the middle there.
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and the people inside the map are part of the nation.
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But that's actually a relatively new thing for people.
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And so if you just understand the world this way,
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But I think if we understand the history leading up to that,
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it makes a little more sense as why Russia would feel compelled
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of what the country looked like before Zelensky came to power?
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started here talking about the Putin thing, right?
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that he was able to rattle off the history that he was.
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if you're a Westerner, if you're here in the U.S.,
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The reality is, is that this region of the world,
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Ukraine, Russia, it's been one region for a long time.
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And then there's been autonomy and there's, you know,
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as has been explained, I think, in other interviews,
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the term Ukraine, I guess, doesn't mean a country.
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It means people who live to the east or whatever,
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But here's the history that I think a lot of people don't know.
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And the reality is, is that under the Soviet Union, right,
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but Georgia and all these different satellite states, right,
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And when the Soviet Union dissolved around 1990, 1991,
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we end up in this situation where all of a sudden
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But the reality is, is that Ukraine itself is a fairly interesting story
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because Ukraine is really divided into two parts,
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when you had East Germany and West Germany, right?
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meaning Russian-speaking people from birth, right?
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That's what they are, that language they're taught.
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Most people in Eastern Ukraine identify as Russians.
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One thing we did not know until we started this process
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He did not speak Ukrainian until he ran for president.
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The near history tells us something pretty remarkable,
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which again is only about 30, 40 years old as a country,
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is in the midst of having a presidential election.
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And around 2014, there's a coup after a recent election.
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He had long been kind of vying for this position.
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hey, we want to make a bunch of loans to your country
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wait, wait, before you start taking money from the IMF,
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And Yanukovych preferred to take money from Putin.
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It was run by the same people who helped push the Iraq war.
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Victoria Nuland, who was the undersecretary of state
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And the US says, oh, look, it's a fight for democracy.
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The US going in and overthrowing another country
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because we don't like who he's going to take money from,
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back when Russia stole or annexed this part of Ukraine.
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They fly Russian flags and they identify as Russians.
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which people have probably heard some of these terms.
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The vast majority of those people speak Russian,
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even though this information has been out there,
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And it's people who are identified as Russians,
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And so the Ukrainian military and militia groups
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that region of Ukraine now for almost 10 years.
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And thousands of people have died in this civil war.
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there's a presidential election that's gearing up,
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He was on a TV show about a guy who was a teacher
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is caught ranting about government corruption on video.
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And then The Servant of the People Party candidate,
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and they plan out his ascension to the presidency
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or what is now functionally the Russian Empire.
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He thought that they would work this out without a war.
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And I think a lot of people will look at Ukraine
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and say, well, why wouldn't they want to be part of the IMF?
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I don't understand why they can't make that decision.
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And I think as people who basically live inside
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that these organizations are extensions of that.
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You know, one thing that I thought was very interesting
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was when Vladimir Putin talked about asking Bill Clinton
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of all the things he talked about historically,
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That was its objective from the very beginning.
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And so they stumbled around in the dark for a while,
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And they created, you know, the Atlantic Council
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or we're gonna fight against cyber wars, right?
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They started trying to come up with some other mission.
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That's how they kind of re-found their purpose.
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Since then, NATO's more than tripled in size, right?
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I'll give you people a geographic example, right?
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to control and even to hold back the United States.
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Yeah, we don't even need a hypothetical for that.
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because it's been admitting things like Turkey,
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Those are questions you're not really supposed to ask,
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And I think that brings me to my next question.
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seems to be very motivated to eliminate Russia.
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is to say that I think there's a misnomer there
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and not in the traditional sense either, right?