The Ben Shapiro Show - June 18, 2026


The largest drone attack on Moscow yet

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Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

186.05

Word count

1,600

Sentence count

99

People

Also mentioned:
Bishop Avrami Vladimir Putin Pete Hegseth Barack Obama Joe Biden Zelensky

Harmful content

Hate speech

18

sentences flagged


Summary

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

A massive Ukrainian cathedral is struck by Russia, and then a lot of people on the woke right are pretending that it never happened? Nothing? The great defender of Christianity in the east, supposedly is bombing churches, and you got nothing?

Transcript

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00:00:00.000 A massive Ukrainian cathedral is struck by Russia, and then a lot of people on the woke right pretending that it never happened.
00:00:05.000 Nothing?
00:00:06.000 Nothing.
00:00:06.000 The great defender of Christianity in the East, supposedly, is bombing churches, and you got nothing?
00:00:12.000 I know it feels like this Russia Ukraine war has been going on forever now.
00:00:15.000 It's officially gone on longer than World War I, but I'll get into the geopolitics of all of it from NATO to the signal model of Trump's foreign policy, peace through strength.
00:00:23.000 Just the other day, a Russian strike slammed into Kyiv's Dormition Cathedral, is what that looked like.
00:00:32.000 So, this is a picture of a cathedral that was built, you know, a thousand years ago.
00:00:38.000 The Russians just struck it.
00:00:40.000 I didn't hear any caterwauling, by the way, from the same group that keeps saying that Ukraine is not Christian and that Russia is super duper Christian and that Ukraine is attacking Christians and all the rest of it.
00:00:49.000 I didn't hear, I didn't see a single tweet about the fact that Russia purposefully hit a historic church in the middle of Ukraine.
00:00:56.000 That's weird.
00:00:56.000 It's weird they all went totally silent.
00:00:58.000 Strange.
00:00:59.000 Almost as though they're totally dishonest about what it is they're pushing, these particular folks.
00:01:04.000 But, according to the Wall Street Journal, the sight that met Bishop Avrami when he arrived at the Dormition Cathedral here shortly after 2 a.m. on Monday was like something torn from the pages of the Bible or Ukraine's own bloody history.
00:01:16.000 The roof of the main cathedral at the Kiev Monastery of the Caves, one of Eastern Orthodoxy's holiest sites and overseen by Avrami, was ablaze minutes after a Russian explosive drone struck.
00:01:25.000 As the flames ate away at the roof of the roof's wooden frame, the bearded 41 year old clad in a black cassock formed a rescue team of priests, police officers, and first responders for a daunting mission to save what they could from inside.
00:01:37.000 What followed was an hours long battle to rescue Ukrainian religious heritage, which Russia has long laid claim to and, in a vicious tryst, was now destroying.
00:01:45.000 Again, I didn't see it.
00:01:46.000 Did you see that?
00:01:46.000 It's like big news on the woke right.
00:01:48.000 No, nothing. 0.97
00:01:49.000 Zero zip zilch, Russia, great defender of Christianity, slamming into a millennium old cathedral. 0.74
00:01:55.000 Nope. 0.97
00:01:56.000 Yeah, I missed it as well. 1.00
00:01:58.000 They are very upset, however, at the fact that the Ukrainians have now been pummeling Moscow. 0.64
00:02:03.000 And again, the post American world, if what we are actually ushering in, if the vision of someone on the woke right and their acolytes in the government come to pass, Post American world will be a world where our erstwhile allies arm up and defend themselves. 0.95
00:02:17.000 I am significantly less worried about those allies than I am worried about an America that retreats from the world and leaves the world at the tender mercy of Russia and China, pretending that they are our friends. 0.77
00:02:30.000 That would be an enormous mistake for Americans. 0.86
00:02:33.000 It would mean shutting off of waterways.
00:02:34.000 It would mean everything gets more expensive.
00:02:35.000 It would mean that America's capacity to ensure our safety would drop significantly.
00:02:41.000 It would mean influence in areas of the world much closer to home from places like China and Russia.
00:02:46.000 It would be not good.
00:02:48.000 And well, Ukrainians are not giving up.
00:02:51.000 According to the New York Times, as Ukraine escalated its efforts to bring the war home for Russians, the strikes on Thursday appeared to be the largest drone attack on the Russian capital since Vladimir Putin launched the war more than four years ago. 0.88
00:03:02.000 No deaths were immediately reported, but the large scale assault seemed likely to feed fears among Russians that the Kremlin's ability to isolate society from the impacts of the war was sharply eroding.
00:03:11.000 For days, lines have formed and rationing has been implemented at gas stations in dozens of Russian regions.
00:03:16.000 As persistent Russian drone attacks on oil refineries and processing facilities have threatened a fuel shortage.
00:03:21.000 Ukraine has taken particular aim at Crimea, the peninsula that Russia illegally annexed in 2014, with a range of strikes aimed at cutting off the region's supply lines.
00:03:30.000 The Russian economy has also begun suffering from the costs of the war in a way that the Kremlin had managed to avoid for years.
00:03:37.000 And Zelensky cited, as a rationale, a response to that attack on the Pechersk Lavra monastery complex in Kyiv.
00:03:49.000 Here is some of the footage of targets that were hit in Moscow as well as occupied Ukraine.
00:03:55.000 You can see the smoke rising from oil and gas facilities in Russia here.
00:04:02.000 And cars driving in the foreground because this is actually a pretty populous area.
00:04:10.000 And a massive strike by a drone blew the roof off of one of these oil facilities. 0.99
00:04:21.000 Again, this is the Ukrainians doing significant damage in Moscow. 0.67
00:04:24.000 That is why, whenever you hear that the Ukrainians are going to quote unquote lose the war, Or that they're going to give up the ghost? 0.95
00:04:29.000 The answer there is no.
00:04:30.000 And the idea that Russia is unbelievably strong is also not true.
00:04:36.000 But the world will become a more chaotic place.
00:04:37.000 You'll miss American hegemony when it's gone.
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00:05:58.000 Now, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, is still ripping into the NATO allies, suggesting that they need to increase their spend.
00:06:06.000 He is right about this.
00:06:07.000 Here's the Secretary of War yesterday.
00:06:10.000 But make no mistake about it, this will be a real review.
00:06:14.000 It will be designed to ensure that NATO is moving fast and irreversibly toward Europe leading, stepping up to take primary responsibility for the defense of Europe, stepping up to ensure our forces are postured for America's global needs, and stepping up to make sure that our access, spacing, and overflight are clearly delineated and assured.
00:06:41.000 Any other country would do the same.
00:06:47.000 So he is right about that.
00:06:49.000 And, you know, I think that realistically speaking, these European countries will be forced to.
00:06:54.000 They're not going to have a choice.
00:06:55.000 They will be, in fact, forced to up the ante and rebuild their militaries.
00:07:01.000 So now the fact that Ukraine is still withstanding this, remember, we are now four years into this war, and Ukraine is still withstanding the Russian onslaught. 0.62
00:07:09.000 The best thing that the United States could do is continue to provide arms to the Ukrainians. 0.84
00:07:13.000 Yes, it is bad if the Russians expand. 0.92
00:07:16.000 Further into Ukraine. 0.76
00:07:17.000 No, Ukraine is not the bad guy in the war.
00:07:21.000 And no, it is not good for America if a country that suggests that it wants an entire civilizational overturn in Europe directed against the United States were to gain more power and credibility around the world.
00:07:34.000 The push for a multipolar world order is inherently a call for America to recede from global affairs, not for the benefit of Americans, but because the idea is that America is somehow a malign factor on the world stage.
00:07:50.000 And as we saw when Joe Biden pulled out of Afghanistan, as I fear we will see if the MOU were to become a full deal, as we have seen with regard to the weakness of Barack Obama, weakness begets aggression from people we do not like. 0.97
00:08:05.000 That is true for the Europeans, which is why they should arm up. 0.64
00:08:08.000 It is true for the United States as well.
00:08:11.000 Otherwise, honestly, what's the point of having a military that we spend trillions of dollars on if the idea is that we are simply going to back away from the rest of the world inherently?
00:08:20.000 And that any minor threat is going to result in American concessions at the negotiating table.
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