Russia shells a Ukrainian nuclear plant, Ukraine and Russia hash out a few areas of agreement while war continues, and the economic impacts of war start to go global. Meanwhile, Putin launched on Ukraine a week ago has run into fierce resistance, according to the Wall Street Journal. While Russian forces have advanced in the northeast and south of the country, the offensive has continued to stall around Kiev and Moscow, leaving more to indiscriminate civilian neighborhoods in cities like Kharkiv, Mariupol, and Sumyup. And listen, if you still want unlimited data, you can get it and save a fortune. Pure Talk is simply smarter wireless. They have a 30-day, risk-free guarantee, so you literally have nothing to lose. Go to Puretalk.com/SHAPIRO and enter promo code SHAPIRO to get 50% off your very first month of coverage. That's right, you'll save 50% on your first month, and you'll be set up for the rest of the month for free! You'll get unlimited talk, text, and 6GB of data for just $30 a month. Go check it out and save yourself a bundle right now. To get started, go to puretalk.me/Shapiro to get started and get a FREE month of Pure Talk to get a $30-a-month plan. Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. - the show is all about saving money on everything you could possibly dream of in the world of travel, including a VPN, a fast, a 5G hotspot, and more. I talk about it all on The Ben Shapiro's show, the best way to get the most of it sipping on the best deal on the whole place you ve ever heard about it. You won t have to go to the best place to get it all, the ultimate travel and everything you ve got it anywhere else in the best of it. It s all got it, he s got it on the place you re gonna get it anywhere you go anywhere and more than that, you re not going to be there, you get it, right here, you listen to it, it s not even gotta go there, right on the show, right there, and there sie see it seeeeeeeeeeeedeeeeeedeedeeeedeee and more, right to it all that s not gonna be that s gonna be it, no more of it!
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00:01:28.000Well, the world started to panic late last night when it appeared that there might be a nuclear meltdown in Ukraine over Russia shelling a nuclear power plant.
00:01:37.000According to the Associated Press, however, no radiation was released from a Russian attack at Europe's biggest nuclear power plant in Ukraine.
00:01:43.000Firefighters have extinguished a blaze at the facility, according to U.N.
00:01:48.000Russian forces continued to press their campaign to cripple the country despite global condemnation.
00:01:52.000The International Atomic Energy Agency's Director General, Rafael Mariano Grossi, said on Friday that the building hit by a Russian projectile at this particular plant was not part of the reactor.
00:02:01.000Instead, it was a training center at the plant.
00:02:03.000Nuclear officials from Sweden to China said there were no radiation spikes that had been reported.
00:02:07.000Ukrainian officials said Russian troops took control of the overall site.
00:02:10.000The plant's staff were continuing to ensure its operations, so electricity has not been cut across Ukraine thanks to the takeover of the nuclear power plant.
00:02:18.000In the frenzied initial aftermath, When the risk of a radiation release was not clear, the attack caused worldwide concern and evoked memories of the world's worst nuclear disaster, which, of course, did happen in Ukraine at Chernobyl.
00:02:29.000Facing worldwide indignation over the attack, Russia sought to deflect blame without producing any evidence.
00:02:33.000Defense Ministry spokesperson Igor Konashenkov blamed arson rather than artillery fire, he claims, of the Ukrainian sabotage group.
00:02:40.000had actually occupied the plant, fired on a Russian patrol and then set fire to the building as they left. All of this, of course, raised the alarm because when we look at the situation in Ukraine, there are a lot of unintended consequences that are possible, which we'll get to in just a moment. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Russian forces continued pushing up north from the They reached a place called Enerhodar on Wednesday.
00:03:04.000After attempted surrender negotiation failed, a large column of Russian forces attacked the city on Thursday.
00:03:09.000Webcam footage showed a huge fireball rising behind a church in the city, a short distance from the nuclear facilities, and then two munitions, possibly illumination rounds, landing on the compound itself.
00:03:18.000The video is, in fact, pretty stunning.
00:03:21.000Meanwhile, Russia continues to pound a bunch of Ukrainian cities.
00:03:27.000The war that Putin launched on Ukraine more than a week ago has run into fierce Ukrainian resistance, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:03:32.000While Russian forces have advanced in the northeast and south of the country, the offensive has continued to stall around Kiev and Moscow, has now resorted more to indiscriminate shelling of civilian neighborhoods in cities like Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Mariupol, and Sumy.
00:03:45.000Russian shelling in the power plant area paused after 3 a.m.
00:03:49.000At the time of the Russian attack, two of the six reactors were operating.
00:03:52.000The plant's management switched off reactor number three at 2.26 a.m., leaving only number four.
00:03:58.000According to Jans Stoltenberg, the Secretary General of NATO, he said the shelling of the plant just demonstrates the recklessness of this war and the importance of ending it.
00:04:06.000For his part, Vladimir Zelensky spoke with President Biden about the attack on the plant, and Biden urged Russia to cease its military activities in the area and allow firefighters and emergency responders access to the site.
00:04:17.000Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said on Twitter she'd spoken with the Ukrainian energy minister.
00:04:21.000She said, we have seen no elevated radiation readings near the facility.
00:04:24.000So there were a bunch of false reports at the very beginning that this was going to turn into a full-scale nuclear meltdown, which again underscores the fact that you can't predict what's going to happen in a war.
00:04:32.000Meanwhile, Vladimir Zelensky keeps calling on the West for more intervention.
00:04:34.000He says, we're fighting for our people.
00:05:00.000There's also a propaganda war that's going on between Ukraine and Russia at the moment, which is why there's a humanitarian ceasefire that has been signed.
00:05:07.000Temporary local humanitarian ceasefires allowing for humanitarian corridors so civilians can be evacuated and food and medicine can be delivered.
00:05:13.000By the way, it's also in Russia's interest to destabilize the rest of Europe by effectively forcing out millions of Ukrainian refugees into the rest of Eastern and Central Europe, which is exactly what is happening.
00:05:23.000Right now, according to the Washington Post, Russia has sent nearly all of its assembled combat power into Ukraine.
00:05:29.000On Thursday, they unleashed some of the most intense fighting since the invasion began, with local officials pleading for help as ground troops seized or encircled strategically important southern cities.
00:05:37.000Vladimir Putin, for his part, For his part, he said that the mission was, quote, going according to plan and in full compliance with the timetable.
00:05:43.000Despite widespread agreement among Western military analysts, the invasion had been slowed by unexpectedly fierce Ukrainian resistance.
00:05:49.000And of course, the images that are coming out of this war are stunning to a lot of people because this is what it looks like when it's not the United States running a war.
00:05:57.000The fact is that when first world nations run wars, they're very meticulous in how they go about fighting those wars.
00:06:03.000They try and hit very specific military targets.
00:06:05.000You don't see a lot of tape coming out of indiscriminate rocket fire against civilian targets.
00:06:10.000When Israel fights a war, they actually drop knock bombs on the top of buildings to evacuate the building before they bomb the building.
00:06:15.000When the United States fights a war, they're firing missiles through individual windows.
00:06:20.000When Russia fights a war, they're fighting a war like 1945 style.
00:06:22.000They're just firing munitions at anything that they think is going to achieve some sort of objective for them, strategic or otherwise, and that includes killing a lot of civilians.
00:06:31.000They want to cover up for that fact by allowing humanitarian aid, but mostly what they want is more streams of refugees, because again, that encourages the West to try and make some concessions to him to make all of this stop.
00:06:41.000He's ratcheting up the pressure not just on Ukraine, but on the West, the West to force Ukraine into some form of surrender.
00:06:47.000And realistically speaking, that is probably the most likely scenario here is that the West negotiates some sort of separate peace with the Russians without a lot of Ukrainian input and just carves off part of the Donbass region and gives it to Russia in a final attempt to appease.
00:07:01.000And then they say, if you ever come in here again, then we are going to establish an off-line zone.
00:07:07.000You have to reestablish deterrence because deterrence obviously didn't work in Ukraine.
00:07:09.000The problem is once the deterrence has not worked, as we discussed yesterday, you start to run out of options very, very quickly.
00:07:14.000According to the Washington Post, Kherson, among the first Ukrainian cities to be encroached upon by Russian forces, was running out of medicine and is facing disaster within days if that humanitarian corridor was not established, according to the secretary of the city council, She said people are in a panic, people are tense, people are frightened to the core of their souls.
00:07:31.000Reports from other cities in Ukraine's south told a story of increasing desperation as communications and transport routes were cut off and supplies dwindled.
00:07:38.000The mayor of Mariupol said a Russian siege and hours of shelling that battered rail links and bridges had cut off all water, power, and food supplies.
00:07:44.000The mayor of Odessa, which is a major port on the Black Sea, said the population was preparing to mount a defense.
00:07:49.000Amid unverified reports, a large fleet of Russian warships was heading toward the waters off the coast.
00:07:53.000When you look at the map, what you see is that Russia has taken over Literally the entire southern border of Ukraine outside of the area around Odessa because they now have control over the Sea of Azov.
00:08:03.000They have control over large swaths of the Black Sea.
00:08:05.000They've also taken control of pretty much the entire Ukrainian northern border up to the Ukrainian border with Belarus.
00:08:11.000And Belarus has become effectively a Russian client state at this point.
00:08:15.000There's been talk about whether the Russians go into Moldova when all this is over.
00:08:20.000That if the pressure is ratcheted up Ratchet up further and further by the West.
00:08:23.000Russia says, OK, we got nothing to lose.
00:08:24.000We'll just attack every nation in the region that is not an overt NATO ally at this point.
00:08:31.000Ukrainian officials said early Friday that Russian shelling had caused that fire to break out at the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine, which is Europe's largest power plant.
00:08:42.000This week, Ukraine temporarily lifted visa requirements for foreign volunteers who wished to enter the country and join the fight against Russian forces.
00:08:48.000In Washington, two men arrested with firearms near the Ukrainian embassy told police they had driven from Indiana to volunteer for the battle, according to law enforcement officials.
00:08:56.000defense official, according to the Washington Post, told reporters that 90% of the combat power Russia had assembled outside Ukraine was now within the country, up from 80% on Tuesday.
00:09:05.000So now it's just going to be a long, grinding war in which Russia tries to crush all opposition by cutting off supply lines, by creating a humanitarian crisis.
00:09:14.000Again, they might try to band-aid that for public consumption by essentially allowing some humanitarian aid in.
00:09:20.000But that is not going to make up for the fact that they continue to close off these cities in the main.
00:09:26.000Pressure people to leave the country and create humanitarian crisis within by shelling civilian areas.
00:09:32.000The situation on the ground for people who are still in Ukraine is really, really ugly, according to the Financial Times.
00:09:36.000In the two-day battle for Kherson, Russian tanks shelled the school and troops shot dead residents seeking to repel the attack with molotov cocktails.
00:09:42.000Once the city was captured, the yellow and blue Ukrainian flag kept flying above its main official building as part of life under Russian occupation.
00:09:49.000The new mayor laid out the rules in a Facebook post.
00:09:52.000His constituents could leave home in groups no bigger than two.
00:09:56.000Arrangements were made to collect corpses of Ukrainians killed in the main square and other parts of town.
00:10:01.000The city said that was at least 49 people, mainly civilians.
00:10:04.000According to that mayor, Ihor Kolikayev, he said, we are experiencing colossal difficulties with collecting and burying the dead, delivering food and medicine, rubbish removal, accidents removal, etc.
00:10:13.000He said, for now, the flag flying above us is Ukrainian.
00:10:16.000In order for it to stay that way, these requirements must be met.
00:10:21.000Ukrainians say that the Russian hold on these cities is incomplete and occupiers have shown little sign they are equipped to run them or any interest in doing so.
00:10:29.000How they hold this long term is going to be a major question because obviously the Ukrainian people are not interested in living under Russian occupation.
00:10:35.000So the most likely scenario here is if there is no separate peace signed, if there is no attempt to do some sort of final appeasement of Vladimir Putin, then the likely outcome here is going to be a 10 to 20 year civil war, which really is just an insurgency against an imperialist foe in Russia invading Ukraine.
00:10:53.000Meanwhile, Joe Biden is calling out the In the State of the Union address, I announced that the Department of Justice is going after the crimes of Russian oligarchs.
00:11:12.000Attorney General spoke to that earlier and who lined their pockets with Russian people's money and while Ukraine and the people are hiding in Subways from missiles That are being fired indiscriminately in Russian cities. Of course that is true It is also true, as many people pointed out, that there is a propaganda war going on between Russia and Ukraine in which you can't fully trust the information coming from either side.
00:11:38.000The one thing that we know, and you don't require any sort of belief in Ukrainian propaganda to believe this, is that Russia has invaded a sovereign foreign state and is seeking to impose its will on it.
00:11:48.000However, it is certainly true that much of the stuff that's coming out of war zones, Fog of War and all of that, or active propaganda, may not be true.
00:11:55.000According to the New York Times, just days into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a pilot with a mysterious nickname was quickly becoming the conflict's first wartime hero.
00:12:02.000Nicknamed the Ghost of Kiev, the ace fighter had apparently single-handedly shot down several Russian fighter jets.
00:12:06.000The story was shared by the official Ukraine Twitter account on Sunday in a thrilling montage video set to thumping music showing the fighter swooping through the Ukrainian skies as enemy planes exploded around him.
00:12:16.000The Security Service of Ukraine also relayed the tale on its official Telegram channel, which has 700,000 subscribers.
00:12:22.000The story of a single pilot's beating the superior Russian Air Force found wide appeal online.
00:12:26.000Videos of the so-called Ghost of Kiev had more than 9.3 million views on Twitter.
00:12:30.000The flyer was mentioned in thousands of Facebook groups, reaching up to 717 million followers.
00:12:35.000On YouTube, videos promoting the Ukrainian fighter collected 6.5 million views.
00:12:39.000There is only one problem, which is that this might be a myth.
00:12:42.000While there are reports of some Russian planes that were destroyed in combat, there's no information linking them to a single Ukrainian pilot.
00:12:47.000One of the first videos that went viral, which was included in the montage shared by the official Ukraine Twitter account, was a computer rendering from a combat flight simulator originally uploaded by a YouTube user with just 3,000 subscribers.
00:12:57.000A photo supposedly confirming the fighter's existence, shared by the former president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, was from a 2019 Twitter post by the Ukrainian Defense Ministry.
00:13:07.000In the information war over the invasion of Ukraine, says the New York Times, some of the country's official accounts have pushed stories with questionable veracity, spreading anecdotes, gripping on-the-ground accounts, and even some unverified information that was later proved false in a rapid jumble of fact and myth.
00:13:20.000Now, Russia itself has been suggesting that false flag attacks are what caused them to rush into Ukraine in the first place.
00:13:31.000Laura Edelson, a computer scientist studying misinformation at New York University, said Ukraine is involved in pretty classic propaganda here.
00:13:37.000They're telling stories that support their narrative.
00:13:38.000Sometimes false information makes its way in there too.
00:13:41.000More of it is getting through because of the overall environment.
00:13:44.000And so it's important to keep an eye on what exactly is happening.
00:13:47.000However, none of this changes the basic logic on the ground, which is that the Russians are in fact involved in imperialist conquest of a foreign neighbor.
00:13:55.000And for all the talk about how Russia is quote-unquote justified for having to protect itself from NATO expansion on its borders, the simple fact is that Russia is currently bordered by a wide variety of NATO nations, ranging from Norway in the very north of Russia, which joined NATO in 1949, to Poland, which joined in 1999, There's an area called Kaliningrad.
00:14:15.000It's kind of a bizarre outlying area of Russia.
00:14:18.000It's like a little kind of tip of land and it borders Poland.
00:14:22.000And if they were to invade Ukraine, by the way, they would be, if they were to take over the entirety of Ukraine, they would now be bordering Poland on the other side.
00:14:30.000So this really is not about any sort of buffer zone against NATO.
00:14:34.000Ukraine was the independent buffer zone against NATO.
00:14:37.000And if Ukraine became more Western, and even if it had joined NATO, all that would have meant is that there was just more border that was bordering with NATO.
00:14:43.000But NATO has never attempted to topple Vladimir Putin.
00:14:46.000And that's why it's a mistake at this point for people in the West to start openly talking about the necessity of toppling Vladimir Putin if they are in a position of power.
00:14:54.000Lindsey Graham came out yesterday and he tweeted out that it was time to topple Vladimir Putin.
00:14:58.000Well, that seems like a really good way of getting Vladimir Putin to attack more countries.
00:15:04.000Because if he feels like the West is actually going to attempt to throttle him from the inside and coo him out, then what exactly would prevent him from getting more and more aggressive in an attempt to stymie any sort of internal dissent?
00:15:16.000And cracking down on all dissent inside of Russia, by the way.
00:15:19.000This is why, again, John Brennan, who's the former Director of National Intelligence under Barack Obama, he said Putin's days are numbered.
00:15:25.000Like, you shouldn't be saying this stuff publicly.
00:15:27.000Listen, I'm more hawkish than Brennan is, by a long shot.
00:15:30.000It is unwise in the extreme to talk about cooing out the dictator of a country that is armed with thousands of nuclear warheads, not a bright moon.
00:15:40.000Putin and his henchmen that are around him.
00:15:42.000I think they believe that the only option they have is to continue with this ferocious intensity and trying to devastate Ukraine.
00:15:50.000But I think, as Ambassador Soderbergh said, this is only going to lead to, I think, Putin's unraveling in terms of his position in the Russian government.
00:15:59.000Now, what's going to be the tripwire in terms of pressure on oligarchs and pressure on the Russian people and commodities and other types of things?
00:16:19.000The real story is that Putin is well ensconced and he ain't going anywhere.
00:16:22.000It'd be a giant shock, a cataclysmic, earth-shaking shock if he were to be cooed out at this point.
00:16:29.000So when Joe Biden says things like the sanctions are having a profound impact on Russia, they are having a profound impact on the everyday Russians living in Russia.
00:16:36.000And they're having an impact on the oligarchs and depriving Russia of the resources it needs in order to project foreign power is a good thing generally.
00:16:44.000But the reality is that it's having very little.
00:16:46.000The severe economic sanctions on Putin and all those folks around him.
00:16:48.000Ukraine, which seems to be, if anything, the sanctions are actually strengthening his grip on Ukraine. Again, when deterrence fails, bad things happen.
00:16:55.000Deterrence failed because the man sitting right here in the middle of your screen, Joe Biden. Here's Joe Biden saying that the sanctions are a big win.
00:17:02.000The severe economic sanctions on Putin and all those folks around him, choking off access to technology as well as cutting off access to the global financial system. It's had a profound impact already. And the goal is to maximize the impact on Putin and Russia and minimize the harm on us and our allies and friends around the world. Our interest is in maintaining the strongest unified economic impact
00:17:36.000According to the Wall Street Journal, sanctions are very unlikely to force Putin to back down in Russia.
00:17:41.000According to David Lunel, Andrew Rastuchia and Shun Engel Rasmussen writing for the Wall Street Journal, Western nations have in the past week imposed the most sweeping economic sanctions against a major country in recent decades, moves that are likely to cripple the Russian economy and sharply raise the costs of the country's invasion of Ukraine.
00:17:56.000Whether it will be enough to cause Putin to withdraw his troops from Ukraine or even weaken his hold on power is far less likely, according to experts on sanctions.
00:18:04.000Sanctions have historically done very little unless you have a complete blockade.
00:18:07.000They do not have a complete blockade of Russia.
00:18:09.000In fact, as we'll talk about in a moment, we are still importing Russian oil and natural gas right now.
00:18:13.000Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, he said there's very little in the history of sanctions that show they can get the target country to change policy on something that is important to the country.
00:18:22.000I see very little of Putin's temperament that sanctions will even be in the zip code of being decisive.
00:18:27.000Sanctions have a mixed track record, often falling short of causing a dramatic change in behavior, particularly in authoritarian countries like Russia.
00:18:33.000Sanctions on Iran were one of the factors analysts believe pushed it into a 2015 deal on its nuclear program and brought its leaders back to the negotiating table recently, but they didn't dislodge the government or stop what the U.S.
00:18:43.000sees as its aggressive military behavior in the Middle East.
00:18:46.000It wasn't sanctions on Iran that brought Iran to the table.
00:18:48.000It was the fact that Barack Obama wanted to give them an ass massage that brought them to the table.
00:18:52.000They were getting free crap from Obama, and now they're getting free crap from Biden, and so they're at the table.
00:18:57.000Sanctions by the U.S., the U.N., and others have failed to make North Korea give up its nuclear weapons.
00:19:01.000So sanctions are useful in terms of limiting the reach of an opposition power by impoverishing that power.
00:19:07.000But in terms of getting there to be a shift in power within the country, very, very unlikely.
00:19:13.000According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S.
00:19:14.000and European sanctions against Libya from the 1980s for its activities sponsoring terror lasted 20 years before Libya disclosed and scrapped its weapons program.
00:19:22.000And by the way, the reason that they scrapped their weapons program had nothing to do with the sanctions.
00:19:25.000It had to do with the fact that the United States invaded Iraq.
00:19:27.000Once the United States invaded Iraq, Qaddafi looked around and he said, maybe I should give up this nuke that I have here, this nuclear program that I'm working with.
00:19:34.000And of course, that ended well for him when Hillary Clinton Had him killed.
00:19:38.000So that turned out to be a bright move all the way around for Muammar Gaddafi, who certainly deserved it, but also bad strategy right there.
00:19:46.000Iraq's Saddam Hussein resisted more than a decade of UN sanctions.
00:19:48.000So all the talk about how sanctions are going to change the situation on the ground, that's obviously not true.
00:19:53.000Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesperson, said they probably think by imposing sanctions, they can force us to change our position.
00:19:58.000It's obvious here this is out of the question.
00:20:01.000For all their limits, sanctions are widely viewed as better than doing nothing.
00:20:05.000But, I mean, better than doing nothing is not much of a measure.
00:20:11.000And again, the West sanctions that are being placed on Russia exempt a large part of its energy sector.
00:20:17.000So Russia is still able to bring in the kind of money that Putin needs in order to keep the oligarchs happy enough not to coup him, even if that were a serious possibility.
00:20:26.000So Gensaki says that we are willing to pay any price, undergo any burden for freedom, except for a higher gas price.
00:20:53.000They have episodes that you will be interested in.
00:20:55.000He does interviews with really, really fascinating people.
00:20:57.000Everybody from Dan Carlin to Kobe Bryant to Scott Adams.
00:21:00.000Harbinger has a talent for getting his guests to share never-been-heard-before stories and thought-provoking insights.
00:21:05.000Without fail, he pulls out tactical bits of wisdom in each episode, all with the noble cause to make you a more informed, critical thinker to better operate in today's world.
00:21:13.000He's also got a strangely relatable weekly segment called Feedback Friday, where Jordan covers advice on everything from psycho family situations to relationships to networking.
00:21:20.000I don't always agree with Jordan and what he says on the show, but hey, that's what makes it interesting.
00:21:24.000You can't go wrong with adding The Jordan Harbinger Show to your rotation.
00:21:31.000That's H-A-R-B as in boy, I-N as in Nancy, G-E-R on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts today.
00:21:41.000The fact is that Europe right now is significantly more serious about Russia than the United States is.
00:21:46.000Europe is rethinking its whole relationship with green energy because they've recognized that their green energy utopianism has led them to reliance on Russia.
00:21:54.000And they're trying to cut that off now.
00:21:57.000Joe Biden is afraid of the economic blowback were he to do that.
00:22:00.000Which is why yesterday, Jen Psaki, for example, she said, we're going to do everything we can to lower gas prices.
00:22:05.000When she says everything, she means everything except for Except for abandoning the progressive environmental left.
00:22:13.000We would say directly to consumers, the president is going to do everything we can to reduce the impact, to make sure that we are working with our partners around the world to address the volatility in the global oil markets, to consider a range of options that he can continue to take to reduce the impact that they're feeling at the pump.
00:22:32.000And this has been front and center on his mind since the beginning of this conflict.
00:22:36.000Okay, so she was asked about banning Russian oil from American markets, and she went further.
00:22:41.000She said there's no strategic interest in banning Russian oil from American markets, which is a weird thing to say, considering that your entire administration is now marking the... is now essentially suggesting that only economic sanctions are going to work here.
00:22:55.000We don't have a strategic interest in reducing the global supply of energy, and that would raise prices at the gas pump for the American people.
00:23:05.000Okay, so he doesn't want to raise prices.
00:23:07.000So, well, Europe, by the way, you know the kind of prices that Europe is facing right now for gas and oil?
00:23:12.000prices. And that is certainly a big factor for the president in this at this moment.
00:23:18.000Okay, so he doesn't want to raise prices. So, well, Europe, by the way, you know, the kind of prices that Europe is facing right now for for gas and oil, like 100% higher than it was two weeks ago. In the United States, the change is incremental.
00:23:31.000And that change could be made up for if they would just abandon their green utopian nonsense.
00:23:46.000Investing in clean energy does not lower prices in the here and now either.
00:23:50.000If the argument is that Keystone XL will only come online after a certain amount of time, and therefore it doesn't lower prices in the here and now, which is a dubious proposition, because if you know that more gas is going to be supplied in the future, it does actually, future supply, does have the capacity to drive down price marginally.
00:24:04.000But, even if she were right about that, that would be exponentially more true of clean energy, which is not even close to coming online in the kind of numbers that you need it to come online in order to lower the gas prices right now.
00:24:17.000The Keystone Pipeline has never been operational.
00:24:19.000It would take years for that to have any impact.
00:24:22.000I know a number of members of Congress have suggested that, but that is a proposed solution that has no relationship or would have no impact on what the problem is.
00:24:57.000If we do more to invest in clean energy, more to invest in other sources of energy, that's exactly what we can do to prevent this from happening in the future.
00:25:05.000Is that what we can do to prevent this from happening in the future?
00:25:07.000Because, you know, Europe has invested exponentially more as a percentage of GDP in green energy than the United States has, and all it did was make them extraordinarily reliant on Russian oil.
00:25:15.000Because unless you can change the basic science, which is that carbon-based fossil fuels are way more efficient and way more easily available than green energy, That ain't going to change anything.
00:25:25.000So it's just delusion all the way down.
00:25:26.000I mean, Nancy Pelosi is saying she's not even... Nancy Pelosi is out there saying, no drilling on public lands.
00:25:31.000So yeah, we got to fight the Russians.
00:25:49.000Okay, meanwhile, the pressure is in fact telling on the Russian natural gas and oil sector, but not because of the United States.
00:25:55.000It's because of Europe, and it's also because you have a bunch of other oil companies that are attempting to divest from the Russian oil industry.
00:26:01.000Lukoil, Russia's second largest oil company, appeared to distance itself from Vladimir Putin on Thursday, calling for a fast resolution to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
00:26:10.000The statement most likely reflects the company's desire to protect its extensive overseas operations, which include a network of more than 200 franchised gas stations in states like New York and New Jersey.
00:26:19.000Luke oil is one of the most recognizable Russian brands in the United States.
00:26:21.000They're afraid that in the United States there will be local acts to shut down Luke oil.
00:26:25.000Many lawmakers in Washington are pressing the Biden administration to ban the purchase of Russian oil by U.S.
00:26:30.000companies and to impose sanctions on Russian energy companies.
00:26:33.000Shares of Luke oil have fallen more than 40%.
00:26:44.000So here's the question, where does all this go from here?
00:26:46.000And this is where things start to get ugly because the unintended consequences of war, they really do change in enormous amounts across the planet.
00:26:53.000So we've already seen a major realignment.
00:27:05.000All independent minded nations have no trust in the West and no trust in Russia and China.
00:27:09.000And so they're going to seek to go their own way and to develop their own militaries and nuclear weapons.
00:27:13.000Which raises the prospect of future war pretty dramatically.
00:27:17.000The overt alliance now between Russia and China, which has rejected economic sanctions against Russia, and their alliance with Iran is reshaping the world order.
00:27:25.000The United States is now no longer seen as a reliable partner in pretty much any way.
00:27:29.000We're not a reliable partner to the people of Hong Kong.
00:27:31.000We're not a reliable partner to the people of Afghanistan.
00:27:34.000We're not a reliable partner to the people of Ukraine.
00:27:49.000Like, what would be the... Let's say you're Saudi Arabia.
00:27:52.000And let's say that the United States has had a warm relationship with Saudi Arabia for a long time because of Saudi Arabia's access to oil.
00:28:00.000And now the United States is making overtures to Iran.
00:28:04.000Would you start making overtures to maybe Russia, and China, and Israel, and a wide variety of countries that might have an impact on you, rather than staying in the American camp?
00:28:12.000The answer is, of course you would, because you'd be a fool not to do otherwise.
00:28:15.000So the entire New World Order is reshaping, but not in the way that the left once suggested, which was going to be a sort of grand global liberal democracy get-together, or a grand kind of Francis Fukuyama barbecue.
00:28:28.000It turns out that we are seeing again a re-emergence of the spheres of influence that dominated international politics all the way up through basically the end of the Second World War.
00:28:37.000War was much more common in the spheres of interest area.
00:28:40.000Once the spheres of interest area basically broke down into two and it was just the USSR versus the United States, the world got a lot more peaceful post-World War II than it was pre-World War II.
00:28:49.000And as it turns out, post-Cold War, the world got very peaceful in the era of American hegemony.
00:28:54.000The biggest wars in the post- Cold War era where wars were maybe three, four thousand people died.
00:29:01.000I'm talking about wars involving major powers.
00:29:03.000That is likely not to be the case in the next few decades because of the global realignment that we are seeing right now.
00:29:08.000And all of that could have been prevented.
00:29:09.000All of that could have been deterred by a muscular America who knew her world, who knew her role on the world stage.
00:29:17.000Right now we're in sort of an odd position with Ukraine because on the one hand, if you get too hawkish, you're actually encouraging Vladimir Putin to invade more surrounding countries.
00:29:26.000You're encouraging him to use tactical nuclear weapons if he thinks that he's going to go down.
00:29:30.000On the other hand, if you are not more hawkish when it comes to NATO, If you're not rebuilding the American military, if you're not guaranteeing the security of Taiwan, if you're not guaranteeing the security of Middle Eastern countries against Iran, if you're not doing those things, what you're likely to see is a world that gets fragmentary, chaotic, new alliances being formed that we can't completely control.
00:29:48.000And for all those people who think that has no impact on America, just get ready for higher prices for literally everything.
00:29:53.000And the possibility of more involvement in war.
00:29:55.000Because once war starts, it's difficult to see where it goes.
00:29:59.000Most wars, most major wars, start off as rather contained conflicts.
00:30:06.000According to the New York Times, that is the worry with Putin right now.
00:30:08.000Senior White House officials designing the strategy to confront Russia have quietly begun debating a new concern, that the avalanche of sanctions directed at Moscow, which have gained speed faster than they imagined, is cornering Putin and may prompt him to lash out, perhaps expanding the conflict beyond Ukraine.
00:30:22.000In Situation Room meetings in recent days, the issue has come up repeatedly, according to three officials.
00:30:26.000Putin's tendency, American intelligence officials have told the White House and Congress, is to double down when he feels trapped by his own overreach.
00:30:32.000They've described a series of possible reactions, ranging from the indiscriminate shelling of Ukrainian cities to compensate for the early mistakes made by his invading force, to cyberattacks directed at the American financial system, to more nuclear threats and perhaps moves to take the war beyond Ukraine's borders.
00:30:48.000I'm going to go back to it one more time.
00:30:50.000If the United States had engaged in actual deterrence of Russia over the course of the past 20 years, but particularly within the last year, this would not have happened.
00:30:57.000Once you have the invasion of Ukraine, it is now in Vladimir Putin's interest to make it as ugly as humanly possible.
00:31:02.000Because that leaves the rest of the world with a couple of choices.
00:31:05.000One is to get an overt conflict with Russia, which no one wants.
00:31:09.000And the second is to make some sort of concessions to Vladimir Putin to end this thing.
00:31:13.000So Putin is now fully invested in making things hideous and ugly.
00:31:17.000Especially because the world has not seen hideous and ugly, at least not in the center of Europe, for a very, very, very long time.
00:31:23.000Like long before any of us listening were probably born.
00:31:27.000You have to be, at this point, well into your 80s to remember the last time Europe saw significant damage this way.
00:31:36.000The debate over Putin's next moves is linked to an urgent re-examination by intelligence agencies of the Russian leader's mental state and whether his ambitions and appetite for risk have been altered by two years of COVID isolation.
00:31:45.000Those concerns accelerated, according to the New York Times, after Putin's order on Sunday to place the country's strategic nuclear weapons on a combat-ready alert to respond to the West's quote-unquote aggressive comments.
00:31:55.000It was a sign of the depth of American concern that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced on Wednesday he was canceling a previously scheduled Minuteman nuclear missile test to avoid escalating direct challenges to Moscow or giving Putin an excuse to once again invoke the power of the country's nuclear arsenal.
00:32:10.000John Kirby said, We didn't take this decision lightly, but we are trying to demonstrate we're a responsible nuclear power.
00:32:15.000We recognize at this moment of tension that it's critical that both the United States and Russia bear in mind the risk of miscalculation and take steps to reduce those risks.
00:32:23.000Beyond canceling the missile test, there is no evidence the United States is considering steps to reduce tensions.
00:32:28.000A senior official said there is no interest in backing off of sanctions at this point.
00:32:32.000Quite the contrary, said the official, who, like other American officials, asked for anonymity to discuss the internal debates.
00:32:37.000In fact, Biden announced expanded sanctions on Thursday.
00:32:41.000A few hours after he spoke, S&P dropped Russia's credit rating to CCC-.
00:32:45.000The credit rating agency said in a statement that is far below junk bond levels Russia was ranked at a few days after the invasion.
00:32:51.000It is two notches above a warning that the country was going to completely default at this point.
00:32:57.000But as we box Putin in, is he actually boxed in or is he just going to get more and more erratic?
00:33:02.000In just a moment, we'll get to further unexamined consequences of this war that, again, could have been fully prevented by a West that actually had the balls to stand up to Greta Thunberg on energy and the spine to stand up to Vladimir Putin on territorial invasions over the course of the last several decades, but instead decided to neuter itself.
00:33:19.000And now these are the natural consequences.
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00:37:10.000Among the other unintended consequences of what is going on in Ukraine is of course this massive wave of refugees, which has destabilized governments in the past.
00:37:22.000We saw an entire populist uprising in Europe thanks to their taking in of hundreds of thousands, millions of Muslim refugees from the Middle East, from Syria, from places like Libya.
00:37:30.000What's it going to be like where, in the course of one week, you have a million refugees Hundreds of thousands of whom are crossing over the borders into places like Hungary and Poland.
00:37:40.000According to the Wall Street Journal, within days of Russia's invasion of Ukraine last week, the line of cars carrying people fleeing to the country's border with Poland was already 55 miles long.
00:37:49.000In wet snow and cold rain, Mothers began abandoning their cars to walk for hours, prodding exhausted children as they dragged their strollers and suitcases along the road.
00:37:56.000Near them, jam-packed sedans running low on gas inched to a modest checkpoint that ordinarily serves a half-dozen people at a time, often day-trippers crossing into the duty-free zones to buy cigarettes.
00:38:06.000Inside the checkpoint, two Ukrainian immigration officers have been frantically trying to keep up with one of the fastest exoduses from any country in modern history.
00:38:13.000In just a week since the war with Russia began, according to the Journal, more than 1 million refugees have left Ukraine.
00:38:19.000Most headed west into Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and Moldova.
00:38:23.000By the weekend, more asylum seekers will have entered the EU in a matter of days than in all of 2015, when 1.3 million people crossed from the Middle East and Africa into the bloc.
00:38:32.000That would make the rush from Ukraine, the continent's biggest refugee crisis, since World War II.
00:38:37.000Most of the people are fleeing to Poland.
00:38:39.000The sudden arrival of hundreds of thousands of people has jolted many European governments, which didn't consider a Russian invasion imminent, as the United States did and had not foreseen the massive exodus.
00:38:47.000So how do you even take care of these people?
00:38:49.000Two days into the war, which began last Thursday, no EU member state had requested tents, blankets, or other basic necessities from the bloc's emergency reserves.
00:38:57.000On the eve of the conflict, Poland's local governments were still scouting potential locations, like town halls, stadiums, and schools, for an inflow it estimated would reach no more than one million people in all.
00:39:09.000It took a procession of volunteers on both sides of the border to manage the mass displacement of Ukrainians in roadside villages in Ukraine, lined with wheat and lavender fields, elderly residents set up stands, stacked with free food from their own pantries, as shelves at local gas stations ran bare.
00:39:21.000Others walked along the traffic, ordering soup and porridge to passengers stuck in cars and to families trekking beside them.
00:39:30.000Whatever the duration and outcome of the war, it is likely the conflict will deposit an enormous diaspora of Ukrainians in the EU, reshaping politics, society, and the refugee population on the continent.
00:39:41.000At this point, 550,000 people have already arrived on the border to Poland, another 80,000 have arrived on the border to Slovakia, 133,000 on the border to Hungary, 51,000 on the border to Romania, 100,000 on the border to Moldova.
00:39:54.000In total, the UN Refugee Agency now expects 4 million Ukrainians to seek shelter outside the country.
00:40:00.000And this will have long-term implications for Europe, especially Poland.
00:40:05.000The country's had very few ethnic minorities since World War II, when basically all the Jews of Poland were murdered.
00:40:10.000And then all the other minorities either fled or ended up in the Soviet Union.
00:40:14.000Poland has spent a long time trying to restrict the flow of asylum seekers, but it's welcoming Ukrainians because, of course, Ukrainians speak similar language, they've found jobs in a wide variety of areas, but the diaspora is likely to expand.
00:40:28.000So that giant overtaxed welfare state, the overburdened welfare state in all of Europe, that's likely to get significantly worse.
00:40:34.000These are impoverished people who don't have jobs, who have no assets, and who are now arriving inside the borders of a country where, in many cases, they do not speak the language.
00:40:42.000That will have some pretty dire and severe consequences with regard to world politics, including, by the way, pressure on the EU.
00:40:49.000The EU is trying to solidify in the face of Russian aggression.
00:40:54.000And at the same time, you're going to start to see member countries of the EU saying, we really need to solidify our borders here because we just don't have the wherewithal to take in 100,000 Ukrainian refugees at a time.
00:41:04.000Meanwhile, I've got money problems as well.
00:41:07.000Okay, so Lindsey Graham yesterday, he said, we're crushing the ruble.
00:41:13.000Here's Lindsey Graham, the senator from South Carolina.
00:41:16.000For 20 years, Putin has murdered his own people, imprisoned dissidents, opposition leaders in his country, committed war crimes in Syria and Chechnya, nothing happened.
00:41:58.000The Wall Street Journal points out another unintended consequence of all of this.
00:42:01.000They say, if Russian currency reserves aren't really money, the world is in for a shock.
00:42:06.000What is money is a question that economists have pondered for centuries, but the blocking of Russia's central bank reserves has revived its relevance for the world's biggest nations, particularly China.
00:42:14.000In a world in which accumulating foreign assets is seen as risky, military and economic blocs are set to drift farther apart.
00:42:21.000After Moscow attacked Ukraine last week, the United States and its allies shut off Russia's central bank access to most of its $630 billion of foreign reserves.
00:42:29.000Weaponizing the monetary system against a group of 20 countries will have lasting repercussions.
00:42:52.000dollars if you can't use the dollars anymore?
00:42:54.000It becomes absolutely worthless to you.
00:42:57.000According to the Wall Street Journal, the 1997 Asian financial crisis scared developing countries into accumulating more funds to shield their currencies from crashes, pushing official reserves from less than $2 trillion to a record $14.9 trillion in 2021, according to the IMF.
00:43:10.000While central banks have lately sought to buy and repatriate gold, it only makes up 13% of their assets.
00:43:39.000To be sure, the West has frozen Russia's stock of foreign exchange.
00:43:42.000It hasn't blocked the inflow of new dollars and euros.
00:43:44.000The country's current account surplus is estimated at $20 billion a month, thanks to exports of oil and gas.
00:43:49.000The US and EU want to keep buying that.
00:43:52.000These balances go to the private sector, but officials have mobilized them.
00:43:55.000But the entire artifice of money as a universal store of value risks being eroded by the banning of key exports to Russia and boycotts of the kind corporations like Apple and Nike announced this week.
00:44:04.000Why hold dollars if you literally can't use the dollars?
00:44:07.000If currency balances were to become worthless, computer entries, and didn't guarantee buying essential stuff, Moscow would be rational to stop accumulating them and stockpile physical wealth in oil barrels rather than sell them to the West.
00:44:17.000At the very least, they're going to shift into gold.
00:44:20.000Indeed, the case levied against China's attempts to internationalize the renminbi has been that, unlike the dollar, access to it is always at risk of being revoked by political considerations.
00:44:30.000So, this is a real problem because the United States is funded by debt.
00:44:33.000If the United States sells its bonds, for example, and let's say that you have a bunch of countries that are holding American bonds, and let's say to punish those countries, we decide that we're going to cut them off from their bond holdings.
00:44:43.000We're just going to renege on our debt because we don't like them.
00:44:45.000Who's going to buy our bonds in the future?
00:44:46.000If people translate their money into dollars, In order to hold those dollars so they can use them for later.
00:44:53.000Because the dollar is a good store of value.
00:44:55.000And then we say, actually your dollar is a store of zero value because we're just going to freeze it.
00:44:59.000That's going to undermine the value of the dollar.
00:45:01.000China itself owns $3.3 trillion in currency reserves.
00:45:04.000Unlike Russia, it cannot usefully hold them in renminbi, a currency it prints.
00:45:09.000Stockpiling commodities might be the alternative, so that creates more inflation.
00:45:17.000Many of the world's central banks are going to be buying gold as it becomes clear that currency is actually no guarantee of access to value.
00:45:24.000So all of this is really risky stuff that we are playing with here.
00:45:28.000When deterrence fails, things get really risky really fast.
00:45:30.000Plus, none of this is mentioning, by the way, the simple fact that the interest rates in the United States are about to rise in the middle of a massive inflationary cycle, which has now been exacerbated by foreign chaos.
00:45:39.000Here is Jerome Powell yesterday saying, it's too early to know if the Russian invasion will impact the interest rates in the United States.
00:45:45.000Does Russia's war in Ukraine change the Fed's thinking about interest rates?
00:45:52.000I think right now, in this very sensitive time where uncertainty is highly elevated and we really don't know which way things are going to go, I think we need to move carefully.
00:46:04.000We need to move carefully, is what he's saying, because we don't know which way things are going to go.
00:46:07.000Well, that's a lot of reassurance to markets.
00:46:13.000That doesn't mean pacifism or isolationism is the answer.
00:46:16.000Both of those make war more common, make it more likely.
00:46:18.000What it does mean is, this should be a reminder, when deterrence fails, things get bad.
00:46:22.000So, spend more time on deterrence, and less time on appeasement, and less time on worrying about the worries of Greta Thunberg, and less time worrying about the international liberal order, and ignoring actual threats as they grow on your own borders, including Russia and China.
00:46:36.000All right, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
00:46:38.000First, you can't forget to end your week by tuning into The Andrew Klavan Show.