Russia NATO Dynamics ｜ A Critical Compass Clip
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
143.60947
Summary
In this episode, I sit down with my good friend and long-time Russian-American friend Alexei Pudin to discuss the ongoing proxy war between Russia and Ukraine. We talk about the history of the conflict, the motivations behind it, and what the future of the proxy war looks like.
Transcript
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like if you look at this from russia's perspective this is just
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they're going to keep on fighting as long as it gets fueled
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like the sending money and fighting a proxy war is not really it's not really sending a message of
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peace oh of course i mean that's like that's the the western countries that are funding this are
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obviously talking to both sides of the mouth all the time you know this this war needs to end
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here take some more tanks you know it's it's the i think the notion of uh you know like you all you
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have to do is go back you know a year year and a half and uh look at how the the headlines are
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being written about how oh this is an easy this is a walk-off victory for ukraine this is going to be
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over before it starts the russians are you know bleeding resources and and uh and troops and
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obviously that's just not the case and russia has obviously shown its willingness to just
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as it has throughout history as throughout its entire history just throw bodies at a problem
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until the problem ends there there is no um for like sort of what you said earlier there's there's a
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um a clear vision and a obviously a um i can't think of the term that i'm i'm trying to use but
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like a a sort of a pride behind um the mission and it's it won't be it's it's not going to be able
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to be derailed by just pretty words you know i guess the russian identity the national identity has
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been pretty strong yeah um they they also don't spend that much time teaching their army about
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pronouns so yeah or putting like tampons in men's washrooms yeah yeah they are quite focused on just
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creating strong individuals ready to fight um you did say like just throwing bodies into the meat grinder
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uh i think you can look at ukraine right now and the fact that they're the there's conscription
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going on and they've expanded the age range for conscription meaning that they're running out of
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bodies that way they're running out of willing people to fight on the battlefield so it feels like
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right now through the money and resources that's being just funneled into ukraine lives are being lost
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endlessly where potentially peace could have been negotiated earlier on if
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if if this adversarial relationship wasn't wasn't established and i i think pudin
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he was mentioning kind of the the nato dynamic to it and when the soviet union collapsed part of that
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part of those discussions was that nato would never there there'd be no established nato bases
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directly beside russia um and the whole fact that nato exists is because of the soviet threat
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so for nato to exist and russia's not in nato for them to continue to exist and then expand and get
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closer to russia what is that like what message is that sending well of course i mean that's the
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you know the the inverse is not mentioned enough about just how much of a thorough unending brutal
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strike would occur if uh the russians ever had the notion of putting uh you know military outpost
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outposts on the mexican border or in saskatchewan i think or saskatchewan would be a great place for
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yeah or on the you know the coast just just uh off the coast of alaska or something like that or on a
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or on a or on an island on the what if they put like put something in cuba what would happen then
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yeah yeah we'll never know but you know it's uh um i mean it's just silly when you think about it
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like just for for more than five seconds of course you know you can as you said but at the very very
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beginning when you began um telling me about this um it's it's it was an a reframing of an aristotelian
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quote of it it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain an idea without accepting it
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and of course we can hold the ideas in our mind simultaneously that yes of course putin is a
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dictator of course he's a megalomaniac of course he's you know done the exact same things that we
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uh all despise justin trudeau over like debanking people and uh and had taking political prisoners
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but that doesn't necessarily mean that he doesn't have a point about uh if the u.s wants to put
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uh long-range missile silos on the ukrainian border next to uh russia of course there's
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going to be issue taken with that and it's completely reasonable to have issue taken with that