The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - September 10, 2025


PREVIEW： Realpolitik #11 ｜ Why the West Has Always Hated Russia

Topics
geopolitical problem
Hosted by
Callum Edmunds Carl Benjamin Connor Tomlinson Harry Robinson John Wheatley Joshua Ferme Edward McLaren Elizabeth Heverin
Mentioned
Gorbachev Boris Yeltsin Koroats Vladimir Putin Hillary Clinton Bin Laden Belarusia Napoleon Austria Berlin Hitler Assad
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1248 The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1250

Episode Stats


Length

24 minutes

Words per minute

125.53

Word count

3,133

Sentence count

169

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

24

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, we take a look at the events leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Iron Curtain, and how this may have led to the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hello, welcome to a new episode of RealPolitik. Today I'm going to be talking about the word
00:00:09.980 unprovoked and whether or not the Russian invasion of Ukraine was in fact unprovoked as we keep
00:00:16.200 hearing repeated from Western leaders. To give you some context, we're going to go through a
00:00:21.920 little bit of what was happening in Russia and geopolitically in the 1990s to try to give some
00:00:28.260 context as to what happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union and what led us to the crisis
00:00:34.160 that we see in Ukraine today. As a reminder, this episode is live, meaning that if you want to post
00:00:41.520 any questions on comments, please go ahead and do so. I will be looking at them halfway through and
00:00:47.380 near the end of the show and I will try to address them as best as I can. By now you know I always try
00:00:55.200 to start these things with a map and this is a map of the alliances in Europe in 1989 before the
00:01:03.880 collapse of the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain. For those of you who are old enough to remember,
00:01:11.780 there were two competing geopolitical blocs. NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization,
00:01:17.260 led by the United States, obviously, and the Warsaw Pact, the counter-alliance to NATO, which obviously
00:01:28.200 was led by Russia, as well as a number of socialist satellite states, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia,
00:01:38.480 Hungary, Poland, and obviously East Germany. If you remember your history from the time,
00:01:44.460 Germany was divided. Berlin was, and still is obviously, in the east of the country. It was
00:01:53.040 a divided city, half of it governed by pro-Russian authorities, half of it governed by the Federal
00:02:02.340 Republic of Germany, aligned with the United States, and a member of NATO in good standing.
00:02:08.540 And you see this string of buffer states trying to separate Russia from NATO. You see Finland and
00:02:20.760 Sweden, both of them refusing to join either alliance. The Finns, because they had lost the
00:02:26.940 Winter War against the Russians and lost, I think, a tenth of their territory and were forced to sign
00:02:33.840 on to neutrality. The Swedes, because they were neutral even in World War II. You see Austria as a
00:02:41.440 neutral country, refusing to join either alliance. Switzerland. You have Yugoslavia, a Serbian-led 0.95
00:02:50.020 socialist entity that still was not part of the Warsaw Pact. And you see Albania, kind of aligned
00:03:00.860 with the Russians, kind of not. Both it and Yugoslavia setting out their own path. And Greece, 0.74
00:03:08.660 Turkey, Italy, Germany, Norway, and behind them, the bigger powers, England and France, 0.72
00:03:19.900 holding up the European part of the NATO alliance, dreading the potential Russian invasion through the
00:03:28.280 Fulda Gap. And you see a kind of balance here. The Russians have a sphere of influence. The Americans
00:03:34.740 have a sphere of influence. There is a string of neutral states in the middle. And then the Berlin
00:03:41.540 Wall falls. The Berlin Wall falls because essentially the security apparatuses and the political apparatuses
00:03:51.260 that underpinned the socialist systems in Eastern Europe and in Russia just lost confidence in
00:04:00.120 themselves. Some junior official in the German Democratic Republic, the socialist republic, that is,
00:04:10.980 announces that they're going to allow free travel between East Berlin and West Berlin. And people in
00:04:17.980 East Berlin just tear the wall down. You can see iconic images of that all over the internet where
00:04:24.500 the Germans can't believe that the wall has fallen and implicitly reunification is on the way.
00:04:33.340 The Russians at the time had forces deployed in Poland and in Germany, and I think also in
00:04:40.660 Czechoslovakia, but they weren't in a position to use them because Russia itself, after Gorbachev,
00:04:49.400 had also lost confidence in the socialist system, and it was slowly falling apart over there as well.
00:04:55.940 And so everybody's faced with the question, do we now allow a united Germany, given what united Germany
00:05:05.580 had done in the First World War and the Second World War, which were obviously deeply ingrained in the
00:05:12.420 memory of everybody of that era, unlike today where we sort of operate without a historic memory of
00:05:17.940 anything, which is kind of why I'm doing this show. So you see this challenge, okay, will Germany be 0.92
00:05:25.880 allowed to unify. And the promise that was made to the Russians was that if you allow East Germany and
00:05:38.120 West Germany to unify, we will not expand NATO not one inch eastwards. And this was a commitment that
00:05:46.940 was made to Gorbachev in order to convince him to allow for the unification of Germany after the Second
00:05:54.940 World War. Obviously, the Russians had a major say in whether or not this is something that they
00:06:00.680 would tolerate. And they decided to allow it in part based on these guarantees. And here we have
00:06:07.180 an American ambassador to the Soviet Union at around that time, explaining the nature of that thing.
00:06:17.020 Let's listen. It's just a 30 second clip.
00:06:18.940 There is one other factor here that we seem to be forgetting. And we did, though it was not a legally
00:06:24.680 binding assurance, we gave categorical assurances to Gorbachev back when the Soviet Union existed,
00:06:31.180 that if a united Germany was able to stay in NATO, NATO would not be moved eastward.
00:06:36.660 And, you know, I think that the current Russian government is very clear.
00:06:40.240 So we would be, but that assurance was given to the Soviet Union.
00:06:44.060 That is right. It is not a legally binding, but it was, you might say, a geopolitical deal.
00:06:50.080 So that's exactly it. And that sort of focuses the debate a little bit. You hear the Western side
00:06:56.700 saying, we didn't promise them anything of that sort. It wasn't legally binding. It wasn't a real
00:07:03.700 commitment, et cetera, et cetera. And from the Russian perspective, the argument is, well, actually,
00:07:08.760 no, you made an agreement with us that you would not expand NATO, and then you did anyway, and that
00:07:17.880 is a major betrayal. And if you think about it, again, from a Russian perspective, it's always worth 1.00
00:07:24.280 looking at a map, you know. This is a map of the Soviet Union and its constituent republics.
00:07:30.140 So you have Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania here on the Baltic Sea. These are states that were part of the
00:07:43.740 Soviet Union, and they were given a kind of privileged status under the Soviet Union. A lot of money was
00:07:50.900 pumped into them. You have Belarusia, which is still an ally of Russia. You have Ukraine, and you have
00:07:57.880 Moldova, and that's the border with Europe. And then you have the border with Turkey and Iran in the
00:08:02.900 Caucasus. You have Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. All three of them were incorporated into the USSR.
00:08:12.120 And then you have Central Asia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, the rest of these countries
00:08:18.900 that were under the full control of Moscow. And this was, combined with the Warsaw Pact, a position
00:08:30.240 that made Moscow extremely secure. It meant that there was no way for it to be invaded again,
00:08:37.000 as had happened under Napoleon and Hitler. It meant that the Russian homeland was secured by a huge buffer 0.80
00:08:43.600 zone. And nobody in their right mind would think of invading Russia by land, and nobody would think of
00:08:50.660 nuking Russia, because it had enormous nuclear capabilities of its own. And the Russian Federation today is 0.72
00:08:59.540 just this, the part in pink. It's still huge, but in Central Asia, it's vulnerable to China. In the Caucasus,
00:09:08.440 it's vulnerable to Iran and to Turkey. In Europe, well, Western Europe is now right at the border of the core 0.52
00:09:19.640 of Russia. And previously, the Russians had a very firm grip on the Black Sea. You have to remember that
00:09:28.980 there are Romania and Bulgaria here, both members of the Warsaw Pact. And you have Georgia here, and you have
00:09:36.480 Ukraine, which meant that the only two players in the Black Sea were Russia and NATO member Turkey.
00:09:44.460 The Russians felt safe. They didn't feel under the enormous threat that they felt under after the
00:09:53.560 collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. And now they are faced in a situation
00:10:03.180 where they have very reduced strategic depth between potentially unfriendly countries and Moscow
00:10:14.220 in the center. So this is the geopolitical problem as Russia saw it. And it believed that, OK, we got these
00:10:23.660 guarantees from the West, from the French, from the Germans, from NATO itself, and from the Americans, that there would be
00:10:33.640 no further expansion of NATO. This is the world in 1990, 1991. And so you want to remember that. And you want to remember
00:10:45.840 also that under the president that came after Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and then under Vladimir Putin, both these Russian
00:10:57.460 presidents asked to join NATO. And they themselves said that, OK, if you're going to expand NATO, well, expand it all the way.
00:11:08.420 And we, the Russians, will become part of it. This was obviously very naive and would never be accepted
00:11:16.720 by the West for a pretty simple reason. And that reason is primarily Russia is too big. 0.93
00:11:26.140 It would instantly become the second power in NATO. It would become, it would be able to challenge the
00:11:33.680 United States, unlike NATO in its current configuration, which is the American behemoth and a
00:11:39.920 bunch of, you know, Britain, France, Germany, OK, big countries, the rest, not really able to do very
00:11:46.100 much. And none of these countries are actually independent in their foreign policy decision-making
00:11:53.420 from Washington, D.C., whereas the Russians would be a genuine challenge and would force NATO 0.99
00:12:02.540 to act in a way that respected Russian interests as well. And because Russia was too big, well, what do you do
00:12:13.220 with a country that's too big? You do to it what was done to Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia, I want to go back to 0.98
00:12:21.020 the map here, is this country here. Today, I think it's seven different countries. Slovenia, Croatia,
00:12:31.140 Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Kosovo. I'm missing one, whatever. So it's been completely broken up.
00:12:45.600 And pretty much each of these countries, other than Serbia, has been absorbed into NATO. Meaning that
00:12:52.500 NATO today looks very, very different from a Russian perspective. I had a map of NATO here
00:13:01.740 somewhere. Anyway, it looks very, very different from a Russian perspective because it means that
00:13:07.400 all of a sudden, rather than NATO being distant from Russia with a bunch of buffer states,
00:13:17.040 countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union, like the Baltic states, are now all included
00:13:29.600 in NATO. Poland, both Czechia and Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania. So the geopolitical picture for the
00:13:47.020 naturally, they feel threatened by it in the same way that the United Kingdom would feel threatened
00:13:54.100 if the French were to set up military bases in Ireland. In the same way that the Americans would
00:14:00.640 be threatened, as they are indeed right now, by Chinese influence over Canada and over Mexico.
00:14:07.560 So the Russian reaction isn't them being absolutely and completely irrational. The Russian reaction
00:14:14.780 comes from, A, a sense of betrayal. They were promised that NATO would not expand. And, B,
00:14:21.860 the reality that now NATO is literally on their borders with, therefore, a much bigger risk
00:14:31.560 for Russian security. In the same way that if the Canadians or the Mexicans were to join a Chinese-led
00:14:40.860 alliance, it's just perfectly normal, it's just perfectly normal. And to pretend otherwise, it's a little bit
00:14:45.640 dishonest, shall we say. But what were the 1990s like? Well, after that commitment was made
00:14:54.140 and the Soviet Union collapsed, the currency in Russia collapsed. The state had to cut spending massively.
00:15:03.780 Unfortunately, the life expectancy of people in Russia simply fell off a chart. You can see it on
00:15:12.080 this graph here. And you can see that the most affected with the biggest declines were really the
00:15:19.800 Ukrainians here in orange and the Russians in green. I mean, it just fell to 64 years. Life expectancy
00:15:28.440 fell from 70 almost to 64 years. And this was the result of massive cuts in welfare, massive
00:15:39.420 unemployment because the whole economy was privatized. And as it was privatized, it was really
00:15:45.660 Western companies that reaped a lot of the benefits, as well as the Russian mafia and Russian oligarchs.
00:15:52.160 It was the result of a huge increase in alcoholism, in drug abuse, in pretty much everything, in pretty
00:16:01.280 much everything that you could imagine. So you see the society simply begin to crumble. And you see
00:16:10.180 that Russia goes from feeling invulnerable, if you will, to feeling absolutely surrounded.
00:16:20.140 And then, to add insult to injury, a series of wars is launched in order to weaken Russia 0.81
00:16:31.600 further. The first one, well, when Yugoslavia fell apart, first the Koroats broke off and the 0.96
00:16:42.580 European community said that it was going to support them. And then the Slovenians, no, first 1.00
00:16:47.540 the Slovenians broke off, and then the Koroats. And you see these small wars beginning in 1990, 1991.
00:16:55.620 And then the core of Yugoslavia, which is the part that includes Bosnia, that all comes crashing down 0.69
00:17:03.880 and breaks into total civil war. And you see the West interfering in that conflict, gradually,
00:17:10.740 step-by-step, providing weapons, providing arms. When the war in Bosnia happened, when the siege of
00:17:16.200 Sarajevo happened in, I think, 1994, you have to remember, not only were the jihadis fighting on the
00:17:24.520 Muslim side, and you saw people from Al-Qaeda, with funding from Saudi Arabia, backing from Turkey,
00:17:33.420 backing from the UAE, backing from the Gulf states. You also saw the Shia joining in on the game.
00:17:40.000 So there's a number of senior Hezbollah commanders who, in the 1990s, while Lebanon was still partly
00:17:49.400 occupied by Israel, traveled to Bosnia to support the Muslim side in a war against the Serbs.
00:17:58.320 It's quite similar to how you saw this big assembly of jihadis coming from all over the world
00:18:06.880 to fight the Syrian government of Assad, starting from the 2011 uprising. It's pretty much the same
00:18:15.300 playbook. So you see the West siding with the Muslim side against the Orthodox Serbs, who, because they are 0.99
00:18:27.400 Orthodox, are naturally allied with Russia. And you see this massive effort to break up Serbia and to break 0.93
00:18:36.980 up Yugoslavia in order to make sure that there wouldn't be a large, strong entity sitting on the 1.00
00:18:47.780 Adriatic Sea and in a position to pursue autonomous policy. I mean, you have to remember, this is a big
00:18:55.300 country, a population rivaling maybe Poland or Germany, very diverse population, obviously, religiously
00:19:04.180 diverse, not ethnically diverse. And you see this big effort to break them up and to divide them. And if you
00:19:13.400 think about the Russian requests, okay, nice, Mr. NATO, can we please become a part of you? The response is,
00:19:22.220 actually, actually, you're too big, and you're too autonomous. The corollary of that is that the only
00:19:30.520 way that Russia could be absorbed into the Western order is to break it up into its constituent parts.
00:19:41.960 And if today you were to take the time to look at the Atlantic Council or if at various think tanks that
00:19:47.940 sort of deal with the Russia problem and see what are they advocating, well, what they're advocating
00:19:55.540 is the breakup of Russia. So let's sort of pause and recap. And I'm going to do that a couple of times
00:20:04.820 because there's a bunch of threads that I'm trying to tie together to give you an idea briefly of what
00:20:12.940 the 1990s and early 2000s were like for Russia and why Ukraine is important. You see this promise,
00:20:24.260 we're not going to expand NATO. You see Russian society imploding with gangsters, criminals, oligarchs, 1.00
00:20:33.180 partnering with Western companies in order to take control of the best assets in the Soviet Union
00:20:40.860 and in Ukraine so that these could be made more profitable and the result naturally is going to be
00:20:50.080 asset stripping, mass unemployment, a collapse in the currency, etc., etc. You see the only remaining
00:20:59.500 natural ally of Russia, which is Serbia, being decimated and destroyed with NATO intervening in 1998
00:21:10.300 to bomb Belgrade and to bomb Serbia to smithereens in order to take away from it Kosovo. And if you look at 1.00
00:21:21.340 the sort of foundational history, almost mythological history of the Serbian people, it's about Kosovo and
00:21:29.660 capturing Kosovo and defeating the Muslims there because their whole shtick is that we stood up against 1.00
00:21:37.060 the Ottomans as they were expanding into Europe and we fought them and we defended ourselves against 1.00
00:21:44.900 them successfully. You have to keep that background in mind. So the one remaining ally that Russia has
00:21:52.500 gets pummeled to smithereens and that's the first war. And the second war is the Chechen War.
00:21:58.000 From 94 to 96 and then again from 99 to 2000, you see that the West is backing this insurgency in Chechnya
00:22:08.600 on in the Caucasus, where basically Russia is most vulnerable to invasion by Muslim powers.
00:22:21.160 And this is the sort of Kosovo, Ingushatia area right around here, where you see these crazy jihadis 0.91
00:22:30.640 backed by Saudi money with some Saudi fighters, Arab fighters, Bin Laden, I think, wanted fighters to go and
00:22:40.560 join the Chechen jihad, who are going around attacking schools, attacking civilians, attacking a theater in
00:22:50.260 Moscow, conducting pretty much heuristic, nihilistic violence comparable to 9-11. And you see these guys
00:22:59.760 being backed by the West and kind of treated like heroes. And you see this resultant instability in Russia
00:23:08.800 because, as you might know from the Lord of War film, the Russian arsenals were being looted.
00:23:17.200 The army had to be reduced. The competency of the military is highly in question.
00:23:24.640 And the Russians are just getting pummeled on all sides. And you see these regular meetings 0.99
00:23:32.880 between Yeltsin, the new president of Russia, and Bill Clinton. And Yeltsin, he wins an election in 1992
00:23:46.480 and again in 1996. But he's a drunkard. And according to one friend of mine, people around 0.97
00:23:55.520 him, at the instigation of other powers, were really encouraging him to remain a drunkard. And
00:24:04.400 where sort of every day would start telling him around 10-11 in the morning, how about a shot?
00:24:12.080 How about we have a drink? And you get this video compilation of an incredibly drunk Russian president
00:24:18.640 running around the world, stumbling, falling. In one incident, I think in 1994,
00:24:29.840 the guy is visiting the White House. And the security at around 1 or 2 a.m. finds him in a bathrobe
00:24:42.480 walking outside of the White House, trying to hail a taxi, saying that he wanted a pizza,
00:24:48.880 and that he must have a pizza now.
00:24:51.680 If you enjoyed this piece of premium content from the Lotus Eaters, head to our website where you can find more.