The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - September 22, 2025


PREVIEW： Realpolitik #13 ｜ Russia and Ukraine 2000 Onwards


Episode Stats

Length

12 minutes

Words per Minute

120.6963

Word Count

1,463

Sentence Count

67

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

2


Summary

In this episode, we continue our discussion of the relationship between Russia and NATO in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and look at how NATO expanded its influence in the post-World War II period, and the impact this had on the relationship with Russia.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hello, welcome to another episode of RealPolitik. I am your host, Viras Modad.
00:00:05.880 I'm continuing with the question of Russia-Ukraine and trying to give the broader context of the conflict.
00:00:14.980 In the previous episode, we went over Russia in the 1990s and the relationship between Russia and NATO in the 1990s.
00:00:21.900 To summarize, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Russians, the Soviet Union was dissolved and the Russians ended up being governed by Boris Yeltsin,
00:00:36.060 who was more or less a drunken, corrupt buffoon who helped hand over the country to a big bunch of pretty horrible oligarchs
00:00:47.660 that mainly got rich by taking control of state assets at ridiculously low prices and then proceeding to milk them for all that they were worth.
00:01:01.220 This liberalism dubbed shock therapy and strongly recommended by the IMF and by the West in general and by the United States
00:01:10.660 as the way to modernize Russia's economy, culminated in 1998 in Russia defaulting on its debts,
00:01:19.460 the currency collapsing, massive inflation.
00:01:23.340 Throughout the 1990s, Russia was more or less governed by criminals, actual gangsters, as well as oligarchs associated with them.
00:01:36.040 And this internal weakness very much allowed NATO to expand its influence.
00:01:45.260 So we saw the breakup of Yugoslavia and subsequently the breakup of Serbia,
00:01:52.080 a key Russian ally given that it's Slavic and Orthodox,
00:01:56.040 the last bastion supportive of Russia in the Balkans.
00:02:01.120 And we saw, obviously, in 1990, the defeat, the complete and comprehensive defeat of the Iraqi military,
00:02:10.140 which had been supported by the Soviet Union.
00:02:13.920 So Western weapons really proved that they could do enormous damage to Soviet equipment with minimal losses to the West.
00:02:24.040 We saw that NATO kept on expanding, even though the agreement that allowed the reunification of Germany
00:02:33.840 was based on promises from NATO that it wouldn't expand one inch eastwards
00:02:41.720 if the two German republics, East Germany and West Germany, were allowed to reunite.
00:02:50.060 And we saw, as well, how the West supported the war in Chechnya,
00:02:55.100 waged by pretty insane jihadis who would do things like take schoolchildren hostages,
00:03:03.720 take theatergoers hostages, blow up various civilian assets in Moscow.
00:03:10.480 All of this was supported by the West in a moment where Russia was really thoroughly collapsing.
00:03:17.240 In 1996, after the buffoon Yeltsin won his re-election and Bill Clinton in the United States also won his re-election,
00:03:29.500 NATO confirmed that it was going to violate the commitments made to Russia,
00:03:35.480 informal, non-legally binding, but commitments nonetheless that were made to Russia that it wouldn't expand.
00:03:41.700 And it invited a bunch of Eastern European countries to join.
00:03:47.140 And I think it was the first expansion was formalized in 1999 with Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic being allowed to join NATO.
00:03:58.320 So basically, this was really the West formalizing its control over Central Europe.
00:04:09.760 Hungary here, the Czech Republic here, Poland here.
00:04:14.580 So Central Europe became fully part of NATO.
00:04:18.000 And as I mentioned last time, when you become part of NATO, it's not just that you are in an alliance with the United States.
00:04:29.360 What actually happens is that all of your equipment is changed to become interoperable with NATO equipment,
00:04:36.860 and your army becomes a cog in the American-led NATO machine.
00:04:41.840 So this isn't sort of, you know, France and Russia signing a treaty to say that they will stop German aggression in the 19th century.
00:04:52.040 No, this is a lot more involved in that it places these militaries under a single command.
00:04:59.640 And obviously, this is American command.
00:05:02.880 That's what it does.
00:05:03.860 So the first step was really expanding towards Central Europe, which is still a little bit of distance from Russia's own borders.
00:05:13.040 There's still the Baltic states, there's Belarus, there's Ukraine, there's Romania and Bulgaria.
00:05:18.500 But promises are made to other countries that they can eventually join NATO in the teeth of pretty obvious and strong Russian opposition.
00:05:29.180 So you have this picture of large-scale internal collapse in Russia,
00:05:38.160 and you have the subsequent taking advantage of that picture,
00:05:46.820 which is the expansion of NATO into areas that had been well within Russia's sphere of influence.
00:05:54.660 Remember, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, East Germany, these were all within the Warsaw Pact.
00:06:03.580 And there was a string of neutral buffer states, Finland, Sweden, Austria, to some extent Yugoslavia, here in the Baltics,
00:06:14.720 that were not aligned with either side, and that therefore played a role of keeping the peace and keeping the militaries of the two sides apart from each other,
00:06:27.440 except in Germany, where they were, you know, Germany was the main frontline state, really,
00:06:33.860 between NATO and the Russian-led Warsaw Pact.
00:06:38.640 So that's the context in which Putin takes power, and he's elevated to some planning position in the late 1990s,
00:06:51.200 and then he becomes prime minister in 1999, as Boris Yeltsin, the drunken buffoon, prepares to leave office,
00:07:00.900 having served two terms, which were completely disastrous for Russian society.
00:07:07.440 Absolutely disastrous on life expectancy, law and order, employment, inflation, international credibility, economy,
00:07:17.300 pretty much every metric.
00:07:18.840 The 1990s were a complete disaster for Russia.
00:07:21.200 And Putin inherits this semi-collapsed state.
00:07:26.720 And one of the most egregious things for you, if you're Russian, is that just a decade ago,
00:07:37.160 you were the only other superpower in the world, leading a massive alliance,
00:07:43.300 and now you're in a state in near collapse.
00:07:46.380 And so the first thing that Putin does is that he solves the terrorism problem.
00:07:49.560 And the way that he solves the terrorism problem is that he goes against the Chechen insurgency
00:07:57.560 and absolutely destroys the city of Grozny.
00:08:03.060 He just goes after the Chechens without any mercy,
00:08:09.100 and he ends that insurgency once and for all,
00:08:14.200 and he installs a loyalist, first Ahmad Kadirov,
00:08:18.040 and then his son, Ramzan Kadirov, who's still ruling until today,
00:08:24.240 as the only authority who's in charge of Chechnya.
00:08:30.420 It's a trusted ally.
00:08:32.180 The Chechens get what they need to rebuild.
00:08:35.640 Afterwards, there's a lot of Russian investment into Chechnya after it gets destroyed.
00:08:40.700 But he wins that war decisively.
00:08:44.040 The second thing that Putin does is that he takes control over the oligarchs.
00:08:50.600 It's widely acknowledged that it's the economic liberalization of Russia that created the oligarchs,
00:08:58.140 and that this was done at the behest of the IMF.
00:09:01.700 Obviously, not the corruption of it, but there were voices in Russia saying,
00:09:06.580 let's privatize slowly.
00:09:08.260 Let's not sort of jump into this.
00:09:11.820 The result of this wave of privatizations that Yeltsin oversaw in the 1990s
00:09:18.440 was that a big group of oligarchs became billionaires.
00:09:23.640 I asked Grok to help me research and identify them.
00:09:28.200 And of 40 top oligarchs, Grok says that 18 were of a particular ethnic group.
00:09:36.060 And of seven top banks in Russia, six were controlled by the same group.
00:09:42.740 So it was wholesale looting of Russia.
00:09:47.320 Putin sits these oligarchs down and lays down the law and explains to them that unless you obey me completely
00:09:59.280 and use your resources in the way that I say you will, I'm going to take away everything from you.
00:10:06.300 Now, remember, in 1996, during the re-election campaign of Boris Yeltsin,
00:10:13.300 it was the oligarchs who supported him fully, along with American consultants and advisors.
00:10:20.960 And they helped him win the election against the communists who were making a resurgence.
00:10:26.040 The West didn't want the communists back in charge of Russia,
00:10:29.500 especially now that they could reform the system.
00:10:33.300 So they supported Yeltsin.
00:10:35.160 And Yeltsin chose Putin in part because Putin was unknown
00:10:41.740 and in part because Putin promised that he wouldn't pursue Yeltsin or his family,
00:10:47.740 especially his daughter, for their own ostentatious corruption.
00:10:52.900 So Putin made that commitment that he wouldn't go after the oligarchs directly
00:10:57.620 or that he wouldn't go after Yeltsin and hold him to account for his corruption
00:11:02.140 that enabled the oligarchs.
00:11:03.620 And that made the oligarchs feel safe.
00:11:08.520 And so in 2000, when Yeltsin had resigned and it was time for Putin to run for president,
00:11:16.900 the oligarchs fully supported him and they backed him.
00:11:20.540 But a few months after they did that, and after he won the election,
00:11:25.500 he turned the tables on them.
00:11:28.080 And he made it clear to them that this era where it was the oligarchs who were governing Russia is over.
00:11:36.160 And he would fully use the apparatus of the state in order to make the oligarchs fall in line
00:11:46.840 and serve the Russian national interest.
00:11:49.920 And in exchange, in exchange for that, he wouldn't go after them for all of the corruption that they were involved in
00:11:57.740 and for all of the crime that they were involved in in the 1990s.
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