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


Summary


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.
00:12:00.920 If you enjoyed this piece of premium content from the Lotus Eaters,
00:12:05.040 head to our website where you can find more.