On this episode of the podcast, we discuss the new president, Donald Trump, and his new role in the Ukraine crisis. We talk about the Minsk agreements, the current situation in Ukraine, and why Russia should take back Crimea.
00:00:32.940And the question to you who actually knows the answer is, how do you do that?
00:00:36.580Yeah, well, how you bring the war to an end, this has been on the table since before the war started.
00:00:43.160And Trump is going to have a much more difficult position now to bring that to fruition because of the horrific decisions made by the outgoing administration.
00:00:58.420This war could easily have been avoided before it happened.
00:01:18.120The Minsk agreements, I know a lot in the West like to say bad things about them.
00:01:21.480But the fact is that we now know Angela Merkel, Hollande of France have both admitted that that was never supposed to be implemented.
00:01:29.480They just wanted to, quote, stop Russia's invasion of the Donbass area.
00:01:33.700That's what they said that it was for.
00:01:34.900To buy them time, the Ukraine side time, so that they could defend against it.
00:01:40.520And you know that's true because one of the central provisions that was agreed to by the Russians and the French and German and the Ukrainians was that the Ukrainians would change their constitution to have political autonomy and protections for the Russian-speaking people in the East.
00:01:55.400That was one of the absolute central features of that Minsk agreement.
00:02:05.580So the Ukraine side didn't implement the most important provision of it.
00:02:09.380They were also supposed to move back heavy weapons and all this kind of stuff, some of which happened.
00:02:13.500And then both sides had minor incursions over the time with artillery that was going back and forth because the Russians are going, all right, we're not going to implement our part of this all fully until you get that central part.
00:02:24.700And so they just talked about it all this time.
00:02:27.420And all we had to do is say, okay, Minsk agreements had no NATO in it.
00:02:31.340There was no NATO for Ukraine inside there.
00:02:33.280It was just resolve this situation peacefully.
00:02:40.800So since 2008, that had been talked about by the West that they were going to come in.
00:02:44.720But the Minsk agreement would have ended all the conflict that was on the line of contact for essentially an eight-year civil war before this one broke out.
00:02:52.600All they had to do was just implement those.
00:02:55.960And then now then Russia has no need to intervene because the whole issue has always been protection of the rights of the Russian people and the ethnic Russians living in eastern Ukraine and the protection on their border not to have NATO in it.
00:03:08.880So if you get that off the table, now then there's plenty of room.
00:03:11.320But then by 2021, which very few Westerners are even aware of, is in March of 2021, Zelensky signs this law that says they're going to now take back all of the temporarily occupied areas, especially Crimea, which is a no-go red line for the Russians, and by force if necessary.
00:03:30.700Can you possibly describe why – and lots of Biden administration officials talked about taking back Crimea.
00:03:57.080Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine when Khrushchev controlled Ukraine.
00:03:59.260Right, when it was part of the Soviet Union, right?
00:04:01.540Yeah, so it was just like moving things left and right within his controlling and holdings.
00:04:06.180But the people in it were still ethnic Russians primarily.
00:04:09.500And when they had this plebiscite, like 95 percent of the people voted to go into Russia after the coup that happened that unseated the legally elected government in Ukraine that Victoria Nuland and all these other people supported.
00:04:23.800Then Putin said, well, I'm certainly not going to have a NATO country around Sevastopol where I have my Black Sea fleet.
00:04:30.940So he said, we're going to annex this thing.
00:04:33.320The people voted for it, and that's what he claimed.
00:04:35.280Now, you can disagree that that was legitimate, but that's how they voted, and that's why.
00:04:39.360Does anyone argue that Crimeans, the residents of Crimea, if allowed to vote on it again, would vote to join Ukraine?
00:05:05.160So none of them would ever want to go back into the Ukraine side.
00:05:08.720So if you cared about democracy, you wouldn't try and steal Crimea from its people and give it to another government that they didn't want to join, right?
00:05:15.400No, especially if you care about people getting to make their own decisions, which we claim to in other parts of the world that, yes, the will of the people should rule.
00:05:23.000Unless, of course, it's somebody we don't like, which goes back to the whole thing that happened in February 2021.
00:05:29.100I'm sorry, 2014, when we encouraged a coup and then supported the overthrow of the legally elected government because we didn't like what they were doing.
00:05:39.040And we helped the other people who were going against it.
00:05:43.940So everything that violated what we claimed to believe, we were supportive of at that time.
00:05:48.080And that's not democracy in any way, shape, or form.
00:05:51.620But still, that's the problem, that we could have ended this war by doing the Minsk agreements.
00:05:57.500Then in late 2021, and we know this for a fact because Jen Stoltenberg has admitted this stuff very publicly, that Putin said, hey, if we don't get a deal here, we're going to use force.
00:08:49.460So when we're talking about now, when we say, no, democracy and this unprovoked aggression, which we know wasn't true because we've admitted that it wasn't true, now then we have what we have here.
00:09:01.140And so all of these opportunities – and by the way, there was one more in November – this is one of the worst ones in my view.
00:09:07.400In November of 2022, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, said, hey, by the way, if you want to negotiate a settlement, now is the time to do it.
00:09:16.360Because remember, that was the one year where there were two big successes for the Ukraine army.
00:09:20.900They drove Russia out of Kyrgyzstan City, and they drove them out of a huge swath of Kharkiv area in the north.
00:09:26.520At that time, Russia was at its weakest point.
00:09:28.720They had force-mobilized 300,000 people.
00:09:31.480They were scrambling just to get uniforms in them, much less trained, et cetera, to stop the gap, to stop the bleeding up there.
00:09:37.200And the Ukraine side had every advantage.
00:09:39.300And Mark Milley publicly said, if you want to negotiate a settlement, now would be a good time.
00:10:30.640But militarily, Tucker, this is one of the things that's so important.
00:10:33.860Militarily, it was evident at the time that Ukraine couldn't win because Russia then – they withdrew from Kyrgyzstan City.
00:10:42.700And it was talked about a humiliation for Russia at the time, but militarily, that was the wisest decision they could have made because it would have been hard to hold on to Kyrgyzstan City because of the river behind them.
00:10:52.780So they moved 40,000 guys across the river, blew all the bridges so that now Ukraine can't follow that up.
00:10:58.360And so they preserved all of that manpower and all of the experience that they had, and then they ended up using them elsewhere to build a fortified defensive series of about five different periods.
00:11:08.320And Russia was really good at defensives.
00:11:10.480So there was every reason to think –
00:11:21.340So I knew how hard it would be to try to do an offensive against a dug-in Russian defensive line.
00:11:26.600And so when I heard in 2023 that the Ukraine was going to have this big combined arms operation going into the Russian lines, I said, there's no way that they're going to do that.
00:11:35.600But I've conducted operations like that before in Desert Storm with Doug McGregor and an armored CAV regiment.
00:11:42.020I knew what it was like to go into prepared enemy defenses, and that was against a not very good unit.
00:11:46.940But to go against the Russians when they had six months to prepare was suicide.
00:11:51.940Our leaders should have recognized that.
00:11:54.080Our secretary of defense should have recognized that.
00:11:56.100But instead, they said, no, we're going to succeed.
00:12:50.060Our leaders should have known that, but instead they encouraged it.
00:12:53.340And then you had, I'll never forget this one, David Petraeus at the end of May 2023 went on the BBC and said, I think that the Ukraine side is going to do this combined arms operation.
00:13:03.320And he listed all the reasons why they're going to and the tanks and the Bradleys and all this stuff.
00:13:07.320I think that they're going to penetrate the Russian lines.
00:13:09.820The defensive lines will crumble, crack, and maybe even collapse, and they'll go to the Azov coast.
00:13:14.420That's what he said on the eve of this thing.
00:13:17.020And, of course, it worked out the way any rational analysis would have said was a complete disaster.
00:13:22.180It never even penetrated the first line of defense.
00:13:24.620So all of 2023 went to a predictable failure.
00:13:29.780And so now then that was the next chance we had to end the suffering and say –
00:13:33.020May I just ask you, you're describing the war as really a war between the United States and Russia.
00:13:39.220You're saying that these are decisions that our military leadership made or should have made.
00:14:01.740Doesn't matter what Ukraine wants to do.
00:14:03.460Without our willingness to give the information, the ammunition, the weapon systems, all of it, and to apparently help with some of the plans, they can't do anything.
00:14:13.280So I just don't think – I mean, thank you.
00:14:20.320And I think a lot of people have been lulled into this idea that there's this valiant –
00:14:24.600Now, they may be valiant, but, you know, Ukrainian military that's fighting this war against a foreign aggressor, Russia, and sort of leaving out the key point, which is the strategy and the munitions come from the United States.
00:14:35.960So this is a failure on the part of our military leadership as well.
00:14:51.400And very quantifiable reasons why that is.
00:14:54.160Though I will say it's not exclusively us because Zelensky deserves specific arguments and criticism because he continued to take these operations and actions.
00:15:08.580However much who actually made the decisions is unclear, but he actually has a lot of the say over what they did, especially over how they employ them.
00:15:15.900And so he sent his troops to do operations that really had no chance of success.
00:15:21.300And especially – and he deserves – people claim that he's, you know, like this modern-day Winston Churchill kind of thing, right?
00:15:28.580I mean, he got all this publicity in the first.
00:15:30.740Well, Winston Churchill made some huge mistakes in early in his career, and because of that –
00:15:43.460But he learned from those mistakes, and so he did a bunch of things right in Second World War because he learned from his mistakes in most parts.
00:15:52.060That wasn't so – but he eventually did help with that.
00:15:55.440Well, Zelensky doesn't have any of that experience at all.
00:15:58.140And so he fought in this place called Severodonetsk, Lysychonsk, and even Mariupol early in the war, and in every case, he stayed too long.
00:16:06.760So when his forces started – when it was clear that the Russian forces had moved in and into the outskirts of the city, they should have withdrawn to the next defensive line.
00:16:14.240They should have been building subsequent defensive lines knowing that the Russians were going to eventually get there.
00:16:18.960Make it as expensive as you can on every – go back, and then you'll have like, all right, well, back here we're not going to allow penetration or we have to bring the war to an end.
00:16:27.620But instead, he just stayed there, and almost like Hitler in the end of World War II, not one inch.
00:16:33.100So instead of pulling his forces back, he kept them in there, and they were methodically destroyed.
00:16:38.040Now then you have to have new guys for the next city, and then they're destroyed.
00:16:41.680And you see what happens, Tucker, is that you destroy the ability to have a coherent offensive or defensive because the guys who know how to fight who've learned die.
00:16:52.140So now then you have to bring in new guys, and it's starting from scratch again.
00:16:55.400And Bakhmut was the worst because they lost probably 10,000 people to defend a city that gave them no value.
00:17:01.780They should have moved back to another area because here's the key.
00:17:04.680So like Bakhmut is here, and it's tough to move into.
00:17:06.980But if you had moved back here where there's a lot of open land and to the next defensive position, which high ground, then it would cost the Russians a lot more to move across this territory.
00:17:15.840And they could have defended themselves better.
00:17:17.480But instead they stayed there, then they lost thousands of men.
00:28:24.500If he doesn't get the deal he wants, he'll just keep rolling until he does.
00:28:28.520And I believe that the likelihood is that they would take all the way up to the Dnepa River, even if it took another six, nine months of fighting.
00:28:35.520I don't see any way that they're going to stop fighting here.
00:29:08.680So I think that the likelihood is that Odessa and Kharkiv cities are probably not going to remain on the western side if Trump doesn't come in and give Putin everything he wants on the first day.
00:29:22.880And I perceive – and I certainly don't know this.
00:29:26.200No, I haven't talked to Putin, so I don't know.
00:29:28.600But I perceive that he's set these lines here on the 14 June lines, which were all of those four oblasts because there's large swaths that Ukraine still owns.
00:29:37.120It would be so hard, maybe even impossible, politically, domestically for Trump to give away areas that Ukraine hasn't lost in the war and agree to that.
00:29:47.840And so if Trump, with the Kellogg plan or whatever, they try to say they want NATO put off or they want the current line of contact to be the dividing line, then Russia will just say, okay, we tried to negotiate with you.
00:30:18.800And, Tucker, if Trump said, all right, well, I'm going to go in big.
00:30:21.540I'm going to take the 1st Armored Division, 1st Infantry Division, 1st Cav Division, all of that equipment, the whole set, and just give it powerful divisions that we have there and just hand it to the Ukrainians.
00:30:32.140They don't have the manpower to use it.
00:32:01.660You had Secretary Blinken say, you know what, we have –
00:32:05.100Secretary Blinken's a criminal, by the way.
00:32:07.000And if he retains his security clearance after January 20th, I'm going to every single day raise the alarm.
00:32:13.880I mean there's no way that Tony Blinken should have a security clearance after Trump is inaugurated.
00:32:19.820But I know he's going to – it's super simple.
00:32:22.120Just pull Tony Blinken's security – Tony Blinken is a – you know, I think was running the U.S. government, hurting this country more than maybe any other single person in my lifetime.
00:32:31.900And that man deserves to – should be held to account for what he did.
00:33:02.400And, you know, last weekend I had a meeting at, you know, in a ski resort in the Alps, which is probably the most expensive town in the world.
00:33:10.040I was not there to ski for the record.
00:34:03.160Like, no American seems aware of this.
00:34:04.980We're sending these arms to Ukraine, billions of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars, and it's being stolen and sold to our actual enemies.
00:35:23.360And sometimes they put a little caveat headline and then move on to whatever's next.
00:35:27.200And no one says the implication of, wait, this stuff could come back to bite us on our own border.
00:35:31.960Well, yeah, we saw that in the 80s with the Majedin, of course.
00:35:35.560How are you going to have commercial air travel around the world?
00:35:37.340By the way, if they're missile systems, you know, handheld missiles, you know, you can shoot down a commercial airline pretty easily with a lot of this stuff.
00:36:53.980And then Austin did the same thing about six days ago, to be specific, where he says, we have given Ukraine everything we can and we still – he's saying this still.
00:37:02.800At this point, we can't let Ukraine lose the war.
00:37:10.480There is no possibility to even maintain anything.
00:37:13.220For him to say that is to continue the fiction that they – so that – and here's why I think all this is happening – so that when Trump comes in and whatever he ends up negotiating, it's Trump's fault.
00:37:25.520We were doing everything we could, and then Trump comes in and hands it back to Putin.
00:37:28.960That's why I think it's going to be so hard for Trump to do what makes sense and what's rational because he's going to come under withering attack from the political left.
00:37:40.840You can exercise power to the extent that you're willing to exercise that power and to the extent that you're willing to ignore, you know, your faithless critics.
00:37:52.020Like who actually cares what they say?
00:38:15.200That is two world wars, and they have doubled that in all probability.
00:38:19.480And now then we're not even talking about how many have lost limbs, how many have severe PTSD that will take the rest of their lives to recover.
00:39:16.680So what should – thank you for being patient.
00:39:19.940What's – so given everything you've described, what should the incoming administration do?
00:39:24.900I think that Trump should come in and try to get this resolved as fast as possible and rationally understand that the June 15th line that Putin laid out is the best that he can possibly get.
00:39:35.560And just – and he's going to have to put a good face on it.
00:39:38.680He can't just come in and literally say, okay, whatever you want is fine.
00:39:42.260But there are some other – there's some leverage we can do elsewhere that's like, hey, look, we can even remove some of these sanctions on Russia as long as we get this in return for it.
00:39:51.060And, you know, some increase – some security guarantees that Russia's not going to do anything beyond this, et cetera, which is going to be hard because they have the capacity should they want to go further than the Dnepa River.
00:40:02.340But I think that he should just say, hey, this is the best we're going to get right here.
00:40:06.660I'm going to end this war as soon as we can on these lines right here because it would – all we're going to do is get more Ukrainians killed if we keep delaying this.
00:40:16.580We're going to start the process of letting the Ukraine side recover and just to help them rebuild.
00:40:23.140Europe needs to handle the lion's share of that, not the United States.
00:40:27.580But we can help diplomacy, you know, build that with diplomacy.
00:40:31.400Especially the Eastern Europeans, let them build up their own national security and defense, get bigger on there, not the United States, not put more money in NATO.
00:40:40.420But the Europeans need to handle that.
00:40:43.520And then the other thing is we just have to acknowledge this is where the lines are going to be because that's already a reality on the ground.
00:40:50.620If you get that over with now, then we can start the next hard thing, which is to rebuild relations with Russia going forward.
00:40:56.900And I know many don't want to do that, but Russia is going to exist into the – perpetual into the future.
00:41:02.020Why are we supposed to hate Russia exactly?
00:41:03.640Because these people can't escape the Cold War that we won in 1990.
00:41:08.180But, like, why – as long as Bill Kristol is chirping his vile little lies in your head, like, you're never going to get anything done.
00:41:29.260And now it's aligned with China in a larger, much larger military and economic block than NATO.
00:41:36.520So, by the way, we just destroyed the European economy by blowing up Nord Stream.
00:41:40.600No one's ever been held accountable for that.
00:41:42.180I don't know how the Europeans are going to pay for Ukraine reconstruction when we wreck their economy by blowing up their natural gas pipeline, but whatever.
00:41:49.020You don't want – we have lost our preeminence because of this.
00:42:10.900None of those things existed prior to October 22 when we started making Russia weaker.
00:42:15.920We have made them stronger in every capacity.
00:42:18.140If you stayed in the United States for the past four years, you didn't leave, and you didn't read any non-American, non-U.S. media, you have no idea.
00:42:26.000You have no idea that any of this happened.
00:42:27.500You would think that it was 1997, and this was, you know, we had a unipolar world, and we're in charge of everything, and the blue passport's a big deal and all this stuff.
00:42:39.900If they did know, I mean, you know, they'd be upset at the damage, pointless damage done to this country.
00:42:45.520They'd be upset, and I hope that's – that's why I'm so grateful for your show here that you separated from the mainstream media because now then you're putting it to millions of people.
00:42:53.020They get this information that they aren't getting in any of these other places.
00:43:18.640There's no reason to antagonize a nuclear superpower when they're happy to just cooperate with us and actually help us in the Western European countries with cheap energy so that they can develop their economies.
00:45:33.080We're demonizing them, and he still is calling us a great country that they want to have relations with.
00:45:37.760So Trump can exploit that and say, we're going to start repairing that to our advantage and to our benefit because there is still advantage to have.
00:45:44.280And instead of going down any other path, I don't know if he'll do it, but he can do it by just – because he's the president.
00:45:53.000Of all the New Year's resolutions you're likely to put off, the one you're most likely to put off and keep putting off is buying life insurance.
01:02:20.900He was put in charge during that time of the anti-corruption process for the Afghan government.
01:02:26.340And he claimed over and over how they were making progress and all this stuff.
01:02:29.560And as we talked about earlier in this show, that never happened.
01:02:31.920But then since that time, now that he's going on and saying all kinds of stuff like, yes, he needs to, you know, he's anti-Russian and all this.