Ukraine is a test for the West’s credibility
2024-07-22 00:56:55
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Welcome to Trevor Loudon Reports on America Out Loud. Today we have a very special guest, Victor Root, an Ukrainian-American, who's going to talk to us about why Ukraine is so vitally important to U.S. interests, some of the history behind that, some of what needs to be done going forward, and, you know, I'm very aware this is counter to a lot of the narrative that's seeping into conservative circles right now regarding Ukraine as unimportant, secondary, a regional conflict, all this kind of thing. But I hope, if you bear through this and you listen to this, Victor is a great, a great voice. You'll come to understand how wrong those narratives are and how vitally important Ukraine is, not just for itself, to Europe, but also to the United States going forward.
So I want to, let's, welcome to the show, Victor. That's the first thing.
Thank you very much. It's a pleasure. Thank you for the invite.
Well, you're most welcome. First of all, could you just tell me, just give me a little bit of a rough CV, just, and then, then I've got some questions I want to ask you, but what, what is your background, Victor?
Sure. My professional background is as an attorney. I focused on international transactions.
I retired from the practice of law recently, but in parallel, I have written and spoken before various audiences for 20, 30 years on US-Russian-Ukraine relations. when, you know, Ukraine was something which wasn't even understood. It was basically, in most people's opinion, limited to, you know, chicken Kiev in the frozen food aisle of your supermarket. I served as special counsel to a member of the US delegation to the Helsinki Review Conference. I represented Soviet dissidents in the West.
Back in the Soviet days under Brezhnev, they were being persecuted. I was one of their representatives in the West. And multiple other events and transactions between, before academic audiences, I was at West Point State Department, so on and so forth. And I've written periodically on the subject generally.
Just by the way, I didn't realize about the dissidents. Did you ever, did you ever remember Marina Ratushinska, no, Irina Ratushinska?
Irina. Ratushinska rings, rings a bell, but I cannot place it. The last name rings a bell. I can't say whether the first I know was a woman. I don't know whether it was Irina or not, but Ratushinska rings a bell, yes.
Yeah, well, she was, she was given Russia, she was Ukrainian from Odessa, and she was given, she was stripped of her citizenship. She was a poetess and stripped of her citizenship by Gorbachev, and Reagan brought her to the United States. And I actually hosted, yes, I actually hosted her for a visit to New Zealand back in the day, back in the late 80s. Unfortunately, she died in Moscow about three or four years ago, I believe. But, okay, Victor, now, you have told me before that you've been dealing with this for a while.
And a few years ago, quite a few years ago, you wrote a letter to then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, outlining Putin's potential invasion of Ukraine and the implications for the West. And that was a, that was a time when everybody thought, you know, the Soviet threat was over, the Russian threat was over. What prompted you to write that letter and what was the basic message of it?
Yeah, thanks for the question. I guess that's a good springboard for some of this, at least.
I wrote the letter to Condoleezza Rice. This was the month before she was supposed to have her Senate confirmation hearings for Secretary of State. She was at the time the National Security Advisor for Bush. And I was continually stunned at her very benign, even laudatory, views of Vladimir Putin, which was consistent with the views of almost everybody in the foreign policy establishment and Western politicians. Those of us who are old enough will remember there was a veritable conga line with people elbowing each other to get out of the way and kiss the ring of Vladimir Putin.
He was to be the great savior and mediator with the West. And it has escaped everybody's notice. But actually, I don't think it did. I think people just didn't know and didn't care that even before he became president of the so-called Russian Federation, he was already celebrating Joseph Stalin's birthday, and the birthdays of Stalin's executioners, including Felix Yerzhinsky on 9-11,, coincidentally or not, brought back the anthem, the Soviet anthem, not the words, but the melody, reintroduced Soviet symbolism. And that didn't phase anybody in the least.
It was. it probably wasn't even noticed.
And, you know, to me, if we had a re-militarized Germany on the march, with a retired Gestapo colonel invoking the name, the image and the imagery of Nazi Germany, I really wonder how long that would be tolerated. We certainly wouldn't have had...
Very, very strong analogy, you know, Putin being a GB man. But now he's a Democrat. Now he's going to work with us.
Yeah, well, it tells you something about, you know, our Russian experts, who have gotten things consistently wrong 99 percent of the time. And, you know, a lot of those people are still formulating policy. In any event, I wrote a letter and I alerted her to the fact that Moscow's war against Ukraine has been going on for decades, even before Soviet rule, and that Putin was going to either suborn Ukraine or, if he was unsuccessful, then there would be an outright military invasion. And how the United States dealt with that would either reinforce or it would shatter our global deterrence. credibility, very simply for several factors.
Number one, Ukraine's independence, is what finally drove the nail into the coffin of the Soviet Union, allowing us to declare that we won the Cold War and we were number one again and America was great again. So if we do not support Ukraine, which achieved that for us, what's our credibility in terms of supporting any other ally? We had stripped Ukraine not only of its nuclear arsenal, but also of its conventional arms. Ukraine had the third largest nuclear arsenal, as you may or may not know, larger than China, France and Britain at the time. Third, after the United States, Russia and Ukraine was third.
That was removed, and not only that, the arms had to be transferred to Russia. The Ukrainians were very, very concerned. Obviously, they wanted to either destroy the weaponry or give it to the United States. Washington said no. Bill Clinton said no.
You have to give it to Russia. Well, guess what? Those missiles, without the nuclear warheads, with conventional warheads, are striking Ukraine regularly for years.
I just want to clarify, because a lot of Americans don't understand this. Bill Clinton forced Ukraine to give up its nuclear weaponry, as you say, the third largest nuclear power in the world, and destroy much of its conventional weaponry. Now, if Ukraine still had those nukes and still had that conventional weaponry, we all know this invasion never would have happened. Why do you think Clinton forced Ukraine to do that?
Well, the angst expressed in the West was that the Soviet Union dissolved and there had to be some control put over the nuclear weapons, and we might as well assemble all that control in the hands of Moscow, because we don't want nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists. Well, Russia is a terrorist state, and we just ensured that that weaponry was secured and held by the Soviet Union. It was myopia. The Ukrainians, of course, they had previously experienced the Chernobyl disaster. They were very sensitive to the radiation that they were exposed to and basically the horrors of nuclear war.
But they did understand the deterrence effect. And Putin has written and has spoken more than once, famously once in a New York Times editorial, that if you have a nuke, you're safe. That is your assurance against invasion, in whatever context. Of course, that was lost. There was a document that was signed not by, this is significant, it was signed not by the so-called Budapest Memorandum in 1994..
It was signed not by defense officials or by foreign ministers or secretaries of state. This was a document that was signed by the head of state, by Bill Clinton, by Boris Yeltsin and by,
I think at that time it was Tony Blair. I'm not sure. I think it was. Tony Blair, wasn't the prime minister of England at the time. I forget the name of the signatory for England.
But in any event, it was a very significant document, certainly from the Ukraine purposes. And, you know, the title was security assurances. If you parse through the language, it's not as strong as you think it should be. But nobody wanted to give Ukraine any stronger assurances. But Russia did agree it's going to honor territorial borders and the sovereignty of Ukraine.
Now, I did not know, but at that time that I wrote the letter, almost to the day,
Condoleezza Rice had a meeting with Putin outside his dacha, outside of Moscow. He has several.
And he walks in with a big hulking fellow and introduces that guy to Condoleezza Rice. And that guy was Viktor Yanukovych, who was Putin's puppet, the one that he installed in Ukraine with the help of Paul Manafort.
Now, how do I know all of that? I wasn't aware of it when I wrote the letter. Well, I know about it because only after the invasion of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014,, February 20th of 2014,, almost 10 years after my letter to her, only then did she write an op-ed piece in the Washington Post titled Will America Heed the Wake-Up Call of Ukraine, where she recites this meeting with Putin.
And in her words, she said, it was clear to me what Putin meant by doing the introduction. And his message to me was, Ukraine will be mine.
Now, you would think that something like that would have been in her testimony a month later before the Senate committee. It was not. There were some perfunctory references. And in April of, you know, a few months after that, in April of 2005,.
Putin comes out with this statement. It wasn't the first time he said this, but it was the most memorable one, perhaps, that the solution of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century. Nobody had an eyelash about that. So you look at all of these things and you see where all of this is going. My concern with her view of Putin was, number one, his worship of Stalin, which I analogized, you know, a few minutes ago to somebody in Germany worshipping Hitler and coming to power.
But the point is, it isn't just the terror and the evil of Stalin. It's his aptitude, his ability to control entire societies, entire nations.
The Soviet Federation, the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation are both the largest countries in the world. You take the Russian border and you stretch it around the equator, it'll go around the equator one and a half times. There are dozens upon dozens of countries of nations that have been subverted, precisely what you're seeing that's happening in the United States today. They were subverted, they were dissolved, they were atomized. And only then did you have a physical, kinetic occupation of those countries.
And that is how Russia became the empire that it became.
Go ahead.
Well, that's a very important point, that there was always a campaign of subversion, of undermining, before the soldiers marched. And you're saying that that's happening in the United States today, that there's a campaign by the Russians to subvert this country. Perhaps we can come back to that a little bit later. I think that's a very important thing.
The difficulty, let me just stop here for a second, the difficulty in discussing these kind of things, Trevor, is that, and particularly if I'm talking to an American, Canadian or Western European audience, the difficulty is that there is virtually zero patience.
To listen and to understand lessons of the past and to focus on the behavioral patterns that are repeated, we don't care, we don't know, we don't extrapolate out of the past. You know, if you try to invest in a stock market without understanding past stock behavior and how the market reacts under different circumstances, you could never give investment advice.
And if your computer is broken, if you need brain surgery, if you want to learn how to play golf, you want to have a teacher that has experience. You don't care about book learning. You want to have experience. The anomaly for the West is that we have uniformly dismissed, ignored experience. And another name for experience is history.
Every time I say a word in the course of this interview, that's history already. You don't have to go back 10,000 years. We don't know it. We don't want to know it. We don't have the patience for it.
And it is precisely, unfortunately, in the area of foreign policy that you really have to draw on the people and the nations that have that experience and take it into account. I'll give you an example. Why the surprise today about China? We're running around, we're apoplectic about the Communist Party in China. Well, where the hell was everybody back in 1979, when we pulled the rug from underneath Taiwan, embraced Communist China, thinking, well, we're going to make them good capitalists and everything's going to be kumbaya.
Yeah, they became good capitalists better than us. Look where we're at. And we did that with China, repeating a pattern that we did with the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 30s, feeding them massive aid technology, including military technology. We extended diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union. We did so on November 16th, 1933, at the very time that the Soviet Union was breaking the back of Ukrainian resistance with the forced famine in Ukraine.
We repeated the pattern with China, and then we repeated the pattern again, the third time in the 1990s, by plowing billions of dollars into Russia, transferring technology into Russia and keeping it together, getting Russia to sit on the National Security Council of the United Nations. Russia was never a member of the United Nations. Russia didn't ever go through an application and admission process for membership in the United Nations, but we made sure that it became a member. Now, when you see those kind of repetitive patterns, and I can tell you that Putin and China and North Korea and all the bad guys, they know this history. They can plan and they can predict, and they see us making the same mistakes over and over and over again.
So, for example, if we today, as increasingly more unfortunately in the Republican Party, and that's a real flip, say that, well, you know, we have to focus on China and Taiwan, and so on and so forth.
Well, issues of national sovereignty, territorial integrity, which that's the so-called international order, right? That's what we fought World War II all about.
Yep.
They don't apply to Taiwan. Taiwan is not an internationally recognized state. And, as I said, we withdrew recognition in 1979..
Ukraine is a founding member of the UN. Those issues of sovereignty apply.
So if you throw Ukraine under the bus, where is our credibility with Taiwan?
Or the Baltic states, or or Moldova or Romania or Poland in the near future?
Well, excuse me, with one distinction. My point is that Taiwan is not an internationally recognized, let me put it this way, international law does not apply to Taiwan.
It does apply to the Baltic states, to Poland, to Moldova and to other countries, if you, if you give any weight to so-called international recognition, OK, define it, however you want. My point being, if you do not enforce, if you're going to be hypocritical about what the pronouncements that you make about international law, and if you don't enforce it, if you don't assist it in areas such as Ukraine or Poland or the Baltics, then how can you be expected to do anything with or for the benefit of Taiwan?
Well, the other. the other point that the China-focused people seem to forget is that Russia and China are full allies. They have an unlimited partnership. They are as close as Mussolini and Hitler were. So how do you, how would you fight World War II by saying we're only going to fight the Italians, we won't fight the Nazis?
We're only going to fight Japan, but we won't fight Italy and Germany. You know, these are. these are a unified military bloc. We're talking Russia and China. How, why would, why would Russia abandon China to help the United States?
Well, it never would. And, and we tried that, right. It happened in in World War II. It didn't quite work out. that way, did it?
And the unity there isn't. I would take issue. The unity there isn't quite as deep as some people think it is.
China is looking at our behavior and attitude towards Ukraine, and their view is very, very simple, very obvious. If we can't deal with Russia. Right, we've got 32 NATO members, NATO alone has accounts for about half of the world economy. If we add countries that are, you know, would vote being supportive of Ukraine, that's even more than half of the world economy.
If we can't deal with Russia, that's got the economy of New York City or Texas, how in the world are we going to deal with China? Somebody explain that to me. We are not dependent on Russia. I'll go into my kitchen. in my cabinet.
I will not find a frying pan from Russia. Right. OK, I will find. Not in my kitchen, but go to a store, you're going to find a lot of stuff from China. You have to go down to your local CVS and renew your prescription.
Guess where your active ingredients are coming from. They're coming from China. Our dependency on China is massive. Now, we're the ones who built that dependency up. But the fact is, that's where it stands right now.
And that is one of the levers that China can exert over us, which Russia does not have. And yet Russia is doing pretty damn well. And, you know, shaking the nukes, intimidation, that whole aspect of psychological subversion has always worked wonderfully.
And let me add one other thing. It isn't just China, but it's and China, by the way, and North Korea both became communist regimes on the strength of America's lend lease program to the Soviet Union during World War Two.
Yep, that's correct.
Our aid to the Soviet Union was so massive with it was a blank check, literally no accountability, no use restrictions. It was used to suppress the uprisings against Moscow by the underground movements in the Soviet Union, and it was used to help install Red China and North Korea. But that's a bit of an aside. When our allies and our enemies look at us,
reputation, credibility, and the absence of hypocrisy. Is critical when you assess a country, a nation or an individual. We unfortunately have. A fair amount of hypocrisy already behind us. When it comes to Ukraine in 2014,, you may or may not remember the so-called Minsk protocols or Minsk Accords, which rejected the so-called international order that we are always beating the drum about and basically surrendered Ukraine's sovereignty over its humanity and a good slice of its territory in the eastern part of the country.
We did that. We did it repeatedly. We did it officially, actually, officially, several times. But the last time we did it was at the June summit in Geneva in 2021, before the invasion, the renewed invasion.
OK, look, I'm going to have to call a hard break there, Victor. We'll be straight back after this short break with more on Ukraine and how important it is for the United States. So please come back in a couple of seconds.
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Okay, welcome back to Trevor Loudon Reports on America Out Loud. We're here with Victor Ruud and we're discussing Ukraine. It's very much in the news right now for a number of reasons. Also because of the positions, the not very pro-Ukraine positions of the new vice presidential candidate under President Trump, J.D. Vance.
That's put some focus back on the issue. But before we get to that, I want to carry on your discussions, Victor. So America basically has been very hypocritical over Ukraine. It has been very weak. Obama basically let Russia take Crimea with hardly a protest.
Bill Clinton forced Ukraine to give their nuclear weapons to Russia, destroying their conventional stocks, on a guarantee that Russia would never invade Ukraine's national sovereignty, would never, ever intrude in Ukraine's space. Now that that's happened, we've got quite a tepid response from the West, a very weak response from the West in general. So this lack of credibility we have, you're saying, Victor, this is going to empower the Chinese, probably empower the Iranians too, I think. So if we cannot defeat Russia, which is eminently defeatable here, with the right support, Russia is bleeding troops. It's bleeding money.
It's bleeding equipment at an incredible rate. It cannot sustain it. The only way they can win the Ukraine war is if Western support collapses, that we could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. So why are we doing this, Victor? Why is this hypocrisy and this weakness so evident on our side of the fence?
Well, there are several reasons. One is,
if Russia, there is a tremendous, tremendous amount of ignorance and misinformation.
about Ukraine and Russia generally. If Russia had invaded Italy and occupied and annexed Sicily, or invaded England, Germany, France, any other so-called real country, even if it invaded, for example, Poland or one of the Baltic republics, Baltic countries,
the Western reaction, and forget about the members of NATO, put that aside. My point is, if Russia had invaded those countries,
those countries are, you know, real countries. Ukraine has always been, in the history books, treated as a quote-unquote part of Russia. And as a matter of fact, it even goes further with, you know, Russia and history beginning in Ukraine, so on and so forth. That is the deepest integrated and longest lasting piece of Russian misinformation in Western academic circles. It was brought over to Western academic institutions by Russian imperial scholars after Lenin's coup d'etat in 1917, and they implanted the notion of imperial Russia, which was a rewritten history.
I could give you reasons, arguments, analogies, which would make it very, very clear. The bottom line is that Ukraine as a separate country, as a separate nation, as a separate state, never embedded itself in the Western mind. And consequently, the invasion, we will talk on the one hand of, oh, it's terrible, it's an invasion, it's a violation of territorial integrity. But, well, you know, it isn't all that bad. I mean, after all, it was theirs anyway, you know, at some point in time, yada, yada, yada.
Well, and I think I do want to spend a minute or two on this, and then, Juan, just to disabuse your listeners with one quick example. The Russian word for language is язык.
The Ukrainian word for language is мова. I bring that to your attention simply because the languages are different, the grammar is different, the histories are different. But fundamentally, the reason we have the war against Ukraine is twofold. One, Ukraine has a very, very deep-seated democratic tradition.
We're going back a thousand years that Russia never had. And also, if Russia is successful in Ukraine, then the international order has just been flipped.
When you say it's been flipped, do you mean just locally? Like, do you mean this will empower Russia, China, Iran, to the detriment of the West? Do you go that far? Or how do you mean, what do you mean by that?
Our credibility, look at it this way. In addition to the fact that in the West, everybody who has been supportive of Ukrainian aid has recited the need to secure and preserve what was gained after World War II. The international institutions and everything else, right?
If you let that go in Ukraine, why is it significant? Number one, we're not talking about some small speck of coral in the South Pacific. Ukraine is the largest country in Europe. It's the size of England, Germany, Hungary, and Israel. Ukraine had a constitution 77 years before the United States.
Checks and balances, separation of church and state.
Ukraine had a Bill of Rights, a Magna Carta, 200 years before King John and England. And when we talk about World War II and the international order,
Ukraine had the highest loss of humanity of any country in the world during World War II. If Ukraine is thrown under the bus,
what do you expect to be our credibility, both with allies and with enemies? And I call these countries enemies because to do so, not to do so, would be to endorse.
an intellectual fraud. These are countries who have declared themselves enemies of the United States. And if we try to paint them as anything less, then we're deluding ourselves.
And I'm waiting for it to shoot a drop in Latin America. That will be coming soon. We already have the Middle East, North Korea, China, Russia, their proxies.
And it's going to get worse before it gets better. And we still don't seem to have understood how our behaviors are fueling that dissolution of credibility. It doesn't make a difference. We could have the largest arsenals in the world, but it's the brain that controls the trigger finger. And if the brain can be captured or if the brain is compromised, that weaponry is meaningless.
And I'm afraid that we are being captured, we're being weakened by a fog that has descended on our understanding of what is happening around the world.
And where do you think that fog comes from, Victor?
The promotion, the exacerbation, and sometimes the creation out of whole cloth, but more often than not, the exploitation of conflicts of any society, promoted,
egged on, nurtured and nursed primarily by the Soviet Union and secondarily China. But the Russians are past masters of this.
And because we are not aware of that, since we have not experienced it,
I said before, other nations have, and they see it, they smell it, they identify it. Our reaction, our response to these people was we dismiss, deny, denigrate. Sometimes we've killed these people.
After World War II, have you heard of something called Operation Keelhaul?
Absolutely. Yes.
Yeah.
Well, I had a member of my parish who was one of the people in the Ukrainian underground.
that warned U.
S. Army intelligence that Stalin had a plan underfoot to assassinate George Patton.
And he wanted to do that because George Patton was retiring and returning to the United States in December of 45.
. And he wanted to do a cross-country whistle-stop tour, warning that Stalin and the Soviet Union was not who and what we were led to believe.
Well, an arrest warrant went out from Washington, from the OSS office, for this fellow and for a lot of other people. We did not want to believe it was inconsistent with our beliefs and what we wanted to believe about Moscow at that time. And that refusal to believe continues, despite everything that has happened in 75, 80 years and even before that. It continues here.
Yeah, I think it's partially because there's so many Soviet, then Russian, agents in our system, in our media, whatever. You know, Condoleezza Rice spent a whole year in Moscow in 1971, 1972, while she was studying at Stanford University. She obviously was influenced by that to some degree to have a very, very benign view of the Soviet Union, then Russia. But the big argument that's coming from a lot of conservatives is, look, we shouldn't get involved in this. This is a regional struggle.
Putin doesn't want to go further than Ukraine. He'll be satisfied with the Donbass. He'll be satisfied, well, he might take the whole Ukraine, but he's not going to go into Poland or Estonia. And then, well, so what if he does? So what do you think would happen if this eminently winnable war against Moscow?
that would put the dictatorship back decades? if we win it, what do you think will happen if we allow Ukraine to fall? Do you think Putin's going to stop at the borders and just become a nice, friendly guy from then on? What do you think would happen?
I think we're going to have explosions around the world. What I mean is Russia does not need more territory. Anybody who thinks this is a territorial war, they should take a look at a map of the Russian Federation. If Russia took the territory they want, that they say they want just right now, that's the end. That's equal.
20% of Ukraine is everything east of the Mississippi River of the United States, other than Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana, keeping in mind that Alaska is U.
S. territory as well. So that gives you a sense of proportion of what he would take. But that's not why that is being done. This is, as I said in my letter to Condoleezza Rice, Ukraine is the fulcrum for flipping the entire structure that we built after World War II and that we have largely led.
And if that happens, what do you think will be the enticement for China? Russia will have solidified its position and its credibility with China. It will have credibility by other existing and wannabe tyrants, who then would rely on anything that we then try to say or achieve, or a piece of paper that we shove under somebody's face and ask them to sign. You think that the nuclear or denuclearization has any prospect of success with Iran or any other place? There's going to be a mad rush, of every country in the world, with any capacity whatsoever, is going to rush to get the bomb.
And what do you think that's going to lead to? We're talking about, I'm afraid, an accelerant that we ourselves will be pouring on the fire.
Well, if you think of your India, your Japan, your Indonesia, you've been living in a stable world, guaranteed by the Pax Americana, the strong America. That goes away. if you can no longer trust America. What's India going to do? What's Japan going to do?
What's Indonesia going to do? What are a whole raft of countries going to do just to ensure their own survival? So you're saying we're opening up, we would open up a whole Pandora's box. that would make the world infinitely less stable than it is today.
And the reason, you know, a lot of the, a lot of the pooh-poohing that I hear about, the so-called, you know, some people will label this going back to, excuse me, I think a term that was used during the Vietnam years, you know, the domino theory, one country falls, everything follows.
And, you know, a good number of even well-intentioned people are pooh-poohing that. Well, they're pooh-poohing it against a background of countries that, in and of themselves, didn't present any great significance, for example, as Vietnam. But Ukraine does. And it does for the reasons, some of the reasons and more additional ones that I mentioned to you. First and foremost,
Ukraine made America great again with its declaration of independence, which collapsed the Soviet Union, the nuclear disarmament of Ukraine. The fact that Ukraine is the only country that is waging a defensive war against Moscow, which is the originator of terrorism against the West. back in the 70s and 80s, both in Europe and in the Middle East, so-called Arab nationalism was deconstructed and then reconstructed as Islamic terrorism by the Soviet Union.
Absolutely.
And the only, you know, we're batting away, we're flailing at its external manifestations, but the core of it, the curator, was Moscow, and which is, of course, exactly what Ukraine is defending against. We have a moral culpability and a redemption of an infamy that has to be achieved. when we extended legitimacy and acceptance to a genocidal regime in Moscow in 1933, as it starved upwards of 10 million Ukrainians. That was the final blow that broke the back of Ukrainian resistance to Russian communist rule.
So I'm only touching upon some of the highlights that go into the package that focuses on Ukraine and which makes a walk away from Ukraine so much more consequential than if we were talking about defending, you know,
Senegal and Africa or some coral atoll in the South Pacific.
Well, look, if Ukraine falls, even if Russia doesn't invade Poland or whatever, Europe is going to have to make its peace with Russia, is it not? Because they will no longer trust America. Russia has got huge numbers of nukes. It's got huge influence operations going on in Europe and a lot of influence in several major political parties in Europe. So that'll lead to basically the Finland-ization of Europe, won't it, at the very least?
Oh, sure.
No, I'm glad you said that. I didn't say that. I thought it would be obvious enough, but I guess it really should be born. And the other thing, you know, we have to understand as well that there's something called the Genocide Convention, and that requires countries to prevent genocide. That's the reason why NATO got involved in Yugoslavia and stopped the genocides going on there decades ago.
And I know I'm in touch on a daily basis. I know what is happening in the occupied territories, occupied by Russia and Ukraine.
And these are things which they're very, very hard even to describe without.
physically getting sick.
There was a recent bombing, and this is relatively mild because it sounds antiseptic. There was a recent bombing of the largest children's hospital in Kyiv. Sick children, infants, a lot of them undergoing cancer cure, are being murdered.
But you could say, well, that's distance, that's a bomb, that's different. Well, I can give you a lot of examples of hands-on, of infants and children and adults.
And if that is tolerated, if that is.
And we've got to be clear, that was accidentally at a children's hospital.
Excuse me?
Yeah, I was saying that that attack on the children's hospital wasn't accidental. It wasn't aimed somewhere else and happened to fall on the hospital.
Oh, no, it wasn't accidental. No, no, no, of course not. You know, the news coverage is, it's so exasperating because it says, you know, the Russians are indiscriminate in what they bomb. No, they're not. They're being very, very discriminating.
Russian warfare through the ages has always been focused on the population. The opposing military is a secondary concern. The foundation of a country is the population. And you attack the population two ways. You invade and occupy the cerebral cortex.
And then you physically attack the population. You destroy the population. You kidnap, you abduct the youth, the infants. You remove them. And you import your own people into the country.
Those you don't like, you kill.
Which is what Russia did in the Crimea and the Caucasus and everywhere else in Central Asia, everywhere else it occupied.
That's true. But you see, everything we're talking about, Trevor, it's, you know, a lot of this history. I know it. We're talking to each other. You try to explain this to others in some sort of condensed, concise way.
And it is very, very, very difficult, because the vacuum that has to be filled is massive. And before you fill the vacuum, you have to get rid of all of the disinformation, the misinformation that has filled that vacuum for generations.
And simply making these statements and the like, some of them on their face, sound not very credible because they appear to be extreme. But they're not.
So I'm not, honestly, I am not very sanguine about either our situation here in the United States.
or otherwise in Ukraine and, as a consequence, globally.
Yeah, well, look, we're going to have to draw it to a close here, Victor. As I know, we could both discuss this for hours. But I'd like to bring you back in a few weeks' time, if possible, to discuss what can be done in the United States to move public opinion to a more rational approach to Ukraine, because we've got huge worries in both Republican and Democratic parties at the moment.
regarding this issue. And the bad guys are drawing strength from this division, from this confusion. But I want to thank you so much, Victor. You're a wealth of knowledge, wealth of experience, and that experience is just as critical. So I want to thank you.
I'd love to get you back soon. But I want to thank the audience. So signing out today from Trevor Loudon Reports on America Out Loud.
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