The Duran Podcast
Zelensky shuffles cabinet. IMF squeezes Ukraine
All right, Alexander, let's do an update on what is going on in Ukraine. We have a big shake-up in the Zelensky government, the big name that is out is Foreign Minister Kuleba. And things are not looking good in Kursk. They continue to look really bad for the Ukraine military. They appear to be trapped as the Russians start either hunting down whatever Ukrainian resources are in Kursk or push whatever Ukraine forces are in Kursk, push them back, push them back to where. I'm not quite sure because at the same time that they're trapped in Kursk or they're being pushed back towards the border of Russia and Ukraine, Russia is hitting at Sumi, which is the main area where these forces in Kursk are being supplied. That's the logistics are coming from Sumi, so Russia continues to hit Sumi. They've hit Lvov, the big strike at both of which, depending on where you go, could be either 50 casualties or 780 casualties, depends on what source you look at. And the information there is quite interesting with regards to the foreign assets that may have been in Lvov once again, it depends on what source you go to. And of course, you have the situation in Pakrovsk, which is getting worse by the day and everywhere else on the front line. So a deteriorating situation for Ukraine and for the Ukraine military. And maybe at the end of this video, we can talk a bit about the Ukrainian economy and the IMF and their demands. It's not going to play a part in the unraveling of the Zelensky regime, a big part. I believe it's going to play a big part being from Greece and Cyprus and understanding what the IMF does to a country to its citizens, it's not going to go well for Zelensky. Anyway, what are your thoughts? Well, absolutely. Now, let's actually start with the reshuffle. Now, this is a curious story. Now, let's start with the foreign minister, Dimitri Koolabar. There's been some attempts over the last day or so to try to speak, to talk him up and say that he was actually quite a good foreign minister. I think he was a terrible foreign minister. I think that he upset the Poles recently, by bringing up a completely ridiculous issue about what the Poles supposedly did in Ukraine to try and justify the terrible things that Ukrainian nationalists did during the Second World War in Poland. Anyway, he upset the Poles, he's infuriated the Chinese on several occasions. Apparently, there are several Western governments, which apparently don't like him very much. I think that he's a whole management of the recent peace conference in Switzerland, as we saw, was a disaster. So it was necessary, I think, it was necessary for him to go. And it's unsurprising that he did go, but he's gone as part of this bigger reshuffle. And the reshuffle makes no coherent sense, because all sorts of people are being sacked and replaced, but they're none of the big decision makers that you would really need to sack and replace if you were really seeking to change direction. So what is this about? Now, as we know, a couple of, a week ago, Jernmach, who was Zelensky's Chief of Staff, went to Washington and had a meeting there with Jake Sullivan. And I'm starting to think that what happened is that Sullivan, who you remember, we discussed it in another video, had with him the National Security Advisors of Britain, France and Germany. I think that he insisted that Kuleba Musko, he insisted that all of these, that there should be a major restructuring of the Ukrainian government, apparently, there are reports that he also demanded that Ukraine start mobilizing people from age 21. In other words, lower the threshold of the mobilization even further. And of course, all of this is connected to the pressure from the IMF that we're going to come to shortly. So a government that is under intense pressure, which is what Zelensky's government now is. They got rid of Kuleba, who had to go because he's incompetent, I mean, not just incompetent, but disastrously so. And then in order to appease the West, they carried out this reshuffle, which changes nothing ultimately. It doesn't resolve any problem. It doesn't put in new people with genuine new ideas in place. In fact, all it does is bring in people who are even closer to Zelensky and to his system than the ones who existed before. So just, you know, in effect brings more people who are even more of the same than the ones who have been thrown out. And I think that's been done so that Zelensky and his people can come to Washington, to Jake Sullivan and to the IMF there and say, look, you wanted to reshuffle. You wanted the corruption reduced and we've just done one. I think this is what this is all about. I think it's a further sign of a political economic crisis in Ukraine and a lot of confidence increasingly by the West in the decisions of the government in Ukraine. But we see that the demands that are coming from the West are demands that Zelensky and his people cannot fulfill because what a real fundamental change would require the dismantling of the entire system. And that, of course, they can't do. So I think that's what the reshuffle is. So I mean, this goes back to the video we did a couple of days ago where we talked about how Jake Sullivan and a lot of the team, the Biden White House team that is running foreign policy. Their goal is to get Ukraine past November 2024. And beyond that, maybe January, February, maybe they've said, okay, we need to get Ukraine to pass the inauguration late January, early February, at least let's get them there. Let's get them past that point so they don't collapse. And then we're home free, as Blinken Sullivan asked, and these guys are ready to move on. I mean, these moves seem like they've been constructed for that very purpose. Not that they can do anything to win. I think it's important to say there's nothing that Sullivan can do at this point in time outside of sending American troops to Ukraine, a lot of American troops to Ukraine that's going to change the dynamics of this conflict. So everything's kind of, and even going to the UK and real quick, even going to the recent announcement of UK, the light missile systems that they're sending to Ukraine, air defense systems, which have like a six kilometer range, even that looks like a move that's just meant to just keep Ukraine going at least for a couple of more months. And what your thoughts. That's exactly the same. I mean, these air defense missiles are British are providing have no relevance to the situation in Ukraine anymore, they can't shoot down, they can't shoot down the Russian aircraft, which are operating far outside the range of these missiles. And if we're talking about drones, Russia produces 4,000 drones a day. What does 650 missiles going to do? I mean, it is an absurd idea. The same, by the way, with the JSams, which people are talking about an awful lot. And the United States is a stockpile, I believe, of around 2,000 JSams missiles. They are an essential, indispensable part of the strike force of the US Air Force. So the United States is not going to be able to give Ukraine many of these things. Perhaps 50, perhaps a hundred. Set that against the fact that Russia launches missile strikes with 130 missiles against Ukraine on any one day and has launched 10,000 cruise missiles against Ukraine over the course of this entire conflict. All of these things are putting plaster on a gigantic wound, which is getting bigger all the time. And we'll come to the economics later, but you're absolutely the same there. And the politics is the same. You rearrange the faces, you bring in a few new people, you hope that this will somehow make things work a little better in Ukraine, that they have been working at the moment. We have huge corruption in Ukraine, everybody can see the fortifications haven't been built, apparently, the governor. I couldn't believe this when I first heard the story. I thought I must be misunderstanding things, but that the mayor of Pokrovsk, which will come to shortly instead of getting people to build fortifications around Pokrovsk, was having them plant flowers. Now that almost certainly was some kind of racket. It's not that he has a love of flowers or that this is some sort of aesthetic thing. This is an embezzlement of some kind. So the US Sullivan and company. So bring you people in, maybe they can sort something out, maybe they can hold things together for a few more months or a few more weeks because things are getting so bad. We'll give them a few more missiles here, we'll give them a little air defence missiles. We can't give them patriots because we can't produce them in the numbers they need and they're losing patriots all the time. We can't give them long-range missiles because we don't have that many. So we give them a few, we keep the hope, we keep them going just a little longer, get them past the election and if we get them past the election, as you rightly say, all of these people can say to themselves, "Look, we're gone, we're out, we're whether or not whoever wins the election, we can go and take our jobs in the NGOs of the think tanks and all of those places and we can pass the problem to whoever takes over from us." That's, I think the thinking now and that's all there is to this and I think that's what Jake Sullivan's priority was when he met Yermak last week, whether the Ukrainians themselves have figured it out, I don't know, but perhaps some of them have, which is, if they have done by the way, it's going to make the corruption even worse because people in Kiev and in Ukraine will be saying, "Look, everything's going down, so let's take out as much money as we can, as quickly as we can before the ship sinks and then we can bail out." Yeah. Kolob was lucky. He got out. He got out. Yeah. He's going to take whatever he needs to take and he'll be an ambassador to the UK. Yeah. Well, apparently he's been parachuted to some sort of, apparently in some sort of agency or organisation, which gets him out of Ukraine, which is what this is all about at the end of the day. There you go. Yeah. So, I mean, he got out. I imagine there are quite quite a few officials in and around Zelensky who are also preparing their exit and the one person that I think may not know what's about to hit him and then we'll get to the economic side of things but this ties into what's going on on the front lines. The one person that I believe has not figured out what's about to come his way is Commander Sierzky. Yeah. He's going to get blamed for a boatload, isn't he? Well, absolutely because of course he's not really, this is his problem, he's committed himself to Ukraine but of course he's committed himself to a Ukraine whose leadership doesn't like him and doesn't trust him because of course he's Russian and they don't really feel deep down that he's one of them. So, he's the perfect scapegoat, the perfect Patsy when it all goes wrong. As you rightly say, I don't think he understands that he has some technical skills and we mustn't overstate how competent he is as an officer but he has some technical skills. He knows a bit about how to do his job but I think he's completely out of his depth in understanding the really complicated politics that are going on in Kiev. There's illusionally there by the way, his predecessor I think had a much better understanding of the internal politics of Ukraine than Sierzky did. So let's talk about the military situation and what Sierzky is trying to do because of course a narrative is now being spun and it's all part of the same narrative, the one that wants to hold things together until November, that things have stabilized on the front lines and they haven't stabilized on the front lines. This is a complete misunderstanding of what's happening. In fact, we face this issue many times over the course of this war. The Russians after the fall of Avdaevko advanced very fast in the western direction. They've now reached Pakrovsk, they have to now prepare for the storming of Pakrovsk, which is a substantial place. It's had just before the war a population of 52,000 people. Apparently at one point in the 1980s its population was as high as 155,000 people so that tells you again we're not talking about an unsubstantial place. There are various important towns that they have to sort out before they really deal with Pakrovsk, places like Wukrinsk, Selidovol, Vugladar for the south, that they are busy sorting out. They have to deal with the various Ukrainian forces that are milling around and I think it's almost the right word in southern Donbas, the Ukrainian forces, significant numbers of them that they're very fragmented and they're all over the place. Inevitably, the Russians have to take time to do that. They also have to sort out their own logistics by gaining control of the main supply roads, which they have largely done by the way, getting their logistics organized, and then probably in the second half of this month I'm guessing the major offensive, the assault on Pakrovsk itself will begin. Now, I don't want to dissipate too far because as we've discussed many times, neither of us is a military background, it's not something we are familiar with. The general staff in Moscow doesn't share its plans with us, but there has been no stabilization or real slackening of the tempo. To talk in that way is to misunderstand the whole process and the way this war has been conducted. In fact, the way all wars are conducted, the really big important wars, if you read them and learn about them, you often find this very rapid advances, then people reach the end of their supply lines, they have to stop, reorganize, refit their forces, mop up the people that they've captured, and then only then after a short couple of weeks can the advanced resume. That's what we see. Elsewhere, of course, the Russians continue to advance, they've been making significant progress in the other big town that they're currently storming, which is Toretsk. It gets lesser tension than Pakrovsk, the Toretsk is an important place and it brings the Russians much closer to capturing central and northern Donbass. There was less information for some time about what was going on in Chassafir, which is another important town. So the Russians have been storming and many people thought that the Russians had put this battle there on pause, but they haven't, and we're now getting information that they are close to capturing central Chassafir, and in the meantime, Sursky has been landed with this operation in Kusk, which apparently he wasn't too keen on. To start with, he's given an interview, I think it was with CNN in which he's tried again to rationalize, and I think rationalize is the right word, rationalize it, trying to explain what it was all about, the explanations he gives for it make no sense to me, or I think to most people. The best he can come up with is that it was intended to divert forces, Russian forces from other fronts, but of course the Russians haven't diverted forces from other fronts, and when they have a numerical advantage, why would they need to? And you're absolutely right, Kusk has proved to be a cemetery for Ukrainian armour. The Russians have been destroying it, it's been a cemetery for Ukrainian high mass systems, where I think the Russians have now destroyed eight, and it's been a cemetery for Ukrainian air defence systems. The Ukrainians are taking very heavy losses there, they're not achieving anything, and in the meantime Sursky has to shuffle forces back and forth from one key place on the front lines where things are about to collapse to another, and he's doing that, and he's doing that to the best extent that he can, but it's like the story of the little boy trying to prevent the damn collapsing by sticking his fingers in the holes, eventually he'll just run out of fingers, and the same will happen with Sursky. And when it all goes wrong, exactly as he said, they'll all blame him. Absolutely, that's what's going to happen to Sursky, that's probably why they had this CNN interview with him, I imagine, they're preparing his removal, so Sursky is in trouble I think, air defence systems, yeah, air defence systems and Kursk, that's why the Russians were able to hit what they hit over the past week, as well, no air defence anymore really. But they've just carried out, not lost, a couple of days ago, a major missile strike on Loevorff, which we'd always assumed was particularly well defended, and there was no air defence to speak of at all, I mean the Ukrainians launched some missiles, you heard some heavy caliber machine guns rattling away in the skies, but you could see Russians and some Sony cruise missiles, and these are the ones that are the easiest for the Ukrainians to shoot down, and they go crashing in and destroying the targets that they've been assigned. It's clear that Ukrainian air defence barely exists anymore. All right, how about the economy and the IMF, let's talk about that. Well that's possibly going to be the coup de grace, because the IMF is now demanding budget cuts, spending cuts, tax increases, and they're also demanding a devaluation of the Ukrainian currency, which of course is what the Ukrainians have been struggling to keep steady, because if the currency starts to fall, it's already experienced a 10% fall over the last few months. But if it starts falling in a situation where Ukraine is production, the productive side of its economy is starting to collapse, well if the greener starts falling, the risk is that there will be a stampede out of it, because people will feel in this kind of atmosphere that the currency is going to lose value, and of course that will complicate the government's own problems, because if the currency loses value at the kind of speed that he might do, that the government is going to have problems with tax collection, of course it already does. It can only cover I believe about 40% of its budget through internal revenues, it depends on the West, it has to take out loans, the West is increasingly demanding that it conduct its financing through loans rather than outright grants from the West. How does Ukraine repay its loans? Already it's impossible to imagine how that can happen, but how does it repay its loans if its currency is losing value? So you can see that this pressure from the IMF risks a further implosion, and the IMF nonetheless has to try and reconcile its own rules with its absolutely illogical decision to continue to support Ukraine. By the way I ought to say, neither the IMF nor the World Bank should have continued to fund Ukraine after the 2014 crisis, and especially not after Ukraine began to default on various lands in 2015. As long ago as that, the IMF, if they'd followed their rules, should have pulled out of Ukraine, but they didn't, they went on first, they went on supporting Ukraine and they've continued to support Ukraine, they poured money into Ukraine. The situation there has steadily deteriorated, it's got far worse during the war, of course the IMF and the World Bank, by doing that, have been exposed as complete tools of Western policy, then whatever fiction that they're impartial and objective mechanisms, I don't think anybody believed that anywhere, but whatever fiction that was about that, nobody takes seriously any longer. So they've been doing that, so they now find themselves in a situation where they're going to lose huge amounts of money, which they've invested contrary to their own rules, so they have to come up with some kind of plan, as they say, to turn things around, and they're making these demands of Ukraine, which Ukraine cannot possibly fulfil, and if it does fulfil, it would be economic and social suicide for Ukraine from the top of all of the other problems. Ukraine is in default. The IMF should not be lending it money, it's as simple as that, it's bankrupt, you don't lend money to a bankrupt, it's a fundamental rule which the IMF has ignored for 10 years, but has now reached that point when it's become impossible to ignore. So they've come up with this plan, Ukraine will have to accept it, will have to pretend to do some of these things, that's going to make the situation in Ukraine economically much worse, it's becoming again a real possibility that at some point next year we could start to see currency collapse and hyper-reflation take in. Currency collapse, hyper-inflation, social unrest, increasing taxes, increasing VAT, citizens are not going to be happy about that, and of course you devalue the Krivnya, and how does Ukraine pay back all these loans, well with the devalue currency, they sell off everything on the cheap, right? What exactly? How the game goes? Yes, the IMF, once, what wonders what there is left to sell and who the buyers now would be, that's the other, that's the other unanswered question here, they'll find buyers. Oh, there always do, there's always someone, I agree, there's always someone, there's the vulture funds and all of those people, they'll come piling it, I agree. And they'll find buyers, I'm going to, I'll ask you this question, they'll find buyers who will be willing to cooperate should Russia control some of these assets, correct? Yes, oh yes, yes, absolutely, and no question, no question, all right, we will end the video there, thedaran.locals.com, we are on rumble odyssey, bitch shoot telegram, rock fin and twitter X and go to the Daran shop, pick up some merch, like the shirts we are wearing. Today, the link is in the description box down below, take care. the next video. (upbeat music)