The Duran Podcast
Presidency ends, mobilization begins
All right, Alexander, let's talk about what is happening in Ukraine and we can start things off with a big picture update on Harkov, maybe. Putin said that the goal of Harkov, as of today, these moments, it's all about creating a buffer zone. Of course, that could change given the way Putin phrased his statement about Harkov. We could give an update on what is happening in Shasov-Yar. Fierce fighting continues, but the Russian military looks like they are continuing to advance in the Dombas, the Donetsk direction, and then we can talk about Alenskyi's term, which is ending, and what comes next. There's a lot of other things that we can get to, but let's let's start things off with just a big picture update on Harkov and the rest of the fighting on the front line. Absolutely. Now, the important thing to understand is that, of course, the fighting in Harkov is the fighting in only one part of Ukraine, but we can see the Russian strategy. It's not difficult to understand. They're advancing now in multiple directions, and there's basically four big directions where they're pushing the Ukrainians very hard. One is Harkov, and we'll come to the details of that in a moment. The second is the whole Oscar River Kupiansk area, where they basically reactivated that front line, and they're making significant progress there, too. The second is the central Dombas area, which is the most important. Chassif Yar, Oceretino, all of that area, where the big breakthrough took place in February and March, and where the fighting in Chassif Yar in particular is intensified. And then there is another sector, which looks like it's opening up as well, which is in the south, in the southern Dombas, an important town called Kraslogorovka about to fall. Various other key villages also apparently about to fall, and the growing threat of an encirclement over the Ukrainians in this important fortified town of Ugludare in the south. So these are four places. Now, this is a very wide offensive, and the Russians have done this on purpose because they're overstretching the Ukrainian army. The Ukrainian army is short of trained men. It's reduced to a small number of elite units that it's having to move rapidly from one part of the front line to another. There was an article about this in the New York Times. I noticed that one of the contributors was Michael Kaufman, who is one of the most, you know, one of the most, if you like, experienced military analysts who's been discussing the war basically from the Ukrainian side, but he's expressing concern about this, that Ukraine is burning up its elite units. And of course, the rest of the Ukrainian army now increasingly consisting of brigades made up of raw conscripts, many of them unhappy to be on the fighting lines. And as we saw in Harkov, unable to put up much resistance unless they're strengthened by these other elite units. So what the Russians are doing is they're burning up Ukraine's army, and it's aggressive attrition taken to a whole new level, even as Russia continues to gain ground. Now in Harkov, in Harkov region, Putin, very clever, very sly statement. He said, "We got no plans to capture Harkov city up to now." People have seen the number of Russian troops in Harkov. They already worked out that with around 55,000 Russian troops in the area, the Russians don't have enough forces to capture Harkov city. But so, Putin in a sense is not telling us anything that any military analyst didn't already know, but he's feeding Ukrainian doubts because he's throwing in the word up to now. We don't have any plans to take Harkov up to now, but he's leaving open the possibility that in time, the Russians might do exactly that very thing. So the Ukrainians are there for because they absolutely do not want to lose Harkov, because for one thing, they know that if they do lose Harkov, given that Harkov is a Russian city, they are almost certainly never going to get it back. Anyway, they've rushed reinforcements for all parts of the front line to try to hold the Russians back there. And in the Harkov area, they're concentrating all of these reinforcements basically in one place, which is this village of Lipsy, which lies between the Russian army now and Harkov city. And of course, this is exactly what the Russians want them to do. They're burning up, again, some of their best troops in Lipsy, where the fighting has been very intense, and where the Russians are able to bomb the Ukrainian forces and destroy their artillery, which they've been doing on a massive scale, even as pressure everywhere else increases and pressure everywhere else includes Harkov's region, because the other place the Russians are seeking to capture is a tank called Volchansk. Now Volchansk is not on the direct way to Harkov city, but it's a fairly big place, 17,000 people before the war, and it is also one of those places, which the Russians, I think, would like to control, because if they can control it, that puts them in a much stronger position to push for further advances further south, in areas like Kupyensk, Easy and Ballerkler, and all the rest. Volchansk connects with that part of the front line, where the Russians have been active now for the better part of 10 months. So in a way, what the Ukrainians are doing is by over-concentrating on defending Harkov city itself. They're allowing the Russians to gain a steady control of Volchansk and to open up an important new front line in the north, which could affect the key battles, which are going on further south. There's a complicated picture, but the Russians want to keep it complicated. They're not allowing the Ukrainians any rest, and of course, even as we've been making this programme, and indeed over the last few days, there's a major Russian assault going on, on the town of Chassafjard, 6 kilometers west of Bachmut, important place, it seems the Russians have crossed the canal that besets Chassafjard in two places. They've been carrying out a massive assault on the eastern suburb of Chassafjard, east of the canal, which I referred to as the micro-district in my programmes. There's an enormous battle going on. Again, Ukraine has concentrated a huge number of troops, of its best troops in this area, and there's a general consensus that if Chassafjard falls, then the situation of the Ukrainian army in Donbas will go from being merely critical to becoming simply catastrophic, that the entire defence system will simply start to collapse, and collapse very quickly. So, the Ukrainians forced to defend all of these various positions. The Russians keeping them guessing constantly about what they're doing, but the Russians also advancing on a broad front, not concentrating in one sector or in another sector, and forcing the Ukrainians to manoeuvre their forces, move their best forces from one part of the front lines to another, allowing them no time to rest, or refit, steadily exhausting their soldiers, and losing their troops and their reserves. Isn't it interesting how everyone knows, even in the collective west, all the analysts and the top generals, they all know that Russia is not planning to take Harkov with 50,000 troops, but the narrative that we've been getting for the past two years was that Russia was going to capture Kiev with 40,000 troops. Just a thought. They knew that Russia wasn't going to capture Kiev with 40, absolutely. But they still created the myth of the centre of Kiev. You didn't even mention Sumi, which is another front that they might be opening up. This is the other front, which may be opened, and the Ukrainians are really worried about it, that the Russians are starting to concentrate forces there. Well, obviously, if the Russians start an offensive in Sumi, which is to the northwest of where the fighting in Harkov is taking place at the moment, and you front on the border, well, that will add to Ukrainian problems even further. And by the way, just saying, Sumi is quite close to Kiev. You mentioned the Russians having been in Kiev in 2022 and all that. Well, who knows if they get to Sumi and if they advance in Sumi, they might not be that far from Kiev again. And well, that would be an absolute catastrophe because the one place that the Ukrainians cannot afford to suffer major reverses around is Kiev itself. So you can see that Ukrainians' problems on the battlefronts are multiplying every day. They're losing men. They're losing men at a rate this year that we've never seen at any time in the period of the special military operation. I mean, it's now over a thousand men a day, dead and wounded, and this is catastrophic. So they're losing men. They're losing equipment. They're using artillery pieces. I mean, every day, you know, roughly a dozen artillery pieces destroyed by the Russians. Their tank and armored vehicle forces seem to be severely depleted. We're seeing fewer and fewer of those now on the battlefronts. So it's an operational crisis and one that's getting worse when the Russians, as I said, continue to apply the pressure everywhere all at once and able to increase the pressure wherever they want. So the strategy for Ukraine is to mobilize. And you have this big mobilization that is taking place now. The laws have been passed to allow for the registration of military-aged men into a database where they can then be found and eventually trained up for however long they're going to train them for and then send to the front lines. And the analysis that I've been getting is that Ukraine is aiming for anywhere between 150,000 new soldiers in the next three to four months. Something around there with the mobilization. It's going to take some time. It's going to take about three, four months to get everyone trained and ready to be sent to the front. But that's what they're hoping to get out of this. I don't know if you've heard of it. It's exactly the same thing that the South had. Okay, so this is to me the last throw of the Ziletski regime. I mean, once you've finished this mobilization, which is a very strict, very aggressive mobilization, what's next? NATO is the only thing left, or NATO member states contributing troops to Ukraine, because you're not going to have anything else left as far as manpower is concerned. Well, that's exactly right. Now, first of all, I think it is the last throw. I mean, they were talking, you know, about six months ago about conscripting half a million men, but it looks as if that's been quietly dropped. They're now talking about between 100 and 150,000 men. Now, if you can find the time to train and equip those men, you know, that would obviously improve your situation, given that your army is very short of men at the moment. But it seems that they don't have the time to train these men up to that standard, because the situation on the front lines is so critical. Mostly these are younger men, it seems, who've not had much experience in the army before. Many of them will not have done national service, it seems, so they may not be very experienced in, you know, weapons and operations and things of that kind. And of course, this is massively unpopular in Ukraine. This is the major difference between the situation today and the situation in 2022, when Ukraine also carried out enormous mobilizations. But what it did, and it's now clear, is it tapped into that demographic within Ukrainian society that had strongly supported the Maidan revolution, let's call it that, of 2014, 2013, 2014, that, you know, was passionately committed to the cause, and that it was keen to fight the Russians. It's clear now that that was a finite body of people. Most people in Ukraine do not want to fight, most men do not want to fight, and it's deeply unpopular when the Ukrainian government tries to conscript these men to fight. And we're seeing pictures now appearing, and I think that we can say now that there are so many pictures of this, that it's impossible to deny their overall truth. We're seeing pictures of Ukrainian cities, and they're empty. The streets are empty. The people are hiding. They're hiding from conscription. They don't want to be pulled into the battle, and more of them, when they can try to leave Ukraine, go either to the west, or I suspect, because they probably, in many cases, understand that life in the west is precarious, and that the Ukrainians might try and get them back from the west. I suspect that in many cases, we're going to start to see a lot of Ukrainian men and their families even using various transit corridors to end up in Russia. I know that sounds a bit illogical, but I think that is what's going to happen. Russia has, in fact, received many refugees from Ukraine. Millions, in fact, since the start of the special military operation, I think it's nothing like three million people have gone to Russia from Ukraine, and I suspect that that will now grow, because it's the place where people can go and find jobs and assimilate, and at the same time, they won't be afraid that they're going to be conscripted and thrown into this war, where many of them fear that they're going to be killed. So this is a major deeply unpopular problem policy, and we're now getting film right across Ukraine of empty cities, of the people withdrawing from the streets, hiding in their houses, as I said. It's an eerie picture when you see these cities, and of course, that's going to have a catastrophic effect on the economy as well. And last but not least, we see the first big organized protest truckers coming out, blockading roads, to protest the mobilization law, organized labor, in other words, trying to assert itself. I doubt that they can themselves challenge the government in Kiev, but it's another thing for Zelensky and his officials to worry about. Now Zelensky, of course, is in a precarious position. His constitutional term ends on the 20th of May. After the 20th of May, he ceases to be the elected president of Ukraine. He becomes purely the president by virtue of the fact that he has himself extended martial law. And there's a lot of questions about the legality of this, whether in fact martial law actually does preclude presidential elections as opposed to merely parliamentary ones. I'm not going to get into that topic. But inevitably, people are going to question whether Zelensky really is in a position to continue to be president. His popularity apparently has collapsed. And beyond that, there will also be, as the New York Times has admitted, there are inevitably going to be people who will say that Zelensky wants to be president, and he's using the war to remain in office without going to the Ukrainian people and asking them to give him a mandate. So there's going to be all these problems. So a bad situation on the battlefronts, a bad situation with mobilization, all deeply unpopular, and an uncertainty's question marks over Zelensky's own position in Kiev, all of these feeding off each other, all these problems feeding off each other, all of them creating a potential for a real crisis. So what is Zelensky's way out? Well, I think it's absolutely obvious, and we've seen more and more signs of it over the last couple of days. It is to try to get NATO directly involved. So he's now telling the Americans, "I want you to give me the green light so that I can launch missile strikes deep inside Russia. I want you to provide me with satellite and targeting data about positions in Russia, which I can attack." So he wants the United States, in other words, to become directly involved in his deep strikes against Russia itself. He's not making any attempt to conceal the fact that he's making these requests, which is why basically we know about them. And he's making all sorts of incredibly provocative statements. He's made an astonishing speech, which he's just made shortly before we did this program, in which he says that the United States is betraying Ukraine. It's not helping Ukraine win. It doesn't really want Ukraine to win against Russia. Instead, it's trying to prevent Russia winning against Ukraine, which in effect means that it's making it certain that Ukraine will lose. So what he's basically saying to the Americans is, "I want all-out escalation, and I want you directly involved because he knows perfectly well that if you can achieve that level of all-out escalation, then the United States is at very major risk of getting itself drawn in. And that's the only way he has, not just to winning the war, but to surviving as presidents of Ukraine, and perhaps surviving at all." Yeah, that's always been his exit plan, though. I mean, remember the missile strike that I think it was an S-300 missile that Ukraine launched, but Zelensky tried to blame it on Russia that fell into Poland and killed two farmers. I mean, that was Zelensky's way of trying to draw NATO into the conflict. That's always been his plan. Since the conflict first started, it's just Boris Johnson told him to tear up the negotiation agreement. Zelensky's always tried to find ways to get NATO into this war, and now I think he's getting much more desperate to get NATO involved, because he's not only running out of weapons, he's running out of men, even if he got all the weapons that he asks for, which is absurd, because he's asking for 130 F-16s and so on, but even if he got all those weapons, he doesn't have the men. That's obvious. I mean, everyone knows, even if the U.S. gave Zelensky 120 F-16s, who's going to pilot those F-16s, who's going to maintain them. Obviously, Ukraine doesn't have those people, so his only way out of this is to get NATO involved and to get a World War III, NATO vs Russia, and that is the inevitable direction, isn't it? I'm not saying we're going to have NATO vs Russia, or some NATO member states in a war with Russia, but the inevitable trajectory is that we're going to get to the point where Ukraine has indeed exhausted all its manpower, and NATO, the United States, the UK, the EU, they're going to have to make a decision. Do we start sending troops to Ukraine, because there are no more people to fight the Russians, or do we not? Is that where we are heading towards? Because that's how I see it. I think this is going to be the inevitable decision that the United States, NATO, and the collective West is going to have to make. Grant Shaps, the UK defense secretary, he said that the UK doesn't want to get into a war with Russia, but then the telegraph, they came out with an article and they said that the UK isn't ready for a war with Russia, but they're preparing. They're preparing to build a military so that eventually in the future they could fight this war with Russia, this type of warfare with Russia. So, I mean, how do you see this moving towards? Well, more importantly, I mean, the United States apparently is reluctant to provide trainers to Ukraine, because of course, they're not really trainers. They're special forces. They're people who will engage in fighting. But General Brown, who was the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said, now said, that in his opinion, their dispatch to Ukraine is all but inevitable. So, that tells you that even though he's clearly not enthusiastic about this and probably resisting it, he can see that this is inevitably going to come. So, bit by bit, the West is indeed being drawn in. Now, of course, the point is how far are they prepared to go and what happens when they start sending trainers to Ukraine, so-called trainers, and those trainers start returning to the US and elsewhere in body bags, which they will. I personally think that rather than escalate, that will be the moment of truth. And I think that we will see at that point that European and American publics are dead set against war with Russia. I think there's even enough people within the political class who are afraid of a war with Russia and understand how dangerous that would be. And I think that at that point, they will pull back and they will understand that that is impossible, you know, that you can't go on there. And of course, we had this article also in the New York Times talking again about trying to find some kind of negotiated outcome with the Russians, which involves some kind of freeze of the conflict, the Korean variant. You remember all of that? We've been hearing about this for almost a year now. It's always been floated. Of course, it's never floated in a way that the Russians would ever want to even contemplate it, let alone sit down and negotiate about it, because in effect, it doesn't really concede or accept or acknowledge anything. But anyway, you could see that there are some people in the West who probably would not want to generally don't want escalation of the conflict with Russia. But they're not the only people in the West. You constantly read others who do want a full-scale escalation and who are law being for it. So I mean, yesterday, you mentioned this article in the telegraph. Well, the article in the telegraph did at least a bit that the British military is in no condition to fight the Russians. And by the way, won't be for years. So I mean, even if it says, you know, we want them prepared to get ourselves into that point, realistically, they're not going to be ready in any conceivable timeframe that could help Ukraine. But there are others who simply won't accept that. So there's an article yesterday in The Guardian by its former foreign news editor, Simon Tisdall. And he's talking again, no fly zones of missile strikes deep into Russia, of the NATO, Navy's blockading Russian, you know, sorry, protecting Ukrainian ports and entering the Black Sea. He doesn't explain how he's going to get past the fact that the Turkey has said that he won't allow NATO warships into the Black Sea. I mean, he never worries about those kinds of problems. But you know, you read his article that he talks about, you know, uncontrolled indefinite escalation. And he says, we can do that safely because Putin is a coward and likely uses that word likely. He won't react with nuclear weapons or anything of that kind. Well, you know, you can laugh at Simon Tisdall. I don't, by the way, because he does reflect a real current of opinion that you find in Europe and in the United States. There are these people who will not hold back. And who do want that uncontrolled, indefinite escalation leading eventually as they believe to that victory against Russia, which they're confident that NATO can achieve. So, you know, we are moving, as you correctly said, steadily in that direction. I think the trainers will be sent. I think the foreign legion is already there. I think that the more level-headed people understand that this is a slippery slope. I think they understand too that when the Western publics start seeing people coming back in bodyguards, they'll say, stop and enough. But we cannot be confident at all that those level-headed people will prevail given the extraordinary number of, you know, not as crazy people that they're all around. I wish I was as confident as you that the people in the West would be outraged if they saw their countries drifting into war with Russia. I'm not so sure about that. And even if they are outraged, I wonder if the governments would even care. Well, I am reasonably, I mean, I can sense the mood in Britain at least. I think that in Britain, there really is no, I mean, I think people would be very strongly opposed to a war in the government care. I think, I think in the end it probably would. I mean, they would not want to see people coming out and protesting something like this again. They've been rattled by the Gaza protests. They're haunted by the memory of the, you know, million person protest against the Iraq war. I think they would be nervous about seeing something like that happen again, because it would be a return to real political activity. And that's the one thing the political class over the last 10 years, well, they basically ever since the Brexit referendum has been working to suppress. They don't want political activity to resume in that way in Britain again. So I think they are nervous of it. But, you know, at the end of the day, I mean, that's just my own sense of things. I believe, by the way, the same about Germany. I think that in Germany also, the mood would not look favorably to German soldiers being sent to fight in Ukraine. But I mean, the test of it will be when it happens. Yeah, well, Tuzka said that in Poland, he said that there are trainers in Ukraine, Estonia, they have acknowledged the fact that there are trainers in Ukraine. Yes. So we're definitely moving in that direction. Absolutely. I just wonder in the case of the UK, if Stalin is elected, if he's, if you, if labor wins, and he's appointed as the, as the prime minister, I wonder if the establishment in the UK is going to say, well, now we can go full on into, into war with Russia, even though we're not prepared for war, even though everyone understands that NATO is not ready for a war with Russia. Everyone understands that. But I think the momentum is in that direction. I wonder if they say, you know, now that we have Stalin in as, as the new prime minister, he's got the political capital to, to, to spend on, on this, on this adventure. Well, I mean, it's a miscalculation to think that, but I wonder if that's what they think. He's new in the position. So he can, he can start to spend some of this political capital that he has as the newly appointed prime minister. I mean, the reality about starman is that he will come into the office of prime minister with very little political capital indeed. When every single opinion poll shows that he's not particularly, but in fact, he's not popular at all. He's got negative ratings. The labor party is not widely supported. It's going to win the election because the conservatives are completely discredited and widely disliked. And in some places, even hated. So there isn't political capital. He doesn't have that buffer of political capital, which Tony Blair did in advance of the Iraq war. For example, the problem is that I'm not sure what goes on within the inner, inner, inner body, the deep body deep inside the British establishment. They may say to themselves, well, you know, starman may not be very popular. He may, his government may not be particularly popular, but it's got a majority in the House of Commons. It's reasonably, it looks therefore reasonably strong. We can't afford to lose in Ukraine. It's an existential issue for us. I don't think it is an existential issue, but people are increasingly talking in Britain as if it was, and they might believe it. And they say, look, you know, starman might have some problems. He might lose his popularity. He might collapse in a few years time when the next election happens. But in the meantime, he has a government, a strong government, to all appearances. So let's just go ahead and do it. And then, of course, if it all ends in a victory, the starman gets reelected, we can face down the protests and, you know, will have won. Whereas if we don't do it now and Ukraine goes, then we have this existential crisis. The West could start to disintegrate and we will have lost and lost conclusively. Simon Tisdall, who I spoke about, who wrote that article saying, you know, we need unlimited escalation. I mean, he's basically making precisely that point. He says, if we don't defeat Putin, then NATO is lost. NATO ceases to have any relevance or importance. It will might as well pack up and close, short, and go home. And it has no further reason to exist. Now, I don't personally agree with that. I think we will see that NATO will survive hate-defeating Ukraine for the reasons that you have often discussed the fact that it's a massive grift. I think people will want to keep all that going. But, you know, the way it's been pitched, not to the British people, because, you know, most people in Britain don't read someone like Simon Tisdall. But to the British elite is that this is an existential issue for us. If we lose, we lose the whole game because there'll be a huge question mark over NATO. The Americans, that's another thing that Tisdall says, the Americans might become disillusioned, especially if Donald Trump is elected and choose to walk away. So we've got to start taking on these incredible risks because if we don't, we're left with nothing. Yeah, I definitely believe that if Biden wins the White House, then I think the chances are fairly, fairly good that we're going to get into the hot war with Russia. I think that's the key election is the election of the United States. And if Biden has another four years, and I believe that that Biden will go for it, or not just Biden. I mean, you know, because, you know, if Biden is replaced by another Democrat, and there's some rumors about this increasingly again, it doesn't make any difference. It would be exactly the same. If the President's administration, whoever leads it, is reelected, then of course we will see, we will see this thing escalate. They will not give up on, they will not just walk away from this. I agree with that. By the way, I mean, just to get a sense of how dangerous these people are, Ray McGovern did a brilliant article in consulting news over the course of which he provided a link to an interview that Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, gave to a Russian newspaper. Now, I'd missed this interview completely. It was just a short time ago. But Lavrov discussed a meeting he had with Tony Blinken in January 2022. Over the course of which Blinken made it pretty clear to Lavrov that the United States was indeed eventually planning to install ballistic missiles with nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Now, you know, Blinken could say that or at least giving Lavrov that impression. That tells you how provocative and extreme and aggressive these people ultimately are and the incredible risks that they're prepared to take because Blinken would surely have known that there was nothing more likely to provoke the Russians than to give that impression that the United States one day would agree to have, would decide to have ballistic missile interceptors with nuclear weapons in Ukraine, just a few hundred kilometers from Moscow. Of course they were. I mean, that doesn't surprise me at all. I mean, when you listen to Kaya Kallis, the other day, she said at a conference in Ukraine that Russia needs to be broken apart. It wouldn't be such a bad thing if Russia wasn't broken. She even said there's a whole bunch of states that are already in Russia, ready to just be broken up into into little micro nations. This has always been the end and they've never, yeah, I mean, I never, but the thing to understand about Blinken's point is that he said that to Lavrov. He gave that impression to Lavrov in a discussion in January 2022, which was supposed to avert a war, the war we have now. So, I mean, the point is he clearly didn't want to avert the war. He wanted the war to happen. I mean, you know, what Kallis says, and we're all sorts of people saying now, I mean, it's the mask dropping. But yes, making that comment directly to Lavrov in that context, that tells you basically the kind of, not just the kind of people we're dealing with, but the fact that they wanted a war, that they weren't trying to avoid one in January 2022. Yeah, well, what you hear Kallis saying in people like Kallis or Behrbach, when they say these provocative statements, these aren't their ideas. This is what they overhear other people higher up than them saying when they attend the NATO meetings or the EU cocktail parties or wherever they go. When they hear Blinken speaking with Stoltenberg and talking about how they're going to start a war with Russia, then when they overthrow the Putin government, they'll break Russia up into six different countries. Kallis is sitting there with a drinking hand shaking her head going, oh, yeah, yeah. And then eventually a year and a year and a half later, she's able to repeat what she overheard at the NATO summit in Lithuania. Way that way. Well, this is exactly what I mean, it's, it's the quiet secret that everybody shares every body, of course, who's in the, in the magic circle. But then they've all shared it, they've all, they've all had this objective all along. This has been the plan right the way through. It's the way to break Russia, isolate China, and all that. That's what that is all about. And of course, they're talking in that way, and Estonia is talking about that in that way, and people in Germany are talking about it and all kinds of conferences happen principally in the United States, discussing how it might work. And beyond that, of course, you have articles in newspapers, there's been articles about this in the daily telegraph, by the way, which you just mentioned, but they've also been talking about, you know, breaking up Russia, recreating a state to be called Muscovy, which will have just Moscow and Lenin, some Petersburg is part of there, but in all of the rest, Siberia will be broken away, all of all. But of course, that's exactly what they've been talking about. And that's why we have a war. That's why the war is happening, because that's ultimately the plan. It always has been, or at least not the plan at least, but it's been the intention. It's been the desire. Some would say it's the objective. Yeah, we said it a couple of years ago that the hope was that the sanctions were going to be able to accomplish the goal of breaking up Russia, removing Putin and breaking up Russia. When the sanctions failed, it had to move towards, towards a proxy warrant. Eventually, we're going to move towards the real war, where the West is going to have to decide. Exactly. We go from proxy to the hut. Yeah, but of course, the point is exactly the point, because of course, the sanctions failed, the proxy war failed. And of course, the fact that they are losing the proxy war, I mean, I don't think it's going to end, of course, if Ukraine collapses and is defeated completely, I don't personally think it's going to end either the EU or NATO. But beyond that, some of these people may be starting to worry that it will. That's what they're now also saying to each other. So it's very much the mentality of people like this, that they tend to think everything is all or nothing. Either we win completely and break up Russia, or they win, in which case we get broken up instead. Now, when you're talking with people like this, when you're having to deal with people who tend to think in all or nothing terms, then of course, there's absolutely no limit that they're beyond which they're not prepared to go. They're prepared to cross any limit, cross any red line, because that's the mental gear and reverse that they inhabit. There've been examples of this in history. The leaderships in Tokyo and Berlin in the 1940s were like that. And, you know, if you read there, the history's carefully. And I'm afraid the leadership, some of the people in the leaderships in the west of the Sun. It's interesting that the collective was to NATO. They used Zelensky to destroy Ukraine, and now Zelensky wants to use Ukraine to destroy NATO and the collective west. As much as I poke fun at Zelensky and mock him, he doesn't have any other choice but to try and bring NATO in. Of course not. This is his only path out of this mess. Indeed. And he is becoming more desperate. I mean, you can see that. You can see that all the time. You can see that he's becoming angry, very angry, and pessimistic, and upset all at the same time. I mean, he's optimism such as it was and he's humor such as it was. He's basically melting away. Now he's just becoming angry, snarling, furious man, very desperate, very concerned about the situation, and trying to save himself by his correctly hooded. I mean, setting the stage for World War III, a disastrous thing. And it tells you how disastrous the whole handling of the whole Ukrainian crisis has been. Going all the way back to the Orange Revolution in 2004 and beyond. Yeah, well, we'll end the video there. But yeah, when you go that for a back, that's when you realize all the money that's been tied up into Ukraine. And once again, you get back to what you were saying, which is that a lot of people in power in the West are also going to view this as their money being destroyed. Their revenue, their income is about to go away. So they're going to fight for that. They're grift. Absolutely. Think about all the people that have been invested in Ukraine over the last 10, 15 years, and all the money that's been generated out of Ukraine over the last 15 years. And here comes Putin and he ruins all of that. Yes, I agree. It's going to be a lot of angry people in power. I agree. I agree. All right, the Duran.locals.com. We are on Rumble Odyssey, Bitch Shoot Telegram, Rockfin, and Twitter X and go to the Duran shop, 15% off. Most merch use the code GetReady15. Take care.