Deep Dive: Why Tucker Carlson is Wrong About Russia-Ukraine
Correcting False Narratives about the Russia-Ukraine conflict
I’ve been wanting to do a deep dive on Russia and Ukraine for a while because I’m taken aback by some of the Pro-Russia, Anti-Ukraine sentiment on the right.
I finally got around to writing this in response to this recent tweet of mine about Tucker Carlson where it seems quite a lot of folks disagree with me.
Anyways, I will break down this deep dive into two main parts:
Part 1: Why Tucker Carlson Is Wrong - A point by point rebuttal of the narrative Tucker outlines
Part 2: The Russian Narrative - An analysis of the overall narrative that has been pushed by Russia and accepted by quite a few people
I also have a short conclusion and a FAQ section at the end.
Part 1: Why Tucker Carlson Is Wrong
Alright, let’s dig into this because it seems that lots of people commenting on this tweet vehemently disagree with me.
Let’s first establish what Tucker is saying here:
Democrats have convinced themselves that Russia stole the 2016 election
That is why they are taking us to war with Russia - on some level the core motivation is just that
We know the war in Ukraine is not about saving democracy
We know it’s not about protecting the borders of a sovereign nation - the US doesn’t care about its borders
We know that the war is not about helping the Ukrainian people because more will die thanks to the Biden Administration's support for Ukraine - If you cared about the Ukrainian people, you would push for a settlement now
Instead, the war in Ukraine is designed to cause regime change in Russia
Final Conclusion: This would be payback by Democrats for Election Interference - the inevitable end state of Russia-gate
Okay, let’s take it point by point then.
Democrats have convinced themselves that Russia stole the 2016 election
Many have and you can’t discount this as a motivation (even if subconscious) for people on the left to hate Russia.
And let’s not forget Ukraine-gate which is also probably a reason why a lot of people on the left support Ukraine.
But what Democrats think should not play any role in one’s ability to objectively analyze an issue. This is pure contrarianism and it’s now as prevalent with some people on the right as it was with the entire left during Trump’s presidency.
And keep in mind that there is an entire continent of people in Europe that don’t know much and really don’t care about Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections. Yet they’ve adopted the same position vis-a-vis Russia as the majority of the US.
That is why they are taking us to war with Russia - on some level the core motivation is just that
First I would say that the US and NATO have no interest in getting into a hot war with a nuclear power such as Russia. The number of people calling for actual war is negligible in both political parties because it has long been established that war between nuclear powers carries too great a risk.
But you might say that we are encouraging war by provoking Russia with our support of Ukraine. But there is no precedent for this being the case. This is why they’re called proxy wars and not actual wars. The US supplied arms to the Afghan rebels. China and Russia supplied arms to the Vietcong. This has been standard fare for a long time.
So in fact what we have here is a case of saber-rattling by Russia. They make threats and the west is supposed to back down. But that’s a terrible way to run foreign policy with devastating historical consequences.
Think of the precedent that is being established:
If you have nuclear weapons then you can invade another country with no fear of outside intervention
If you don’t have nuclear weapons, you are at the mercy of any foreign invader that does
Threaten other countries with your nuclear weapons and they will back down
This alone should scare you because it creates a major incentive for every country to go nuclear. A world where every sovereign country has nuclear weapons is pretty terrifying.
Backing down from these threats is not a precedent that you want to create.
So I see no evidence that the US or NATO is trying to take us to war with Russia. Here I see a dishonest sleight of hand where Tucker conflates a hot war with a proxy war when the two have very different meanings and connotations.
One question I get is whether I think that the US government is pushing the US towards war with Russia. There is a difference between standing your ground against unreasonable threats by a hostile nation and trying to provoke war. Arming Ukraine is completely within the bounds of established international precedent.
Now, if the issue of actual military intervention ever comes up then it’s a different discussion. But we are not anywhere close to this. Putin has so far won the public opinion battle on military intervention with his nuclear threats.
Could things change in this respect? Only if public opinion significantly shifts, but I’ve seen no indication of this so far:
We know the war in Ukraine is not about saving democracy
I’m not even sure what Tucker means by this.
The main issue was never democracy, but rather national sovereignty. But democracy is also a factor insofar as the West has tried to support Ukraine in its pursuit of becoming a western democracy.
Have we become so cynical that we no longer care about such things? When you become so contemptful of your own country that you believe it doesn’t have a moral leg to stand on, you are now sharing an opinion with the far left. You may have arrived at the conclusion from a different perspective, but you’ve essentially decided that your country lacks any moral virtue.
But in comparison to what? No country is perfect, so who exactly are you comparing yourself to?
This is a point I make often when I say that we shouldn’t want to hate our neighbors. As much as we may disagree with them politically, we have far more in common with our fellow Americans with which we fundamentally disagree, than we do with countries like Russia or China.
Many Americans are so consumed in hatred of the other side that they have lost sight of this fact. I disagree with people on the left, I argue with them, I get really angry with them sometimes…but I never allow myself to hate them.
Anyways, maybe you think that Ukraine is hardly a democracy because it is so corrupt and is full of neo-nazis.
Every single post-communist democracy in Eastern Europe has followed more or less the same path in transitioning to becoming a western democracy.
I got this from an old diplomat who had worked extensively in the region…he said this about the path that former Eastern-bloc countries must traverse to become modern democracies:
They spend the first phase of their development trying to overcome the legacy of communism → this is the exercise of establishing democratic norms
The next phase is spent trying to stamp out corruption → this is the exercise of establishing the rule of law and strengthening the judiciary and adjacent institutions
And the final phase is about modernizing their economy → this is the exercise of developing a functional market economy. This is when the Oligarchs start to get pushed out of the economy as these are not purely businessmen but beneficiaries of economic cronyism
All the countries making this transition do so with lots of support from both the European Union, EU countries, and the US. It’s a messy process where the west uses both sticks and carrots to help these countries build and strengthen their democratic institutions. The west offers financial and technical support but also intervenes politically at times in unpopular ways. Progress is slow, but when seen over the course of decades progress is also evident.
That’s where Ukraine is. They’ve transitioned past communism to democracy but they still have big problems with corruption. The west works to help modernize and professionalize the Justice Ministries in these countries, but it takes time because mindsets are hard to change.
This is actually the reason why people like Hunter Biden get fat contracts from Eastern Europe. Local oligarchs think that the West controls these prosecutors and they can influence their corruption dossiers. Mostly it’s a grift because they can’t. But in the case of Hunter and Joe Biden and the firing of that prosecutor…that was pretty egregious because that is the only reason Hunter was getting paid.
What about the Neo-nazis you might say? I have looked into it and I readily admit this is a problem.
I’ve done quite a bit of research to try and understand this phenomenon. This is the best source I’ve found for a balanced point of view.
Quick summary:
There are real groups with Neo-nazi ideologies
They’re relatively small at only 1.6% politically, but very dangerous nonetheless
Russia overstates this problem, the west mostly ignores it
Their ideology makes for great fighting units which is why they’re currently tolerated
There is a concern about modern weapons being in their hands
I make no excuses for this, but I also don’t think this should be used to label the Ukrainian people or its government as Nazis. Nor is it any justification for Putin to invade.
If you were to ask Ukrainians about this problem, they think the problem is vastly overstated. Most of the people labeled Neo-nazis are actually strongly nationalist and are ideologically motivated by expelling Russia from sovereign Ukrainian territory. They get thrown in with other actual Neo-nazis making the problem appear bigger than it actually is.
Here is a very detailed perspective by Ukrainian liberal human rights activist Olexandra Matviychuk about the Azov Regiment which gets so much attention on the Neo-nazi subject:
And I can’t help but notice the similarities of this tactic which is being used to cast aspersions on the Ukrainian people to those used by the left to label the MAGA movement as white supremacists. Think about that for a second.
Finally, if your interpretation is that Democrats don’t care about democracy because of their politics on voting, censorship, etc, then I think you need to consider that the type of anti-Democratic activity that we are talking about in the US is orders of magnitude removed from the situation in Ukraine. Right now both the right and the left in America are accusing each other of putting Democracy in peril, but Americans have no idea how strong their Democracy is compared to other countries. In Ukraine the consequences of losing this war are living in a society where political opponents are murdered, there is no free speech and elections are a sham…in other words an authoritarian state.
We know it’s not about protecting the borders of a sovereign nation - the US doesn’t care about its own borders
Conflating Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine with the US’s illegal immigration problem is nonsense. Just because the phrase “sovereign border” can be applied to both issues does not mean they have anything in common.
However, the issue of the sovereignty of nations is a crucial one and it’s one of the most important reasons why the west must care about what happens in Ukraine.
Allowing Russia to achieve fundamental territorial gains from invading Ukraine would open up a pandora’s box of issues related to historical territories/borders and independence movements by ethnic minority populations in all other countries.
These are powderkeg issues in a world where sovereign borders can again be called into question. You might think that we’ve gotten past these issues in the West but we haven’t. Let’s not forget that it wasn’t that long ago that we had violence in Europe by the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, Basque Separatists in Spain, and the disaster of Yugoslavia’s breakup.
Ethnic tensions are very easy to stir up because humans are tribalist by nature. Every country in Europe has significant ethnic minority groups with historical grievances that go back hundreds of years.
Now try extending this problem to the rest of the world…
Here is Kenya’s ambassador to the UN explaining the dangers of trying to relitigate the borders of sovereign nations.
This situation echoes our history. Kenya and almost every African country was birthed by the ending of empire. Our borders were not of our own drawing. They were drawn in the distant colonial metropols of London, Paris and Lisbon, with no regard for the ancient nations that they cleaved apart.
Today across the borders of every single African country live our countrymen with whom we share deep historical, cultural, and linguistic bonds. At independence, had we chosen to pursue states on the basis of ethnic, racial or religious homogeneity, we would still be waging bloody wars these many decades later.
Looking back, it was a huge mistake to appease Russia’s annexation of Crimea, but here we are.
Precedents matter, but they matter a whole lot in this case.
We know that the war is not about helping the Ukrainian people because more will die thanks to the Biden Administration's support for Ukraine - If you cared about the Ukrainian people, you would push for a settlement now
It is true that if Ukraine were to fold to Russia, they would save a lot of Ukrainian lives. But the same would have been true in the American Revolution, the Civil War, or the World Wars. Yet Americans chose to fight.
Who are we to decide for Ukrainians whether they should fight for their liberty or not? The idea that the US is pushing Ukraine into a confrontation with Russia is to deny that Ukrainians have any agency in the matter.
Look at Afghanistan where the US actually pushed the government and the people hard to fight for their liberty and freedom against the Taliban. They folded in weeks because the Taliban had more resolve than they did.
Does Tucker even know what the people of Ukraine actually think about the idea of surrendering or conceding territory to Russia? The fact that they are fighting and refusing to surrender says all you need to know about how Ukrainians feel. Everything I’ve seen so far paints a picture of a united people that are mobilized and resolute in their commitment to expelling Russia from their territory.
If there is one thing the world should have learned by now from Vietnam and Afghanistan is that an invader will never win so long as the locals have the will to resist indefinitely. Right now that is what the Ukrainian people are saying.
The idea that we, in the West, know best what is best for the Ukrainian people is textbook paternalism.
I’d also like to share this opinion from a Ukrainian citizen on Tucker’s take about saving Ukrainian lives. As much as we can try to understand this conflict, we will never understand it as well as somebody that has lived this reality:
“Spoken by someone who doesn't know (or purposefully ignores) our history with Russia. Every time in history, in any form, when Ukraine conceded to Russia, yeah at the start some lives was saved, but in the end thousands, then hundreds of thousands, and then tens of millions of Ukrainians died. Even now almost every family in Ukraine has dead relatives BECAUSE of Russia. For example, in my family 4 brothers of my grandma died in The Holodomor, and her husband was used as a cannon fodder for Germans. So yes, we know and remember what Russia brings, and we will not surrender this time.
We know there is no true "settlement" with russia as long as it exists as a remnant of an empire and is not broken down into states. This is very wishful thinking by westerners who think you can reason with Russia as a whole.
And it's when they IGNORE the things that happen right now, like Mariupol, Bucha, Borodyanka and other horrors inflicted on our people RIGHT NOW IN FRONT OF THE CAMERAS that they have the gall to tell us to surrender”
Instead, the war in Ukraine is designed to cause regime change in Russia
The only regime change that could occur in Russia is from within. If this were to happen it would be as a result of Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine and the consequences that followed this decision of his own making.
The west has cohabitated with Putin for over 20 years. Germany sought to bring them closer to the west through economic collaboration. They viewed their energy policy as a form of economic diplomacy thinking that Putin would behave so long as they depended on German markets. The UK turned a blind eye to Russian oligarchs for decades leading to London’s nickname of Londongrad. The US cared so little about the region that they allowed Putin to annex Crimea without any significant sanctions. All that the west wanted was for Putin to behave and not invade other sovereign countries.
But are they trying for regime change now that the invasion has taken place? I’m sure they would like for that to happen, but they will not risk taking any action to actively pursue this.
To understand why, I’ll share this example from nuclear war game theory based on the work of Nobel Prize winner Thomas C. Schelling.
Imagine two people are playing chess and each is trying to win. Underneath their table is enough TNT to blow both of them up and each player has a detonator. Therefore each player is incentivized to play the game in such a way that they can win, but not by such a great margin that they would provoke their opponent into a rash decision.
At the national security level both the US and Russia understand these things and it’s why conflicts between nuclear powers have always been waged via proxy wars and incremental ebbs and flows in hostilities, but never through dramatic escalation (Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest but never escalated).
Therefore, regime change has never and will never be on the table in terms of US military or covert actions. Joe Biden and Lindsey Graham can wish for it, but these are just political declarations, not policy.
Final Conclusion: This would be payback by Democrats for Election Interference - the inevitable end state of Russiagate
It’s possible that some part of Democrats’ motivation is linked to animosity over the perceived injustice of Russian election interference, but to ascribe most of it to this is to ignore all the other legitimate reasons for the US to support Ukraine.
This is what I mean when I say Tucker is projecting. He is seeing the Ukraine conflict only through the lens of internal American politics. He’s doing what we’ve been accusing the left of doing which is engaging in single variate analysis when the problem is far more complex than just left-right politics.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is actually a political disaster for the Biden presidency because it contributes to inflation which is currently the biggest political issue in the US. Americans care much more about the gas pump than they do about Ukraine, so this would be a pretty big price to pay just to get revenge on Russia.
Also, this isn’t really an issue that has divided Americans along political lines…yet.
Americans broadly support America’s aid to Ukraine and right now that is the only thing that is being talked about. Again, all this talk about proxy wars is just meant to push a narrative because “support to Ukraine” is the same thing as a “proxy war”.
Part 2: The Russian Narrative
The narrative being put forth by Russia and which is accepted by many on the right is the following:
The US promised not to expand NATO one inch further to the east after the breakup of the Eastern Bloc
Since then NATO kept expanding and getting closer to Russia thereby creating grave security concerns which went unheeded by the west
In 2014 the US facilitated a “coup” in Ukraine after the Euromaidan Protests
A civil war erupted when Russian speaking Ukrainians in the east objected to breaking with Russia and since then Ukraine has waged genocide against the Russian speaking minority of Ukraine while
Ukraine is a corrupt country that serves as a piggy bank for the Democratic party and particularly the Biden family
The US has intentionally stoked Ukraine into provoking Russia in the hopes of creating a proxy war that can destabilize Putin
Quick Sidenote: I wish I could spend more time on who Putin is, not because I want to convince you that he is evil, but to convince you of what you should expect from a former KGB agent. Just do a little digging into something called the Ryazan Incident (it will blow your mind) and you will begin to understand Putin and what he does a lot better.
During the cold war, the KGB was the most effective intelligence agency on the planet. Whereas the CIA was more advanced technologically, the KGB dominated in human intelligence, psyops, disinformation, and propaganda.
The KGB was actually far less interested in intelligence gathering than they were in influence operations: rewriting history and manipulating public opinion. The Soviet Union had more people working on disinformation than they did in the armed forces and defense industry. This book goes into the extent to which the Soviet Union spread disinformation throughout the world.
And in fact, the legacy of those operations is still being felt today. As Christopher Monckton explains in this clip, they were able to recruit one million Soviet agents of influence (western Marxist sympathizers) who were in contact with the Soviet disinformation services. All of this is documented.
The Soviet Union is no more but the Marxists have remained in positions of power in our most influential western institutions and we’re currently dealing with the consequences of the capture of these institutions by that ideology. These are not conspiracy theories. It is how the KGB operated and it is how Putin thinks and works.
Jokes aside, disinformation is the name of the game and they invented it. So you have to be really careful how you parse information coming from Russia. I get accused of not being objective because I was born in communist Eastern Europe…I would counter that by saying that I know how to spot the Russian BS better.
This reminds me to address an argument that I keep hearing about how we shouldn’t look back in history to understand what is going on today in Ukraine. Russel Brand calls it “infinite regress” and argues that we should instead focus only on recent history in order to understand the conflict.
As a fan of history, I disagree wholeheartedly with this approach. There is a lot to be learned from history because human nature doesn’t change and cultures change very slowly in time.
Also, and possibly, more importantly, is that if we look only at recent events then your interpretation is more vulnerable to the narratives that Putin has been weaving.
So again, let’s take the Russian narrative and evaluate it point by point.
The US promised not to expand NATO one inch further to the east after the breakup of the Eastern Bloc
This is actually incorrect although those words were used in a different context. What was discussed at the time was regarding the reunification of Germany and the agreement was that NATO troops would not be deployed into East Germany.
“NATO will not move one inch further east” was launched by Putin in 2007 in his speech at the 43rd Munich Security Conference and he’s been repeating it ever since. The fact that James Baker and others did actually say something to that extent is true, but it was not referring to NATO expansion.
But don’t take my word for it. This is what Mikhail Gorbachev said in an interview.
RBTH: One of the key issues that has arisen in connection with the events in Ukraine is NATO expansion into the East. Do you get the feeling that your Western partners lied to you when they were developing their future plans in Eastern Europe? Why didn’t you insist that the promises made to you – particularly U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s promise that NATO would not expand into the East – be legally encoded? I will quote Baker: “NATO will not move one inch further east.”
M.G.: The topic of “NATO expansion” was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years. I say this with full responsibility. Not a singe Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn’t bring it up, either. Another issue we brought up was discussed: making sure that NATO’s military structures would not advance and that additional armed forces from the alliance would not be deployed on the territory of the then-GDR after German reunification. Baker’s statement, mentioned in your question, was made in that context. Kohl and [German Vice Chancellor Hans-Dietrich] Genscher talked about it.
Everything that could have been and needed to be done to solidify that political obligation was done. And fulfilled. The agreement on a final settlement with Germany said that no new military structures would be created in the eastern part of the country; no additional troops would be deployed; no weapons of mass destruction would be placed there. It has been observed all these years. So don’t portray Gorbachev and the then-Soviet authorities as naïve people who were wrapped around the West’s finger. If there was naïveté, it was later, when the issue arose. Russia at first did not object.
The decision for the U.S. and its allies to expand NATO into the east was decisively made in 1993. I called this a big mistake from the very beginning. It was definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990. With regards to Germany, they were legally enshrined and are being observed.
Gorbachev who was at those meetings had this to say when asked specifically about “NATO will not move one inch further east”:
“The topic of “NATO expansion” was not discussed at all”
“NATO’s military structures would not advance and that additional armed forces from the alliance would not be deployed on the territory of the then-GDR after German reunification”
“The agreement on a final settlement with Germany said that no new military structures would be created in the eastern part of the country; no additional troops would be deployed”
All these things were captured in a treaty that was signed because that’s how diplomacy works. You don’t just make verbal promises.
On the other hand, I would point out that it was Russia that broke the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances whereby Russia provided security guarantees to Ukraine upon agreeing to relinquish nuclear weapons from the former Soviet Union. That was a signed treaty…not words spoken decades earlier that were taken out of context.
And oh yeah, the US and UK were also signatories of the Budapest Memorandum and were supposed to be guarantors of Ukrainian security.
Since then NATO kept expanding and getting closer to Russia thereby creating grave security concerns which went unheeded by the west
There are two questions that need to be answered to evaluate this claim:
Is NATO expansion an actual security threat to Russia?
Does Putin actually perceive NATO to be a security threat?
To the first question, I would say that NATO is absolutely not a security threat to Russia, and here are my reasons:
NATO’s charter provides for a purely defensive alliance. It just ensures that an attack on one is an attack on all. Even if NATO didn’t exist there would be other collective security alliances between western democracies.
NATO expansion was not driven by NATO looking to find new members, but rather by new members asking to join. The countries of Eastern Europe did not trust Russia because of its imperialist history, and quite frankly I hope you now see why they did so.
The giant elephant in the room is the nuclear deterrence thing. NATO would intervene militarily in Ukraine if Russia were not a nuclear power. The fact that they are not doing so is proof of the fact that NATO would never invade Russia, even if they had reasons to do so.
There are no such things as surprise wars. There are months if not years of build-up to war. The reasons for war must be explained to the general population so that they understand why fighting and dying is necessary. This is especially so in the democracies that make up NATO where popular support for a war is essential. In over three decades since the end of the cold war, there has never been any discussion in any NATO country about the possibility of invading or attacking Russia.
I just don’t buy that “NATO is a security threat to Russia” as a serious argument.
The second question of whether Putin perceives NATO expansion as a threat is a bit more complicated because it’s not just an issue of military security, but rather the security of his position. Putin knows that NATO is not a military threat, but the prospect of a successful western democracy of 40 million fellow slavs is a threat to his power.
Consider that every single former communist country that has joined EU/NATO has a higher per capita GDP than Russia. And this is in the absence of wealth from vast natural resources like in Russia.
So in a sense, Putin is serious when he says Ukraine is a threat, but not for the reasons that he gives. It’s actually for personal political reasons.
A thriving modern democracy in Ukraine is a disaster for Putin’s regime because it would provide a stark contrast to what Russia is offering its citizens.
The “NATO is a security threat” narrative is utter nonsense. And even if you want to argue that Putin actually believes this, that doesn’t mean that the world needs to cater to his paranoia.
In 2014, the US facilitated a “coup” in Ukraine after the Euromaidan Protests
First off, I want to say that I watched Oliver Stone’s entire documentary on the Euromaidan so I understand the Russian narrative because that is all you’ll see in it. How do you create a documentary where you only interview Putin, Yanukovych, and his ministers and think it has any credibility?
Again, entirely too much credit is being given to the US for events that are largely on the shoulders of the Ukrainian people.
Of course, the USA was interested in a more pro-west administration. But they did nothing significant to facilitate this. I laughed really hard during the documentary when they blamed US-funded NGOs for fomenting revolt in Ukraine. Every single country finances these types of programs through its embassies. To think that these NGOs have the power or influence to cause events such as the Euromaidan protests is ridiculous on its face.
No, what happened here was not a coup. It was a revolt or even a revolution, but not a coup. And it was definitely not "facilitated by the USA".
Here are the words of a Ukrainian who lived this reality.
We were enraged by this. There was no need to facilitate anything from outside. When the first baton dropped, Yanukovich was doomed. Also many theorize snipers were russian, but sadly investigation was buried by the still pro-russian government. There was only one part of the protest which looked "financed" and it was a scene local politicians used trying to get some "clout" with protesters but in vain.
Everything was crowdfunded, all my friends made food for local protesters. When the violent protest started, everyone! (and you can see this in videos and photos) including most ready groups of nationalists, were wearing makeshift "armor" and weapons. Maybe the USA funded some secret nano plywood shields and tungsten planks?
What about Victoria Nuland’s phone call where she strategized about who should be in the new government?
This speaks more to the arrogance of the US state department than any conspiracy. As I mentioned earlier, the US/EU sometimes intervene in local politics in these countries in heavy-handed ways. Here you are seeing an example of the attitude of some state depart officials and how they behave in these countries. People like Victoria Nuland can exert great pressure on these governments and politicians, but they have no power to force them to do anything. Again, the game is carrots and sticks.
In short, to understand what really happened in the last week leading to the fall of the Yanukovych government:
Shootings broke out where mostly protesters but also police were being killed. Hundreds of deaths occurred.
It is not clear who these snipers were and who ordered them to shoot - everybody blamed everybody else for orchestrating this, but to this day there is no agreement on who was behind it.
The European Union sent in mediators who helped broker an agreement between Yanukovych and the opposition - it was agreed that they would have early elections
Opposition leaders took back this news to the protesters and were firmly rebuffed - they were booed off the stage. The leadership of the far-right also rejected the deal.
By this point, the writing was on the wall and the security forces of the regime started to disintegrate. Some armed forces turned against the Yanukovych government.
Yanukovych and much of his government fled the country - and that was it.
There is a lot of room for speculation about whether the shootings were a false flag operation or whether it was Russia/Yanukovych. We don’t know.
And for all the talk about the US and CIA being involved, people forget the very obvious fact that Russian intelligence was heavily involved in trying to prop up the Yanukovych government.
Nothing in all of this speaks to this being a US-backed coup and if you say this to a Ukrainian, they will laugh at you.
A civil war erupted when Russian speaking Ukrainians in the east objected to breaking with Russia and since then Ukraine has waged genocide against the Russian speaking minority of Ukraine while
It’s very difficult to call what occurred between 2014 and 2022 a civil war. Ask Ukrainians about what happened and they will firmly reject the notion of civil war and will tell you it is actually Russian territorial occupation.
Here are some facts which are known to Ukrainians, but don’t seem to have reached the west:
It's hardly a "civil" war when most of the fighting was done by the regular Russian army.
Yes, there are local separatists (mostly descendants of ethnic Russians), but "many", as in thousands or tens of thousands, but not hundreds of thousands and definitely not millions.
It would be more accurate to say that the separatists are backing Russia, not vice versa.
Russian speakers have never been oppressed or threatened by Ukrainians - Rather what happened is that post-2014 a strong nationalist pro-Ukrainian movement was begun but the focus was never Russian-Speakers in Ukraine but rather Russia itself
The important commanders of the “separatists” are almost exclusively Russian like Igor Girkin (Strelkov)
They introduced the Russian ruble as the currency of the region
What about claims of genocide against 14 thousand Russian speakers? False, there have been a total of 3,400 civilian death attributable to both sides over 8 years of war.
In World War 2 about 150,000 Russians fought in the Russian Liberation Army under the command of Germany against Stalin’s Red Army. That didn’t make it a civil war.
An analogy would be if US forces would enter Canada, enlist the help of a few thousand US sympathizers, and then wage war against the Canadian army while calling it a Civil War.
Take a look at this tweet about the Donetsk pro-Ukrainian demonstration from 2014. I implore you to read the comments from Ukrainians, many of who were there, and have a different version of what happened.
What happened with this demonstration? Titushky (mercenary agents) were brought in to beat up the people and disperse them.
Here’s an example of an account from someone who was there:
People who were there will all tell you that it was a Russian occupation, not a civil war. In the aftermath over a million people fled this area, so when they talk about popular support, keep in mind that a lot of the population is no longer there.
In truth, this has nothing to do with Russian speakers in Ukraine. Most Russian speakers stand with Ukraine. They frame it in this way so that they can claim that it is a vulnerable minority that is being oppressed. But in fact, this is about being Pro-Russian or Pro-Ukrainian. A Pro-Russian Ukrainian is actually therefore considered a collaborator with the Russian occupiers who want to annex the region.
If the separatists were so committed to the cause, then why does Russia need forced conscriptions? “Forced conscription in Lugano looks like this”:
The other part of this story is that these “conscripts” will get little to no training or equipment and will be used as cannon fodder.
And if this is a civil war, why does Russia need to mass issue Russian passports to the locals?
Let’s face it, this is not a civil war. It’s a Russian occupation.
Finally, I wanted to show you a blatant example of how Russian propaganda is being used to demonize Ukrainians as the evil Nazis in this civil war.
This is former President Petro Poroshenko talking about the separatist regions. Listen to it and you will come away horrified by his callousness towards his fellow Ukrainians:
There’s only one problem. It’s propaganda.
First of all, it is taken out of context. This is how the speech starts and the point he is making is that Ukraine offers a better future and this is evident from the liberated territories where citizens can restart living normal lives.
“This war cannot be won by weapons. Each bullet gives birth to two enemies. And every day of the world, when the Ukrainian state demonstrates in the liberated territories, what citizens, who sang a month ago to the pseudo-separatist regime, understand today, that they get warmth, they get light, they can finally send their children to school, they can begin to receive pensions, pay the loss of the breadwinner, on disability, they get a job, they get paid”
The second problem is one of past and future tenses. The video makes it seem as if he is talking in the future tense when he is in fact talking in the present tense. The point he is making is that people in the occupied regions don’t have what normal citizens in the rest of Ukraine have.
I remember seeing this video for the first time and because of this and some other materials I saw, I had started to think that maybe Ukrainians are just as bad and corrupt. But when you dive deep into the subject matter the narrative crumbles.
Ukraine is a corrupt country that serves as a piggy bank for American politicians and particularly the Biden family
As I explained earlier, Ukraine has problems with corruption and one of the symptoms of this is the emergence of oligarchs that get very rich through their political connections.
There is nothing unique about this phenomenon. There were oligarchs that emerged after the cold war ended in all the former communist countries.
As the rule of law is established in these countries, the oligarchs start to get pushed out because of all the skeletons in their closets (bribes, illegalities, etc).
As rule of law is established and prosecutors open cases against them, they reach out to buy American influence hoping it will help their dossier.
Here is a case involving Rudolph Giuliani working for a Romanian Oligarch, Gabriel “Puiu” Popoviciu, who had serious legal problems.
Giuliani tried to intervene on his behalf.
In 2018, Giuliani wrote a letter to Romanian President Klaus Iohannis in which he decried the “excesses” of Romania’s National Anticorruption Directorate and called for an amnesty for people who had been convicted of crimes initiated by that body in recent years.
Even former FBI Director Louis J. Freeh got money from this particular client.
Who did this Oligarch use before hiring Freeh and Giuliani? He was working with Hunter Biden in 2015.
It’s the same phenomenon in Ukraine.
So here’s the thing, why lay all the blame on countries like Ukraine and Romania? Those oligarchs are private citizens and can spend their money as they like.
Wouldn’t it be better to ask why the US tolerates a system where former politicians and public officials sell their influence in America to shady clients all around the world? And the oligarchs are actually okay compared to some of the other leaders with US representation.
The US has intentionally stoked Ukraine into provoking Russia in the hopes of creating a proxy war that can destabilize Putin
What I’m particularly struck by is Putin’s success in framing the conflict as one between Russia and the West. It’s as if the Ukrainians are just these puppets trapped between great powers and don’t have hundreds of years of their own history with Russia.
Puppets run and hide as happened in Afghanistan. The fact that Ukrainians have chosen to stand and fight and die should make it clear that they have agency in this conflict.
Maybe, just maybe, it would be a good idea to listen more closely to what the Ukrainian people are saying because it seems to me that they’ve earned that right through enormous sacrifice.
Have we become so cynical that we can no longer see past local political grievances? The conflict in Ukraine has far less to do with the US, EU, or NATO and everything to do with Russia vs Ukraine.
Of course, framing it this way would be very unpopular in Russia, where there are close ties between the populations. This is why Putin prefers to make it a conflict between Russia and the US/NATO.
So every time somebody like Tucker Carlson goes out there and confirms Putin’s narrative he is stabbing Ukrainians in the back. He is giving Putin the “proof” that he needs to feed back to his population. Because if seen as a conflict between Russia and the US/NATO, Russians are far more likely to support the war and its consequences (sanctions, deaths, etc).
Final Thoughts
Some people say I’m biased because I was born in communist Eastern Europe, but I am not alone among conservatives who think this way. Many conservative intellectuals who have been on the front lines fighting against the left are in full agreement with my point of view: Mark Levin, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and Douglas Murray are just a few.
I’m adding here an interesting answer that Douglas Murray gave in a recent interview on UnHerd with Freddie Sayers because I think there is some truth to it.
Freddie Sayers: What would your message be to political actors and people in the discourse on the right of politics in the US who find themselves oddly sympathetic to Putin and are found stopping just short of defending him? What’s your message to them?
Douglas Murray: How can you be so foolish as to fall for this man? There is a type of cynicism…which is cynical about everything other than the things it ought to be most cynical about.
We know this in the information age. People who are understandably suspicious of mainstream media…like utterly justifiably suspicious of mainstream media because they’ve seen the Washington Post lie, and they’ve seen the NY Times lie. And then they end up, falling for say Russia Today.
This is a completely avoidable trap, but unfortunately, as I say there is a tendency at the endpoint of some form of modern cynicism that you’re cynical about everything other than the thing you ought to be most cynical about, and a lot of people, sadly, particularly of our generation and particularly the generation younger than us now have very little understanding of what actual propaganda is like from other regimes around the world.
Just this week the China Daily News publishes a cartoon of Uncle Sam covered in corpses and it says America always George Floyds, separations at the border. Do you think the CCP cares about racist killings, do you think the CCP cares when they are separating a million people from their families in one particular province? Do you think they care? Of course they don’t.
A certain type of younger people, in particular, absorbs this and thinks that these people are telling the truth. That used to be a problem on the gullible left and it’s now a problem on the gullible right. You now have people on the gullible right who believe the propaganda pushed out by the Kremlin and by the CCP and there’s a reason.
And the reason is that idiotic actors in our own societies in the west browbeat us with false claims about the Kremlin for years. We were told that the Kremlin bought Brexit. I hate these people for wasting our time and for running down our moral resources and others on this crap. All of these people who have no evidence and didn’t even bother to find out why the British people might have voted to leave the European Union legitimately. They didn’t bother. They invented Kremlin conspiracies.
In the same way in America, a whole class of journalists and politicians didn’t bother to try to work out why the American people might legitimately voted in this man Trump. They didn’t bother. They went immediately for Russian conspiracies.
One of the many reasons I deeply resent these people is because they made millions of people in the west ignore all claims of Russian propaganda. They made people more idiotic because they used false claims, never paid any price for that, never paid any price for their lies. In some cases they’re still pumping those lies around.
So there are plenty of people in the west, now again sadly of the left and the right, who say “I don’t want to hear about this Kremlin stuff because you threw it at us for years and it wasn’t true then and we don’t think it’s true now”.
No! Sometimes it’s true…sometimes it’s true. This is one of the consequences of lies and of pumping lies into society without any cost. You make society stupider and you make it more vulnerable.
We should have unending contempt for the people who have done this as well as trying to correct the people who have very sadly fallen into that trap.
Douglas Murray is a bit brutal in how he puts things, but overall I think he is correct.
I’m not saying that the Democrats understand the situation any better than “Russia bad…because Trump”. I understand the revulsion to the Ukraine virtue-signaling happening on the left. But you have to look past that.
The people who are advocating these non-interventionist policies in Ukraine because of “The Democrats” never seriously looked into the Ukraine conflict before Russia’s invasion. So we have a scenario where a lot of people are catching up on history in a world filled with Putin‘s propaganda. And lo and behold they arrive at the same conclusions as Russia would like them to believe. How convenient.
On the other hand, people with in-depth knowledge and understanding of Ukraine and its history with Russia that predates the invasion have a completely different understanding of the facts because they’ve lived those events in real-time and have a more nuanced understanding. That’s why Europeans as a whole get it a lot better than do Americans unfortunately.
I would compare this to the really poor reputation that Donald Trump has in Europe. Most Europeans do not understand Trump’s appeal to the Republican party and largely consider him a buffoon. That’s not surprising given:
The narratives that have been created about Trump by the media
The lack of a nuanced understanding of local American politics and the ongoing culture war
The further away you are from the source, the more gets lost in translation.
So now we get to the final important question which is why did Putin invade Ukraine?
It is pure ambition. As Putin nears 70, he wants to cement a legacy for himself, and adding the Ukrainian territory and people back into Russia would put him in the history books alongside Russia’s greatest leaders.
More accurately it would be termed imperialist ambition because what he covets most of all is to reassemble the Soviet Union.
It’s not like he’s been secretive about it. He actually wrote all of this down in an essay he penned last summer.
“The Russian leader uses the essay to reiterate his frequently voiced conviction that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people,” while blaming the current collapse in bilateral ties on foreign plots and anti-Russian conspiracies.
The Ukrainian people on the other hand want no part in this delusion and are willing to fight for their independence.
Again, why anybody would believe Putin’s stories about foreign plots and conspiracies is beyond me.
At this point, the final argument I always get is: “Fine, we all agree Putin is a bad guy, and Ukraine is in a bad situation, but why should we care about what’s happening on the other side of the planet?”
Earlier I stated a couple of geopolitical reasons related to the importance of respecting sovereign borders and not allowing abuses under the shield of a nuclear threat.
But I would think that caring about such things is what makes America such a great country…
Here you have Ukraine, a country that has charted its own path, against the will of its Russian neighbor. They are enduring unspeakable horrors as a result of wanting a Western/European future that entails freedom and democracy. The consequence of losing is for them to live under authoritarianism.
Isn’t this exactly the story of America?
Wasn’t it America that taught the world the virtue of standing for liberty and freedom?
If we turn our backs on Ukraine, then we no longer stand for any of that.
It’s okay to be cynical. But don’t give in to the progressive narrative that America has lost its moral virtue.
Don’t lose sight of what makes America a great country.
FAQ
Tucker is just anti-war, what’s wrong with that?
I have no issue with him being anti-war.
I do have a problem with him claiming that we are in a war or in danger of being in a war when that is not the case. A proxy war just means that we are supplying the Ukrainians. By this definition, Sweden is also in a proxy war. It’s semantic games.
I also have an issue with the isolationism he is pushing without acknowledging the underlying issues. It’s easy to say “no more wars”, but that’s a hippie trope from the 70s. This is a very complex issue with pretty vast ramifications.
So what would it mean for the US to become isolationist?
There are no direct threats to the mainland and we already have nuclear deterrence. If the US stops projecting power across the world, then why have such an army?
It sounds a hell of a lot like what the progressive left has been pushing forever which is probably why we’ve not adopted such an extreme policy has never been adopted.
Forget about American isolationism in the past because we are living in a completely different world. An economically integrated world that is vastly more complex than it was 100 years ago when we tried that policy.
The world we live in today has largely been shaped by post WW2 American hegemony. It is American power that has ensured the global stability which has enabled the largest decrease in extreme poverty in world history. It’s not a coincidence.
From this point of view, the US has been the greatest force for good in human history.
Now imagine what happens if the US exited the world stage. There would then be an enormous power vacuum which would quickly be filled by countries like Russia, China, and Iran who have regional and global expansionist ambitions.
The current Russia-Ukraine war is a direct result of American weakness. Putin didn’t do this under Trump. He took Crimea under Obama and invaded Ukraine under Biden.
Trump showed that there is a blueprint whereby you can project strength while also avoiding unnecessary wars.
Doesn’t Russia deserve to have its spheres of influence? Why is the US interfering in their backyard?
Spheres of influence have not been a thing since the end of the cold war. The only exception is Russia which keeps insisting that its sphere of influence must be respected.
The Ukrainian people strongly disagree. They don’t want to be under Russia’s sphere of influence. And honestly, why should they?
This is an outdated model of international affairs which robs sovereign countries of agency in determining their future path.
What about John Mearsheimer and his predictions about Ukraine?
I would argue that all Mearsheimer does is repeat the same talking points as Putin.
Putin basically says “this is how I see things and if you don’t agree with me then I will crush Ukraine”.
Then Mearsheimer comes out and says that Ukraine will be crushed unless we listen to what Putin wants.
Well, what if we disagree with Putin and think he’s full of shit? What if the Ukrainian people have the right to decide their own future and Putin doesn’t get to have a say in what that is.
I understand that many people saw him as some guru because he predicted that Russia would invade Ukraine. Good for him, but all he’s done is repeat Putin’s narrative word for word.
What about the Bio-labs?
I was curious just like everybody else.
I did look into it. There’s nothing there.
It’s too bad because it would have made for some great content, but there’s nothing to see.
Yes, there are US labs there doing research. It’s part of a larger US program that extends outside of just Ukraine. They are not making bioweapons.
This has been part of a Russian disinformation campaign run since at least 2015.
You would think that if this were a real threat, Russia would have captured one of these labs to expose the truth.
What happened instead? The story quickly disappeared.
Isn’t Putin fighting for traditional conservative values and the Christian faith?
Russia is about as religious as Belgium and the Netherlands…which means not very.
And I’m not sure that invading your neighbor and slaughtering tens of thousands of civilians is a very Christian thing to do by Putin.
Yes, Russian society is more conservative than the west but it is the same way in all of Eastern Europe. There is nothing special about Putin in this sense.
Putin has tried to craft this persona but it has nothing to do with reality.
Final Final Thought!
I’m not sure that I have changed any minds with this.
But I do hope I’ve given you another perspective to consider.
What I hope that people would take away from this is that the story here is not the West vs Russia. That is a flat-out falsehood necessary for Putin to frame this war so that it is palatable for Russians.
Blaming the West as always being wrong and evil is a progressive tactic…don’t do that.
Don’t let partisanship blind you to the fact that this is about Ukraine and the Ukrainian people.
The left needlessly turned Covid-19 into a partisan issue. I hope the right doesn’t repeat the same mistake and make Russia-Ukraine partisan.
Someone sold you the lie that Ukraine is near 100% united, and it penetrates your whole narrative.
Ukraine was always very different in its eastern and western parts. Over the past 30 years the country has been moving toward values of the western Ukraine, largely due heavy anti-Russian bias in education. So, if you only talk to people under 30 present on social media sites, who chose to stay in Ukraine, I can see how one can come away with the impression that there's a unanimous opposition to Russia. Tons of people left even before the war. Many are in Russia, but a lot are also in Europe.
But there are still tons of people in eastern Ukraine over the age of 30-40 who are hoping that Russia takes over, tons of people in the Donbass that volunteered to fight since 2014, etc.
During the Euromaidan, the young people in Kiev were overwhelmingly against Yanukovich, but it doesn't make what happened one bit democratic. Whether U.S. helped that particular violent overthrowing of the government is really not that relevant.
Dismissing that NATO is a threat to Russia is also quite a claim. When USA renamed the Department of War to DoD, it did not suddenly became a peace-keeping organization. Just because Russia's nukes are enough of a deterrent today, doesn't mean they will be tomorrow. Russia has a recent painful history of Europeans invading by land. Dismissing it just hurts your own credibility.
I could go on. I think Tucker's take is a lot closer to a well-reasoned position that this post.
Ukraine is no modern democracy that Russian citizens want for themselves. It is correctly perceived in Russia as a cesspit of corruption that makes Russian oligarchs look like angels of mercy. Ukranians themselves are so fed up of it that they want to join the EU because they have no hope on their own politicians.
What sort of civilised country outlaws an entire language? A country in which minorities Russians, Hungarians, etc are treated as second class citizens. Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk had legitimate referenda on independence and deserve the right to be independent of their Ukronationalist tormentors.