Dave Smith Breaks Down the Reasons Russia Invaded Ukraine

Dude, this thing with Russia is just like the craziest thing in the world. Like, the idea that we're actually flirting with a nuclear conflict with Russia is the most important priority in the history of humanity, is that America and Russia do not go to war. There's nothing more important than that. That's it. We'll destroy the human species if we do this. And yet, there's this war right on Russia's border and there's no effort to negotiate going on. There's like no effort. In fact, from very solid reporting that actually America through Boris Johnson told Ukraine not to negotiate with Russia at the very beginning of the war, when they had a deal worked out. They had a deal worked out that's been reported in multiple sources, that they had a deal worked out and the deal was basically that Vladimir Putin would pull back his troops and leave Ukraine under the condition, the very simple conditions, that Ukraine guaranteed autonomy for the Donbass region and agreed to never join NATO. And that was a deal. Like, okay, I'm not saying everyone thinks that's the perfect deal, but it's better than what we got right now. It's better than nuclear war. And right now, just the other day, dude, the official narrative on this whole war, it's just like it makes no sense. Again, like I said, remember, the same people who are pushing this are the ones who were telling you Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and stuff, but the official narrative, Joe, is basically that, okay, so Vladimir Putin is a madman, a crazy war criminal, who's hellbent on reforming the Soviet Union, and this is a real threat that he could do this, but also he's getting humiliated in this war in Ukraine. It's like he's losing the poorest country in Europe, and he's just getting humiliated in beat back, but he's still a real threat to take over all of Europe. And he's a complete madman, by the way, Joe. But when he says he's going to use nuclear weapons, don't listen to that. He'd never actually do that, even though he's a complete madman. And as everyone says, this war, the word they use over and over and over again, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, all of them, unprovoked. Vladimir Putin led an unprovoked war in Ukraine. But then, it's just like with Osama bin Laden, what they did with him then, don't listen to him. Whatever you do, don't listen to what he's actually saying, because none of that's his motivations. His motivations are what we tell you. Osama bin Laden hates us because we're free. And then Ron Paul would just go like, yeah, but that's not what he's saying at all. Like, Osama bin Laden was so clear about why he hated America. And then he's like, look, I hate you because you murder innocent civilians in the Muslim world, you prop up brutal dictators in the Muslim world, you prop up Israel, who mistreats the Palestinian people, and you have your bases in our holy land in the Arabian Peninsula. And then they're like, no, he hates us because we're free. He didn't mention anything about freedom there. And then if you say that, they're like, well, are you defending Osama bin Laden? And you're like, no, I'm just saying listen to your enemies. There's a reason why he hates us. And if you listen to Vladimir Putin and what he's saying, I mean, look, he's wrong for invading Ukraine. And I mean, you know me, Joe, I'm the most anti-war fucking person there is. And there's no excuse for that. Like, tens of thousands of people have died. It's horrible. And a lot of them are soldiers, but a lot of them are civilians. But to say he was unprovoked is like insane. It's just only people who know nothing about the history of this conflict would say there was no provocation. Did you see the conversation that Roger Waters had with that CNN guy? Yeah, because Roger Waters was awesome on that. Because he knows what he's talking about, dude. And he's right about all of that shit. Look, this is what he was saying. And he's absolutely right. It's at the promise when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. And this was verbally promised and put in writing, was that NATO would not expand one inch to the east. And NATO at that point, the line then was through Germany, right? Like, the western half of Germany was in the west, and the eastern half was with the Soviet Union. And they were like, we'll let all of these nations secede, and the Soviet Union will collapse, and we're giving up on communism. It's one of the greatest things that ever happened. And the deal was, OK, you do that, then we won't move NATO. We won't move our military alliance into your area. That used to be your realm of influence. And every single president since then has moved NATO east, to the point that NATO is now on Russia's border. And in Ukraine, even though they didn't officially join NATO, there was always talk of it. Kamala Harris, right before the start of the war, said we're looking to put Ukraine into NATO. And they put under George W. Bush, they put in Poland these dual-use rocket launchers. There's a big complaint that Vladimir Putin has, that he's like, these can be used to get nukes here in a matter of minutes. Like, this is like a threat to us that we cannot tolerate. Then, in 2014, there was a coup in Ukraine that was completely led by the west. I don't know if you've ever heard, but like, I think I sent you actually once the tape of Gideon Rose, who was the editor for Foreign Affairs Magazine on the old Stephen Colbert Report show, back when Colbert was hilarious. And he was just openly bragging about what the game is here. And then he was like, well, Ukraine is kind of like the Robin to Russia's Batman. And so our job is to steal Robin away from Batman and make him come over here and join us. And aha, Vladimir Putin's so stupid that he won't do anything. And then Colbert's in his old character. So he's like, well, shouldn't Obama be spiking the football and saying, yeah, in your face, Putin? And Gideon Rose is like, well, no, no, because then Putin might invade Ukraine. So we wouldn't want to spike the ball. But there's these. Oh, yeah. Here it is. Let's play it. Let's play it. Go from the beginning. Yeah, play it from the beginning. There. There's the magazine, Foreign Affairs. Now, Gideon, help me out here. We've got a battle. The Ukraine, some of them want to go into the EU, the European Union. And some of them want to stay with Russia. If the Ukraine's not in Europe right now, what continent is it on? Well, it's part of Eurasia, but it's part of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet bloc. It's basically Robin to Russia's Batman. And the challenge here is to try to attract it to the west to get it to flip sides. So the rebels in the streets, what are they fighting for? They're fighting for a better future. Countries have a development. That sounds like a political speech. No, but it's actually true. Countries have to develop over time. And Ukraine, basically, after the end of the Soviet Union, faced two tracks. It could stay a sort of stagnant, corrupt, authoritarian country tied to Russia. Or it could essentially join the west. It could modernize, liberalize, become a democracy. At the last minute, when it looked like it was going to trade up from its sort of abusive relationship with its boyfriend from the hood to a nice, yuppie. You're not loading these choices in any way whatsoever. It's actually true. When it looked like it was going to trade up to a better environment, at the last minute, Putin offered a bribe. How much? $15 billion. That's a lot of cash, man. It's a lot of cash. And the president, who himself was tied to the old elites and the eastern part of the country with ties to Russia, decided to back off the change and go join Russia. Do you know how many pirate themed restaurants you can buy with $15 billion? The problem was the western parts of the country and the younger parts of the country and the more modern liberal parts of the country basically knew that they had no future being Russia's vassal. And so they took to the streets. Is America taking sides in this in any way? If these people, the rebels are winning right now, right? Yes, just recently. Why isn't Obama spiking the ball in the end zone and calling Putin and saying, hey, you might have won the medal count, but we won the country count. Biah! It's actually a very good question. And the answer is that we don't want Russia to intervene and kick over the table like a game of risk and take Ukraine back. Would they do that? Could he send in troops? Yes, he could. So we are choosing... Does Ukraine have any troops of their own? Would they fight back? Yes, but we don't want this to escalate and we don't want Russia to crack down. So we want to basically distract Russia. Oh, look, you have the highest medal count. Oh, you did really well. And focus on the Olympics. There's a shiny object. We'll just take an entire country away from you. Holy shit. That's a huge... Isn't that funny? There's a power vacuum right now. There's a power vacuum. The opposition is all together, which it's easy to agree on getting rid of the bad old regime and much harder to create a stable country in which everybody compromises and moves forward. They need a strong leader to move the country forward. Do you know who's always good at a moment like that? Vladimir Putin. Do you think he might volunteer to come in and help Ukraine find its way? The reason we don't want... We don't want Putin to get involved in this. And so we are basically... We want to try and involve him in this decision so that he allows Ukraine to go. We actually want to not... We want to say, we want a non-exclusive relationship with Ukraine. You can have a relationship with it too. You're the only one making this into a girlfriend-boyfriend relationship. Ukraine is basically choosing its future between two completely different courses of action. And we're trying to blur that choice so the old boyfriend doesn't get too upset when it makes the right choice. Jesus Christ. So it's just all these George Soros funded NGOs were funding the militias on the ground who were overthrowing the government. And then there's a tape of Victoria Newland who was at the State Department at the time, one of the top people at the State Department. And she was basically talking about who would be the new government that took over who America didn't want in, who we did want in the new government. So it's not... What happened basically was, as Gideon Rose was even saying, the Ukrainian government was kind of siding with Russia, or at least a lot more pro-Russia. And then we overthrew that government and installed a pro-America government. And this to Putin, he had said over and over again, was a huge red line for him. Like Ukraine was the big line. And you could look, imagine, take it from our point of view, if like Russia was coming over here and overthrowing the pro-America government in Montreal and installing a pro-Russia government there. Then, you know, like this would be seen as, would you call that an unprovoked attack? You know, if we were to go in there and then go overthrow that government. So again, I'm not justifying what he's doing, but... And then the other thing to this, right? That's important ad is like you remember, the two big things that it's so weird knowing, like at least in the larger conversation, I don't see anyone connecting these things, is that there's two things like involving Ukraine, that were very big, that happened very recently in American history, that very much connect to this war. And one is that, our last president was impeached over a thing with Ukraine. And like, what was that? And then the other thing is, the current president's son was getting paid millions of dollars from a company, Burisma in Ukraine. And these things all connect. Basically what happened was, after the 2014 coup, this company Burisma, they were, and by the way, Matt Taibbi's done incredible reporting on this, I highly recommend everyone read his stuff, his sub-stacks, incredible. Yeah, he's fantastic. Unbelievable. But so basically, Burisma was in bed with the old government that had allied with Russia. And so when this government was overthrown, they were very worried, because they were like, oh, we were in bed with the old government, and now there's this new government who's in there. And so instead of bribing the new government, they just went right to the source and bribed the son of the sitting vice president, Joe Biden, when he was vice president, was in charge of Ukraine policy. Oh my God. So they just went, that was why they put him there. And then they put some other like CIA guy or something like that on their board. They're just paying him money to just be like, hey, keep us in with you. And then Trump was telling them to investigate all of this shit. He got on the phone with them and was like, I want to investigate everything that was going on with Joe and Hunter Biden in Ukraine. And Donald Trump did. He got into an area that it was, there's an argument it was not okay what he was doing, because he was kind of going like, maybe you don't get these weapons that I was gonna send in, unless you go investigate them. And this was his political opponent. So it was a little bit of a shady thing. But then the other story about that is that ultimately Trump caved, and he sent in the weapons to Ukraine. So now not only did Obama overthrow the regime, when Joe Biden was the point man, Joe Biden was running Ukraine policy, Obama leads this coup, overthrows that government and puts in a pro-Western government. Then Trump comes in, sends in a whole bunch of weapons to this new government that Obama wouldn't even send in, because he was concerned it would provoke Russia. And then the next president is Joe Biden, the last guy who was the point man on Ukraine, who was there when this coup happened. Then he comes back in. This is all like the context that led to Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine. So again, I'm not saying, the other little thing I should mention there too, is that that Donbass region on the eastern portion of Ukraine is like majority ethnic Russians. And they got really pissed off when the new government came in in 2014, and they were basically warring with the Kiev western portion of Ukraine since then. And they had a referendum in 2015 and voted overwhelmingly that they wanted to be a part of Russia. And Vladimir Putin didn't take them, but they said they voted that they wanted to be a part of Russia, not a part of Ukraine. So it's just a very complicated mess. And it's the same thing with like the war on terrorism. If you're gonna tell this story of like what led to this, to understand where to go from here, the story has to include that America was intervening in the middle East for decades before 9-11. The story can't just start at 9-11, you know what I mean? And so I guess the biggest part is what I said before that. The concern of all of us should be just that there's no nuclear conflict between America and Russia, which seems like we're like dangerously close to.