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Hello, and welcome to the listeners of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

We are today going to look at Russia broadly, its 20th century experience, so the Soviet Union, Stalin, but then also modern, the Ukraine, what's going on in the Ukraine today and Putin.

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Welcome back, and we're happy everybody has joined us.

How are you doing today, Victor?

Very good.

Very well, I should say.

Great.

Well, I would like to remind your listeners that you are the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

This week, I would like to look at Russia, Russia as it was as the Soviet Union and in the 20th century, and then get to to what's going on currently in the Ukraine.

And then Putin, I know that we often cast a character, and I hope maybe we can look a little bit at how to cast Putin's character, which has been cast by many people in many ways, and we can get to that.

But if you don't mind, can we start with the historical Russia, the not way back, but the 20th century Russia, and maybe some reflections on you as it turned from the old regime to the Soviet Union.

There's a very famous poet, Anna Akhmatova, and she's often used to illustrate the transformation because her life really changed and her poetry really changed after the Soviet Union became the Soviet Union.

And I have a couple of quotes from her.

I just want to read one I thought was really interesting because I think it'd be interesting to talk a little bit about Dostoevsky that she said about Dostoevsky, and it was relevant to the Soviet era as well.

She said, Dostoevsky knew a lot, but not everything.

He, for instance, thought that if you kill a human, you'll turn into Raskyn Nikov.

But we know now that one can kill five, ten, 100 people.

and go to the theater in the evening.

And that was a comment made about, obviously, Stalin's regime and how she got away with that.

I don't really know, probably didn't get away with it till later.

And she often talked about how hard it was to

be a poet in the Soviet Union and that you couldn't write poetry for yourself.

She and her contemporaries, in fact, practiced poetic verse by memorizing it rather than writing it down because it was far too dangerous to write it down.

So she's always a great illustration of just the damage done in a generation or so to a country and a culture, like a complete transformation of the culture.

And I know I have packed in there a lot for you, but we'd like to hear from you on the Stalinist regime and how it changed the life of the intelligentsia.

I think we can start with the premise that Russia didn't have to go communist.

In the October Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks were the minority.

Remember that Lenin had been put on a car into Russia from the Germans.

And so the collapse of the Tsarist armies, essentially in 1917,

was the catalyst.

And they were the ones that said they would get out of the war and on abreast Latovics.

People forget that the communists, the first thing they did,

I think that treaty was settled in February of 1918.

They gave over a million square miles to the Central Powers and, what, 55 million people.

And so that was a very important thing in the 20th century because that gave the Bolsheviks peace.

They had a great hatred for the Western democracies and it hurt the Western democracies because

Ludendorff and Hindenburg transferred about 500,000 men to the Western Front.

Had they not done that and just let the Russians control the land that was ceded to them or not take it over and taken the whole Eastern Army of a million and a half.

They might have won World War I before the Americans arrived in numbers, but they were trying to occupy a lot of Russia.

That's very important because that made a profound impression on Hitler that Germany in World War I had defeated Russia and they'd gotten almost to St.

Petersburg.

And they had never got more than 80 or 90 miles into France and Belgium.

And so in his calculation, the next war would be the French indomitable army and the British, and the Russians would be a cakewalk.

And that, you know, how that ended.

The other thing is that once the communists took control, they couldn't have done it by themselves.

I mean, they had the peasants and

the serfs, but we should remember that there were people in Russia, reformers, who wanted a constitutional monarchy, maybe something like Britain's where the Tsar would remain, but in a constitutional fashion.

But a lot of the people who supported

the Bolsheviks were the aristocratic classes, either out of virtue signaling or they thought, these guys are going to win someday.

We want to be on the right side.

They were mostly, all their estates were confiscated.

They were killed and driven off.

The whole mess didn't end to the early 20s when Kerensky and everybody fled.

But there was an alternative to czarist authoritarianism that didn't have to include the Bolsheviks.

Social Nitsyn's really good on that.

But it was the Bolsheviks after all was said and done.

And what is it that made all of that so attractive there?

I mean, I know.

Yeah, they have to realize that when you get into these revolutions, there's always going to be a group like the Jacobins in the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror, and they were stopped.

but they were stopped, you know, almost like a coup where they executed the Robespierre brothers.

And the Bolsheviks were not stopped.

But these elements were willing to kill people.

They're willing to do anything.

And they always become the, the further left they go, they're the only authentic, they claim they're the only authentic voice of the people.

So yesterday's revolutionary is today's counter-revolutionary.

And they were able to say that the constitutional monarchists, the socialists, all of these were sellouts, just like the Jacobins did.

in 1793.

And the more radical groups of people, even if they're small and they're willing to decapitate the state or go after people, assassinate, do anything.

And you can see that in this revolutionary fervor that we're in, Antifa has no public support, none.

BLM's support is way down.

It's down to a minority of the population support BLM.

And yet they continue to get, in the case of BLM, corporate handouts.

Antifa is...

you know, riots with impunity because people know they're capable of doing anything.

And I mean that seriously when they, on their official website, you know, lament Juicy Smollett's conviction and they believe that he's innocent and it's racist.

So that was part of the attraction.

They were extremist

and there were people within the czarist landscape that were willing to support them and they got them out of World War I.

And then most of the communist problems that occurred after that in the 20s and early 30s, they had lost public support because of the Ukrainian confiscation, the war on the kulaks, the show trials, the liquidation of the officer corps in 36.

And there was a lot of people who really believe, and the Comintern had not done much.

A lot of people were angry about them on the left for their conduct in the Spanish Civil War.

A lot of people who felt it wasn't foreordained that communism would survive.

I remember Almarich, his name was 19, he wrote a book, and I read it in college, Almarich, I think his name was, Will the Soviet Union, will Russia, will the Soviet Union survive until 1984?

And he goes through the inherent instability of the origins and then contemporary Russia.

The system doesn't work.

It had to kill vast numbers of people.

Maybe.

20, 30 million were killed from the period that Lenin took control to World War II.

And then to stop the German army, they lost 11 million soldiers and another 10 to 15 million civilians.

And so it was a death machine.

But it's important to see that history of what communism did to Russia.

And it also gives you a framework about Putin's aggressions right now.

I mean, no one is stronger in his opposition to Putin than I am.

But

when you look at Ukraine, it wanted to be independent.

But on the other hand, In World War II, it was the scene at the Donets Basin and outside of Kiev of the largest single encirclement military history.

Over 700,000 Russians were either killed or taken prisoner, which meant they were killed, in the largest German encirclement of the war.

And then von Monstein, he obliterated Sevastopol to take Crimea.

Then another 150,000 Russians were slaughtered.

So when you look at Putin and you want to know why would anybody support that thug who's trying to appropriate former Soviet republics who were brought in under coercion.

The answer is that there's a lot of Russian-speaking peoples in those areas, but in Russia that feel that in World War II,

that cost Russia a lot of blood.

And it's their internal affairs that we don't know anything about.

So when you look at cable news, right-wing, left-wing news, and everybody's saying we've got to go to war with Putin essentially if he goes into Ukraine or Crimea or whatever, we have to deter him, but they don't know any of the history of those countries and how barbaric and violent those wars have been.

And I just think, you know, we went from 260 million people that were enslaved by the Russian Empire down to about 145 million Russian, mostly Russian speakers now, primary language.

So it's a shadow of its former self.

But what Putin is trying to do is in the style of Peter the Great in the 18th century, or the Leninists that wanted to recapture the land they had to give up, or either liberate or give up to the central powers to obtain power, Poland.

They hated Poland, which was created by the Versailles Treaty, which they were not a part of, or the effort to recalibrate or reform the Soviet Union.

It's this idea that they're the central power in the Eastern European Asia landmass and they have certain prerogatives and we don't really know what we're doing.

Of course, they wouldn't exist today.

The Soviet Union would have never lasted after 1941 had the United States and Britain not supplied 25% of its material needs, and not just its material needs, but material needs that were precisely calibrated to free up Russian industry to do what it could only do and do best: heavy industrial production of massive guns, tanks, rockets, but not radios, rubber ponchos, food, ZK rations, truck, domestic trucks, all of that, we supplied them.

Yeah.

And we created the Cold War, not that there were viable alternatives to it, by using Russia to kill two out of every three Germans.

Yeah.

Did they ever think of not supporting?

the Soviet Union?

Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely.

People forget that if you read the letters of a lot of the Tories in the 1930s Britain, people like Stanley Baldwin or Neville Chamberlain, the people that surrounded themselves with them, or if you look at people in the United States that were isolationists, like Charles Lindbergh, Father Kauflin, the really nutty isolationists, what they were all saying was

that

Nazi Germany performs a valuable shield or buffer from global communism.

In other words, just as the Soviet Union was hoping that Hitler would attack the West and they would fight it out under the divisions of the Molotov-Fribentrov Non-Aggression Pact of 1939, so the Allies were thinking the same thing.

Maybe Hitler will attack Russia and not attack France, and then the Nazis will finally rid the world of communism.

but they'll be so weak in doing it that they'll leave us alone.

And the Soviets have said, well, maybe Hitler will go west and he'll wipe out the liberal democracies and weaken himself.

And Hitler had the same type of calculation.

So there were a lot of people in the West who were not strong in their opposition to Hitler as they should have been because they felt that he would be a valuable break or check on Russian expansion westward.

And they really fell for some of the things he was saying.

They hadn't read Mount Mein Kamp, and they were falling from some of the things out of Goebbels' propaganda office and say 35, 34, 36 that said he had no territorial ambitions other than reclaiming stolen land under the Versailles Treaty or he wanted the British Empire to stay in power.

And

he thought they were civilizing mission and they were taking care of people like the Indians and Asians that needed colonialism for their own good.

So he had this propaganda that had fooled a lot of British aristocrats, as you saw in that movie and the novel, Remains of a Day, and also in the United States.

But we didn't have, you know, George Patton basically said, and he got him relieved for saying that we went to World War II to keep Eastern Europeans, Poles and Czechs and Hungarians, they have their own elections, and Hitler had absorbed them basically.

And then we ended World War II by ensuring that they would be absorbed and not have elections, just as it started, but only this time by the Soviets.

so that was a period of mass depression after world war ii and then with the fall of china who lost china and then the rise of this exile group in taiwan and 1956 hungarian revolution that failed there was this idea in america that after winning world war ii and keeping Russia in the war, there was no gratitude from them.

And then all of a sudden, we were told they wouldn't get the atomic and then the hydrogen bomb for years.

And suddenly, just a few years after we had it, they had it and they had more of them than we did.

And in the Korean War, we had a terrible time where the North Koreans were using Russian equipment.

MiGs were pretty good, or if not better, until we got the F-86.

They still had upgraded versions of T-34s that were superior to upgraded Shermans.

You know, and they were ahead of us in the space race.

So there was this idea that, wow, what happened?

We won World War II.

We helped these people.

They hate us now.

They've taken over China.

There's communism all throughout the Arab world, all throughout Latin America, through Africa, through Asia, Vietnam, Indochina.

And they're ahead of us in every aspect.

And that was sort of the background of the McCarthy period.

where people say, well, they couldn't have done it if it hadn't been for people like Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, who gave them the secrets for nuclear weapons or who, in the case of Alger Hiss, plotted as early as World War II to make sure that the Soviets had diplomatic knowledge of what our strategies were.

And then we think it was that?

That played a role, but I don't think it was the primary.

Well, because if we take the premise even from Akhmatova that it was a culturally stagnant society, the Soviet Union, it doesn't seem like you would get such dynamism in their technology, etc.

Remember it.

It devoured Eastern Europe and melted those countries dry.

The Soviets,

you know, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Romania, Hungaria, Czechoslovakia, and had a little bit more trouble with Yugoslavia.

That was one thing.

And the people had a standard of living that was pathetic.

And then it was kind of similar today how we have such a higher standard of living than Russia does and yet Russia spends not as much as we do but a lot of them on

defense but American standard of living just zoomed in the 1950s and people were really sick of war 12 million people had been the military we lost almost 450,000 again

and people were saying

Wow, World War I, we went all the way over there, lost 118,000 people.

And guess what?

They were back at it again in 1939.

We went back over there, and guess what?

Our

so-called allies are back at it again.

And now, the Europeans, we've had to bail them out twice.

Now, we're going to have to be there in NATO.

So, there was a lot of anger.

That was Robert Taft in the 1940s and 50s isolationist movement.

Again, very sophisticated movement.

But people thought, how could this happen to us?

And, you know, there's all these novelists, that great novel, The Bridges of Tokyo Re, and made it into a movie with Bill Holden.

And at the end, when he gets killed, you know, it's sort of what is a lawyer doing?

I think he was from Denver with the Bill Holden and married to Grace Kelly, had a beautiful family.

He was a lawyer, and they recalled him.

And he's in Korea, and he's in some ditch, going to be killed by a bunch of North Korean Red Army supply peasants.

And he goes, What the hell am I doing over here?

I fought in World War II.

It's kind of reminded me of my dad when he flew on 40 missions on a B-29 as a Central Fire Control Gunner.

And there was this pilot named Allenby.

And he was, I've mentioned him before, very heavy-set guy.

He was a junk collector.

I don't mean a junk collector in the bad sense, but he was kind of a collector.

And he had a certain, he was up in Oregon.

I don't know if it was Bend, Oregon, maybe it was.

But he would come down maybe every four or five years when I was a little kid.

This would be in the late 50s, early 60s.

And he was very obscure.

And my dad pointed to him one day when we were here.

He said,

this man is here again with his junk truck.

And my dad said, line up.

That man had 16 B-29s in his squadron.

And we were one of two that survived.

That man knew how to fly a B-29 better than anybody in the 20th Air Force.

And he would gun those RPMs up to 5,000, take off from Tenyon, and we never hit the ocean.

And then he flew us, you know, nine hours in the middle of the night and nine hours back and he did that 40 times.

And then he went home and guess what?

He went back and flew another 60 missions over Korea when we did not have air, you know, we didn't have air superiority until the F-86.

And so I thought to myself, what is that guy doing in the Cold War?

Why would a man

go over there and risk his life?

50, 60 times in a B-29 after doing it in World War II when he should have been killed.

Because when you look at the 2% failure rate on those missions and you start going up to 40 missions, if you want to look at the percentage in a long-term fashion, it's 80%.

You're not going to make it.

And then go back and repeat that in Korea, and yet they did it.

And my mom would always say, why does that wonderful Mr.

Allen?

Do you have to go back?

Why do you have to go back and do that?

Not that they were against the Korean War, Harry Truman.

They were big Harry Truman fans, but it was the idea that in the Cold War, something had gone terribly wrong.

We had disarmed ourselves.

We had a great 50s lifestyle.

And all of a sudden, everybody in the world is saying, help us.

We're going to be overrun.

The communists are taking over.

If they take Korea, they'll be in Tokyo within a year.

Yeah.

You know, you just mentioned that, you know, they had a great 50s lifestyle.

And I think in the United States, our lifestyles have become fairly nice.

And so people, you know, even looking at modern events sort of think, well, you know, I'll just sit it out and it will blow over.

But as you were talking about the Russian Revolution, you seem to suggest that you think the things change in the moment more so than they are changing over some very long sort of historical foundations that we go way back.

That the moment is absolutely crucial, that things don't have to go as badly as they did in Russia during the Russian Revolution.

But the moment made the difference.

Just look at right now very quickly.

Look at right now.

After the George Floyd death, thousands of liberal professors and K-12 teachers who used to rail, correctly so, about administrative bloat.

These people don't teach.

They have EDDs.

They contribute nothing to education.

I don't want to insult our listeners who are EDDs, but there is something to that stereotype.

And then suddenly, we came up with a diversity, equity, and inclusion czars, and we hired them all over higher academia, K through 12, and the corporate world.

And nobody said a word.

All the people who complain now about administrative bloat have thousands of these peoples in schools and universities and corporations.

And what are they doing?

They're just monitoring people like Komassar.

Nobody said a word.

Nobody said a word when the transgender thing went way beyond tolerance for people of ambiguous sexual identification that we had known as transsexuals before.

And suddenly

we've destroyed women's sports.

We have this athlete who wins all of these awards and he's biologically a man.

Nobody dares say anything.

So when you don't speak out or you look at your computer and you say, that's absurd.

Nobody believe that.

Come on.

It'll go over.

And all of a sudden you see after that the English language now has to capitalize black, B.

And there's no, is it because it's a proper noun like white, white's not capitalized, brown, no.

And that is something.

And then all of a sudden, you can't question certain things.

You can't question the fact, I've had two vaccinations.

I got COVID after them.

And I'm a big believer of as soon as my antibodies go down, I'll get a booster.

But this idea that Joe Biden and everybody say, if you have a vaccination, you cannot get COVID.

I can tell tell you, you can get COVID.

I did it.

And so, why don't they just say,

if you have a vaccination,

the downside of side effects, which are many, I think 60%

report with the Moderna booster or the Moderna second shot, fever, achiness, unpleasantness for a day or two, it is worth that.

It does not mean you will not be infected or you cannot pass it on.

It means that you have a greater likelihood of not being hospitalized or getting very sick.

Why not just say that?

And people should demand that they say that.

Instead, they said, oh,

you get Joe Biden, if you get vaccinated, you're in good shape.

You won't get it.

And that's not true.

Kevin Kleinsmith, yes, you altered a document.

You were an FBI lawyer.

You forged essentially a FISA court warrant.

And what happened to you?

They can't even disbar you in Washington, D.C.

That's intolerable.

It's intolerable that you, John Brennan, lied under oath twice and smirked about it.

You, James Clapper, and you, Andrew McCabe, and you likely, James Comey, when you said you couldn't remember 245 times.

But when we don't speak out, you end up with the absurdities of Hillary Clinton now lecturing everybody about the dangers of trying to warp an election.

This is a woman who spent a considerable amount of money to hide her hiring of Christopher Steele through what, the DMC, Perkins-Coey,

Fusion GPS, to what, subvert subvert an election campaign, a transition and a presidency.

And she's lecturing us on ethics because we don't speak out and we don't get angry.

And so

things aren't necessarily going to just go back to the way they were.

No, they're not.

The leftists today are not Democrats.

They're not Democrats.

The people controlling the Democratic Party.

Not that Democrats were always sober and judicious people, but there were Democrats like JFK and Terry Truman and some of the Cold War hawks, elements once in a while of Bill Clinton, who was the last vestige of that party, but they don't exist anymore.

They've been hijacked by Jacobin.

And these people

are angry and they're smug and they hate the idea of the United States and all their personal frustrations in their own lives that their geniuses are not appreciated or they didn't succeed because of sexism or racism or some ism.

All of these people, they don't like America.

They don't like the middle classes.

And they're very dangerous people.

And the only way you can fight them is to speak out and to demand that you be heard and you protect the Bill of Rights.

They don't like the Bill of Rights.

And so.

I do like.

When you go around today, there's a lot of people who just don't wear masks.

And it just is like a,

I guess it's somewhat passive, but it's a very funny protest.

Once again, I mean, it makes common sense that if you are sneezing, if you have a mask, it'll knock some of the pores off someone else.

And there's so much data out there that's ambiguous.

You can go on the internet tomorrow and find a peer-reviewed article that will say masks have no utility.

And then you'll find another one that said they have some utility, but not at the cost of, you know, social disruption and the

inability to see a person's face and maybe even some evidence that it can cause greater health problems.

And then you can find some that say, no, no, they work.

They work.

But the point is nobody expresses that ambiguity because they don't trust the American people or they have an agenda that we're going to tell you how.

to behave and what to do and we're going to find you and do this to you because otherwise you would not like us because we are not democratic people.

We say we are, but we're not.

That's something that also we should learn from what happened in Russia, the rhetoric about who was the enemy of the people.

If you were a general in 1937, you were a betrayer of the revolution.

If you were once in a while joking about Stalin, then you were a class enemy.

Or in the Ukraine, if you were just a person that gave all of the Soviet Commissars all the wheat they needed, but you kept a little bread and cheese or a storage section in your shed, then you were an enemy of the people.

And when you start seeing that when you speak out, that's hate speech.

No, no, that's hate speech.

You can't say that.

That's hate speech.

Or when you say, you know, there's an ambiguity about the efficacy of vaccines, you're a vaccination, a no-vaxxer.

Or when you say, you know,

if I look at periods in history where there's been radical warming and cooling of the planet, and I look at some of the data, it does seem to be warming somewhat, but I don't know if the data supports that the Industrial Revolution is the cause of a rapid heating.

And even if it were, we're not sure of the effects of it, at least to the effect that we would shut down the economy, then you're a climate denialist.

And so

that's how they stifle speech because they cannot support their arguments.

And you can see it with Joe Biden, this idea that Joe Biden, oh, I'm Uncle Joe, I'm a sweet old guy, I was an old moderate in the Senate, lying like Kennedy, lying in the Senate.

That was a complete myth.

Joe Biden was always mean-spirited.

As we've said before, he had a history of racial expletives.

He was intolerant.

He was an egomaniac.

He was mediocre.

He had a history of plagiarism, sexual harassment, forging or lying about his own dossier or CV.

And now,

given the power that he has and the loss of his full cognitive powers,

he's a very dangerous person when he gets on there and he starts slurring and talking incomprehensibly.

But when he, moments of clarity, when you hear what he wants to do, he says things, you know, a lot of people are going to die this winter.

You know, well, I thought you told us that anybody who was president when 250,000, I think that was in August of last year, died, then he was responsible and shouldn't be president.

But we've had almost 400,000 die under his tenure.

I don't blame him for it, but according to his own logic, he should be blamed for it,

as he did to others.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, we've gotten far away, but you've done a lot just in this last to say that it's very important that when you've got revolutionary times, things that people are doing are going to make revolutionary changes in some fashion.

And so that's what we're seeing.

And it's very important not to realize that you're not going to wake up tomorrow and it's going to be back to all the old ways.

Oh, no.

And I think people have to realize it's incremental, but it's sudden, insidiously.

So when you're in the 70s and all of a sudden this thing called affirmative action takes over that we can let people in on the basis of their race to universities or hiring,

it'll be good discrimination or good racism.

Or all of a sudden you can pick your roommate.

by race or all of a sudden you can have a theme house, theme house.

Notice that euphemism, theme house.

How about race-aliched selective house?

And then

safe space look at that euphemism safe space which means racially segregated zone or when you trigger warning look at that we're going to stifle free expression of literature and etc

so when you do that and you allow that to happen it's going to snowball and snowball and snowball and that's not very far from where we are with critical race theory and indoctrination and workshops separated by race and that constant north korean you are white, you were culpable.

And remember, we're talking about something, what, 150 something years ago that was abolished slavery.

And we're still more interested.

And we've had the greatest evolution of parity with the African-American community in the history of any civilization that had distinct minorities.

It's been a wonderful success.

And yet we're now angrier about it than we were in the 1960s.

And that's because this revolutionary fervor has allowed,

because we were being somla and complacent, we've said, well, if we're going to change this word and take down that, then we're going to do this and we're going to do this.

And then incrementally, we don't even realize that now we accept something that would be absurd.

In 1962, my parents took me, we drove up from Selma, our station wagon to watch the Stanford University host of the Russian-American track meet.

And it was away in the Cold War being being friends.

And they had these two sisters, I remember, the presses, P-R-E-S-S-E-S.

And one was a javelin thrower, and one was a shot putter.

And they looked like men.

And we had these wonderful American athletes that beat them in track, they beat them in the hurdles, they beat them in Pol Vaud.

And they could not, of course, win those heavy.

And everybody said, well, why don't they take saliva, you know, hormone test?

These are men, and they were.

They were either, either you know men that had taken female hormones or women that had taken steroids and testosterone but even then people you could see where this was going to go but the average person in the street said that's not fair to female athletes but once you let that happen

then you can see that if you say

what I just said, I will probably get somebody, I'll probably get a note and say, somebody called up Stanford University and said that you were transphobic.

That's where we are now.

Yeah, so insane.

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So, welcome back.

And I just had one last question, I think, with the Ukraine since that was the top of the agenda today.

And that is, what do you think broadly is the position of the Ukraine?

Why would Russia want to be harassing it?

What is the European non-interest or interest?

Oh, there's a lot of reasons.

Putin feels he's Peter the Great, and he feels he's going to recreate this Russian Empire.

And he's already got the Crimea from Ukraine.

He's got most of eastern Ukraine.

And he thinks he's just going to build troops there and slowly put pressure on Ukraine and then see the West squabble and bicker.

And given Afghanistan, he doesn't think the United States is going to do anything that's good for domestic opinion that otherwise would be hostile because he's murdered people.

There's no freedom in Russia.

The economy is not that good.

It really sends a message to Germany.

You know, now that you're wind and solar, you need natural gas and you're not going to get it from anybody but us.

So Germany is not in the equation.

And in his way of thinking, the more that he sort of probes and pushes around and ratchets up the pressure, the more opportunities arise.

Some of them he doesn't expect.

But he does not want to go into Western Ukraine and fight a guerrilla war or go into the streets of Kiev.

He doesn't want to do that.

And he won't.

But he will, you know,

subvert the government of Ukraine.

He will try to disrupt NATO.

He will threaten Lithuania or something.

In the meantime, he will see what we do in response.

He'll talk to Qi in China and say, you know, this is helping you with Taiwan.

Can you this thing?

What's his long-term objective?

His long-term objective is

to recreate the premacy of the Soviet Union, not with the Soviet Union, but a Russian autocracy that is as powerful as Soviet Union.

He's got the nuclear weapons, but he only has 145 million people, and he wants to get back up to 250, and he's going to pose as the anti-woke Westerner, you know.

And he's going to hope that conservatives, Tories, all over the world say, well, you know, he's just the mean version of Orba, and so we like him.

And so that's what his propaganda is.

And he's going to work in concert with our enemies like Iran or China.

Not that he's not as scared of them as we are.

He is, but he feels that they're useful and they feel that he's useful.

He didn't do this with Trump because Trump was predictably unpredictable.

And he didn't know on any given day whether Trump would kill 200 mercenaries.

or tell Merkel you couldn't have a pipeline or get out of a missile treaty or keep the sanctions on

or

who knows knows what he was going to do, sell offensive weapons to Ukraine.

All the stuff that Obama would never do and Biden would never do.

Trump did.

And the result was he behaved.

Yeah.

Biden.

I mean, just to finish, Obama said, tell Vladimir I'm going to be flexible.

This is my last election, and I'll be flexible in missile defense.

And that was in Seoul, South Korea.

And so he invaded.

Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

Yeah, Victor, our time is up here, so we've got to close off.

Thank you very much for everything today on Russia.

It's a really interesting conversation.

Thank you.

And thank you, everybody, for listening.

Yeah, thanks to our listener.

And this is Victor Davis-Hansen and Sammy Wink, and we're signing off.

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