https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=4kvOEnw6MhY
Putin doesn’t care, you know. For him, he’ll use any tool he can find. And that’s how he sees his people, not as allies and partners, but as tools to be used to achieve his end, which is first, last, and always Russian state power. What do you think his goal was in the Ukraine? When I looked at what was happening, I thought two things. I thought, well, three things, I suppose. Putin wasn’t very happy with Western expansionism into Ukraine. He also was more than willing to extend Russian dominion, especially in the eastern parts of Ukraine. And then I also thought it’s possible that he didn’t really care in some fundamental sense whether Ukraine emerged from this conflict devastated, as long as it didn’t fall into the hands of the West. But I’m still relatively unclear about what his motivations and vision were for the invasion. I mean, do you think he thought it would be a cakewalk, like so many military leaders tend to presume when they march into a foreign country? Or what was Putin exactly imagining? U.S. intelligence also thought he was gonna win. You know, the Americans were saying to Zelensky, we’ll give you a plane so you can escape. And we were telling the ambassadors of all the countries, leave, leave, the Russians are coming. There was a panic. So our message to Putin, by the way, was not a message of deterrence. It was a message of encouragement. Our intelligence is terrific and it tells us you’re gonna win if you do this. So, you know, that’s interesting. I think he did think he would get a lot of success very quickly. But as to the threat of Ukraine to Putin, it’s not like Western, it’s not that like there might be Western troops in Kiev. It’s clear, we don’t want to invade Russia. No one in the West wants to invade Russia. No one, there’s no support in the United States for sending an army into Russia, right? That’s not on the table. But what is on the table is suppose Ukraine democratizes and becomes a successful country. Putin’s whole argument to the Russian people is that, oh, you know, democracy may work fine for the English and the French and the Americans, but we Russians, we’re different. We Orthodox Slavs, we have our own tradition and our own world. Kiev really is where Russian, the birthplace of Russian civilization. Ukraine for Russians is part of their heartland. And if Ukrainian Slavs, Orthodox Ukrainian Slavs are happy and prosperous in a democracy and achieving things that a corrupt, stagnant, sterile, Putinist regime is unable to achieve in Russia, a happy democratic Ukraine without lifting a finger, without sending a single shot across the frontier is a mortal threat to Putin’s power and vision at home. What if there was someone out there who kept a log of every single thing you did every minute of the day? Pretty creepy, right? What if I told you that’s exactly what happens every time you go online? Your internet provider is allowed to store logs of every website you’ve ever visited and can legally sell this data to anyone. That’s why the Daily Wire trusts ExpressVPN to protect our online privacy. ExpressVPN is an app that reroutes your internet connection through their secure servers so that your internet provider can’t track your online activity. ExpressVPN’s trusted server technology makes it impossible for their own servers to store any data. They’re so confident in their no-logs claim that they even had one of the biggest assurance firms, PwC, audit their technology. You don’t have to take my word for it. The Verge even named ExpressVPN the number one VPN in the world. Stop letting strangers keep logs of what you do online. Visit expressvpn.com slash JordanYT right now and find out how you can get three months of ExpressVPN for free. That’s E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com slash JordanYT. ExpressVPN.com slash JordanYT. That’s the problem. Okay, so does that make a devastated Ukraine and a Russian withdrawal a Putin victory? I think, yeah, Putin wants Ukraine to fail. He wants, and he wants to be seen to be dominant in Ukraine. Those are the two things he needs. And Crimea. And that’s a minimal grounds for victory for him. Yeah, and Crimea. Okay, so now what do you see? We don’t know how the Russia-Ukraine war is going to continue. I mean, the Russians have been being pushed back, but they’re unbelievably heavily armed in the final analysis. And it isn’t obvious exactly what a Ukrainian victory would look like in the face of that ultimately overwhelming, let’s say, nuclear threat. And so I’ve heard read, let’s say, intimations that Putin might be willing to sit at the bargaining table now. What do you think? Are we in for a long war? Are we in for a long deteriorating war that’s moving to a nuclear exchange? Is Putin feeling pressure to get to the negotiating table? What’s your sense of where things, how things are going to unfold over the next year? Well, I think we’re in back. The war has gone through several phases already. And it’s important to remember, it’s been so long since we were all thinking about a big war in this way. We’ve all forgotten some of the things that are normal in warfare. And one of them is that war changes. So like in World War II, you start with 10 months of Zitzkrieg. No one is doing anything. Then Hitler conquers everything, and oh my gosh, he’s gonna win. But then another stalemate, et cetera, it changes. And in this war, there was the initial phase of Russian attacks, and people for a while thought those might succeed. Then the Ukrainian defeat. Then we went into that long period of like slow grinding Russian advances. Then there were the heartening Ukrainian pushback, and everybody said, ah, their whole Russian army could disintegrate, et cetera. They seem, at least for now, to have stabilized their front. We don’t really know. And with the missile attacks and Russia fighting on the boundaries, are we back to grinding war of attrition? Or because the morale in the Russian army is quite low in some places, could we see more military collapses like we saw on the Russian side, et cetera? So there’s a lot going on. Both the Ukrainians and the Russians still think they have some cards to play. And neither one is willing to give up until they don’t think they could gain something extra by trying something else. So both now, the West is saying to Zelensky, come on, at least look like you wanna talk peace. So he says, I’m ready to sit down. And discuss peace on the following terms, basically complete Russian withdrawal and reparations. And Putin, also feeling some internal pressure and from some others to sound, at least, look like he’s interested in peace. Yes, I’m interested. I want peace talks on the surrender of Ukraine to me and on exactly what pieces of Ukraine I’ll take. But neither side at this point is ready to stop fighting. So I don’t see immediately much change. And the future will be determined by how the armies do on the ground. The god of battles will determine where we are. And then as the reality changes, the two sides appreciation of what they can reasonably hope to achieve change. And at some point, maybe, we’ll see an agreement on a negotiated peace. Right, but you think there’s a fair bit of war to come before that. I’m afraid there is. Because it isn’t obvious that either side is losing in some fundamental sense, right? It’s still very ambivalent. Each side has reasons to believe that it can gain from where it is now. And as long as that’s the case, the tendency is for the war to continue, yes.