Speaker 1: Well, if you've not been paying attention to the news for the last 20 or so
hours closer to 24 now, Vladimir Putin's Russia has started an invasion of Ukraine.
And this is I mean, listen, you know, at a certain point when you see 190000 troops massing
at the border and you understand that it really is starting to not make sense merely as a
posturing exercise what Putin is doing.
You start to consider this might be the precursor to some kind of an invasion and almost exactly
as predicted by many Vladimir Putin creating a pretext for that invasion, using all sorts
of fluffy language like peacekeeping to justify that invasion, doing it slowly.
But a slow invasion is still an invasion, and that's what we have going on.
Stock markets around the world very rattled in anticipation of what may be very erratic
energy prices, further supply chain delays and all of the economic cycle.
We will talk about once we get a sense of what the scope of this is going to be.
But for the time being, sort of following the Georgia playbook, that's not Atlanta,
Georgia, where Marjorie Taylor Greene is from.
I'm talking about the country of Georgia and possibly all of this meant to goad Ukraine
into an overreaction to provide an even bigger pretext for a larger scale conflict.
So let's kind of talk through what is going on yesterday.
OK, so let me back up.
Even there are what we might call separatists in Ukraine separatist, meaning they don't
want to be part of Ukraine.
They want to be part of Russia, OK?
Two of the regions in which there are such separatists are regions, and I'm going to
do my best with the pronunciation here.
The Donetsk region and the Luhansk region, these are on east eastern Ukraine.
You can pull it up on Google Maps and sort of take a look at what where these are.
So what Vladimir Putin did early yesterday or actually it was early in the U.S. it was
already kind of in the afternoon in Russia and Ukraine is recognize those as regions
as as legitimize legitimately recognize those areas as independent.
So Putin is saying, OK, it's part of Ukraine.
Donetsk is part of Ukraine.
Luhansk is part of Ukraine.
But there are separatists there who quote, really are Russian.
They speak the language.
They want to be part of Russia.
So we're going to say those are independent regions, not Ukrainian regions.
Now if you Ukraine, you say, Wait, hold on.
It's it's part of the country.
It's Ukraine.
But Putin says, no, those are.
Those are independent regions.
He then hours later, after some mild sanctions were imposed by the EU and the United States
on on Putin for doing this.
Hours later, and really, the sanctions were imposed on those regions rather than on what
we might consider Russia proper.
Putin says, Hey, the separatists in those quote independent areas that have recognized
they are going, they are under attack.
So we need to go in and send in peacekeeping forces into that area.
It's the Putin playbook hook, line and sinker, and there shouldn't really be anything surprising
about it.
This is what he was signaling for a long time.
This is what various foreign policy analysts and experts were saying could could be done
for a long time, some kind of pretext to then send in troops.
But you know, they call them peacekeeping.
But it doesn't matter how slow it is.
It doesn't matter if you say you're there to keep the peace.
It is still fundamentally an invasion.
We have video where you see tanks rolling down the road.
This was yesterday, shortly after this announcement was made.
And of course, the question now is to what degree is this going to escalate or grow now?
There are some people who will talk about it a little bit who are really going out of
their way to sort of defend and normalize what Russia is doing.
And you can be against American involvement and be against war and be against violence
the way that I am and still recognize that this is a classic Russian playbook, that this
is an invasion, that Russia has no right to send tanks where they are sending tanks into
the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
And just imagine a similar situation with Mexico or Quebec.
These are not perfect analogies, but imagine that Mexico said, Hey, you know what?
There are people in Texas and Arizona they look like.
US and they speak Spanish, our language, and they would prefer to be part of Mexico rather
than the United States in Texas or Arizona, so we are recognizing these enclaves of Mexican-Americans
as Mexico.
They are independent as far as Mexico is concerned.
Well, in the U.S., we would say, yeah, but that's the United States.
And I mean, they could go to Mexico.
You're not stop.
If you want to welcome them, they could go.
And then Mexico says, Well, listen, on the basis of the independence of these separatists,
we're going to send some peacekeeping troops and come on, guys, nobody would go for it.
Think of Quebec.
Another analogy These are not perfect analogies, but they are useful in thinking about this.
In Quebec, there is a separatist movement.
Imagine that that separatist movement in Quebec, Canada, said, Well, we don't want to be our
own country.
We want to be part of the United States.
Would the U.S. have any right to say, Hey, those Quebec separatists, we think of them
as independent because they really want to be part of us.
Oh, they need us to help keep them safe.
We're going to send some tanks there.
Give me a break, guys.
It's absolutely absurd.
Now we have video from the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, who is still kind of
hedging a little bit as to the terms that are being used.
Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2: Well, Russian troops has entered in Donbass, we consider Donbas part of Ukraine.
So certainly the Russian troops enter it into the dramatic Ukrainian.
And we're going to say that a fully fledged invasion by Russian troops on the Ukrainian
soldiers.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they've invaded.
One part of Russia is what we.
I'm sorry, one part of Ukraine.
The idea may be just to do this and then back off.
We don't know.
And again, I hope that people recognize that all along.
I've said we can make assessments based on the signals, but we don't really know what
Putin plans to do.
This could just be one tiny step a day, so there's never any one day where it's like,
Wow, look at what happened, and then they move towards Kiev.
It's just it's not completely clear.
We are also going to have to consider what Putin's greater ideology here is.
And it's sort of like the idea of pointing back to the former USSR.
Ukraine is really important in Putin's mind in kind of recreating that, and we'll talk
about that on the bonus show today, but also in terms of tactics.
This is really kind of back to like an old war concept, which is can you just change
your country's borders by force since World War Two?
And since the codification in international law that prohibits the threat or use of force
against territorial integrity or political independence, we've seen few attempts to just
change your country's border by force in this degree.
Now you could say, Well, you know, there's a bunch of areas of the border in India where
there are constant disputes and small skirmishes and little bits of land taken and given back,
and it is changing the border in a way by force.
In major ways, there have really only been four attempts since World War Two North Korea
in 1950 trying to conquer South Korea, a North Vietnam successfully conquering South Vietnam
in 75, Indonesia annexing Timor Leste in 75.
And that very short, very short lived Iraqi annexation of Kuwait in 1990, before it was
liberated in what we call the first Gulf War.
So this is not super common since World War Two.
It will be important not only to watch what happens in Russia, but also to watch China's
behavior and ambitions on the basis of what happens with Russia.
Ukraine.
Because if Russia gets away with this, China's interest in similar action with Taiwan may
increase.
So a lot at play here and in the immediate, it's going to remain extraordinarily chaotic