Kristian Kahrs
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of this site. This site does not give financial, investment or medical advice.
In mainstream media (MSM), we hear a constant stream of denials that Donald Trump is lying when he says that Volodymyr Zelenskyy bears great responsibility for the war starting and continuing.
Therefore, it’s necessary to set the record straight with a thorough analysis. This analysis is long, with a lot of text, a lot of facts, but I hope this article can serve as a reference that many will want to bookmark to get the facts about the authorities in Kiev and how Western leaders have acted.
In this context, it’s useful to watch the video by Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis, a recognized geopolitical analyst, in his video How Biden, NATO & the West DESTROYED UKRAINE.
Below, you can read a complete transcription of this video, which was published on January 10, with links to relevant websites and articles. Grok has been used to adapt YouTube’s automatic English subtitles into Norwegian. It’s Daniel Davis who leads the conversation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrYqSMN6icw&ab_channel=DanielDavis%2FDeepDive
Daniel Davis: “Biden, NATO, and the West in general are responsible for destroying Ukraine. I know right off the top that that’s going to get a lot of eyebrows raised and maybe even scoffing to say, ‘Well, obviously it’s not those guys; they’re trying to help; it’s Russia who’s destroying Ukraine,’ and certainly there is some truth to that because the actual instrument that’s being used to destroy Ukraine certainly is the Russian armed forces. And by the way, let me just kind of point out right at the beginning of this, this is not to justify anything that the Russians have done; they have blood on their hands; they chose a path early in this operation to choose the instrument of war to try to rectify the situation that they saw in their security on their border. There were other paths that were open; we can do a whole show on that separately.”
“But what I want to talk about here, because it’s something that nobody in the West recognizes and everybody needs to understand, is that we are a huge, huge problem in this war, and without our active involvement from before the war, all throughout, and here on the current day as we sit here on the 10th of January 2025, we have made so many errors, and the bill payers for all this are the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian land. In the name of helping Ukraine, we have literally enabled their destruction, and history will not be kind to these people. And I’m just not going to allow so many on the Biden Administration team to go out in some sort of blaze of glory with all these self-congratulating statements that many of the senior leaders have made to try to make it appear that they have just been trying to help out. No, they haven’t; they have, along with a number of other leaders that I’m going to discuss here today, literally laid the foundation for the death and destruction of Ukraine.”
“Unless anybody thinks that I’m exaggerating, I have a lot of justification and validated sources here; what I’m going to show you here is graphic ground truth reality. Anyone who’s going to argue with me at the end of this and say, ‘No, it’s not; it was just the Russians; they’re the bad guys here,’ the Russians are the bad guys in some respects to this, but it’s in the sense of if there’s a bear in a cave and somebody’s running around on the streets on the 11:00 news and showing bloody footage and saying, ‘This bear attacked me; we need to go and find a posse and go get it; it’s a terrible thing; it’s on the loose,’ well, then when you find out, ‘Well, what happened?’ ‘Well, I went into the cave and started provoking the bear and started slapping it and throwing rocks at it and yelling at it and doing all this kind of stuff,’ and then you’re going to be surprised when the bear acts like a bear and takes action against you. Had you never gone into the cave, there would never have been a problem. Now, the analogy is not perfect, and I’ll show you why in a minute, but it is 90% there; had we not acted the way we have, Russia would almost certainly not have taken the action that it did. And I’m not talking about one or two moves here; I’m talking across the board, consistent, and horrifically poor decisions that we have taken when we should have known better, and we didn’t. And we’re going to see how it’s the political, the military, and the media all together are part of this problem, and the bill payers, again, it bears repeating, are the Ukrainian people; the ones that we claim to have helped the most are going to be the ones that have paid the biggest price for this.”
“This didn’t start on February 22; this started really in late 2013, and that’s when the Maidan Square issue started, and this violence that started occurring provided the pretext for the overthrow of the government. And just as a real quick background, this issue started when the leader of Ukraine, the legally elected government of Ukraine led by Viktor Yanukovych, had been working on some economic deals; many of the people thought he had something he was going to work with the West, but then he ended up at the last minute because of some negotiations with Russia saying, ‘No, we’re going to sign an economic deal with Russia,’ and then this is what happened next:”
News reporter after 4:21: “On the 21st of November 2013, there were a few hundred people here in Kyiv who gathered as a form of protest because the government had suddenly decided to shelve an economic agreement between the European Union and Ukraine, and the pro-Russian Yanukovych government was again nearing itself from Moscow, and that’s something that Ukrainians didn’t want anymore, and what first started as a very peaceful protest was soon repressed with violence; the Berkut police, anti-riot police that was seen dismantled after the revolution, the Berkut killed 108 Ukrainians during November 2013 and February 2014, and which led to the revolution of February in 2014.”
Daniel Davis: “Okay, so she left out a lot of that, and so let me fill in a few of the gaps here. Now, it’s important to understand that the legally elected government was Viktor Yanukovych; Ukraine is badly split ethnically, and when you look at a map of who voted for whom, it’s almost always the people in the west vote for integration with the West, and the people in the center and in the East voted for integration with Russia, and there was enough votes in this particular election to elect Yanukovych. So he had been deciding or thinking about some economic issues; apparently, if I recall correctly, they had like a limited agreement or a verbal agreement to have some economic integration with the West, and then Yanukovych changed his mind at the last minute because he decided that actually Putin had a better deal. Now, you can decide, you can believe that the deal wasn’t good, the deal was bad, whatever, that’s not relevant; what is very relevant is that in a democracy, which Ukraine claims to be, if you don’t like the policies of the leader that was legally elected, then you elect the next guy the next election; that’s how it works. But the people who were in the west didn’t like that; they started protesting, and then there’s lots of evidence that the police were being brutal about how they repressed and some probably used too much violence.”
“Then there’s also a lot of information that there were some saboteurs in that on the people from the who were oriented to the West, and it’s unclear at this and I’m not going to talk about, I’m not going to come to a conclusion here because I don’t have enough information, but it appears that there were some saboteurs that caused a lot of the violence which made it explode into bigger violence. Then the European Union said, ‘Hey, we need to find a negotiated settlement’; there was some Russian diplomats, there was some European diplomats, and they met with Yanukovych, and on the, I believe it was the 21st of February—if you can put that first call out up there—there was the news came out from here in Politico that President Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine agreed early this morning to hold early parliamentary and presidential elections after a night of tense talks with opposition leaders and envoys from Russia. Yanukovych’s office issued a statement saying that the talks had finished, although European ministers said the city they were still working out some details. So at that moment on the 21st of February, it looked like the crisis was going to have come to a diplomatic solution, even though the legal issues and the electoral issues in place could have kept Yanukovych in power; he could have said, ‘No, we’re not going to give into this; we’re going to go just to the next election; you don’t like it, get a better candidate,’ but instead he said, ‘Okay, fine, we’ll agree to this.’”
![Image: Screenshot from Politico showing the headline “Ukraine agrees to hold early elections” dated February 21, 2014.]
Caption: Yanukovych announces transition deal in Ukraine
Caption: Yanukovych announces transition deal in Ukraine
“Now, you may recall also a month or so ago, we showed an interview with Sergey Lavrov where he said, ‘Yeah, oh, it was with Tucker Carlson; he said, “Yes, we recognize this; we agreed; we were part of the deal that came to that; we didn’t like it, but it was diplomatic; it was legal; it was basically democratic involved; we agreed to his terms that would not be good for us because we knew that when those new elections came up, our candidate would almost certainly lose, and they would end up going to the West, and Russia was ready to let it go with that.”’ Now, that doesn’t get talked about very much in the West; in fact, it never gets mentioned, but the next day after that deal had been signed, all of a sudden, the protesters now are trying to put him in jail, and now then they’re saying they’re actually going to impeach the guy; he says, as the president, Viktor Yanukovych fled the capital; the parliament voted to strip him of his power; he likened the actions of his opponents—Yanukovych did—to those of Nazis and said he would battle to stay in power, but then he didn’t; he ended up saying, ‘No, I’m going to actually have to leave because now his life he feels is in danger’; he ends up flying out to Russia, and so now then you have the legally elected government has been forced out of power, and the people who didn’t like the policies have now been taken the reins of power.”
“Now, if it had just been that, that would have been bad because that’s not democratic; that’s not democracy in action; that violates the constitution; it violates everything about a legally elected government; you can’t just overthrow it because you don’t like a policy, but it wasn’t just that because the United States was behind this as well, and through an intercepted telephone call between then Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine made it very clear, along with the video I’m going to show you next, that she was physically active in helping the protesters overthrow the legally elected government:”
Intercepted call: “I just think [Vitali] Klitschko (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitali_Klitschko)) going in, he’s going to be at that level working for Arseniy Yatsenyuk; it’s just not going to work.”
Daniel Davis: “There is a suggestion for Nuland to contact [Vitali] Klitschko directly to play to his top dog sensibilities while Nuland refers to getting the United Nations involved in a political solution, and that’s where the unfortunate comment arises:”
Intercepted call: “I’m obviously not going to comment on private diplomatic conversations, other than to say it was pretty impressive tradecraft; the audio was extremely clear.”
“Hello, how are you? Good to see you. We’re here from America; would you like some bread, something? Thank you for coming here.”
Daniel Davis: “This was Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt visiting Independence Square in Kyiv in December, handing out food to protesters and police.”
![Image: Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt visiting Independence Square in Kyiv in December 2013, handing out food to protesters and police. Photo: Likely sourced from public domain or media coverage.]
Caption: Victoria Nuland og Geoffrey Pyatt deler ut mat på Uavhengighetsplassen i Kyiv i desember 2013.
Caption: Victoria Nuland og Geoffrey Pyatt deler ut mat på Uavhengighetsplassen i Kyiv i desember 2013.
Nuland video after 9:55
“Now, as you can imagine, the people that actually voted legally to have Yanukovych elected president were none too happy with this turn of events, and then—I don’t want to go through all this history; it’s certainly out there to be read by anybody—basically, the eastern side rebelled from the western side, and it eventually devolved into the Luhansk and the Donetsk republics, the oblasts at the time, and they said, ‘We’re not going to give into that,’ and there started to be this bloody repression. And even though all the people on the pro-Western side always claimed that it was the Yanukovych government that used violence to start this, then they started using violence to quell it on the other side; the West never talks about that, but now all these pro-Russian and ethnic Russian people who were saying, ‘We don’t like to have our votes overturned and someone else taken out of power that we voted in,’ they start being killed, and the Ukrainian Armed Forces start moving further and further to the East, and then finally they set up some lines.”
“Now, this is where it gets a little murky; the West says that that’s when Russia sent ‘Little Green Men’ in, and they came to the side of the Ukrainians, and so they were Russian soldiers fighting in the East, and that kind of solidified this civil war which then broke out in 2014. The Russian side says, ‘No, we didn’t send any troops; they did send us some supplies; they did send some ammunition and stuff, just like, by the way, we have been doing in for the Russian or for the Ukraine side in the Russian war,’ but be that as it may, that stirred the pot up, and so now then you have effectively a civil war that broke out along the lines, and that caused then some real consternation in Russia because they’re saying now, ‘If you guys have taken over all this, and now that you’ve installed a pro-Western leader, that’s your effect; we have a naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea,’ and that caused Putin, and I think it was June of that year, to say, ‘All right, that’s it; we’re going to annex the Crimea because there is no way,’ when Putin announced this, he says, ‘Listen, there is no way that we’re going to allow a Western-dominated country to come all around our naval base at Sevastopol; we won’t be secure,’ so he annexed it. Of course, obviously, no one in the world recognized it outside of Russia, I don’t believe, but it didn’t matter because they had control over it; it was a bloodless situation; they didn’t conquer it because it was, if I remember correctly, about 95% ethnic Russians in there anyway; they had a plebiscite, and that’s about the number of people that voted on the Russian side to be annexed into Russia, and so that’s where it is.”
“So now then you have your first casualty so far, so had we left the government alone and had we done the very first thing when that EU deal and negotiations came up with Yanukovych to have early votes and an early election in, I think it was April or May of that year, all of Ukraine to this day would still be under Kyiv’s control. Think about that for a second; that is so crucial to understand; had we just kept our fingers out of the pot, Crimea would still be part of Ukraine to this day, but instead we had to try and fix the issue to push it more and more towards what we thought was a pro-American and a pro-Western Europe situation, so now there’s the first casualty; they’ve lost Crimea.”
“So now then diplomacy gets back in again, and the four sides—it’s called the Normandy group—I think it was Russia, France, Germany, and Ukraine, those leaders; they get together; they come up with a deal, and then in 2015 they signed what’s called the Minsk Agreements, and the Minsk Agreements basically called for a ceasefire of this civil war, the withdrawal of heavy weapons to certain lines, and called for political autonomy for the Donbas—for the Luhansk and Donetsk area—and then also a constitutional reform in Ukraine that never happened. That’s crucial to understand; both sides accuse the other of not fulfilling all the terms, and there’s truth to elements on both sides of that, but the absolute heart that caused Russia to annex Crimea and to help those in the Donbas already was the fact that they were being oppressed inside of Ukraine; they were literally being killed, and then there was all kinds of laws passed that said you can’t speak Russian, that you can’t do this or that in the schools, and so they were trying to get rid of the ethnic Russians, which they had lived—those people who were in the East especially had lived—for generations, and so Russia said, ‘No, that’s not what we’re going to do; here’s the Minsk Agreements,’ and everybody signed it; everybody said we’re willing to do that; that’s going to work out; only Ukraine never, in all the years from 2015 after they signed that, did the constitutional changes to give autonomy to those Luhansk and Donetsk republics.”
“This is the second point: had they made the deal at that time, had the West that helped sponsor, and if the Ukraine side had done what they said and made the constitutional changes and given autonomy—even loose autonomy—to those republics, then the whole thing could have been over, and the war would have come to a complete end, and everything except Crimea would have stayed under Kyiv’s control, and the killing would have stopped. That’s the second thing that is crucial; how many people have died since that time because actually even all during the 2014 to 2022 period could have lived if they had just accepted the political outcome? No, there was too many people in Kyiv and certainly in Europe and definitely the United States that didn’t want any of that deal; as a matter of fact, we then subsequently found out that the German and the French leader never intended for that to happen. Again, this is not some Russian misinformation; this is the Kyiv Independent in an interview with the German newspaper Die Zeit (https://kyivindependent.com/merkel-minsk-agreements-were-meant-to-give-ukraine-time/); Angela Merkel, who was the Chancellor of Germany at the time, said about the Minsk Agreements, ‘It was obvious that the conflict was going to be frozen, and the problem was not solved, but it just gave Ukraine precious time.’”
Interviewer: “Do you also believe that negotiations in Minsk were intended to delay Russian advances in Ukraine?”
François Hollande: “Yes, Angela Merkel is right on this point; the Minsk Agreements stopped the Russian offensive for a while; that was very important to us to know how the West would use this respite to prevent any further Russian attempts.”
Daniel Davis: “So they all said, ‘Yeah, we didn’t put any pressure on Kyiv to make these requirements and these actions that were required by the agreement that they signed; they just wanted it to stop Russian advances to buy time for Ukraine to continue to advance its military and buildup,’ and that is so perverse, and hardly any people in the West at the time that came in thought through that a little bit: ‘Wait a minute, you say that you sign these to buy time for Ukraine to stop the Russian advance; the agreement itself called for the end of the conflict; if you had just done what you said and given political autonomy to Luhansk and Donetsk, they would have had no more reason to fight; that was why they were fighting you; instead of just following the diplomacy which could have ended the conflict on the spot, you kept going.’”
“Then that turned into more trouble because in March 2021—so apparently after they had decided they had bought enough time—Zelenskyy signs this law that again got very little notice in the West but it sure did in Russia, and he signs this decree (https://www.president.gov.ua/documents/1172021-37533) that as of March 24th, 2021, the strategy of de-occupation and reintegration of the temporarily occupied territory of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, the city of Sevastopol, on the decision of the Security Council of Ukraine, was signed on March 11th, and there was subsequent that they also upset all of the occupied territories to include Luhansk and Donetsk would be returned, and Zelenskyy in Western media added, ‘by force if necessary,’ so that’s in March of 2021. The very next month, what a surprise, Russia starts building up forces on the Ukrainian border:”
News clipping: “Russian forces are massing on the Ukraine borders; bluff or not, Putin is playing with fire (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/13/russian-forces-mass-ukraine-border-bluff-or-not-putin-playing-with-fire).”
Daniel Davis: “Well, Putin wasn’t in his mind playing with fire; he was trying to show his seriousness that if you don’t put the Minsk Agreements into effect, we may take additional measures here, and that apparently people didn’t believe him because instead of saying, ‘Hey, we’re not going to do this,’ the West said, ‘Not only are we going to do this, we’re going to not pass the Minsk Agreements because all throughout the latter part of 2021, Putin repeatedly said, “Minsk Agreements, Minsk Agreements; that’s what we need.” He didn’t say, “Let’s have a war”; he said, “Let’s do diplomacy; let’s solve this problem what we already agreed to years and years earlier,”’ but instead we not only didn’t sign or didn’t apply the Minsk Agreements, didn’t put any pressure at all on the Ukraine side to abide by them and to change their constitution as was required by their signature; instead, we start saying, ‘Oh, and by the way, this whole thing we’ve been doing since 2008, Ukraine’s coming into NATO,’ and now Russia is adding that to the list and say, ‘No, no, no, you’re going to do the Minsk, and you’re not going to do the NATO because there is no way on God’s Earth we’re going to allow a foreign military alliance to come right up to the border of our country, which basically has a wide open plain straight to Moscow.’ They said that we were never going to do that; even Trump a couple of days ago in one of his interviews acknowledged the same thing; he said, ‘We would never, we would never do that’; he said, ‘I get it; I get their consternation and their desire not to have NATO,’ and when Trump said, ‘Yes, there was some issues there that we said, “Hey, this NATO is a non-negotiable for us,”’ Trump said, ‘I understand that; he would feel the same way,’ and he said, ‘I think that there was an agreement that was in place, but then Biden went back on it.’ Well, this is what he’s talking about—the Minsk Agreements here—so we continue to ignore him.”
“Well, by December of 2021, then Vladimir Putin says, ‘Okay, we’ve had enough; what the U.S. is doing in Ukraine at our doorstep, and they should understand that we have nowhere further to retreat; do they think we’ll just sit idly by?’ Putin said, ‘If the aggressive line of our Western colleagues continues, we will take adequate military-technical response to these measures.’ Now we know now of course that he meant war; it was self-evident at the time because I think the troop numbers was somewhere around 175,000 that had been built up around the Ukraine side, and as I wrote about several times in toward the end of 2021, it wasn’t just a bunch of troops; it was what kind of troops they had, where they had them, to include medical facilities, resupply trains, obviously the armor, the air, the infantry, air defense, all the things that you need to actually conduct combat operations because I had done it; I had done large scale operations like this in Desert Storm in 1991, so I knew what was coming.”
“Well, it turns out that Biden himself shortly before the actual war came said, ‘Yes, our intelligence shows they’re going to attack.’ Well, you had every chance in the world to put that attack off, but instead you chose not to, and we know that’s what Putin said publicly because I showed you right there; that’s the press clippings from it (https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-says-it-may-take-military-action-if-no-answer-nato-demands-2021-12-13/). What we now know thanks to Jens Stoltenberg, what was said privately earlier in the fall of that year, was that NATO is a non-negotiable for us; we’ll go to war to stop this, but if you just declare neutrality and then in no NATO, then there’s not going to be any war. Here’s what Stoltenberg admitted: Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and he actually sent a draft treaty that he wanted NATO to sign to promise no more NATO enlargement; that was what he sent us, and that was a precondition for not invade Ukraine. Of course, we didn’t sign that.”
“Yeah, and not only did we not sign that and did we not do anything, check this out; this is now the third point here; this is the third time Western action has worked against the Ukrainian people. So we had a chance at the eve of war; all we’ve got to do is just say, ‘We’re not going to have NATO go into Ukraine; they’re not going to get membership; that’s it; all the rest of the stuff could have stayed on the table and could have been negotiated, and it would have been difficult, but they could have kept on talking.’ That was the red line: NATO and Ukraine, and instead of doing that—and look, that would have cost so little—that at the time the famous thing in the West was, ‘Nobody tells us who comes into our alliances; we decide who’s going to do that.’ Well, yeah, that’s really tough sounding; well, you know, good on you; sound like a big hero there; who paid the price for that? Did anybody in the West? Are there hundreds of thousands of dead Western Europeans or Americans? No, your braggadocio and your arrogance have caused Ukrainians to die in large numbers, and now, now then, so of course right on the eve of that, Stoltenberg again went out—I didn’t have time to pull this one out, but I remember it so distinctly—he went out there again in very public and brashly said, ‘Nobody’s going to tell us; Ukraine will come into NATO when we’re good and ready.’ So if Putin had given his basically an ultimatum in the late December and then it come February, then he acted on it; what a surprise; nobody could have been surprised by that, and yet everybody in the West from Biden on down keeps saying how this is unprovoked and illegal and all this kind of stuff, and I’ll reiterate what I said at the beginning: Russia had alternatives here; they didn’t have to resort to war, but when you keep shoving somebody back over and over and you put a military alliance threaten to put it right up on their border like we did in the Cuban Missile Crisis, we would never accept it; we never did; we never will passively accept a major nuclear power with a military alliance on our border, but somehow we think that there’s no problem that Russia should because we said, ‘Oh, it’s just a defensive alliance; it’s not against you.’ Well, that’s absurd; we would never accept that argument; we didn’t accept that argument, so to suggest that Russia was unprovoked is irrational and illogical and a flat out lie; it’s a lie; they were provoked; they should, maybe you can say they shouldn’t have done it, but we would have; we would have done the same thing here, and but here’s the thing: I had been again writing before the war started; I said, ‘Look, this is the nation of Russia; when you look at the balance of power between the two countries and their potential to support and sustain war over time, it’s unequivocally on the Russian side.’ It made no sense whatsoever to get into a big war with Russia because you can’t win it; it doesn’t matter how passionate and heroic the Ukraine fighters fought; it wouldn’t mattered because Russia had more people, has more natural resources, it has a huge defense industrial base, and it views this as an existential fight, so even though the Ukraine side absolutely had the will to win and the motivation to fight, that was equal on both sides, but Russia had that and everything else.”
“So on March the 1st of 2022, on the—so the war was I guess six days old I think by that time—I went on CNN (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6L0ZeD4zHvI) to share my views about what I thought this war would be, and I said what I said at that time and have never said anything different because it was true then and it’s true now: ‘This is the hard reality; if it’s evident that militarily you can’t stop Russia, then it doesn’t matter how brave a face you want to put on there; there’s no point in putting civilians in harm’s way if the end result is going to be the same, whether you make a negotiation, whether you even say, “Hey, I’m going to surrender the capital so it doesn’t get hit,” or you say, “No, we’re going to fight to the end”; the end result is the same; the difference is how many people have to die before that, and I think the leader has a responsibility to take care of his people.’ Now, you could see the other guest that was on there with me was shaking her head because she’s like, ‘I can’t believe you’re saying this,’ and believe me, everybody else in Western media was jumping all over: ‘Yes, evil; the Russian side is evil and wicked, and we need to go and support them; we need to push them back or whatever,’ and I’m saying, ‘Look, it don’t matter what you want to do; it matters what you can do, and if I said then on the sixth day of the war, if you keep going down this path, all you’re going to do is get more Ukrainian people killed,’ and now then by all estimates probably a million total military civilian are dead, and we could have stopped the war.”
“Now it turned out that in the couple of weeks after that, finally at least a number of people in the West finally started going, ‘Oh snap, there’s not; we don’t have the capacity,’ now then they’re doing those calculations and they see, ‘Yeah, there’s nothing; Ukraine fought bravely, heroically, but we don’t have the manpower for this; we don’t have the—it does—our defense industrial base is not set up for a major war to sustain it, and it’ll take years to get it up to that level, so we better start to work on a negotiated settlement,’ and so people started kicking around the idea that, ‘Hey, maybe we need to find a way out of this,’ and around the middle of March, you actually had Zelenskyy finally soften his tone; he said, ‘Well, I—you know—I might consider neutrality actually at this point,’ which of course if he had done that about a month earlier, no one would have had to die, and this country would never have been invaded. But he did, but at least now he’s going, ‘Okay, well, maybe we can do that,’ so the Turks tried to help us out; they said, ‘Hey, I want the Russians and the Ukrainians to meet in Istanbul in late March—I think it was March 29th was one of the days of those negotiations,’ and they said, ‘Hey, let’s find a face-saving way to end this deal.’ They sent their representatives there; I’ll never forget; I remember when it came out; they both sides independently announced, ‘Yes, we had the general outlines of negotiated settlement.’ I thought, ‘Wow, we’re going to avoid all the worst outcomes of this,’ and of course I was concerned for our own national security that if anything bad happened, the war could accelerate and expand and possibly even draw us in, go nuclear, and so that was an unnecessary danger when I heard that; I said, ‘The fact that both delegations came out and said, “Yes, I think we have the general outlines of an agreement,” terrific; that’s cool,’ except that a couple of days later everything changed, and now all of a sudden Zelenskyy is categorically against any kind of negotiations; we have said, ‘Yeah, whatever Ukraine’s going to do, we’re going to support them,’ and then Zelenskyy said he’s no longer going to talk—talked to Russia; it was not long after that that he actually signed a law that said that as long as Putin is in power, they won’t even engage in negotiations; they actually passed a law that said that they cannot negotiate anything with Russia as long as Putin is in the office; to my knowledge, that law is still in effect today, but then we found out sometimes later why that thing fell apart, and apparently it was by then Prime Minister of UK Boris Johnson; now many have claimed that he personally sabotaged it; he’s been kind of quasi, ‘Yeah, maybe I did, maybe I didn’t’; he’s been kind of uncertain about it, but in this interview here, it’s pretty clear he did (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BXZDtZftYg):”
Boris Johnson: “Putin must fail, and Ukraine must succeed, and that means at the least driving Putin out of all the areas he has taken at least since February the 24th, but I tell you how—so let me explain how we were able to win the arguments; it was because fundamentally there was no alternative to Ukrainian military success because whenever my colleagues from other European capitals began to think about some negotiation or some peace plan or some deal, some land-for-peace deal, the idea crumbled immediately in the discussion because you can’t negotiate with Putin because he’s so patently untrustworthy.”
“Yeah, Putin is patently untrustworthy.”
Daniel Davis: “Wow, so what you have there is one of the biggest problems that there is; Biden is equal to him, but that’s one of the bigger ones right there; here is Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of the Great United Kingdom, doesn’t do math; he can’t calculate that here’s how national military power is built; here’s what Russia has; here’s what Ukraine has, and this was even before you really had the active involvement of Iran and of North Korea on Russian side and we had 50 nations on the Ukrainian side; this was never about little Ukraine in big Russia and they couldn’t win; this was about Ukraine with all of 50 nations and all of NATO support behind it, and that’s one of the reasons why it was a big slugfest, and of course they raised their number of troops; they mobilized a bunch of people; allegedly according to Ukrainian leader Zelenskyy, they have around a million men active force; Russia has somewhere around the same, a little bit more, but inside Russia it’s actually something close to parity; most people don’t know that either, but here you have Boris Johnson not recognizing that the math doesn’t work for Ukraine and instead just says, ‘Nope, Ukraine has to win; Russia has to lose; I don’t care what you want; it doesn’t matter what you want if you can’t make it happen; if you don’t have the resources to make it happen.’”
“So given a chance to end the war—this is number four—we could have ended the war there in Istanbul (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Russian-Ukrainian_talks#Istanbul_talks,_29_March), and then there would only been minimal damage to the Ukraine side; part of that deal required Russia to withdraw the forces that it had back to the Luhansk and Donetsk area because that’s—that they Russia had right before this thing had happened had recognized the independence of both Luhansk and Donetsk, so that was kind of a precursor; now then they are independent nations, and so Russia could actually send troops in to help them, which was help—it’s how they basically did their invasion from that part anyway, but so this—the initial deal would have been withdraw all the Russian troops from everywhere except for those two areas, and then we can get back to work in some negotiations again, but instead, ‘No, we want to keep going with that,’ and then we had, you know, all the through most of 2022, and then that’s when Ukraine had the best chance it would ever have to have a negotiated settlement on terms favorable to Kyiv, and that came because in late summer and early fall, the Ukraine side caught Russia with their pants down in the North in the Kharkiv area and had this big surprising offensive that captured like 6,000 square kilometers; Russia had done a terrible job of preparing for defenses; in fact, they hadn’t done any at all, and then when Ukraine was able to muster enough troops to overwhelm the small troops they had up there, they had this huge area they got back; then they also in the Kherson oblast—much of which Russia had captured—then they said, ‘Hey, we’re going to go after the capital city of Kherson City,’ and then Russia was faced with the choice of, ‘Do we fight for the city, or do we withdraw our troops across the bridge on the Dnipro River and live to fight another day?’ That’s what they chose to do, and it was a big celebration in Ukraine because they had driven the Russians out of both of those two places, and now many in the Ukraine side are excited because they think, ‘Now the momentum has shifted on our side, and now we can drive Russia out of all of this territory.’ Those facts, though, that I talked about before about the balance of power hadn’t changed; they hadn’t changed at all; Ukraine had some tactical success, but they had only moved Russia out of a place where it didn’t have much troops and that it wasn’t valuable for them to fight a battle then with their backs to a river, so they just repositioned; it made complete military sense, even though politically it was a big plus for the Kyiv side, but the dynamics didn’t change, so the need to make a negotiated settlement was ever more so on one of the rare times then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley actually said out loud what I and many other people actually knew (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7P8QSmM96jU&t=267s), that that time in November of 2022 is the best chance Ukraine would ever have to have a negotiated settlement because Russia had just been kicked out of this area; they had recently forcibly mobilized 300,000 people; they were having a whale of a time trying to get them in uniforms and get them trained, and they were just trying to stop gaps, so they were definitely on their back heel on the tactical battlefield. Here’s what Milley said to anyone who would listen at that time:”
Mark Milley: “The probability of a Ukrainian military victory defined as kicking the Russians out of all of Ukraine to include what they define or what they claim as Crimea, the probability of that happening anytime soon is not high militarily. Politically, there may be a political solution where politically the Russians withdraw; that’s possible; you want to negotiate from a position of strength; Russia right now is on its back; the Russian military is suffering tremendously; leaders have been—you know—their leadership is really hurting bad; they’ve lost a lot of casualties killed and wounded; they’ve lost—I won’t go over exact numbers because they’re classified—but they’ve lost a tremendous amount of their tanks and their infantry fighting vehicles; they’ve lost a lot of their fourth and fifth generation fighters and helicopters and so on and so forth; the Russian military is really hurting bad, so you want to negotiate at a time when you’re at your strength and your opponent is at weakness, and it’s possible maybe that there’ll be a political solution.”
Daniel Davis: “Okay, that’s number five; that’s the one spot that the Biden Administration unbridled or unsettled with the emotional issue that Zelenskyy obviously was because they see success and now they want more of it; the Biden Administration and all these European capitals should have been looking with a little bit more balance and saying, ‘Okay, I get it; those are good moves here, but this balance of power—the math still holds, and that Russia has the time; they have the men to lose the casualties; they have—they have the time to build up their defense industrial base because now then they’re gone to something close to a full-on war footing and they convert a huge portion of their economy into military affairs,’ so they have all that stuff; we can see that; you saw Milley tried to get that point across: ‘You want to negotiate from a position of strength; they were at it right then; we should have insisted at that point that, “Okay, Zelenskyy, I get it what you want to do, but this is as far as you’re going to get; you’ll never get a better chance to negotiate than right now,”’ but either we didn’t do that or Zelenskyy just would refuse to do it; we can only guess which; most likely it is we never even did the calculations; most likely despite what the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said, the President and all of his advisers—Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense—they probably just said, ‘Yeah, I don’t know what he’s talking about; yeah, keep going; that’s what Zelenskyy wants, so that’s what we’re going to do, and hey, Russia’s hurt now; I bet we can make them hurt even more,’ so you see this arrogance is now coming in there, and we lost an opportunity to do that, so instead of having a negotiated settlement, then the Ukraine side said, ‘You know what? Let’s go on an offensive; we were good there in the Kharkiv area and in the Kherson; I bet we can drive a hole all the way through the Russian defensive lines in the Sea of Azov area and cut that land bridge off that they used to get to Crimea, and then we can split the Russians in half, and then, you know, over time we can continue to drive them out.’ Now, I was writing at the time of this; I said, ‘Don’t go down that path; you don’t have it,’ because just like I acknowledged it on the sixth day of the war, I certainly acknowledged it a year plus into it when I said, ‘You don’t have the military force to do it; you don’t have the trained personnel to do it; you don’t have the air force to do it,’ but that’s one of the things I wrote about a month ahead of time; I said, ‘Don’t do this; it won’t work.’ Russia still has a dramatic advantage in the air; Ukraine basically had no air force; they couldn’t hardly ever even fly it; Russia was doing glide bombs, air strikes, conventional stuff all over the place; they had an advantage in artillery; they had huge number of mines; they had spent six months—nine months in some areas—building up five lines of fortifications all throughout the zone; Russians are historically really good at defense, and when they had the time to build the lines and bring the troops up, it was going to be nearly impossible; I had trained in an armor—I was in this unit right here; well, not this one—this is from the Texas—what used to be the 49th Armored; I was in the First Armored Division as a Cavalry Squadron executive officer—number two in command of a Cav Squadron; that’s—it’s tanks and Bradleys, and we had trained many times on what it would take to penetrate a Soviet defense that had minefields and all that kind of stuff, so I knew exactly what was required, and so I told anyone who would listen and wrote everything I could that it would not work because if you’re the offensive side and you don’t have air superiority or even parity—at least parity—and if you don’t have a substantial number of mine-clearing equipment—a lot of engineering stuff up—and above all, you have to have not just large numbers of tanks and artillery pieces but you have to have trained crews that know how to use them; they know how to fight together—that platoon leaders and company commanders and battalion commanders, command sergeants majors, all the way up the line here—everybody has to know what they’re doing; none of that happened on the Ukraine side; they had maybe a month or two in some cases of minimal training; that’s not even close to being enough, so there was no way that was going to work, but instead we supported it, and then I mentioned before some of our military people were also to blame on this; Mark Milley gets credit for what he tried to do, but here’s two generals that deserve a lot of blame for what happens here; first of all is former CIA director and four-star General David Petraeus telling the BBC (https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-65551488), and he’s going to tick off a lot of stuff, and he’s going to claim that actually the Ukraine side’s ready to do this:”
David Petraeus: “I believe that we’ll see for the first time in this war on either side the achievement of true combined arms effects, in other words, the results of tanks protected by infantry against anti-tank guided missiles, artillery and mortars keeping the enemy’s heads down, engineers reducing the obstacles, breaching these fortifications that the Russians have established, air defense keeping the Russians off the Ukrainians, electronic warfare jamming the Russians already inadequate command and control facilities, and all orchestrated by very, very good Ukrainian command and control, and also using drones out over the Russians to attack them in depth with the precision munitions that the U.S. and UK and others have provided, and this I think is going to break the front lines; this is a force that has been battered; that many of these units have been in constant combat for well over a year; they’re not pulling units offline and reconstituting them—in other words, replacing the losses—the people, the equipment, and retraining them; they’re just adding people to the front lines; that’s not the way you produce a cohesive, coherent, well-disciplined organization, and I think therefore that’s why they’re going to crack, crumble, and perhaps actually collapse.”
Daniel Davis: “That was just—I could not believe it when I saw it at the time that he had said that; did he actually think that the Ukraine side was going to be able to conduct this extremely complex combined arms offensive when they had never done it before, when they only had a lot of the tanks and other equipment literally weeks before in some cases, they didn’t have any air power, they had only a handful of mine-clearing capabilities and engineering support, and the Russians had months to dig all these lines? It was absurd; it was insane, and yet instead of being realistic, he’s just talking what he wants to be true: ‘I want the Ukraine side to be good at combined arms warfare; I want the Russians to be ready to collapse and crumble and fall apart.’ Well, that—that was absurd; I mean, again, about a month before he said that, I wrote something that contradicted all the stuff he said, and listen, folks, this is not to say, ‘Wow, I was really—I could see through this when no one else good’—it’s not hard when you know how to conduct these operations and you know what it takes and you see what the capabilities on each side—it’s obvious it’s not going to work; it should have been obvious to everyone, but it wasn’t obvious to David Petraeus because he didn’t want it to be; he just wanted it to work, and I don’t know why—how his conscience allows him to so confidently make these kind of statements and encourage the Ukraine to go out there and get slaughtered in these kinds of suicidal missions that they did, and it was a bloodbath, but there was another general officer, okay, so that’s a former CIA director, former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan; Petraeus had all the on paper all the credentials that you would need to be a great military mind, and you see what he did there; now that you know what happened, well, then there was General Ben Hodges who was a former three-star general who was the Commanding General of all U.S. Army forces in Europe when he was on active duty, so again, somebody on paper looks like they really know what they were doing; well, he’s going to go one up on Petraeus and say not just that they’re the Ukraine side in this 2023 was going to get to the Azov coast; he said they’re going to Crimea (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7P8QSmM96jU&t=112s):”
Interviewer: “Are there bright lights on the horizon for Ukraine that there could be some kind of decisive victory, or is it really a prospect of many, many months, if not years, of kind of attrition and stalemate?”
Ben Hodges: “So I believe that Ukraine is going to liberate Crimea by the end of August, so the end of this summer, and I say that because we know that from history that war is a test of will and it’s a test of logistics; clearly Ukrainian soldiers and Ukrainian people have the superior will; the logistical situation for Ukraine gets a little bit better each week, whereas the Russian logistics system is frail, and it was never designed to support sustained long-term land operations outside of Russia.”
Daniel Davis: “And again, you’re seeing what you want to be true; I mean, the truth was self-evidently the opposite of what he said there; it was the Russian side that was getting better every month; they were getting bigger, stronger, better trained, more logistics; their defense industrial base had kicked in; they have so many troops; they have enough to keep them off the line and have them trained up for a long time before they come in; they have enough to rotate troops off so they don’t have to stay on the line of contact all the time; they didn’t have to mobilize because they had enough people willing to fight on their own; they just recruited them, so they have maintained a lot of domestic support; there is nothing that would have ever indicated that the Russians were going to lose Crimea in ever, much less in 2023; I mean, that is just bizarre that, you know, a former three-star general would say that, and of course on it as a sidebar—that gives me concern about current three-star generals; I mean, my gosh, what kind of system allows that kind of person to get up to this kind of degree that is so disastrously wrong; there’s three- and four-star generals both horrifically wrong that any good lieutenant or captain worth his salt could have figured out at the time knowing the same things that they did.”
“Well, unfortunately, then we punted there; that was the—I guess we’re now up to six, right—that was the sixth opportunity that we had after that offensive had failed, and especially by the end of—by the fall of 2023, and what even little offensive steam they had finally ran out, and then the Ukraine side went to the defensive, then the following month—I think about November—Russia started on this creeping offensive, and so they went back on almost a whole line of contact because they had been building up combat power; now then they’re ready to start going forward after they had made sure they exhausted all the offensive capabilities of the Ukraine side; unfortunately, we punted on number six as well, so we say instead of saying, ‘Okay, we did everything we could; we gave them all this money, all this ammunition, all these combat vehicles—tanks, planes, infantry fighting vehicles, you know—air defense systems—I mean, a whole slew of them—all these different kinds of things, and they broke their teeth on the first line of Russian defense and didn’t even penetrate that; they never were able to push through, and now then they’re starting to be pushed back,’ any rational person would say, ‘Okay, Biden would say, “Okay, Zelenskyy, we gave it our best shot; we did everything we could; if we keep fighting now, all you’re going to do is keep losing; there’s no logical path to ever reverse what’s going on here because the Russian side doesn’t stay static; it just keeps getting stronger, and we don’t have the capacity that the Russians along with their allies do because unlike—unlike North Korea and Iran, who are totalitarian states, they can just say, ‘Hey, we’re going to build up our defense capabilities,’ even though they’re not at war, just because they have the command authority to do so; it doesn’t work that way in the West,’ so all the Western countries combined—and that includes the United States—I think the number that Zelenskyy himself said just a week or so ago was about 1 million in the month—in the year—in the calendar year of 2024; Russia got three and a half million alone from North Korea in 2024, and then they’re building—this is like six months old, so it’s almost certainly higher now—the last factor category I saw was they’re building about 250,000 shells per month, so it’s almost certainly much higher than that now, so those two things combined we’ll never match that just an artillery ammunition alone, and the drones are—are both increasing on both sides, and maybe you’ll say that’s a—that’s a wash; both sides are doing really well; they’re also doing good electronic warfare, but now then that we’re getting into these wire-guided drones—the fiber optic cables that can’t be blocked—the question is going to be who can make more of those the fastest because those things—they can’t be stopped on the battlefield; there’s nothing you can do to stop those, and so all the other categories are in Russia’s advantage and—and are irrevocably so; they’ll never change and never turned down, so what we should have done then is said, ‘Alright, we’re going to end it,’ instead you had Biden going, ‘I’m not going to acknowledge reality again, and I want 61 billion dollars to do more given to Ukraine,’ so by May of that year, after a lot of debate in the U.S., we finally broke that loose; they said, ‘This is desperately needed to turn the table for the Ukraine side.’ What we know now is from the time that that was passed in May starting in June all the way through the end of the year is that instead of turning the tide, Ukraine lost faster—hard to believe—and I don’t have enough information yet to know how those two things simultaneously existed, but they did; we have graphic evidence provided by the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/25/world/europe/ukraine-war-maps-russia-territory.html); it shows from June, July, August, September, October, and then some—a couple of other sources in November, and I’m still waiting for the information in December, but every month the amount of territory that Russia seized from Ukraine continued to grow; I think it was 600 square kilometers in the month of November alone; the Ukrainian casualties continue to go up; you have the problem with they can’t recruit enough people to offset losses; the people that they do recruit are deserting in huge numbers; the Russian side continues its onslaught; every day they capture more and more territory, and now here comes Donald Trump in, but before he gets in, we have one last—I guess—valedictorian speech by the Secretary of State of the United States Antony Blinken, who has the temerity and the audacity to try and say with a straight face to anyone who will listen (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sj3C47lZ9NU&t=1528s), all the great things we did for Ukraine right now where as I’m looking at this:”
Antony Blinken: “I think the real measure of success is whether going forward Ukraine will continue to stand strong as an independent country, increasingly integrated with Western institutions and able to stand on its own feet militarily, economically, democratically, and in each of those areas we put Ukraine on a trajectory to do that; time to end the war, though—these are decisions for Ukrainians to make.”
Daniel Davis: “That—that is as bizarre as it is immoral to say to that interviewer all these great things we have done for Ukraine: ‘They can stand on their own two feet economically, militarily.’ Do you see any evidence that they can stand militarily? You had Zelenskyy himself in—I think it was in last fall—was asked by a Fox News reporter (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZijF0jEvwZw&t=60s), ‘If Trump comes in and stops all the support, what happens?’ and he said, ‘We would lose; we would lose right away.’ They can’t stand on their own two feet; you don’t even need to see that report to know that; all you have to do is be able to just look at the news and just look at the balance of power between the two; it’s self-evident, so every opportunity the Biden Administration had to end the war, every opportunity that anyone—whether it’s here Keir Starmer in Britain, Boris Johnson before him, Emmanuel Macron—all of these leaders—every chance they had to end the war, they double down on it, ignoring reality, ignoring math, and now then we are coming to the end; there is nothing that Trump can do to stop what’s already happened here; the best he can do is to try to say, ‘We’re going to get this negotiated an end as fast as possible, and whatever the best terms that he can help negotiate to get for Ukraine,’ he’s said he’s going to do everything is clear on that, and it doesn’t matter if he wanted to or not because that’s all that’s left open to us, so what you’re going to have then is some kind of negotiated settlement that is something worse than what exists today; that’s a fact; that is a fact, so here’s what you’re going to be left with now.”
“I told you that at the start of this that Biden, NATO, and the West basically conspired to destroy Ukraine because I’ve showed you at least six different places; there was more, but at least six major inflection points we could have ended the war and could have preserved—preserve Ukraine; we could have prevented the war from happening; we could have ended it shortly after it did happen, and there was several points around the rest of it where we could have, and instead we rejected every one of those, and now Ukraine has lost probably about a million people, and every day there’s a thousand or 2,000 more depending on how intense the combat gets that are dying; why should one more Ukrainian man or woman die in defense of their country when they can’t succeed? The end is already determined; it’s already written in stone; it can’t be changed, so why add to the body count from it? That’s something that all of these leaders I’ve talked about are going to have to reconcile with for
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