The 3 Narratives on Russia/Ukraine & The Social Justice Connection

Media Lies, Wartime Propaganda, and Christian Truthfulness

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. Today, I will be taking the gloves off because I have been wondering for the last few days now, what have we become? I don't recognize what I'm seeing right now.

For those who listen from the United States of America as Americans, for those of you who are Christians listening as Christians, I don't know what some of us have become. I don't have a fully mature righteous indignation formed in me, but I have one that's starting.

I have to question what in the world is going on among people who for the last two years weren't buying media narratives and cultivated what I thought was a healthy suspicion and are now buying a simplistic narrative, hook, line, and sinker, and it has more implications than just being simplistic.

There are moral issues at play in this. I'm sick and tired of a few things. One is the media lies, including conservative media, by the way. I can hardly listen to most talk radio. At least there's some out there like Steve Dace, who's a Christian and a conservative talk show host who will come out and say, look, I'm going to just admit I'm ignorant about a lot of what's going on.

We have the fog of war, and there are a lot of people really sure about themselves on some things that probably shouldn't be speaking with such assurances. At least there's a few people honest like that.

There's hardly any, though. There's a lot of lies being spun and half-truths about what's actually happening, and I don't know the full picture. I'm not an expert, but the little I do know is incompatible with what we're being told.

Proverbs 20, 23 says, differing weights are an abomination to the Lord, and a false scale is not good. The Lord hates measures and weights that are not equal, and we need to be suspicious of media narratives that are completely lopsided in one direction and one direction only, portraying certain figures and leaders and governments as pure as the driven snow and others as the height of all evil.

They're not really giving us hardly any explanation for why what's happening is actually happening. With little, and I'll be honest with you, this is the thing that really, it's bugging me. It should be bugging all of us.

With a callousness, in many cases, to actual people being harmed right now, I don't recognize it. I don't recognize it. I'm tired of the outright hypocrisy of those on the progressive left who are valuing right now armed civilians, championing armed civilians, women who, according to some of the stories, some of which now have been proven to be false, but women going out with guns and Molotov cocktails, and this is a good thing somehow.

And masculinity, strong masculine leadership, that's what we need. That's really good. And borders, borders are sacred and they shall not be infringed. And the democratic process is this sacred institution that shall never be questioned, shall never be challenged, and any war on a government that claims to be democratic is a war on everyone else.

It's a war on the entire world. And in Ukraine, it's fine to talk about these things, but apparently in the United States and Canada, well, we call people who like guns, ignorant rednecks. We call super masculine people toxic.

And borders are meant to be crossed. And democracy, well, we just had an election that showed where people are at in the mainstream elite media when it comes to democracy. How about in Canada? It's nauseating.

I hope you see it. Matthew 7, 5 says, you hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye and you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye. It's one of the big issues with us getting involved in some of these conflicts.

There are others, but one of them is what we would supposedly in the minds of our elites be fighting for and funding, we don't even value at home. Not in reality, not tangibly. It's all an abstraction.

It's a mental exercise we engage in, and it's callous towards the lives of actual people being hurt. Do you see that? I'm tired of the simplistic, reductionistic, intelligence insulting wartime propaganda, including the massive deceit on social media intended to paint one government as pure as the driven snow and another as the definition of evil, while actual innocent people are experiencing the consequences of their failure to negotiate.

And that's wicked. Exodus 20, 16 says, you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. Does it bother anyone that Russians themselves are starting to be vilified now? Here's a video of Congressman Eric Swalwell suggesting the deportation of Russian exchange students.

Check it out. I think closing their embassy in the United States, kicking every Russian student out of the United States, those should all be on the table and Vladimir Putin needs to know every day that he is in Ukraine, there are more severe options that could come.

And on the other side of the aisle, here's a tweet from Congressman Dan Crenshaw, excited about women making Molotov cocktails and passing out sunflower seeds so Russian troops will grow flowers when they die, while also managing to share fake news about Snake Island and the ghost of Kiev.

For those who don't know, there's a lot of stories going around, and just about every single one of them that I've seen, and I've probably seen 12 or 15, has been proven to be false so far about this whole entire situation, the ones that have gone viral on social media.

But you have him, I mean, the more important thing isn't the fake news he's sharing, it's this excitedness he has about, yeah, there's women out there with Molotov cocktails and they're giving sunflower seeds to Russian troops so they'll grow flowers when they die.

Does it occur? I know I'm not alone in this. I know many of you in this audience, I understand, many of you, you feel similar to me, and I'm in some ways your voice right now, but does it disturb you?

Does it disturb people listening that there's real lives being killed, real people are dying right now in Ukraine over things that should have been negotiated years ago? And this is how the ignorance emanating from politicians on both sides of the aisle in our country, distantly from a foreign land, saying the kinds of things they're saying is irresponsible, is downright irresponsible.

This isn't a game. And Russian exchange students, what do they have to do with the president of their country going into another country to take a military action? What does that have to do with them exactly?

Are we going to repeat the things that happened during World War II? Are we, is that where we're going? If we get sucked into this, are we going to set up some internment camps? How far do we take this?

I'd really like to know. As a student of history, I know what it can be and I know what's happened before. And we're not as involved in this conflict as we were in others, but during World War I, oh, yeah, people were jailed.

In fact, going back way before that, during the American Civil War, journalists were jailed, thousands of them who disagreed, who dissented. We, this is not a new thing. This is a, this is something that happens in times of war often.

A lot of the freedoms that we take for granted are taken away. And we've had two years of freedoms being taken away. And the people that are vilified, that are honestly reduced down to, you're just this or that, some evil pejorative usually, oh, they lose a lot more of their civil rights than the rest of us.

I can see little hints of it starting, bubbling up. We're not even in the war, we're just funding one side of it. But we're, these little things are bubbling up that I recognize. I'm just telling you, this is not good.

We should not celebrate. There should be some sense of sadness in this somewhere, that a woman would even go out with a Molotov cocktail in the first place. I don't feel like celebrating that. I don't know about you.

I understand, look, if you're, if in fact you are being attacked, whether it's an army or just evil people in your town, who are trying to break into your house and you defend yourself, there is nothing wrong with that and you should.

But man, the loss of human life, the fact that these kinds of stories are being passed around with kind of glee, and just a cavalier approach. I'm just using these two as examples, I could use a lot more.

This is really disturbing. I hope you see it. This is not Christian. This is not how Christians should look at these things. Russians are made in God's image too, as are Ukrainians, and those living in the contested regions between the countries.

They're all made in God's image. How is it that in less than a week, otherwise intelligent people, some of whom were skeptical of the media because of their coverage of COVID, BLM and the election, and many who probably couldn't even tell you where the Donbass region was on a map of Ukraine, are completely parroting the media narrative.

Dehumanizing leaders on one side, elevating as moral heroes those on the other, and sharing unconfirmed stories, as well as lies on social media about the whole event. Does this concern anyone? Is this knee-jerk reaction Christian?

We need to take the higher ground and be about the truth in this. And that means being careful with some of the things we share and say, and admitting we're ignorant if we are. And there's nothing wrong with that.

That's humility to say, I don't know. I just don't know. I know what everyone's saying, but I don't know. I haven't looked into it. I got a job. I'm working a lot. I don't have time to dig into all the geopolitical things going on around the world.

You know what? There's nothing wrong with that. We don't have to take a side. But right now, what's happening, just like the other movements we've seen in the last few years, there is an intense pressure that you must be on a side.

And if you deviate in any way, well, then you're just pro-Putin. You're pro-Russian. You must be a Nazi. And that media narrative is an odd one to me. We'll talk about that as we get into it a little bit, the Nazi thing.

But that's what you are. You must be a white nationalist. You must be a horrible person. If you even question the binary moral narrative, we need to take the higher ground. My commitment to you is to share what I can reasonably confirm.

And if I can't, I won't say anything. Or I'll share my suspicion, but I'll make it clear that's what I'm doing. And this is what I'm striving for. I don't want to pull one over on you. And I like it. I want people to challenge me, not out of ignorance.

I don't care for that. And that's mostly what I've been dealing with for people who don't agree, which is fine. But if it's just a repeating platitudes, you know, if you have something that I've missed, if I said something in error and you can back it up, I want you to tell me.

This is my commitment to you, OK? No one's perfect. No one gets everything right. And some people are deceived. And some of you may have shared some of these fake stories. And I don't think you should live in guilt about that necessarily.

Confess it, move on, perhaps. Or, you know, this is the reality we live in. We just got to be aware there's a lot of lies and that mainstream media isn't helping. They're sharing all these things. We can take the higher ground as Christians.

We can be about the truth in this. Meanwhile, as I said, people are dying. They're fleeing the country. Some are staying behind. And I've been in contact with several missionaries and missions organizations already.

And I'm trying to arrange at least one interview. And right now, it's very hard, though, because the people that are living under these circumstances find it hard to find the time for that. In the info section on this video, though, or a podcast, if you're listening, you can find information on groups that I verified that you can contribute to if you want to meet tangible needs of those fleeing areas where military actions are taking place.

So please check that out. I'm giving of my own resources in this. I'd encourage you to give some of your own resources. I don't know the full extent of all the needs. I just know from those on the ground there are going to be needs.

And that would be any time you have something similar to this and you have a large group of people that have to move very quickly from an area, they're going to have tangible needs that need to be met.

So pray for safety, but also that the gospel would go forward as some consider their mortality. There's missionaries that have chosen to stay behind in order to be a witness to those who are still in places like Kiev.

Pray for them. Pray that the gospel would go forward. Is that not more important than the political situation right now that men and women would receive Christ, know the true peace that comes with that and have an eternity to spend with him?

God can turn evil into good. And how many people are going to hear the word of God and become saved because they didn't stop long enough to consider their own mortality and now it's staring them in the face?

Why the Ukraine War Narrative Matters for Christians

Today on the podcast, we are going to talk more about this situation. And I've been reading as much as I can from all kinds of sources and doing my utmost to apply the training that I received in grad school to piece together the truth as far as I can tell.

I think this is important for a variety of reasons. Number one, there is an agenda to influence the way you're thinking about this. Behind it seems to be a number of motives, including reinforcing the idea that democracy as an end in and of itself is a goal.

Not a means to an end, but an end in and of itself. It's a goal worthy of unlimited support and sacrifice. Also, there are powerful forces heavily invested in getting you to think about the governments of Russia and Ukraine in morally absolute terms.

And as Christians, we need a healthy dose of skepticism about man's goodness, which both of these motives relate to. It is possible that the media conceives democracy to be a tool for creating egalitarian, globalist, open societies.

It is also possible for there to be multiple bad guys in a conflict, which is a thought not being entertained by hardly anyone right now in the mainstream, at least. James 4, 1 through 2 says this, what is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you?

This is about the church. There's a general principle here. Is it not the source your pleasures that wage war in your members? You lust and do not have, so you commit murder. You are envious and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel.

You do not have because you do not ask. What's the root of this? Shouldn't we as Christians kind of assume right away, what's the root of this? How come there's been eight years and really more than that, but there's been at least eight years of attempts to negotiate, to settle this particular conflict?

It hasn't happened and there's conflicted interests here. Could not the source be pleasures that wage war? Could not be the source lust for something? Maybe for oil? Maybe for, oh, I don't know. It could be economic.

It could be military defense. Some of it could be reasonable. Some of it, though, could be sinful. So just knowing what we know about human nature, we should kind of be suspicious of a hard binary narrative about this.

The issue will become also one of big, a big election issue. We have elections this year and this will be one of the things that candidates are going to have to take a position on. And it will likely develop just like the COVID narrative developed.

By the time we reach the election. So it's important to steward your vote well. So we want to, I want to start on this early. It's also important for us to pursue the things that make for peace. Christians should be about peace.

Notice I'm not saying anti-war. We know war is inevitable. There's going to be war if there's sin. We just read James 4. There's going to be war, going to be conflict. We know that, but we should pursue the things that make for peace.

That's what makes Christians unique in many contexts. Blessed are the peacemakers. It's who we should be. We should try to avoid what's going on right now. We should try to resolve things. We should be peacemakers in every area of our life.

And then when it becomes inevitable, we have to defend ourselves. We do that. We champion David's mighty men. We can make these distinctions. It's possible. We don't have to be on one side of the anti-war completely, and then on the other side, the completely pro-war hawkish.

There is a reasonable, and I'm not saying a middle third way necessarily. What I'm saying is there's a deeper, there's situations in which we can be on the hawkish side of some things. Especially if American interests are being threatened, and it's literally by sinful, evil impulses.

We can, yeah, let's defend ourselves. We can also be in the same way. Let's not get involved in that conflict. Let's try to use another means by which to adjudicate this. Or this isn't our business. I read for you two podcasts ago from Proverbs, or three podcasts ago.

The principle is if it's not your business, you should probably stay out of it. You need to be careful about getting involved in things that don't directly relate to you. I don't know about for debate in Ukraine.

We've been directly related, and our influence unfortunately has been one of the things that has unfortunately led to the situation now. I don't know that the State Department of the United States is the good guy in all this.

Doesn't mean Putin's a good guy, right? And this is what you've got to remember. You can have multiple bad guys. Just because someone says one person isn't good, or one side isn't good, or one government isn't necessarily good, it doesn't mean the other side's good.

It's also important for us to pursue knowing a little bit about the situation before applying ethics. It's nice to think we can just be biblical. I get that sometimes. John, you shouldn't talk about politics.

You've just got to be biblical, right? Without any understanding of the political realities, that's just a dream. You can't be biblical. Why? Christians telling Canadian pastors to just be biblical and submit to government fail to realize the circumstances that those pastors were under.

We must understand the circumstances if we are to apply biblical principles. This makes sense. And it makes sense about a whole range of issues. I don't want to get on a big tangent here, but this is one of my issues with some seminaries, and this is from my own experience, is the impression that's given that you're here to know about the Bible, and that's the only thing that matters.

You don't need to know about history or politics or get involved in that. You don't need to know about science. You just need to know what the Bible says, and that's it. Well, amen, you need to know what the Bible says.

Amen. Absolutely. In fact, that's the most important thing. You don't know how to navigate things ethically if you don't know what God says about it. But you need to know what's out there. You can't talk about historical situations you don't know anything about and apply a biblical ethic.

You're going to come out wrong. You're not going to come out with good guys being bad guys, bad guys being good guys, and all kinds of confusion if you just accept the narratives that are given to you by the mainstream.

At this point, we need men who are humble enough to admit what they don't know. We need men who are also willing to look into important matters, especially things that they're going to comment on, so they do know, and they can apply what the Bible says.

If you're going to become a pastor, for all those out there who are going to become a pastor, it's really important, I think. First, try to get a grounding. Know what you're dealing with. Understand history.

Understand science. Basic stuff, right? Understand economics to some extent. Understand politics. Understand literature. Get a really good grasp of some of these things. You don't have to be an expert.

The basics, but that will give you a good grasp. Hardly anyone has it today, or it doesn't have to be in this order, but then study what the Bible says. Go to seminary or get training, whatever you're looking to do, and you'll be far more equipped, far more.

Most seminary professors, I'm just telling you, sometimes they're so specialized, they don't know what's outside their area, and it creates errors. I know I went maybe too long on that rabbit trail, but we need to be people willing to understand a situation before morally applying ethics to it.

So those are the reasons I think it's important for me to comment on this, and it's important for you to care a little bit about this situation. Now, look, you don't have to understand. A lot of you have busy lives, and most Americans, this isn't really related to them, and they're going to see their price of gas go up, but this shouldn't be related to them.

The thing is, though, the elites care about it so much, and the media cares about it so much, it's going to be an issue, and they're going to pull us into this issue, and they already are pulling us so much into this issue that it's good to know a little bit, and that's all I want to give you.

I want to give you a little bit to challenge this narrative and to help you think through this as rationally and biblically as we possibly can. Is that fair? Is that reasonable? You don't have to listen to me if you don't want to listen to me.

I just want to listen to the social justice stuff in the church. Okay, well, skip this one. We'll talk about it, though, a little bit, but that's not the primary focus of this, but we will talk about social justice.

That's going to come out. So with that said, let's talk about the three, let's start here, the three prevailing narratives right now, what we can reasonably verify and infer about the situation, and let's then apply what we know about social justice and Christianity to the situation, okay?

Let's talk about the three narratives that are out there right now. Of course, one of them is taking all the oxygen out of the room. We're in the West, but let's talk about the three that are being discussed in some way, somewhere, and consider them.

The Mainstream Narrative of Russian Aggression and Ukrainian Heroism

Here's narrative one, and I'm going to make this as simple as possible, as understandable as possible, and my goal is, one of them, is I hope you walk away and you understand this issue. Putin is the leader of the government invading Ukraine as part of his aspiration to aggressively reinstate a Soviet-style empire.

He is acting against military and civilian targets. Volodymyr Zelensky is a democratically elected president championing freedom and bravery, standing up to Putin's aggression. Now, there's some truth in some of this.

This is the mainstream narrative. This is what all of the evangelical elites I've seen are talking about. This is what Al Mohler's talking about on his briefing. This is what your talk radio hosts are talking about.

This is the prevailing narrative, and most people don't know anything past this if they even know this. There's a contrast between Zelensky and Putin. Putin being the totalitarian dictator wanting to oppress, Zelensky being the pro-freedom, pro-democracy person, and I will tell you this, that is not entirely accurate.

In fact, Russia would claim to be democratic in their process. Zelensky would, well, let's just say, governments that shut down newspapers and have a lot of special interests and are as corrupt as Ukraine, they're not perhaps democracies in the way we think of democracy in this country.

But I'm going to talk a little more about democracy at the end of this because I think that's the social justice connection because there's something going on with that word, and I read a whole book that really has helped me understand this better.

But that's the binary right there, that on one side you have oppression, on one side you have freedom, one side totalitarianism, one side democracy. And so Putin is aggressive, that's true, Putin's aggressive in this.

He did cross the national border with his military, and it is true that military targets are certainly under threat but as far as civilian targets, it is, I'm going to just admit that I have some ignorance in this.

I've seen the videos, I've seen the photos, most of them from places I can't, I have a very hard time verifying, and I am talking to missionaries on the ground. The best picture I can get, and it's a blurry picture, seems to be that there is no systemic targeting of civilian targets.

There may be mistakes that have been made, and that happens in war, and there may be some very cruel things that have happened, and that normally happens in war too. But there doesn't seem to be a concerted effort to bomb cities the way that, I don't know, like the Allies bombed cities when they were going into Germany, or the way that cities were bombed by some of the Japanese forces in China and things like, it's not like World War II stuff.

It seems like the military targets are more the concentration and strategic targets. That's a blurry picture, and the situation changes every day, and it could very well have already changed by the time I say this.

So I'm not, I don't know, it could be that maybe there are civilian targets that are being targeted, but I haven't seen evidence of it that seems to indicate that that's going out to the Russian military specifically, and that they're carrying it out.

Ukraine’s Shared Blame, NATO Expansion, and the Minsk Agreements

All right, so that's narrative one, and then you have narrative two, and this, I think this gets more, this is more thought through. This is not, you're not going to find it many places. If you know someone who's saying this in the mainstream, let me know, because I don't know anyone in the mainstream.

I know people that are just kind of just off the mainstream that are saying this, but that is that Ukraine has a shared blame in this one, but that this was the assumption, and this is what a lot of people can't handle right now, especially people who are steeped in that first narrative.

They'll immediately start, you know, acting like the critical race theorists do on when they throw out the white supremacy thing. They'll start just calling you a pro-Putin or pro-Russia person if you believe in there's any shared blame in this situation, and I've seen it, and I've been called it, and basically that's what the social justice warriors do.

We don't just, we should engage in argument. We don't just go to pejoratives here, but there's shared responsibility in this way. The Ukrainian and Western governments have provoked Russia by taking advantage of Ukraine's corruption, helping engineer the Maiden Revolution slash coup in 2014, encouraging Ukraine to join NATO.

By the way, for those who don't know, along the way I'll try to explain things. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is, let's be honest, it's a military alliance, and if you attack one country or you're at war with one country, you're at war with everyone, so if the continuing fighting that's already going on in Ukraine were still taking place and NATO was involved and they found out Russians were involved in that, and let's just be honest, Russians probably are.

I think the Kremlin, in one article I read in 2014 in Crimea, Russians came into the territory with unmarked uniforms, and that kind of thing is probably happening. Meanwhile, on the other side, you have neo-Nazi type militias harassing the pro-Russian population there, so there's been a war there now for the last four years.

This is just a continuation and an escalation of it. It's really important to know that. If you just think that Putin did this out of the blue, and I'm totally saying right now that Russia is certainly involved in its own attempt to influence that situation, and they're not being necessarily honest about it from what I understand, but Russia is also provoked by this, and if NATO, if they join NATO, Ukraine, then they could find themselves at war with the West, and there's no way Russia can handle that.

Actually, their economy is smaller than France's and Spain's. I mean, I think it's probably around the same size as Spain's. It's smaller than France's. It's smaller than Germany's. I mean, it's smaller than Italy's.

It's not this... I mean, I know the Soviet-style image that you might have about Russia, but that's not who they are right now. China is immensely bigger, immensely. They have military capability. Russia does have nukes, though.

That is true. So, anyway, if Ukraine joined NATO, it could be that nuclear missiles are put in Ukraine. That would be like nuclear missiles being put by China in Mexico. That's to give you somewhat of a Cuban Missile Crisis.

It's kind of like that, and there's been several indications that Ukraine wants this. They really want nuclear missiles, and they want to be in NATO. And so if they are, that becomes World War III very easily.

I hope you can see how that would become World War III. So attempting to nullify the Russian language, there's been several efforts, I believe mostly unsuccessful, but I am willing to be corrected on that, to get Ukrainians, and even those in Russian-speaking areas, to only speak Ukrainian and make it against the law to speak Russian in certain contexts.

But that has instigated the pro-Russian sentiment in the Western regions especially, supplying Ukraine with billions of dollars in military funding and weapons. So Ukraine's military is not solely because Ukraine's paying for military.

It is Western countries, mostly the United States, sending aid. And at one time I know they were number three. It was like Israel, Egypt, and then Ukraine was getting the most military aid from us. And then encouraging neo-Nazi militias to harm pro-Russian residents in the Donbass region.

And there are some resources at the end of this I'm gonna give to you on this that you can go look up yourself and you can start, if you are skeptical about this, you can start tracing this thread. I don't know how direct those connections are with the current government.

But there has been some involvement with other very important political proceedings like the Maiden Revolution. And neo-Nazi militias are very active in that Western part of Ukraine. And they're certainly being equipped from somewhere.

So not enforcing, and Putin's accusation is that this is basically, this is the Ukrainian government that's fomenting this. So I don't know, and he's calling it a genocide. He's calling it, I mean he's saying that this is, I think he even said that millions of people have died.

He may be exaggerating it. But that's certainly one of the things that he's using as a pretext here. And then you have not enforcing the Minsk Agreement. So this is actually something that's really important in this.

The fact that there were attempts since 2014, especially, or actually even negotiations before then, but the Minsk Agreements since 2014 have been an attempt to create, to rectify the situation through negotiations.

So Ukraine agreeing to give a level of popular sovereignty to those Western regions, let them hold their own elections, that kind of thing. And so the problem has been actually, from what I've read, it's been Ukraine that keeps toying with it and saying, well we need to renegotiate this, we need to renegotiate this.

And it becomes, as the violence is going on, it just becomes this never-ending kicking the can down the road. And it hasn't produced an active ceasefire in that region. So there's been conflict going on and there's been no resolution.

And every time Russia feels like they have a deal, they do, the Western end of Ukraine is not in favor of this. So the Eastern part of Ukraine is more so, but the Western part isn't and so where is Kiev, right?

The President has Western sympathies as well and so he has political pressure from the people around him that don't care for these agreements. And then you have shutting down pro-Russian TV stations.

And now look, Putin doesn't have money. To complain about that or to feel bad about that is a little difficult when in Russia that's pretty much what Putin's done too. He's shut down stations that are critical of him or at least tried to and he has successfully shut down I think most of them if not all.

And then you have harboring U .S. labs researching biochemical weapons. Now this is one of the ones that piques my interest a lot and I'll show you some things on it because I just did a podcast a few days ago and I showed you hey this is what the embassy says and this is something that just last year Russia was complaining about this.

Why do you have these labs here? Russia and China both complaining about what happened in Wuhan with the COVID stuff and what are you doing in these labs and it's spelled out there in black and white on the embassy website that this is what's happening there and yet now the documentation isn't that interesting?

So this is one of Russia's concerns as well. And I have to ask you this. Why does the United States have five labs in Ukraine? Two of them built in 2019. I think those are the recent ones. Why? Why five labs to research chemical warfare?

Biochemical weapons? Why aren't they in this country? Why do we have labs in Ukraine? And why that many? It's kind of weird to me. I'll be honest. I was in Crimea after cutting off its water supply. So this was probably this may have been the straw that broke the camel's back that really set things in bad motion last year when Zelensky the president of Ukraine said we are committing ourselves to take back Crimea from the Russians and that is a pro-Russian area.

In fact many of the polls that have been done even CNN I believe it was did a poll but many of the mainstream media polls at the time didn't report there since the 1700s. It's population tends to be to favor Russia and and so there's there's not a big give and take on this and one of the things you have to understand too is that some of these regions like Crimea like the Donbass region like western parts of the or eastern parts of the country they were not always part of Ukraine.

I think we have an idea that there's a sovereign country that's been the way it is forever and that's just not the case. In fact it was Lenin I believe who gave back or not gave back but he included Crimea as part of Ukraine and then it was Khrushchev who put some of those western or I keep saying western eastern areas in the orbit of Ukraine and at the time it didn't matter because it was all part of the Soviet Union.

Well now it does. So that gives you a little window into why this issue is happening as well. Now out of desperation Putin took military action to neutralize Ukraine's military capability and that's what he says at least that he's doing.

He doesn't want to occupy long term he doesn't want to take over Ukraine that's what he's saying. Now you could be wrong you could be lying but he did that as well and keep them from securing nuclear capabilities and if they're viewed as unstable and all this you know they can't be part of NATO and support for Russian natural gas interests and there's a really good video at the end I will introduce it to you that I would recommend you watching that talks about the military strategic nature of Ukraine why that's important for Russia why it's historically been important the natural gas issue is a really big issue when like 40 of Europe's oil or natural gas is coming from Russia and Ukraine's been putting a heavy tariff the Russians have tried to get around this and now it's winding up there's with the new technology for fracking there's deposits interestingly many of them in eastern Ukraine and the Crimean region so that makes them valuable as well so that's part of it too now the first thing that I mentioned is the corruption in Ukraine and I'm not going to go into an itemized detail on that it actually would be overwhelming and I don't have it on the tip of my tongue or filed in my head I've read a number of things on it but don't take my word for it here's President Trump and what he said about Ukraine.