Extra Episode: Jon Shares Thoughts on Media Narrative on Russia/Ukraine

Ukraine, Media Narratives, and the Need for Prayer

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast, my name is John Harris. We're going to talk today a little bit about the situation going on in Ukraine. I hope you're praying for Ukraine and for the Christians there.

It's very tragic. I have a memory from my teenage years of my dad, who's a pastor teaching at the seminary in, I think it's a seminary connected with Master's Seminary in Ukraine. It's not an extension.

I don't remember exactly what the affiliation is, but he went over there and taught on the Book of Acts, and then he brought back for us, not just pictures and memories and things like that, but he brought us back physical, tangible things, some chocolate, and I think he has a Ukrainian doll still, or a Russian doll, I'm not actually sure, but he got it in Ukraine in his office, and then he brought us all back hats, Soviet era hats, I still have mine, that definitely keep you warm, and I do wear it sometimes.

My wife, she doesn't like it if I wear that in public, but I have my Ukrainian hat, and there are Christians there. I don't have a strong connection with Ukraine, but I'm just very aware of, through my dad's experience, that there are Christians there who love the Lord, and the Lord has his people in every place, and all over the world, and just about at every place, and so pray for the Christians there in particular.

I know that this is a challenging time, I'm sure, for them, and it's gonna be challenging for, as things develop, a lot of other countries as well, and we're gonna talk about some of this. So, I wanna say two things up front before we get into it.

This is kind of a bonus episode. I realize not all of you come to this channel because you wanna hear about my thoughts on topics outside of social justice and Christianity, and I'm not gonna be talking so much about social justice and Christianity.

I might mention a few things as they come to mind, but that's not the purpose of this podcast. I really do wanna talk about the geopolitical situation, so if you're here for the social justice and Christianity stuff, and that's it, then you can feel free to skip this, it's totally fine.

I know I've had some people, very few, I'm only thinking of two, there's probably more at this point, because I don't read all the comments sometimes, but on YouTube and Facebook, who have given me a little pushback for things I've already posted about this situation, saying really that the American media is lying about it, because they are, and the insinuation that I'm pro-Russian or buying into Russian propaganda, or I'm not staying in the lane that I should be in, that I don't really know what I'm talking about when I talk about this stuff.

So, I know that some of that's out there, some people think that, and if you think that, feel free to skip this one, that's totally fine. And I'm not pretending to be an expert on geopolitics at all, but I do have a mind, I do use it, and I do try to exercise the same kinds of discernment, the same filter I have when I'm looking at the social justice and Christianity stuff, I exercise the same level of discernment, I try to at least, when I'm looking at other issues as well, including this one.

So, I also do have a degree in history, I did have to study some, at some level, some European history, so I do know a little bit, but I'm certainly not trying to be an expert here or pass myself off as an expert.

And if there are resources you think would help me understand this better, please feel free to share them in the comments section, I would definitely appreciate that. But I want to share with you, the purpose of this podcast is I want to share with you some of the media sources and commentary as well that I'm looking at, because it's a lot different.

I really do think it is important for us to break out of the prevailing narrative that seems to be, I don't know if it's across the Western world, but it's certainly in the United States, and I suspect across the Western world, and certainly the English-speaking world, about this whole situation.

Because it's more nuanced, like most situations, it's more complicated than we're being told. There's definitely a white hat, black hat, kind of simple binary going on, good guys, bad guys, and it's just quite, it's not quite that simple.

You know, it is possible to have situations, as Christians we should totally be fine acknowledging and entertaining the thought that there are situations where you have multiple bad guys, and this may be one of those situations in some ways.

So I want to just flesh out some of the things that I've been researching on this, because I do want to understand it, and my understanding, of course, is not going to be comprehensive in every way, but there are some things that, some holes in the narrative that is playing out on our televisions and radios right now.

I know because I've turned on the radio, and every time I turn it on and I hear about this, I just got to turn it off. I just, I can't believe some of the things I'm hearing. And then it's the same thing on the television for the most part.

The Media's Simplistic Putin Narrative

So I want to share with you some of the sources that I have found helpful for me in understanding this. What I see right now, let me give you big picture stuff here. I see a reflexive move, okay? So we're supposed to immediately, without really a lot of conversation about this particular topic and background knowledge, and that seems obvious to me, the media people commenting, and I even, I was listening to a nationally syndicated talk show host today.

I think he's the third most popular, if I'm not mistaken, talk show host on the conservative, in conservative media, and it just was obvious to me, this guy has no clue what he's talking about. And not that I'm an expert, but I'm like, I think I, just in my reading over the past few days on this situation, it seems like he doesn't know, he's not quite as informed as even I am on this.

And I don't, I'm not trying to, you know, put myself out there like I'm, you know, I really don't feel I know, I have a full grasp on this, but we're getting a lot of ignorance, like real ignorance from our own media.

It's just failing us. And I'm talking about supposed alleged conservative media as well in this. There's a reflexive move. You have to immediately take a side. And if you don't fully embrace the prevailing narrative that Putin is this horrible aggressor in the vein of Hitler, and he is invading in order to bring back the Soviet Union, and his intention is to take over the world, and he must be opposed at all costs.

If that's not your feeling on this, then it seems like you deviate a little bit. You are immediately in this pro-Putin camp, or you're just, you must love Putin, you must love Russia, you're pro-Russian or something, which is, that's ridiculous.

I wouldn't consider myself at all pro-Putin. In fact, I, there's a lot of things about Putin that, quite frankly, disturbed me to some extent. But I will say this for the guy, and well, we're going to go through some of this, so I don't want to talk about it.

I have a Putin file in my mind I want to share with you, but I'll just kind of give you the, briefly here. The guy does stand up for his people. He is against the pro-LGBT nonsense coming from the West.

He is also against globalism. He's a nationalist, and what I mean by that is he is someone who cares about his nation and puts his nation's interests first. And that is, I mean, I know we're, this is basic stuff.

This should just be kind of, every leader should, in my mind, really be there for the people that elected him and to serve his constituents. Every leader should look out for the best things for his people, and they should see through the nonsense of this, this hyper-egalitarian push coming from the West.

And from an America pop culture in particular, that's kind of a baseline for me. That doesn't mean Putin's like a really good guy. It just means like he's met kind of like a baseline here for like what we should expect at minimum.

But so many of our leaders don't even have that. So it makes Putin stand out in some ways, and I've seen some, especially social conservatives, like to, they look to Putin as like, oh, maybe he is a good guy.

So some people are legitimately thinking that. I don't know how big of a group that is. I tend to think it's a pretty small group, but there are some social conservatives who do think that because they read Putin's speeches and they see his rhetoric, his pro-family, and it's against some of, even in this situation, it's going to come up.

And I'll show you from the last speech he gave on this, on the Ukraine situation, it comes up even in that. He sees himself as standing against the decadence streaming from the West. And, you know, what do you say about that?

I mean, maybe, you know, there's some bad qualities. I'm sure there are. I know there are. But you have that on the other hand, right? And that's not even a basic baseline that most of our leaders can meet.

So that's Putin. And I'll flesh that out a little more. I'll bring some more description to that. But we can't view him with any positive of any kind. There is no positive in Russia. They are the big villain.

They're equivalent to the Nazis. That's what we're hearing. And we have to react kind of reflexively to this. Immediately, we got to be against them. We got to be willing to make sacrifices. The gas prices go up.

Well, that's just the sacrifice that we got to make for opposing this horrible person. The other thing is, of course, and I've already mentioned is the media is lying about this. And so that's another interest I have in this is, this is really the thing that made me from the beginning decide, okay, I'll do a little podcast on it because I've heard, and I haven't listened to a lot of media, but every time I turn on the radio, I feel like I'm hearing a lie in Biden's speech today.

I'm recording this on the evening of the 24th, by the way, for those who are curious. I heard lies in Biden's speech. He actually, he lied about Putin's, the speech Putin just gave and talked about Putin's ambitions to invade all these other countries.

And Putin doesn't even talk about it in his speech. He just expects, it's just amazing to me. You expect a room full of reporters to just buy it. And then they do. They don't even ask him about it, which maybe some of them didn't have an opportunity, but I heard a room report I turned on a few days ago.

I think I might've mentioned this in a previous podcast that they were, again, they were talking about Putin's speech and I was like, I read Putin's speech. You're just speculating on the thoughts in his mind and maybe your speculation's correct, but it is speculation.

And in a straight news report, maybe I'm old fashioned, but you shouldn't be inserting speculation into that or at least tell people you're speculating when you are. I was listening to a talk show host today and it was completely reflexive.

It was just bashing anyone who would disagree with that prevailing narrative about Russia and Putin and their interests in the area. And just the assumption behind all of it was just that this is all due to an attempt at aggressively taking over territory and it's some kind of imperialism.

That's all it is. There's really not much more description or discussion. And maybe there's some websites or not websites, but there's some talk shows, mainstream news talk shows that are doing a better job of this.

I know of one that is, Tucker Carlson, but for the most part, I'm not seeing really educated, nuanced discussions of this. It's a vilification process. And so that makes me very skeptical of the media.

I'm already skeptical, but it makes me wonder why. Why is this narrative so important, this black and white narrative? And then of course, the other thing that makes me want to do a podcast on this is the push for globalism and the use of the term democracy over and over.

We've seen this with January 6th. We've seen this with Justin Trudeau in Canada now. We see this actually all the time with the voter law issue, voter idea issue. The constant word that is brought up against Donald Trump, against anything right wing, it seems like is democracy.

We have to preserve democracy. And the justification for preserving democracy is a blank check. You must sacrifice everything. That's the assumption that seems to be behind this is if we can make whatever purpose we have, whatever cause we have, if we can make it so that it's in the name of democracy, that's our purpose, then nothing else seems to matter really.

We can just, we can drive that bill up as far as we want. We can sacrifice as much as we want. And if it's in the name of democracy, then it's worth it. And what I see a connection between this and globalism, to be quite honest with you at this point, I'm not saying it's always been like this, but the way it's being used now, and the reason is because of all the hypocrisy.

The people that are deploying this are the same people that don't seem to care about democracy in their own countries. We just had an election. There was a lot of funny business. And yeah, we don't care about that.

In fact, we'll deploy the word democracy against the quote unquote conspiracy theorists who we won't ever engage in argument about that issue. With the trucker issue going on right now, they're against democracy.

When it's like, but isn't that, isn't what we're seeing? Isn't that protest? Isn't that a manifestation of democracy in some way? It's a word that is often used and it's often used against national groups.

If the nation doesn't do or vote or support some kind of a globalist agenda thing, then it's like, then all of a sudden, well, in the name of democracy, we need to put an end to this protest against our plan.

We saw it with the COVID stuff. We've seen it with just, I mean, BLM was democracy in action apparently, but not the truckers, right? It's this word that has lost, in my mind, it's kind of lost its meaning.

And I don't know what it means anymore other than does it just mean, I don't know, global interests must be preserved. Is that what democracy means now? It's deployed in weird ways and it makes me suspicious of when it's used to be quite honest.

Our country's a republic, right? It's not a democracy technically. It is a republic. But generally, when people have used the word democracy, I tend to think of a vote. People vote and they have a choice.

They have a say, right? Democracy. I'm not certain that's what it quite means anymore. That's almost, sometimes it's used that way, but behind it is this assumption that only if the public affirms a certain viewpoint, is it democracy.

If they don't, it's not democracy anymore somehow. So if you have a region in Ukraine that's pro-Russian, right? In that particular region, if democracy would dictate, that region wants to be part of Russia, let's say, and you can put this in the hypothetical realm if you prefer, but it's no longer democracy at that point.

It's against, so who, so the popular sovereignty goes out the window. It's democracy, doesn't matter. And it makes me wonder, what's the interest then? What's behind this shield that's being put up with our purposes are pure because we love democracy.

So yes, I'm being critical right now of our media, of American foreign policy at this moment in time. In some ways, I'm being, not even critical, I'm being suspicious. It may be somewhat critical. That does not mean though, and I gotta say this very clearly, it doesn't mean I'm not critical of Putin.

We can look at this situation and see multiple bad guys. That's very possible. Multiple self-interested people that have nefarious interests even. So I don't have to be a big Putin fan for any of this.

And I see what Putin is doing is, with the limited knowledge I have, is an aggressive action that we would all prefer he did not do and we're praying for Ukraine. So why did he do it? Why did he do it?

That's what I wanna answer. I wanna answer some of these questions. I want to give you some information and I wanna give you links in the info section of some things that have helped me and maybe some sources that you can go to and just bypass this narrative, okay?

Bypass the simplistic, just black and white, shallow narrative and really understand this issue. I mean, you can sit there watching Fox News or CNN for your whole afternoon and just have a replay of the same talking points.

Or you can take that same time if in fact you are doing that kind of thing and you can put it into actually understanding the situation. And that's kind of what I believe in. Let's really understand this.

And then we're gonna make a better educated decision. But if we're not informed, then it's very difficult too. And so I realized one other thing before I get into some of the websites I wanna show you.

This can be stressful for some. There's a lot of things going on, especially in the media, the war with Russia. I mean, even that word harkens back to Cold War era fears. And I just wanna remind everyone, look, God is in control.

I think the media right now wants to drum up fear. And I'm not saying that there aren't things to be afraid of, not afraid of. There are things to be afraid of. There certainly are. But we only have so much influence.

And our votes are our biggest influence. Hopefully we can petition the people who represent us because we are a republic. We can seek to convince friends. We can, but I think understanding the situation helps drive away fear in some ways.

When you, you tend to fear the things you don't understand. And if Russia is, there's this mysterious Nazi-esque country with a horrible thug dictator who is bent on controlling the world and has nuclear weapons, if that's all you know, then yeah, I mean, you're gonna be pretty scared.

I think understanding the situation helps us not be quite as fearful as well. So trust the Lord and then understand the situation, which is what we're gonna be doing some. So what are the reasons for this?

I'm gonna get into it. And I will also be pointing out, I have a list of like eight or nine hypocritical things coming from the narrative that I see in our media and some of the people who are propagating it.

But we'll get there. Let's start here, if I may. Let's see, actually, I have so many websites pulled up right now. I'm trying to debate where I wanna start with all this. We'll start here. This is a book that you can get on Audible.

That's where I got it. I'm not sure if there's a print version. There probably is. But I found it very helpful if you're trying to understand this situation. It's called Ukraine, What Everyone Needs to Know by Serhii Yakelchik.

I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right. And then it's narrated by Joel Richards. You can get it on Audible. And it is kind of like an encyclopedia, but very suited. It came out in 2020, the end of 2020, actually.

It is very suited for the conflict that is going on right now. And so it'll bring you to the present. And I just found it very helpful in understanding this whole entire situation. So if you have the time, and I know for working class people who like to listen to Audible, audiobooks, I would recommend just getting this and just listening to it.

And if you listen to it at like double or triple speed, you get through it faster. And you'll just get a basic understanding. It's just a foundation for understanding the rest of it. And I realize sometimes this can be dangerous depending on the bias that you're getting from the author.

To me, this seemed very fair-minded to me. This seemed like someone who I'm sure has a bias because everyone does, but seemed really bent on trying to give the facts and not being too anti-Russian or anti-Ukraine.

But just here's the situation. And it's a messy situation. I mean, Ukraine's borders have been drawn and redrawn. And you have different segments of the population in different regions that feel differently.

And there's different ethnic makeups and linguistic makeups and religious makeups. And you have that complication mixed with a political situation that pits them between the East and the West. And the question right now, one of the big ones is, who are they gonna be pawns for?

And, John, why would you say that about a sovereign country? Well, because Ukraine also, one of the things you'll learn in going through this is they, especially in the last few decades, have been known, they are known to be extremely dysfunctional and corrupt.

And it's no surprise that our own president and his son got into issues in Ukraine specifically because that's the reputation Ukraine has. So I would just recommend, download this book if you have the time and read it.

And you'll have a lot more educated discussions with people. There has been, one of the things that you'll learn is there has been a war in Donbass, which is the region that Putin is very concerned about.

It's got, I believe the population is, it's a Russian plurality, not meaning not a majority, but a plurality, I believe. But there's, but more importantly than that, there seems to be at least, according to some, a pro-Russian majority there.

So even people who might not be ethnically Russian, they identify with Russia. It was one of the regions that was more pro-Soviet during the Cold War. And this region has been in conflict really since 2014.

And if you remember in 2014, that whole kerfuffle that took place and we might talk about that a little more later, because if you understand that, this is an extension of that, this current situation.

And I find it super ironic. Do you not find the super ironic that we have in 2014, the whole situation with Russia and Ukraine, and the US got very involved in that. Of course, we didn't come in with military.

We threatened a lot. We did the same thing that Biden's doing now, right? Sanctions, Obama put sanctions on Russia, same kind of thing. And there was a pause during Donald Trump. That didn't happen. And now all of a sudden Biden's president, now it's happening again.

I just, I'm just pointing this out. It seems like Putin didn't want to poke the bear when Trump was in office. Isn't that a little ironic to you? The pro-Russian president, right? It wasn't, I thought Donald Trump was supposed to be controlled by Moscow.

He was, it was Russiagate, right? But of course, Putin, that doesn't take advantage of his friendship with Trump. I'm just telling you, there's a narrative that's not working here. And the same people, some of the same people, I should say, like CNN and MSNBC, the same people giving you the current narrative are the same ones that fed you the Russiagate narrative.

So it just seems like there's a hole already there in some ways, or it could be, there could be. So anyway, there's been conflict there for a while. And I'll be honest with you, I haven't been able to have the time to dig deeply into, I mean, look how complicated this is.

This is just the Wikipedia page for this particular conflict. This is complicated. There are a lot of different battles and facets and, or just situations, and there are battles. This has been going on for a while.

And there have been casualties and children have been casualties. And it's just interesting to me that Putin seemed to indicate in his last speech, there were millions, right? In the book that I showed you, the estimates range from like 5 ,000 to 50 ,000 as far as how many people have died.

I really don't know. I haven't looked into it enough. But the point is, though, there is a conflict and it hasn't been resolved. And the status quo is that it hasn't been resolved in that particular region.

And that's not the only region, but that's one of the regions in contention right now. So that's one thing you have to understand. I mean, how many media outlets are even reporting about this? I mean, it seems like unprovoked, the Russians just moved in.

Well, here's the thing, like out of nowhere, there was no reason for it is just completely greedy about territory and bringing back the glory of the Soviet Union. Yeah, I'm not saying that couldn't be a factor in this, but there's more immediate things that Putin's actually talking about.

And this is one of them. And I don't see media outlets, at least the ones that I've frequented in the mainstream, talking about it. So I just want you to be aware of that. The other thing to be aware of is that the US gives an incredible amount of foreign aid to Ukraine, including military.

40 of their foreign aid is military. And this is before this whole incident. You can look at this chart here and it's increased. Here's 2014, okay? And look how much it's increased since then. I mean, it's increased a lot.

We're at 679, actually it's a round up. It's almost 680 million in 2020, total US foreign aid to Ukraine. 40 of that's military. Why? Why are they giving so much aid to Ukraine in this way? Well, I mean, it's obvious.

It's because Russia's right there. That's a big part of it. And the fear that Putin has is that Ukraine is under the orbit of the United States. In fact, we were, meaning the United States, was very much behind a coup in 2014.

And I'll get to that, but there was an opportunity for Ukraine to kind of be more in Russia's orbit. And there was an open question. And since 2014, especially, it has been more the government, at least, in the orbit of the United States and possibly NATO.

And that's one of Putin's big fears. And we'll get to that. Now, here's where I like to go to for reporting on the issues. In fact, I'll even refresh it now to see if there's something new coming up. There is, actually.

One hour ago, Ukraine orders general mobilization announces new death toll. So I'll click on that. I'll read the story. This is the Epoch Times. I do pay for a subscription to the Epoch Times. Because, and it says, let's see here, allow.

Let's see, where's the death? I'm looking for the death toll. By the time you're listening to this, though, it'll probably be, it says local time that 137 people have been killed. It's very tragic. And 316 were wounded.

Now, that's, I don't wanna downplay this, but that is for an invasion. That's not a high number, necessarily. So we can see, perhaps, a silver lining there, but it doesn't take away from the fact that the 137 people have died.

So please be in prayer for their families. This is a good website, though, the Epoch Times, in my opinion. I think there's good information there. Definitely, they have a bias against communism, right?

But that's certainly a bias I'm aware of. And that's, I wanna support them, because I think their voice is important to be out there. I can listen to the pro-communist voices all day, but I don't get a lot of anti-communist voices.

And they're very aware of what's happening in China, which I appreciate, because China, in my mind, is the big geopolitical threat. Not Russia quite as much. It really is China. So we'll talk about that, too, later.

But the Epoch Times, great place to just get general reports. Here's what happened. Now, I am a big believer, big believer, that we need to go to primary sources, as much as I really am big on this. If you really wanna understand an issue in history, but it applies today to journalism in current situations, go to the primary sources.

Okay, if there was a speech, we don't all have time to listen to every speech. So it's sometimes good to find a good secondary source. I mean, that's what you're doing listening to me. You're listening to someone who's giving you information.

But if you really wanna understand the issue, don't listen to me. Go to the primary sources. Look at the websites. The problem is right now, if this was going pretty well until today, multiple government websites in Russia, including the Kremlin and the State Duma, have fallen offline.

And the incident comes amid a spate of cyber attacks targeting neighboring Ukraine. So both our websites are down. Now, fortunately, I have some of these websites. On the Wayback Machine, I was able to get the latest from actually, oh, this is February 25th.

So that would be... So it's actually, this isn't that long ago, earlier in the day. I was able to get some of the statements from the president of Ukraine. And they're very short. And you can get them in English, which is great.

And they're very simple. He compares them to Nazis. It's actually very similar to the narrative that I hear in the American media, interestingly enough. And there's really not a whole lot of, I don't know.

He's not making much of a case or an argument. Not saying that he doesn't in other places, but most of, this is pretty much what you can expect. This short, generally, and it's trying to get support for Ukraine and boost morale against Russia and really vilify Russia.

And it's very similar to the news reports that we're hearing in our country. Now, the one thing that's not down is their Twitter account. So you can go to their Twitter account and you can see their, and it's the same kind of thing.

It's, they're trying to petition Twitter to remove Russia from the platform. They want to get Russia canceled from Twitter. They, that's their, man, that's interesting. It's a little weird to me, I'll be honest with you.

I don't know who runs Ukraine's Twitter, but that wouldn't be the first thing on my mind. I'm not saying that, I don't even, I don't know. I don't know. It's like getting Russia removed from Twitter seems kind of low on the priority list, but that's what we're seeing.

There's other, like, for instance, this. They posted this less than a day ago. Here's Hitler giving Putin a, well, acting like he's proud of Putin. He's kind of looking at him the way an uncle would look at his nephew or something.

I don't know. And, I mean, it's weird to me because this is an official government website. And Ukraine says, this is not a meme, but our, but our and your reality right now. I don't know what to say about this.

I'm not, certainly not anti-Ukraine, but I am wondering why in the world their social media looks this unprofessional. And I don't know what they're, I don't know. It seems like it's someone who's, it just doesn't seem very mature to me.

I don't, I'm trying to struggle to even come up with the words to describe this. I mean, if your country's being invaded, you fear for your life. I don't know why you'd be posting stuff like this and trying to get Russia booted off Twitter.

I mean, is Russia doing so much damage on Twitter? I mean, let's go to Russia's Twitter, actually. We'll go there. Let's go there right now. President of Russia. Here's their Twitter. If, I mean, if you click on, here's the latest one from seven hours ago.

I mean, look, I mean, it's people, it's people, the people commenting are all against Putin. They hate Putin. So it's not like Russia's Twitter is being, is making much of a difference in this conflict, I wouldn't think.

But Ukraine's, whoever's running Ukraine's Twitter seems to think so. But that is going to the primary source, at least. You're at least looking at what is Ukraine saying? What is Russia saying, right?

And I think you get a better idea that way of the purposes of each particular country. Now, Putin, he has, he's been putting speeches out. And the one from, the last one from February 24th, where he talks about the military action, there, people have been saying this is a declaration of war.

It's, and that may be the case, but he doesn't come out and really say that. The media is, whenever they reference his speech, and I've heard references to it, they don't seem to accurately depict it in my mind.

There's two issues that come out of this. One is that there's a fear that Ukraine is going to be used by the European Union and the corruption and the coup that happened in 2014 backed by us in some ways.

And the neo, he talks about actually the neo-Nazi contingent in Ukraine that Russians are afraid of, an anti-Russian neo-Nazi contingent. And that gets more interesting. I read some articles talking about how in 2014, the United States actually backed some neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine.

I'll show you the groups later. And they are the big anti-Russian groups, apparently, political groups. And I just find it interesting. Ukraine's trying to say that Putin's Hitler, and then Putin is saying, well, you have actually neo-Nazi groups in your country.

And they're both kind of like calling each other Nazis, which it's just, okay, like that's where we're at. But Putin thinks that it's unsafe for Russia, because if you are part of NATO, and one country, if you go to war, let's say if there's a conflict between Russia and there already is, right?

I already showed you there is a conflict already going on. It's unresolved. But if it escalates and you have a conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and that Ukraine is part of NATO, then the NATO countries all have to pretty much go to war with Russia.

And so Ukraine isn't in NATO at this point, but there's a strong pressure. The United States, actually, their interest is to, what it seems like at least, is they really do want to push NATO farther east, and they want Ukraine in NATO.

So that's one of the big deals going on here, one of the issues. And so where do you come down on that? That's a big question, this. Do you think that Ukraine should be part of NATO? Do you think that Ukraine shouldn't be part of NATO?

That that would be a threat to Russia? That, depending on where you come down on that question, can determine a lot about who you think is in the right or the wrong in this particular situation. Or you could just think that everyone's kind of in the wrong.

That is also a legitimate option here. So I'm just trying to, as best I can, just give you what I understand to be the situation. There's an interesting section in this speech. He gives a whole history lesson, by the way.

And I will say this, okay, I just got done reading a very long biography on Hitler by John Toland. And one of the things that Hitler tended to do in his speech is sometimes, and this isn't wrong, this doesn't make you Hitler to do this, but he would give these history lessons sometimes about, and German greatness would be very much part of it.