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Okay, introducing James Carden.
He is part of the most important project ever.
I'm sorry, I need to page down and get the title here.
He is the contributing writer at The Nation and executive editor for the most important project in the world, the American Committee for East-West Accord.
And he has a very important article here at The Nation, McCain Talks Tough as the war in Ukraine continues without end.
Welcome back to the show, James.
How are you doing?
I'm all right.
Thanks for having me.
Very happy to have you here as always and appreciate you writing these great articles so I can link to them and show people the stuff in them.
Jeez, you know, it seems like just a few weeks ago Tulsi Gabbard was being accused, the congresswoman from Hawaii, was being accused of violating the Logan Act and some kind of treason because she went to Syria to basically meet with the Assad government there and be a proponent for peace that is undermining the American policy of war there, or at least one faction of part of the war there.
It's complicated.
Anyway, but no problem, I guess, when John McCain and Lindsey Graham go to Ukraine for the express purpose of stirring up trouble.
Is that really the case?
And do you know why that is?
Well, that is the case.
The attack on Gabbard, for instance, was motivated by people who just can't simply get their head around the fact that we've been on the wrong side of that conflict.
So Gabbard went there legally, right, through the channels of the sovereign government of Syria to give a report back on the humanitarian crisis that's going on there.
McCain, on the other hand, was not there with the express permission of the sovereign government of Syria, and in fact was breaking Syrian law by doing so.
The accusations of people violating the Logan Act are multiplying, it seems, by the day.
The president- Wait, let me stop you right there.
Wait, wait, let me stop you right there.
Are you talking about when McCain went to Syria back in 2013 to hang around with Norman Stormbeam?
No, no.
Or you mean Ukraine?
No, no.
McCain just went.
He just went back to Syria again?
Indeed.
He went about a week or two after Gabbard.
I just can't keep track of his high treason, sorry.
That's right.
He's a man of the world, and so where there's trouble, you're going to find McCain.
And his trip to Ukraine with Lindsey Graham and another protege of theirs, it looks like it's going to be Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.
She's a Democratic congresswoman, and they kind of have a habit of forming a troika.
So you remember the first McCain troika was McCain, Graham, and Joe Lieberman, and then Lieberman left for Greener Pastures of the American Enterprise Institute, and then they replaced him with Kelly Ayotte, and then Agnes Ayotte didn't survive, I don't believe, her election.
Right.
And now Klobuchar.
It looks like she's been tapped to fill in that very distinguished neocon senatorial troika.
Well, at least they're feminists, right?
Yeah, I guess they're equal opportunity warmongers.
Civil rights for imperialists.
That's right.
They lit out for Kiev and Eastern Ukraine, government-controlled Eastern Ukraine, right after the Christmas holidays, and Senators McCain and Graham, along with the Ukrainian president slash oligarch, Pedro Poroshenko, visited Ukrainian troops about four kilometers from the front line in Eastern Ukraine.
And then while they were there, the senators gave pep talks to the troops.
Graham said that 2017 would be the year of offense for the Ukrainian troops, and McCain was also pledging undying American support for their endeavor.
The fact that they would do this, and where they were doing it, I found to be particularly reckless and actually pretty offensive, since I've been one of the few independent American journalists who actually recorded from both sides of the conflict line in Ukraine.
And what these areas are like are they're small towns and villages of relatively poor and working class people who've been suffering for going on three years now, when the Civil War erupted on April 6th in Donbass, in the Russian-speaking eastern section of Ukraine.
And so it's really quite amazing that these powerful U.S. senators would go there to encourage more violence on the part of the Ukrainian regime.
The other thing that I'm at pains to add is that the recent uptick in fighting in Eastern Ukraine, by all accounts, even by Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which are U.S. government funded propaganda channels, have all agreed that the recent offensive in Eastern Ukraine was started by Kiev.
And they started it only a week or so after McCain and Graham visited and urged them to.
So it's really quite a remarkable story that, of course, is getting no airtime.
And no one is paying any attention to it because of all the activity that's going on in Washington.
And of course, Democrats aren't going to pay any attention to it because they have transformed themselves into the party of the Cold War.
So as much as it pains me to say it, they are more than happy to lend their support for McCain and Graham's crusade.
It's amazing.
It's like hypnotizing a chicken or something.
You just snap your fingers, just do it, just flip flop around.
I guess as long as they can be wrong about something and horrible on something, you can get them to do anything and believe anything.
Right.
It's just incredible.
Now, I'm sorry, James.
I'm on a tangent.
Help me with the timeline here again.
They went.
It was still during Obama times at the very end of last year that they actually went.
But then the video surfaced later.
Do I have that right?
That's right.
Do we know if Obama had signed off on this at all or this was like a top secret John McCain 007 sort of mission over there or what?
Well, the administration doesn't have to sign off on on these things necessarily.
I mean, I or the State Department gives them a slip of paper or something, right?
Yeah, that's right.
You know, what they're called are code outs, congressional delegations, and they are usually coordinated between the offices of whatever the senators or the congressmen and State Department.
But it is a very rare thing, indeed, for the for any administration to to to block that because after all, Congress holds the purse strings to these departments.
So yeah, that's what happened.
It was after the Christmas holidays.
They went over there, video surfaced, I think, a few weeks later, I'd say towards the a few weeks, maybe a week before the inauguration.
And then, of course, the offensive, a renewed offensive on on the rebel republics began not even a week after Trump was was sworn in.
So a lot has been going on.
But of course, it's, as I said, basically ignored because people stopped caring about it.
But I'm not sure that people should stop caring about it, though.
I wonder if outside of a few of us who pay attention to these things actually pay much attention to it.
I don't know.
I really I really don't know.
You know, I'm starting to wonder.
John McCain is just a figment of my imagination.
It doesn't really make sense to me, James, that he thinks the things he claims to think or does the things that he does.
What in the world could possibly I mean, I get it, OK, he's a Russia hawk, but is he not stopping and thinking at all of the kind of danger that this is when we have American soldiers?
I mean, I guess that's his point, right?
But why is that his point?
When we have American soldiers in Ukraine, if Russia shoots and kills them, then this can turn into a real war that could turn into H-bombs over every American city and worse.
So and everybody knows that.
So at this point, what in the hell is the game?
Why isn't Minsk too good enough?
Well, I don't understand.
Well, I think to your first question about what motivates or drives John McCain, I actually would recommend people who are interested in getting some insight into that.
There's a writer, journalist and author.
He wrote a book that made a pretty big splash a couple of years ago called This Town.
He's a New York Times reporter named Mark Leibovitch.
And he did a profile of McCain in the New York Times magazine a few years ago.
I think it was in 20, I don't know, 2014 in and around then.
And it really kind of just made the point that McCain doesn't really give a lot of deep thought to what he is up to.
What matters for McCain, according to this piece, is just the action.
He likes to be on the move all the time.
And I guess, you know, that makes sense.
Bill Kristol once told him, you remind me of Theodore Roosevelt.
And he just went, oh, swoon.
You think I should start a war, huh?
Okay.
So they're both right.
And they like to be in the arena, as TR said.
That makes a lot of sense.
I mean, in fact, when would he ever have time to read anything or know anything?
He's always on the move.
Right.
And well, I think, you know, anyone who has read the terrific book by Tim Berg, the Nightingale's song, I think it was called, it was a profile of a number of very famous Naval Academy graduates, McCain, Oliver North, Jim Webb.
And I don't think McCain, you're not allowed to say anything negative about McCain in Washington, but I don't think McCain ever had a reputation of being a scholar or much of a reader.
Crash five planes, too.
Right, right, right.
And so and then you will pivot away from McCain and maybe talk about Minsk, which you brought up.
Yeah.
And why isn't that going anywhere?
Well, I guess the first thing we could we could point out is that recently Putin decided to that Russia would now recognize the civil documents and passports of the rebel republics.
He did that also within the last few weeks after Trump's inauguration.
That basically is seen by some as de facto recognition of the republics.
And that is in violation of the agreement.
So that is something that Russia has done to undermine the agreement.
On the other side, Kiev, for a long time now, has supposed to have held a vote on decentralization, a vote on whether or not to give a measure of autonomy to those breakaway republics.
That was, according to the United Nations, supposed to be a precursor to implementation of Minsk.
They haven't done that yet.
So Kiev has been dragging its heels also because I think that Poroshenko and the oligarchs fear that if they do hold the vote and do grant a measure of autonomy to the breakaway regions, they will be swiftly overthrown by the far right in that country.
So they're kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place and they haven't been filling their end of the bargain.
And as we've seen over the past few weeks with the de facto recognition of the republics, that the Russians are undermining it as well.
Having said that, though, I don't really see any alternative.
And I guess the final update on Minsk is that the British, no, not the British, excuse me, the parties to the Minsk protocol, the Germans, the French, the Ukrainians, and the Russians did sit down at the Munich security conference two weekends ago and agreed that they would try to redouble their efforts to find a way forward.
So that's a bit of good news, but I don't really have very high hopes.
So what is this Ukrainian far right of which you speak, James?
Well, the Ukrainian far right was, in spite of what you hear in the mainstream media, was really the driving force behind the Maidan revolution, which took place three years ago on this February, and it culminated in the overthrow of Ukraine's democratically elected president Viktor Yanukovych.
Now, Yanukovych is often mistakenly painted as a pro-Russian or even a kind of stooge of the Kremlin.
And of course, then there's a connection here to the Trump campaign, because Trump's former campaign manager, who was hounded out of the campaign, Paul Manafort, worked for Yanukovych at some point.
So that's the reason why a lot of people believe, I think mistakenly, that Manafort is a sort of agent of the Kremlin.
But the far right, basically, there's still a lot of disputes over what actually happened on the Maidan Square in the lead up to the overthrow of Yanukovych in February of 2014.
I think we could all agree from the video footage that we've all seen that it was not a peaceful demonstration, that it was actually quite violent, and that Yanukovych, I think, quite wisely ran for his life.
And so the far right then organized and had been funded by wondrously wealthy Ukrainian oligarchs and formed their own battalions to go fight in the East.
And these battalions do not fall under the purview of the Ukrainian government.
So they're basically nationalistic, many of them anti-Semitic, hired guns that report to no one.
And so they're a very dangerous force in Ukrainian politics.
And I think that their existence and their ability to cow people like Poroshenko is one of the primary reasons that the government has really refused to make any steps towards implementing the Minsk Accords.
I hope that makes some sense.
Yeah.
You're saying that they're an independent power that the police and the military can't do anything about, and that the so-called elected junta there must appease, or else they'll be overthrown just like the government before them was overthrown by these guys.
That's right.
And one of the frustrations...
And they've been, I know it's been a couple of years since they started protesting outside of the parliament and saying, I guess the guy that's the Speaker of the Parliament now is one of these Nazis from the right sector who had said, well, they're not national socialists, they're social nationalists.
Like the alt-right.
They are.
But they said, hey, if you don't like it, we'll just get rid of you.
If we were able to overthrow the last government, why, you know, then you guys are serving at our pleasure, basically.
Right?
Peruby, that's his name that I'm searching for here.
Andre Peruby said that, right?
That's right.
And you're saying this is an ongoing threat, that the right sector basically is saying that at any given time, they'll just march right on in there if they don't like it.
That's right.
Yeah.
I mean, that's basically it.
I mean, Peruby's an interesting character.
Before he became, he was deputy speaker and now he's the speaker, I believe, of the Rada.
He apparently was the commandant of the Maidan.
And I was kind of, the Maidan, you know, protests.
And I was kind of puzzled because if you claim, as many neoconservative Americans do, that, you know, this was a wonderful, peaceful thing that happened.
Why does a peaceful protest need a commandant?
I didn't see, you know, the women's march that they had on January 21st.
I don't think there were any commandants there.
Yeah.
And what's with all the swastikas?
Right.
And then of course, you know, there's, Pete, there are, I don't know how much credence to give this, but there are reports that, you know, Peruby was kind of directing the false flag operation of snipers in the Maidan.
Some people, you know, believe that right sector, and not the government, were the people who were actually opening fire on the crowd.
I, you know, I don't know too much about that, but it wouldn't surprise me if that were the case.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's quite a bit of evidence of that, including some snipers had admitted that that was who had hired them, all right, and that kind of thing, which I, like you, plead at least partial ignorance.
I don't know if I could make the open and shut case, but it's not just kookery or something.
There are real indications of that, including there was even a, I think the Russians leaked an intercepted phone call of EU officials, you know, one informing the other and that kind of thing.
Right.
There's a very serious scholar up at the University of Ottawa who has covered this stuff and is worth reading.
And I'm not going to, unfortunately, I can't recall his name right now.
It's Ivan K. something.
I forget what it is, but he's been covering this.
And so, no, I mean, you know, I'm agnostic on that because my bottom line is that, you know, we shouldn't have been we shouldn't be involved there.
We shouldn't have been encouraging, you know, the overthrow of a democratically elected government on Russia's border.
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Well, in fact, let me ask you this to to rewind it one step before that.
My understanding, I was reminded of this the other day.
Oh, it's because of Gareth Porter's great piece debunking all this hype about Russia.
And he's saying, yeah, man, a fort worked for Yanukovych, but he's the guy who was telling Yanukovych to sign the deal with the EU, which is the American policy.
Right.
And then the way I remember this history, though, was that Yanukovych was told at the last minute at the big meeting that, oh, yeah, by the way, if you sign this deal with the EU, then you cannot have a deal with the Russians that'll break this deal and and you'll lose your trade deal with the EU.
It has to be an exclusive deal with us.
And they changed that the last minute.
And Yanukovych said, well, geez, I feel like I just showed up to my wedding and and was hit with a prenuptial.
And this kind of changes everything.
And I think actually I'm going to not sign the deal.
And that was the start of the riots and the start of the coup and the regime change.
But so I wonder, is it kooky conspiracy theory or is it just part of the story as far as you're concerned?
Or do you think that that was actually deliberate there, that they figured that actually they didn't want to have this trade deal with Ukraine?
They would rather have a coup.
And so they changed the deal in to to make it an offer he could not accept so that they could go ahead and engineer this riot and overthrow it.
Well, no, I mean, personally, I mean, I agree with the facts there about the about what happened with the trade agreement.
Of course, Russia at the same time was offering a 15 billion dollar package.
So if you are a politician who's up for re-election the following year, as Yanukovych was, you'd have to be a fool to spurn the Russian deal and go for the West Western deal, which also would have imposed a number of austerity measures on the population.
No, I think that that's another reason, right, to think that maybe it was sabotage.
Right.
All that austerity stuff, too, just made it a no way he could accept that.
Right.
Yeah, but I don't know if it was intentional, as Porter puts it, because only only that was me putting it that way.
Oh, I was just I just brought up about Manafort's role.
And that was what reminded me of it.
Yeah.
No, I mean, I would I would just say that I think that that theory would give the European Union far too much credit.
I don't think that they're nearly that crafty.
I was kind of thinking the Americans must be behind it.
But I don't know.
Well, I don't know how skilled we are these days, either.
So everything we touch seems to.
And see, but in other words, though, they could have said, hey, let's just have a deal.
And yeah, what do we care if you have a trade deal with Russia, too?
That'd be fine.
Yeah.
And then everything would have been fine.
Well, that's right.
The other thing that people forget about that this period immediately prior to the outbreak of protest is that, you know, that that really evil bad guy in the Kremlin suggested a tripartite deal to Merkel.
And she said no.
You know, so it wasn't like the Russians who were about to embark on the Olympic Games, the Winter Olympics.
Right.
It wasn't.
Can you imagine that they were they were trying to destabilize the neighboring government in Ukraine as they're preparing to showcase their country to the world?
You know, I mean, it makes absolutely no sense.
Well, in fact, I don't know if we've talked about this before, but it's worth bringing up because it's been at least a little while since we've talked about it on this show.
And that is that the editor of the journal Foreign Affairs, which is the most prestigious journal of the most prestigious foreign policy think tank in America, the Council on Foreign Relations, of course, he was a guest on The Colbert Show.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Yeah, I know.
It's just incredible to me that this prestigious journal is edited by such a manifest clown like Gideon Rose.
Well, I appreciate it, though.
I mean, in this case, it's sort of one of those things out of the mouths of babes where he's not the one behind it or anything, but he went right on Colbert and said, yes, see, we had him distracted, trying to suck up to us, really mocking Putin.
Yeah, he was trying to suck up to us and pretend to be part of Western European civilization somehow, thinking that he can do that by hosting the Olympics.
But we just took advantage of his distraction.
And while he wasn't paying attention, we're running off with his girlfriend.
Ha ha ha.
And put it like that.
We're stealing, you know, Robin to his Batman or stealing his girlfriend away, breaking his partnership.
And we're going to get away with it, too, because he's so dumb.
He's watching a bunch of Olympic games instead, trying to impress us with his PR stunt.
If I had to wager money on a battle of wits between Gideon Rose and Vladimir Putin, well, and as Gideon Rose said, I wouldn't be betting on Rose.
Yeah, I mean, what Rose said, I mean, because this was one or two days after the coup or something.
Right.
And what he says is now the test is whether we can get away with it.
Right.
We don't want to gloat too bad and spike the football too bad because then there might be a war in the east or something like that or we might lose Crimea.
So we're going to try to like.
Yeah, it didn't work at all, of course.
No.
If that was the plan.
Well, foreign affairs is coverage of the.
Ukrainian crisis and the ensuing civil war has been has been really disgraceful, but it's useful because it's a good barometer of group thinking and, you know, the conventional wisdom of the foreign policy establishment, which depresses me to no end.
Yeah, he might as well been blowing the whistle on them, you know, for for as frank as he was being about how stupid their thinking is behind, you know, these kind of programs.
I mean, of course, we shouldn't really neglect the to mention the the famous intercepted phone call of Victoria Nuland and Jeffrey Piatt.
She was the assistant secretary of state for European affairs, which is basically the ambassador to the United to the European Union.
And he was the ambassador to Ukraine.
And they are intercepted on the phone, the famous F the EU phone call where she's actually just saying F the EU because they're not moving fast enough on this coup d'etat that we're working on and we need to move them along and or get the U.N. officials to intervene here and help us do it.
Well, you'll also recall that one of the lines in that intercepted conversation is her saying to Piatt that Yats is our guy.
And Yats is Yatsynuk, who who wouldn't you know, it became the prime minister of the country after the coup.
So they were busy, you know, picking out, you know, who are there, you know, who they should try to maneuver into maneuver into power.
Yeah.
Well, you know, as you know, this is the thing.
The narrative begins in Crimea.
If you watch the Lair News Hour, never mind CNN or CBS or any of those goofballs.
But if you watch serious grown up news, the narrative still always begins in Ukraine.
The narrative never includes the trade deal, the riot, the overthrow and the maiden or if they do refer to it, it's always in broken context.
It's not in terms of this happened, which preceded the crisis on the Crimean Peninsula in any way.
And then even then, of course, it's only told as a heroic uprising against a corrupt government and this kind of thing.
But nor they would never give fair shake to your point of view about, you know, what what's important to tell in the chronology here.
Right.
And nor do they mention the fact that.
After the annexation of Crimea and really before that short, month long period before violence really took off.
That.
There were peaceful protests in the east against the revolution, against the Maidan, and Kiev sent the army in to suppress these, to violently suppress these to suppress these protests.
Now.
Some will argue that the Russians helped stir these up.
That may that might be so.
I wouldn't surprise me in the least.
But if you were a government that is seen to be illegitimate by a significant part of the country.
You should try to gain yourself some legitimacy, but instead what they did was violently crack down on the anti-Maidan protests and they immediately took to the parliament to pass restrictive language laws that would have, you know, downgraded the status of the Russian language in Ukraine.
So they didn't make any effort to try to win over the Russophone East.
And.
That's something that people overlook, that they open fire on people, and when you do that, then you're going to have to expect that there's going to be some reaction.
You should also they should have also have expected that if you're going to be opening fire on ethnic Russians.
Within sight of Russia, within sight of the Russian border, that you're going to have a significant problem on your hands because the Russian Federation under Putin has always been very, very clear about their policy when it comes to ethnic Russians in the states of the former Soviet Union, that if they if if they are if they come under attack, if they're discriminated against, if they're treated poorly, that is going to provoke a reaction from the Russian Federation.
Now, we may not like that policy.
We may say, well, that's interfering with the internal affairs of other countries.
That's true, but that's the policy and they should have known that in Kiev and they should have known that at the U.S.
State Department.
And you know what?
I suspect that they did know it, but they didn't care.
And so it was just a really, really reckless thing to do.
And, you know, I just would you know, I mean, you're familiar with the work of Richard Sakwa.
He's a British-Polish expert on Russia and Ukraine and in England.
And he wrote a terrific book on the crisis.
And, you know, he said that the European Union, the European Union's behavior throughout this thing was was just was geopolitical nihilism.
They didn't they didn't care about the consequences on the ground.
Right.
They were just concerned about wrenching Ukraine from Russia's orbit and the consequences for the for the regular people.
To hell with it.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, on the other hand, I think, you know, Merkel finally I forget if she tried this at Minsk one, but certainly for Minsk two, she sort of came to town and notified Obama, look, I'm doing this and then went with Holland, the the French president, and went and did the deal.
I don't know.
I guess it wasn't over Obama's dead body.
He went ahead and told her, OK, fine, go ahead.
But she wasn't really asking his permission or for his help.
I don't think she was sort of saying enough is enough, although that wasn't until what?
Late 2015.
That's right.
The first ceasefire, I believe, was.
September of 14, and then Minsk, too, was in and around February of 15, and I give I give Merkel and Hollande a lot of credit for.
And they have successfully since managed to keep the United States out of it, and that's good for the trainers there, which is that's a huge trip.
Well, no, I mean, the peace process.
Oh, right.
That's another that's another very aggravating piece of the puzzle is that.
And again, of course, it's not covered in the American media.
This information is readily available online on the U.S.U.S. Army website that we've established a base in in western Ukraine.
No one talks about this, you know, we're we're helping train and fund their their army.
We have troops on the ground on the border of Russia.
No one no one talks about it.
Oh, all that we can focus on are, you know, these disgusting rumors of Trump in a hotel room in Moscow and in all this other nonsense.
And they're like, hey, everybody, look, part of part of the dossier was confirmed.
Oh, yeah.
Which part?
Oh, something that had nothing to do with anything that.
Yeah.
One time a Russian called another one on the phone and they talked about sports.
Oh, yeah, that's great, guys.
Good job.
That's right.
Part of it's confirmed, everyone.
Did you hear?
Yeah.
Did you hear that that someone that an American that an American had the audacity to speak to the Russian ambassador in the United States?
Well, you know what, Scott?
If if that's if that's a problem, then I'm going to jail because I've I've even had I've even been at dinner.
Probably are, James.
I mean, you know, I mean, I'll be I'll be hauled before, you know, HUAC 2.0 soon enough.
I mean, you know, it's absolutely I'll testify against you.
Hey, listen.
Yeah, no.
I mean, hey, Mike Flynn was the designated national security adviser, the president-elect of the United States.
It was after the election.
I mean, he's had every right in the world to be on that phone.
I mean, that whole thing.
In fact, let's get into that in a second.
But I want to go back to what you're talking about, the war in East Ukraine for a minute there, because, you know, the the Russians did.
And by the way, I hate even doing disclaimers because I think it's conceding too much.
But I don't give a damn about Russia or their priorities or anything.
I'm only defending the truth from lies and peace from war.
And that's it.
You know, and I know that's the same for you here.
But, you know, so the deal is that the Russians said, you're not getting our naval base.
In fact, Putin joked that, you know, I thought about how nice it would be to go and visit our NATO friends down at the Sevastopol Naval Base for the holidays.
And then I thought, nah, you know, we'll keep it.
And then you guys can come and visit us and we'll have a good time.
And, you know, he's being kind of sarcastic, putting it that way.
But the point being that, yeah, no, two coups in 10 years, you're not going to threaten our naval base.
We're keeping our goddamn naval base.
And so, you know, and then they seized the Crimean Peninsula.
Yeah, outside of the law, the international law of how these things are supposed to work.
On the other hand, they didn't kill anyone.
Not one person was killed.
I think some shots were fired over the head of some Ukrainian soldiers, you know, as warnings.
I don't know if that counts as in anger or not.
But anyway, that was the whole invasion of the peninsula.
And then for the whole duration of the war, for a good solid year and a half there, horrible, solid year and a half in eastern Ukraine, Russia never invaded, much less absorbed eastern Ukraine.
I mean, Russia could have just said, I mean, Vladimir Putin had joked back in 2008 after the Georgia war that, hey, look, you know, come on, you know, and I know and we know and everybody knows that I could march to Kiev in a week or two at the most if I wanted to.
And that kind of thing.
He could have certainly invaded and absorbed the Donbass and said, OK, now wage your anti-terrorist war if he wanted to play it that way.
And he did not do that.
And I think I already know the answer.
But I guess I want to ask you, why didn't he go ahead and do that?
As you said, it is his priority to protect ethnic Russians who were in fact being slaughtered, as you're indicating they are again right now.
Well.
Just let me go back to Crimea before we would pick that threat up.
There's an interesting thing.
Again, that never gets mentioned, but the British House of Lords held an inquiry on the Ukrainian crisis.
And what it found was that on March 1st.
Right.
So in between the time of the Maidan revolution and the annexation of Crimea, March 1st, 2014.
This is from the report.
Three former Ukrainian presidents, Kravchuk, Leonid Kuchma, Viktor Yushchenko, called on the new government to renounce the Kharkiv agreements.
What are the Kharkiv agreements?
The Kharkiv agreements are the agreements between Ukraine and Russia, which gave Russia a lease on the naval base in Crimea.
So the Russians were seeing that the government was overthrown on the night of the 21st of February 2014.
And then a little over a week later, three former presidents come out and say, forget it with the naval base in Crimea.
So what do you think their reaction was going to be?
You know, I mean, that's kind of astounding.
Well, that's a huge point that I did not know.
So this wasn't just a, hey, Putin had reason to believe that the status of the Sevastopol base on the Crimean Peninsula might be threatened.
He had every reason, a very important, very specific reason to believe that, in fact, not even to believe he knew he read that it had been threatened.
That's right.
Every reason.
And now you can argue with.
What they ultimately did right now.
They could have secured the base, I believe they could have secured the base without annexing the entire peninsula.
I can understand the reasons why they did it and the reasons of history, why they did it and why that would appeal to the Russian public and the Russian government.
I think that probably was, in retrospect, a political misstep on his part.
But no matter what's done is done.
And they had ample reason to be very alarmed by what was happening in Ukraine.
Now, there was a second part.
Why didn't Russia absorb the Donbass?
Yes.
Expansionist, Rancho Vista, Russia.
It's not quite the new Soviet Union, but it's the old Russian czarist empire come back to life.
I think part of the reason is that they saw the fierce international reaction to what happened with Crimea.
But I think really the more.
Important reason is that they simply couldn't afford it.
So when I was in.
The People's Republic of Donetsk in March of 2015, right after the Minsk protocol was put into place.
Was in a small meeting with the foreign minister of the DPR and someone someone asked him.
You know, do you want to become part of Russia?
And he said, yes, of course.
But.
We have no right to ask them to do that, and we have no right to ask them to bankrupt themselves.
Over us.
And so it was always a issue, it seems to me, of of resources, and I don't think that it probably it probably wouldn't really have served.
Russia's interests in the long run, and I think that probably just from a real politic point of view, it serves their interests better.
To have.
What could be autonomous Russian leaning regions within Ukraine.
So that those would be, I think, the reasons why they never went ahead.
Yeah, well, that's a good point.
That's a good point, too.
They could have pro-Russian leadership elected, presumably someday in Kiev again, but not if they absorb the east where all the pro-Russian votes lie.
So, yeah, that's a good point, too.
I hadn't thought of that one.
All right.
So I don't know.
I guess, you know, what else do we have to learn here, James?
What's the important thing?
Is it that Biden and his family are making a lot of money or that Trump is is more or less likely at this point to make any positive changes or what do you want to say?
Well, I don't know.
I mean, I am pessimistic about.
The direction that the administration is going, though, I think that, you know, the appointment of H.R. McMaster brings a much needed professionalism, perhaps, to the foreign policy team.
But on this issue, by the way, or you have a reason to think that he's good on Russia just overall, it seems like he reads books compared to, yeah, compared to Trump.
Yeah, because, you know, I was reading, you know, Mark Perry has this thing in Politico all about it's McGregor versus McMaster for what's the best way to wage tank war against Russia and Eastern Europe, which doesn't necessarily make him a hawk.
In fact, it might mean that he really knows better than most why to never tangle with them.
But his point of view is is certainly, you know, quote unquote, well-informed on this issue for better for worse.
I don't know, you know, what what kind of real bent it gives him, though.
Right.
And I think that the initial that's his specialty, though, apparently is war in Eastern Europe.
If it is, then, as you say, that could be a good thing because anyone who knows even a little bit about Russian military capabilities knows that it probably wouldn't be best to tangle with them in a tank battle in their own neighborhood.
Their tank capabilities are, from what I understand, are quite, quite impressive.
And I don't really I can't see any reason why we would think that we would come out well in a war with them, given that we haven't really come out well.
In any wars since 1991, fighting far less sophisticated and well-funded opponents.
Yeah, well, and especially when you're facing an H-bomb arsenal like the one that they got.
I think that that would be prohibitive, you know, somehow.
But you know, you would hope that that would induce a note of caution.
But I guess if you're John McCain or Lindsey Graham, it doesn't really bother you for some reason.
I guess they figure, hey, well, we'll be dead in it, so we won't care.
Which is perfectly logical, if not reasonable.
Right.
And horrifying.
All right.
Hey, listen, I really appreciate you coming on the show, James, as always.
My pleasure.
Take care.
All right, y'all.
That is James Carden.
He is from the Committee for East-West Accord.
He is a contributing writer for The Nation and executive editor, editor, should slow down.
Someone on Twitter said, you sound like you're trying to win the contest for Talks Fastest.
He is the executive editor for the American Committee for East-West Accord at EastWestAccord.com, contributing writer at The Nation, and he wrote this very important article, McCain Talks Tough as the War in Ukraine Continues Without End.
They're at TheNation.com.
And that's Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, you guys, I appreciate it.
ScottHorton.org, LibertarianInstitute.org, Twitter.com, Scott Horton Show.
See?
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