For Pacifica Radio, February 27th, 2022.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Antiwar.com and author of Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,600 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
And it's still fun drive here at KPFK.
We're going to be doing some pitches here in a minute.
But first, introducing our guest.
It's my old friend, the great Greg Palast, author of numerous different versions and updated books called The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
You're a specialist on Republican voting shenanigans and also the international oil industry and lots of really smart stuff.
Formerly with BBC News Night and he writes for The Rolling Stone and whatever else.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Greg?
Pretty good, Scott.
How are you?
Gregpalast.com, I meant to say that too.
That's where you find all this stuff.
Now, so here's the thing.
How are you, my old friend?
I haven't spoken with you in too many years.
In many years.
Well, you know, the world's in flames and it's not happy, is it?
It's a sad day.
Now we're recording this on Thursday morning.
So by the time everybody hears this on Sunday, things almost certainly will have gotten worse.
But as we record this now, we're about half a day into a full scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
Apparently, they're taking Odessa.
The last I saw, they're moving on Odessa.
I guess might as well place our bets on the idea that the Russians are going to, in fact, invade and take the whole country all the way to the Romanian border.
Is that what you believe, Greg?
Well, Putin hasn't talked to me in weeks, so I have no idea what's in his head.
You know, that's one of the problems we have here.
And in fact, you know, as we sit here on Thursday, the information we get is confused.
All we do know is that Russia has certainly been hitting with maybe missiles, maybe artillery or planes, probably missiles, airports throughout Ukraine.
Tanks have rolled through the border areas.
We really don't know much more than that.
But it looks like a grim situation.
Horrible.
Yeah.
And, you know, for those familiar with the geography of Ukraine, I guess it looks almost certain that they're going to keep everything east of the Dnieper River here, give or take Kyiv.
We don't know yet.
And then the question is whether they're going to conquer the west of the country as well.
That's how it looks at this point.
Right.
Well, you know, it's I'm just wondering if Russians are getting that old Afghanistan feeling, you know, when they try to swallow Afghanistan, the Soviet Union choked on it and blew apart.
Whether that will happen with Russia now, I don't know.
But, you know, it's very hard, you know.
You know, let's face it.
This is one of the problems we have.
You know, people know Greg Pallas, know me a lot for my work on elections and vote suppression.
And one of the things I've constantly said is that when you have unelected leadership, you're out of control.
If George Bush had to really face the electorate and felt he couldn't stay in office by stealing elections, we wouldn't have invaded Iraq.
I think Putin has decided that he doesn't have to face the judgment of his own people.
He's got his main opponent, Navalny, in prison this week.
You know, you can't divide these things.
You can't divide the suppression of the Russian vote from the invasion of Ukraine.
Even there, Navalny ain't much of an opposition figure.
It's not like he leads some major party that would otherwise be the ruling party if only Putin wasn't stopping him or something like that.
You know, so.
We don't know, do we?
That's one thing about not having elections.
You know, it's like I've been in these areas.
I've been in the, from, I was in Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, plenty of places where, you know, they said, well, there doesn't seem to be an opposition.
Well, that's because you get killed, imprisoned, poisoned, destroyed.
And then we just saw the uprising in Kazakhstan where, you know, I was assured I was there.
I was assured that everyone loves the great granddaddy dictator, you know, who gets elected technically with 112% of the vote or whatever.
So it's not clear.
I mean, why would Putin jail his opponents if he didn't fear them?
If he didn't fear them, he wouldn't jail them.
All right.
Hold on one second.
Listen up, you all.
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All right.
Now, Greg, I think you're right about that.
I'm not so sure that elections provide much accountability, as the great Tom Woods says.
No matter who you vote for, you always get John McCain.
And it doesn't seem like there's much variation there.
Biden, I think, you know, he's a 20 time loser, right?
What does he have left to screw up at this point that he hadn't already ruined?
But, you know, I don't know.
How about this?
If we could just zoom out just a little bit since America is the superpower.
And yeah, this is my bent, but I think it's also right.
Doesn't it make sense to question, first and foremost, whether or not this is a failure of American diplomacy?
Supposedly, they know how to handle these Russians and they know how to handle the Chinese.
They know how to handle keeping America in and the Germans down and the Russians out and all this smart stuff.
And yet, somehow, all their greatest plans have led to this.
Now, of course, it's all Vladimir Putin's fault, but maybe it's also Bill Clinton and W. Bush and Barack Obama and Donald Trump and Joe Biden's fault, too.
What do you think about that?
Well, it wasn't Bill Clinton in a tank crossing into Odessa.
Right now, there's fighting, as we speak, in Chernobyl.
So, yeah, I mean, I don't agree with that.
You've got to be careful with that.
You'd be glowing in the dark.
Yeah, so, exactly.
So, one of the things we want to be careful of is the idea that, you know, for all of the ills and evils of U.S. imperialism, it doesn't mean that the U.S. is responsible for every evil in the world.
And, you know, yes, if you go to gregpowells.com, you'll see a story, seven facts about Ukraine.
Because I'm interested in the facts.
You don't need to, you know, I'm not a pundit.
I'm an investigative reporter.
I have a team of people who've been in Ukraine for many years.
And there's no doubt that we have to look at the center of this conflict.
And it's not the usual, you know, the play is to make it the new Cold War.
This is more medieval.
That is, it's a religious war.
In the east of Ukraine, in the Donbass area, that population is almost entirely Russian Orthodox, with about 15% Muslim population.
There are no Muslims in the rest of Ukraine.
Virtually none.
And few Orthodox who follow the Moscow Patriarchate.
Most of Ukraine follows the Kiev or Ukrainian Orthodox Church, or the Greek Orthodox Church is a bit smaller than that.
So why am I mentioning these things?
Because this is in the end, actually a religious conflict.
One of the things that's driving Putin, his base of power, and while I said, you know, he doesn't have to worry because he doesn't really have elections.
But you know, he does have to get reelected.
And no matter how much he crushes, poisons, jails the opposition, you don't last long without some popular support.
And at the base of his popular support is that he is selling the Russian people that he's defending.
He's defending their co-religionists, those who follow the Moscow Patriarchate.
And what he calls defending them against genocide in the east from the Ukrainian Orthodox.
Now, I can't tell you, Scott, the difference between the Ukrainian, the Moscow, and the Greek Orthodox churches.
They all have different funny hats, like every, like every religious sect their leaders have funny hats, whether it's Jewish, Muslim, or the various flavors of Orthodox.
That might be it.
You know, as George Carlin said, he thinks maybe that's what the fighting is all about, is just the difference in the funny hats.
Way different and wrong compared to ours.
Yeah, well, it's what Freud actually called, before George Carlin, I guess, you know, his ghostwriter, what Freud called the vanity of small differences.
So we have to look at this to a great extent as religious war, because Putin cannot stay in office, no matter what happens with the elections, without the support of the Patriarch Kirill in Moscow.
This has been the base of his support, just like we have the Christian evangelists, who are very powerful in the US.
Greg, you're saying that this Patriarch has been on Putin's case lately?
Very much, because there's a concern, he had a concern, which is, there's two concerns of the church that they've expressed.
One is the killing of, we've had about 14,000 people killed in the eastern Ukraine over the past eight years.
This war didn't just start, it's been going on for eight years.
In 2014, well, in 2010, I hate to do history, but we have no choice, because history always bites us in the ass.
In 2010, Viktor Yanukovych was elected president of Ukraine, and he was pro-Europe, and we said that was a fair election, and wonderful, we're happy for Yanukovych.
But he was facing West, and trying to join the European Union, and trying to even join NATO.
But this is after the world economic collapse of 2008-9, so Ukraine was on its back, but the Germans and the European Union would not give any help or debt relief to Ukraine.
So, Putin stepped in and said, well, I'll help you out.
And so, Yanukovych switched his allegiance more towards Russia.
So, when he got re-elected in 2014, we claimed this was an illegitimate election.
Suddenly, we liked him before, and we thought he was legitimately elected, now he's illegitimate.
And there was an insurrection, just like January 6th insurrection in the US.
The difference was, it was called the Maidan Europe insurrection, led by the Ukrainian Orthodox leaders.
You can see them on the stage at the Maidan.
And they overthrew, and the difference between the January 6th insurrection here in Washington, and the Maidan uprising in 2014, is that that insurrection succeeded, and removed the president favorable to Russia.
That led the Eastern, the Russian Orthodox, and who are Russian speakers.
By the way, I have some distant relatives in the Donbass area, quite distant, but they see themselves as Russian, they speak Russian, they thought of themselves as nothing but Russian.
And so, that area declared itself independent, and you've had a war for eight years since then.
So, this is really, so what is the difference between these two areas?
One has been the Donbass area is Russian Orthodox and Russian speaking versus the rest of Ukraine.
And that's been at the core of this problem.
Plus, you've had the Ukrainian army and right-wing militias killing thousands of people in the Donbass.
So, this gave Putin his causus belli.
But here's the thing that's so frightening right now, is that he won.
The Donbass was effectively independent.
He recognized its power.
In effect, the Ukrainian government had never, had not controlled the Donbass in eight years.
So, Putin had won.
So, the question is, after you win, what is the new game he's playing?
And there is an anger in the Russian Orthodox church that they were kicked out of Kiev and replaced by a Ukrainian patriarch.
So, you have to understand these really important religious undertones of this whole fight.
And of course, one of the things that's both, you know, one of the almost saving possibilities that we had in Ukraine was that the president is Jewish.
One of the few Jews left in Ukraine.
And he didn't have a dog in the fight.
And he was pushing against his own parliament to try to cut a deal with Russia, going back to what was called the Minsk Accords of 2015.
Remember, Russia was in the Donbass area in 14 after the attacks and the overthrow of the pro-Russian president.
So, you ended up with Russian troops there.
They left when Ukraine, Ukrainian separatists, France and Germany signed an agreement that said that the Donbass would be autonomous and have certain powers within the Ukrainian government, mainly to keep NATO out of Ukraine.
And unfortunately, the Ukrainian government never lived up to the Minsk Agreements, though in truth, neither did the separatists in the Donbass, who wanted to be separate, did not want to have an autonomous republic.
They wanted to have a republic.
They wanted to rejoin Mother Russia.
Now, I'm going to give you a little more history, whether you like it or not.
Let me stop you for a second, Greg, because I want to go back to, real quick, the regime change in the church that you talked about there.
Could you please elaborate a little bit about what exactly happened after the war broke out there and the pro-Ukrainian Orthodox Church faction took power in Kiev?
What was it exactly that they did?
I mean, I know they tried to outlaw the Russian language as an official language at first, at least.
That was kind of the declaration of culture war right there.
But please elaborate a little bit more about what exactly it was that they did to the Russian Orthodox Church leaders in Ukraine that you were mentioning there.
Well, keep in mind that the Russian Orthodox Church, after the fall of the wall in 89 and the independence of Ukraine in 90, still had tremendous power of the Moscow Patriarchate.
I know that this sounds very strange to us.
These are the issues that people fight and die over, these medieval religious issues.
And so the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate was effectively kicked out of Ukraine.
And the Russian Patriarch, Kirill, was not too happy about that.
And keep in mind that they go back historically.
Russia, Rus'.
What do you mean exactly by kicked out?
Could you please elaborate on kicked out there?
You're talking about this is after the coup and after Crimea and with the start of the war in the Donbass in 2014, essentially, right?
You'd already had this shift where the Ukrainian church had replaced the Moscow Patriarchate.
And so, again, there were followers of the Patriarchate in the east of Ukraine.
And this is the core of the battle.
But again, the Moscow Patriarchate was not only concerned about the killing of their co-religionists in the Donbass.
Remember, about over 3,000 civilians have been killed in the Donbass.
There was a real reason why Putin was and the Moscow Patriarch was concerned about the safety of the people in Donbass, is that they were getting shelled and killed.
Right.
3,000 in the past year.
Now, that does, you know, let's face it, there was a kind of causus belli in in protecting the people of Donbass, what Putin called genocide of the people in the Donbass.
That may be an exaggeration.
But on the other hand, if 3,000 civilians, mostly children, were killed, you know, you might take the same view.
Hey, let me ask you, Greg, when in February of 2015, about a year into the war, the Donbass region, Donetsk and Luhansk held a plebiscite referendum type of a deal where they voted that they wanted to ask Putin to please join the Russian Federation and he told them no.
And now he's taken by force and then some.
So my question to you is, why did he not go ahead and just pull out a sharpie and redraw the line and say this is Russian now back then?
Well, that was because of the what we call the Minsk Accords.
Again, France, Germany, and the two sides of the Ukrainian conflict signed that.
So the idea was that, okay, the people of of the Ukrainian east would have a certain autonomy and they'd be protected from attack.
That never happened.
They were never attacked.
They were never given autonomy, though they effectively created a separate republic.
And so this is what is so horrible and tragic.
And frankly, in my, you know, I mean, it's not a great stretch to say inexcusable extension of the conflict, because Putin did effectively get control of the Donbass.
They were effectively independent.
He rolled tanks and troops back into the Donbass.
Remember, they were there in 15, left because of the Minsk Accords.
The Minsk Accords were never implemented.
So now they rolled back in.
It was a virtual invitation to the Russians to go back into the Donbass.
The question is, once they've got these areas back, Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, and by the way, there's a fourth province, which is adjoining called Kherson.
And I expected that that would join Russia again.
One thing we should know historically, just so people have a sense of history, because history always bites us in the butt.
From 1783 to 1954, this eastern Ukrainian area and the Crimea were part of Russia.
They were not traditionally Ukrainian, which is why it's a different religion.
It's a different language.
It's a different country.
They were always from 1783 to 1954.
These eastern areas, including the Crimea, were part of Russia.
In 1954, Khrushchev became premier, head of the party.
And he was in an internal fight in the Politburo with his prime minister, Melnikov.
So Stalin dies in 53, Khrushchev takes over in 54, and in his fight with Melnikov, slices off part of Melnikov's base, that is the Crimea, which has the big Russian naval base at Sevastopol and the eastern Ukraine.
So he gave them to Ukraine to give his allies power so that he could reduce the authority of Melnikov.
So basically, this area became part of Ukraine as part of some internal Communist Party conflict.
But these are not Ukrainians.
It's the same story with Crimea as well.
Yeah, Crimea is part of that.
Certainly, Crimea is completely Russian.
Again, I follow my issue as elections.
And while there's no question that the Crimeans fairly voted to rejoin Russia, in part, by the way, the naval officers, by rejoining Russia, their pensions grew by 500% versus the starvation pensions that you get if you're in Ukraine.
So there was no question that the Crimeans were Russians.
They voted to rejoin Russia.
That made complete sense.
It's Russia.
It's always been Russia.
The Donbass, very much the same.
The question is what we have now.
And again, this is Thursday morning, so I don't know what the latest developments are.
And as you know, truth is the first victim of war.
So we're getting all these conflicting reports.
All we know is that the airports have been destroyed from Odessa to Kiev and Kherson.
We're getting reports.
By the way, I have two correspondents on the ground in Ukraine.
And so a lot of this comes from them.
So we have this destruction of the airports.
There may be an invasion.
There seem to be columns moving through the border area.
I want to be very careful just repeating the fourth-hand reports we're getting from the media.
But it does look like how far Putin will go, we don't know.
My question, though, and I'm confused, I admit, why after winning, it's like he just won the gold medal.
He was standing on the stand.
He got the Donbass.
He has Crimea, Putin.
Why this sudden new why extend the conflict?
You've won the war.
Now he's extending it.
Why?
And I can't.
I got a theory there.
I literally can't tell you.
Yeah.
I mean, I have a theory, which is that, you know, the one of the main reasons he didn't absorb the Donbass back in 2015 was because then he would be essentially tilting the ethnic and linguistic and religious culture war balance in favor of the other guys.
Whereas now, even though they're obviously on the outs and suppressed and had their last president overthrown and everything, that there's still the potential that you still have kind of this 50-50 split inside the country.
Once he takes the Donbass now, you know, he had to make some kind of statement, but now he just reduced his his 50 percent by 10 percent.
I'm making up these numbers, but you see what I mean.
And so now there's like, well, so now I'm giving the Ukrainian nationalists an even bigger majority and control of the government for the ongoing future.
So I guess I better take the whole rest of the country to that.
You know what I mean?
This is government logic to me is, well, I created a problem.
I better solve it by creating a worse problem and keep going till I run out of money.
Well, keep this in mind.
2015.
The price of oil was plummeting.
To understand Russia, you need two things.
You need to understand religion, which is their concern for the Russian Orthodox Church and their Russian Orthodox co-religionists in Ukraine.
But the second thing is oil.
And you say, well, wait, how much oil does Ukraine have?
The answer is almost none.
But in, you know, and relative in the world, certainly relative to Russia, Russia doesn't need its oil.
It's drowning in oil.
But the price of oil is everything to to Putin.
So when you talk about 15, you have to look at the price of oil, which shot down by March 2016, just looked it up to 45 bucks a barrel and 45 bucks a barrel.
And then it began plummeting, going up and down.
But, you know, obviously hitting the floor in 2020 because of covid down to 20 bucks a barrel.
This is devastating to Russia.
The price of oil is everything.
Forty percent of the Russian budget, 40 percent is comes from sale of oil, gas and the related royalties.
The Russian government was broke.
And the more conflict, the more problems that Putin can create, the higher the price of oil.
The one thing, the minute that he announced the tanks rolling, I was wondering how he's going to keep up the price of oil because he got it up to over 90 bucks a barrel.
And I said, well, now that he's won the Donbass, how does he keep up the price of oil?
The answer is, well, you keep pushing the invasion.
So now oil just busted 100 bucks a barrel as we are speaking, Scott.
And and that's what's a concern to Putin.
And by the way, that's also what makes the sanctions that we're imposing that the U.S. and Europe are imposing a laugh.
Right.
Because while we're imposing these like sanctions, it's like, oh, we're going to cancel your Amazon Prime card, Putin.
And America last year, they spent or they imported approximately 20 million barrels of oil and gas from Russia a month.
So I don't know if they're trying to cancel all that now.
But here's the thing.
We're on a severe time limit here.
And so, I mean, even to record this thing, much less to fit on the air on Sunday.
So let me just say that it's fun drive time.
We need your support.
Otherwise, this show would have to be sponsored by Northrop Grumman and we'd have to lie to you all morning, like over on the TV channels.
So, well, you got to support it.
Let me just give him the number here.
It's 818-985-5735, 818-985-5735.
Of course, KPFK.org.
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Enough already.
Time to end the war on terrorism.
And now you, Greg, kill him dead for about one minute.
OK, go to KPFK.org.
I have just so you know, I've just donated twenty five hundred dollars to KPFK.
Can you match me?
You're going to send me that book, but I already have it, don't I, Scott?
So KPFK.org.
And there's some great premiums there.
I just don't talk the talk.
I'm walking the walk.
I'm writing a check.
And by the way, it's not because I'm loaded.
You're in my book, by the way, although I think I just plagiarized you.
I'm not sure if I gave you credit by name.
Go ahead.
I like that.
OK, so so I've you know, if you look out in front of my house, I have a actually an 18 year old Toyota.
That's what I drive.
But I thought, what's important to me?
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Thank you so much.
That's Greg Palast, everybody.
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