OK.
I'm Austin Smith, joined by Michael Muir of 24/7 Wall
Street.
And Michael, we had a conversation recently about the China
Taiwan conflict, and we talked a little bit about the
conflict that's going on between Russia and Ukraine today.
And I'd like to go back to that for this.
And I'm curious what has actually led to Russia's invasion
of Ukraine?
We've seen a lot of different narratives.
We've seen, you know, Putin is is trying to conquer
Ukraine.
We've seen Putin is trying to reintegrate Ukraine.
We've seen the argument of denoxification.
We heard Putin's own argument with Tucker Carlson, which was
somewhat long winded and based in history as you view
it, based on the information you've seen, what has actually
brought us to the conflict today?
What triggered this?
Well, we can really go back a long way to
see the origins of this idea that Putin and other
hardliners have put forward of Ukraine as essentially little Russia.
That goes all the way back to the days of
Imperial Russia before the Soviet Union, when the Polish Lithuanian
Commonwealth was partitioned amongst major European powers.
A large chunk of Ukraine ended up in the the
Russian Empire, another portion was taken by the Hapsburgs, and
the two Ukraines, for lack of a better word, had
very different experiences.
Austria Hungary wasn't necessarily very welcoming of its ethnic minorities,
but because it was a multi ethnic multilingual empire, it
needed to be a bit more accommodating.
So they allowed a proliferation of Ukraine language and culture,
whereas the Russians suppressed it.
So again, this idea goes way back to the 18th
century.
So that's just one of many areas of this very
long story.
And we can go forward a little bit to World
War One.
Now when we think World War One, we generally think
Western Front, 2 lines of static trenches, not an awful
happening, and that's largely true.
But then when we go to the Eastern front, which
is far less studied in the western world and English
language speaking world, there's not an awful lot of research
on that area.
But Ukraine was actually an epicenter of World War One.
We just don't typically associate with that conflict.
And because of the partition between the Habsburgs and the
Russian Empire, about 300,000 Ukrainians fought for Austria Hungary and
about 4.5 million Ukrainians fought for by the Russian Empire.
And then by 1917 the the Eastern front was largely
dead, it was finished and Ukraine we see the first
Ukrainian government, for lack of a better word emerging in
1917.
But this experiment wasn't destined to last very long.
Again there was a lot of conflicts after World War
One ended in Eastern Europe to establish the post war
borders.
There's also the Russian civil war.
So Ukraine, Ukraine comes under Russian dominion once again after
the end of the Russian civil war in the early
1920s.
There's another key point that we want to address here
is the the famine in Ukraine that took place as
a result of Stalin's five year plan.
And that still has an impact on the present discourse.
You know, Ukraine, it's pretty adamant that that was a
genocide carried out by the Russian, well, by the Soviet
Union, but under Russian dominion.
And Russia has consistently denied that that was a a
genocide.
It was just an unfortunate consequence of rapid industrialization.
So there's already this very, very long standing distrust of
Russia in Ukraine goes way back.
And then we can get to, so you mentioned the
denacification of Ukraine, one of Kuinski talking points that goes
back to Operation Barbarossa in 1941.
So after the famine Operation Barbarossa has launched, that's Germany's,
Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union.
Most of Ukraine is quickly overrun.
And some elements of ultra nationalists within Ukraine were actually
fairly welcoming of this invasion, seeing them as liberators.
Obviously that wasn't the reality.
A few even went as far as joining up with
volunteer s s regiments, but that shouldn't be misunderstood.
The Galicia division represented thousands of Ukrainians, but millions more
Ukrainians fought against the Nazis.
But that's a talking point that Putin and a lot
of hardliners have exploited this memory of World War Two.
In fact, the really the first half of the 20th
century was Ukraine was probably one of the worst places
to be.
It was just a series of tragedies and conflicts.
So again, there's a couple more important things that happened
between the end of World War Two and today, 1954.
This was an event that didn't really generate a lot
of attention at the time, but Khrushchev granted Crimea to
Ukraine in 1954 as a goodwill gesture.
Now at the time, very little changed, didn't have a
great deal of practical effects because it was all still
under the the Soviet Union.
But obviously we Fast forward to 2014 and we see
that's that's a major bonus contention between Russia and Ukraine.
Like Crimea didn't really have any specific attachments to Ukraine.
In fact, a lot of the population wouldn't have been
considered themselves Ukrainian.
When Ukraine became an independent nation after the dissolution of
the Soviet Union, there was a question of what are
we going to do with Crimea because it didn't necessarily
want to be part.
So the sort of solution, the ad hoc solution was
to have Crimea as an autonomous region within Ukraine.
And there's one other point we need to get to
as well is in 1994, this is after the the
dissolution of Soviet Union and Ukraine is an independent nation.
And there's a question, what are we going to do
with nuclear weapons that are stationed in Ukraine?
And obviously with hindsight, we can think of that as
a very bad move.
But actually in the context of the time, it made
a lot of sense.
There was serious questions over the safety and the loyalty
of the soldiers who were in charge of nuclear weapons
at the time.
So it just seemed a sensible move.
But it also should be pointed out that even in
1994, Ukrainian government was under no illusions that this guarantee.
So the the deal was, we'll remove the nuclear weapons
and you promised never to invade.
But even in 1994, the Ukrainians didn't take that particularly
seriously.
They pointed out one of the senior politicians at the
time pointed out if Russia invades tomorrow, no one's going
to do anything.
Obviously it wasn't tomorrow, but it was more like 20
years later.
So yeah, there's just a lot of these points going
way back have a huge impact on the present day.
So when when I look at this, you know, the
the clean answer is probably that it's complicated, right?
And what we've already looked at is, is five different
potential causes of Russia's invasion of Ukraine going all the
way back to early 1900s.