An Update on Ukraine

Robert sits down with researcher Aram Shabanian to ask the important question, 'Hey, what's going on in that giant bloody land war in Europe?'

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome to it could happen here the only podcast where
the hosts asks all listeners and guests to provide their
Social Security number and bank account number, routing number, all
that good stuff. UM. This is a podcast about how
things aren't always great, uh and maybe are kind of
falling apart a little bit. And and it has also

(00:27):
not been, for the most part, a podcast about the
expanded war in Ukraine. UM. For a variety of reasons.
We have done some coverage of that, uh, but we've
focused specifically on stories of individual people and and that's
generally where I feel like our strength is as a program.
But people have been repeatedly requesting we do a little

(00:49):
bit of a bigger picture look at what's gone on
in that conflict, and so I have brought Aram Chambanian
into the studio. Aram, how are you doing, buddy? Oh?
Not a bad man? How you doing today? Finding dandy
like sour candy? Now, would you describe kind of your
your who you are and what you do and why
why you're You're someone people should listen to when we're

(01:12):
talking about a conflict like this, because you are one
of the people who when everyone was like, there's no
way Russia will invade was was saying, well, maybe it
might happen. Yeah, I mean, um, well, I think one
of the things that that sets me aside from a
lot of other analysts out there is that I never
thought I would become an analyst, and I never thought

(01:32):
that I would do this. Um. I it wasn't set
in stone from me from the beginning. I thought I
was gonna be like a high school history teacher. And
so I've always studied the world in terms of reading
books on different conflicts around the world, and and I've
tried to keep appraised on where these books have led to. Right,
So if I read a book about the Second Congo War,
it makes sense to then follow current events that are

(01:54):
related to what happened after the Second Congo War. As
a result, I followed things going on in Ukraine starting
in with you am I done, um, and elsewhere in
the world. But but Ukraine has been one that I've
focused on pretty heavily because, um, there's been a lot
of information about Ukraine ever since because of how late
the war happened in terms of human history and in

(02:16):
terms of recent conflicts. Feen, isn't that long ago? Um?
And so uh, I started following it back then, and
I think that if you combine modern open source tools,
modern technology, some of the stuff that organizations like Belling
Cat can do with traditional research and and and knowledge
some of the stuff that I've done in school, you

(02:38):
have a really powerful tool to combat disinformation UM. And
I think that's one of the best tools we have
to combat disinformation is wedding oh sent with traditional research UM.
And Yeah, when it comes to open source intelligence, UM,
the Ukrainian War is actually kind of one of the
It's not the conflict where that really started to become
a thing. That would probably be the Libyan Civil War

(03:00):
when when that UM began to be something people were
talking about in a big way. But the Ukrainian the
invasion of Ukraine by Russia in particular in two thousand fourteen,
UM is really where open source intelligence kind of came
into its own in a really widely known way. That's
when Belling Cats reporting on the downing of MH On

(03:23):
seven like went out and that was kind of like
the first first really huge international story involving like open
source intelligent cracking a case UM. And now since the
expanded invasion of Russia back in February, we've kind of
entered and again this isn't really where this period started,
but this has been kind of we've seen an explosion

(03:46):
of what I think would be fair to call open
source intelligence disinformation. Um. Yeah, you want to talk a
little bit about kind of some of the stuff that
you've seen, because there's there's a number of accounts claiming
to be doing ocean on the Ukrainian war. Um, and
boy howdy, they are not all giving out good information.

(04:07):
And it can be difficult for people to tell what
they should trust because if you're if you're kind of
just scanning over it, bad ocean or even outright fake
ocean can look very similar to good ocean, right and
and so I would put a lot of the ocean
community into four rough categories. Uh there's uh osan analysts,

(04:27):
and those are pretty rare. Those are the kind of
people who combine what they're seeing in real time on
social media with a background of knowledge in the area.
So like a Ukraine regional expert combining that with what
they're seeing happen in Ukraine, that's an ocean analyst. There's
some Twitter accounts that are more ocean aggregators. They don't
really have much analysis that put into what they're what

(04:49):
they're producing, but they spit out a lot of information
in real time, and so if you follow the right
ones that use the right sources, you can get some
pretty decent information from them. Then there's more of the
misinformation aggregators, which are accounts that just kind of spread
whatever they see without regards to whether it's true or not.
Um they'll sensationalized stories. You know, if there's the uh

(05:12):
A rare command and control plane takes off somewhere in
America that's known as the doomsday plane during the Cold War,
they'll tweet out the doomsday plane is in the air.
Doesn't mean the clear war right, And they're not doing
it to be hurtful, they're doing it for likes. And
then there's disinformation aggregators who are deliberately out there trying
to sow discord and so problems. And those are four

(05:33):
categories that I've seen all of them develop in their
own ways in the last ten years. UM. I think
the best best example of that final category there's an
account on Twitter called s MM Syria, and if you
look at the account, it looks almost identical to the
OS ces Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine. It takes the

(05:53):
same kind of graphics and it has the same kind
of terminology, but it's an astaddist disinformation outlet and so
but they've woven their way into if you just took
a casual glance at the war in Syria, you might
believe that it's a valid source. And that's the kind
of more malicious disinformation that I'm talking about, where like
they know what they're doing and they're trying to confuse people,

(06:15):
and it's there's you know, I think one of the
best examples of something that really struck me recently as
problematic in in the war in Ukraine, as you've got
a video going around um of that purports to show
Ukrainian soldiers shooting captured Russian soldiers um, which is a
war crime. And uh, I think credible people within the

(06:38):
Ocean community have said this is something that desperately needs
to be investigated more seriously. This this like is very
has a very good chance of being legitimate and people
should be looking into this. Whereas you've also seen folks
who kind of reflectively jumped to defend Ukraine against these allegations,
putting out what I think is fairly shoddy ocean claiming

(07:00):
to show like issues with the video and stuff, and
it's like people circling blurry sections of the video and
saying like this is you know, looks like it could
be edited, or this doesn't look credible, and it is
the kind of thing. I think. One reason people can
get tripped up by that is prior to the invasion
of Ukraine, there were some Russian false flag events that
involved like cadavers, bodies that had been autopsy and stuff,

(07:21):
which was broken down by people like Elliot Higgins at
Belling cat Um and one of the things that again
if you're just kind of looking at the surface level,
you can see like, oh well that those were videos
that were faked, and so these like the o cent
around this people like pointing out different sections of the
video looks the same. Some of the differences are, for example, Um,
when they were analyzing the bodies and those those false

(07:44):
flag footage, they brought in actual you know, corpse cutter ruppers, morticians, yes,
to analyze like the cuts in the in the skulls
and whatnot, as opposed to again just kind of a
guy circling aspects of a video and being like this
doesn't seem right and it's like, um, but you can
I can see why people get tripped up by it,
and it it is important not to get tripped up

(08:05):
by that kind of stuff because um, war crimes are bad,
I think is a general attitude that we we both
share um and and should be investigated regardless of like
whether or not they're being done by the side who's
also towing Russian tanks away with tractors. That you're you're
on the side of right, like right, And I think
that that's that's exactly an important distinction to because like,

(08:27):
there are certain claims that have come out from the
Ukrainian side, certain statements that have come out that as
an osan analyst, I could probably look into more and
maybe poke holes and stuff like the number of kills
that the ghost of keys, right, Okay, maybe it's not
thirty kills or whatever it is that people are saying.
Maybe he's not really, but that's not harmful as much

(08:50):
as did these guys shoot people in the legs? Right? Right?
So one of those bears examination just because of the
nature of the claim. The other one, maybe we can
xamined it after the war when it's not a It
doesn't really matter if there is a Ukrainian ace fighter
pilot who's dropped a bunch of a crazy number like
obviously in a military sense of Russian jets are being

(09:11):
down to that doesn't matter. But like from the perspective
of people just kind of observing this war as as
news consumers, it doesn't really matter, whereas whether or not
a country gets away with a war crime absolutely matters,
and people are treating it with the same reflective handwave
as they do when they accept these ghost of Kiev.
Yes Smiths, right, they're saying like, well, no, but I

(09:32):
want the Ukrainian side to win this war, so we
can't even look into any claims of war crimes. And
that's just not how it's supposed to be. Like you
condemn the crimes up front, and you investigate and you
try to move forward, and that's how we prove that
we're better than the opposing sides. Like that's that's been
the rule in this war, and it's been the rule
in war's past. You know, you you prove that you're

(09:54):
better than your opponents by being more decent. Yeah, and
it's it's I have seen some really unsettling logic from
some people along the lines of like, well, these were
artillerymen who have been you know, shelling civilian areas, so
why shouldn't they be be shot in the leg? And
the answer is because, like, that's number one, it is
a war crime to shoot captured prisoners. Likely that that

(10:16):
is a thing that we as a as a species
have attempted to make illegal, um and problem and ought
to be. It is a thing that like should not
be done. And there's actually of a wide variety of
like tactical reasons why it's bad for Ukraine. If Russian
soldiers believe they will be shot after being captured, it makes,
among other things, that makes soldiers less likely to turn
themselves in. UM. One of the wiser decisions that the

(10:38):
Ukrainian government has made in this war has been really
deliberately pushing um the idea that like, hey, Russians, if
you surrender, will pay you, you can get Ukrainian citizenship,
Like bring in your tanks, you know, land your planes
or whatever, like well, you know, will make it worth
your while. Um, which is a lot which is potentially
a force multiplier, right, Um, If Russian soldiers think when

(11:02):
I get captured, they will shoot me, then they will
fight to the death and Ukraine will lose more people
in that fight, as opposed to if Russian soldiers think, well, ship,
I could actually have a pretty decent life if I
just turned myself into these guys and refused to fight.
That means less people you have to fight. Um. So
it it does. It does really matter whether or not
this is happening. Um. And it's also just like on

(11:26):
a moral level, you you shouldn't accept it. And I
see some really I think one of the things that
I find so unsettling about that logic like these are uh,
these are you know, artillerymen who have been targeting civilian areas.
Why shouldn't they be shot? Um, It's not that much
of a leap to like some other ship we saw
people saying in Vietnam, you know, these villages are harboring insurgents.

(11:46):
Why shouldn't we treat them like the enemy? You know,
like all of this logic leads to people getting murdered
who don't deserve to get murdered, and that is bad. Right,
there's the snowball effect, the slippery slope effect with the
moral side of it. And then like you're saying a
tactical side of it. I mean, if you look at
part of the reason members of ISIS fought so hard
in places like most of which because once you're in

(12:09):
that organization, your options are a bullet or like a
desert cell. If you're lucky, they're not going to treat
you well and reintegrate you into society. Come on, like, no,
that's not how it works, so you fight like hell,
you know that's that's a very basic rule that is
pretty easy to understand, I would think. So that's why
this needs to be looked into. And if it's proven false,

(12:31):
if it's proven it to not be a correct true video,
that just strengthens the Ukrainian side. But if it is
proven to be true, it's something that needs to be investigated.
It can't be overlooked. It can't be swept under the
under the rug. Just because we we want one side
of this war to come out on top doesn't mean
that we have to ignore you're committing like one, A
good rule of thumb to approach a war from when

(12:51):
you're trying to analyze it is that there there has
never been a side in a war who have not
committed war crimes. Um. So that should always be on
your mind when you're trying to evaluate the reality of
a war crime. It doesn't mean every claim of a
war crime is true. That would be a very silly
way to translate that. But it does mean that when
there is a claim that the side you support has

(13:12):
been responsible for a war crime, your default should be
this is not impossible, and I should I should proceed
from the area that this could have happened, and and
it should be analyzed without reflectively dismissing it, and also
without saying that like war crimes committed by a group
of soldiers in a single part of a theater necessarily
mean that the the war itself is being prosecuted in

(13:32):
a criminal level by that government. Um because for example, well,
I mean, I was about to say U. S. Soldiers
committed war crimes in World War Two, but actually the
prosecution of that war was criminal in a lot of
fundamental ways. But it doesn't. That doesn't mean that like
your granddad committed war crimes because other U. S. Soldiers

(13:54):
who were in the field executed captured German POWs, you know, um, Yeah,
which I think is something people have an easier time
understanding when it's not a war, they feel the need
to have a series of two character or less takes
on in Twitter. Yeah, it's That's the weirdest thing about
about the social media age and and kind of sent

(14:16):
in general, is that while it does make it very
accessible and easy for anybody to get involved in investigating
these crimes and these events, it also means that everybody
thinks they have an opinion that matters on it, and
uh and and in that sense, they muddy the waters.
They they a lot of people can can imitate the

(14:36):
ocent look pretty well. They can circle things in pictures
that look similar, or as we saw in Syria, a
lot they'd take two pictures of two totally different dudes
and say these are the same guy, they're both members
of Al Nustra are something like that, and they would
compare the eyes and compare the chins and stuff, and
it's kind of like a belling cat image. But it
wasn't right. It is. That's the anger here is that

(15:00):
like everybody can can help, but everybody can hurt now too. Yeah. Yeah,
And it's one of those things. Every every aspect of
this cuts both ways, because like the thing people started
saying rightfully so after the invasion, or the expanded invasion
I should say of Ukraine by Russia. Is like, well,
now all of these people who were experts in whatever
the last big story was are going to become experts

(15:22):
on the Ukrainian conflict, right, which is absolutely a thing
that happened. You get all of these people who I
think are pretty bad journalists and reporters who suddenly like
rushed to to have their commentary on this thing that
they have ignored for the last eight years. Um. But
at the same time, it's to talk about Belling Cat.
The founder of Belling Cat, my old boss, Elliott Higgins,
was like literally an unemployed dude sitting on his couch

(15:45):
and when he started analyzing war footage um and is
now one of the most respected conflict analysts in the world. UM.
And that is a thing the Internet has made possible. UM.
I think a great example would be the Caliber Obscura Twitter,
which is just like a dude in the UK who
has an almost impossible ability to recognize firearms and pieces

(16:07):
of firearms and so just analyzes people send him footage
from all over the planet and he'll say, like, these
are these guns, and this is where they came from,
and this is uh, this one is like looks like
this kind of gun, but it's actually, um, a fake
one that's being made locally in this country, and it
is supposed to look like this. And you can tell
because like, um, that's not a person who Caliber did

(16:28):
not like go to some sort of fancy gun school.
They just are uh. I mean, it's definitely not right
to call them an amateur because quite frankly, I don't
know any people who are working at institutes and better
at the thing that Caliber does than calibers, right um.
But they did just start as a person on Twitter.
You know, that's the thing about this, this is that

(16:49):
you get people who were not kind of born with
an idea that they were going to become analysts and
this in this field. And so you have people like
both of both of the people you mentioned, whom I
I know personal I don't know Elliott personally, but I
remember him from our days are shared days on a
comedy website together. It's the website that show remained nameless,

(17:11):
right um. And then and then you know, uh, Caliber
and I have talked on Twitter a bunch and you know,
we're friends there and it's just interesting to see that,
like both of them are very real people behind like
their professional personality and their their expertise. They're also down
to earth, real people, which is rare in this field
because a lot of people are kind of elitist um

(17:33):
and and and yeah Gatekeeper E And neither of them
are about that. They're both all about like getting as
many people doing this as possible because more eyes are better, Like, yeah,
Elliott is is Uh. I mean, the whole reason my
career with Belling Cat existed is because, like I emailed
him out of the blue one day and said, hey,
I've been noticing this weird thing in videos of fascists

(17:53):
talking to cops. Can I write a thing for you?
And he was just like okay, and and that was
I mean, like that was how that started. Um and
he's I've met him since a couple of times, and yeah,
it is a very I think it is very informed.
Because of the fact that he did not come from
sort of this big institutional background. UM has has a
humility with which he approaches his investigations that, uh, I

(18:17):
think is one of the things you should look for
in trying to decide whether or not open source intelligence
that you're seeing on Twitter whatever is credible is how
how how conclusive are they stating their claims? Are? How
many times do they offer only a single possibility for
what something is like? Um, you know, there's a number
of things you can do. I think at this point

(18:48):
we should probably move to a separate area of discussion,
which is how's the how's this working? Who? Who's who's winning? What? Um? Well, so,
I I made a statement on my Facebook page, my
personal Facebook page, three weeks ago, and I still feel
confident in that statement, and that is that well, Ukraine

(19:09):
has yet to win this war. Russia has already lost.
They've already lost their objectives, They've already lost what they
what their goals were. And at this point it's a
face saving venture on the Russian part. But a rum um.
Russia carried out a cutting faint action to distract while
they while they took the East by burning a fifth
of their general staff and all of their armored vehicles.

(19:32):
It was a cunning fat Yeah. I saw someone on
Twitter positive was actually uh a move to use up
all of Ukraine's ammunition. Brilliant, Yeah, just very very zab
Brannigan logic. Half of Vladimir Putin. Ukrainians have a preset

(19:53):
kill limit and once they hit ten generals, the army
will shut down. But no, the war is not well
for Russia. Um. And that's not to say that it's
going great for Ukraine either, but no one needs to
do less well to succeed here. Yes, it's uh, I
mean because one of the things that is a black box, right.

(20:15):
I do think because there was a lot of discussion
earlier in the ward, particularly like how credible are these
numbers that the Ukrainian government is putting out for for
dead and for destroyed vehicles? And I think the oceans
out there, like the verified vehicle casualties and stuff that
we can verify, means that like obviously the Ukrainian government
is patting their numbers, but not by as much as

(20:36):
a lot of people might have, like it's not wildly
off saw their first casualty account. I think first casual account.
I think it was okays, like day two or three,
and then like all of the western and help me, yeah,
actually yeah, it's probably about oh my god. Wow. Yeah

(20:57):
in perspective for some people who may not that number
may not jump out to them. We lost, you know,
just shy of three thousand soldiers killed during the Iraq Wars. So, yeah,
two thousand in a couple of days is an extraordinary
number of losses. Yeah. And of course the black box
here we don't have nearly as good an information on
is what kind of casualties is the Ukrainian military suffered

(21:18):
and what kind of civilian casualties have been suffered? And um,
Obviously civilian casualties nearly always take much longer to get,
um to the extent that it's ever. I think we
have a better chance of getting objective civilian casualties for
this because, unlike a lot of other conflicts, these civilians
being killed, our civilians under the ages of a government

(21:40):
that is a functional state, as opposed to Syria, for example,
where the there's basically the only people with an interest
in accurately reporting the death count are a number of
different non governmental organizations. Um, because the people being are
being killed by one government or the other, right including
like this is this was the same thing like in
a rack. The civilians who died in Mosel were technically

(22:02):
under the Iraqi government's you know whatever protection. Seems like
the wrong word to say, but I can tell you
from my experience there there was no We still do
not have anything that approaches a credible civilian death count
for for that conflict, um and probably never will right
and and on that note, on the civilian casualties note,
we were talking earlier about what how you can identify

(22:26):
a credible ostan account versus a one that you probably
shouldn't give too much credence to. And one of the
best ways to do that, honestly is is, ah, look
at their their morals. I guess if they're ever posting
and celebrating the death of civilians anywhere, you should probably
disregard them. Like, yeah, I'll never see Elliott Higgins being like, yeah,
suck at people of belowgrad like you got hit with

(22:48):
a missile, Like it's not it's you know, it's not
gonna happen. Yeah, it's not. It's the same thing as like,
I get why people celebrate, uh, you know, battlefield victory. Obviously,
I don't think, especially if you're literally a Ukrainian living,
you know, in the area affected, I don't think there's
anything morally wrong with celebrating opposing soldiers being defeated. But

(23:12):
I I am I continue to be deeply unsettled by
footage celebrating things like the destruction of armored personnel carriers
full of nineteen year old kids, um, even though a
non insignificant number of those nineteen year old kids are
accessories to war crimes. Right, Like, it doesn't mean like
I'm broadly okay with it. I do. I do feel

(23:33):
a lot better about celebrating losses of special forces units
like the vdv UM that have been heavily involved in
war crimes around the world, like that I have less
kind of an issue with. But and I felt that personally.
You know, I'm Armenian and during the Carback War, it
was just day, every day I would wake up to

(23:53):
dozens of videos of Armenian conscripts and soldiers being blown
up and hunted from the air, and people on when
or cheering for it because they were, for one reason
or another, on the ZERI side. And like, I get it,
you know, like you were saying you want to cheer
your battlefield victories, and I understand that from people who
live on the battlefield and live near the battlefield, I

(24:14):
get it. It's happening to you, to people thousands of
miles away cheerleading on the internet. What the hell is
wrong with you. Yeah, maybe don't do that. Maybe don't
do that, like you what the hell? Like you know,
those are real people in that video that never did
anything to you. And this is not like a sporting
event where like they go home at the end of
the day and they've just lost, like they're dead even

(24:35):
when they do. Like, I've spent a huge amount of
my career talking directly face to face with victims of ISIS, Right,
I have been to like eight or nine refugee camps
in two countries at this point, specifically for that were.
In addition, Todays spent on the refugee trail in between
Hungary and Serbia, talking to two Syrians and talking to

(24:57):
um um, people who would like led the region. Uh.
But at the same time, I can't help but like,
like I've literally been under fire by ISIS and then
had those ISIS guys gotten killed, and I have celebrated
and cheered when that's happened. Um, And I'll never forget
we were embedded with this mortar team and we were
under fire from this sniper and the mortar team. I forget.

(25:19):
You can in the article I wrote on it, I
list the exact number of rounds fired but it was
like nine or ten something like that, where they're gradually
walking in mortars until they get this guy um. And
obviously we like cheered when they fucking killed this dude
because he was shooting at us. And I remember, like
kind of on our way out away from the front,
my fixer Sangar was like, how many rounds did they

(25:40):
drop before they got him? And I was like, I
don't know. I think it was like nine or ten.
I've got the footage somewhere and he was like, I
wonder what else they hit and and sing sangarsa uh
like was born and raised in mosle Um, And it
was one of those things we spent the very next day.
We were like talking to people fleeing their homes and stuff.
And not only did we like see some of those

(26:01):
people who lost family members to miss his Um, both
by Iraqi forces and by coalition aircraft and stuff, but
like we came upon this dead iis fighter in a
fighting position where you could see he had been in
there with his wife for days and he had been
wounded two or three days before he got killed, and
you could see the evidence of the first aide she
had done on him, and it was one of those things.

(26:23):
I guess I could try to make the case that like, well,
maybe she was a captive and didn't want to do it,
but quite frankly, everything I saw in there makes me
believe like she cared deeply for him and stayed with
him until the bitter end, trying to keep him alive
and fighting. Um. And that doesn't mean he's not like
a monster, and it doesn't mean he shouldn't have been
killed because he's a fucking dashi who was in the

(26:43):
middle of doing enabling a series of terrible things. But
he's also like, you can't you can't ignore the humanity
of of somebody when you have seen that element of
what what happens in the conflict, and that has stayed
with me quite a bit ever since. Yeah, and it's
it's one of those things. And you gotta you gotta

(27:06):
remember that the majority of of young men of fighting
age around the world who joined a military or an
armed organization or an insurgent group, whatever it may be,
they do so typically because it's whomever is in charge
of the area they're growing up in. Right, you don't
join the Russian Army because you wait all the options
and the Brazilian Army offer some good aid, you know,
some good healthcare packages. And I looked at the Italian Army,

(27:28):
but really I want to go with the Russian. No,
you go with wherever you were born, yeah, whether and
you know, and I was talking to my roommate about
this last night. We were watching this footage from the
flood of ninety six here in Oregon, you know, And
it's this National Guard a helicopter where they're pushing bales
of hay out of the back of the helicopter down
to cows stranded out in your tillamook. And so depending
on when you join the National Guard, you either fed

(27:51):
cows hey from a helicopter or deployed to Irock. That's
the luck of the draw, right, That's not fair. No,
they don't just or have to die any more than
the guys dropping the hay out of the helicopter did, right.
But people get Yeah, they get carried away with like
turning it into a sport almost, and they forget that
there's people on the other end, and that like, while

(28:12):
some of them are threats and they may need to
be dealt with, it's like you know, a bear comes
at you in the woods, you shoot it, you don't,
you don't skin it and make fun of it, like yeah,
you know, I go kill its kids. You know, that's
not that's not how it works, you know, So like yeah, yeah,
don't don't be don't be a piece of ship, Like

(28:33):
don't don't don't don't lose your humanity, m because I mean,
one of the things that makes it easy to lose
your humanity is that like videos of ship getting blown
up looks dope, right like it it does. It looks
cool to watch things get blown up. That's in fact,
I suspect how a lot of people who become very
good oh since investigators part of what draws them in.
It's just like I'm sure that was a part of

(28:54):
why Caliber started obsessively researching guns. Is like their neat
guns are neat. You know, weapons are interesting. People are
inherently interested in in weaponry. Um, which is not a
good thing. It's just the thing, you know. It's not
a bad thing either. It's just like a thing human
beings will always be interested in because warfare is as
natural to us as eating and fucking um. Well, you're

(29:17):
talking about the mortars, right, the mortars walking in and
there's this video on YouTube of made by an American
Navy attack squadron Um of them dropping bomb after bomb
on targets and muzzle and and and rocca places like that,
and it's set to the Devil's going to cut You down,
and every time there's a beat and in the music
and you see a bomb drop, and some of these

(29:38):
bombs it's like four bombs dropping at a time, dropping
an eight story building. And so I'm sure there was
a guy inside there with a woman, but like you
want to tell me there wasn't anybody else in that
eighth story building, And like, okay, yeah, you're celebrating the
death of the combatant there, but like also all those
other people are being celebrated indirectly, and so like you
gotta remember that, like these bombs explode and they take

(29:58):
out a large area, and these fights are happening in
cities a lot of the time. Yeah, the weaponry that
the United States uses is more precise than something like
a barrel bomb, but not by as many orders of
magnitude as you would hope um And and precision doesn't
precision matters. Yes, it's not a non important things an

(30:20):
important thing, but ultimately It doesn't matter if your missile
went right into that living room full of civilians and
blew them all up, or if you leveled the block
and maybe you know, killed them indirectly. Like you gotta
know what you're hitting. The target is what really matters, right,
So it doesn't matter if you can hit the target,
you gotta make sure it's the right target. And that's
where we're starting to have issues now, is like we
can hit targets really well, we just aren't always sure

(30:42):
that it's the right yes, as opposed I mean, and
and you are seeing. So let's let's talk about we
we started this chatting about Ukrainian potential Ukrainian war crime. Um,
what we have absolute documentation. It is a tremendous amount
of war crimes on behalf of the Russian UH invaders,
including a thing that they have done repeatedly in Syria,

(31:02):
which is the targeting of hospitals and medical facilities, um
with with terrible civilian casualties as a as a result.
And this is something that the New York Times actually
published an incredible article based on a mix of O
cent and like I'm not entirely sure how they got them,
but combat flight recorders, like the audio that these these
Russian fighter pilots were sending back and forth to command

(31:25):
as they attacked hospitals in Syria. Um, so we actually
have a tremendous amount of detail about like what it
looks like inside the cockpit and in like the control
room and whatnot, as air strikes are being ordered on
medical facilities. I really recommend people check that article out.
Um it's it's pretty harrowing shit. But um, yeah, are
you are you surprised at all by kind of what

(31:47):
you are what you've seen so far in behalf of
the Russian forces in Ukraine? No, no, not even not
even the slightest, Because I followed the war and in
Syria rather closely. And uh, I mean there was a
point when they had stop marking the hospitals with hospital
marketings because the Russians would target them so consistently. The
United Nations had to stop giving the Russians the coordinates

(32:07):
of the hospitals and in Aleppo because they kept getting targeted. Um,
there was an aid convoy that was struck, I believe
by Syrian aircraft, but it was the targeting was given
to them by Russian aircraft. Um, it was just an
AID convoy coming into Aleppo, a United Nations and Aid convoy,
and it was bombed and strafe repeatedly for you know,
several hours. Um. Things like that that happened so regularly

(32:29):
in Syria to the relative silence of the rest of
the world. Um, that led me to believe that when
they go into Ukraine, they're not going to be any gentler. Um.
A lot of people suspected early on that, like, well,
they it's harder to demonize people who look like you,
so they're not going to have as much of an
easy time demonizing Ukrainians. And I think there has been

(32:53):
some degree of difficulty with that, at least in terms
of some of the conscripts on the Russian side. But
the other thing we're seeing is that, like a lot
of these, a lot of people seem to genuinely believe
the mission of denazifying Ukraine. And so if that's what
you believe you're doing, then the bombing doesn't surprise. It
doesn't become a surprise. Right If you think that you're

(33:15):
going into Ukraine to suppress it and occupy it, then
bombing city city is full of Russians, Russians and Russian speakers.
Seems like a bad idea, but if you believe that
they're all Nazis, then it makes sense that you might
just blow them up because they're all the enemy. I'm
not saying I'm not condoning it. I'm saying no, But
I mean that is literally what the US government in
the British government did in World War Two. You know exactly.

(33:48):
There have been claims made that what Russia is doing
in places like Maryo Pol announced to an active genocide. UM.
What is your opinion on that? Genocide is a big word.
It's yeah, but you know it has a lot of
meaning behind it, in the sense that like, just because

(34:10):
somebody is killing large numbers of people and doing so
in heinous ways does not make it a genocide. You
have to pro an attempt to destroy culture and destroy
heritage and things of that nature. Um. As it stands,
I would say that it looks likely that there are
signs of potential genocide in Mariable. I am not confident
enough to come out and say that I conclusively think

(34:31):
it's happening, but the way that it looks like the
the city is being deliberately targeted to either force the
entire population to flee or to radicalize them one way
or the other. Is it goes beyond military uh targeting.
You know. I think the thing that were that I
that is the most like troubling potential sign of an

(34:55):
intention of genocide is the reports that the Russian government
and has been evacuating civilians that they have in parts
of Mariopold. They have captured two places in Russia, which
is this is a misconception. You don't have to just
be killing people, as you stated, it's an attempt to
destroy a culture, which you can do by killing, but
you can also do by things like separating people, moving people,

(35:17):
like forced migration and whatnot. Like there's aspects of that. Again,
look at like the genocide of the Native Americans in
the United States. It was not all straight up killing.
A lot of it was forced migration, um, which is
an act of genocide as well. Um. And that's the
kind of thing where I'm I'm kind of waiting for
more reporting on that to the to see here exactly

(35:37):
what's happening in the extent to what's happening, But that
really troubles me in terms of potential signs of a genocide. Yeah,
and when they when they coined the term genocide after
World War Two, it was it was with reference to
the Holocaust. But but what they had in mind was
the Armenian genocide. Yeah, when it when they when they
drafted these words, and because it was beyond just sheer

(36:00):
number of people killed, if we're talking a sheer number
of people killed, the Nazis also killed six million other
people in addition to the six million Jews they killed.
The reason we talked about the Jews is one, six
million is a lot of people. And two, it was
a deliberate attempt to destroy their entire culture, to make
them have never existed. And that's very different and very scary.

(36:22):
Dying is also very bad, the idea of dying and
then all of the people who were like you just
don't exist anymore, and all your books and your literature
are gone, Like that's that's monstrous. Yeah, And that's why
there's a difference between genocide and mass killing. Yeah, And
it's it's the difference that we talked about US war
crimes in World War Two, of which there were many,
including the fire bombing of Dresden. I would argue, but

(36:45):
it's not an act of genocide because when they fire
bombed Dresden. It was certainly um the killing of civilians
without particular regard to the direct military efficacy of the action,
But it was not an attempt to destroy German culture
or obliterate the German people. And you brought up the
Armenian genocide, Well, we'll talk about this at some point
behind the bastards. But he mentioned that that was kind

(37:08):
of what the people when the term genocide was invented,
that was what people were looking at, even though it
was kind of a direct response to the Holocaust. It's
also worth noting that like when the Nazis planned the Holocaust,
they used the Armenian genocide as a model. Um Hitler's
literal statement was when people when he was asked during
like one of his his dinners with a bunch of

(37:30):
Nazi officials, like what what about kind of the international
reaction to what we're planning to do? He was like, well,
who remembers the Armenians? You know? Like that was his
That was his attitude, is like, we'll get away with
it because nobody did anything during this genocide, right and
and and I think while I would hesitate to call
the entire war in Ukrainian genocide. Yes, as of yet,

(37:52):
I would say that there's a similarity between the Armenian
genocide and and how that led to the Holocaust. There's
a similarity be between the Russian war crimes committed in
Syria and how that led to the war crimes being
committed in Ukraine, in the sense that if the world
had stood up earlier, we would not be seeing this now. Yeah.
The problem is the world looked the other way when

(38:14):
the Russians bombed hospitals in Syria, when they repeatedly bombed hospitals.
In fact, the world didn't just look away. A lot
of people in the West mocked it. I'm sure you've
heard it as often as I have. The last hospital
and Aleppo joke right where, oh they're bombing the lost
the last hospital and Aleppo again. Well, the reason that
happened is because when you bomb the hospital, they build

(38:34):
a new one and then it gets bombed again three
days later, so they've bombed the last one again. So
it wasn't a joke. It was just a tragedy that
kept playing out that people couldn't really fathom, so they mocked, right,
And so when that's the attitude of a lot of
the world, it's no surprise that what's what's happened in
Ukraine as as run out of control? M hm, Where
do you think we go from here? What are you

(38:55):
what are you expecting to kind of see next within
this conflict? You know, the most recent kind of reporting
is that Russia's pulling. Russia's framing it as they're pulling
back from Kiev to to focus on other fronts. Uh.
The Ukrainian side is saying like, well, they've been defeated
around Kiev and they're pulling back. What do you think
kind of we're seeing next? What what is your opinion
on kind of the next stages here? So I think

(39:16):
it really depends on Vladimir Putin's power and how long
he remains in a position of unchecked power. I'm not
saying necessarily he will fall from power. I'm saying that
how long can he go as the only guy calling
the shots? Because as it stands right now, it doesn't
look like he's the same Vladimir Putin that we were
used to dealing with. It seems like something may have

(39:38):
changed with him. And that's a wild card because if
if Vladimir Putin wants to continue to escalate here. He
can continue to do so because he may not be
getting the same reporting that we are about the condition
of his army. He may think his army is doing
better than they're doing and that they actually are just repositioning.
So if that's the case, there's a chance to he'll
escalate against potentially in NATO country. I find that unlikely,

(40:01):
but there's still a chance for it. I think what's
more likely is that we're going to see the Russian
military refocused efforts in the east, in in donetskan Hansk
with an attempts to create a land bridge to Crimea
through the area through Mariopola Melitopa area UM and I
think they're going to try to rusify the area as
much as possible and remove as many of the Ukrainians
as possible UM one way or the other. And I

(40:24):
don't know if they'll be successful in that, but I
think simultaneously while they do that, they're going to try
to tie down and destroy as much of the Ukrainian
military as possible UM, which will be difficult because the
units in the east are Ukraine's best to equip units.
So I don't know how this ends. I don't see
a reasonable end to this insight, but that's just because
there's too many variables at the moment. I do think

(40:45):
one thing that's kind of worth looking at this war
in in historical context. A number of comparisons have been
made to both of the world wars here, Um, I
think the thing that it most reminds me of is
World War One, not in that it's a conflagration on
that scale or in that um it's a similar war
in terms of the combat, but it is an example

(41:06):
of the first big war that utilizes a variety of
weapons and tactics that have been battlefield tested in a
series of smaller wars, right, um, And I think we
are seeing in Ukraine for the first time the actual
I think one thing that we have seen is that drones.
And I'm not talking about the big ones here. You know,

(41:26):
they get a lot of the bay rock tar and
stuff like get that gets a lot of attention, but
like small the kind of drones anyone listening to this
could pick up and buy today, right Those drones I
think are proving to be a game changer on a
tactical level, in a similar manner to the machine gun
in in the turn of the last century, before the

(41:47):
last century. Yeah, Well, with the drones, I've often machine
guns are good, good comparison. I've often thought of it
as like the airplane, and we had airplanes, and we
haven't had combat airplanes. Before World War One, we didn't
have very many of them because no he really realized
the utility of them in war. And then as the
war got closer, and then the war started, countries started
to slowly build up these small fleets of aircraft, and

(42:08):
then by the end of the war, everybody had an
air force. I think we see the same thing with
these small consumer drones, is that like, by the end
of this war or whatever conflagrations are coming after it,
every military in the world is going to have little
little you know, phantom phantom threes or whatever, basically for
every infantry squad. One of the things that's so wild

(42:28):
is that if if you again, if you sitting here
right now, have not an insignificant amount of money, let's
save three to four thousand dollars and the enough mechanical
like competence to carry out modest repairs on your own car,
you could, with things entirely available over the shelf, build

(42:50):
a weapon system capable of disabling a variety of armored
vehicles at night. You know, like you that that is
a thing that individual people you could do that and
you and have it up and running in a matter
of days. Just I'm imagining the next protest in unnamed city. Yeah,
and a consumer drone flies over the police line and

(43:10):
drops a little thing on him. This is bang, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Like there's a lot of people, even even as as
influential and meaningful as they've been on the battlefield in Ukraine,
I think people still are kind of slow to understand
the extent. Like there's one of the wildest stories that's
come out of it is that the Ukrainian military has
a an outfit of civilian drone operators using hacked and

(43:35):
home built drones to attack Russian forces at night UM
and they have been The documented of efficacy of their
raids has been significant, And I can I can remember
spending a brief period of time with an Iraqi military
unit that was just using d g I phantoms that
they had rigged to drop what were since essentially mortar
shells with shuttlecocks on them from a height um and

(43:57):
they were very effective at killing people um as isis
drones were effective at sort of spotting you know, mortars
for folks well. And one of the things I saw
i SIS use their more their drones for great effect
wasn't so much to kill large numbers of enemy soldiers.
It was to do the same thing that American predator
drones and report drones had done for for decades by
that point the terror groups, which is let them know

(44:19):
you can't gather in large numbers. Yeah, if you gather
in large numbers your target. And so you saw a
Rocky soldier saying no more than two or three in
a group. Any more than that will get targeted, you know,
And so they flipped the equation basically yep, and don't
I mean I one of the reasons why I I
have a general policy heavily informed by my time in
Mosle that the last place I want to be in

(44:41):
a anywhere near a war zone is an armored vehicle.
Um because that's really unless you are in something that's
heavily up armored, like an im wrap. Little bombs dropped
by drones can do significant damage to something like a
humpy and that's exactly what you target. You don't target
a Toyota Corolla with a drope like that, unless you
specifically know an individuals in that Corolla that you want

(45:03):
to kill. But you may just behind the lines see
a target of opportunity in an armor see an armored
lightly armored vehicle, and drop a immunition on it. And
that's one of the things this is done. There's a
lot of talk prior to the expanded Russian invasion about
how immediately Russia was going to get air superiority, and
that's obviously a bigger story than just drones. There's a
lot of factors and why Russia. It's probably accurate to

(45:27):
say they have superiority in a number of parts of
the war, but they don't have supremacy like they It's
not like an absolute matter. And part of that is because, um,
it's not really possible to at this moment. Someday, I
suspect there will be more effective ways of stopping drones
and at like a theater level. Um maybe, but it
certainly hasn't happened yet. Yeah. Yeah, And and that's the thing.

(45:50):
You know, there's there's the drones, and then there's also
on the Ukrainian side, they you know, I think they
recognize that air force against air force, the Russians have
a new miracles periority. So you can deny the Russians
air supremacy by shooting down their planes with man pads.
You don't have to have an air force to deny
your opponent, You just have to dye them the ability

(46:11):
to freely operate in your airspace. And this is one
of those things. There's been a lot of talk about
a no fly zone, um, which I tend to think
would be a bad idea in the traditional sense in
terms of like the US and NATO sending in planes
to down Russian planes over Ukraine. There's a number of
reasons why that's concerning. But you can effectively establish a
no fly zone by shipping in a funckload of man

(46:31):
pads exactly. Yeah, And I'm not against that. I think
in terms of what kind of what kind of armed
arms support is ethical to provide, giving people the ability
to stop planes from bombing cities is broadly speaking, one
of the most ethical things you can do in terms
of shipping munitions around the world, right, and the other

(46:53):
advantages that man pads. I'm sure somebody could turn it
into a lethal ground weapon, but they're pretty hard use
against ground targets, against houses, things like that, not really
what they're designed for. So it's not like just handing over,
you know, some indiscriminate weapon to the Ukrainians to use

(47:14):
against Russian cities. You're you're giving them a weapon that's
specifically used against military aircraft, like most man pads can't
reach the altitude that airliners are at even so yep,
so I think that's probably what we want to talk
about today. Um, you wanna plug your plug aubles. Tell
people where they can find you in your analysis out
in the wild. Yeah, so you can. You can follow

(47:35):
me on Twitter. My handle is at Shabanian Rum and
I work I published occasionally with the New Lines Institute.
Uh so you can see my work there as well.
And I have a website that I seldom update, the
Folded Gap dot com um hasn't been updated and probably
eight months now because I've been tired. But um, yeah,

(47:55):
those are the places to find me, and d ms
are open on Twitter. If you ever have questions or
anything like that, let me know. I'm happy to talk
with anybody who's got questions on these kind of things.
Hell yeah, well that's gonna be us, so you know,
enjoy this analysis of the of the war in Ukraine.
UM before we return you to your regularly scheduled multipart

(48:18):
series on Nazi cat girls UH, the primary focus of
this podcast, It Could Happen Here, as a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check
us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources

(48:39):
for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zone
Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.