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NewsTranscript
00:00 In the morning of the 24th of February 2022, the Russian army, which had camped across
00:08 Ukrainian border for months, launched a large-scale special military operation in Ukraine with
00:14 a broad aim of protecting the people of the Donbass region, who claimed that the Ukrainian
00:20 government had been harassed.
00:23 It was the biggest war in Europe after the Second World War, with the most shocking part
00:28 being that the opponents, Russia and Ukraine, were former allies in the Soviet Union and
00:33 that the countries share a large proportion of history, culture and cooperation, which
00:38 counts centuries prior to Soviet Union collapse in 1990.
00:44 Today counts more than two months after the start of this operation, which saw a number
00:48 of citizens displaced while others fled to neighboring countries.
00:53 In an exclusive interview with IJH, the ambassador of Russian Federation to Rwanda, Karen Chalyan,
00:59 provides insights on circumstances under which the operation was launched.
01:04 Well, you know, I've been in this business since the middle of 1977 and even I and my
01:16 colleagues were in difficulties to understand what the Ukrainian regime since 2014 has been
01:28 up to.
01:29 Why I mention 2014?
01:31 Because in February 2014 there was a completely unlawful, illegitimate anti-government coup
01:41 in Ukraine, which brought to power the very political forces that have now precipitated
01:52 an armed conflict.
01:55 Paradoxically, this is not about Ukraine, not just about Ukraine.
02:06 This is about an effort, or I should say the effort, by the collective West, which I believe
02:22 is led by the United States, aided and abetted by the UK, to fight Russia politically and
02:39 militarily against the last Ukrainian.
02:47 In this situation, the Ukrainians in philosophical terms are not a subject, they are an object.
02:57 Whatever word you choose, instrument, tool, proxy, any term would fit.
03:09 And I am amazed at how a leadership, a responsible leadership of a nation of 43 to 45 million
03:20 people had not only allowed itself to be unveiled into such a scheme, but also had decided for
03:32 all practical purposes to involve its own people, the whole nation, in political and
03:43 ideological war against its own brothers.
03:49 And we are brothers.
03:50 I sincerely believe that we are one people.
03:58 Interestingly, it's difficult to give you an exact figure, but at least, and I'm old
04:07 enough to know, at least 30% of the people that I know in Russia have Ukrainian relatives.
04:16 And it is the same in Ukraine.
04:20 So what those people in Kiev did when they came to power was to move their own country
04:33 onto a path of, for all practical purposes, civil war.
04:41 First of all, civil war against their own citizens, and I will come to that, and civil
04:47 war against their own brothers.
04:51 And that's us.
04:53 Now when they came to power in February 2014, or rather when they were brought to power
05:01 by the West, and honestly, the West doesn't care.
05:06 They don't care.
05:07 They don't care how many Ukrainians get killed.
05:12 And it's even worse when it comes to Russians.
05:16 They're extremely happy.
05:17 The more Russians die, the happier they are.
05:21 In fact, it's now out in the open, especially in the past 72 hours, all the things that
05:28 are being said that there are two objectives that the West has in this war.
05:33 First of all, to kill as many Russians as humanly possible, and second, to weaken Russia
05:40 as much as possible.
05:43 Thank you very much, as if we didn't know all along what the objective was.
05:49 It's just that this grand secret is now in the open.
05:53 It was never a secret to us.
05:56 We always knew this is a continuation of the Cold War by other means.
06:06 It all started, it's interesting, you know, people have cut off points, people have starting
06:12 points.
06:14 All of us in our minds, you know, we've tried to find that exact day, that statement, that
06:23 trigger point.
06:25 When did it all start?
06:27 We can go back in history, which may mean we don't have time for this, but to me it
06:33 started in 2007, when during the Munich Security Conference, my president went up on the podium
06:45 and told all the Western leaders, "We know what you're doing.
06:51 Look, the Soviet Union is no more, the Warsaw Pact is no more, what do you need NATO for?
07:00 What is your, who is your so-called defensive alliance against?
07:07 Who is it aimed at?"
07:12 There were five ways of NATO expansion, and every time they got closer and closer and
07:19 closer to our borders.
07:24 And my president gave the West a very fair warning in 2007, saying, "Please, cease and
07:31 desist.
07:32 We are ready to work with you, but we will not tolerate a security threat to our very
07:40 existence."
07:41 They chose not to listen, because in 2008 in Bucharest, the capital of Romania, NATO
07:50 decided that the next two candidates for NATO enlargement would be Ukraine and Georgia,
08:00 two former republics of the Soviet Union.
08:05 Now I repeat, Ukraine is a country of 43 to 45 million people.
08:12 No one knows exactly what we're talking about.
08:17 This is not, we're not talking about the Baltic states here, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia.
08:26 I don't know if you know, I don't know if many people know, anyone in the audience,
08:32 that Ukraine possesses the third largest army in Europe.
08:39 The first army is Russian, the second one is Turkish, the third is Ukraine.
08:46 And that is, let me preempt a question you might ask later about how we are often asked,
08:53 why is this taking you so long?
08:55 That's why.
08:56 It's the third largest army in Europe, deeply entrenched.
09:04 You know, for eight years they had been preparing, since the February 2014 coup, they've been
09:10 preparing for this eventuality.
09:13 They've been preparing for war.
09:17 I'll come to that slightly later.
09:19 So 2008, NATO decides they're going to accept Ukraine.
09:26 Now what would a responsible government do under these circumstances?
09:31 Any government.
09:33 It would start thinking how to take proper precautions.
09:40 Because and I will need to come to this again and again and again, we can tolerate many
09:48 things in life, both as individuals and as structures and as countries.
09:58 But one thing none of us should ever tolerate is the existence and the creation of an existential
10:08 threat from the outside to our security.
10:13 And I have to underline the word existential.
10:19 We're not talking about a common garden variety threat.
10:25 Threats are many.
10:26 They're minor, they're operational, they're tactical, but strategic, existential.
10:35 No responsible government would ever allow that to happen.
10:41 It will take measures.
10:42 If necessary, it will undertake what is known in the United Nations and in international
10:51 affairs as preventive deployment.
10:55 And in fact, what my country has done is it has undertaken action under the provisions
11:06 of Article 51 on Individual and Collective Self-Defense of Chapter 7 of the Charter of
11:15 the United Nations.
11:20 And you know what, when we're being told that you shouldn't have worried, you know, this
11:28 is just talk.
11:30 No one would have accepted Ukraine.
11:33 I'm sorry.
11:35 Responsible governments take decisions based not on the spoken, expressed good intentions
11:47 of a particular group of people, but only based on their capabilities, on the capabilities
11:54 that they possess.
11:57 Because they're good today, they may be bad tomorrow, but the capabilities will remain.
12:05 So we're all human.
12:08 And we're all under political and ideological pressures.
12:11 And Ukraine, more than anyone else that I know, because for such a large nation to lose
12:22 political sovereignty is to me, it's just unbelievable.
12:31 I cannot believe this has happened.
12:36 That they are essentially governed from abroad.
12:43 And you know, there's a standing joke these days about my own colleagues when our people
12:49 were saying, you know, in the past week that if the Ukrainian regime does certain things,
12:58 then we will attack their decision-making centers.
13:02 And my colleagues ask each other, decision-making, what has this got to do with Kiev?
13:10 There's no point in attacking them.
13:11 They don't decide anything.
13:15 Since the launch of the special military operation, Western countries have termed it as a war,
13:20 an unnecessary invasion to conquer Ukraine, and so on.
13:23 But why does Russia call it a special military operation?
13:27 We didn't mobilize.
13:29 Russia is not in a state of mobilization.
13:33 Our economy, our whole social life has not been militarized.
13:40 To us, this is not a war.
13:42 This slightly over 100,000 military personnel that have gone into Ukraine, that's an expeditionary
13:49 force.
13:52 The other side, and you know, like military strategy means you have to have at least three
13:59 to one advantage over the defending side.
14:04 The Ukrainian army, as far as I know, and we're talking about three main elements of
14:09 the Ukrainian military.
14:12 That is the regular army, the territorial battalions, and the National Guard.
14:22 Roughly speaking, that's about 300,000.
14:25 They're all fighting.
14:26 And I think they possess another 200,000 in reserves.
14:33 That's a formidable figure.
14:36 And yet, we're still winning.
14:40 This was never supposed to be some kind of lightning operation.
14:46 You know, look at all the recent examples of a military conflict.
14:52 Where was the last time you saw a lightning operation?
14:58 I don't want to talk about what happened in Iraq, for example.
15:02 You can look it up in Wikipedia, and you will see how much time it took one of the sides
15:09 to move to the capital of the other side against no military opposition and with complete superiority
15:17 in terms of armor and in the air.
15:23 So just move to that place, and then how much time it took them in the capital to secure
15:29 it.
15:30 So I don't want to make these comparisons.
15:36 But one of the other reasons, and I have to go back to what I've said, one of the other
15:43 reasons why I said it had elements of civil war, genocide, and ethnocide, because after
15:53 the February 2014 coup in Kiev, the people who came to power were to us real Nazis, meaning
16:05 national socialists, meaning they started eliminating and moving against anything and
16:16 everything that had any connection to Russia or the Russian language.
16:24 Now two areas in the east, the Donbass and the Luhansk, which by the way have a special
16:34 history, they were never part of the Ukraine until 1919.
16:42 They said, "Look, guys, we don't wish to be governed by you.
16:47 We don't like you.
16:52 Please leave us alone.
16:55 Let's come to an arrangement that we become a self-governing territory," or in this case
17:04 two territories.
17:07 This was so easy.
17:09 When I look back at these eight years, I see such a large number of missed opportunities
17:17 to avoid military conflict.
17:21 And all these opportunities were missed by the Kiev regime.
17:29 They didn't have to do much.
17:31 They just needed to tell the people of Donetsk and Luhansk, "Okay, we respect your choice.
17:40 Let us sit down and reach some kind of understanding of the limits or of the scope of the self-governance
17:50 that you can hope to achieve.
17:56 We reached a kind of a modus vivendi, and everyone's happy, and we continue living like
18:02 brothers."
18:03 Instead of that, they started killing them.
18:07 And they've been killing them for eight years with impunity.
18:13 And no one in the West seemed to care.
18:17 No one seemed to care.
18:19 Eight years.
18:25 In these eight years, the Ukrainian armed forces were receiving training and equipment
18:34 from the West, and they were getting stronger and stronger and stronger and more and more
18:40 aggressive.
18:42 In fact, the bombing campaign or the artillery campaign on 18 February was something like
18:56 10 to 15 times more intense than ordinarily by 18 February.
19:02 It peaked on 21 February.
19:05 And on 24 February, as you know, we moved in because we knew this was the end.
19:11 This was the end.
19:13 They would have crushed them.
19:14 They would have killed them.
19:17 I've been killing civilians for eight years.
19:21 What's another 10, 20, 50, 100,000 civilians to those people?
19:28 They are gripped by a very strange mania, which I find hard to understand.
19:34 But even harder than that, for me, is to understand what all those supposedly enlightened leaders
19:46 in the West were thinking and are thinking still.
19:51 Didn't they see what kind of monster they had created?
19:57 The answer, of course, is evident.
20:00 They saw everything.
20:02 They created that monster.
20:03 It was intent.
20:04 It was not an accident.
20:07 Because that monster was created to attack Russia and anything Russian.
20:15 That monster was supposed to be a NATO bulwark, a NATO military base on our borders, and I
20:24 repeat a permanent existential threat to the security of my own country.
20:31 We were not ready to tolerate NATO missiles within five minutes flying distance of Moscow.
20:39 Sorry.
20:41 That is where we take action.
20:45 If you don't listen, we act.
20:48 It is that simple.
20:51 This is not higher mathematical calculus.
20:56 And we keep telling them this since 2007, "Stop.
21:01 Do not move your military alliance closer to our borders.
21:07 We can be friends, partners.
21:11 We can reach all kinds of understanding.
21:16 But do not behave like you have won the Cold War and you want to solidify your victory
21:24 and you want to make sure that the Russian bear is dead for all time.
21:31 That will never happen."
21:32 When we went to Ukraine, this was not for territorial gain.
21:42 God knows we have a large enough country.
21:47 This was to achieve four goals.
21:51 Denazification, because we could not live with those crazy people in power in Kiev.
22:01 We needed to get them out.
22:03 Demilitarization, meaning that we had to make sure that they will no longer constitute a
22:09 threat, which means a legal obligation that they will not join NATO.
22:18 The recognition of Crimea as a part of the Russian Federation and the recognition of
22:25 independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk Republics.
22:31 We had tried to put that on the table repeatedly.
22:34 They said no repeatedly to everything, because they always felt that the West was behind
22:40 them and that the West will step in and fight for them when the time comes.
22:48 Nice work, guys.
22:51 That will never happen.
22:53 The West will provide you with weapons.
22:56 West will provide you with money.
22:58 No one's going to fight for you.
23:00 The West doesn't want casualties and doesn't want a hot war with Russia.
23:07 They want the Ukrainians to do their dirty work for them.
23:14 So this is not a war of territorial conquest.
23:18 We want certain limited goals.
23:22 But the longer this continues, the more the situation may change, because expectations
23:33 would have been created.
23:37 And it's been shown in the history of the world that the more a conflict drags on and
23:48 persists, the more the initial goals and objectives may change.
23:56 I mean, once the situation on the ground changes, you never know.
24:02 If the West continues to pump Ukraine full of weapons, and if the West does something
24:11 else or something particularly stupid, I don't know what may happen in the Ukraine.
24:19 I don't anticipate much, but I don't know.
24:25 I don't anticipate much wisdom from the West.
24:28 This is the problem.
24:31 I mean, they've become fanatical.
24:39 It's a group of fanatics to me as an individual and as a political scientist and as a historian,
24:46 as a group of fanatics sitting in Western capitals thinking about how to do damage to
24:52 Russia.
24:59 Regardless of Ukrainian casualties or of the ensuing destruction.
25:08 All those videos that you have seen of destroyed settlements in the Ukraine, destroyed urban
25:18 areas.
25:19 I mean, we all see the same videos, right?
25:23 What you don't see, what I see, but what you don't see, because we're watching different
25:29 sources, is how Ukrainian armor and artillery has been deployed in the middle of these urban
25:37 settlements.
25:40 They hit us, we hit them, we hit civilians.
25:44 It's a classic.
25:46 It is a classic.
25:48 I saw this when I was a peacekeeper.
25:52 I saw this so many times.
25:53 I saw this in you, the former Yugoslavian.
25:56 I saw this during the siege of Sarajevo.
26:00 If you have a multiple rocket launcher, a Grad, a BM-21 or something like this, based
26:10 right next to a hospital.
26:13 By the way, all of these hospitals, when you see destroyed schools and kindergartens and
26:19 they invite you to cry with them, you have to understand that there are no children in
26:25 those schools or kindergartens.
26:26 Haven't been for several months now.
26:31 Because these facilities have large assembly areas.
26:35 They're now military barracks.
26:39 A kindergarten is not a kindergarten without children and with soldiers.
26:45 It's a legitimate military target.
26:49 Same as a school, same as a hospital.
26:51 You throw out the patients and medical personnel, you put in a mechanized company, it will get
27:00 hit.
27:01 Especially if it does its fighting and deployment from that facility.
27:08 The history of warfare has not invented anything new, just for our sake.
27:17 So it's a terrible thing.
27:20 Urban warfare is a terrible thing, which is, by the way, precluding a possible question
27:26 from your side, why we left the north of Ukraine.
27:31 Kiev, Chernihiv, Sumy, we went in, then we left because the civilian casualties, two
27:42 main reasons.
27:43 The civilian casualties were getting too great because these are urban built up areas.
27:50 They were getting too great.
27:52 And second, we wanted to show goodwill.
27:55 Because we're negotiating at the same time.
27:58 First we negotiated in Minsk, now we're negotiating in Turkey.
28:04 Let's hope that something comes out of it.
28:07 I hope so.
28:08 No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
28:15 Look, given enough, I return to the military aspect of this.
28:19 This is an expeditionary force.
28:22 If we mobilize, I can give you another quote from the Bible, "The living shall envy the
28:30 dead."
28:31 But we haven't.
28:36 Why should we fight in urban areas?
28:42 Despite the call for negotiations, it remains challenging to predict when this conflict
28:46 will come to an end.
28:48 Here today, we asked the Russian ambassador to Rwanda about his country's stand in this
28:52 situation.
28:55 This is the operation in south-east Ukraine, which is already underway.
29:01 The sealing off of the western part of the Donbas cauldron.
29:10 And once that happens, I do not believe that the Ukrainian armed forces would be able to
29:19 relieve that area anymore, to relieve their troops anymore, that they were able to relieve
29:30 the garrison of Mariupol.
29:34 We knew from the very beginning, once that city was encircled, that was the end.
29:42 We knew they would end up fighting in that iron and steel plant, which is impossible
29:48 to take, and I use the word "take" loosely, because it's a city.
29:54 You can imagine, this was the largest iron and steel plant in Ukraine.
30:00 And you have a city on the surface, and you have another city, another town down there.
30:09 There are bunkers for 4,000 people.
30:12 These were bunkers constructed in the days of the Soviet Union to withstand a western
30:21 nuclear strike.
30:23 So they can sit there forever, at least until they run out of water, food, and ammunition.
30:34 The interesting part is that they keep saying they have at least 1,000 civilians there.
30:41 We've been saying for weeks, "We are ready to help you remove every single civilian from
30:51 that place through humanitarian corridors."
30:55 They don't want to do that, because the civilians are the greatest trump card that they have.
31:04 They protect them.
31:05 It's a human shield.
31:07 It's a human shield situation.
31:10 We keep reaching agreement on humanitarian corridors, raising these flags as indication
31:16 that free passage is here, it's waiting, the buses are ready.
31:22 It's not working.
31:25 But there's another interesting dimension of this situation in the iron and steel plant.
31:32 We have 2,000 military personnel there, we believe, and there's some indication that
31:40 there's about 400 foreign fighters there.
31:45 And that may be one of the reasons they're not giving up.
31:50 If those foreign fighters surrender, you know, the term "foreign fighter" is very loose.
31:59 Who are these people?
32:00 Are they volunteers?
32:01 Are they volunteers?
32:02 Are they mercenaries?
32:03 Are they instructors?
32:04 And that's the most interesting category.
32:05 They've undertaken in the past weeks at least three attempts, three very brave attempts,
32:24 to bring in helicopters from the Azov Sea, from the shore side, into that plant to evacuate
32:42 whom?
32:45 People were risking their lives.
32:47 We took down three helicopters.
32:50 People were risking their lives, some very brave pilots, acting on desperate orders to
32:58 land there and evacuate certain people.
33:05 Your guess would be as good as mine.
33:07 But those attempts were suicidal.
33:11 They were suicidal.
33:12 And you can't evacuate 2,000 people by means of a few helicopters.
33:18 That means you need--the objective was to bring out a number of extremely valuable individuals.
33:29 I believe we shot down three helicopters and one managed to get away.
33:36 There you go.
33:44 Let me tell you, I don't know if you've heard about a place in Kosovo called Račak.
33:51 Have you ever heard that?
33:55 All those who worked in the former Yugoslavia immediately make that connection.
34:03 In 1999, at the beginning of '99, Serbian special forces went into the village of Račak
34:15 in Kosovo.
34:19 And I was in Belgrade at that point.
34:22 And they went in because they knew that a unit of the Kosovo Liberation Army had went
34:31 in for the night.
34:33 They went in, they killed everybody, and two hours later, it was still night, they left.
34:44 Which, as it turns out, was not a very good idea, because the next day that village was--well,
34:56 it wasn't retaken because there was still no--I mean, there was still no foreign troops
35:06 on the ground.
35:07 But the Albanians went in, the OSCE mission went in, the bodies were redressed.
35:15 I know some people who worked with those bodies.
35:19 Even the bullet holes in the bodies and the bullet holes in the clothes did not even correspond.
35:26 There were some cases like that.
35:28 They brought in fresh bodies.
35:31 They dumped all the bodies from all the houses into one ditch.
35:38 And then the cameras went in, the same CNN.
35:43 Massacre.
35:45 The Serbs massacred innocent civilians.
35:50 And that was a trigger event for a NATO bombing, of course, of Serbia.
35:58 What happened in Buča?
36:00 We left on 30 March.
36:02 Our troops withdrew on 30 March.
36:07 The Ukrainians came back the next day, our Ukrainian administration that had ran away.
36:16 The mayor of Buča on 31 March was shown giving an interview in those same streets.
36:26 Nothing was said for three days.
36:29 On the fourth day, you had bodies scattered around the streets in interesting poses, fresh
36:37 corpses.
36:39 We couldn't have killed those people.
36:42 Fresh corpses with blood still in the wounds, with no rigidity.
36:55 Eight days later, Ursula von der Leyen comes to visit.
37:00 This was so in Congress.
37:02 And Josep Borrell from the European Union.
37:05 And there's a wonderful photo.
37:07 You know, I know these things because I was involved in these things.
37:12 You have black body bags.
37:15 And there's an Orthodox priest with a beard and a huge cross looking solemn.
37:21 And Ursula von der Leyen and Borrell looking very serious, saying this is a terrible crime.
37:30 These corpses have been on the streets for eight days.
37:33 Are you kidding me?
37:34 And no one has a mortuary mask on him.
37:37 You know what the smell is like?
37:41 This was staged, all of this.
37:45 And to any unbiased observer, I mean the logic, you add two and two.
37:51 First of all, why did these corpses appear on the fourth day?
37:55 Where were they before?
38:00 Why are body bags?
38:01 Why were the bodies lying on the streets for days?
38:04 But they have no friends and relatives.
38:07 People there are no animals.
38:09 They would have buried their people.
38:13 And eight days later, they're still in body bags on the streets.
38:17 Who are you trying to fool here?
38:20 You know, as Joseph Stalin used to say, gentlemen, this is a story either for little children
38:31 or very big fools.
38:35 Oh, guys, removing Zelensky for what?
38:55 Who is Zelensky?
38:57 And you know, Marxist theory, and I studied Marxist theory when I was much younger, there
39:06 is this fascinating premise about the role of an individual in history.
39:14 According to Marxian theory, an individual is maybe not nothing, but compared to the
39:26 action development of historical forces.
39:31 He is not something that is a factor of great significance.
39:39 If you look at Zelensky, the individual, you know, we all love Zelensky as a comedian.
39:49 That guy was great.
39:52 We still watch videos with him on YouTube.
39:56 The man was a Russian speaker.
39:59 He always used to poke fun at the Ukrainian nationalists and Nazis to the point where
40:06 he was receiving death threats from them.
40:10 He was always their enemy.
40:15 And he was loved in Russia.
40:20 Suddenly, after all these traditional leaders in the Ukraine failed, he is identified by
40:30 someone.
40:32 He is plucked out of this artistic and cultural milieu.
40:39 And suddenly he is a political leader, which was amazing to everybody.
40:44 I mean, wait a minute, how did this happen?
40:47 He does not have a party.
40:51 He does not have a political force behind him.
40:55 He has no ideology.
40:56 He has no politics.
40:57 I mean, where did he come from?
41:04 We used to say these things of Macron, if you recall.
41:09 But you know, this was bizarre, what happened in Kiev.
41:16 And then he wins this election because people were so tired of those traditional leaders,
41:23 of the thieves, all those corrupt individuals.
41:30 They were all known through and through.
41:32 And this was this fresh face, out of nowhere.
41:36 And he was pro-Russian.
41:39 He was a Russian speaker.
41:41 I've never heard him speak a word of Ukrainian up until now.
41:50 And naturally, the people would vote for him enthusiastically because he was the only remaining
41:56 option.
41:57 Someone, anyone except the old guard, anyone.
42:03 So if he leaves tomorrow, you know, he's not in control of events.
42:08 He is surrounded by several dozen very hard men from the military and security services,
42:22 both Ukrainian and Western, who are in full control of what he does and all Ukrainian
42:31 policies.
42:33 But as a figurehead, he's still very good.
42:37 That short, heroic figure in a military-style T-shirt, unshaven, looking gaunt and pale,
42:47 he looks good.
42:51 Don't forget, he's an artist.
42:55 He's an actor.
42:56 He knows how to do these things.
42:58 He knows how to speak.
43:02 He knows where to make all the proper pauses in his sentences.
43:08 But the real people are behind the surface and behind his back and in other European
43:15 capitals, not to mention the ones who are across the Atlantic.
43:22 We will limit Russia's ability to do business in dollars, euros, pounds and yen.
43:29 I'm not going to claim to you that this is not unpleasant.
43:34 It's unpleasant.
43:35 It's uncomfortable.
43:38 And a few months from now, I will be able to give you a more definite assessment of
43:44 how this really is.
43:45 This is all very fresh still.
43:49 But what constantly amazes me is this never-ending misreading of the Russian psyche by people
44:02 in the West who should know better.
44:07 When I read and I listen to all these statements by people who are described as Russia analysts
44:19 and you look at their educational qualifications, goodness, a couple of bachelors, a couple
44:26 of masters, a PhD, speaks Russian, and you think, "He's an expert."
44:35 He's not an expert.
44:36 He's a clown.
44:38 He's a clown.
44:42 I am amazed at the obtuseness and lack of understanding of how Russians react.
44:50 You put pressure on Russians, they're not going to rebel against the government.
44:56 They're not going to pour out into the streets and demand the return of McDonald's.
45:06 They will support the government even more, which is what I told you.
45:11 The support is actually growing.
45:13 People are angry.
45:16 People are also angry because the West is taking them for idiots.
45:23 The West believes that the Russians are not able anymore to fly to Milan for the annual
45:30 fashion show or buy diamonds in Amsterdam.
45:36 They will overthrow the government.
45:38 How stupid can you get?
45:42 This simply will not happen.
45:49 The mood is getting more and more resolute.
45:52 You're trying to pressure us.
45:55 You're trying to coerce us.
45:57 Ain't going to work.
46:00 We are going to push on and we're going to finish what we started.
46:09 It's very simple.
46:11 But again, what scares me is the lack of mental, intellectual, and analytical quality in the
46:21 West among people who should know better.
46:27 Russians never give in to coercion.
46:33 It's not in our psyche.
46:37 And when I say psyche, I don't mean brain.
46:40 I mean here, in the gut, where all the proper and honest human emotions come from.
46:52 You know what the main problem is?
46:54 The West is forcing countries to choose sides.
46:58 The pressures are enormous and they never come from Russia.
47:04 If only, and for two reasons.
47:07 First, we have nothing to threaten Africa with.
47:13 And the second reason is we simply don't operate that way.
47:18 We don't go where we're not wanted.
47:21 We do not issue instructions to governments and countries how they should behave.
47:26 We don't tell them how they should vote.
47:30 We can recommend something.
47:36 The West operates completely differently.
47:40 There was a wonderfully ironic expression in Russian back in the days of my youth.
47:46 It had something to do with the political course of the Soviet Union.
47:52 It was like this, but it was internal.
47:56 If you do not sing with us, do not forget that you're being silent against us.
48:05 That means forget about voting with Russia.
48:10 That's not even the issue here.
48:12 They do not allow anyone to even be neutral.
48:20 They always want you to pick a side, their side.
48:27 Neutrality, not just supporting Russia, I mean, that's risky business.
48:33 Neutrality is, as far as the West is concerned, neutrality is not an option.
48:41 You have to be with them publicly.
48:45 Publicly, officially, openly, emotionally, whatever.
48:54 This is the problem.
48:57 They don't allow you to keep your own conscience.
49:01 How do you get out of this?
49:06 As always in life, look, it's the usual.
49:10 The stronger you are, the more freedom you possess.
49:15 The stronger you are, the richer you are, the more freedom you have in your actions.
49:25 It's that simple.
49:26 Humanity has not invented any other way for the past 5,000 years.
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