Excellent conversation, great guest. I'll make the point that a lack of morality may be a strategy for conquest, but it doesn't make the army competent in the modern sense. Hoping to find 'Night Train to Odesa' in audiobook form. 💙💛
"It's a war against fascism." Yes indeed. That's it. Terrific guest, Jonathan. Thank you very much for the privilige of listening to the marvellous Jen Stout.
As it happened last time in 1940ties it took a while every important democtratic power to come to terms that fascism needs to be fought with and defeated. The same is now with a quite slow uptake of this inevitable reality. And I understand American since each time they are consistently slow in coming to terms with this situation. I cannot understand European reticence to quicker grasp the reality considering the grim past experience with fascism.
My Russian ex wife has lived in England since 1989. She supports Putin 110%. She even painted his portrait! On the day the full scale war started, she contacted me, hardly able to contain her excitement.
Thank you, Jonathan, for the conversation with Jen Stout and for mentioning her book, which sounds very interesting. 🇺🇦 Перемоги і миру всім українцям! 🇺🇦
Standing ovation both to Jen Stout and Jonathan! Jen ‘s analysis is absolutely astonishing , deep , surprising. The domestic violence, abuse even among friends or unknown people is inherent in the russian forma mentis. I was chocked when reading Maxim Gorky’s novels , which was in the school programme, but I hated totally . Maybe because I’m Ucrainian. Cultural difference☺️
I must confess I am getting addicted to your interviews, really enjoyed this one however as a former soldier I do agree with you that the Russian army is extremely flawed. Once the West stops over thinking the nuclear threats and invests more appropriately, Ukraine will win !
I tend to think so - this is not the same army that fought the Germans. It takes them months to capture small towns, with catastrophically high losses…
@@SiliconCurtain The misunderstanding comes to the surface by seeing the facts: in WWII the majority of Red Army were Ukraineans fighting the NAZI with American materials from lend-lease supplies while Russian NKVD were shooting them in the back for "hesitation". Does anyone see a resemblance with the full war in Ukraine in 2024?
Excellent interview and insight into the attack. This makes it more clear we need to be more united in our common understanding of freedom. We should accept that we have common values of liberty and life well lived as individuals in a free society with a variety of views where everything “good and great” is possible as we see it.
It's a mixed bag. Remember inscriptions on the walls in somebodys house in Bucha " Who gave you the right to live like this " and another example; intercepted call Russian soldier to wife - can I shag this Ukranian woman? wife - as long as you use a condom, yes. Also from Bucha spring - 22. Many are voluntarily recruited making the sacrifice for the motherland. Watch " City of heroes " approx 58 min about the city of Yelnia on YT. It's very telling and frightening. Human sacrifice is part of their doctrine therefore it's difficult to have a normal moral stand on this.
Jen is touching upon something I find absolutely fundamental, and that is the very best in Human nature arising from existential threat as opposed to the very worst found in those that wage war and think they may profit from it.
Thank you. I've fallen in love with your channel. Adroitly asked questions that dig deep into the topic and great selection of well-informed guest speakers. Many thanks.
Thanks for yet another great insight into this terrible tragedy and to Jen Stout who has bought yet another dimension to the Russian/Ukrainian mindset , I too believe that Ukraine will will win , they must win for Ukraine , Europe and the world. SLAVA UKRAINI
yeah, can, but humans are exceedingly resistant to change, and some tribes and institutions are infinitely slower than others, e.g. N.Korea, Russia, Iran. Ru is stuck in the distant past. It is appearing as if believing Putin's fluffy deranged and delusional pseudo-mystico-religious socoipathic fascism, where the neighboring areas in Ukr are tortured en masse, children stolen en masse. Half of Kherson's population was tortured!!! Let that sink in to your mind tonight when u fall asleep.
Absolute obedience seems to be ingrained in the Russian culture and history. A lot of nations have made the change from monarchy or even dictatorship to democracy but Russia just can’t seem to get the idea. The Czars, the Communist dictatorship, ten years of sudo democracy, and first chance they get, back to a Supreme Leader. So throughly sad.
Someone deleted the comment about the accent of the journalist from Shetland islands. My suggestion is to live a while in historical South of the USA to develop a skill of understanding all kind of accents. To me it looks she just talks very fast. I just used subtitles from RU-vid for understanding some of her weirdly pronounced words.
It's a very softened dialect compared to some areas of Scotland, possibly due to travel and communications as a journalist; well spoken and clear, poised and good cadence.
Two short stories; one about a cat being thrown off a train in the Urals somewhere. The cat was later found dead and millions of negative outcries on socials. On the same rail line and under similar circumstances ( severe cold and at night time ) a bunch of people were misinformed by train staff and got off in the wilderness. They almost not survived and almost no reaction among the general public. Human life has no VALUE in Russia.
precisely! One of the Russians on this channel explained how deep in Russia, a killer had killed a teen girl, and ppl were not moved or concerned in the least. The detachment of the russian soul is profound & that soul is broken, fundamentally.
Regarding WWII: 1939 isn’t the cut-off year, either. Not really. Just ask anyone in China who was on the business end of Imperial Japan’s gentle ministrations in 1937.
About fight with fascism in Europe: the history inevitably repeats itself with some distortions. The most confused are Germans since Soviet Union fought against fascism. However the bulk of fighters at the time in Red Army were Ukraineans while Russian NKVD troops were shooting them in the back for advancing too slow. Today RuZZia has Z people which are equivalent of SS troops in Nazi Germany. The RuZZian propaganda is more pervasive vs Dr. Goebbels was. The difference is a friendly brothery nation Ukraine does not agree with anschluss the way Austria did in 1938: no brother raping the wife of another brother, kidnapping kids and putting house on fire should be considered a brother. However the third RuZZian empire will fail miserably the way third Reich did since history's verdict is sooner or later on the side of justice.
When she said “it’s like arguing with…(and paused) I wanted to fill in “a Donald Trump follower”, right as she finished …like a toddler. I laughed and said “same thing”.
Saying that Russia's military didn't suffer from severe competence issues is....quite a statement to make, especially from someone who follows it up with saying they're not an expert in strategy and changing the subject...it doesn't take a great military mind to recognize that a vastly numerically superior force with equipment that should be as effective if not more effective should be victorious in a matter of months. We've seen that in Afghanistan and Iraq twice each in the last 40 years. (Though 3 of 4 examples also prove that said victory over a resistant population very easily turns into a very painful insurgency...indeed that was precisely what western powers expected and were ready to support just as they had back in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) Where it gets dangerous is assuming that the Russian army remains blind to its incompetence and does nothing to improve itself. History offers several examples where a military starts out largely incompetent and improves dramatically over the course of a war. The most obvious example in relatively recent memory is the Soviets during WWII. During the Winter War, the Soviets were badly losing to Finland, until they made the necessary adjustments, steamrolled through every defensive like the Finns had and saddled them with a treaty harsh enough that they signed on with Nazi Germany to get them back in what they call the Continuation War. During Operation Barbarossa, the Nazis and various allies came within spitting distance of Moscow in a matter of months before falling victim to the famous Russian winter counteroffensive. They spent another year more or less retreating across Ukraine - still losing but at least not getting hundreds of thousands of soldiers encircled and captured in the process. Then they fought a bloody attritional battle in Stalingrad, started turning the momentum of the war back on the Nazis, and spent the next couple of years grinding down a good portion of the overall Nazi war machine culminating in the brutally one-sided Battle of Berlin. That's quite a shift in military performance over 6 years. It's not entirely attributable to the Soviets' ability to improve in the absence of outside support - Lend Lease sent the Soviets an astonishing amount of materiel and the Western Allies efforts in Africa, Italy and France took up rather a lot of the Nazis attention and military capacity, and shared military intelligence made a big difference even with Stalin's mistrust of much of what they received. But there's a huge difference in competence between the idiots who were running the Winter War and commanders like Zhukov who planned and oversaw major Soviet victories in the latter half of the war. Russia's rate of improvement in this war has definitely been slower than in WWII - had the Soviets been so slow to solve their structural problems, they would have been out of the war by the end of 1942. Part of this can be attributed to challenges like the sanctions which have rather the opposite effect of Lend Lease (ie: making military logistics much harder instead of much easier), the rest would require more historical expertise than I have to explain with any confidence. But while Russia's initial forays into the war were hugely incompetent and costly, it's pretty clear they've been adapting already, and it would be a mistake to assume that Ukrainian ingenuity can make up for Russia's numerical advantage indefinitely.
Dmitri Peskov: "US aid is causing more Ukrainian casualties!" Coming from the aggressor’s side, this level of gaslighting is just... beyond everything imaginable … wow.
Someone made the point that "imperialist Nations" must face great difficulties, even be almost destroyed, before the politicians and people learn they must change. Perhaps this may be the time in history where at least two Nations face up to their beliefs in invincibility. So far history describes most of these as being horrific before the society and imperialism fades.
If u are implying the U.S. believes it's also invincible, i think it's plain to see it does not see itself that way any longer. Just look at what its statements were over the past ten years. The US has acted realistically and mostly magnanimously. EU, the U.S. and others together may be able to truly assist Ukr in securing the country and containing Ru aggressive capabilties.
I know exactly how Jen feels constantly checking the telegram channels and map updates in a country where people aren’t talking about Ukraine very much. Americans by and large are tuned out from it, and I’m afraid it gets forgotten between political debates about aid packages.
I don't believe UK imperialism resemble Russian imperialism. The main difference is that UK imperialism is based on soft power and the attractiveness of the imperial project while Russian imperialism it's only a form of delusion and the attempt to impose it to all these peoples that don't really believe in the Russian imperial project and don't resonate with Russian realities of deprivation, oprimation, injustice and slavery basically.
ruzzia?!.. yes permanently unless they upgrade thier education system.. they could learn a thing or two from British experience of empire and adjusting to the modern world.
100%. But there is a big but. Russians genuinely consider themselves a an elevated people@@piseag458which gives them rights to pursue the conquest of Ua anyway they see fit. The society has to fundamentally change.
Sweden has a super extreme narrative, promotion any culture or ethnical group, whilst publicly defiling on their own flag. " Sweden", to show of how much against threats against "multi-culture" they are. This create EXTREME problems...amogst one is debating or nigotiating or changing national social contract. Then there are like a 1000 other stuff....related....
@@SiliconCurtain Leaving only what sir? I would suggest propaganda.Truth over narrative indeed. USSR tactics at it's very best. Eric Blair will be turning in his grave...
Hi Jonathan. Saw you interacting with Pyotr K. I didn't want to leave a comment on his channel. On one occasion him talking to I think a britt, he used the expression " what is ours " regarding russian claims of territories in Ru/Ua war. I think you'r being played. Don't trust that guy. I don't.
Nationalism must inkluderat the understanding that there are other systems and other countries, and to have acceptans that they exist. .... To care for humanity, solidarity and mutual respect... Well, that would be some steps further.... Well, that
yes, but there is also power in numbers & russians know that. Per the numbers, most russians are a combo of ignorant, cowardly, passive/docile. That is the sad unavoidable fact. It's the only way a nation succumbs to a clearly insane war of aggresion/choice after their first relatively prosperous two decades out of the entire past 150 years. They are clearly a lost ppl. But regardless, the Ru military must be contained & many nations in the world have an interest in containing it.
What our societies are able be fair, free, trues beliving all needed for be an rich society? Western really better accepting difference? Or in west only money counting? We maybe same captured in system like russian only different?
At the end of the day, the human cost of this war is the only thing that matters. Europeans have been waging war amongst themselves for centuries and the property damage is always mitigated. The loss to humanity, however, can never be measured nor truly replaced. (What's happening in Ukraine is truly a travesty).
Standing ovation both to Jen Stout and Jonathan! Jen ‘s analysis is absolutely astonishing , deep , surprising. The domestic violence, abuse even among friends or unknown people is inherent in the russian forma mentis. I was chocked when reading Maxim Gorky’s novels , which was in the school programme, but I hated totally . Maybe because I’m Ucrainian. Cultural difference.