Google Cloud Speech-to-Text API (Chirp) + Gemini 2.5 Flash Non-Thinking. Treat it as a searchable index of what was broadcast, not a quotation record.
00:00:00while they are with her in union, uh-huh, and
00:00:03if they refuse this union, she
00:00:06reserves the right to such
00:00:08claims,
00:00:11that is, it was immediately said that the former Soviet republics
00:00:14are located in some foreign territories,
00:00:17Russian ones, and that their territories are such generous
00:00:21gifts of Russia, which she is ready not to take away if they
00:00:24are all under her, together with her, in
00:00:27allied relations, uh-huh. Uh-huh, so the West slept through this
00:00:31statement, well, because at that time it didn't seem very important, no, we somehow
00:00:35tried to react to it, but no one
00:00:38disavowed it, well, and then the most important thing was something else, everyone
00:00:42thought that we would always be in allied relations, where would they go?
00:00:46Don't forget that in August 1991, work on
00:00:49the Union Treaty was still ongoing. Many people generally believed that Ukraine would
00:00:53sign it. And in the world, little was known about Ukraine,
00:00:57Chernobyl, there, and then. practically
00:01:00the work of the great Russian writer, Nobel
00:01:04laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn, "How We
00:01:06Should Rebuild Russia," was published, in which it was clearly stated, it was said that
00:01:10the future Russian state should consist of Russia, Ukraine,
00:01:13Belarus, and part, as Solzhenitsyn intelligently said, of
00:01:17"bloated Kazakhstan." That is, it was also clear that a large
00:01:21part of Kazakh territories were also not Kazakhstan.
00:01:25Then there was an interview with
00:01:28St. Petersburg Governor Anatoly Sobchak,
00:01:31whose deputy was Putin, and Sobchak
00:01:34also said in that interview publicly and in his
00:01:38speeches that Ukraine is located on territories that are not its own,
00:01:42uh-huh, and that if it wants to remain in the Soviet
00:01:45Union or in allied relations with Russia, then it must
00:01:48sacrifice these territories, yes, let it stay in Lviv and
00:01:52Ternopil, if that's accurate, and I myself remember a similar
00:01:56conversation with Sobchak, in the presence of Putin, by the way,
00:01:59in... the mayor's office of St. Petersburg, I heard this with my
00:02:02own ears, yes, from Sobchak, complete
00:02:06conviction in this, that is, that is, Ukraine is a purely Galician
00:02:09project, well, that's also like, you know, these are lands,
00:02:13Galician lands also conquered by the Soviet soldier, not
00:02:17by anyone else, from their point of view, well, that is,
00:02:21Ukraine is Novorossiya, Malorossiya, and
00:02:24the western regions, to be precise in this
00:02:28terminology, so. Since 1991, I
00:02:32have heard all the time that the collapse of the Soviet Union was
00:02:35a mistake,
00:02:39in the FSB they always call it the mistake of 1991, and
00:02:42that it needs to be corrected.
00:02:46Many Russian politicians believed that the creation of
00:02:49the Commonwealth of Independent States was
00:02:52the correction of this mistake, the first step towards the creation of such
00:02:55a counter-state,
00:02:58in which there would be a common army, a common currency, common banks, and all of this
00:03:01would be controlled from Moscow, there would simply be Yeltsin instead of Gorbachev
00:03:05and the CIS instead of the USSR, and if you
00:03:08remember, in the first decade, approximately from
00:03:121991 to about 2000 under
00:03:15Putin, Russians generally said that they live in
00:03:19Esengovia, look at all the old films of
00:03:23the 90s, there is
00:03:25practically no word Russia there, there is
00:03:28CIS, where we... we live in the CIS, we
00:03:32lived in Ukraine, conditional Estonians in Estonia, conditional Kazakhs in
00:03:35Kazakhstan, and Russians lived in
00:03:37the CIS, because they could not agree with the fact
00:03:41that their state is not theirs, but even, even I will interrupt you and
00:03:45with us it was the same until the 2000s, this constant
00:03:48reminder of the CIS
00:03:51countries, we are in the CIS space, that is,
00:03:55that is, we still don't know exactly what percentage of Ukrainians, I don't remember,
00:03:59call themselves Europeans, confidently Europeans, and
00:04:03then it was generally minuscule, yes, of course, because, that is, the identification of oneself
00:04:07with that post-Soviet union, it remained very strong,
00:04:10and interest in Russian political life was higher than
00:04:13interest in Ukrainian, in Russian TV channels more than
00:04:16in Ukrainian, all this,
00:04:19remember, when did the first Ukrainian
00:04:22TV channels even appear?
00:04:25STB, 1+1, this will already be the mid-
00:04:2890s, yes. Yes, and before
00:04:32that we watched, of course, there was Ukrainian state television, but it never
00:04:36enjoyed great popularity, but people watched Russian
00:04:39channels, the first channel, then NTV
00:04:41appeared, people sat for hours
00:04:44watching
00:04:46the program with our colleague Yevgeny Kiselev, it was about Russian
00:04:50politics, let it be independent television,
00:04:53but it was about Russia, Ukraine was there in passing, but people
00:04:56continued to perceive their capital there, well, and... Russians thought
00:05:00that it would be like that, and then
00:05:02suddenly,
00:05:05I think that even things like the creation of the Ukrainian army, the hryvnia and so on, were already
00:05:09some moments of betrayal, but betrayal that can be reversed.
00:05:12Back, uh-huh, and then of course the Orange Revolution,
00:05:16that was already a very serious moment of
00:05:19disappointment, very, it became clear that something had to be done
00:05:22radically, and so they began to prepare, to prepare,
00:05:25yes, so
00:05:29to say that all this can be reduced to Putin, that's a huge mistake, this is, by
00:05:33the way, very interesting, because for Ukrainians, it seems to me very easy, we
00:05:36got a little stuck, we even said this just now during the break for
00:05:40commercials, that we, it seems to me, got a little stuck in this
00:05:42stage when we are looking for who is to blame, we
00:05:46cannot move on to the next stage, what to do, yes,
00:05:50well, because, because we always want, for example,
00:05:53we can even now spend a lot of
00:05:56time discussing whether it was better to
00:05:59prepare for the war or not, Poroshenko is to blame for us not
00:06:03preparing, or Zelensky, well, this is all
00:06:06probably, I always knew what to do, I have no
00:06:09questions about it, when there was the annexation of Crimea.
00:06:13A well-known Russian politician
00:06:16and diplomat called me, he already died, from such, I would
00:06:19say, Yeltsin's cohort, right of perestroika and all that, and he
00:06:23apologized to me,
00:06:27here is a man with such a
00:06:28background,
00:06:32and he said that he, well, he was already retired, nothing could be
00:06:35done, but he was in such, it was such a collapse of his political
00:06:39hopes, because he was exactly the person who wanted to
00:06:42build relations between the two states, he was an absolute Russian,
00:06:46he said, statesman, even of the imperial type, but he believed that Russia, even as an empire, should
00:06:49build relations with Ukraine as a state, and then all this collapsed,
00:06:53it was clear, well, and I ask him, because we were good friends, we talked a lot
00:06:57about many things, what should we do, well, in such a way, you know, as
00:07:00people ask a person of older age, who is 80
00:07:04years old, how many and
00:07:07some recipe, how to do it, you need to dig in,
00:07:10prepare for war. In
00:07:132005, we definitely turned in the direction of war,
00:07:17but we didn't want to believe it, well, that's it, that is, digging in, that's
00:07:20the idea, that is, there is a simple
00:07:23choice, either fight back or disappear, fighting back absolutely does not
00:07:27mean victory over Russia,
00:07:29uh-huh, as many believe, we must
00:07:32end the war with victory over Russia, you are a party of
00:07:36war that wants to defeat Russia, I, you
00:07:39know, always say that you will not defeat Russia, Russia is... one of the most serious
00:07:43states in the modern world, yes, it does not have enough army, it does not have enough,
00:07:47perhaps money, but it has great demographic potential, it has,
00:07:51most importantly, its people have an absolute instinct
00:07:54of imperial offensive, so Russia is Russia, that's why we were part of
00:07:58Russia, and not vice versa, if it were vice versa, it would be a Ukrainian empire, not
00:08:01a Russian one, these are such people, this is such a nation, an imperial nation,
00:08:04ready to sacrifice millions of people, on both sides of the
00:08:07war, for
00:08:10the sake of greatness. And the only way for us to win in this
00:08:14situation is to stop them, not
00:08:17to win, not to think about how Russia
00:08:20will collapse,
00:08:23Putin will be judged in The Hague, no, Russia can
00:08:26remain on our borders as it is, changing
00:08:30its paradigm, we don't know
00:08:31this,
00:08:35but we can become either a country
00:08:37that
00:08:41will be outside
00:08:44Russia, a conditional Outer
00:08:47Mongolia, in relation to China, or an Inner
00:08:50Mongolia, or here, or
00:08:52there.
00:08:56There is no other way in nature. If they
00:08:59see that we are too much for them, they
00:09:02will calm down for a certain time. And they can even
00:09:05invent a story for themselves that we are not Russians, just as they
00:09:09invented that we are Russians, well, they are trying to turn Finns
00:09:12and Poles now, but they wanted, of course, and always wanted, in
00:09:16the 19th century brochures were still published in St. Petersburg, where
00:09:18it was explained why the Polish language is not really a language, but a dialect, of course, that it is
00:09:22one people, only of the Catholic faith, I read with my own eyes that
00:09:26Russians and Poles are one people, I read this,
00:09:30and well, it's just that there are
00:09:33Great Russians, Little Russians, and Belarusians, and Poles are just people who
00:09:37converted to Catholicism, but it's the same
00:09:39people, that is, we
00:09:53well, in principle, the builder of our state, you somehow seem to
00:09:56have said something like that about Kuchma, he actually
00:09:59tried to build the main
00:10:02message to Moscow on this, that Ukraine is not
00:10:05Russia, but he tried to somehow
00:10:09build multi-vectorism, that is...
00:10:13to hold between Ukraine and
00:10:16the Western civilization and
00:10:20the Russian Empire. You understand, Kuchma
00:10:23came to the conclusion, which was probably very radical for him,
00:10:27that Ukraine is not Russia, and for us, we need to come to the conclusion that
00:10:31Ukraine is Ukraine, because
00:10:33this idea that Ukraine is not Russia is generally inherent in the Ukrainian
00:10:37national spirit, that we must
00:10:40react to what Russia
00:10:42does,
00:10:44if Russia is bad towards us, we will be bad, good, well,
00:10:48good, and this is why, because we are not
00:10:52Russia, and look... all
00:10:55our state decisions, all of them are dictated by Russia, you say that
00:10:59Kuchma is the builder of our state, but Putin is the builder of our state, is
00:11:01he a true builder? Well,
00:11:05actually, I'm saying a blasphemous thought now, but to a certain
00:11:08extent, the fact that
00:11:12Bandera became one of our cornerstones, on
00:11:15which modern identity is now built, this is also,
00:11:19to a large extent, a merit of hatred, the hatred of Russians for
00:11:23Bandera, hatred. And how it used to be for
00:11:26Petliura, and before that it was for Mazepa, that is, not Bolbadzhan, but
00:11:30Petliura, conventionally speaking, Mazepists, Petliurites,
00:11:33Banderites, yes, that's how Ukrainians were consistently called,
00:11:37before Bandera, Ukrainians were also called something, they were called Petliurites,
00:11:41and before Petliura, how were they called? Mazepists,
00:11:44okay, so who are all these
00:11:47people? These are supporters of the national-state
00:11:50project,
00:11:53and a figure is chosen that seems
00:11:56radical. Mazepa is perceived as the most
00:11:59radical of the hetmans, Petliura as the most
00:12:01radical of the figures of the Ukrainian People's
00:12:05Republic, Bandera is simply perceived as the most radical of the figures
00:12:08of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.
00:12:11They could have chosen someone else, yes, but Bandera seemed very bright
00:12:15also because, you know, why else? Because it was always possible to combine
00:12:19one's own hatred with the hatred of some other people
00:12:22and... or create hatred for their people, and therefore
00:12:26prove the justice of their claims, this was the case with Petliura, who was accused of
00:12:29Jewish pogroms, Petliura, who was essentially a Judeophile, who had a
00:12:33Ministry of Jewish Affairs,
00:12:36who appealed
00:12:39with a demand to the troops that they not commit
00:12:43Jewish pogroms, whose officers, among whom was
00:12:46Colonel Melnyk, shot people for Jewish pogroms, but
00:12:49the pogroms were, they were terrible, they were massive, they were bloody,
00:12:53cities were destroyed. to the last
00:12:55person,
00:12:58the leaders of the Ukrainian People's Republic simply did not have real control over
00:13:01their own army in this situation after the revolutionary
00:13:04chaos, and so they used this, created
00:13:08this story of the murder of Petliura by
00:13:11Shvartsbard, a court case where people come
00:13:15who talk about pogroms, they are not lying, they just connect them with
00:13:19the name of Petliura himself, and so
00:13:22not just a Russian, but
00:13:25a Russian-Jewish myth about Petliura is created,
00:13:29or a Polish-Russian myth about
00:13:32Bandera, uh-huh, also, it's not the Russians with him,
00:13:35it's the Poles, they hate him, and
00:13:39the Russians just confirm, yes, this is a radical figure, actually, the
00:13:43Russians don't have any particular questions, as they do with other Ukrainian nationalists, they know everything
00:13:47about these, look at
00:13:48the Poles,
00:13:53well, that's all. That is, they work
00:13:56masterfully, Mazepa was
00:13:59to be an enemy not only of the Russian state, but also of
00:14:03the church, it was necessary to declare him anathema, remember
00:14:06that the church, this church of the UOC of the Moscow
00:14:10Patriarchate, it achieved the renaming of this part of
00:14:13the street, uh-huh, where there was, where there is
00:14:16the Lavra, well, now it has returned to the Lavra
00:14:20street from Mazepa street, yes, well,
00:14:23that is, they always need some other
00:14:26cornerstone that they will use other
00:14:30peoples or institutions to confirm this,
00:14:33essentially, the most important thing
00:14:35for Russia is to maintain this connection, this
00:14:38connection can be interpreted differently, it can be somewhere, I don't know, from
00:14:42the perspective of post-colonial studies, that is, it's
00:14:46about relations with,
00:14:50let's say, Creoles and
00:14:53and the metropolis, and so on, but it seems to me that it's
00:14:57productive to just think about how we can, well,
00:15:01just move away from that, and just say that we don't care what Russians
00:15:04think about it, it seems to me that this is the healthiest thought, actually, we
00:15:08don't care what Russians think about this or
00:15:12that issue, yes, we no longer care, we constantly see what is being said,
00:15:15that we need to take their opinion into account, otherwise they will
00:15:18fight, well, actually, even President Zelensky says, we will
00:15:21respond symmetrically to what Russia
00:15:25will do.
00:15:28This is a strange statement, well, this is also a question, either we
00:15:32respond symmetrically to them, they respond symmetrically to us, actually our
00:15:36task is to make sure that they don't interfere, we
00:15:39don't need to respond to them symmetrically or unsymmetrically, we need to find their
00:15:43vulnerable points that will not allow them to continue fighting, that is, to bring their
00:15:47economy to its knees, their state to its knees, and do so that they do not get up
00:15:51for as long as possible, so that they crawl
00:15:54on their knees, and then maybe they will leave us alone, because
00:15:58any other chances to believe that they will leave us alone in
00:16:01some real future, they do not have such chances, well,
00:16:04they do not exist, well, and therefore, again... we return to
00:16:08the birthday boy, the birthday boy simply expresses all
00:16:11these, I would
00:16:12say
00:16:16chauvinistic, in Russia they would say "okhotnoryadcheskiye"
00:16:19tendencies, because there was Okhotny Ryad, this is a street in Moscow, I studied
00:16:23on it, but when I didn't study on it, before that
00:16:26there were meat shops in
00:16:29Okhotny Ryad, uh-huh, and these people who were in the meat shops, they are like
00:16:33people who supported Hitler in Germany, this is this social
00:16:36stratum, they were. Black Hundreds, chauvinists, and they were ready to
00:16:40fight, well, you know, they knew how to work with
00:16:42an axe, like with a plow in
00:16:46our version, and
00:16:50they expressed all these chauvinistic
00:16:53popular sentiments, so these people were called, like
00:16:57Putin, they would be called in Russia
00:16:58Okhotnoryadtsy,
00:17:01they were from this street Okhotny Ryad in Moscow, and this
00:17:05he fully expresses the expressiveness of the mentality, but no one
00:17:08said that the next Russian president will not be
00:17:11the same, because this is the popular mentality.
00:17:15Putin is simply a person who expresses this popular
00:17:18mentality. And here the question is, his
00:17:21successor, who will one day be,
00:17:24he will simply believe that Ukraine can be captured by
00:17:28political, economic means, or it is necessary to continue fighting. That's all, this will be
00:17:32the dilemma that he will solve. Yes, just
00:17:36like Stalin's successors. They were not going to continue the Korean
00:17:39War, but they were going to confront the West differently, but this
00:17:43at least gave the West a little respite,
00:17:45for example, the same
00:17:47Estonia, at least,
00:17:50not
00:17:52Estonia, I meant Finland, of course, Finland, yes, and, but,
00:17:56but I, I mean, that we still have many examples in the 20th
00:18:00century, when in one way or another,
00:18:03death, a wound, it, it gave, opened some windows of opportunity.
00:18:09A lot of examples from Franco to Salazar, to the same Stalin, after whom
00:18:12the thaw began, well, it began, but you see, all Russian
00:18:15thaws, unlike what happened after the death of Stalin and
00:18:19Salazar, it ended, well, and but there is the same North
00:18:22Korea, where in principle the death of the leader means simply
00:18:25the transfer by inheritance, but there is already actually a hereditary
00:18:29dynasty, here there is Lubyanka, then it
00:18:32can also turn out to be, conditionally speaking, a dynasty of just a different character.
00:18:36Nobody knows
00:18:38this to the end,
00:18:40well, that is, I have quite
00:18:44serious questions about
00:18:47how much we can talk
00:18:50about what is happening with the Russian elite and what
00:18:53it will be like after Putin's departure, but now we need to
00:18:57think about how to live with Putin's Russia,
00:19:01how capable Putin's Russia
00:19:04is of retreating from the idea of war.
00:19:08But you see, is the current Russian system itself,
00:19:12which Putin built, not over-centralized? Well,
00:19:15this week we talked, in particular, with the young French
00:19:19researcher Osind
00:19:22Klement Molin, who actually, what
00:19:25happened now, if I correctly understand what happened,
00:19:29we are now having a very successful offensive, which also happened
00:19:32because Putin is constantly lied to about
00:19:36very great successes, and since they are constantly
00:19:39lying about great successes, then accordingly, their units
00:19:43supposedly appear on maps already in completely different
00:19:46territories, accordingly, this
00:19:49stretches all their logistics, because
00:19:53they somehow have to comply with what they declare and just makes them
00:19:56vulnerable at the front, that is, in fact, the lie that
00:20:00was built makes them weak, but this
00:20:03lie, this whole performance is actually for one spectator, for Putin.
00:20:07And therefore his death probably would have had some certain
00:20:10consequences, well, again, this
00:20:13is, a conversation about some such things that can
00:20:17happen, maybe in 10 years it will happen, and the most important thing
00:20:20is something else, are you sure that another
00:20:23person will want to receive truthful information about what
00:20:25is happening, the first candidate to receive truthful
00:20:29information should be Putin himself, he is a career officer of the Federal Security
00:20:33Service of the Russian Federation, before that the KGB of the USSR, well...
00:20:37in principle, he didn't serve in the FSB, he served in the KGB. Uh-huh. All
00:20:41employees of the State Security Committee of the USSR knew
00:20:44that the leadership only wants such distilled information, that
00:20:48party workers do not like it when they are told
00:20:51the truth, this
00:20:55is a quite important
00:20:58moment
00:21:00which
00:21:03eee one way or another is connected
00:21:06with, uh-huh,
00:21:09a real,
00:21:12a real, I would say,
00:21:16such
00:21:19a turning point in... in the situation
00:21:22of the Russian leadership, a person from the KGB comes, who knows
00:21:25that subordinates always lie, uh-huh, well, she should
00:21:28have told them: listen, I am not a party worker, I am not from
00:21:32Yeltsin's school, I am from yours, don't lie to me,
00:21:35but this is happening, well, simply Trump has his
00:21:38accounts, he clearly writes something there
00:21:41himself, I don't know, Medvedev has his accounts, Zelensky has his
00:21:45accounts, everyone has their accounts, Joe Biden, Putin, Putin is an old-school person, he
00:21:49doesn't want to write in accounts, he governs the country differently, well, and the question is, in
00:21:53the 21st century, can one relevantly
00:21:56is happening if one is completely disconnected from
00:22:00social networks, or does one then become an object of manipulation?
00:22:03Well, by the way, Trump writes in his accounts. Here is
00:22:07a new statement from Trump. I don't know if you saw it? Zelensky
00:22:11wants to create problems for the whole world, he could have ended the war countless
00:22:14times already. It's time for Ukraine to choose a new
00:22:17leader. Here you go. Much
00:22:20more interesting statements
00:22:23than
00:22:29the statement
00:22:32about barrels of oil, well, and here I just
00:22:36fantasize, what if Roosevelt, for example, somewhere
00:22:39around 1940, says that
00:22:42Jews generally create a lot of problems for the world, why Jews,
00:22:45Churchill, well, for example, either Churchill, or Churchill, so deal with
00:22:49this. Somehow
00:22:53- this is also new, actually, well, let's say
00:22:56that, Trump was offended by
00:23:00the Nobel Committee, that they did not give him the Nobel
00:23:04Prize and
00:23:06imposed sanctions against the International Criminal Court, because Novali
00:23:10uredka, the judge
00:23:13of the International Criminal Court,
00:23:16now
00:23:19Zelensky said that this is a weak decision, to negotiate with
00:23:22Putin about diesel, Trump was offended by
00:23:26Zelensky, just yesterday he was saying how wonderful
00:23:30Zelensky was and so on,
00:23:33and now he talks
00:23:36about a new leader of
00:23:38Ukraine, and this is actually the path to what? To
00:23:42rejection, rejection of aid to
00:23:45Ukraine, Ukraine says, what new leader, what are you talking
00:23:48about? Let's declare a truce with Russia and hold
00:23:52elections, which will have a new
00:23:55leader,
00:23:58oh, so you don't want a new leader, you don't want to listen to
00:24:02the United
00:24:02States?
00:24:08This, frankly, we, we, we, lately, international
00:24:12politics is turning into some kind of actually biased and very good
00:24:15quality, and I can only repeat what we have said many times,
00:24:19perhaps. The problem is that the United States, despite the fact that they have,
00:24:22of course, every right to consider themselves
00:24:25the founders of a democratic type,
00:24:28the shaping of a democratic country for the world, but perhaps their system
00:24:32is simply outdated, and we see that
00:24:36the system gives extremely great powers, received by one person,
00:24:39the winner of the elections, it, it, it seems in the 21st
00:24:43century just works worse and worse, only this I
00:30:33a few, probably minutes ago information appeared on
00:30:37CBS, it seems, that CBS News, they were the first to
00:30:40report it, the American channel, President
00:30:44Trump stated that Ukraine needs a new
00:30:47president, this news is now just, like a
00:30:51wildfire spreading throughout
00:30:53the whole world, well and this is truly,
00:30:57how do I comment on this?