Russia Escalates Strikes as Ukraine Prepares for a Dark Winter

All hell is breaking loose in the war in Ukraine. We're dealing with a potential outbreak of the pneumonic plague inside Beria after a lab technician came into contact with said plague in 183 other individuals at this bio lab are now being quarantined, we're also aware of a secret document allegedly intercepted by Ukraine's Ministry of Defense. And shown to the New York Times by Ukraine's energy minister talking about what the Russian plans are for the autumn and winter to destroy Ukraine's power grid to destroy Ukraine's bridges. We heard from Zelensky earlier in the day, I'll share with you some of those statements, some of the remaining interceptors that the United States have has not been given to Zelensky, they've been given to Qatar and to Saudi Arabia as the Trump regime appears to be preparing escalation against Iran. And you have the Trump regime orchestrating a judicial coup right now in Bolivia and interfering with the elections in Brazil. I had the opportunity to speak with Yale historian, now historian at University of Toronto, Tim Snyder about all of this. I want to share that with you as well, I want to go through all of the facts with you, bringing out the receipts as we always do here on the Midas touch network. First, let's talk about the pneumonic plague. So 189 Russians who were affiliated with this lab in Siberia were hospitalized after coming into contact with a woman who died of the pneumonic plague in the Atarsk Siberia region by the BSL three lab over there. FSB that's the successor to the KGB units accompanying ambulances were seen transporting people not voluntarily involuntarily to a quarantine facility nearby. We need to be paying attention, there are other people who are having these symptoms of the pneumonic plague, which can be highly contagious, we will see what's going on there. But we learned about that yesterday evening, we also learned that western countries right now that have embassies and consular offices in Ukraine specifically in Kiev are preparing to move their embassies from Kiev. If the security situation worsens and we'll talk about Russia's secret plan, which the Ukraine Defense Ministry and Energy Ministry claims to have intercepted and they talk to the New York Times and Selinsky spoke to the financial times recently about some of these plans. But the Guardian is reporting how these western countries are preparing to leave Kiev, diplomatic missions could move to Laviv or even eastern Poland if the situation worsens, although it seems Putin intends to strike the Laviv area, pay very close attention to what Putin is planning this winter. And part of Putin's plan was that the Trump regime would not provide interceptors to Zelensky or interceptor licenses and Donald Trump has not provided said interceptors or interceptor licenses nor does Zelensky have access to Starlink to strike the ballistic missile launchers that Putin has and Putin has developed Garen-4 and Garen-5 drones which are much more difficult for Zelensky to intercept before Ukraine to intercept. The situation is clearly deteriorating so what some western diplomats in Kiev are saying. I'll show you the scenes from Kiev last night, paralyzed by traffic jams, people trying to cross on bridges and foot to get out of Kiev. Let's see in this photo what the situation looks like over here after some of these Russian strikes. Russians just focus on striking the bridges, the power grids, infrastructure, civilian areas as well and trying to get people out of Kiev heading into the winter offensive. This was the moment of a strike on the southern bridge in Kiev. Yesterday I was showing footage of some other Russian strikes on some of the other bridges, but take a look at this, let's play this clip. I'll share with you now the b-roll right here of a Russian strike in Karkiv. You'll see this house, this residential area over here in the Ryevni region. You'll see the hit 31 Ukrainians injured to dead in this Karkiv region due to the Russian strikes and it's known that two children are among those who were seriously injured. I'll show you over here as well just what the aftermath looked like among the injured a 15-year-old girl, a 10-year-old boy, all the wounded are receiving medical care. Let's play this clip. Now in addition, Russia was able to strike a warehouse of some of the largest pharmaceutical distributors in the world that have their warehouse in Ukraine, Venta over here. We're talking about Bear, we're talking about Pfizer, TAVA, we're talking about Darnitsia and Pharmac and other pharmaceutical companies. We all use and occupy this warehouse, burn to the ground right now. Now let's talk about some of these Zelinsky strikes in Russia. FP2 drones destroying a Russian panseer, S2, surface-to-air missile system, the SAM system right here. After a secondary detonation, the complex was turned apart, you can see right over there. You'll see this large fire continuing to burn at the Krasnyzavsky chemical plant in Moscow region. We covered this yesterday. That plant burning to the ground should also be noted that in the past 24 hours, Zelinsky posted a video showcasing the new FP7 ballistic missiles making Ukraine only one of 12 countries that can produce ballistic missiles. The Ukrainian FP7 missile makes it possible to destroy Russian bunkers, bridges and other hardened targets that long-range drones are practically incapable of. I want to show you this scene right here from Samara 900 kilometers from the front. Deep in Russia, Ukraine has been able to strike refineries there and lots of other infrastructure. Let me show you what it looked like as these facilities in Samara were hit by Ukraine. Let's play this clip right over here. Russia also demonstrated this new launcher for its Garen Kamikaze drones based on a military truck. Those Garen-4s and Garen-5s are really sadly game-changer in terms of the civilian deaths that were seen. Look, Zelinsky's upgraded to FP1, FP2, FP5, FP7s, the ballistics that we're talking about, Putin's upgraded his missile capabilities and drone capabilities and the level and the speed at which this technology is advancing is really mind-boggling. But we got to stay on top of it, cover it all here on the Midas Touch Network. Now the Financial Times interviewed President Zelinsky on Thursday, interview was released yesterday, speaking at a school that had just been hit by a Russian jet-powered drone. Zelinsky said that the Ukrainian spy agencies had obtained information that Putin told his military to remove all constraints that governed earlier air campaigns. Zelinsky told the Financial Times, Putin said there are no rules now at all. Specifically, Zelinsky said Russia was gearing up to intensify attacks on Ukraine's largest cities, heading into the autumn and winter, with the aim of isolating them from the rest of the country. Kiev, the eastern stronghold of Kharkiv, and the southern port city of Odessa are the main targets according to Zelinsky, and the Ukrainian intelligence assessment described to the Financial Times by Ukrainian and European officials. The western city of Laviv, a crucial logistics hub near the Polish border, also features in Russia's plan according to Ukrainian and European security officials familiar with the intelligence that was extracted. The Ukrainian officials said Moscow intended to strike nuclear facilities to sever them from the energy grid, increasing pressure on Kiev to Kiev to Russia's demands in early 2027. refugee flow towards the EU was also part of Moscow strategy official said adding to concerns that a large influx of Ukrainians with strained countries where anti-immigrant sentiment is on the rise. Tensions with neighboring Poland have increased this year leading to more attacks on Ukrainians. The New York Times reporting something very similar as Ukraine's energy minister spoke to the New York Times and the Defense Minister also has been speaking to outlets about this report that they say they extracted showing Russia's plan for the autumn and winter. And Russia's really started that early. We see the winter offensive really beginning right now. I would actually say two weeks ago and you saw our coverage here on the Midas Touch Network. You know it's interesting when I interviewed Tim Snyder, world renowned historian. He just got back from Ukraine and he shared with me what he observed over there. You know he spent his life as a historian focusing on authoritarianism, tyranny, studying Hitler, the rise of Nazism, the genocide. And one of the things that he said and I reflected on this before doing this video is how Donald Trump's policy in the western hemisphere, how Donald Trump treats Central America, South America, Mexico, the Caribbean is very similar to Putin's sphere of influence view over Eastern Europe and more broadly Europe and how Putin sees you know what the Soviet Union should be reconstituted as and how they use strikingly similar tactics in terms of influencing elections and trying to dominate the local political sphere. And so you know we talked about it at a whole video on this yesterday about Donald Trump's coup of the Bolivian independent judiciary. And so the Trump regime utilizes this proxy over there, a guy by the name of Fernando Ceramito, he's Trump's money guy, bag man in South America. He's an Argentinian political operative who works with Brad Pascal attached to the Trump regime to prop up, this is what Ferdinand Ceramito does to prop up these Trump handpicked dictators throughout South America. And many of these handpicked dictators actually have the strongest links to the narcos, to the narco trafficking and the Trump regime doing this performative but actual war crimes killing people on fishing boats without evidence that they're actually narco traffickers while propping up the worst of the worst vile narco connected leaders throughout South America is one of the things that is being alleged and you could of course decide for yourself. So this individual Fernando Ceramito, he was alleged to have attempted to kill his girlfriend and her name is Nadia Beller. She survived the assassination attempt in Bolivia. She's Bolivian and based on certain text messages that were revealed and the prosecution that was taking place of Ceramito by the Bolivian attorney general that Ceramito believed that Nadia Beller, his girlfriend who was actually pregnant at the time of the attempted execution or assassination, knew too much about what he was doing and what the Trump regime knew about these dictators and potentially even their connections to the narcos and what they were covering up in the region. She survived. She's now posting photos of Ceramito with Don Jr and Brad Pasquale and calling it out. We're hearing from top politicians like in Bolivia like Senator Ana Maria Crispin talking about how the U.S. Embassy in Bolivia has been caught paying bribes to legislatures in the Bolivian Congress. You have Marco Rubio working with the Bolivian President Paz, one of Trump's handpicked dictators there, to kidnap the attorney general of Bolivia, Bolivia's President Paz kidnapping the AG, the independent AG who was investigating Ceramito, who had these text messages and interfering with that criminal investigation. Meanwhile, as you know this weekend, there is a election in Brazil where the Trump regime is trying to prop up Eduardo Bolsonaro, Jair Bolsonaro's kid, to try to topple President Lula, President Lula, who is supportive of democracy and supportive of the European, the Prime Minister Karimny, part of all that. And so Lula is trying to be toppled by the Trump regime. The election there is Sunday. The Trump regime is doing everything to intervene and interfere in the Brazilian election. And I point all of this out because the Trump regime is focused there. And what I believe is that, you know, when Trump's mind, it's like Putin, you could take Ukraine, you take Europe. Let me do what you're doing there in South America, Central America. And let me try to topple the governments here in Mexico and elsewhere. And then Xi Jinping, you get to take Asia, you can take Taiwan, you go and do that. And that's how I think they see the world. But I want to bring in a world where now in the story, and tips Snyder, Tim Snyder now is a professor at the University of Toronto. I wanted to give all of this a background before doing this interview with him. And tips Snyder, professor at University of Toronto, you sure you've heard of his books on tyranny, 2017 on freedom, 2024. And so many other incredible works. Let's bring in my interview with Tim Snyder. Now I want to bring in Tim Snyder, professor at the University of Toronto, formerly at the Yale University, author of on tyranny and on freedom. On tyranny was written in 2017 on freedom written in 2024. And before that, you're written a ton of books. But one of the big standout ones in my opinion is Bloodlands, Europe between Hitler and Stalin. That was in 2010. So Tim, you've been tracking authoritarianism your entire career, focus on Eastern Europe in particular, World War Two, the atrocities committed by genocide committed by Hitler. And so I want to kind of perhaps go hemisphere by hemisphere of what we're seeing with the Trump regime over here. And I think we start with what we're seeing in the Western Hemisphere, what the Trump regime is saying is they're Don Roe doctrine. And it's app because this interview is going to be airy over the weekend. There's going to be the election in Brazil with President Lula. And you see the Trump regime trying to install and installing dictators and its puppets across all of the Western hemisphere using the auspices of we're going after the drug traffickers. But it seems increasingly they're putting people in who are not doing that or some might say covering up a lot of the atrocities that are happening and making the situation much worse. We're talking Venezuela, we're talking Colombia, we're talking Bolivia, we're talking Ecuador, we're talking Argentina. So let's just start with the Don Roe doctrine and get your perspective of this I think authoritarian doctrine, the attacks on Canada, what you're seeing here Tim. Yeah, I guess two thoughts. I mean one you kindly remember I'm historian of Eastern Europe. When I look at what we're doing in Latin America now, it does remind me a bit of what the Soviet Union was doing in Eastern Europe from 1945 to 1949 or so, which is like this attempt to reg elections, combine reg elections with threats to get to the leadership that you want. And of course, the second thing is that there is a long tradition of American intervention in Latin America, military, political and otherwise. But the third thing is I think what's new here is just the nakedness of the profiteering, right? Like I'm not even sure this rises to the level of imperialism because it's so much about smash and grab and about what about taking what's there. And where I would tie it back to us is that I think they see I think it's just important to see that they see the United States in the same way that are foreign policy and our domestic policy or in that sense the same. They don't respect Latin American sovereignty because they don't respect American sovereignty. They don't really believe in countries or patriotism or sovereignty at all. And so it's all like wherever they can smash and grab they are going to smash and grab. And that's when the Trump regime runs into country and feelings of something bigger than the individual bribe. You see that's why I believe and I'll get your take on it is hatred of Canada is Canada uniting Prime Minister Carney not working in the interest of Prime Minister Carney. And whereas Donald Trump has installed his puppets all across South America, Carney's out there talking about Canada, Canada's strong and elbows up. And so now Trump says Canada is the worst nation in the world. That's his statement. Yeah, I have to say it's actually kind of pleasant up here. And they are doing a lot of things well. And there's like, it's a very different country. So I don't push this too far. But there is a kind of, there was a funny sense as an American when you're up here that you're on a different timeline where like, you know, things branched off and a lot of stuff that could have kept happening in the US, but didn't just kept happening here. And that's, that's a good thing. Um, but yeah, you're absolutely, your analysis is spot on. It's absolutely spot on. They can't, they, they are all greedy cowards. And if anybody is anything else than a greedy coward, they can't take it psychologically. They just can't take it. The idea that an elected official would actually be a patriot or believe in his country or have a notion of his country's interests. That is all, they can't stand that because those are all things which are, you know, psychically unavailable to them. And it's, I think you're right about Canada, but it goes beyond Canada. I realize we're supposed to stay in the Western hemisphere now. But all around the world, this is, this is the problem that Trump has. If he encounters Europeans or Ukrainians, especially who are, who actually believe in democracy, the rule of law, who care about their country, or in the case of Ukraine, are willing to take risks for their country. This is detestable to him. He cannot handle it psychologically. And so he lashes out and he treats these people who are actually the best as the worst. So let's pivot over though to Europe for a moment. I mean, I mean, end Europe, Asia, lump it together with Trump's infatuation for Xi and Putin. You go into the West Wing of the White House. I mean, literally, the most prominent photo is a photo of Trump and Putin from the Alaska summit and Trump and Xi from the most recent summit. And that's like right above the photo of his children. And he has this infatuation with strong man. It's interesting. Dr. Bandily was on the show and she said, you know, the way Trump kind of sees the world, how he beats down on who he thinks are weaker countries or weaker people, he sees himself as the submissive or the weaker to the Putin and the Xi and kind of bends to them as he, as he actually sees himself in his law of the jungle world as being, you know, someone who they dominate and he shows them. I mean, I'm not sure we need to do a cycle analysis, but, you know, he clearly has an infatuation with them. I don't think he needs psychoanalysis because it's so incredibly transparently obvious what's what's going on. I mean, so I need to point out this irony so we don't forget it. The Republicans are trying to run this midterm on the issue of communism, whereas Trump's idols are all communists, whether it's North Korea, whether it's China, whether it's Russia, whose president is, of course, a former KGB officer, a member of the party, his best friends are all communists, right? They're literally actually existing in the world communists. In the case of China and North Korea, they are the people who are keeping communism going in the world, right? And they are the people to whom we are supposed to feel subordinate. So I think that's exactly right. And it connects to the first part of what we're talking about because if you don't believe in countries, if you believe in institutions, if you believe in the Constitution, then the United States is a much more powerful country than Russia, and completely more powerful than Russia. But if you don't believe in countries, if you don't believe in sovereignty and the law, if you just believe that it's gangster on gangster, well, then sure Putin is a much better gangster than Trump. So his feeling of submissiveness, which he clearly enjoys, is connected to his politics or his non-politics, his disbelief in any kind of political order, in what you're calling the law of the jungle, then what he's doing effectively, is he's dropping the reality of American governmental power. And he's basically saying, "I'm a much smaller mobster than that mobster, so I'm going to admire that mobster until the day I die." Tim, you've in your career have been known to kind of frame the moment with these books, whether it was Bloodlands in 2010, on freedom, on tyranny. So as you look where we are now, and we see the world changing very quickly, where in the past you may have said a post-World War Two, US-led architecture throughout the world. In my view, we certainly have a much more multilateral world with the US becoming weaker and weaker and weaker. US security umbrellas in the Middle East, in Asia, crumbling, in Europe, kind of crumbling. To me, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS meetings took on a much more high-profile thing than it ever was before when we would just kind of cast it away, and Trump's attacking NATO kind of constantly. And so how do you, we're just shooting shit you and me talking right now. How do you describe what even exists is NATO even a thing? I know Europe is leading it and trying to preserve it, but Trump's constantly attacking it is Article 4, Article 5, really even around where we see these hybrid attacks taking place. So how do you see this moment? Let me try to take that in levels. I'm going to start with Ukraine and NATO and Russia and where we are. So the Ukrainians are not just defending the front, they're actually taking back more territory than they're losing, and the Russians are losing an unsustainable number of men, and they are being forced into mobilizing rather than just having contract soldiers, which is politically dangerous for them. So this fall and winter, the Russians will be trying to destroy the Ukrainian economy, which they can unfortunately do, because the Americans have pulled back on the interceptor missiles, which allowed the Ukrainians to stop. Russian ballistic missiles, so now they just fall. And the Russians will also be provoking NATO members, the Baltics, Poland, probably others with hybrids with drones across the border, with sabotage and so on, trying to deter them from helping Ukraine. And the move that Russia is making, what they're trying to do is to get the Europeans to say, oh no, what are we going to do? We need NATO and for NATO, we need the Americans. And of course, if that's the move the Europeans make, they're doomed. And that's the move the Russians want them to make, right? Like this is a kind of remote control. They want the Europeans to say, oh no, we now need the Americans, and then the Americans, of course, won't help. And then the Europeans will say, oh no, we lose. But in fact, the Europeans are more than able to take care of this themselves if they choose to. And whether NATO exists or not to get to your question depends upon whether other NATO members, besides the United States, take treaty responsibilities seriously, as opposed to saying, oh, we have to wait for the U.S. to take its treaty responsibilities seriously. They each one of them, whether it's pulled under Latvia, Lithuania, they have to take the treaties responsibilities seriously with respect to one another and not fall into this trap of waiting for the Americans. So then second level are allies in general. The United States, I mean, the term that I, the term that I came up with when I was trying to capture all this is superpower suicide. I guess can't see an example of a country, a major country, losing so much power so quickly as the United States under Trump. And that has, the alliances are part of it. We've encouraged our enemies and we've made our allies not trust us. But there are other parts of it as well, like that we've shown that we are incompetent with the basic with the basic instruments of state power. We're incompetent with trade, and we're also incompetent with war. We've managed to decisively lose a war to a middle power in a matter of three days or four days or five days or six on the outside. We may not realize that because we're trapped in an American nationalist media bubble, but the rest of the world realizes that we lost a war to, we lost a laughably conceived and ridiculously badly executed war to a middle power in a matter of days. But then there are the deeper, the deeper issues of power too, like we, like in order to be a power, you have to have migration. People have to want to come to you and we are losing that. In fact, we're deliberately driving it away. You have to have tech and we're deliberately destroying the tech, which is actually tech. I'm not counting AI and social media and stuff, which disables us. We're destroying the tech that actually matters and you have to have education, right? So that's the next level. We are choosing to be much weaker. And then final level, like where we actually are, I mean, I think one thing is the core group of democracies is now Canada, UK, EU, plus Ukraine, you know, maybe Australia, South Korea, Japan, then the mix too. But there's that crescent that goes across the Atlantic, but now doesn't start with us anymore. It starts with the Canadians and goes across. That's a big change. And I think we've made them do it. They didn't want to do that. Neither the Canadians nor the Europeans wanted to do that, but we've made them do that. So I think that's kind of the hope with the Americans and what they're doing in the Russian soon, what they're doing in the Chinese soon, what they're doing is that that crescent can consolidate economically and politically. It's a dream, though, for Xi, who obviously when he goes in the White House and talks about Thucydides trap, he's looking in Trump's face and saying, where the rising power, nor the descending power, stay the hell out of our ways, what he's basically saying. And Trump's sitting there you know, yeah, you know, and for Putin and how Putin's kind of seen the world and what he viewed as the humiliation with the end of the Soviet Union and wanting to restore his kind of view of kind of this Russian nationalism. He's a gangster, as you state, but he's operating on a plan, a evil one, she is operating under a plan of how he's going to bring these economic deals and then try to bring loyalty and it seems that every day Trump wakes up and there's a maliciousness and evilness, but then to your point, the execution of it is also done so incompetently that the evil vision is carried out in such a sloppy way that it fails. And you look at the catastrophic war in Iran where we should never have been in the war in the first place, but then running out of the weapons, Trump saying we did a deal. We did a deal 600 times when we didn't, then just having these two aircraft carriers that are kind of there while he brags about being a pirate. Look, we got civilian tankers blocked. It's like, oh yeah, it's civilian tankers. That's the US Navy. That's not like a boast. And so there's this incompetence to it while everyone else is operating, I think at a level of sophistication, regardless of the morality issues that are there. Yeah, I mean, on this, on this sophistication, one thing that I do worry about as someone who believes that there are great dangers in the world is that we, the way we thought the Iran war was obviously out of day, and it wasn't it wasn't being led by people who were learning from the way that wars are currently fought. And that's kind of disturbing. There's been a war going on for, you know, going on five years between a full-scale war between Ukraine and Russia. And it seems like the people who are running our country are determined not to learn any lessons from it. And the result is that you have, although this is not very much covered in the US press, you have Ukrainian miners from the Donbass who have learned to operate drones, helping to defend American positions and other positions in the Middle East because we don't have to do it, right? We haven't learned how to fight a modern war. And with Hegseth and Trump, you know, and they're just fantastic vision of testosterone plus battleships. I just, I don't think we're we're we're going to get there. Second thing is China. I mean, I completely agree with you. I think we're flattering Trump when we think he knows what the city's trap is, but certainly Gnu exactly what he was saying. And I see the Trump administration, I mean, unlike the Trumpers who pretend to care about China, like I do care about China. And what the Trump administration has done is spectacularly help China. They have bailed out China. There was a big opportunity to deter China. And that and that opportunity was Ukraine precisely. If you it just took a minimal amount of American wealth and power to support Ukraine such that Russia would lose. And if you do that, you're deterring China. You're showing China how offensive operations are difficult and how you can lose and how you can be humiliated. But instead of doing that, Trump has basically put his persuasive power on the Russian side of the war. They're by encouraging China and essentially leaving it to the Chinese what they what they what they want to do. And a grand scale, if you throw in trade policy, they have basically bailed out the Chinese. I mean, this whole truth into these things, bracketing whether it's true or not. But China wasn't the rising power anymore. They weren't like they had leveled out. And they're not really a rising power. They're just plateauing. They're only rising. If you if you look at the American trajectory, which is the trajectory of a boulder that fell off a cliff, right? Like they're way down here compared to us, but we've chosen under Trump to just basically allow gravity to be our guide. And so they're not rising. It's that we're falling and we're falling because we've chosen to fall. Yeah, but there is the tortoise and the air and the she-view of civilizations and Donald Trump's view of I need to announce a kind of fate deal tomorrow and get my, you know, whatever injection of deal, deal, deal, deal. And people like, dude, there's no deal. Like what? Stop stop saying that. But we cover here on this network, the technology advances. And as we're seeing, you know, autonomous drones and we're seeing things are accelerating and people have to pay attention to it because on the Ukraine side, FP1, FP2, FP5s, they just did their FP7 ballistic launches yesterday and Zelensky posted about that. On the Russian side, though, the Garen 4, the Garen 5, the Iskenders, and their ballistics, that means Zelensky went from intercepting at a 90% rate to a 51% rate because of the Garen 4. So they now have to adapt to that when we all thought the issue was going to be ballistics heading into the winter. And so what do you see happening as we head into the winter right now because, as you said, the front, the battlefield, as Admiral McCraven says, it's World War 1, trench warfare, but with drones and everybody kills everybody on the front, Ukraine's held the front even push forward. But now in the cities, I cover it every day. I see these Russian strikes and Ukraine struggling to strike down these Garen 4 and 5s, occasionally with manpads, but not like they were with the old Shahids. Yeah, so I'm just back from Ukraine, where I spent several days in Hattakeev and then a longer period in Kiev. And you're a right, of course, and your viewers will know this. The ballistic missiles are a problem. And if the Ukrainians had more interceptors, they would be taking down more ballistic missiles. But it is also a problem that the Russians have jet-powered AI-guided drones, which of course are packed with American technology, which is something that we should probably always remind ourselves. American technology continues to be the most important driver of that part of the Russian war against Ukraine. So it's different now. It's different because the Russians are basically taking, taking aim at the entire Ukrainian economy. So while it was there, a major steelworks was hit, when you drive around Ukraine, one of the things you have to think about is where you're going to get gas, because the Russians are trying literally to destroy all the gas stations, which is economic, but it's also just making people's lives harder. Much more destruction is coming down from the sky. And that's bad. On the other hand, the Russians have problems too. A fair amount of their hydrocarbon production is threatened by long-range Ukrainian drones. The Russians have to mobilize, which I think even Putin recognizes is a risk. And so my basic take, as I said before, is that the Russians are in a position of weakness, which they want to make look like strength. And their game over the winter is to make life unbearable for the Ukrainians, hoping that the Europeans won't help. Knowing the Americans won't help much. And to deter the Europeans by these hybrid activities or by drones across borders. And hope that that's enough, because I don't think they want to do another big push with infantry, given that they've had to mobilize. And so on the other side of it, can Ukrainians hold on? Can they create the domestic conditions inside Russia, where things are too difficult for the Russians? I think we're now reaching, that's where we are. It's this next six months, I think, which will be pretty decisive, where it's fair. Oh, I want to emphasize something you said and just agree. On the front, it's the first world war with drones. But instead of artillery defining the distance, the kill zone is defied, is the death zone, as they call it, is defined by drones. But there are, you know, there are offensives, including offensives underground. I mean, in that sentence, it's even more drastic than the first war because a lot of the Russian positions are actually underground. They're in Soviet era tunnels. And Ukrainians are actually carrying out offensive operations now, which are fully underground. And I'm sure their military historians out there will have lots of examples of this in the past. But it's something which is striking and new, at least in this war. So they're all, and they're all kinds of interesting things happening on the battlefield. The rate of innovation is incredibly quick. And you're right. Like we're now at a moment where I think the Russians have some new things and the Ukrainians are getting towards having some new responses. And you have Hegsiff had a state of a force address saying no weirdos, no trainees, no whatever, and be clowning the United States with, you know, the hateful rhetoric that he used, and, you know, telling that the book of Isaiah says, send me to war, send me, send me, you know, and just, you know, the other buffoonery. Well, I want to have you back on. I want to talk about more things. Let's leave it at this one point, though. I mean, because you have ont tyranny on freedom. My book is called WTF America, because I look at this moment really not even from a political lens to him. I look at it like, do what the hell are we even doing? Like, where's leaders? Where, where's the Admiral McCravitz? Like, where are the people, you know, who can behave like freaking grown-ups and adults? Like, where's the coach? Where's the person who's like, this is how we behave. And so, anyway, you know, can we ever expect there to be a book on hope or on we got out of this freaking mess? Or it's grim right now. But, and I don't think it's going to be, I, if we go back and forth from the seesaw of this side, you know, back, I don't think we get out of this mess. Even if someone comes out and fixes it, our allies or former allies are going to be be like, yeah, but you're going to go back to that. So how do we deal with you? Any hope, I guess, that you have from your historical perspective before we go? Yeah, I mean, I sure do. I think there's a combination of events associated with this election, not that an election victory is enough, but it's necessary. Election victory plus big coalition plus sense that a victory has happened in joy with victory, plus some pretty fundamental domestic policy changes involving money in politics. I do think that the US has a chance in the next three years not to turn things around. I don't like those metaphors, but rather to just build something new because there's been so much wreckage under Trump, but also if the way things were before Trump got us to Trump, then the way things were before must have been flawed in some way. So I do think that we could have a better version of the country. We'll talk about this some other time, I'm sure. I wrote a whole book on freedom about this. On tyranny is about how to resist. On freedom is about what I think could be around the corner. And as for our allies, I think it's a different setup now. I mean, it's not about whether we can get them back. It's more about when we turn the corner ourselves and are starting to look for something better, we'll at least be able to say, hopefully, okay, there's a democracy to our north. There are democracies across the Atlantic. There are democracies across the Pacific. Despite the mess that we made, maybe we weren't as important as we thought we were and other people were able to react to us and do sound things and continue sound practices and cooperate with one another. I think that's it, right? I don't think it goes any further than that. I mean, it'll be a matter of us earning trust and taking examples from other people, which is not something we've been super at the past, but I think that's where it is. I mean, I'm hopeful that this crescent from Canada across Europe to Ukraine will be there for us in the sense of being an example that democracy can continue into the 21st century. Tim Snyder on freedom, on tyranny, bloodlines, the whole line of your books. We'd love to have you back. We'll chat more. Great. Looking forward to that. Everybody hit subscribe. Let's get to 7 million subscribers. Before you go, our book WTF America is available for pre-order now. It's the story of how we got here and how we fight our way back to pre-order, scan the QR code, or click the link in the description. Let's do this.