128: The Theatrics of "Retaliation"

Hello and welcome to the May 27th edition of Ukraine without hype. I am Anthony Bartoway. This will be another news roundup episode, but it will be one that will be less intensive than the previous ones, which, considering the fact that the last episode had three hours of pre-edited audio, it's not hard to do to do less than that. However, the reason for that being is that there are some medical issues. This week, unfortunately, in a couple of days, I will be going into surgery to fix my spine. A small procedure routine, but the necessity for it is that I'm in intense pain at all times and doing research and editing and writing is hard to fully accomplish at the same level. This episode is initially intended to be a look at some of what we call the token Ukrainians in English language media spaces. This was inspired by the recent interview that Julia Mendel did with Tucker Carlson. I would have preferred to basically do a breakdown of Julia and a few other people. Some of them are very obviously, completely opportunistic, like Julia, but there are some that do have an ideology that should be dissected. But that required a phenomenal amount of effort and the amount of pain that I'm in right now does not allow for such things. This will be a news episode. Conveniently, I was able to get out a little bit slowly hobble about. This episode will include local reporting, I guess we can say. We'll begin with the very large strike that happened on Sunday that targeted a bunch of locations around Kiev and attack on a college in Russian occupied Estato-Vilsk in the Luanse Oblast. That Russia is saying is the pretext for further attacks, but we'll get into why that doesn't make any sense really, as well as how Russia is now claiming that they're going to be targeting Kiev and mass intertelling foreigners to leave. Followed up by combat updates, some protests that have been happening in Kiev recently, going back to some memory politics, international news and transnessia and Belarus, an update on the sporting situation and Eurovision. So yes, Sunday night into Monday, there was a very large attack on Kiev. It had been only last episode where we talked about the apartment building on the left bank that was destroyed killing quite a lot of people. While this attack, though less deadly, only two people died, many more were injured, of course. The variety of targets was far larger. The result of this came from at least one hit, a apartment building, but most of the rest were on cultural institutions, office buildings, that kind of thing. And so because there were non-residential buildings, there was less death, even though a lot of these buildings were quite severely destroyed. The center of this attack was in Lukionovka. Lukionovka is a pretty important public transit hub, lots of businesses, lots of residential, and it had been targeted many times throughout the course of this war. Lukionovka metro station is in fact a bit of a meme at this point, because it is the most bombed McDonald's in the world. It is in fact the very first McDonald's to open in Ukraine, and it's kind of hard to go back and track the number of times it was hit, but I believe this was the sixth, is directly attached to the metro station there. Now, an initial explanation for why Lukionovka has been hit so often is that at the onset of the war, there was military production factory within about a block of there. However, it closed very early on, and I feel as though Russia would be aware that it closed very early on. It's not a secret. It should be plain as day that this is an empty building that you just walk by it. They have spies and key of even those spies. As was the case this time, there was an 18-year-old who was arrested for passing information onto the Russians for this attack. They shouldn't be this ignorant about how they already put this factory out of commission. Like within the second month, I think it was, but continuously hitting the same about four block area over and over and over again, I personally would not want to live in Lukionovka because of this. But this time around was the most extensive of the damage. The mall at the metro station was completely destroyed. It's burned not to the ground, but pretty much gutted out entirely. Even the station itself was hit so hard that some of the tiles and structural elements fell down into the metro station. This is not the deepest of the metro stations. If this was happening at Arseneul metro station, for example, and it fell to any impact that deep underground, it would be terrifying. Lukionovka is not as deep as those, but still this is supposed to be a safe area. It is pretty deep underground, and though thankfully nobody was hurt there, I don't believe, the fact that there was this debris falling down even there is psychologically traumatizing because it is the safest place. The safest place to be in Kiev is in the metro because the metro was designed for a nuclear war by the Soviet Union. So nights like these and the pictures that we saw from this attack, people would bring tents down there to sleep the night away in the metro station. It's safe, and it still was safe, but enough to definitely be a bad in it. Also nearby, just around the corner, one of the reasons to go to Lukionovka is the Mala Opera, or the small opera. It's a concert venue, old building, but pretty cool. It had already been in some difficult financial situations. There had been a campaign of safe Mala Opera, and now there is some damage to the building. It didn't seem to be particularly structural damage, mostly windows and doors and drywall, that kind of thing, something that can be fixed relatively not bad, but it was already in a difficult position. So an added expense and an added trauma on top of that is certainly not going to help things for them. And that brings up one of the odd things about this attack is the number of cultural institutions that were hit. Museums, theaters, the Ukrainian House. The reason for this is explainable. These are all pretty close to each other, and there were several strikes above a Hrushchevsky street. European Square, it's a block away from the more famous Independence Square that you would know from Uramaydan, but very very center of the city. And so that's where you would put these museums. So among them we have the National Philharmonic, the National Art Museum, the National Center for Culture and Arts, also known as the October Palace, the Ukrainian House, as well as the National Opera Theatre, which is a bit further away. Thankfully for none of these, it was very serious damage, and nobody is there super early in the morning on a Monday. So again, it's Windows, Doors, that kind of thing that can be repaired. The National Art Museum has said that none of its collection was damaged, but they will have to close indefinitely to repair the building. I went to this location yesterday. I was not able to go on Monday the day after the attack because indescribable pay, you understand. But yesterday I was feeling a little bit better, and from what I saw there, the apartment building across the street from the National Art Museum did take more damage. The top floor had a large chunk of it missing. But thankfully this was right next door to the Ukrainian version of child protective services, and that office seems to be undamaged. Losing out on those resources would be very grim. And because this is also a center for media in Ukraine, there were six media organizations that reported damages to their offices, including Union, and Deutschewelle, and ARD TV, German, as well as several others, including a refugee newspaper from Luhans. And then the third location that was most hit was in the Podil area, and probably got the most international press attention was the Chernobyl Museum. The Chernobyl Museum, which is in the center of the Podil district, which is kind of the artsy bar kind of district, had actually recently undergone renovations. The museum is supported by the government of Japan. Japan has a vested interest in spreading awareness about the dangers of nuclear disasters, not only because of their national traumas revolving around the atomic bomb, but more directly the Fukushima nuclear disaster, other than Chernobyl, Fukushima is probably the second most known nuclear disaster. And so part of the outreach that Japan has done in Ukraine, a lot of it has had to do with Chernobyl in one way or another, including this museum. And they had renovated the museum. It was already a pretty good museum to go to, but for the anniversary, only a couple weeks back, it had been fully reopened. It looked really nice. I wanted to go, did not have the opportunity yet, and then it was struck by a missile, and 40% of the exhibition was permanently lost, unable to be recovered. Top floor completely destroyed. The takeaway that many have had about this has had to do with this very extensive attack on Ukrainian culture. I've said it a million times, I talk more extensively on it, I believe in February or so earlier in the year, about Russia targeting museums, just targeting Ukrainian culture and attempt to erase Ukrainian culture. However there was something more to this that is worrying for the future, and that it did not seem as though the Chernobyl Museum was the primary target here. The building that took the more direct hit was the headquarters of the state emergency services of Ukraine for the key of region. The people who respond to disaster, the people who, when there is an attack, the people who will rescue you, the people who will rebuild, the people who respond to these attacks. That was their headquarters that was very heavily destroyed. In the Chernobyl Museum, certainly Russia didn't care to keep it around, but that was next door. It was right behind it. It was the collateral damage for the real target, which was the state emergency services, so that when there are more attacks in the future, and I believe near future, the capacity to respond to them will be lessened. Now this is the office building. It's not where the equipment is. It's not like they had the night crew waiting there to be deployed from that building. It's an office building, not the action building. But this is one more thing for the state emergency services to have to deal with, having to clean up after themselves getting hit. The people responding to that attack were doing it at their own building. And I certainly hope that they're able to do a clean transition to be working out of somewhere else and not have it be an interruption to their work flow because the reason why Russia did this was to make it harder to respond to their attacks that are going to be happening soon. The reason that Russia says that they carried out this attack is something rather tragic. And that is the Ukrainian military hit a college in the occupied town of Satobilsk in the Luhansk region. The Ukrainian version of events is that they were targeting the Russian drone unit who had taken up shop in the area. While the Russian version of events is that Ukraine brutally targeted a teacher's college with, they called them children, which is weird, but I'm not going to nitpick about calling 18 year olds children. It's a weird thing to do, but I don't think that's the main story here. Now engaging with Russian messaging is always a tricky thing to do because you don't want to accept their version and use it as the baseline and move on just accepting their version of events. But also, if you're the one making it look like you're justifying the killing of a bunch of 18 year olds, you don't look very good in that situation and hence the trap. It does seem to me and all the evidence does point to this that this was in fact in use as a teacher's college and that no, the people killed in this attack were not Russian soldiers or crisis actors or anything like that. And some of the discussion about that in the pro-Ukrainian media spaces has been a bit uncomfortable. I'm going to refer to an article in Realna Gazeta. It is a formally Luhansk based media outlet that is now in Kiev and in fact, its offices were damaged in the attack on Sunday. That did investigation and from what they see, there's no particular reason to believe that there's anything conspiratorial happening here. Some of this is reflexive. Obviously Russia lies about everything, so why would there be any truth to what they're saying now? And I agree there is some logic to accepting that, but again, according to the investigation, it doesn't seem to be that way. To quote from this article, "Lol logic behind questioning the authenticity of the dead and injured students as a name is called the marginalization of victims is used by those who called the "bucha" or the attack on Okhmedid's a "staged event." Here too they look for any excuse not to recognize the victim as a victim. The only difference is who is the object. People who live in the occupied territories are not collaborators by default. They found themselves under occupation not of their own free will. Girls who grew up in the occupied Luhansk region studied according to Russian textbooks lived in the media space where there was no Ukrainian television and studied in schools that the occupiers reformatted for themselves. It is strange to demand from them vivid manifestations of Ukrainian identity. The willingness to deny human dignity to the inhabitants of occupied territories is not patriotism. It is a reproduction of the logic against which Ukraine is fighting. The fact that some Ukrainians choose the language of devaluing the victims in this situation is a worrying symptom. Not because it plays into the Kremlin's hands, although that is true, but because it destroys the ability to distinguish where analysis ends and dehumanization begins. It is a very delicate rope to walk here. Initially, even it did seem as though this could have been a militarized dormitory through military training, through that, through drone training, maybe drone production, but again on further investigation, that seems not to be completely the case. And even then, if there is some pseudo-militarized first-aid training, for example, in a school, which is what some of these pictures were, that does not make it a military target. There are first-aid trainings all over Ukraine, where you don't wear military uniform while doing it. That's weird. The Russian culture on militarization is definitely a topic here. The Russian total militarization of the education systems with the occupied territories is a topic here that doesn't make it military. Now, this very well could have been a simple mistake. There are other factors going on here, for example, the Russians invited a bunch of propagandists to this site in order to investigate things, and even one of them mentioned that the Russian authorities did not allow them a free reign of the territory. It was very careful about allowing these propagandists to go to the correct areas. That is not something that one does, would you invite the press to make sure everything's on the up and up. Ukraine has done these press tours in a response to claims by Russia. For example, I went to a train depot, a repair area for train cars, after Russia attacked it, saying that it was a tank factory, for tank storage or something like that. We were allowed to go everywhere that we wanted to go to confirm that there weren't any blown up tanks there, which then to me raises the question, were they actually trying to hide something or is there natural tendency to be shady, so strong that they made it look like they were hiding something. Either way seems plausible to me. So I'm certainly not ruling out that the Ukrainians were telling the truth that one of these buildings at least was hiding military because the Russians sure made it look that way. So overall, I have to say that Russia is the one who is responsible for this war. Any tragedy that takes place falls upon Russia. But that does not mean that people in the occupied territories have not suffered, that they have not also been bombed. Ukraine does not deliberately target civilian areas, but it is part of the war. It does happen. And it's a tragedy when it does. But it is still odd how much attention that Russia chose to bring to this. These tragedies do happen where civilians in Russian controlled areas have been killed, as well as in Russia itself even. And they would try to make a story out of it, but it would be pedored out within maybe a day or two. Not many resources were given to it. It would just be thrown out into the Russian information sphere, but just as part of the crushing noise, you know, you hear Ukrainians killed a civilian over and over and over again, that on its own has a value to it without needing to go too deep into any particular case, which is Russia's MO here, quantity over quality. Even with the Ukrainian occupation of the course region, Russia tried to make a case that there's all these war crimes committed by the Ukrainian military there, but they didn't really put effort into making that case. There were TV segments about it. They tried to have court cases about it, but in this case, they brought in every propagandist that they had on hand from Europe, from China. Everyone who was present was called in for the all hands to go to this town to report on what happened to show how the Ukrainians are slaughtering the Russians of Donbass. And that's not something they do very often. It's not something they've done, I think ever, that comes to mind how big they've done with this. And in fact, a lot of the journalists, we can call them if we really want to, who work this beat, are often pretty territorial. Within the culture of the Russian propagandist, there's a way more competition that I'm used to seeing on the Ukrainian side of things where everyone has to be more authentic than the next person. It's a weird pecking order thing that you see when they are young themselves. So cooperation like this is not something they even like to do really. Overall, the moralist messaging that they're doing right now is also not something they've done for a while. In the first year of the invasion, there were more stories about the poor beleaguered people of Donbass being attacked by Ukraine, but the propaganda message, especially in this last was not that. It was Russia is strong, Russia is coming, there's nothing you can do about it. It was very heavily on "Mite Makes Right." Not "Mite Makes Might." In this moral dimension, was pretty much missing. I even think back to the first year of the war with the bombing of this one mall in Kremlin Chuk, I think it was, and they went through all this effort to say that, "No, that was actually a weapons depot, not a mall." Now they don't even really do that. When they hit an apartment building, there'll be some chatter about this is why Ukrainians should be making drones in their houses. There's itself kind of an outdated idea. Even then, you know, you can tell that they're fake. It's not sincere. So this switch is definitely something to note. And now they're using it as the justification to what they claim to be is an increase in attacks. This last attack on Kiev is said to be a response to the bombing of this college in Startup Bills. But that's not how Russian missile attacks work. They take a long time to build up. They can take weeks to get up to. Russia uses missiles pretty much as soon as it gets them, unless it's stockpiling for a larger attack like what just happened. The attack that happened this week would have been planned out probably two months ago to know that they would have the munitions to do it. It's not a response to any one particular thing. It's just the the natural flow of the war when Russia has enough missiles to do an attack. They do an attack. You can't just make that decision overnight. So that's an obvious lie. And now Russia is saying that the attacks will get larger. And they've been giving warnings to foreigners living in Kiev to leave and saying that any diplomatic mission in Kiev should also leave. When these diplomatic missions set their stain put, Medvedev did his classical drunken ranting and basically threatened to murder them. If you stay in Kiev, you will die. Russia does not have any more capabilities now than it did at any other point in the war. They shoot what they have when they have it unless they know that Ukraine has fewer air defense, which is a problem. Due to the Iran war, there is a serious shortage in Patriot missiles in the world right now. And we don't know how much more Ukraine has at the moment. If there is another big attack, maybe Ukraine will not be able to defend it as well as this one, leading to more deaths, more destruction. I'm not saying that I am unconcerned about a strike, but in a routine way, not an extraordinary way. It's not a response to anything. It's not a change. They would have had to make this decision a while ago. And the reason for this messaging is obvious. Basically, there is a broad spectrum of Russian propaganda, but you can kind of group it up into two basic messages. The first is that Russian conquest is inevitable. The more you fight, the more you'll suffer pain. Any aid to Ukraine will be a waste because in the end, it will lose anyway because Russia is so strong and powerful and unstoppable. That's one general one. The other is that Russia is beleaguered, that Russia is fearful for its safety, and it will do what it has to do to protect itself. Russia is very strong versus Russia is very weak. Now, Russia does not like to live in the Russia is weak sphere, which is why they always try to break it up. When a Russian is questioned on if Russia is so afraid right now, why aren't they doing more to protect themselves in an XYZ way? At which they'll respond, "Oh no, Russia is so strong and so powerful that you gay Europeans can't do anything to us anyway." That's what always snaps back to. It's a weird position for Russia to dwell in. And so these phases where it stresses this tend to be shorter and are meant to instill fear. The other time that they were on this tech was during the Herzogn counteroffensive where they threatened to nuke the world essentially, if Ukraine was able to take back Herzogn, which obviously did not happen, but at that time they were feeling back in the corner and threatening that if they don't get their way, they'll do something more extreme. And that's where they're at right now. Because Russia is not doing great at the moment. They have not made real gains since the start of this year and in fact have been going backwards in some cases. They have been losing more soldiers than they've been able to recruit. Diplomatically, they are in a difficult place. They had recently went to China to try to get more of a bailout and it failed. There was an all-hands trip to China and the Chinese basically told them to get lost. China's obviously not going to stop its support for Russia, but Russia wanted more and they're not getting it. They've lost Orban and Hungary and any further attempts to manipulate their European union will have to be much more complicated. They don't have their blunt force tool in the EU to just say no anymore. They'll take more finangling. The Americans have basically given up on this war for now. The US announced that it will no longer be doing peace negotiations until further notice. They've set up a four they lied before, but that's a good sign to me. When Trump is paying attention to Ukraine, bad things happen. When he is distracted with other things in the world, it's like taking a weight off of our chests. If the foreign Iran does come to a close and the streets of Honomuz are opened up again, then oil prices will go back down and that windfall that the Russian economy is relying on goes away with it. Every sector is looking bad for Russia right now and that's not to say that things can't change. At the moment, Ukraine has a technological advantage in, for example, medium strike drone capability. I'll talk about that in the next segment. That can always change, in a few months, the Russians might see some new development and turn on their industrial capacity to match it, but we're not in the place we were last year. Last year was not a good one, especially the second half of last year was not good. Now it's about as good as you can hope for, which means that Russia has to change rhetorical strategy. They have to now become the victim. They have to scare people with what they might have to do if they continue to be the victim, which means nuclear threats. And they have to now appeal to the Europeans and the Americans to become more skeptical about Ukraine because the Ukrainians killed all these kids. You know, this is your taxpayer money. Germans, Americans, Brits, do you want your tax-pavar money to be going to killing kids is the new line of argument. Never mind that Russia does this all the time. That the apartment building strike, they talked about last episode, I don't want to rank death and everyone's already moved on, because it is so routine, because it's just a part of the war and as much as I want to make a moral case about every strike being a horrible tragedy, like I was saying last episode, it's a routine tragedy. That one that anyone pays attention to anymore. And so for Russia, who has treated death so casually to now act like this one's strike, changes everything, it's ridiculous. The other weird point about this, and I paid attention to pretty closely, is that all these appeals are also going to Elon Musk in particular, pretty much every Russian influencer, propaganda's account news something, a lot of them are appealing directly to Elon because one of the big changes that happened that allowed this year to go the way it was was Russia being cut off from Starlink. Ukraine has the advantage in the drone war right now because Ukraine has Starlink and they do not. Or when they do have Starlink, they have to go through all these to crudest routes to get to it, getting Ukrainians paying them money for Starlink access. And so they need to go to Elon who is already a very unstable person to get him to change that, because ultimately if they can convince one person in the world right now, that would help them, it would be him. Everyone else can be a write-off, because we live in a world where oligarchs have that much power over life and death. So this line of propaganda is literally two days old and so there isn't much more I can say about the specifics, but that's where it will be looking, that every Russian strike in the near future will be retaliation. And yes, it is a tragedy. But onto this combat update, as I said, the Russians are in a very bad position. They are trying to get into Kostya Nchenivka still, but not having terribly large success. We are in this phase where there is infiltration into the city, but not a permanent presence within it. This has been the case for a while now, although the Russians are doing more infiltrations, it's still in that phase. It could last a very long time in that phase, but what I paid a bit more attention to is the area immediately south of Zepparicia. The Russians were creeping closer to the city of Zepparicia along the Nupro River and late last year, beginning of this year, there was a troubling advance that was starting to put Zepparicia into something closer to drone range. And that advance has been stopped and reversed. But the big story that a lot of the military affairs reporters have been focusing on now is a development of Ukrainian medium range strike capability drones that can reach pretty much anywhere within the occupied territories. And they've been using those drones now to target logistics along the highway that crosses between Mediupal down to Crimea and goes through militopal. Because of frequent attacks on the Crimea bridge, the Russians knew that they could not rely solely on that bridge for logistics. And so they renovated and built up this road that runs from Mediupal to Crimea. And Ukraine has now been hitting that road pretty hard. Many military trucks, supply trucks, troop transports, have been blown up in this way, and though that is not a direct battlefield strike, of course, by degrading Russian logistics, it makes it harder for them to perform on the front line. It makes any further offensives they have much more difficult to pull off. Because already there's the issue that any kind of build up of troops and material anywhere near the front line can get hit pretty quickly. Now it can get hit just about anywhere, which makes offensives more difficult, drags it more into a more advantageous defensive war by Ukraine. And there's no obvious answer that Russia could have for this. And because of the star links that I described and these advances are hitting fast, getting quickly, and have been very, very on their toes about innovation. So at least for the summer anyway, Ukraine will likely continue to have this advantage. Now stepping back a bit from the war and death and destruction to some more domestic issues, and that there have been some protests as of late in Kiev, some of these protests, good, some of them bad. So the other topic that needs to be covered in a much more extensive episode, which was the plan, maybe in bedrest, I'll have more time to be writing, and that is the changes to the civil law in Ukraine. I'm not gonna go over that so extensively again, I'll get its own episode, but as a primer on the changes to the civil law, they're changing a lot of stuff. Some of it is a pretty blatant legalization of theft, where if you hold on to a piece of property long enough, it just becomes yours, which is essentially a way to legally cover the seizure of state assets. If you take a piece of property that is technically a park and you hold on to it for 10 years, and at some point in that you're able to register it, say that it's yours legally, without who knows what checks tend to go with these kind of things. Often there aren't very good checks, which is why land seizure is as common as it is. But if you hold on to that for 10 years, it's just yours, you're in the clear, it's a way to, essentially, it's laundering. It's a form of laundering, turning your ill-gotten gains into legal ones. And just a bunch of silly, silly things like that. But what is getting more attention, and I believe this is very deliberate, is it's also attached to a lot of very bizarre, culturally conservative things. A lot of the changes to family law, for example, tie into this concept of displaying good morals, whatever that may mean, some bizarre, like, men's rights activist stuff, like how there can no longer be no fault divorce. If you want a divorce, the judge can make you wait six months. It doubles down on anti-game marriage, anti-seem sex families. But like a lot of these niche things that really makes me wonder, what weirdo in-sell was drafting this law, and slid these things in. And I really do believe that the purpose for adding a lot of these conservative issues is that when people protest, this obviously terrible change in the law, they can just turn around and say, oh, it's just the blue hair, lesbians, who are mad about it. If you believe in a strong country, you'll like ignore them. And I cannot emphasize this enough when people start talking too much about political, cultural conservatism, about the value of traditional families and all that, they're trying to rob you. 100% of the time. I have never been proven wrong on this. Look at Hungary, the extensive episode I did on Hungary, all of that culturally conservative stuff was a shroud to put on their massive theft of state resources and European Union resources. But by activating these dumb little lizard brain emotions of protect the family, protect the children from the genders, it already puts you in a pretty dumb mind space where you're willing to accept a lot more, because it's about identity and all that kind of thing. So again, this is a terrible law. The European Union has not commented fully on it largely because they're still probably drafting up a response. This is 900 pages that changes a lot, a lot of which is very deeply damaging to the Ukrainian ability to join the European Union. It is a disaster of a law that in fact they are saying is needed to join the EU. They're just saying that these changes are being called for by the EU. While EU representatives are like, we never said that. But they had to be delicate about it because everyone wants progress on Ukraine EU integration. Nobody wants to be the one to say no, even if really do you Ukrainians are not doing great on the European Union criteria. And also the European Union has been throwing in some unnecessary obstacles. It's already a thorany process, which is how it always is. You shouldn't expect it to be anything other than heart. But the EU might have to say if you pass this change in the law, you've completely derailed any EU progress you think you have been making. That's a difficult political pill to swallow, but it may have to be said. It may have to be said. Meanwhile, in the parliament itself, there has been very little opposition to this. And disaster of a parliamentarian said that though he opposed many of the changes in the civil code, particularly the ones about homophobia and all that, he didn't want to hurt his relationship with the speaker. That this change is the speaker's baby. And by voting against it, he would be insulting the government essentially and ruin his relationship. And yeah, as a lawmaker, you will be voting for things you don't fully agree with for political deal making. That's how politics is done. But to concede on something so fundamental over not wanting to make the speaker mad at you is pathetic. I have a lot of bad things to say about the Verhofnerada. They are an ineffectual body who when it comes time to vote for something important, like improving the ability to purchase drones, everyone's on vacation. When it comes to this, everyone shows up. It's an absurdity, but that's why we have to have these protests. And so the initial protests about this were launched by Kiev pride, LGBT rights, because of these feminist issues, because of these homophobia issues, they were the first to respond. This has only started, but I do expect this movement to grow because it's it's bad. So this protest, a lot of young people, of course, one of the trends in it was they're told to address traditional, because a woman is supposed to be traditional. And so they dress in like a red-fair outfit, so it was hilarious. It'll certainly be reporting on this story to Phillips. The other protest, however, was less wholesome. There's this weird idea floating around that there's going to be all these African and Indian migrants who are going to come to Ukraine and take all the jobs and all the women. Now, you may notice offhand that seems ridiculous. Ukraine is not a tract in awfully large amount of immigrants. Ukraine is a source of immigrants, not where people come to. Present company, excluded, of course. It's just not a problem that exists outside of Russian propaganda. Another one of these Russian propaganda lines that has become, it's been altered throughout the war, but is definitely intensified in the last two months or so. Is that this war was engineered by the Jews, by Zelensky, in order to decimate the Slavic people of Ukraine. So that may be replaced by black and brown people, who may then from Ukraine go on to Germany or elsewhere in Europe, which is one of those things that the German Nazi party, the Aeophite, has been promoting. So this is quite common in Russian propaganda, less common in Ukrainian information sphere. It's not non-existence. People say dumb things all the time, and the internet being what it is has created a pretty uniform set of conspiracy theories throughout the world. But there was a protest about this now in a few cities. In Kiev, it was only about 20 people. And my rule is that you can get 20 people to protest about anything, so that does not necessarily need to be a conspiracy here. There's not necessarily need to be anything untoward. But the thing with the Ukrainian far right is that it's pretty obvious who's there. Everyone makes it clear who they are, where they go. And this protest seems much more anonymous than in the past. There's one flag of like Ratsovov or something. But that didn't imply necessarily that there were part of it, that there's another right sector thing. But when there's a far right anything in Ukraine, people kind of have uniforms. They let themselves know they fly the flag. So organized, they want people to know that it's them. And that was not the case here. It was very outside the aesthetic of the Ukrainian far right. They're also doing Nazi salutes in like open public, which is not something the Ukrainian far right does either. They don't go around seek highly on crochetedic. They're at least know that that's too bad of a look. So quite frankly, the stinks to me. This, how the, the stinks very bad of an op. And then someone found out who the person is who ran this. My friend Alexander Kuddy, I believe is the one who found this out. I'm not sure of the source, but he found out early. And the organizers of this action started attacking United 24, his employer for it because you 24 is a government outlet. He works with this government outlet and he referred to this protest as racist, which it is. So they made some videos just how dare this, this government do disinformation against us. But anyway. And the organizer for this is apparently some French guy who's married to Ukrainian woman, a immigrant who's anti immigrant, who would have known. And it's this outside quality to it, which makes it make a lot more sense because this whole great replacement stuff. It's, it's not absent from the Ukrainian far right discourse, but they kind of have to, they kind of have to stretch. Like yeah, there's no obviously reality to the great replacement or anything. It's not some Jewish conspiracy to eliminate white people. But if you're around a bunch of immigrants, I could understand someone feeling as though that there's more immigrants around. If you're in Ukraine, where there's a certain lack of immigrants, where did you even get this idea from just the internet? But yeah, it doesn't have the aesthetics, it doesn't have the organization, it doesn't have the usual indicators of Ukrainian far right action, which I think I have a pretty good beat on at this point. It doesn't smell right. And so I'm gonna call shenanigans on it, though I truly suspect that they're not gonna shut up. These people never do. Okay, so the pain is starting to set in. So forgive me for not being as detailed with the rest of this episode as I may like. And this next one is definitely a topic to be returned to because it was just kind of dropped on us. And that's really the story. Is that how quick it came and was just a part of the discussion in something that should have been a much more societal and broad. And that is the body of the former leader of Ukrainian nationalist Andre Milnik has been returned from its burial place in Luxembourg back to Ukraine. And he's a very controversial figure, we can say. Milnik was a soldier in the Austrian army, the siege rifleman, this unit that became kind of the core of the Ukrainian independence movement during and after the First World War. And though he was very strongly for Ukrainian independence, his ideology didn't get much more detailed than that. He was not a theory nerd by any stretch of the imagination. And really in my investigations of him, no one really has much to say about his particular program or politics or ideology beyond Ukrainian independence. Which is interesting in the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, a time where ideology was everything. He just really just wanted a independent Ukraine. And under the Ukrainian national republic, he was a soldier, colonel, and was even put in charge of putting a stop to pogroms anti-Jewish violence, which was rampant at the time. But then his story really picks up with World War II. Milnik is the head of the organization of Ukrainian nationalists and collaborates with Nazi Germany. And interestingly enough, a very fascinating part of his character is that it was his sort of lack of ideology, his lack of radicalism that led to him doing more collaboration with Germany, not less. There was a split in the organization of Ukrainian nationalists between the Melnikites and the Banderites. And the ones under Banderah tended to be younger, more ideological, more radical, and was there very radicalism that caused them to have a far earlier break with Germany when Germany denied them independence. Very very soon after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Banderer faction tried to declare Ukrainian independence. Germany shut that down immediately, and a lot of them were either killed or thrown in jail, including Banderah himself, which makes a lot of discussion about culpability and all that during the Second World War, about the Holocaust, about anti-pollish violence, very very hard to do. Because Banderah himself was in a concentration camp at the time. So who made those decisions? It all gets very messy and complicated and I'm certainly in no condition to discuss the particularities of all that right now. But nonetheless, because he was so cautious, because he was less rash to act, he played along more with the German occupation and everything that entailed. He did this largely from House arrest in Berlin. Now the Ukrainian nationalists were actually trusted, but he still did it. Banderah has much more of an excuse that he was imprisoned than Melnik did. The Banderer faction defected. The Melnikites did not until very late. When now the Germans are on their back heels, retreating, trying to gain more support to withstand the Red Army advance, tries to gain more support from Ukrainian nationalists. So Melnik says, okay, maybe we'll help you. If you give us independence, the Germans say no. His followers, I mean he gives him concentration himself for a bit, but his followers after this decision go west to surrender to the allies coming from the western direction rather than from the eastern direction. At which point Melnik kind of gives up on a lot of the interwar far right politics that had become so dominant at the time and becomes kind of a cold war liberal. A lot of the European far right, the interwar right made that decision that that was an arc that a lot of them made as a new form of anti-communism. And Melnik was among them. He was very typical in this way. You can find a figure like him in most countries at that time. And the rest of his life he doesn't have particularly offensive politics and organizes the Ukrainian diaspora, tries to get recognition for and and choose recognition for Ukrainian IDPs and refugees so that they would not just be considered Russians. They really push for that. They want to make sure that Ukraine and the Ukraine cause would not be forgotten even as the Soviet Union swallowed up the whole of the eastern block. And it was his activities in diaspora that he's probably more fondly remembered for. But he's still collaborated with the Nazis. And I think in a way that was worse than the figures in Owen Baugh. Because he stuck with it. He did not have the ideology of a dense solve. He did not have the phase where he was leading a pro-German military unit like Shaheyevich did. Shaheyevich turned on the Germans. And Dera turned on the Germans. Melnik did not. This issue of Ukrainian far-right nationalism into fascism at points done so was just a fascist. The holocaust of the Volin massacres. There's a lot there. There's a lot there to chew on. But in it Melnik. Melnik was the first one. As part of this project by the Ukrainian government right now to bring back a lot of Ukrainian national figures who were buried overseas and re-barry them in Ukraine. There's a lot of them. As you imagine, a lot of Ukrainian figures of the early 20th century were not able to stay in Ukraine. Earlier in the year, I did an episode that focused pretty heavily on Nester Machno. He died in Paris. Maybe he can be brought back. I don't know. But as part of this complex of the Ukrainian government is planning. And the problem here, ultimately, is just kind of announced when it happened. These kind of issues of national memory are something that bears much more public scrutiny, public debate, societal education, and even negotiation. Is there going to be a list of heroes? Let's talk about who that list of heroes is going to be. And I follow a lot of figures involved in Ukrainian national memory. Some of them I like more than others. And it seemed sudden. I feel like if there was a more extensive discussion on this, I would have seen it. And there wasn't like there's no discussion. It wasn't like they just decided today they would do this, but not to level that it should have been. Again, who's going to be on this? Is there plans for the future? We don't know. We know kind of all it's it will be. But beyond that, but Laura maybe put Laura should have been first in life. I think this historical discussion around pitlora would be much more fruitful. I'm of the opinion that both the official Ukrainian and widespread Jewish narrative on the life of assume in pitlora is very much lacking and that there is very much a place for a reconciliation on historical memory on a fusion of different stories that we tell each other. on Pitlura, I think that would be very fruitful. I personally don't think he was blameless. I also don't think that he deserves as much blam as is given to him. It's one of those things. It's a complicated discussion to have in public, maybe bringing him back would be a way to have that discussion. And it was just this week, the centennial anniversary of his assassination. But instead it was Melnik, who it's a rough one, it's a rough one, and it's a way to immediately pick a fight. If he was maybe later in line, then enough of this process would have happened before you got into the really controversial ones, before you got into the harder cells. But as it is right now, it's just Russian propaganda babe. It's just a complete on goal, which has so often been the case with Ukrainian identity politics and national memory is that it's dictated from the top down is resistant to criticism and then hopes to maybe fix things later after the damage had already been done. And I, oh, that again, there's something that's just dropped on us so I'd have so much elegance to say on it, but on that. But this is definitely a story that really is of being investigated. Who thought that there wouldn't be any friction on this? International topics for you and they involved potential threats to Ukraine from some of Russia's proxies in the region to start out with. I do not consider either these topics to be as pressing as a threat as some sensational headlines have made them out to be, but they do have to be mentioned and confronted because something is going on. First transness, in the last episode, I covered a lot more of these international topics and I did mention how Moldova had plans in place to reintegrate the occupied a transness era into Moldova proper. And the Russians have certainly noticed this transness is on what I think is in very clear path to reconciliation and reabsorption into the Moldovan state to stall this out. The Russians have begun the process of passportization to turn more transness Koreans into Russian citizens so that if there is any attempt to absorb a transness era further, Moldova will be having to absorb more Russian citizens. We know how this goes. In Ukraine, Russia declares people to be Russian so that it then has a responsibility to go in and save them. It is a pretext to do further destabilization and nothing more. Though the problems mentioned in the last episode in transnessia remain, there is basically nothing that Russia can do with transness era right now. It is locked away behind Ukraine and Moldova. They have no good access to it. Their military there is unmotivated and now lacks their leadership. So now Russia has to dig into its old weathered toolbox that it uses for everything to cause more problems. Speaking of Russia causing problems onto Belarus and there have been further announcements from the Ukrainian government that Belarus has been making movements that may would make it look like they could be about to invade Ukraine especially in the western part of the Belarusian Ukrainian border attacking down towards Lusk and Rivna. The odds of this remain low for the reasons they've always been low. Belarus does not have a good military. This area is now heavily mined and defended and there's no good reason for Belarus to want to do this. Russia has long pressured them but it has not happened. Now does Russia feel more backed in the corner to try to apply more force on Belarus to do what it wants in this regard? To toss aside any logic, to risk a civil war within Belarus itself in order to do a rather floppy offensive that draws in far more paranoia and defensiveness on the part of Poland and the Baltic States because now Belarus is in on it. The cost benefit analysis here does not work out in Belarus's favor, does not work out in Lukashenko's favor and that will likely remain the case. But there's another reason for Lukashenko to be more irritated with Ukraine right now in that he recently made a statement that it was time for the presidents of Belarus and Ukraine to beat each other and talk things out over various topics and Ukraine's responsiveness was inviting Chikanovskaya, the head of the Belarusian opposition to Kiev. Chikanovskaya was invited for this summit where Zelensky made that obvious joke. Lukashenko said to talk to the leader of Belarus so here she is. As always, I hope or more from the Belarusian opposition. There's already plenty of activity in a Belarusian opposition in Ukraine. It's very important. I'm not going to minimize their contributions in any way. However, I do feel like the government in exile needs to behave like a government in exile. And so to wrap up our episode on to culture, sports and music, sports, just a quick little comment here. Go back and listen to the much longer episode about Russian influence in sport and how they are being reintroduced to the world of sport. And I just want to give a short list of the organizations either at the time with that episode or since the time it was released, who have invited Russians back into their good graces. World gymnastics, world aquatics, international skating union, federation international, de-escrem, the fencing people, united world wrestling and the federation international, de-le-automobile. So go back and listen to that episode. Though I said that these organizations were in the process of letting Russia back in under their own flags and rankings and all that, there's your update. It keeps on happening. In Eurovision, Eurovision this year was frankly a mess. It always was going to be a mess. Few countries had boycotted this year's Eurovision over the inclusion of Israel or countries is not accurate. The broadcasters who are a part of the broadcasting union that puts on Eurovision, boycotted Eurovision over Israel. Not the governments I represent. I think that is an important distinction. The Netherlands didn't boycott Israel, the Netherlands organization that participates in Eurovision boycotted Israel. And that was really the tenseness this whole time. As far as the music went, it was not as good as previous years. I'm someone who generally is not enough of a Eurovision music fan to be able to differentiate so much that between what makes a good Eurovision song and a bad Eurovision song, there'll be songs that I like personally, but that often doesn't correspond to winning songs or favorite songs or anything like that. I will not look at the betting odds or anything. So then when I hear that, oh this song is definitely going to win. Everyone loves that song. I'm like, okay, I don't understand what makes that so much better. I like this one. I like the Moldovan saying, welcome to Moldova. That's fun. Put that on. So I'm not, I don't have the, I don't have the, the ear, the palette perhaps to be a good judge of what makes a Eurovision song good or not. But this year didn't have as many fun ones. 2021, 2022. Those were good years. Not so much in 2020, but it was really this political issue that hung over everything to the point where at the very, very end was going to either be Israel or Bulgaria. And I know that every Eurovision executive was just gripping their chair to not have to put on a Eurovision in Israel next year. And of course it didn't happen. It's going to go to Bulgaria. It was a club song, cool, but that's fine. I'm not going to, not my type of music. She seems nice. I don't know. There was some contensions that her co-songwriter worked with a Russian at one point, but also the way that these songs work that the songwriter isn't exactly a close-in-person relationship with the singer. I haven't investigated her feelings on Russia too closely. It doesn't seem as cause for alarm. I don't know. Maybe she's awful. Maybe she's great. Either way, I'm probably not going to learn. But yeah, the winner was Baranga. Baranga. Ranga by Dara. It's just interesting that's be going to Bulgaria. It's a country that had not won before I believe. It's nice to see the representation from these smaller, more away from the center of things countries. Perhaps Spain and the Netherlands and all those people dropping out left more breathing room for the countries who relied more on it as a way to get their culture out to the world. Ukraine certainly is one of those countries that does particularly well at Eurovision and uses Eurovision as a substantial part of its cultural diplomacy. And so they're not going to back out when this is a big part of how people outside of Ukraine hear about Ukraine. It's important. So Bulgaria, this Eastern European country, this Balkan country, being able to get its image out. I feel good for them. Get more tourists to go through Bulgaria. Make more people familiar with the country. It certainly helped Ukraine on a cultural diplomacy level of people in Europe who had been to Ukraine for Eurovision, had been to Ukraine for the Euros. To say that, "Oh, I was there. I met these people. They were nice to me. We hung out at a good time that I went home." They walk away from that place with a better image of the people there. And yeah, cultural diplomacy. diplomacy matters. Although there are some concerns that Bulgaria won't be able to afford to put it on, or that it would be a pretty big chunk away from their budget to host these things. I know Ukraine managed it and South Ukraine was in better financial condition, and in fact hosting Eurovision was an impetus to renovate a lot of the area around where Eurovision took place as well. Though without the same horror stories that came, you hear about the World Cup for Olympics. There's nothing on that scale. They has cleaned it up a bit, put in a wheelchair access ramps to the metro station there. But on the note of music, I will make another announcement about the show, and that I am put together a playlist of Ukrainian music. This is something we talked about in the discord recently, after I had commented that I didn't know Ukrainian pop music very well. This playlist does not have much pop music in it. It is very tilted towards post punk, I think, gets the most disproportionate representation, though I tried to get a lot of the more popular artists in there, as well as some more underground bands to get a good taste of things. We got a lot of post punk, some folk, that kind of thing. So I'm going to be linking that. So if you want to listen on the Spotify playlist, the Ukraine without hype playlist, and it'll be a part of a larger project of recommendations of Ukrainian stuff in general, that I would like to be working on in the near future. So with that, I would like to thank you all very much for listening. Like I said, it was, but this one was kind of a heart to go. I'm definitely I'm definitely feeling the lack of stretching right now, but hopefully in a few days, I'll get that surgery, I'll be fine, I'll be back on my feet, and hopefully I'll be able to have a more active July. I can't do anything in June, I need to recover in June, but hopefully in July, I'll be able to walk to a place that is my dearest hope. I would also like to announce the other podcasts that I've been working on as an editor, not as a writer or presenter, anything, the behind the scenes guy. It is called mildly alarmed. It is petted up by my old colleague at the key of independent Anastasia La Patina. She was one of the real rock stars at KI back in the day and has moved on to other journalists and think tank roles. You can also find her on the podcast law fair. But mildly alarmed is Astasia and a group of other foreign policy experts who cover the issues of European security. They're on the fourth episode at this point. There'll be another one coming out on Friday, meaning that it will be edited before I have to go in, but it will be about the issues of European security, about the role of the United States, about Ukraine and how these work together with issues such as nuclear security and with a decidedly Scandinavian tint to it. So thank you very much to Randy McGerlin, the voices my head from Big Pharma, Kyle Smith, Damascus Medusa, George Eau, David Shepherd, Vannecker Croscaya, Mike Kevin Apperton, Michael Drucker, PLM, Armenius, T. Bart, Barbara Station, Devy, Anonymous, Night Michael Wickman, Jane Louise, Margaret, Demetri Litvin, Dennis Napolm, Vivek, James Burke, Alison Chainsaw, Big Meg, Elizabeth Hughes, Nick Nieson, and yes, John Gates, Nicole Ford, Sanjay, Grace Krauss, Lorde Leon, Had to laugh, Jacob Homme, Chris Menington, Levy Grove, James Wise, Alex Grochemel, Edemig Donald, Jurd, Fischer Mateis, Scott Tucker, Yucatian Salay, Anastasia, Captain Technical, Evelyn, Veronica Aime, Julia Lindsay, Emily Bavona, Scott Burry, Anonymous, Settle Knife, Marion, R.D.K., Laurie Hillila, Christopher E. Lehmann and Ken Demetriot MUNOS, Ursula Zollankoff, Noah Brown, Gulling Wind, Ken Dostopian Fiction, Pleas Remain Fiction, Marcus Nashkis, Andrew Glen, Zay Perry, William Brown, Abel Lenz, Denon Jones, Joseph Feralone, Hilo Duck, Anonymous, Bokshon 2021, Florian Kunkle, Matthew Row, Bill, and the Biggitchen Chililabi. Thank you all very much for your support, you will make this all possible. And until next time, on the other side of the surgery, I'm kind of nervous for Slavukraining.