Matt discusses his recent article on the rise of Putin and the current situation in Ukraine with Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news.
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Paul JayHi, welcome to theAnalysis.news. I’m Paul Jay. We’ll be back in just a few seconds with Matt Taibbi to talk about the conflict in Ukraine. Please don’t forget there’s a donate button, share button, subscribe button, all the buttons.
It’s very easy to explain war by declaring your enemy as evil. In fact, I suppose that’s as old as war itself. It’s very easy to explain [Adolf] Hitler away by talking him as the greatest evil when we all know he’s the product of German monopoly capitalism and a general crisis of capitalism at the time in the late ’20s and ’30s. But why is it when we’re actually in the situation we don’t talk about the crisis and products of monopoly capitalism? We are right back to good and evil again, and of course, from every side. Of course, the Western press, led by the United States, has for quite a few years declared [Vladimir] Putin to be the definition of evil. And of course, Putin says that about the Americans and about the Ukrainian government and so on and so it goes. But it’s not.
I personally don’t think there actually is such a thing as evil. There is actual social phenomena. There’s history. There’s a system that gives rise to people who then play out what’s possible for them to play out, given where they’re at, what country they’re born in, what class they’re born in, and where the geopolitics in life is at. Well, Matt Taibbi has written a great piece that explains just who Vladimir Putin is, and about the rise of Putin in a way that deals with the fact that he’s the product of a set of circumstances. He’s a product of U.S. and other Western geopolitical maneuvering and most importantly, domestic developments.
In all of this— and this is what I think is interesting— even the American Left is so American-centric. There’s not an event in the world that takes place that isn’t explained either by sections of the Left, America the bad or section of the Liberal Left, America the good. Sometimes it’s not all about America. It’s also about what’s happening inside each of these countries.
And as I said Matt’s done a great piece about the rise of Putin, and here he is. Now joining us is Matt Taibbi. He’s an award-winning investigative reporter, was a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine and writes a top written column on Substack. Thanks very much for joining me, Matt.
Matt TaibbiThanks for having me, Paul.
Paul JaySo before we get into talking about your piece about the rise of Putin, I’ll just for the record say, I think people have heard me say it before. You can say what you want to say. The invasion of Ukraine cannot be justified by either— this is me giving my opinion here— American involvement in the events of 2014, which I think were a coup but weren’t only a coup. There was a mass character that happened in 2014. The United States, and sections of the Ukrainian oligarchy took advantage of that mass protest, which was also, I think, a protest against the oligarchy in general. But it was in the end a coup. And Putin, Russia, has a right to be concerned about it, the expansion of NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization], but it doesn’t justify the killing of civilians and the invasion of Ukraine. So that’s me, now over to you, Matt.
Matt TaibbiYeah. I mean, I think what I would add is there’s been a lot of propaganda in the United States to the effect of anybody who brings up the idea that it might have been unwise to try to expand NATO to Georgia and Ukraine is dishing Putin’s narrative or hitting Russian talking points. I think Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is monstrous, barbaric, crazy. It’s irrational on a number of levels, but that doesn’t mean, I think, that our policies have been wise and that there aren’t things to criticize about NATO’s expansion. Having lived in the region throughout a lot of these decisions, I know exactly how Russians feel about this. I think there was a sort of a decision to overlook what the likely response was going to be that was very conscious on our part. So both things can be true. The invasion can be unjustified and wrong and worthy of criticism, and we can look back and be critical of our own policies.
Paul JayYeah, I agree with that. Just to add, this is a battle of competing oligarchs, including American oligarchs, for control of Ukraine, not just the bread basket— I can’t say it— the breadbasket of Europe and much of the world. It’s also a place which has significant industry, a significant arms industry, a large population— what is it 44 million people— of Europe. All the oligarchs— and you have to start, I think, actually with the Ukrainian oligarchs and understand the split there and the battle between both section of oligarchs, pro-American, pro-Russian, all corrupt up to their eyeballs. So are the Americans.
I agree with, and I think what you’re saying, especially for us living in North America, I go back and forth between U.S. and Canada. We have a particular responsibility when we’re living in the heart of the hegemon to critique it, because none of this happens out of the context of that U.S. power. That said, it doesn’t excuse any of it. So I think we’re agreeing with each other.
Matt TaibbiYeah. Really quickly I just want to add that I saw a friend of mine, Lee Fang, the other day. He was tweeting out that people are comparing this to, well, what if Russian forces had built up in Mexico and the United States had exercised its Monroe Doctrine philosophy and invaded Mexico to prevent a Russian build up in that country? Well, that would make sense to Americans, and that’s a comparable situation. We probably also, I think people in the rest of the world would critique the United States for doing that, for engaging in a preemptive invasion of another country. I think it’s important to recognize that while there are things that are understandable about the Russian point of view, especially if you’re an American who’s grown up being taught the Monroe Doctrine is a legitimate way of looking at the world, the Russians see their sphere of influence in roughly the same way. That doesn’t excuse it. It’s just an explanation for why this all happens.
Paul JayI mean, we could talk a bit about it. I didn’t want to get too far into this right now because I really think your article about the rise of Putin is sensational, and I want to talk about it. There’s something about this which I don’t get. Maybe you have some insight, having been there and knowing more about Putin than I do. There was no threat of NATO going into Ukraine. I don’t buy it. It wasn’t happening. Everybody was saying who knows NATO, that they would never get consensus to allow NATO in. There was no imminent threat of Ukraine attacking Russia. I buy that there could have been some scheme up to attack in Dombas, that Eastern region, mostly Russian. There were other ways to help defend Donbas, if that was true. So I kind of don’t even get this being a thing to stop the expansion of NATO. Then this idea that he would then go into NATO from the other side. Oh, if he goes into Ukraine, he’ll go into Lithuania. It’s nonsense.
An article in one of the Canadian papers today said that the actual state of military readiness in these NATO countries that used to be Soviet republics on the whole, is so bad that nobody was taking seriously that they were actually ever going to be under threat. That’s why they’re rushing soldiers there right and left. It’s ridiculous. This isn’t the days of colonization. The Soviet Empire worked because there were local ruling classes in each of these former Soviet republics that enforced the law, enforced the police state, if you will. To a large extent, it was a police state. It wasn’t just the Red Army. They don’t have that in these countries. There’s no local ruling class that’s going to ally in Poland that’s going to ally with the Russians. It’s not an analogous situation.
Matt TaibbiNo, I don’t think so. Going down this road would be really complicated. Getting into the whole history of how Russians feel about NATO and what they think and what people in Putin’s inner circle likely think about this. It’s a long story. It starts going all the way back to 1989 when we were negotiating, when James Baker and Eduard A. Shevardnadze, they were negotiating over the terms of the break up of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The Russians have feelings about what happened since then. They believe that certain reassurances were made, but none of that means that they’re on the precipice of invading Poland or the Baltic States. I just don’t think that’s going to happen. Although, that premise is based on the idea that Putin is a rational actor, which I’m now having to reconsider a little bit.
Paul JayAlright, well, that’s a good segue into the article. So I’m with you up until what is it, a week and a half ago or whatever the invasion was. I believe Putin was a rational actor. So tell us the story about Putin. Just give us a real sense of who this guy is and how he became the leader of Russia, because we’re not hearing much other than he’s terrible.
Matt TaibbiSure. So just for people who don’t know, I lived in the former Soviet Union for the entirety of the ’90s. I was there for the transfer of power from [Boris] Yeltsin to Putin, for Putin’s first election and the first few years of his rule there. I was a resident of the city of St. Petersburg in the early ’90s when he was getting his start in politics. He began as an Advisor to the first democratically elected Mayor of the former Leningrad St. Petersburg, Anatoly [Aleksandrovich] Sobchak. He worked his way up to Deputy Mayor, and that’s what he was when Sobchak finally lost election in 1996.
Now, there are a million stories about the corruption that went on under Sobchak. Sobchak was one of America’s favorite politicians, by the way. He was a Václav Havel type figure. He was an academic, spoke very good English. He had a literary sensibility. He was thought of as this great Democratic theorist. He was the author of the Russian Federation’s first Constitution. Putin was really his right hand man. Now, if you ask people who live in the city at that time, they will tell you that his role was less Democratic than it was as a kind of bagman who went around the city basically collecting on protection rackets that the government held at that time. Basically, Russia has always been kind of a mob state economy where the ruling political system is that there’s a strong man who gets tribute kicked upward to the boss, who allows various groups to operate and negotiate divisions between different criminal and political interests. That’s what happens in cities, and Putin was understood to be kind of the bagman for Anatoly Sobchak. That’s how he got his start.
Now, Sobchak got in trouble in 1996 and 1997. He was voted out. He was unpopular for a variety of reasons, including that some people in the local government felt that he was, among other things, he was privatizing apartments to all of his friends in a way that some people considered unseemly. So he was about to be criminally charged in 1996 and 1997. Putin, who was a former KGB man, helped engineer Sobchaks flight out of the country. He went to Finland first and then ended up in Paris. This is how he evaded federal prosecution. According to Boris Yeltsins own biography, Midnight Diaries, this was what brought him to the attention of the Yeltsin regime, the fact that he had secured the safe exit of his corrupt boss. It was around that time that Putin was essentially brought in to the Yeltsin Whitehouse. Here you’d have to know a whole lot about what went on in Yeltsin’s Russia in the ’90s to understand the significance of all this.
Paul JayDo it as quick as you can because some of the viewers may not know.
Matt TaibbiBasically, in the ’90s, Russia had to privatize all of the Soviet industries. The way they did it was in this incredibly rapid fashion, where they held a series of auctions, where the Russian state lent money to a handful of friends of Boris Yeltsin so that they could bid and win auctions for companies the size of Exxon and Microsoft. They instantly became some of the world’s richest people. People know their names. They have names like [inaudible 00:16:05] , Vladimir Putin, and Boris Berezovsky. Overnight they created an oligarch class.
Paul JaySome of them had been party bureaucrats themselves.
Matt TaibbiParty bureaucrats. [inaudible 00:16:20] members. In other words, they were connected with Russian intelligence. Yes, they had all been party bureaucrats, almost all of them. The idea was, and America was sort of behind some of these transactions. We helped design these auctions. The idea was to create a super empowered oligarch class that would help defend the nascent Russian democracy against a ravancious Communist movement that was threatening to win the 1996 elections. So we sort of instantly gifted all of Russia’s wealth to a handful of people who, in turn, would back Boris Yeltsin’s 1996 presidential election campaign. He went from being at 7% in the polls to winning.
So there was all kinds of corruption that was going on. Handing over these massive companies that were worth hundreds of billions of dollars. In addition to that, there was this common thievery going on in the Yeltsin administration. Yeltsin himself was taking no limit credit cards from Swiss construction companies. There was massive looting from the state property committee, which held all the former Communist party holdings. He was worried about being prosecuted on the way out. Basically, the idea of Putin was that he was going to guarantee safe passage for Yeltsin on his way out of the country.
Yeltsin was being pursued by a prosecutor named Yury Skuratov in the late ’90s. Remember, during Russiagate, we heard all those stories about sexual blackmail and how great Putin was at that. Well, the first time he did that, that we know about involved this prosecutor Skuratov, who was going after Yeltsin over the Swiss construction firm scandal. Putin went on television as the new head of the FSB [Federal Security Service] and showed the entire country a grainy videotape of the sort of obese Skuratov of covorting with prostitutes on television, and that was the end of him. This was Yeltsin’s role. He was the hatchet man for our guy, our man in Havana, Boris Yeltsin. As such, for roughly a three year period, almost a four year period, the Western media was incredibly complimentary of Putin in a way that’s been completely whitewashed out of the public memory.
Paul JayOf course, Steven Cohen had a line. I don’t know if it’s his or not, but what the West thought they got and wanted was a sober Yeltsin.
Matt TaibbiExactly. In fact, you can look at your own finance Minister, Chrystia Freeland. At the time—
Paul JayNo, when you mention her name, I go back to being an America. I’m dual citizen. You mention her, I’m back to being an American. Go ahead.
Matt TaibbiI’m going to read a passage that she wrote in the year 2000. This is what she wrote in the New Statesman:
“It looks as if we’re about to fall in love with Russia all over again. Compared to the ailing, drink adult figure Boris Yeltsin cut in his later years. His successor, Vladimir Putin, in the eyes of many Western observers, seems refreshingly direct, decisive and energetic.”
And then she talks about how Tony Blair was complimenting him, and Bill Clinton and all these other people. The World Bank loved him. This has all been forgotten.
Paul JayAnother thing which I think has been forgotten, and remind me if I’m correct about this. Wasn’t it in the early 2000s, not only was he kind of a darling of the West, he actually was at the time NATO was expanding, negotiating in a very friendly way with NATO. In fact, he didn’t object to that expansion at the time.
Matt TaibbiThere were even quotes by him in a New York Times magazine profile where he’s asked directly about the possibility of Russia someday joining NATO. He says, I wouldn’t rule it out. That’s something we’d have to consider. To be fair, there was some guardedness on the part of the expat reporter community because we all knew what was going on. It didn’t take very long for Putin to show his real colors. There were friends of mine, reporters in the Russian reporting community, who were beaten and shot at for investigating him. That was very early on. So we immediately knew what he was all about.
Paul JayAnd you knew the journalist. I always screw up her name. Is it Anna Politkovskaya?
Matt TaibbiAnna Politkovskaya. I knew her. I wouldn’t say I was close friends with her, but I met with her multiple times around that time. Especially when one of his first crises involved the launching of the Second Chechen War. This was a crazy period in Russia’s history where it was kind of a wag the dog situation. The idea was it seemed that the Russian state wanted to start a war in Chechnya for a variety of reasons, to get the public’s mind off a whole bunch of things that were going on domestically. They launched the war, and the pretext of it, for that war, was a series of apartment bombings that were attributed to Chechen terrorists. Now, I’m like an anti-conspiracy theorist. I’m one of those people who cannot stand stories like 9/11 truth. I have a very low tolerance for that kind of story. But there was—
Paul JayA little too low in my mind. But go ahead.
Matt TaibbiRight. Yeah, I’ve been criticized for that. The Russian apartment bombing story was legit. It had teeth. There was actual legitimate evidence that Putin’s FSB had some kind of hand in those bombings, at least one that we know of. There was an incident in the city called Ryazan, where a bomb was discovered before it went off by local police who were kind of acting at cross purposes with the Feds. They tested it. They found that it contained a material called Hexogen, which is used only by sophisticated militaries around the world, including Russia. There was a car that had delivered the bomb. They got the license plate of it that was traced back to the FSB. The FSB admitted they were there, said it was a training exercise.
So friends of mine who worked for newspapers like Novaya Gazeta were investigating this, and Putin started his crackdown, really, on the press over that issue. And that was where he first started to come out as a real hardcore autocrat during that time. Those quotes that I read to you from Chrystia Freeland and people like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. The World Bank was talking about how they were going to be better off with him because he was going to defend against a centrally planned economy. This all came after stuff like that.
Paul JayLet me just add, because it’s not that they didn’t know about all this stuff you’re describing about Putin. It’s because they all do it, too. Maybe it isn’t quite as overt in Russia, but only because of the stage of development for no other reason.
Matt TaibbiYes, I think that’s a fair assessment. Look, we have a long history with the IMF [International Monetary Fund]. The World Bank has a long history of kind of palling up with the local strongman and executing these neoliberal structural adjustment programs, where the idea is there’s unlimited capital that comes from the West, that the local ruler gets to use to prop up the regime. In exchange, there’s going to be kind of free access to the markets by Western companies. There was an expectation that Putin was going to be exactly that person who was going to be able to execute that plan. In fact, he was going to be much better at it, as Steven Cohen pointed out, than Yeltsin, who was incompetent in a lot of unnecessary ways. Very unstable, despite having a really firm grip on power in Russia. Putin was expected to be like the sober, dependable version of Yeltsin. He was treated like that and welcomed with open arms until suddenly he became public enemy number one because he changed the deal. After Yeltsin was out, after he became President, he switched up the original deal for those oligarchs.
Paul JayIn what way?
Matt TaibbiSo originally they were gifted all those companies in exchange for this idea that they would back Boris Yeltsin and by extension this sort of plan of Westernization that Yeltsin had started down the road toward. Putin called all these people in. The same people who were gifted all of those companies in the privatization auctions and essentially said, okay, you get to keep all that stuff, but on a couple of conditions. Number one, you pledge absolute allegiance to me. Number two, none of you are going to have your own political ambitions. The third piece of that was that we’re going to stop taking all the capital out of the country. We’re going to keep a little bit of it at home for development. His idea was that he basically made a bet that he would survive longer as a nationalist than he would as a sort of piece of a global system.
Paul JayDidn’t it, in terms of even the interests of the oligarchs as a class makes sense? You have an actual system with an actual government, with laws. You actually will be richer, make more money if there’s a government that works for you, but in a somewhat systemically, rational way. So even if an individual oligarch didn’t like it, it was good for them as a class.
Matt TaibbiYeah. I think on the whole they benefited from this because they had protection from a very powerful leader who was willing to squelch all opposition and there wasn’t going to be any Western interference about anything like pollution or workers rights or anything like that. They got to keep their monopolies in whatever industry they were in.
Paul JayNow, one thing I don’t know or understand about this period is why didn’t the West get a bigger direct ownership stake? I would have thought that’s what they would have expected. A very weak Russian state and eventually the oligarchs have to become subordinate to the Western oligarchs.
Matt TaibbiYeah, there was a big debate about whether or not to allow Westerners to participate in the original auctions. Obviously they would have attracted a 1,000 times the capital they actually got. They were basically limited to the capital that existed in Russia at the time, which was not much. In the end they decided not to do that. It actually escapes me at the moment why it was it was decided that way, but it was. The loans for shares auctions didn’t allow foreign bids. So these massive companies like Yukos, Annexon Bank and [inaudible 00:29:00], which control huge portions of the world’s mineral reserves, petroleum reserves, timber and all these other things. We weren’t allowed to bid on it. So the Russians got to keep all of it. Then after Putin cemented his rule, it was basically, the understanding was that these companies were going to remain Russian and that they were not going to suck all of the profits out of the country and put them in Swiss Bank accounts. There was going to be some reinvestment in the country, which is why people who went back and visited Moscow ten years after 2000 were shocked to see the development. It’s a completely different city now than it was. The country is still largely the same, but there’s been significant investment.
Paul JaySo at some point, the Russian state starts having more direct ownership in some of the oil and gas companies. I know in the military industrial complex, which is I think it’s 30% of manufacturing workers in Russia work in the arms industry, but the state’s actual direct ownership starts to become quite significant. I know in the arms company, if I’m right, the state owns something like 70-80%.
Matt TaibbiYeah, I’m not sure what the exact numbers are, but that sounds right. Like, you know, [inaudible 00:30:35] is one of those companies. There are a number of nationalized Russian companies. For the most part, they’re private or privatized, but, yeah, there is that. Some of the companies are like quasi public, like Gazprom. There’s certainly an enormous power base for Russia. Well, not enormous compared to a country like China. They never had the massive industrial economy that a country like China had. What they did have is enormous reserves of natural resources, which, when oil prices are high, allowed them to be a fairly wealthy country relatively. The old saying that the Soviet Union was upper volted with rockets started to change a little bit. Russia was still extremely poor in the ’90s. The wealth discrepancy was just enormous. It still is. It’s just slightly more tenable for the ordinary person maybe now than it was before.
Paul JaySo carry on with the story then. So why and when does Putin start to become the devil?
Matt TaibbiWell, so the first thing was when Yeltsin was running the country, we had basically free access to the Kremlin. People who are extremely close to the United States and the diplomatic community in Moscow. These were Russian politicians, English speaking Russian politicians, many of them trained at Harvard, like Anatoly Chubais, Yegor Gaidar, Boris Nemtsov, Maxim Boycko, these people were essentially kind of ambassadors of the United States, and they were in the Yeltsin White House affecting policy. We more or less controlled Russian economic policy for years and years and years. Putin, one of his first moves was to get rid of all the American connected, sort of Harvard trained or Ivy trained officials inside.
Paul JayThese are the shock therapy guys.
Matt TaibbiRight. Exactly. They used to call them, the energetic young reformers. That was the name that they had back then. This set him down the road to doing things like kicking out USAID [United States Agency for International Development], the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute. The significance of that is interesting because back in 1996, when it was looking like Boris Yeltsin was going to lose reelection to the Communist Gennady Zyuganov, these American incidents, they spend enormous amounts of money on what they call kind of pro democracy campaigns. There would be television commercials that were a variation of vote or lose. They had one that was called [inaudible 00:34:00] , like vote or whatever. Essentially, they were pro Yeltsin commercials.
So we funneled millions of dollars, really into this kind of anti-Zyuganov movement. Putin being no dummy, he understood that these organizations essentially existed in Russia to advance American interests and kicked them out. It was that and the redoing of the deal. It was preventing people from [inaudible 00:34:39] who we were close to from pursuing his own political ambitions. The instant we sort of cut him out, he cut us out of the deal, he became public enemy number one. This is very similar to the Saddam Hussein story or any of a dozen other stories involving sort of dictators we’re friends with. Then they turn on us and suddenly they’re members of the Hitler of the Month club. [inaudible 00:35:04] is another one.
Paul JayHitler was a member of that club, right?
Matt TaibbiYeah, exactly. He was the founding member of the Hitler of the Month club. So, yeah, in 2001, 2002, 2003, because there was a little blip there with 9/11, remember, there was some sharing of information for security that kind of kept the relationship from going completely sour. But then we start to turn against them rhetorically around that time, I would say. And this all happened after I left.
Paul JayWhat was that moment of Hillary Clinton and that crazy red button? We’re going to reboot the relationship. What the hell were there expectations?
Matt TaibbiYeah. I forget whether the button was supposed to read. It was supposed to be [inaudible 00:36:05] , I think. And it was [inaudible 00:36:07] . So they got the translation wrong. And so instead of reboot, it was like reload. I forget what it was.
Paul JayThat turned out to be more accurate.
Matt TaibbiYeah. I think [Barack] Obama always had an interest in pursuing kind of a more pragmatic, real politic type relationship with Russia. His attitude towards Ukraine is now infamous. If you go back and look at his interviews about it, he said openly in an interview with the Atlantic that Ukraine was always going to mean more to Russia than it will to us. It’s not worth going to war over. And we just might as well just admit that. And this was seen as a green light for Putin to go into Crimea, but I don’t think that propaganda line is exactly right, because there was also the Maidan revolution in Ukraine and mixed in there, which some people see as a provocation that led to Putin going into Crimea. But either way, I think Obama always had this idea that the way to deal with Russia was more as potentially a strategic partner. Certainly in Syria, for instance, he preferred that route. He was overruled essentially by people within his own administration who wanted to go a different way. And this is all we’re dealing with now is the split about how to deal with Russia that started back with the Syria crisis in 2014-15 and Maidan and Crimea and all that.
Paul JaySome Russian lefty friends of mine have sort of cautioned me over the years, not right now, but up until right now anyway, not to exaggerate Putin, the individual that he represents a whole clique of bureaucrats, the whole state machine. There’s a lot of people in that state that have power. And yeah, he’s the leader of it, but it’s not a situation where he’s like the Emperor, the way he’s been described. But I’m not so sure. I saw that television thing with him and the head of the Foreign Intelligence Agency of Russia. Did you see that?
Matt TaibbiYeah.
Paul JayThe way he humiliated that guy, it makes me wonder maybe it really is or has become a one man show.
Matt TaibbiYeah. And this is what I heard, too. I reconnected with some old friends. In the last couple of weeks, there were a lot of reports by people who cover Putin constantly, Russian reporters who are indicating that even his top advisers weren’t really privy to the invasion plan until the last minute. There was a Security Council meeting that they had three days before the invasion where one Russian reporter compared it to a bunch of school kids who are being given a surprise test. They looked like they had no idea what was going on. And there may be something to that. In general, I agree with you. I think it’s usually wrong to pathologize and personalize political stories. The classic example is Trump. The media loves to make so much out of his individual faults, whereas the real issue in America is they’re always systemic, right. Like having to do with structures and sort of administrative bureaucracies. But in Russia, there may be something to the idea that he accumulated enough power in his own hands, and he’s definitely got some unusual character leanings that maybe that’s a thing that we really should be paying attention to. This isn’t necessarily an expression of a systemic desire to expand. It may have a lot to do with what he personally wants.
Paul JayAlthough I do think that is possible. I think if Putin’s gone tomorrow, there will be another sort of Putin, because until the west recognizes that objectively, Russia is a regional power, not just another country in Europe, because of the size of the population, which is what double Germany, the massive resources, certainly the potential to be more of an industrial power. And it’s not just the country with a gas station as it’s what some people call it. And there is an industrial base there, including a big arms industry, which is very competitive with the American arms industry. I was surprised to find out that 60% of India’s military hardware comes from Russia. I didn’t realize it was actually a majority.
Matt TaibbiYes. And we’re thinking about slapping sanctions on them for buying Russian hardware. But anyway.
Paul JayYeah, well, I don’t think that’s going to happen push India towards Russia and China. This whole policy has been pretty stupid. I keep going back and forth here because I don’t want in any way diminish what’s happening to the civilians in Ukraine, because there are thousands of people that are being killed and injured. And I have, frankly, pretty much the same sympathy for Russian soldiers who are just working class kids who didn’t know what else to do to join the army. And I think it’s wrong the way we think it’s okay when soldiers die and we’re only worried about civilians. Well, they’re all bloody, more or less ordinary people forced into shitty circumstances.
Matt TaibbiYeah. And I mentioned this in the article back in the 90s, I interviewed Russian soldiers who were sent to the first war in Chechnya. And just being in the army and Russia sucks really badly. And if you know of anything about what they call deathshima, which is this hazing process that Russians go through, which is like way beyond anything that we have in the military. It’s sexual abuse. It’s absolutely brutal what kids have to go through. And then they got sent to Chitchania without proper equipment, without any sense of information about what the mission was for. They were selling their weapons to the enemy for food. These are Russian soldiers I’m talking about in the Chechen war. So, yeah, I mean, if you look at the POW videos involving the Russians who got sent in the first wave, a lot of them are just barely old enough to shave. They had no idea they were told it was a training exercise and they’d be back in five days. And I do have a lot of sympathy for those folks, but I have sympathy for Ukrainians, too. The whole thing is just awful on every level. It’s just strange to me the way people get excited about this. They’re like they’re into it as though it’s just not a disaster all the way around.
Paul JayYeah. I think there is sometimes in the Liberal left who so often feels in the minority, like even on the Iraq war, clearly, even though so many people came out against the Iraq war, the majority of Americans were for it. There’s these occasional times, actually, the interest of sections of the left and Liberal line up with the imperialist American mainstream position, and all of a sudden you got wind at your back? Well, actually, I don’t know where she’s been on Ukraine. Sanders came out with some stuff that wasn’t too bad. Sanders came out saying Russia’s security interests and the expansion of NATO are fully reasonable. He talked about the Monroe Doctrine. Why, has she done anything differently than that?
Matt TaibbiNo, she had the Ukrainian flag pin and wearing it during the State of the Union address, which I guess everybody did. But still.
Paul JayYeah, I agree. That is an example of what I’m saying.
Matt TaibbiYes, it’s not wrong to be sympathetic with Ukraine by any means. I just think that there are a lot of people who are ginned up and thinking that there’s a military solution to this and there isn’t. There’s no way to fix this, but with bombs and missiles, that doesn’t lead to a worse scenario.
Paul JayWell, let’s go back to this Putin conversation and where we started it. You and I, we hadn’t talked to each other about it, but I think we had pretty much the same conclusion that Putin, as a rational actor, would not violate international law in such an absolute obvious way. If he did anything, he maybe goes into Dumbass and sort of protects Dumbass. And I have no idea whether Dumbass was really under threat. I guess it could have been given. There certainly is a history of such threat from the Ukrainian government saying, okay, I can believe that. I don’t know it, but I can believe it. But then you go in and you defend Dumbass, you don’t invade the rest of Ukraine. I know his argument. He has to smash the Ukrainian armed forces. So that’s the way to protect the Demilitarized Ukraine, which is ridiculous, because if he succeeds and then withdraws a zillion dollars of arms goes right back into Ukraine again. I mean, it will be even more so. And it will be a field day for the American military industrial complex. The only way this thing makes any sense to me is that is part of the equation. It will also be a field day for the Russian military industrial complex and the price of fossil fuels to the roof. And if you look at Cheney’s role in the lead up to the Iraq war, I never believed the Americans would invade Iraq, which shows how good I am at because I kept saying it’s not rational. Everybody that knows the situation says you cannot win. You will not be able to install a pro American government, even grabbing the oil. You’ll have trouble grabbing the oil. And I didn’t get I did these interviews with Bill Black about the banking crisis. I think you know Bill, he’s certainly a fan of your stuff.
Matt TaibbiYeah, we know each other, definitely.
Paul JayAnd he wrote this thing, you don’t understand the 708 crisis by trying to understand what was good for the banks. You have to understand what was good for the bankers.
Matt TaibbiRight.
Paul JayAnd I think the same thing for the military industrial complex. The invasion of Iraq wasn’t good for American geopolitics strategically. It was good for Dick Cheney. It was good for Halliburton. It was good for these goddamn oligarchs that are thieves themselves. And I guess the Russians and the Americans and the Ukrainians. I mean, that’s where I think we have to at least I want to try to take this conversation is that this is a global system of how stuff is owned. We can’t keep on with a system where these oligarchs of all these countries own the commanding pieces of the economy and thus the politics, because the bigger threat here, and as much as this is terrible, what’s happening to the people of Ukraine and of course, in Yemen and many other places, but certainly those two are outstanding. The climate crisis is facing us within this decade, and it’s completely off the radar now, right?
Matt TaibbiYeah, I would argue nuclear war is up there, too, and this is not making that situation any better either. Yeah. None of this makes a whole lot of sense unless there’s some other motive that I don’t really understand. Most of the people that I talked to before the invasion thought that Putin’s massing of troops on Ukraine’s border was a game that he was playing, that he was trying to drive a wedge between America and Europe because Germany obviously was seeking greater ties with Russia because it has a cheap energy source. They were trying to get that gas pipeline through. The Americans, on the other hand, had no interest in that pipeline on the country very much opposed to that happening and wanted to expand NATO theoretically, at least into Ukraine. I think the Europeans probably would have rather that Ukraine stay away from NATO and keep the cheap energy. And I think what Putin we all thought what Putin was trying to do was exacerbate these tensions by threatening war and forcing the United States to kind of overplay its hand. But this move into Western Ukraine was what completely through everybody. It was one thing to recognize Danielsk and Lucask, those two regions, but to bring the war to the other side of the country was totally mind blowing.
It’s very difficult to understand what the upside is there unless you’re counting on there being a long insurgency, and that’s somehow a positive for you. I don’t understand why they would do that. I actually agree with the much criticized University of Chicago Professor, John Mearsheimer, who says that he doesn’t think that Putin has designs on all of Ukraine. I actually still kind of doubt that, too, even though they’re conducting a war over there.
Paul JayHe can’t he can’t when he’s going to get into a long term occupation of Ukraine and an endless war.
Matt TaibbiNo, it doesn’t make any sense. I think he wants to install a government that would be subservient to him. But why do that? Why not just move into Luhonskin?
Paul JayI don’t get it. Unless you want and you want. Like I firmly believe in some conspiracies. In fact, the Iraq war shows what was a bigger conspiracy than claiming there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and trying to enforce that throughout the various agencies to say that there are weapons of mass destruction. It was a total lie, a full scale conspiracy. Even when Valerie claims husband comes back. I interviewed him and he comes back and says there’s no yellow cake. They have a whole conspiracy to demolish Claim and Wilson and slander them.
Matt TaibbiCredible conspiracy.
Paul JayWar is conspiracy and lies. That’s one of the tactics of war. It’s just another weapon in your Arsenal. Lie through your teeth and conspire because you can’t have it. I don’t think there’s such a thing as a war without these things.
Matt TaibbiRight.
Paul JayBut that being said, this war in Ukraine, unless various oligarchs and interests wanted it, was so avoidable. Start with the Ukrainian government could have declared neutrality, take NATO off the table because it was never happening anyway. So they’re defending a fiction. Take it off the table. Two ridiculous even sounding like you might want nuclear weapons someday. How insane is that? I don’t believe they ever would be. I don’t think it was true. But there was a words came out of Zelinsky’s mouth that sounded something like that. Three recognized that there needs to be a legitimate referendum in Dumbass and so what? So they’re in independent republics. So you try to win them over economically unless you want endless conflict when dunbas because it’s never going away with Russia. There. So the Ukrainian government had all everything in its hands not to have this happen and didn’t do any of it. Russia. I don’t buy any of their arguments. There was no imminent threat from Ukraine. No Dumbass Navy was under threat. There was ways to defend that.
Matt TaibbiAnd the other thing I have to remember, there was a long conflict where a lot of people died in those reasons.
Paul JayGood reason to think.
Matt TaibbiYeah.
Paul JayBut I actually don’t think even if a nuclear weapon was in Ukraine, what the hell would it change? Nuclear weapons all over the place point in Russia, they pick up 27 seconds or something. As long as there’s such a thing as Russian submarines with the ability to wipe out the United States, it makes no real. Unless I’m wrong. But I’m doing this work with this film with Ellsberg now, and I know more than I used to about this. As long as you’ve got the subs, you’ve got the turn. Nukes in Ukraine, nukes in Poland, here and there. Okay, it sounds terrible, but the truth is you can still wipe out your enemy. So what big difference does it make? And then, of course, the Americans. Every single word out of the Americans is hypocritical. Although Putin has given them a great gift. Now all of a sudden we can’t say never believe American intelligence agencies. You can never say that again.
Matt TaibbiI know it’s a nightmare because this is like Christmas morning every day for military propagandists and intelligence propagandists in America, because this is the eternal gift that we’ll keep on giving for a generation. Never again will we be able to say that it’s irrational to bring a country into a military alliance or to build up to spend money on weaponry and intelligence and that sort of thing. There’s a lot to be concerned about, though, with this. I think the American public is not recognizing the scale of some of what’s going on. The idea of just sort of Willy nilly, getting companies like Google and Apple to shut off services to the entire country, all of Russia, on the premise that we have to inflict pain on the population so that they overthrow their leader. Are we ready for other countries to apply the same logic to us who might decide to cost services to us for some reason? I worry about this thing that we’re hearing from people like Fiona Hill, that we’re already in World War Three so that we have to do everything possible short of open armed conflict. And they will get to that, too. People they’ll get to calling for a no fly zone and American troops deployed to the region. I’m confident of that. It’ll just take a while.
Paul JayI don’t know. I can’t believe I’m about to say something positive about Marco Rubio. Never in my life would I have imagined it. But Rubio last Sunday, on stepping off of the show, came so very forthrightly against the no fly zone. He just said, if you have a no fly zone, you’re declaring World War III, and you better be ready for all out nuclear war. He was very firmly against it, which suggests at least there’s some rationality left and even some of the right wing of the elites, at least they’re worried about nuclear war. On the other hand, the level of hysteria, the fact that they either fired or removed the lead opera singer of the Metropolitan Opera, a Russian woman, because she wouldn’t sign a document denouncing Poof. Yeah.
Matt TaibbiIt was like a loyalty of this is worse.
Paul JayI mean, it’s at the very least of McCarthy like. I mean, that’s insane.
Matt TaibbiYeah. It’s straight out of Catch 22. It’s the loyalty of. Right. Yeah. And the Canadian Hockey League barring Russians and Bella Russians from the draft and the International Federation of Cats barring Russian cats. I mean, kind of crazy. Yeah. But the stuff that really makes me nervous, though, is the whole visa Mastercard banking services being shut off, like the cyber war ideas that we’re kind of unleashing. That makes me very nervous.
Paul JayWell, it’s clear they want regime change in Moscow, and I don’t know enough about what’s going on in Moscow to know if it’s possible. There’s actually a part of me, honestly, that I don’t think I’d mind regime change. The fall of Putin at this point. I know a lot of people are going to write in and say, how dare you say that? I just think the danger of nuclear war. If there’s a lack of rationality in Moscow and the hysteria that’s developing in Washington right now, I don’t think there’d be this careful planning of a nuclear war right now. But, boy, shit can happen, right?
Matt TaibbiI’m kind of with you like, if Putin was not in power tomorrow, I’m certainly not going to shed a tear about that guy. I think he’s been repressive, autocratic, antidemocratic from the beginning and has had a severely negative impact on Russia’s history, recent history notwithstanding our foreign policy mistakes in the region. Just to get back to the original subject of this conversation, my attitude when I was there and what I observed and so many of my friends who are expats who lived in Russia observed at the time, is that our policy towards Russia and Ukraine at the time was so focused on controlling these countries, on making sure that they went down a certain path, that they elected the right people, that they adopted the correct policies. We pressured them so much into cutting off health care and free energy subsidies for apartments and free higher education and all kinds of other things as part of our shock therapy doctrine. It was, like, central to our whole idea of how we got on with Russia, that we were going to make sure that somehow our people were in charge. Right. And there was a profound resentment that grew out of that from the Russian people.
And it was part of the reason that Putin enjoyed popularity because he was seen as somebody who was standing up to the west. And I always thought that was a massive mistake, this idea that we should have. I think what we should have done is envisioned a Russia that was independent but could be a strategic and economic partner in some way. Right. And we didn’t do that. I think we wanted to make Russia into a vassal state and that backfired. Would I be sad if Putin was no longer the leader? Of course not. But these people who want to do regime change in Russia all stems from the same problem that they had at the beginning. You know what I mean? Like, they thought it was their responsibility to decide who gets to sit in the Kremlin because the United States wants to maintain hegemony in Europe.
Paul JayAnd Russia is so big, they’re an actual rival in Europe. But I got the solution to all of this.
Matt TaibbiWhat’s that?
Paul JayNationalize all the major fossil fuel companies. Phase them out quickly, as quickly as possible. Get the world off fossil fuel, and then Russia will have to have a different kind of economy, as will Canada and some other places, Saudi Arabia. And that will force on Russia, not the kind of distortion of politics that fossil fuel economies create and it will also change American politics. So I’m going to dedicate theAnalysis to nationalizing fossil fuel companies. I don’t know who that gives a damn on what we do here. But that said, it’s the solution to inflation. How many wars are fought over oil, the military industrial complex? What the hell would they fight over if there wasn’t a fossil fuel economy? I’m sure they’d look for something. But yeah, nationalize. In these extraordinary times when you can destroy the banking system of a country, you can change every kind of thing overnight that no one would imagine. Okay, let’s really do it. Let’s get rid of fossil fuel and you’ll change the whole politics. And of course, not to say the least, actually save organized human society from the climate crisis.
Matt TaibbiIt sounds like kind of a two for one. I’m all in favor of phasing out fossil fuels. I think that’s a great idea. We haven’t done enough to try to make that happen. The hypocrisy of bashing these foreign autocracies while we’re dependent on countries like Saudi Arabia is like unbelievable to me that we still persist in that. It would be great if we didn’t have to do that. Well, we don’t have to do that, but it would make it even easier to not make those horrible decisions.
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