NATO escalation and Ukraine's military and humanitarian crisis discussed with former US Army officer Stanislav Krapivnik
Glenn Diesen interviews Stanislav Krapivnik, a former US Army officer originally from Donbas, on the state of the war in Ukraine.
Summary
Glenn Diesen interviews Stanislav Krapivnik, a former US Army officer originally from Donbas with military education in both the United States and Russia, covering the CIA director John Ratcliffe's brief visit to Moscow, the deteriorating military situation on Ukraine's front lines, and the deepening humanitarian crisis across Europe. Krapivnik argues that Ratcliffe's visit was conducted as an imperial show of force rather than genuine quiet diplomacy, reflecting weakness rather than strength. He contends that Ukraine is at an absolute breaking point militarily, with Russian forces achieving a 10-kilometre breakthrough near Kramatorsk and Druzhkivka, while Ukraine is running out of men and is now reportedly procuring body armour adjustable for pregnant women — which Krapivnik treats as a marker of civilisational breakdown. Krapivnik also argues that Europe faces a converging crisis of food shortages, diesel scarcity, and agricultural collapse, driven by fertiliser price spikes, drought, and the closure of Black Sea grain ports, which he believes is a major driver of renewed Western interest in negotiations. He is deeply sceptical that meaningful diplomacy is possible given what he describes as a total absence of trust between Russia and Western governments. He also discusses Trump's potential recourse to emergency executive powers, referencing a prior conversation with Scott Ritter, and devotes significant attention to the fracturing of NATO solidarity — noting that Romania, Hungary, Croatia, Spain, Portugal, and Poland are unlikely to contribute troops, with Polish public sentiment toward Ukrainians having sharply deteriorated after an estimated 10,000 Polish deaths in the conflict.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
CIA Director Ratcliffe's Visit to Moscow
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back everyone. Today is August 26, 2026, and we're joined by Stanislav Krapivnik, a former US Army officer originally from Donbas, who had his military education in the United States and is now in Russia. Thank you for coming back on the program.
Stanislav Krapivnik: Thank you. I just have one question — where did summer go?
Glenn Diesen: It went very fast, didn't it?
Stanislav Krapivnik: Incredibly fast this year. Why did summer go? And here we are. But let me ask about this visit today by the CIA director, John Ratcliffe. We saw a US military transport aircraft — the C-17 — apparently went to Russia, and shortly thereafter the CIA director came. He was there apparently only for a few hours and then left. Not in a big hurry, but a very brief visit. From what I understand, he met with the Russian intelligence chief, and again it's unclear — are they discussing peace? Are they discussing de-escalation, new rules of the game? Or is it only speculation at this point?
Glenn Diesen: Well, it's speculation — unless of course you read some of the Western press, which seemed to know exactly what they were talking about even though nobody said anything, through possible anonymous sources. You know, the "me, myself, and I looking in a mirror." It varies from everything — the Financial Times said he came in there to warn the Russians: "We know you're about to do a major assault, throw in a couple hundred thousand more troops, and NATO will not be broken." As if NATO is not already fighting, and as if NATO is going to do anything else. But that's the Financial Times. Some others, like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, are talking about a new formula bid to try to stop the war — at least stop the fighting in the Black Sea — because Europe is going to be going very hungry. The grain is not coming out of the Black Sea from the Ukrainians that goes to the European ports. Africa is also affected because Russian grain isn't going out either, and that goes mostly to Africa. But the point is, that's what they're saying they know — but they don't know.
Look, the reality is this is a very short visit. An incredibly short visit, and a very pompous visit, because the next question is: why a C-17? And it was a C-17. There are pictures of it parked at Vnukovo Airport, which is a civilian airport. This plane flew in — I don't remember if it was Norway or Scotland where it landed to refuel — and then went on. The transponder wasn't switched off. Somebody picked up on it early on that there was a C-17 coming in, and they watched it fly into Russia. Before it even landed, it was already hitting the news that there's a C-17 flying into what looks like Moscow.
Out pops the back hatch, and out drives a small convoy of — I'm assuming armoured — cars, SUVs, and a limo to deliver one Ratcliffe to the Kremlin. Well, maybe Novo-Ogaryovo. I'm not quite sure where they went. And then back again and off they go. When I say fast, they were on the ground for less than three hours. Even if you clear the lane out from Vnukovo to the centre of Moscow, that's at least a 40–45 minute drive. Even if the road is clear, it's still going to take at least 30–35 minutes to get there, and 30–35 minutes back. So they were there for about an hour and a half.
The next obvious question is: why the hell do they bring a convoy? Who does that? Oh, Trump does that. Normally, if somebody like the head of the CIA comes flying in, they do it on the low. You don't want anyone to know he's there. At most, you get a charter plane. A charter plane flies in quietly. He gets in some unmarked limo or SUV, gets shuttled over, they have their meetings — maybe have a toast or two, or maybe spit in each other's eye, you never know. He maybe overnights, maybe not. And then he drives back quietly, and you find out about it about a day or half a day after the plane has taken off. That's how it's normally done. These aren't the people who go advertising their presence. This is the head of special services. They don't like attention.
But this is Trump. And you ask me why they would do that — the easy answer is you have a beta male trying to act like an alpha male in charge of the White House, and he's failing everywhere and he needs to look tough. He needs to look imperial. So instead of having his main spy chief come in quietly to deliver whatever message he wants to deliver — or take one back — he comes in like a parade. An imperial parade. "We're here, we're big. Look, we've got multiple cars. We're important. These are expensive multiple cars that we flew in on an expensive plane that cost the taxpayer a couple of million dollars there and back, because we can do that because we're the empire. We're powerful."
Well, the point on that is: powerful people don't have to remind everyone they're powerful. They walk into a room and everybody goes, "Yeah, okay, we know who he is." Weak people have to constantly remind everybody how powerful they are. Weak nations have to make a show of everything — pomp and ceremony — to try to intimidate other nations. And other powerful nations look at it and just laugh, because they know the situation, or they should know the situation.
Ukraine's Deteriorating Front Lines
Glenn Diesen: But there's probably a lot of showmanship here, which is not — but there's another thing, though. There must be some panic setting in at some point, because we know that in Ukraine there's a huge problem now with weapon shortages. The manpower problem is only growing. I saw that Keith Kellogg went to Kyiv and started encouraging them to recruit women — or conscript women. And indeed, this is something the British media as well as the American media is pushing. With all of these military problems, we also see economic problems, political instability, some social instability, more opposition towards the military recruiters. And with the front lines cracking — a possible encirclement of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, the problems in Zaporizhzhia — as all of these things are intensifying, Russia is intensifying its strikes on Ukraine, massive strikes even as Ukraine has no more air defences, and also ramping up across the entire front line. I see some reports that the Russians are preparing a massive offensive in Chernihiv as well, stretching the Ukrainians even further at a time when they're already overstretched. I can see why there would be panic. What do you see happening on the front lines, and how can Ukraine respond to this? Because I'm assuming this is part of the reason why, across the NATO countries, they're suddenly talking about negotiations again.
Stanislav Krapivnik: Well, it's not just what's on the battlefield. One of the largest issues, if you zoom out, is a fuel crisis — and hand in hand with that, starvation. The European forecast for crop yields this year is down 40% from last year. That is starvation. That is starvation in the EU — at least for the lower classes. The middle class are going to get crushed too; they may still afford food, but they're not going to afford a whole lot else. The lower classes will be starving. As a friend of mine, Lorenzo — a professor in Italy — put it: the problem for the lower classes in Italy, even before all of this really started kicking in, was that there were a lot more days in the month than there was budget in the bank. People for the last week of the month were already having problems feeding themselves and their families. And this is before the spike. The spike is coming.
Diesel prices are already going up. There are three or four reasons for the drop in agricultural output. One, obviously, is that fertiliser prices have tripled — and that's a problem for the US too. The US, unlike the EU, imports Russian fertiliser — about half a billion dollars' worth last year, about $600 million. This year that same fertiliser is worth $1.4 billion. It's practically tripled in cost. A lot of American farmers couldn't afford it. It was there, they could buy it, but they couldn't afford it. The Europeans are even worse off, because they not only couldn't afford it but said, "No, we're not going to take it because it's Russian fertiliser." So we're going to freeze our face off to spite our mothers. We've gone past noses and ears. This is the point Europe has reached.
Then you have a diesel crisis, and diesel is needed for agriculture. Russia doesn't export diesel between mid-March and about October, because starting mid-March you're sowing the fields in the south, and by mid to late May you're sowing the fields in the far north, the Siberian plains. Then you're gathering the crop. In the south there are at least two crops, sometimes three. And by the way, Russia had a record crop on the first one, and the second is looking to be another record crop. The problem for the Europeans is that if you don't have the diesel, it's pretty hard to gather a very large crop. You can only do so much by hand.
Then you have the simple fact that it hasn't rained. Unlike Russia's relatively cold and rainy summer — it's about 15 degrees outside right now and it's been raining — once you get out of Eastern Europe and toward central Europe, the temperature spiked, the drought kicked in, the Danube is down, the Rhine is down. You can't get coal up and down the Rhine because the barges are flattening out on the sandbars. The nuclear power stations are being switched off because there's not enough water, or the water is so hot it doesn't cool anything effectively. So you've got a whole host of problems. Lack of rain is one of them. Wildfires raging — all of that affects crop yield.
And then there's the EU war on farmers. Not every EU country has gone stupid, but the Western European ones in particular have gone extremely stupid. The prime example is the Netherlands. The Netherlands had one of the most efficient agricultural sectors in the world — actually used a very moderate amount of fertiliser, very well run. So the government tried to destroy it. When they couldn't get the farmers to comply and couldn't quite take the land away from them flat out, they forced the farmers to feed their cattle anti-flatulence drugs. Right off the bat, we're already in the realm of the absurd. Anti-flatulence drugs for the cows. At which point somebody from outside our time stream would look at you and say, "You people are morons. What the hell is wrong with you?" But the anti-flatulence drugs also kill the cows. So no more flatulence because the cows are now dead. And if you don't feed the cows the drugs and bankrupt yourself with dead cows, they'll just take the farm — fine you for not feeding poison to your cows.
You get all of this into a perfect storm and what happens? Either you start growing mealworms to try to get some protein, or you're looking at starvation. The alternative to starvation is Ukraine. Ukraine has a lot of grain, but the West in its infinite wisdom decided to expand the ship war in the Black Sea as much as they could. They started hitting a lot of Russian ships carrying Russian grain. And unlike Ukrainian grain, which goes mostly to Western Europe, Russian grain goes mostly to countries like Egypt and various countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Without Russian grain, Egypt is going to face starvation. A lot of Africa is going to face starvation. Southeast Asia. China — well, China could do it by rail, but you can't do Africa by rail.
Russia countered and escalated, closing all seven ports in the Odessa province — by "closed" I mean blew them up, and continues to blow them up and hit any ships going in and out. So the West is now in a very bad position. While the average European has become a spineless sheep and won't do anything no matter what his government does to him, it's a whole different game when it's cold because there's not enough gas and you're hungry and you're watching your kids starve. People tend to get mean when they're hungry, when they're watching their kids starve and going, "Mommy, why can't I have some food?" People tend to get really mean.
I think the Americans are getting very nervous because this could cause a lot of problems this autumn and this winter inside the European Union, the NATO states, if they don't have enough food. They can tolerate a lot, but you can't tolerate it when you're hungry and somebody's telling you, "Yeah, it's because of those Ukrainians." That has a tendency to cause a lot of social unrest. And telling them to eat cake doesn't work either — we've tried that before in history with very bad results. I think that is a very large part of why the Europeans, and particularly the Americans who don't want to lose the Europeans, are starting to panic, because winter is around the corner, and with it starvation and cold.
Now, to the other part of your question — the battlefield. What we're seeing is that they don't talk much in the West about the battlefield anymore.
Glenn Diesen: No. Well, they keep saying we're winning, we're winning, but —
Stanislav Krapivnik: No details. There was the Ukrainians had some success across the entire front line in one area in Zaporizhzhia where they were able to retake territory, and there was a lot of celebration about this while ignoring the rest of the front line. But then when the Russians began to retake that territory the Ukrainians had taken in their offensive, they kind of lost interest. It's a common theme — you celebrate your own victories and ignore the opponent's.
They had three counter-offensives in different areas of Zaporizhzhia. One was destroyed right off the bat. Two had moderate success, but at massive cost. The Ukrainians can roll back Russian forces faster than Russia rolls back Ukrainian forces because Russia is conserving its manpower and Ukraine doesn't give a damn. They don't care how many corpses of their own they have to walk across to get where they want to go. The leadership is quite willing to accept the sacrifice of their entire population — they can live with that, and the money they're going to make off of it. So yes, they can push Russian forces back, taking massive losses in the process, but then they don't have the manpower to hold. Russian forces pull back to a better defensive position, regroup, and start coming back.
Russian forces broke through in the south. Russia is holding about 15%, maybe 20% by now, of the Azov region. Ukrainians are still throwing whatever little reserves they have at the Russian drive from Doura Zaparo westward toward Zaporizhzhia city. Once that falls, that's your last fortified city — and even that city has only been getting fortified for three years. This is nothing like what you saw in the Donbas, but it's your last fortified city before you reach Saroia, about 40 kilometres northwest, up Interstate M-08. Between that and Zaporizhzhia are just scattered villages, unprepared for any kind of combat — a little bit of field fortifications, trenches, but nothing else.
Then, skipping over to the Donetsk People's Republic — Russia has now two-thirds surrounded Druzhkivka and is on the edges of the city, which is a logistical hub feeding areas like Druzhkivka and Kramatorsk. Russian DRG groups — the reconnaissance and diversionary groups — are inside Druzhkivka fighting and raiding, and Russian forces in that pincer movement are now about four kilometres east of Kramatorsk. But that's not the main problem they have now.
About four or five days ago, Russian forces found a weak spot and burst through the front. They haven't broken through yet — they've broken into the front and near-rear to a depth of 10 kilometres. That's a big move in this kind of warfare. That is a huge move. We've seen occasional breakthroughs of 2, 3, 4 kilometres. This is a 10-kilometre spike. The base of it is being widened — it's about a kilometre wide and about 10 kilometres deep — and it places itself right behind Druzhkivka and southern Kramatorsk, which allows Russian drones to fully dominate the logistical battlefield behind those three cities. Behind those three cities are fields and roads and a few small villages. That's it. There are no more lines.
I've seen video of the new road of death — the main road coming into the west of Kramatorsk. Yes, it's been netted up, and the netting is destroyed in a lot of areas — artillery does that. The netting may stop an FPV drone, but it's not going to stop a 152mm shell or a 120mm shell. Just destroyed vehicles up and down that road, and the video is being taken by a drone flying underneath the netting, filming all these destroyed vehicles. Getting in and out of those three cities is already almost suicidal, and it's only going to get worse.
The desperate counterattacks the Ukrainians were launching at Russian forces around Kostiantynivka — both sides have already said those counter-offensives are done. The Ukrainians didn't get very far for very large casualties. So now Russian forces are going to be turning around and finishing cleaning up Kostiantynivka and starting their move toward sliding from there. The situation is horrible, and we're not even talking about Kharkiv. We're not even talking about Sumy, just in those areas. And if you open up Chernihiv on top of that, the Ukrainian forces are at an absolute breaking point — to the point where one of the Rada deputies was talking, and he said flat out their aim is to have 40 to 60% foreigners in the assault brigades. Which is a little problem, because most of the mercenaries that come over there want to make money, not die. The assault brigades are there for one reason. Your chance of survival walking out of there alive is pretty low.
Word is finally spreading to the Colombian fighters there that their trip to Ukraine is more than likely going to be a one-way trip. They're not even getting the bodies back. To the Ukrainian army, the Colombians are absolutely expendable. There have been lots of videos of wounded Colombian soldiers saying, "I'm dying," uploading it on Starlink, "and these Ukrainians won't take me off the battlefield. They're walking by me and my battle buddy is already dead." They just look at them as expendable meat — more expendable than themselves.
NATO Escalation and the British Role
Glenn Diesen: One reason for great concern, though, is that as things are going so poorly on the front lines, you would think the backers in NATO would be more panicked and find a way of escalating. And as usual, you see the British very eagerly seeking to take that role. We saw Britain beginning to send long-range drones to strike deep into Russia. Lavrov made the comment that this is direct participation and there will be consequences. And now we see the British announcing that they would give the blueprints to the Storm Shadows — which I interpret as plausible deniability for the British planning to strike Russia hard with Storm Shadows and claim they're actually Ukrainian-produced. But how do you see the escalation between NATO and Russia? Because I assume one of the concerns of Ratcliffe was also that Russia might begin to push back harder against NATO as well, not just Ukraine.
Stanislav Krapivnik: I fully agree. First of all, for the people that actually believe this line that they're giving Ukraine missile technology — seriously, grow up. Never mind the intellectual property involved. You just can't come in. Here's a missile made of different components from different countries, different factories, different companies — quite a few of which, by the way, are American. They can't even launch these missiles without approval from the US. So when they said, "Oh, the British and the French gave these missiles and they're going to be fired, and the Americans — yeah, we don't care what the Americans say" — oh, yes you do. And the Americans just said yes, you can do it. So the Americans are still at the end of the supply chain, and one day hopefully will have to take accountability for what they've done, because they gave the green light at the end of the day. Their processors are in those missiles. They use the navigation system from the US. It's not something that can just be given away.
And Ukraine is going to build them? We're supposed to believe they can put together an upgraded V-1 rocket called a Flamingo? They can't even do that — not realistically, not in their present state. They can't manufacture anything. The great drone factory turned out to just be an assembly hall. When the truth started coming out, they're putting together FPV drones — all they're doing is putting the bolts in and putting the wings on. They're not producing any of the components. Where are they going to produce them, and on what?
So right off the bat, this is just plausible deniability — except it's not plausible, because nobody's going to believe it. It's just liability. It's like a 5-year-old kid — "Why did you break that?" And he looks at you and goes, "I didn't break that." "I just saw you break that." "Well, I didn't break that." This is the same level, except dealing with grown adults in the European Union and the UK. "Oh no, no, no, we didn't shoot the missile. They shot the missile." Sure. Okay. And we didn't shoot the missile that's going to come back and hopefully hit your factory one day. It's just the Martians who did it.
The point is, if you talk to anybody like Commodore Steve Jermy, who actually has military experience and is not engulfed in this idiocy, they'll tell you flat out: England is going to be wiped off the face of the map. There's nothing England can do. England can't control the Channel, let alone any of the seas. If England goes nuclear — which they can't do anyway, because they don't own the nuclear submarines and they don't own the Trident missiles; it's all American, they're renting them and can't launch them without US approval — the only people in NATO who can launch missiles without US approval are the French, who actually own their own nuclear weapons. Of course, if the French do that, there will no longer be a France. There'll be scorched ground that was once called France. Our grandchildren will be learning about this one nation that was once called France and how it died one day. Because if they ever go nuclear, that's it — they will be exterminated, and probably most of Europe along with them. Even if no missiles hit outside of France, the fallout alone from those counter-strikes is going to contaminate most of Western Europe and the UK. Just the way the wind blows, it probably won't get across the Pyrenees, but it'll definitely get across the Rhineland into Germany and into the Low Countries.
I don't know how stupid the French are. They can be stupid sometimes, extremely stupid. I'm hoping they're not that stupid. But the British seem to be plowing new depths of stupidity on a daily basis. They've convinced themselves there's not going to be any counter-strikes. But the moment Russia said, "That's it, we're going after your ships" — you notice they're not going after any Russian ships anymore.
Glenn Diesen: Yeah, I did notice that. But if there are no good escalation paths, or the Russians can't counter all of this, another option would be to restart diplomacy. I know the Europeans are still asking for an unconditional ceasefire.
Stanislav Krapivnik: Surrender. Just call it surrender.
Glenn Diesen: Yeah — which is for Russia to capitulate. But if Ratcliffe was in Moscow to discuss possibilities of diplomacy as well, how do you see Russia's demands having changed? What do you think is written in stone, and where do you think we might see some flexibility on the Russian position?
The Prospects for Diplomacy
Stanislav Krapivnik: I very much hope that written in stone is: don't trust anybody in the EU and in the US — except maybe Fico and Bobi, but they're minor players. And whoever just came into power in Bulgaria — I don't remember his name — unfortunately he's also a minor player. All the major players in the EU are sociopaths, and they've shown themselves to be that. The same thing with the Trump administration. Look, Trump needs a win. He's desperate. He needs a win.
Of course, he's got another option. I did an interview with Scott Ritter. We were talking about these secret laws that have been passed to allow the president to basically become a dictator. They're supposed to be there only when there's an emergency — like a nuclear war where you can't gather Congress, you don't have time. So he's allowed to take dictatorial action. But they're written pretty openly, generally, to a point where it's either a nuclear missile, a meteor strike, Yellowstone blowing up — or "I'm going to lose elections and I've got nothing else to lose." Would Trump do that? I don't know. Ritter thinks he will. He may. Who knows? We're dealing with an extremely unpredictable personality.
But negotiate — the problem is: negotiate with whom? When I was talking with Commodore Jermy, they were talking about how the only way forward, to even baseline some kind of negotiations, is at a tier-two or tier-three level. You don't send government people — it's pointless to send them. Send maybe corporate heads or some cultural figures to start talking with each other, just to get some kind of basic baseline of where we're at. There is absolutely zero trust. I think there was more trust between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1943 than there is right now between Russia and most of Europe. And by the way, there were communications between Stalin's government and Hitler's government — just like between the UK and the Americans and Hitler's government. There were still back-channel communications. They were never fully cut off. With Biden, they were quite literally fully cut off. That was, I think, the first time it got to that level between two nuclear powers, which is just great — we've reached a new low level of idiocy.
Glenn Diesen: Right now, who would you trust? I mean, who would you trust in the Western governments? It's a good question, and it's also about who to talk to — but also where to meet. Helsinki was the logical meeting place in the past because of Finland's neutrality. But look at what happened to Finland in a very short period of time. They went from being the great success story of neutrality to — I saw the President of Finland in Kyiv making the point that the strategy of NATO should be to have deep strikes into Russia, striking civilian targets like Wildberries, because this will make Russian society feel the pain and put pressure on the Kremlin to end the war.
Stanislav Krapivnik: Enough of what he thinks.
Glenn Diesen: No. Well, I think that's a great point, because what does it mean to end the war? When they talk about Russia accepting an unconditional ceasefire, this is seen as capitulation. The Europeans have said they will move in their troops, rebuild and replenish the arms of Ukraine, and prolong the war. So I would think the main pressure coming on the Kremlin from attacks on civilian targets will be to escalate and get the war over with. And there are strong indications this way. But they're so sanctimonious, and the posturing is so absurd. They never actually discuss these things, nor do they permit any debates within their countries about where all this escalation might be taking us. The British Prime Minister said any negotiations will have to start from where the front lines currently are — finding it unacceptable that Ukraine would have to retreat from territories it doesn't hold. But as always, NATO only mentions the territory, fitting a narrative that this is a war about territory, without mentioning anything about the European security architecture. Will NATO pull back? Will it stop expanding? Will Ukraine restore its neutrality? We don't discuss these things.
Stanislav Krapivnik: Well, at this point they're setting up the standard, and Russia's hearing that standard. So this gets settled on the battlefield, because that's exactly what they just told you. When they tell you — and they don't do this out of pure ignorance, they do it out of pure malice — "As soon as there's going to be a ceasefire, we'll pour in 40,000 to 50,000 troops right on the border" — not that in the big scale, when the fighting restarts, those 40,000 troops are going to get wiped out. But the simple fact is they're making sure you understand: don't stop the war. Keep killing Ukrainians. There are still a few more we can make money off of. This is the exact message being sent to Moscow: we're doing everything we can to make sure we get that last Ukrainian kid.
And when they're saying women — and Kellogg, by the way, his daughter's NGO makes a lot of money off of this war. Don't kid yourself that he's some kind of patriot of Ukraine. He's making money. His family's making money. These people — this is the Epstein elite. They're sick, disgusting subhumans. I don't know how else to put it, because a human being has some level of empathy. These people have no empathy. Maybe they have empathy for their own families. They definitely don't have any empathy for the lower classes — which is everybody who isn't in their clique. These people are vicious.
The Conscription of Women and Ukraine's Demographic Crisis
Stanislav Krapivnik: Ukraine — I was reading a Ukrainian article talking about, "Yeah, we got our first 20,000 sets of body armour for women that are adjustable for pregnant women." Pregnant women. For God's sake — 10,000 years of civilisation, and the last thing you ever do is send children and women — pregnant women — to the front to fight, unless all the men are dead and the enemy is breaching the walls and it's a matter of stabbing the guy before he kills and rapes you. This is the level of insanity. But here we are. We're going to send the pregnant girls off to fight.
And then you've got von der Leyen — one of her greatest contributions as Minister of Defence of Germany was to demand that the infantry fighting vehicles be expanded because they're too small to fit seven or eight-month pregnant women. These people are sick. For such a thought to form in a rational, healthy human mind — "Let's send an eight-month pregnant woman to fight, that's normal" — for most societies, sending women to fight is already a radical issue in itself. That's one of those "we're losing the war, we have no choice, and losing the war means our extermination" moments. That's usually when societies hit that level. They'll send small boys to fight before they send women. They'll send 6, 8, 10-year-old boys to fight before they send the women. This is how societies are set up.
Like it or not, if you're male, you're expendable — because one man can get a hundred women pregnant, but a hundred men can only get one woman pregnant. Your society dies the other way. No matter what, the breeding-age women have to be kept safe. We're talking on a biological level. This is ingrained in every society. Even larger animals understand this. Humans definitely do. It's ingrained in your biology. The women have to be kept safe. Especially the young women — that's your people's future. The boy children can be sacrificed on the altar if it has to be done. But the women have to be kept safe. That is absolutely beaten into the brains on a genetic level of every normal human being.
So what are we dealing with? We're dealing with people who are absolutely abnormal — who can look at the situation and go, "Not only are we going to send breeding-age women to go die, we're going to send the pregnant breeding-age women to go die." You might as well send the three-year-olds off with a hand grenade. And they'll probably do that too.
Women on the battlefield in Ukraine have gone up from 5% last year to almost 8% this year. So for every 100 dead Ukrainian soldiers, eight of them are women — young women — just to put it into proportion. And apparently in Kharkiv, because they've run out of men to press-gang, they've started press-ganging women to the front, and it will spread to much of the rest of Ukraine. But we're seeing more and more uprisings happening. Unfortunately, they're not very well organised. Once they finish, the SS battalions come in and find the people who were leading or active in these little uprisings against the press gangs, and they either kill them, throw them to the front, or make them stand on their knees and apologise in videos — and then throw them to the front. But you're starting to see cracks. That's why they haven't quite come out flat out and said "we're taking the women," because they're already having cracks with what's left of the men.
Sooner or later they're going to go actively after the 15 and 16-year-old boys, and the 14-year-old boys. There's only one trajectory here — the total extermination of every human being that lives in Ukraine, for the greater good of Europe, or more accurately the greater good of the Epstein class.
You're dealing with an absolute insane oligarchy that runs the European subcontinent west of the Russian border, the Belarusian border. The Poles, I don't think, are quite that insane. It's not everybody, obviously. There are some sane nations. If NATO has to invoke Article 5, there's a whole host of nations that will never fight. They'll probably have revolutions before they fight. The Hungarians probably won't fight. The Bulgarians — I'm not so sure. The Romanians are questionable. They have a puppet regime, but the people voted very powerfully for Georgescu — 64% — who said, "We're out of this. This is done. We're not playing anymore." Of course, they got rid of him. So it's a question of how much the Romanians want to push back. The Spanish, the Portuguese — they're not going to send troops. The Croatians flat out said they're never going to send troops. "We'll send tanks, but we ain't doing anything else." So it's a big question who's left.
The Poles have already swallowed over 10,000 dead. I don't know how many wounded. Sentiment in Poland against the Ukrainians has just exploded — they hate them. Every day, depending on whose stream you get on, there are videos coming out of Poles beating Ukrainians. Any traffic violation in Poland is enough to be extradited to the press gangs across the border. The people in Poland are sick and tired of it. The politicians — questionable. But the people are done.
The Germans, the Scandinavians, the Baltic states, the French, the British — they all seem to have this death wish. But there are still Ukrainians that can be sent off to die, so it's not quite over yet.
I find the media campaign — supported by people like General Keith Kellogg — trying to frame the conscription of women as a feminist issue, that dragging women out of their houses and sending them to the front line to die is the new feminism — it's so dark and depressing I don't even know what to do with it. This was brought up under Biden in the US as a possible course, because the US military was having a horrible time recruiting. With a bad economy, which is rare — normally that works the other way around — if we can't get enough men, and if we have a draft, because there aren't as many men available to fight in the US — 40% of the population in America is obese, another 30-plus percent is just overweight. So when you start looking at the skinny ones, they're not necessarily combat capable either. You've got to put weight on them or drop weight off them.
We were discussing this as officers back in the late 1990s and early 2000s — if we wind up having to fight with China, there's not enough manpower because of the health issues. It came down to: we have to recruit women. You'd have to draft women. That issue popped up again under Biden. And if you looked at social media, there were so many women saying, "I'm not a feminist anymore. I don't believe in feminism. I'm not going to go fight. No way in hell I'm going to fight." All of a sudden all these feminists were like, "Oh, I want to be a traditional wife. I'll do the cooking, and you can go fight if you want. I'm not going to fight."
It's funny — while you're sitting in the comfort of your home, warm, dry feet, full belly, you can support all kinds of things. After all, it's not your skin in the game. But the moment things change and the guys are knocking at your door going, "Son, time to go" — people have a tendency of changing their viewpoints very, very quickly. But by then it's usually too late.
Glenn Diesen: Thank you for taking the time as always. I look forward to seeing you again soon.
Stanislav Krapivnik: Thank you. Always a pleasure.