Glenn Diesen interviews Stanislav Krapivnik on the Ukraine war's escalating fronts and Russia's shifting calculus
Glenn Diesen speaks with Stanislav Krapivnik, a former US Army officer now based in Moscow, about the Ukraine conflict.
Summary
Glenn Diesen interviews Stanislav Krapivnik on the state of the Ukraine war as of June 2026, covering Russian strikes on Kyiv, front-line developments across Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Kharkiv, and Sumy, and the possibility of Belarus entering the conflict. Krapivnik argues that Russia is under growing domestic pressure to escalate beyond Ukraine and strike NATO infrastructure directly, particularly in the Baltic states and Finland, which he contends have become direct combatants by allowing their territory to be used for Ukrainian drone operations. He describes a Ukrainian military incentive system that he calls the "gamification of warfare," in which drone operators earn points and equipment by registering kills — including civilian targets — creating a structural incentive to kill regardless of target type. Krapivnik also argues that the fortification of Ukrainian cities such as Kyiv and Odessa is primarily designed to prevent civilian men from fleeing mobilisation rather than to repel Russian forces, characterising Ukraine under Zelensky as a large-scale population containment operation.
Krapivnik identifies Orbán's removal from the political equation as a significant turning point, arguing he was the last meaningful brake on Europe sliding toward direct war involvement. He contends that neither Fico nor the new Czech prime minister carries enough political weight to stop the EU's momentum. He frames European political systems as effectively operating through a managed decision-making matrix — in which special interests, including BlackRock (which he identifies as a backer of German Chancellor Merz), pre-select outcomes and present leaders and populations with an illusion of choice. He draws on Chomsky's concept of narrowing the scope of acceptable discourse to explain how western media and political culture prevent any serious examination of whether NATO's involvement has actually helped Ukraine.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Opening: Drone warfare, civilian targeting, and the gamification of killing
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. Today is June 2nd, 2026, and we have the great privilege of being joined by Stanislav Krapivnik, a former US Army officer who has since returned to his native Donbas. Thank you for coming back on the program.
Stanislav Krapivnik: Thank you. It's always a pleasure to be on. I've returned to Donbas a bunch of times, but I'm living up in Moscow now.
Glenn Diesen: Right, so you travel quite a bit.
Stanislav Krapivnik: Yeah. I just had a couple of friends — they're former military, so they're a little more stable in these situations than civilians — and they did a run down to Zaporizhzhia. On their way back, up and down the highway that the Ukrainians are trying to turn into a highway of death, they were saying that they're hitting — this is the Tokmak-Dniprorudne highway that branches off and goes on to Kherson, which hasn't quite been liberated yet, and then branches off into Crimea. The Ukrainians are talking about using drones to hit fuel trucks. Well, what they're really doing — and they have hit a few fuel trucks, military ones — but the majority of what they're hitting is civilian trucking, killing civilians. What they've started doing is using drones to drop mines in the middle of the night and leave. As my friends were coming back, a civilian car ahead of them drove over one of those mines and blew up. So this is the situation. It's basically more terror bombing — dropping mines all over the roads — and the vast, vast majority of traffic is civilian traffic. It's just out to kill more civilians. Nothing new.
Russia's escalating strikes on Kyiv and the shifting mood in Moscow
Glenn Diesen: I wanted to get to the front lines later on as well, because there are different developments on different parts of the front. But I wanted to first ask how you see Russia going up the escalation ladder, because when I woke up this morning we saw again another massive strike on Kyiv. In the past we knew there were limited strikes on Kyiv at least, and western leaders were essentially free to catch their train in and out as they pleased. But something appears to have changed in Moscow in terms of decision-making. We now see that Kyiv is no longer off limits — it's being hit much harder — and the rhetoric against the European countries is also intensifying. What is your sense of what has shifted in the mood in Moscow?
Stanislav Krapivnik: Well, the mood in Moscow — better to say the mood in the Kremlin, because the mood in Moscow is that Kyiv should be a crater. Estonia should be a crater, and maybe a few European cities — non-Russian, non-Ukrainian European cities — should be a crater. The mood in Moscow is extremely militant, and that's the vast majority of Russia.
As I was saying, civilians being killed is nothing new. The Ukrainians are murdering between five and ten civilians every single day. Have we talked about the gamification of drone warfare?
Glenn Diesen: No.
Stanislav Krapivnik: Okay, so the gamification of drone warfare — why are Ukrainians, as a last resort, killing civilians? By the way, this is also a reason why Ukrainian drone operators don't ever seem to make it to becoming POWs, if you get my point.
The Ukrainians have an incentive program. If they blow up expensive military equipment, they get a certain number of points. If they take out military personnel, they get another amount of points. If that's not available in the target area, they'll go after civilian engineering equipment or telecommunications equipment. If that's not in the area, they go after civilian trucking. If that's not in the area, they go after civilian cars. If that's not in the area, they'll go after a grandmother walking a baby in a pram. They have to kill something to get some amount of points, and the points go down as you go down the target categories.
So they will always, if their batteries are starting to run out while they're waiting or trying to find something to kill — oh look, there's a kid in a playground. Still a target. Got to kill Russians. They will go after that. The unit, be it a section, a platoon, or a company, collects these points at the end of the month and uses them to buy equipment. They get better equipment, better pay, better provisions, swag — whatever. So this is the gamification of warfare. Another NATO creation, handed over to the Ukrainian lab dog.
That takes whatever little humanity is left in these people and deletes it permanently. They have to kill something. Otherwise, if they lose the drones and don't do anything, they get penalised. And when you consider that the vast majority of drones don't kill anything — all the kills you're seeing with drones represent only about 15 to 20% of drones deployed; the rest are stopped, shot down, caught on trees, and so on — this is the reality of it.
Sure, they'll mine a road, a highway. They'll hit a gas station with civilians fuelling up. They'll go after individual cars. And when needed, they'll go after some grandmother in her garden because it's still something. This is the reality we're dealing with. They will definitely go after a school — killed 21. And when the West says, oh, there was just a missile that went off course — what missile? There were 16 drones, and they were reconnoitring that school in Bisk for half a day with recon drones. So no, this is very specific targeting of civilians as the backup plan for not finding something military.
The dormitory strike in Luhansk and Russia's internal factions
Glenn Diesen: I was also wondering what is changing the calculus in Moscow, because on one hand one hears a lot about NATO allowing its territory to be used to strike Russia. We hear about the Europeans making big noise in terms of not just expressing their intention to develop more capabilities — the long-range missiles — but also the intent that these should be used to strike deep inside Russia. So we have this going up the escalation ladder. But the dormitory strike in Luhansk appears to have made it very difficult to have any more restraint. I agree with how it's been covered, because once it was covered across BBC and other European media, the only coverage was "Putin accuses Russia of targeting this." And then you have some stories that it could have been used by drone operators, even though you have Ukrainian websites setting up death lists, putting the teachers and staff on those lists — so they didn't pretend they were drone operators. Anyway, it's quite a dramatic development. Do you see the dormitory strike having more emotional value, or do you see all of these issues coming together to explain why Russia might be shedding its restraints now?
Stanislav Krapivnik: All those issues — and it's still a limited shedding, in my opinion. Unfortunately, it's a very limited shedding. I don't go into the "let's use nukes" portion, but I think we have the conventional means to get the message across — and not through hitting Ukraine.
The problem is, first of all — by the way, that murder-death-kill list, the military, you know where it's registered? Which servers is it on? Right next to the Pentagon.
Glenn Diesen: CIA.
Stanislav Krapivnik: CIA. Sorry. Yeah. Maryland. Langley, Virginia. That's right. By the way, just for the Americans listening, just so you understand — your government has the proxy servers right next to CIA headquarters. And on that list is a whole lot of American citizens. So your government, be it Biden or Trump, has no problems with proxy-targeting and murdering Americans, your citizens, your fellow citizens, for exercising their free speech. Just let that sink in. I'm not even going to talk about places like England that arrest 15,000 people in a year for thought crimes.
So, Andrei Kartapolov — who is a former general, a member of parliament, and the head of the armed forces committee — came out and said, "Yeah, we're going to target decision-making centres, but we're not going after Zelensky or the politicians. We're only going after the decision-making centres. We're fighting with the military." And I disagree with that, because the military is just a tool. You're fighting with the government.
The thing about targeting the government in Ukraine — if you fight Russia, you fight Iran, you fight China, you're fighting civilisational states. You kill one guy, the next guy steps up. You kill the next guy, the next guy steps up. You don't have that in Ukraine. It's a kleptocracy. The people around Zelensky are there because they're stealing everything dry, and they will continue this war because sending Ukrainian people — sending little boys and girls off to war — makes them money. But they're not in it to die for Ukraine. None of them are planning on dying of old age in Ukraine. They're there to feed off the trough like a bunch of pigs, and what they're feeding off of is the meat and bones of their own people.
So the moment they start getting killed, liquidated, brought to justice, having their come-to-Jesus moment, the rest will run — because they have nothing ideological in this. They're going to take stock: okay, it's gotten dangerous enough that I might get killed. How much money have I stolen? It's enough. I'm getting the hell out. That's what's going to happen with the Zelensky government. It's going to collapse. You don't have to go after Zelensky himself. You just have to take out enough of them. Budanov might be one of the only ones that'll stick around because he is a dedicated terrorist. The rest of them will scatter in every direction — just like some of them already have. Yulia Mendel is a prime example. She was in the government — how long? So you're telling me she didn't know about all the corruption, or did she not get her portion? She decided to jump ship. Somebody that's been that close to Zelensky for that long suddenly leaves in the fifth year of the conflict, the seventh year in with Zelensky. Of course she knew what was going on. You'd have to be absolutely blind, deaf, and dumb not to see the corruption. It's absolutely blatant. People like that, if their lives are in danger, they'll run, because they're living for themselves and their pocketbook.
Now, from the Russian side, unfortunately Zelensky's inner circle is not on the target list. It should be. But the problem with NATO is that NATO is very comfortable. The EU is very comfortable. No matter what they do, it's the dumb Ukrainians who are going to get smacked. They're just biomaterial anyway. Who cares? And that's the problem. NATO has to be made an example of — and not in Kyiv, not involving Kyiv. Maybe Tallinn, maybe Riga. That should be the example. Here's what's going to happen to the rest of NATO. You forgot what war is. Start feeling a little bit of war on your own skin. Or maybe Helsinki. These cities should be made to suffer. Switch them off. Take out their life-critical infrastructure — your water sanitation systems. By the way, what the Americans do constantly. The Americans would have exterminated Europe by now if the Europeans were doing this to them. And that's the point: it gets done to Russia. Why the hell are we not doing the same?
Look, the Iranians blew up 13 American bases. Is there a nuclear war? No. The Israelis go in and murder the leadership of a different country. Is there a nuclear war? And those are quite literally the examples being used on the Russian government.
The Kremlin is not a uniform entity, just like any major government is not a uniform entity. It has factions. One of the bigger factions now coming to the fore is: start beating the crap out of NATO. Make an example. Take out NATO bases — take them out. That's the message NATO needs. It's the militant wing that's now rising up. You've got a liberal wing that wants to bring everything back to 2012 — unrealistically, yes, but that's what they believe in. You have different other factions, like in any major government. In the American government you see it all on display because they all like to pump themselves up. In Russia it's under the covers. But you see, for example, Shoigu, the generals, to a smaller degree the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Lavrov — they want a hard response. Medvedev is in that category too. Other people like Dmitry Peskov want to make a deal. So you have different factions within the government, and the hardline faction, especially with these outrages that the Ukrainians and NATO are producing — with Italian-made drones, as journalists have been showing the drone pieces down there — this has just raised public anger that much higher.
And what Kyiv is getting is not the response the majority want. It's enough to calm the anger down a little, but the majority of people want Kyiv to be a very big hole in the ground right now. We can rebuild it later. That's the attitude. The Ukrainians have done something that only the Germans were able to do in 1941 — they taught Russians how to hate again, and the hatred is growing exponentially with all the crimes against civilians.
I think that until NATO countries are hit — take one or two, make an example, and make a very direct message: today it's Riga, tomorrow it's Warsaw, the day after it's Paris or London — we don't have to blow up the civilians. Nobody needs to do it with nuclear weapons. The Russian technology is unstoppable. It's big enough and hard enough that you can switch a city off, destroy the internal communications. When those Oreshnik strikes hit in Dnipropetrovsk, that side of Dnipropetrovsk — all the pipes, sewage pipes, water pipes, they all burst because it's a 4.6 earthquake on the edge of the city, close to ground zero. It's about a 5 to 5.5 on the Richter scale earthquake. Those pipings are not made to be earthquake-proof. That's how much kinetic energy is being dumped. So yeah, you can do a lot of damage and make the people very uncomfortable in their lives — and then after this it gets very serious.
But until NATO feels this themselves, they're not going to stop. When they're allowing their airspace to be used — let's understand what that means. They are now a direct participant in this war. By allowing their airspace, their ground space, anything to be used without trying to shoot down these drones as they pass through their territory, they are no longer neutral. They are no longer a proxy. They are direct combatants. NATO countries are direct combatants. At a minimum that's Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. And if you listen to what the Russian intelligence services have put out, Latvia has gone the next step — it's in the process of allowing five of its bases to be used as launching platforms for Ukrainian drones. They are a direct party to this war. They can't even say they're just supporting and defending Ukraine. They are direct combatants, at which point they should be treated as direct combatants. You've made the decision. You are now a direct combatant in this war.
Now the question is: are the Germans ready to start receiving some of that? Are the British ready? How far are we going to go with this?
Front-line developments: Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Kharkiv, and Sumy
Glenn Diesen: I think this is something that's missed in the West — what is happening in Russia. Every time they see a missile striking deep inside Russia, which European leaders more or less not just celebrate but also take credit for in terms of how they are producing these missiles, and everyone knows they're directing them — I think it gets lost in all of this what's happening on the other side. As you said, the anger growing in Russia, the hatred in Moscow, which wants a powerful retaliation. Even if you put the emotional aspect aside, you can see the pragmatic argument for why Russia is probably shifting now to a much more hardline position.
Over the past four years you had this growing slow incrementalism — longer-range weapons, more powerful weapons being sent. In the beginning it was controversial. I remember Stoltenberg said, "Oh, this means we're in war with Russia" — that was a controversial thing to say. Now they're all essentially saying it. So the language has shifted, the direct involvement has become more obvious, and at every step the Russians had this dilemma: do you retaliate and risk a wider war with NATO, or do you look the other way and send the signal that they won't retaliate, which then emboldens the other side? And anyone reading western newspapers now can't disagree that NATO countries are emboldened — every day you see articles about how we can do what we want, the Russians aren't going to do anything, they're afraid of war. But deterrence works if Russia attacks NATO. If it turns out deterrence means Russia can't retaliate against NATO, then we escalate and escalate, and at some point you're going to reach a breaking point. This is my sentiment as well — we've kind of crossed that line now, and the delusion of escalation control is going to be our undoing.
But I did want to get to the front lines, because there's a lot going on. In the Zaporizhzhia region the Ukrainians have taken territories especially along the Dnipro, while also targeting the roads leading toward Kherson. Meanwhile Constantinivka appears to be falling — I don't want to put a timeline, it could be days to possibly a few weeks. And the Russians are also opening up a much wider front line across Kharkiv and Sumy, where a lot of different front lines appear to be merging as they're expanding. How do you interpret the wider developments? A lot of things appear to be changing — not just the escalation of missile and drone strikes, but the front lines are going through some changes as well.
Stanislav Krapivnik: I'll start from Zaporizhzhia and work my way around in a semicircle.
In western Zaporizhzhia, the Ukrainians have thrown in everything including the kitchen sink, and they have rolled the Russian forces back to a degree. This is their third counter-offensive in the Zaporizhzhia region since February. The problem with the two previous ones: one was an attempted counter-offensive near Huliaipole, which was stopped almost instantly, crushed, and rolled back — well, there wasn't even much to roll back because they hadn't made any progress. The other was northeast, or mostly east, of Tokmak, and that is now basically being encircled. They were able to push through the front lines, got up to the second lines, were stopped, and now they are being encircled from the east and the west, with a river to their rear and all the bridges blown. So there's a very large pocket of Ukrainians surrounded.
The reason the Ukrainians are able to break through faster than Russian forces is they don't give a damn about losses. That's the key point. They will throw in suicide infantry. Just to understand how this works: when these guys get press-ganged off the streets, they get separated into two categories — 35 and under and healthy, and 35 and older or not healthy. The younger guys get picked up by assault infantry brigades where they'll actually get training and decent equipment, because they're used as storm infantry. Everybody else goes to a suicide squad — good for one raw charge, or they put them out to hold some sector that the storm infantry can't hold.
The storm infantry does an assault, but they also take a lot of casualties in the process and then they pull out because they can't hold. Before they do an assault, they'll launch three or four waves of suicide infantry to try to soften up the Russian positions. I have a friend — I'm not sure if I told you this before on the show. He told me they crossed the Kharkiv border over in Vovchansk, took some high ground, dug in. He said in front of their fighting positions there were 2 km of open fields. What the Ukrainians would do is launch these waves of suicide infantry. He said it was obvious these guys had zero training — basically shown which end of the rifle was the business end and sent off. He said they hardly ever fired on them. Two kilometres of fields — the artillery chewed them up halfway through. None of them survived. They bring the next wave, and the next wave, and the next wave. They had such a position with two kilometres of open fields in front of them that there was no point in bringing the storm infantry, because the suicide squads just got wiped out by artillery halfway through every time.
Two kilometres is a long distance to run across, especially if you're out of shape. But even if you're in shape, 2 km of open field against artillery is a suicide mission. The job of any infantryman is to initiate combat within a 50-metre range. The average firefight since World War II was initiated at 50 metres or closer. That's why infantry brawls, climbs, or tries to charge across in vehicles to get as close as possible before initiating direct kinetic engagement. Anything else means you're going to get killed — between long-range artillery, medium-range artillery, mortars, aviation, and everything else. If I see you at 200, 300, or 500 metres, you'll never make it to 50 metres if I'm in a prepared position with enough resources behind me. It's impossible.
So these guys are just being thrown away. They make these movements forward, grab something, put up a bunch of photos — it's PR again. But they can't hold because they lose so much of their resources to grab that ground, and then they get rolled back. So I'm not exactly worried about western Zaporizhzhia. At best you call it a spoiling attack to try to delay the Russian offensive there.
Then you have Orikhiv. Orikhiv runs along two parallel highways. It's a long, thin settlement with satellite settlements to the south of it. It's the last fortress in this area — a hastily built-up fortress, because it wasn't like the Donbas, built up for eight years. At this point the southwestern two neighbouring settlements have been invested. There's close combat that's been going on for a while. There's some movement on Orikhiv from the west, so Russian forces are about 9 km away. And on the east, Russian forces are breaking through and are about 9 km away — they were over 20 km away at the beginning of the year. They're closing in relatively quickly because the Ukrainian defences in those areas have collapsed and it's mostly open terrain. So Orikhiv is about to be taken from three directions, and the northwestern two parallel roads are under drone control, making it pretty difficult to get resources in.
Once that's done, there are no defensive positions in Zaporizhzhia up to the Dnipro estuary areas. In the Donetsk Republic, it's pretty much quiet on the southern portion. There's been a break into the enemy lines in the Donetsk direction — I won't say breakthrough, it's a break in. But everything in that area has been concentrated first and foremost on Constantinivka. Constantinivka is about 70% in Russian hands. There's a big pocket of Ukrainians surrounded in the south-central portion of the city. The city itself has split along the river. The bridges have been blown. The bridges from the north have been blown. So they can't support each other. Russian forces went around the city from either side in a long envelopment, and the pincers came together and cut off about 70% of the city — directly in Russian hands or in a pocket with Ukrainians trapped in it.
What's left in Constantinivka looks like it's about to fall, and Russian forces are moving closer — they're within about 6 or 7 kilometres of the edges of Kramatorsk from the east. I wish you had a map up. Constantinivka would be right here, then Kramatorsk right here — it makes like a C, or an inverted L, or the Cyrillic letter G. And really what's left is Constantinivka, Sloviansk, and there's one other small town to the south of Kramatorsk — I can't remember its name at the moment — that forms this wall. That's it. Those are your final big fortified positions. If you look at any of the tactical maps or theatre maps and see the fortifications, usually drawn in yellow lines, you see this cluster of fortifications up and down those areas, and there's almost nothing past those areas.
In the north, toward the Sloviansk direction, there's continued siege of Lyman. Russian forces have surrounded it, cut off logistics. They're not very anxious to go into house-to-house fighting. They're doing constant probing attacks to wear the Ukrainians out, and the Ukrainians are out of food and running out of ammo. So it's just a matter of time until you break morale or they run out of ammo and you clean up. But that opens the way up into Sloviansk from the north.
Kupyansk is in Russian hands. It's a cleanup operation on the edge of Kupyansk, reorganisation, and in that pocket up to the city and the Siverskyi Donets river — there's a big water reservoir east of Kharkiv — the Russian forces up north have been cutting the logistic lines, moving into that pocket all up and down the borders. Whenever they decide to launch the offensive out of Kupyansk toward the city of Brianka, that'll cut off that pocket fully. That's about a fourth of Kharkiv Oblast that's going to get cut off. It's basically already logistically cut off, though logistics are very difficult in that pocket. There are a couple thousand, maybe 5,000 to 10,000 more Ukrainian soldiers in that area.
Russia is steadily moving toward Kharkiv out of Vovchansk. They've finished off the Ukrainian forces there. They're using the forests to move down because the forests, everything being green, give a lot of protection against drones. They're moving through the forested areas. Same thing in Sumy, while we're at it. Russian forces are about 7 to 8 km away from Sumy in the north — a light day's walk, a very light day's walk. They're also using the forest to infiltrate through and get around the drones to get to the edge of the city. And there's movement in eastern Sumy, but that's still about 30 km outside the city of Sumy, as opposed to 8 km in the north. So there's pressure up and down the line.
Belarus and the fortification of Ukrainian cities as population control
And Zelensky keeps talking about Kyiv — that Russian forces might be moving out of Belarus, and so on. There have been about 160 Ukrainian drone overflights of Belarus, which at this point is a casus belli for Belarus to actually get into this war.
But there's an interesting point I want to raise. I was on with Salivar last week, and people started talking about the Ukrainians fortifying the cities of Kyiv, Nikopol, Mykolaiv, Odessa, and all these other cities — barbed wire, anti-tank trenches, dragon's teeth, minefields. People were saying, they must be ready because we're about to break through. No, gentlemen, you're missing the point.
Ukraine is a big concentration camp. Let's begin with that. The borders are barbed-wired. The guards shoot to kill anybody trying to get out of Ukraine. But Ukraine is still a big place. Now, the Zelensky regime has started mass mobilisation — or as we call it, morganisation — of the male population in Kyiv. Here's the problem: they could still run away in the middle of the night out of the city. So what do you do? You fortify the city.
And guess what? Not only does it work to keep Russian forces out — and it doesn't work too well for that, because unless you have overwatch of that portion of the minefield, dragon's teeth, and barbed wire area, those obstacles can be removed relatively quickly with heavy equipment, particularly tanks. You throw a chain around a dragon's tooth, the tank starts backing up and just drags it out of the way. It's a temporary hold on movement, very temporary. The reason you put up obstacles like that on a battlefield is you have to overwatch them with artillery, with direct fire weapon systems, so when the enemy is trying to get through them you're shooting them up. Other than that, it's just a temporary handicap.
It works great for civilians. You cannot get civilian cars across a field anymore, even if it's dry, because there's Constantine wire, there are dragon's teeth, there are minefields. Civilians running across the field to get the hell out of Kharkiv or get the hell out of Odessa — run for the hills, or to some small villages out there they can hide in. There's the barbed wire. There are the minefields. There are checkpoints on all the roads going in and out, with bunkers and overwatch. So now you control what comes into that city and what comes out of the city.
In other words, Kyiv is a big ghetto — like the Warsaw Ghetto. It's a big ghetto. Odessa is a big ghetto. All these cities have now become big ghettos. Now you can start harvesting them a lot more easily. They're not going to run anywhere. They can't run anywhere, or it makes it much more difficult for them to run anywhere. That's the reality of Ukraine. It's a concentration camp with many concentration camps inside of it.
In the Kharkiv area, they're now press-ganging women because they're out of men. These are pretty well Russian-speaking areas. They've started press-ganging women. All over Ukraine, they've got billboards — they're not press-ganging women in the rest of Ukraine, but they're doing everything psychologically to get them to go fight. Billboards all over the place: you're a woman in Ukraine, your duty is to fight on the battlefield.
This is to the last Ukrainian — just for the western audience to understand. All the meat must go to the grinder. That's it. When the last Ukrainian baby has a grenade strapped to its hand with the pin pulled and is told to run toward the Russian soldiers, that's when Zelensky and the rest of the parasites get off the dead corpse and leave — for Israel, for the US, for the UK. And the majority of them will leave for Israel, because they're all mostly Israeli citizens with dual citizenship. If we're going to be honest about it, Zelensky's grandparents live in a $7 million mansion in Tel Aviv. Just to be honest about this — everybody wants to avoid the fact that the Israelis are absolutely deep in all of this too, and in all this mass murder. And by the way, there are Israeli colonies now popping up in southwestern Ukraine — they've been there for the last year and a half — and they have their own armed security, off limits to the locals who actually live in those areas. So that's the reality of it.
Belarus entering the war and Zelensky's strategy of European entanglement
Glenn Diesen: I'm glad you mentioned Belarus, because that's another area where it appears a possibility for escalation. Ukraine — or Zelensky especially — has made the point that Belarus could enter the fight at any time, either Russia through Belarus or Belarus joining the fight directly, and they say they've picked 500 targets already in Belarus ready to strike. You have a lot of Ukrainian drone incursions into Belarus. So the claims by Zelensky are either real or false. If they are real — that Belarus will enter the fight — that would be a big escalation on the Russian side, possibly part of a knockout blow against Ukraine. If they're false, it could signal Ukrainian escalation — I'm not sure why, unless it's to open another front line. I'm also not sure what the calculation would be, but it might be easier for European countries to enter the war more directly if they were attacking Belarus as opposed to Russia directly.
I'm not quite sure what the calculation would be. But how are you seeing this? Or is this just something to keep the Ukraine war in the media, because this is something Zelensky has been worried about in the past — whenever the cameras are pointing to the Middle East, the weapons dry up, the money dries up. I always made the point, in defence of Zelensky if you will, that people often argue he's fighting a lot of PR wars, but you have to fight some PR wars when you're backed by foreign governments who need the public to have a certain interest in order to continue pumping in the weapons. So how are you assessing these reports about the war expanding into Belarus?
Stanislav Krapivnik: Zelensky's only hope for long-term survival and continuing to feed like the parasite that he is, is to involve the European Union fully in this war. I should say NATO, but it's the European Union — the Americans are going to make money off the European meat they're going to help send to the front, but they're not going to fight. Why would they? Europe is more than happy to exterminate its own population. Non-Russian Europe is more than happy to exterminate its own peasant population for American profits and their own profits. And most of the European leadership, if they don't have dual citizenship, they definitely have landing strips somewhere in the US or such to get the hell out when their term is done or when the civilians are ready to go lynch them. We've seen this obviously over and over again. The people screaming loudest for war — like the Baltics — they all have dual citizenship, most of them with America or England. So yeah, they're not going to stick around. The peasants can go die off. When it gets too hot, they'll get the hell out. A lot of their families are already out.
These people are not going to die for their nations. They're going to get rich off their nations. So the point of Zelensky has always been to drag the rest of the Europeans into this war. That's his modus operandi for survival. And up until about a year ago, the European Union had more or less been good at dodging that bullet. But something in their mentality changed. Not only are they not dodging the bullet, they're getting out of their trenches, standing up full height and going, "Yes, shoot us. Get us into this war. We want to die en masse."
And the European population, for the most part, does too — and I'll tell you why. Because they vote for these people. They continue to contribute to these people. They don't listen to our shows, the majority of them. They listen to what makes them feel comfortable. We're gonna win. We're the winners. But something all those Europeans need to understand — it's called the Ukrainisation of Europe. Your leadership is paying very close attention to how to put you into the grave. They are taking the Ukrainian model. They're experimenting in Ukraine. That's going to be in Germany. That's going to be in France. That's going to be in every one of these nations that really wants to go to war. And if you vote for anybody but the parties that go against that, you want to die in a war. You may not understand that, but that's exactly what you're voting for.
Germany is a prime example. It's basically got two parties. It's got the AfD — Alternative für Deutschland — and it's got the uniparty, because the entire uniparty, all the other parties, are voting for the exact same thing: escalation, escalation, escalation. They may have some differences in internal affairs, but they all vote for exactly the same thing. So it's basically a uniparty. The entire German elite is a uniparty except for the AfD. And it's the same thing in most of these countries. In England, you have Reform, which people still have hope for as an alternative. And then everybody else is the same. The Greens are more rabid than Labour, and then the Tories, but they're basically all the same thing. They're the uniparty. Every single European country has a uniparty. They make you think you have a choice. You have no choice. You have a controlled choice. That's the epitome of controlling the peasants — give them the illusion of a choice. In reality, you have no choice. You vote for any of these parties, you're going to get the same result. Maybe the wrapping will be a little different. Maybe the bow tie will have a little different design on it, but in the end you get the same present. And the present is: the men are going to go die, and the elites are going to get rich.
The illusion of choice and the decision-making matrix
Glenn Diesen: Noam Chomsky once wrote that the way you often control discussions in liberal democratic societies is you just narrow the scope of acceptable discourse and then encourage vibrant debate within that. So if you can have a society where you can discuss whether Putin is more like Hitler or Stalin —
Stanislav Krapivnik: Or maybe he's Genghis Khan — here's the outlying concept.
Glenn Diesen: Yes, so for example in many countries you would have a debate to what extent we should help Ukraine, because on one hand one should avoid nuclear war, and on the other hand we shouldn't embolden the Russians to use nuclear blackmail. But the premise which narrows the debate is the assumption that this is helping Ukraine — that we toppled their government without the consent of the majority of Ukrainians, against their will and against their constitution, then sabotaged the Minsk agreement, sabotaged the 2019 election result essentially, undermined the Istanbul agreement, boycotted diplomacy for four years, and just pumped in weapons to the elites and bribed them to make sure they continue the war. All of this goes under the great banner of helping Ukraine, and no one ever goes back to ask: well, imagine what the country would look like today if we hadn't done this. If we had allowed the country to be a bridge instead of a bastion against the Russians, they would have had all their territory including Crimea, all the men would still be there, the future would be intact. But no one questions whether or not this has anything to do with helping.
So we narrow it like this, and this is what we can discuss. If you challenge somehow the virtue and altruism of NATO, then you fall outside the bounds of civilised discourse. It has to be based on the premise that our leaders are doing what they think is right, that we are good and the Russians are evil. As long as you agree to this, then we can have a debate. That's why before a discussion about Iran or what's happening in Palestine, the opening question will be: do you condemn Hamas? We have to first establish this. Also: do you condemn Putin? Once you've ensured that everyone has identified the good guy and the bad guy, then we can have a debate — and a vigorous one — and then people feel like, yes, this is an open democratic society. But I look at my own country and I see every single member of parliament is for sending weapons. Not a single member of parliament is saying perhaps we should talk to Russia. Diplomacy is controversial. And none of the media — I could name all the newspapers in the world, but they all write the exact same thing. This doesn't happen by accident. Chomsky has done a lot of good work on this. Anyway, do you have any final thoughts?
Stanislav Krapivnik: Yeah. In the corporate and military world this is called the decision-making matrix. The commander goes: okay, what are my courses of action? And the staff goes off to create a list. So, especially if you're a staff with an agenda — you want a particular course of action — you take that course of action that you want the commander, the CEO, or the vice president to agree on. You add a couple of other courses of action that are not far off, or very bad. Any other course of action that may be good but against your agenda, you just drop off and don't add in there. You get your five or six courses of action. You have your weighted averages on what each action will do, and you just weight in favour of your option. You present it: here are six different options, sir. There's only one good option — the one we want him to choose. We've already weighted everything to make sure that's the option that gets chosen.
It works the same way for the peasant as it works for the king. You give the king the options. He feels like he has choice, he has maneuver. But really he has no maneuver. You've already weighted that field. You've gotten rid of the more radical options — or they may not be radical, they may be the only sensible ones, but the ones you don't want. You've taken them off the table or made them look so bad that it's suicide. And you've given them an illusion of choice: here are your five or six courses of action. There's only one right course of action. But even if he doesn't take that one and takes the second-best one, it's pretty close to the first one. So you're still going in that direction, and you'll modify it for the next one and the next one to get back on the course you wanted.
This is how governments are also run, especially when you have ignorant people running governments who have no concept of what the hell is going on, no education worth anything, who are just morons — which describes a very large chunk of western leadership. The special interests behind them give them an illusion of choice. Sure, you're the one in charge. Absolutely. You're the prime minister. Of course you're in charge, sir. Yes, you're the big guy. And he comes out feeling like: yes, it was a horrible choice, but we made the right choice because I knew the choices we had to make and we had to make this choice. And he's now convinced that that's the right choice — the one he was always being pushed toward, to get on the road that his backers or the great cardinals wanted.
That's the illusion of choice. It works just as well for the leadership. And believe me, most of those leaders are getting manipulated just as easily. The worst part is, especially in any quote-unquote democratic society, when the leadership starts to believe their own BS. They start believing their own propaganda. That's when it really gets dangerous.
For the European Union, we're in that dangerous zone now. The last big brake on Europe going to war was Orbán, and Orbán's been removed. Neither Fico nor — what's his name, Bosáč? — the new prime minister in the Czech Republic — neither of those two are heavy enough weights to really put a brake on this runaway train. Orbán was doing a good job of it — not because he was pro-Russian, but because he was pro-Hungarian, as it should be. Everybody should be taking care of their own country and their own country's interests. That's how you can negotiate with people, because you figure out what their country's interests are. He's taking care of his country's interest. We can negotiate. We can find common ground. You can't find common ground with ideologues unless you submit to them. That's the problem. And Russia is not about to submit to a cage full of hamsters — very vicious hamsters biting each other as often as trying to bite somebody else.
These people have bought into their own BS. They believe their own propaganda. They've been manipulated. Some of them very well knew the direction they were supposed to be going from the very beginning. Either way, this is how you control the leadership, just as well as you control the peasant. You can control the king. It all depends who's standing in the background. That's what you really need to look at. Who's behind these people? BlackRock is behind Merz. We know the Americans are also involved, but BlackRock has lost a lot of investment in Ukraine and they're not very happy. A lot of these other companies aren't very happy either. You just start looking at the bigger interests standing behind any of these figureheads.
Glenn Diesen: That's the logic behind the NGO industry as well, I guess. But no, I agree. People like Fico and Bosáč — they're able to pull their countries back a little bit, but they're not able to stop the EU from rolling forward towards war. So yeah. Anyway, thank you very much for taking time so early on a Tuesday morning. I appreciate it.
Stanislav Krapivnik: You too. Thank you.