Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Okay, hello, welcome to it could happen here. This is
Speaker 2: Sharene today. I am joined by you know him, you
Speaker 2: love him. It's Robert.
Speaker 3: Hi, Robert Ah. Someone knows me and loves me. That's nice.
Speaker 2: Robert is here today to talk with me to Charles McBride.
Speaker 2: But I met Charles fairly recently doing just pro Palestine
Speaker 2: stuff online, and I really liked his work. He's here
Speaker 2: to talk about some things that I think are very
Speaker 2: important to like Ukraine, and why helping Ukraine is not
Speaker 2: the same thing as aid to Israel and all that
Speaker 2: good stuff. And yeah, let's just get right into it.
Speaker 2: I want to know your experience with Ukraine. Can you
Speaker 2: just tell us a little bit about that first?
Speaker 3: Sure.
Speaker 4: First of all, thank you Sharen so much for having
Speaker 4: me on. This has been one of my favorite podcasts
Speaker 4: for a while. So this is kind of a slightly
Speaker 4: surreal moment going into my experience with Ukraine. I double
Speaker 4: majored in history in comparative religion in college, and I
Speaker 4: was kind of interested in sort of the post Soviet sphere,
Speaker 4: and I worked on some kind of post Soviet issues
Speaker 4: when I lived in Washington, d C. After school, and
Speaker 4: also was deeply interested in Eastern Orthodox Christianity, which is
Speaker 4: kind of why I took an interest in that region.
Speaker 4: So I remember, in like twenty fifteen, I watched this
Speaker 4: Vice video called Russian Roulette that popped up on my
Speaker 4: YouTube feed, and it just completely it just put Ukraine
Speaker 4: on the map for me in a way that I'd
Speaker 4: never really thought about before. I thought of it as
Speaker 4: the Ukraine. Yeah, my Muscovite Russian history professor had always
Speaker 4: talked about it as a part of Russia, and she
Speaker 4: had denied, you know, I was during the Midan the
Speaker 4: Revolution of Dignity, I was in college, and she denied
Speaker 4: that Ukraine had any autonomy. She echoed all the putinesque
Speaker 4: sort of talking points about CIA intervention and neo Nazis
Speaker 4: and stuff, and I didn't really know what. I didn't
Speaker 4: know at that point. So then I, yeah, I got
Speaker 4: I got interested in in sort of what was happening
Speaker 4: in the lead up to the Russian invasion. And I
Speaker 4: had been following this guy who went over to Syria
Speaker 4: a couple of years ago named Aidan Aslin. And in
Speaker 4: my conversations with with aid and he'd sort of told
Speaker 4: me a little bit about kind of what stuff was
Speaker 4: like in going on in Ukraine, and I got very
Speaker 4: interested in I was following him and all of his
Speaker 4: friends and what they were doing. And at that point,
Speaker 4: I had, you know, about four or five years of
Speaker 4: nonprofit humanitarian experience under my belt, as long as as
Speaker 4: well as sort of a historical political understanding of the region.
Speaker 4: And so when the when the war happened, when the
Speaker 4: full scale invasion happened, I immediately started trying to fundraise, trying
Speaker 4: to help out, trying to educate, and sleep to try
Speaker 4: and cut through Russian propaganda because there were a lot
Speaker 4: of people in my sphere who were just retweeting straight
Speaker 4: up Russian propaganda. They were elevating you know what you
Speaker 4: and I know who are basically Krimlin adjacent individuals in
Speaker 4: the United States who have Sway and leftist circles, some
Speaker 4: of whom have re emerged in the Palestine discussion, much
Speaker 4: to my chagrin.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, I'm sure we'll talk about that more like
Speaker 5: I would love to.
Speaker 3: Get into that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And so yeah, in my hope was to kind
Speaker 4: of to do that, and as I was sort of
Speaker 4: working with Ukrainian it's one of the things they said is, hey, man,
Speaker 4: everything happens here. You have to be in Ukraine for
Speaker 4: to get anything off the ground, so you need to
Speaker 4: come here. And I'm like, are you insane? It's there's
Speaker 4: a war going on in your country. So I said yes,
Speaker 4: and yes, yes, I am in retrospect. So the second
Speaker 4: week of the war, I booked a plane ticket, flew
Speaker 4: over there, across the train and the pole, and scared
Speaker 4: out of my mind, got in touch with the Ukrainians
Speaker 4: I'd been talking to previously, and after a mad hustle
Speaker 4: from the train station, was very comfortably drinking tea in
Speaker 4: a cute little apartment in Leviv with somebody's grandmother. And
Speaker 4: I was like, this is this is crazy experience. So
Speaker 4: I spent two months in Ukraine. At the beginning, my
Speaker 4: attention was to sort of identify gaps in the medical
Speaker 4: supply chain, particularly things that were going to be initially
Speaker 4: overlooked in the mad dash of refugees and resettlement and
Speaker 4: all that sort of stuff. And one of the things
Speaker 4: we identified was like prescription medication for people coming from
Speaker 4: the East to the West. And yeah, I think it's
Speaker 4: important that not a lot of realized that people coming
Speaker 4: from Eastern Ukraine. A lot of them had never visited
Speaker 4: cities like Leviv until the start of full scale invasion,
Speaker 4: predominantly Russian speakers, and you know, for them, Leviv was
Speaker 4: almost like going to Poland, and it was a very
Speaker 4: new thing for them. But you know, your medical issues
Speaker 4: don't stop just because someone invades their country. In fact,
Speaker 4: oftentimes they get worse. And so what I was trying
Speaker 4: to do initially was was find a way to address that,
Speaker 4: and that led me into contact with Rostislov Philippinko, who's
Speaker 4: one of my dear friends and the co founder of
Speaker 4: the organization that we started together called Mission HARKV. So
Speaker 4: that organization worked initially on prescription medications and then started
Speaker 4: distributing high end oncology drugs, which are very difficult to transport,
Speaker 4: very lucrative to steel, and very difficult to store because
Speaker 4: they have to be kept at a constant temperature. So
Speaker 4: we focused on those things while everybody else was focusing
Speaker 4: on tints and you know, and clothes for refugees and
Speaker 4: that sort of stuff. And as a result, we carved
Speaker 4: out a very interesting niche in terms of the humanitarian
Speaker 4: response and are still you know, going strong with that
Speaker 4: today and so that was initially kind of why I
Speaker 4: went over there for that first two months, and since
Speaker 4: then I've been back over to film a documentary, sort
Speaker 4: of an artistic short documentary called Note of Defiance, and
Speaker 4: then I was involved with another documentary project which is
Speaker 4: hopefully forthcoming in the next year.
Speaker 3: Nice.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I don't think I've talked about this on the show,
Speaker 5: but kind of my relationship with Ukraine and eventually going
Speaker 5: over there and starting to report on what was happening
Speaker 5: started weirdly enough as a result of the fact that
Speaker 5: I had friends who went to the big Burning Man
Speaker 5: event in Nevada, and I wound up traveling with one
Speaker 5: of them in India, this Ukrainian woman who lived in
Speaker 5: the Bay and when stuff started in late twenty thirteen,
Speaker 5: which is when the Revolution of Dignity is kind of
Speaker 5: the common Ukrainian name for it. You'll also hear it
Speaker 5: referred to as like the twenty fourteen revolution of the
Speaker 5: madn Revolution. They're all talking about the same thing, which
Speaker 5: is when the guy who was the President of Ukraine
Speaker 5: trying to make himself into a dictator, the stude Victor Yanikovich,
Speaker 5: who is this incredibly wealthy oligarch who literally built a
Speaker 5: golden palace for himself with like a fake lake that
Speaker 5: had a boat on it, that was a restaurant for
Speaker 5: just him, for like the level of rich oligarch asshole
Speaker 5: we're talking about here, cracked down really brutally on a
Speaker 5: student protest, which it kind of culminated in this kind
Speaker 5: of escalating occupation of the Center Square in the capitol
Speaker 5: that basically got built into an ice fortress in like
Speaker 5: the middle of the Ukrainian winter. This very very like
Speaker 5: pretty epic story of successful resistance because this guy is
Speaker 5: eventually forced out the police riot unit, the bearcoot who
Speaker 5: had done had been literally killing people by dropping them
Speaker 5: naked in like ice drifts and stuff, are disbanded. It's
Speaker 5: a really remarkable story, and I just kind of fell
Speaker 5: into it because my friend connected me with a couple
Speaker 5: of people who were on the ground there, who were
Speaker 5: friends of hers, who were Ukrainian in the tech industry,
Speaker 5: who traveled to the US every year or so for
Speaker 5: burning Man, and so when this occupation of the madn started,
Speaker 5: they were like, well, we know how to, like we're
Speaker 5: used to making soup and food for large numbers of
Speaker 5: people and like running little chunks of a camp. So
Speaker 5: we'll just start, We'll just do the thing that we
Speaker 5: do at our camp out over in Maidan. And they
Speaker 5: were part of the thing they were part of was
Speaker 5: the Automidon, which was this like mobile unit of resupply
Speaker 5: where people would like basically drive supplies to and from
Speaker 5: different areas of occupation in the city. It was a
Speaker 5: pretty dangerous job as things escalated, but that was my
Speaker 5: ind and I wound up talking to like, I don't know,
Speaker 5: twenty or thirty people like actively the entire time the
Speaker 5: occupation was going on. There's like two folks I never
Speaker 5: was able to get back in touch with who just
Speaker 5: kind of like dropped off at a certain point. Like
Speaker 5: it was a really sketchy time for a lot of people.
Speaker 5: But I wound up traveling there the year after, right
Speaker 5: after the early part of the invasion, started to report
Speaker 5: from Avdifka, which is, you know, was had been under
Speaker 5: siege for a year at that point and is still
Speaker 5: under siege today. For an idea of like that's a
Speaker 5: decade now basically that that this this little town has
Speaker 5: been shelled.
Speaker 2: Yeah, anyway, yeah, I didn't know that about burning Man.
Speaker 3: That's well, it was a weird way to get connected
Speaker 3: to it. Yeah.
Speaker 5: I just got a message from this friend of mine
Speaker 5: who's like, hey, somebody, someboddies from my camp are like
Speaker 5: trying to overthrow their government. Do you want to talk
Speaker 5: to them? I was like, well, yeah, that sounds pretty dope. Yeah,
Speaker 5: that's your mo that's wild. You know what burning Man
Speaker 5: really does, apply It.
Speaker 4: Provides, It really connects all, doesn't it. I have some
Speaker 4: weird like tangential burning I've never been.
Speaker 3: But I have like neither of I actually yeah.
Speaker 4: I have like Burning Man devotees who play a large
Speaker 4: role in my life. And it's just very interesting.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, the weird little connections you get. And I
Speaker 5: was kind of disappointed, you know. To me, this was
Speaker 5: because the whole time, especially like the late twenty thirteen
Speaker 5: early twenty fourteen, as this was going on, I was like, well,
Speaker 5: they're probably all going to get killed, right, like, just
Speaker 5: you know, we were several years in the Syrian Civil
Speaker 5: War at this point, Like I was not optimistic, and
Speaker 5: that's not what happened. And then there was like this
Speaker 5: counterpoint of realizing a few years later that oh, a
Speaker 5: shocking number of people on the left think it was
Speaker 5: a bad thing that they overthrew their government. Yeah, which, yeah,
Speaker 5: I guess gets us into the kind of thing you
Speaker 5: wanted to talk about, which is the difference in providing
Speaker 5: military aid to Ukraine versus Israel.
Speaker 3: Yeah, which I don't know.
Speaker 5: I mean, from my standpoint, it's pretty obvious, right, Like,
Speaker 5: one country is fighting a military that has a massive
Speaker 5: industrial base, much more powerful than it and is killing
Speaker 5: large numbers of civilians, and they have proven their ability
Speaker 5: with military aid to react effectively to this invasion. And
Speaker 5: the other case, I don't think I need to explain
Speaker 5: which one, but it's Israel is a country with a
Speaker 5: massive arms industry that is fighting people who have no
Speaker 5: arms industry of any kind and primarily killing civilians. So
Speaker 5: I can very easily justify one of those groups of
Speaker 5: people getting US weapons and one of them not needing
Speaker 5: any additional weapons.
Speaker 3: That's right, Yeah, you.
Speaker 4: See, Robert. None of that is justified because of the
Speaker 4: existence of the Azhoh Battalion. There is no right for
Speaker 4: any Ukrainian grandmother to get access to her insulin because
Speaker 4: there's a couple of neo Nazis that were stationed in Mariople.
Speaker 4: But truly, that is that is about how sophisticated. A
Speaker 4: lot of the leftist critiques of the Ukraine, of supporting
Speaker 4: Ukraine are. Yeah, I think a lot of it comes in.
Speaker 4: One of the things that I talk about, and I
Speaker 4: talked with Sharin about this when we went on Instagram
Speaker 4: Live together, is that a lot of leftists seem to
Speaker 4: live in kind of a weird little cinematic universe where
Speaker 4: only the US and Israel can be the bad guys,
Speaker 4: and by extension, France and the UK you know, and
Speaker 4: YadA YadA. But as a result of that, they have
Speaker 4: this just really strange view of global affairs that literally
Speaker 4: no one in the countries they're talking about share. Somehow,
Speaker 4: Russia and Iran and China and Cuba are all aligned
Speaker 4: in a sort of anti imperial axis because they oppose
Speaker 4: the interests of NATO in the United States. And I
Speaker 4: think that's just so, that's that's patently ridiculous, but it
Speaker 4: plays a big role in conversations like what's going on
Speaker 4: in Palestine, yes, or people will invoke, well, why are
Speaker 4: you giving all this money to Ukraine instead of giving
Speaker 4: money to people the relief for the Maui fires, or
Speaker 4: you know, doing why are we doing medical medicare for all.
Speaker 4: So it's like it's a convenient because it's the military
Speaker 4: industrial complex, it's the Iraq War, it's all these things
Speaker 4: that we as leftists were taught to hate, but it's
Speaker 4: there being used for good. It's like America is actually
Speaker 4: being the arsenal democracy and doing the thing that we
Speaker 4: did in World War Two that helped the Soviet Union
Speaker 4: march into Berlin.
Speaker 5: Well, and it's also i think an important thing to
Speaker 5: notice when we talk about the it's always framed as
Speaker 5: the US is giving this amount of money to Ukraine.
Speaker 5: What's what's happening is we are taking stockpiles of arms
Speaker 5: we already have worth that much money, and we are
Speaker 5: sending them there like they're not right like that that
Speaker 5: is overwhelmingly like the the what kind of aid we
Speaker 5: are sending over So these are extant weapons that are
Speaker 5: sitting in the US doing nothing and being like the Bradley's.
Speaker 5: We didn't just build a bunch of new Bradley's. We
Speaker 5: had a shitload of them, we weren't using them anymore
Speaker 5: because they were not very useful in the conflicts that
Speaker 5: we were fighting, right that Bradleys.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the United States is like really itching to like
Speaker 4: need high mars right now. No, Like all of this
Speaker 4: stuff we're sending to them has been mothballed for yeah,
Speaker 4: basically since the Goal War, and people don't understand that.
Speaker 5: It is funny to me to imagine, like, yeah, let's
Speaker 5: send that stuff to Maui for the virus.
Speaker 3: That's what they need. They need long range artillery.
Speaker 5: That's really gonna that's really gonna help them heal.
Speaker 4: I'm in favor of sending lethal aid to the indigenous
Speaker 4: residents of Malai, but I think that's it.
Speaker 5: You talked me into it, and I think we have
Speaker 5: enough mothball tanks for both of these goss.
Speaker 2: I think for me, the comparisons for Ukraine and Palestine,
Speaker 2: it started with how it was presented in the media.
Speaker 2: It just it rought people the wrong way when the
Speaker 2: Ukrainian struggle was presented in a certain way and the
Speaker 2: Palestinian struggle was not. And people can draw some draw
Speaker 2: like comparison like whiteness and all this stuff. Absolutely, and
Speaker 2: I just it got me, really, it really irritates me
Speaker 2: because it's not like the Oppression Olympics, Like we're not
Speaker 2: trying to compare or demonize Ukrainians. We should demonize the
Speaker 2: media for not representing Palestinians in the right way. But
Speaker 2: I think that is kind of the origin of the
Speaker 2: comparison that I saw anyway.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I think that that's really worth digging into
Speaker 5: because there's a couple of First off, it is absolutely
Speaker 5: an injustice that Ukrainian resistance and that light is seen
Speaker 5: as inherently just and not just Palestinian resistance is demonized
Speaker 5: or often ignored, But like all sorts of resistance by
Speaker 5: people who are being harmed around the world, it partially
Speaker 5: is or in large part as a result of like
Speaker 5: US and other Western countries policies are not seen in
Speaker 5: the same light as Ukrainian resistance. I certainly agree with
Speaker 5: that stance. That's not the refault of anybody in Ukraine.
Speaker 5: Right this we are not talking about a country that
Speaker 5: exercises power on the global stage. We are talking about
Speaker 5: a cash poor nation that has been struggling with Russian
Speaker 5: imperialism for most of the time that most of the
Speaker 5: people listening this, actually all of the time that everybody
Speaker 5: listening to this has been alive in one form or another, right,
Speaker 5: And so I think it's perfectly fair to point out
Speaker 5: the ways in which the media reports unequally on these conflict,
Speaker 5: on what's happening in Palestine, what's happening on stuff like Buka,
Speaker 5: and on the mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 5: I think that that is worth pointing out, but it's
Speaker 5: also not worth blaming Ukrainians over they are not participating
Speaker 5: in that, just by saying, hey, it's bad that our
Speaker 5: civilians are being massacred by rockets, right and other forms
Speaker 5: of weaponry. By the way, like that, right, that's not
Speaker 5: on them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think to also kind of flip that on
Speaker 4: its head. I mean, part of it is the media narrative.
Speaker 4: You know, it's easier. Ukrainians are mostly hot white people
Speaker 4: in the eye of the Western media, and it's easy
Speaker 4: to cheer for the hot white people who have you know,
Speaker 4: everyone's a lot of people have been to Ukrainian restaurant,
Speaker 4: They're familiar with some Ukrainian maybe songs, so they have
Speaker 4: friends if they live in a place like la or
Speaker 4: New York. You know Ukrainians, you're familiar maybe even with
Speaker 4: some Ukrainian media, and it's kind of like this accessible thing,
Speaker 4: you know. And also like there's other aspects of it
Speaker 4: to which you're even stranger, which is that Ukraines produces
Speaker 4: like a huge amount of the world's fashion models. That's
Speaker 4: a very accessible thing for people to get behind in
Speaker 4: the nice liberal media. And you could see these in
Speaker 4: these initial broadcasts being like I've never seen anything like this.
Speaker 4: With seeing all these European looking refugees, it's like, all right.
Speaker 2: They're multilearly cast like that, where they're like, these are
Speaker 2: not Arabs, like they say it with their chests, you know,
Speaker 2: like the these are people like us.
Speaker 4: But for the flip side of that is that that
Speaker 4: leftists are reluctant to be charitable to Ukrainians because they
Speaker 4: also see them as hot white people who don't need
Speaker 4: any help. Yeah, and they're they're unwilling to admit that
Speaker 4: Ukrainian Ukrainians, like Gosins, also suffer from a settler colonial
Speaker 4: state as their neighbor with a history of ethnically cleansing
Speaker 4: and genociding them.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean part of the reason for that is that
Speaker 5: the neighbor that ethnically cleansed in gen well one of them,
Speaker 5: because actually they had several neighbors ethnically cleansing genocide them.
Speaker 5: But the Soviet Union, like did a significant amount of
Speaker 5: that during the Holy Dolmore. Now, the Germans also carried
Speaker 5: out a massive genocide in Ukraine. Like and by the way,
Speaker 5: a huge number of the Red Army soldiers who successfully
Speaker 5: helped defeat the Nazis were Ukrainians. As a note is
Speaker 5: you often see this thing where people will point out
Speaker 5: there were a significant number of Ukrainians that fought with
Speaker 5: the Nazis, and they tend to ignore that, like, yeah,
Speaker 5: and there were even more Ukrainians who fought with the
Speaker 5: Red Army. Like, both of those things happened. It was
Speaker 5: a world war and Ukraine was right in the middle
Speaker 5: of it. It's a very ugly situation. And it kind
Speaker 5: of comes down to this inability of a lot of
Speaker 5: people to not even nuanced to care about accuracy when
Speaker 5: that accuracy is not like ideologically convenient, when it points
Speaker 5: to some of the ugliness and messiness of war. I
Speaker 5: find that very frustrating. Like I sympathize with because I
Speaker 5: was reporting on the Syrian refugee crisis from the refugee
Speaker 5: trail right after actually I was in Ukraine, and it
Speaker 5: is unfair that like Ukrainian refugees were treated differently. But
Speaker 5: the people to blame for that is the news media,
Speaker 5: not refugees who have lost their homes. In fact, I
Speaker 5: suspect that a lot of Ukrainians have a different attitude
Speaker 5: themselves towards the suffering that they witness during that period
Speaker 5: of time because they've now been through it. It's just
Speaker 5: like a human thing now, you know what that's like?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean as a Syrian person who for the
Speaker 2: past like over a decade, I really the media really
Speaker 2: fucking got on my nerves every time I would see
Speaker 2: them not talk about Syria, or when they did it
Speaker 2: was not a good way. And then when they started
Speaker 2: really embracing Ukrainian refugees or talking about them in a
Speaker 2: different way, I'm not gonna lie, it made me mad,
Speaker 2: but not at Ukrainians. Like I think even now, we
Speaker 2: should have criticized the media back then, but like they're
Speaker 2: doing the same thing now with their fucking headlines about
Speaker 2: Israel and Palestine. It's always how it's presented versus the
Speaker 2: people it's presenting. Like when someone when some dumb newscaster
Speaker 2: is standing in front of a group of Ukrainian refugees
Speaker 2: behind him and he's like, these are not Arabs, these
Speaker 2: are white people. They didn't say that he did, so
Speaker 2: I don't know. Yeah, And also, like.
Speaker 4: I encourage everyone to ask Ukrainian, particularly Eastern Ukrainian's opinions
Speaker 4: on the Western media and like Westerners in general, because
Speaker 4: two years into this war, they have a lot of them,
Speaker 4: and I imagine that they would. You would find a
Speaker 4: lot of the sentiments shared by the Ukrainians. They don't
Speaker 4: always appreciate how they're portrayed in the Western media, as
Speaker 4: you know, either brave defenders of their country or sook
Speaker 4: covered refugees coming off of a railcar. You know, they
Speaker 4: have a lot of opinions on these sorts of things.
Speaker 4: They feel patronized, they feel babied in some senses, and
Speaker 4: they feel like they will be ultimately abandoned by us,
Speaker 4: which is already coming to pass. And as the attention
Speaker 4: shifts to things like Gaza, you know, it's difficult for
Speaker 4: them to feel like they have any friends.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I want to get into that, but let's
Speaker 2: take our first break, and yes, we will jump back
Speaker 2: in and we're back. Okay, we had just been talking
Speaker 2: about how the support for Ukraine has kind of changed recently.
Speaker 2: Can you get into that little bit.
Speaker 4: I'm not even necessarily sure that it changed so recently.
Speaker 4: I remember being over there and it was wall to
Speaker 4: wall coverage from the moment I set foot, from the
Speaker 4: moment it started to really up until the Oscars and
Speaker 4: the Chris rock slap. Is what we all talked about
Speaker 4: last Oscars like this is yeah, the last Oscars and
Speaker 4: the Chris Rocks slap and all the attention that that got.
Speaker 4: Was the moment that a lot of the volunteers talked about,
Speaker 4: is the moment where people started to want to forget
Speaker 4: about Ukraine. There was still a lot of bridge, but
Speaker 4: suddenly it was like, you don't have to be obsessed
Speaker 4: with Ukraine. You know, Ukraine's now a second page story
Speaker 4: instead of a first page story. That was around the
Speaker 4: same time that the Russians withdrew from Kiev, So suddenly
Speaker 4: there wasn't there wasn't this expectation that Kiev was going
Speaker 4: to fall and the capital be taken in Zelensky would
Speaker 4: be captured, and it started to slow up. Even then,
Speaker 4: you know, the donations dried up, the attention dried up,
Speaker 4: and by the time I went there in the winter
Speaker 4: of twenty twenty three last year, it was like people
Speaker 4: already wanted to forget. I mean, I live in Los Angeles,
Speaker 4: and a lot of people here were saying things like,
Speaker 4: oh wow, is that still going on? Really nice, well
Speaker 4: meaning people who knew I'd been over there, they were
Speaker 4: just like, is that you know, is that still a
Speaker 4: war going on?
Speaker 1: Here?
Speaker 4: We are in twenty days, it's going to be two
Speaker 4: years of this. Yeah, my friends over there are are exhausted,
Speaker 4: and they don't They're now a page eight story.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And it's this comes back to like how Americans like
Speaker 5: to think about conflict. We have an enormous appetite for
Speaker 5: war and for you know, a particularly what we consider
Speaker 5: a just struggle for up to a couple of months, right,
Speaker 5: and then people were very excited when, yeah, the Russians
Speaker 5: invade everyone. The expectation, both from like military experts in
Speaker 5: the West and from certainly civilians, is that like Russia
Speaker 5: is going to crush them immediately.
Speaker 3: And then they don't.
Speaker 5: There's this real upset, come from behind, underdog victory and
Speaker 5: Americans love that. But then like it's not a total
Speaker 5: immediate victory, and in fact, it turns into at this
Speaker 5: point and really really brutal, ugly slow war of attrition
Speaker 5: and maneuver, which is like what war is, right, Like,
Speaker 5: that's that's how any sort of near peer conflict is
Speaker 5: going to boil out. And it's not a kind of
Speaker 5: thing that is resolved quickly, and it's not a kind
Speaker 5: of thing that is resolved without cost. And as soon
Speaker 5: as that became clear Americans, it didn't. It doesn't fit
Speaker 5: into that like ninety minute Hollywood vision of how a
Speaker 5: conflict is supposed to go right. There was no the
Speaker 5: Ukrainians didn't blow up a death star and end it right,
Speaker 5: like I mean, actually that's not what happens in the
Speaker 5: movies either, but like it's still it was not the quick,
Speaker 5: clean end that a lot of people were expecting and
Speaker 5: hoping for. And as a result, people are like, well,
Speaker 5: now it's a quagmire and now it's like we have
Speaker 5: to start looking for some way out of this thing,
Speaker 5: which by the way, has cost us very little. Like
Speaker 5: my stance on like when is this over is like, well,
Speaker 5: I guess when Ukraine says it's over, right, Like if
Speaker 5: the Ukrainians want to come to the negotiating table and
Speaker 5: negotiating into hostilities, then like that's their business. But up
Speaker 5: until that point, I think the business of the United
Speaker 5: States is to continue to meet our treaty obligations, which
Speaker 5: we should. We should note like the United States and
Speaker 5: NATO are obligated to support Ukraine in a war over
Speaker 5: its sovereignty because they gave up their nukes. With that understanding, right,
Speaker 5: this is what happened when we told the country, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 5: we said you'll give up her nukes, and we got
Speaker 5: your back like this. This was the promise we made.
Speaker 5: And as far as I'm concerned, that's the only interest
Speaker 5: I haven't like. My answer is like, how long should
Speaker 5: we support them? Well, as long as they're fighting, and.
Speaker 4: We've been keeping that promise for the cost of five
Speaker 4: percent of our defense budget. And like you mentioned earlier,
Speaker 4: it's it's already stuff that's mothballed since the Gulf War,
Speaker 4: sitting around waiting to be used, you know. I mean,
Speaker 4: the idea of giving them F sixteen's every every country
Speaker 4: in the world, practically, at least in the NATO Alliance.
Speaker 4: It seems like everyone has an F sixteen. I think
Speaker 4: we're giving them a turkey now too, Like it's not
Speaker 4: a big deal to give a couple of F sixteens
Speaker 4: to the Ukrainians or a couple of Bradleys or Abrams
Speaker 4: or what have you. And I think that people especially
Speaker 4: on the right, but also on the left, who get
Speaker 4: obsessed over the amount of money that we're sending or
Speaker 4: the amount of equipment in personnel, especially when they see
Speaker 4: these worries about corruption, they don't they don't understand the
Speaker 4: scale of how small this actually is relative to the
Speaker 4: United States other commitments, like to Israel. And yes, they
Speaker 4: get sort of myopically focused on this, and they use
Speaker 4: it as a reason to dislike Ukraine. The right will
Speaker 4: never like Ukraine because Zelensky was the guy who made
Speaker 4: Trump look bad and got him impeached. I think it's
Speaker 4: that simple. Yeah, it's wild that like well, also, I
Speaker 4: mean the Russian interference and stuff. You know, the Republican
Speaker 4: Party now resembles Russia more. But it's wild that Republicans,
Speaker 4: you know, thirty years ago were super anti Russia and
Speaker 4: now they Russia's best friend, and they think Ukraine are
Speaker 4: sort of Satanists whatever.
Speaker 3: Yeah, to and non corrupt people.
Speaker 5: And it's to kind of emphasize how small five percent
Speaker 5: of the Defense Department budget is the Pentagon. This is
Speaker 5: from like a twenty twenty two story the Pentagon can't
Speaker 5: account for several trillion dollars in assets, which doesn't mean
Speaker 5: we don't fully know where they are, but it means
Speaker 5: that like Pentagon record keeping has sort of like lost
Speaker 5: huge amounts of assets over the years. At the moment,
Speaker 5: like right now, the Pentagon, like as of November twenty sixteen,
Speaker 5: had failed six audits in a row, and as far
Speaker 5: as I can tell, I don't think they've actually ever
Speaker 5: passed an audit of like all of their resources. Like
Speaker 5: there's huge amounts trillions of dollars in assets that like
Speaker 5: we can't fully document. It's it's when you think about
Speaker 5: like the amount of money that we've actually sent over
Speaker 5: there as a defense or as a percentage of just
Speaker 5: like the stuff that we can't fully account for in
Speaker 5: our militaries like Arsenal, it's it's a tiny fraction of that,
Speaker 5: let alone a fraction of like our defense department's total assets.
Speaker 5: And it also this gets back to when people talk
Speaker 5: about like corruption in Ukraine, and by god, Ukraine has
Speaker 5: a history of government corruption, which is part of what
Speaker 5: the revolution in twenty fourteen was about, right, But it's
Speaker 5: particularly silly to complain about that as a reason not
Speaker 5: to send them weaponry when we know the US Defense
Speaker 5: Department is massively corrupt, a huge amount of corruption, involving
Speaker 5: not just like not specifically even like military officials, but
Speaker 5: involving civilian contractors, involving like the agencies we contract to,
Speaker 5: involving the money that we've sent over the course of
Speaker 5: like the eight trillion dollars or so that we've spent
Speaker 5: on the war on Terror. A huge chunk of that,
Speaker 5: hundreds of billions of dollars of the money that we
Speaker 5: spent on the War on Terror is just gone. Billions
Speaker 5: of it disappeared in the form of cash pallets that
Speaker 5: we just lost, right, Like, this is the amount of
Speaker 5: money that it has cost us to support Ukraine in
Speaker 5: this war. Is a rounding error of the shit we
Speaker 5: lost just as a matter of business, like just as
Speaker 5: like as.
Speaker 4: Like a rounding earrow of like what we gave to Halliburton.
Speaker 5: Yes, you know, yes, to build hospitals that didn't work
Speaker 5: in Afghanistan.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly. In speaking of Afghanistan, I think a lot
Speaker 4: of people look at you, they look at the Afghanistan withdrawal,
Speaker 4: and they think, oh, this is what Ukraine's going to
Speaker 4: be like but I think that brings up the point
Speaker 4: of story, what are we getting for that five percent
Speaker 4: of defense budget? You know, we gave a bunch to
Speaker 4: afghan and we ended up getting the same situation that
Speaker 4: we had when we went in there in two thousand
Speaker 4: and one, the Taliban and control. But now they have
Speaker 4: billions of dollars worth of America the state of the
Speaker 4: art American military equipment.
Speaker 5: And hundreds of thousands of Afghan people died in the
Speaker 5: interim exactly.
Speaker 4: And then you contrast that with like, well, what is
Speaker 4: our five percent of military budget get us in Ukraine?
Speaker 4: And you look at what this is doing to Russia.
Speaker 4: Russia gained abou zero point one percent of Ukrainian territory
Speaker 4: in the year twenty twenty three, second year of war,
Speaker 4: and to do that, they lost about one hundred thousand soldiers.
Speaker 4: Now there's a lot of people in Russia. And that's
Speaker 4: always been the thing about Russia is that they have
Speaker 4: this depth of recruiting that they can pull on. But
Speaker 4: they're taking out recruiting ads in like Saint Petersburg, in
Speaker 4: Moscow and in like the wealthy that they're going hard
Speaker 4: on like recruiting from wealthy urban centers instead of sort
Speaker 4: of the traditional rural areas where they bring in all
Speaker 4: their recruits, which is evidence to me that they're suffering
Speaker 4: from a manpower shortage in the same way that the
Speaker 4: Ukrainians are. Yeah, and that's one of the things that
Speaker 4: particularly frustrates me when people say that we're not what
Speaker 4: are we getting for our money? Because that's it, Like
Speaker 4: Russia is on the ropes. People just don't want to
Speaker 4: admit it. People see a slight incremental Russian gain or
Speaker 4: they feel like there's a standstill on the Ukrainian counter
Speaker 4: offensive and they think, oh well, let's just throw in
Speaker 4: the towel. It's like, no, you can't stop the pressure now,
Speaker 4: and Putin is finally kind of ready to come to
Speaker 4: the negotiating table, it seems, and the Ukrainians, you know,
Speaker 4: need our help more than ever, And that's kind of
Speaker 4: the frustrating aspect. I went on the Hill TV the
Speaker 4: other day to talk with someone who said, basically, she said,
Speaker 4: is there any hope for Ukraine? Like very already fatalistic
Speaker 4: about the whole thing, like are they already on the ropes?
Speaker 4: And I was like, no, they're not on the rope.
Speaker 4: So this is a narrative that we need to change.
Speaker 4: We need to understand that there's a very there's a
Speaker 4: huge difference between what military aid gets us in Ukraine
Speaker 4: versus what it gets us in Israel and Afghanistan.
Speaker 5: And there's it's also like a significant change and like
Speaker 5: who is being killed by those weapons, right, because even
Speaker 5: when we talk about the use of like the US
Speaker 5: use of weapons in foreign countries, we are often talking
Speaker 5: about these kind of these brush fire conflicts, these insurgencies
Speaker 5: in which a great deal of the fighting takes place
Speaker 5: in and around civilian populaces. And obviously there are Ukrainian
Speaker 5: cities that have been under siege for quite a while.
Speaker 5: But when we're talking about like the Ukrainians firing or
Speaker 5: giving them him Our systems or giving them Bradley's, we
Speaker 5: are talking about weaponry that is being used to break
Speaker 5: fortifications on along a line of contact, which isn't as
Speaker 5: zero never is a zero civilian casualty endeavor because those
Speaker 5: don't exist in war, but is a significantly less like
Speaker 5: involves significantly fewer civilian losses then the kind of wars
Speaker 5: that we have fought for most of the time that
Speaker 5: I've been alive, right, because we're simply not using the
Speaker 5: weapons are not being used in the same way. Bombarding
Speaker 5: a trench lion is not the same as firing a
Speaker 5: cruise missile at what you're pretty sure is a terrorist
Speaker 5: hideout in a city, you know, right.
Speaker 4: And we have been reluctant to give them any weapons
Speaker 4: that could do that. I mean, some notable exceptions would
Speaker 4: be like the strike on the naval command center and Sevestopol. Yes,
Speaker 4: some other drone limited but but ansoly. Most of those
Speaker 4: are drone strikes from drone factories where the Ukrainians create
Speaker 4: their own stuff, and there have been some limited civilian
Speaker 4: casualties in their incursions into Russian territory because we won't
Speaker 4: we won't give them any weapons that go into Russian territory.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they've had to give is the early anything they want? Yeah, well, shit.
Speaker 4: Anything else, everything they want.
Speaker 5: I mean, we can't say that's not the case for
Speaker 5: whoever comes up next, because a number of our advertisements
Speaker 5: are random, but hopefully not and we're back all right.
Speaker 5: One of the things you have to keep in mind
Speaker 5: when you think about like is what is the US
Speaker 5: capable of doing that is positive and what is the
Speaker 5: US capable of doing. That's negative is that the United
Speaker 5: States is fucking massive, right, Our budget is fucking massive.
Speaker 5: And we talk on this show, on my other show
Speaker 5: about a lot of horrible things our government has been
Speaker 5: involved in, which doesn't which does not detract from the
Speaker 5: fact that US aid and particularly food aid, is like
Speaker 5: a survival matter for tens of millions of people around
Speaker 5: the globe. Right, Like this is one of those things
Speaker 5: when the Republicans are talking about wanting to cut all
Speaker 5: foreign aid that the US gives to basically everyone but Israel.
Speaker 5: What that means when you talk about that, you are
Speaker 5: talking about like starving populations of people larger than most
Speaker 5: major American cities. Because the US is massive, and the
Speaker 5: aid that we give is you know, usually not it's
Speaker 5: not really that significant a chunk of our budget, but
Speaker 5: for the countries, for a lot of countries that receive it,
Speaker 5: it's like critical to survival food aid and medical aid
Speaker 5: that we've given over the years. And I think that
Speaker 5: also gets into like one of the things that's important
Speaker 5: about understanding like how what impact you might have on
Speaker 5: what's going on in Ukraine. You don't have to if
Speaker 5: you have too much of a bad taste in your
Speaker 5: mouth over the idea of supporting US military aid to anywhere.
Speaker 5: There's a lot of aid that's not military that's necessary
Speaker 5: right as you do, Charles. People need medicine right like
Speaker 5: you are having a positive outcome on like the people
Speaker 5: in Ukraine, if you are helping to increase their access
Speaker 5: to food and medicine. And that's not morally complicated. It's
Speaker 5: always there's always some moral complexity in handing out weapons
Speaker 5: around the world. Handing out medication is incredible simple from
Speaker 5: an ethical standpoint, at least from where I. You're never
Speaker 5: a bad guy for giving medicine. It doesn't even matter
Speaker 5: who it's too, Like.
Speaker 4: Well, your bad gut Israel apparently.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes they will drone strike you. But I don't know.
Speaker 5: I think that like one of the nice things as
Speaker 5: an American you don't have to. Realistically, the fight over
Speaker 5: Ukrainian aid right now is primarily something that is happening
Speaker 5: in Congress, and at this exact moment, in that fight,
Speaker 5: there is very little that you or I can do,
Speaker 5: But there is a lot, as you prove, Charles, there
Speaker 5: is a lot that individual people can do to help
Speaker 5: other individual people. You may not have access to a
Speaker 5: HIMR system or any more Bradley tanks to give the Ukrainians,
Speaker 5: although if you do, please please give them over they'll
Speaker 5: appreciate them. But there are a number of ways in
Speaker 5: which you can help, like the actual people suffering on
Speaker 5: the ground. And I think that that's like, that is
Speaker 5: right now what regular people can actually do.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I totally agree. I would push back a little
Speaker 4: bit and saying that there's not a lot that we
Speaker 4: can do in terms of the congressional fund because I
Speaker 4: think that people do. I mean, I remember, from back
Speaker 4: in my time working adjacent to politics, I remember someone
Speaker 4: told me a statistic where it said it took five
Speaker 4: phone calls to an office of a congressman for them
Speaker 4: to rethink their stance on an issue interest. I have
Speaker 4: received texts from aids to congressman Republican and Democrat who
Speaker 4: sit on like House Armed Services Committee or you know,
Speaker 4: Defense and that sort of stuff, saying like, hey, what's
Speaker 4: with this Ukraine? Like what's your take on the Ukraine stuff?
Speaker 4: Should we be giving them all this money? I don't
Speaker 4: really support it, but you went over there, do you
Speaker 4: think they're using it?
Speaker 1: Well?
Speaker 4: And I'm like, holy Holy crap, am I actually getting
Speaker 4: this text? But yes, absolutely, Like, yeah, you need to
Speaker 4: do that, You need to green light whatever, you need
Speaker 4: a green light to send that over there. And I
Speaker 4: think if more people, you know, were, especially now when
Speaker 4: a lot of congress people don't want to engage with
Speaker 4: the gaza issue but are looking for like good wins
Speaker 4: with their constituencies, like get to know your local Ukrainian
Speaker 4: constituency in your area, start a campaign to go to
Speaker 4: the regional office of your congressmen, find out which committees
Speaker 4: they sit on, and pressure them for sending aid to Ukraine.
Speaker 4: I mean that is something you can do. But on
Speaker 4: the individual level, yeah, you can still raise awareness. You
Speaker 4: can connect the decolonial struggle of Ukrainians to that of
Speaker 4: Palestinians and other peoples. Someone who does this extraordinarily well
Speaker 4: is Yulia Timoshenka. Not the Ukrainian politician. She's a young
Speaker 4: Ukrainian influencer and advocate who went to Nyu Abu Dhabi
Speaker 4: and sort of got kind of got pilled on the
Speaker 4: whole Palestine thing and has really eloquently tied the Palestinian
Speaker 4: and Ukrainian struggles together. So you can point people towards
Speaker 4: resources like that and let them know that there are
Speaker 4: at least some people in Ukraine who see that, who
Speaker 4: see that connection. And then you can also, of course,
Speaker 4: you can support humanitarian initiatives in Ukraine very carefully. Please
Speaker 4: just do so very carefully. I would say there's a
Speaker 4: lot of there's a lot of people who went over
Speaker 4: there and started initiatives that were more or less good,
Speaker 4: but mostly kind of ineffective because they did not actually
Speaker 4: engage and include Ukrainians in that process. My role with
Speaker 4: everything involving Ukraine is just like just to ask Ukrainians
Speaker 4: about it, Ask Ukrainians what they need, figure out what
Speaker 4: it is that their priorities are, and make sure that
Speaker 4: you're including them on your philanthropy and your charity. They
Speaker 4: will understand what is most impactful. My organization has experienced
Speaker 4: a lot of success by being entirely run by Ukrainians
Speaker 4: and being based in Arkiv, and as everyone else is
Speaker 4: funding and resources have dried up. Mission Arkiv is being
Speaker 4: handed project from larger NGOs who are leaving the region.
Speaker 4: Because we focused on a local response. It also means
Speaker 4: that you know, donations to organizations like that go farther
Speaker 4: because they're going to higher Ukrainians rather than paying for
Speaker 4: the flights of some Westerner to go back and forth,
Speaker 4: you know, and do a fundraising you know, coming in
Speaker 4: from New York and do a fundraising pitch and go back.
Speaker 4: It's actually going towards This was a commitment I made
Speaker 4: to myself and my partner when I went over there.
Speaker 4: My partner at Mission Harkive was that I was never
Speaker 4: going to expense like a flight or a meal or
Speaker 4: anything to Mission Harkive. So you know, all that's come
Speaker 4: out of my own pocket. And that means that every
Speaker 4: donation that we have gets to go pretty much directly
Speaker 4: into our programs. So you can still do that as
Speaker 4: an individual, you can help in that way. And the
Speaker 4: awareness thing is a huge part people are forgetting Ukrainians
Speaker 4: feel abandoned, like making even just the act of putting
Speaker 4: a Ukrainian flag on your note or like tweeting about
Speaker 4: Ukraine occasionally is seen as such a huge act of
Speaker 4: solidarity at the stage in the game that the Ukrainians
Speaker 4: will love you for it.
Speaker 5: I really love that you bring up the kind of
Speaker 5: pitfalls of and this is this is Ukraine right now
Speaker 5: in particular because it was such a huge international story
Speaker 5: at the start of the expanded invasion, and that always
Speaker 5: brings out not just grifters but also well meaning people
Speaker 5: who are going to raise money and try to start
Speaker 5: initiatives in that country that may not be doing it
Speaker 5: in the most cost effective way possible. And I really
Speaker 5: like what you said about, like the importance of verifying
Speaker 5: that where you are supporting is not just doing the work,
Speaker 5: but is like doing the work in the best way possible.
Speaker 5: And one of like the really important things to look
Speaker 5: at for is like, well, how much money are they
Speaker 5: spending on sending Westerners to and from this place?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 5: It's one thing if like it's an area that lacks
Speaker 5: access to medical professionals and they're flying out medical professionals
Speaker 5: to do like trauma work or whatever, Like, there's really
Speaker 5: like that's obviously important, but this is something that like
Speaker 5: a lot of my friends in Iraq and Syria also experienced,
Speaker 5: like the frustration of like NGO workers staying in nice
Speaker 5: hotels and driving you know, fancy vehicles where there were
Speaker 5: local organizations doing things like maintaining refugee camps that needed
Speaker 5: the support. I think that's always really important to try
Speaker 5: to do your research so that the support you give,
Speaker 5: the awareness you raise, and the money that you donate
Speaker 5: actually goes where it needs to get I think.
Speaker 4: I mean that opens a whole broad category of maybe
Speaker 4: this is a subset essay waiting to happen. But I've
Speaker 4: been playing with this idea of like the idea of
Speaker 4: conflict vultures, these people who sort of descend on a
Speaker 4: conflict or a disaster zone for a variety of reasons.
Speaker 4: You know, maybe it's fundraising. Maybe they work for a
Speaker 4: big NGO and this helps get them in the news,
Speaker 4: so they fly themselves out there. Maybe it's a war
Speaker 4: and they want to be a hero where they want
Speaker 4: to present themselves as a hero, and they end up
Speaker 4: raising a bunch of money for their quick and stuff
Speaker 4: and then stay far away from the fighting line, living
Speaker 4: in nice hotels like you said, Or maybe it is
Speaker 4: like you said, well, meeting people who just take up
Speaker 4: air from the people who need it and take up
Speaker 4: they're like sponges that just absorb all this Western energy
Speaker 4: because they're they're a relatable face. And I've encountered all
Speaker 4: of those people in Ukraine. The reason I went to
Speaker 4: Ukraine is because I was like, if I'm going to
Speaker 4: fundraise for this initiative. People are going to give more,
Speaker 4: They're gonna be more invested if they see an English
Speaker 4: speaking American talking to them about this stuff. But I
Speaker 4: came in with the perspective that I can't be centering
Speaker 4: myself on this. The idea is to deflect onto what
Speaker 4: the Ukrainians are doing and elevate their stories rather than
Speaker 4: saying I'm here, I'm posing with the Bakhmut entrance sign.
Speaker 4: I just delivered seven muffins and a generator to like
Speaker 4: a place that was cleared out by the Ukrainians, you know,
Speaker 4: six months previously. It's more like, Okay, how do you
Speaker 4: take Americans are very generous people, how do you take
Speaker 4: American philanthropy, American dollars, American wallets and directed towards the
Speaker 4: people who are actually going to change, who usually are
Speaker 4: not Americans. These large NGOs, they serve a purpose, The
Speaker 4: UN serves a purpose. Doctors without Borders, direct relief, you know,
Speaker 4: World Central Kitchen. They do a great job in like
Speaker 4: a specific thing. But a lot of times, if you're
Speaker 4: giving to the United Nations or you're giving to one
Speaker 4: of these big NGOs, that sets a fundraiser in the
Speaker 4: immediate aftermath of something. Your money is going to remodel
Speaker 4: an office in Rome or New York or Washington, DC,
Speaker 4: and you're not really reaching the people that you're trying
Speaker 4: to help. And I think if more Americans understood that,
Speaker 4: they'd be more responsible with sort of how they spend
Speaker 4: their money in a philanthropic sense.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Charles, you have been awesome. Thank you so much
Speaker 2: for coming on in telling us your experience. And yeah,
Speaker 2: where can people find you on the internet if you
Speaker 2: want to be found?
Speaker 4: Some I go back and forth. Sometimes I don't want
Speaker 4: to be found and sometimes I do. But you can
Speaker 4: find me pretty much everywhere with at Charles McBride that's
Speaker 4: McBride with a Y, except on Twitter at random, I
Speaker 4: don't have that handle. And then I just launched a
Speaker 4: sub stack, which is I guess Charles McBride dot substack
Speaker 4: dot com, and that's where we'll be. I'm kind of
Speaker 4: shifting towards more long form content to write about my
Speaker 4: experiences with these things and sort of a more digestible
Speaker 4: long form wave people engaging with important issues like this.
Speaker 4: Oh and if you're interested in the organization I help
Speaker 4: set up in Ukraine. It is mission dot harkive on
Speaker 4: Instagram or missionharkive dot com.
Speaker 2: And I could put all the infoon in the description
Speaker 2: for yes, listeners and everything, but yeah.
Speaker 3: Sweet excellent Charles. Yeah to Charlesbeth.
Speaker 4: Thank you guys. I appreciate it.
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