The Vault: Ukraine Episodes
Interviews from the PREVAIL podcast archive, featuring Victor Rud, Moscow Never Sleeps, and Zarina Zabrisky
During the month-long podcast hiatus, I will go back to the archives and post episodes by thematic grouping. Today, we’ll revisit interviews about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with Victor Rud, Moscow Never Sleeps, and Zarina Zabrisky. It’s instructive, I think, to review them in chronological order.
Season Six of PREVAIL premieres on Friday, August 25.
The Ukraine Fallacies: Victor Rud
May 21, 2021
This interview took place nine months before Putin’s invasion.
Ukraine is the largest country in Europe, and is in the geographic center of the continent. Understanding its history vis a vis its more famous northern neighbor is critical to grasping what’s happening right now in the Crimea—and why Western defense of Ukraine is so vital to global stability. Greg Olear talks with Ukraine expert Victor Rud, past chair of the Ukrainian American Bar Association, about Ukraine’s past, present, and future. Plus: A new offering from Time/Life Books.
How is it that one country like Russia, with half the population of the United States, has been able to take all of Western democracy and pretty much press us up against the ropes? And yet they hold their own people in thrall. The same with China. The same with North Korea. There is something fundamentally wrong, and what’s wrong is, that these countries are playing us, taking our strengths, and using them as our most vulnerable points….
Yes, we have to have a strong military. But that is very, I think, short-sighted, and that gives us zero options. We have to do what I’ve been arguing for years. We have to do what they’re doing to us. We have to turn them inward—not by creating artificial problems, but by promoting [their own existing] problems internally, so they are deflected, and have to address internal issues….
Putin in Ukraine: Zarina Zabrisky
February 4, 2022
This interview took place three weeks before the invasion:
Greg Olear and Zarina Zabrisky, who has been covering Putin for years and the invasion of Ukraine since it started, discuss Vladimir Putin’s motivations, Russia’s Eurasian plan, and the escalating situation in Ukraine. Plus: a new CD collection.
In Russia, the lack of basic amenities is not the worst of it. As Zarina Zabrisky and I discuss on today’s PREVAIL podcast, Putin has clearly been studying the Nazi playbook. He saw how Hitler improbably rose to power (and eliminated his rivals when he got there) and did the same. Now, the Russian strongman is doing in Ukraine what Hitler did in Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938—and banking on Joe Biden to make like Neville Chamberlain.
Putin’s War: Zarina Zabrisky and Moscow Never Sleeps
March 18, 2022
These two interviews were recorded a few weeks into the invasion.
Season Three of the PREVAIL podcast begins with a special double episode. First, Greg Olear talks to his friend Zarina Zabrisky, who has been covering Putin for years and the invasion of Ukraine since it started, about the situation on the ground, Putin’s madness, and the history of the two countries. Then, he brings on his friend and PREVAIL contributor Moscow Never Sleeps to discuss what the war means for Russia and the Russian people. Plus: a new support group.
As it turns out, the Russian “traditional values” Putin waxed so nostalgic about three weeks ago were state sadism, widespread oppression, wholesale butchery, and utter disregard for human life—Russian or otherwise. In short order, his vaunted army was humiliated on the field of battle by Ukrainian special forces, grandmothers with sunflower seeds and Molotov cocktails, and farmers towing abandoned tanks with tractors. He’s killing children now, intentionally and on purpose. He’s blowing up hospitals, schools, churches, theaters. He’s doing this because escalating the carnage—to convince the world he’s nihilistic enough to launch nukes, perhaps—is the only move he has left.
“There’s also on-the-ground atrocities,” Zarina Zabrisky tells me on today’s PREVAIL podcast, “where the soldiers are shooting the civilian population. They’re shooting children, they’re shooting women. There are several intercepted phone calls—I listened to them—where Russian soldiers discuss with their mothers and wives the orders they have received to shoot at children.” She’s seen footage of this horror: for example, a Russian tank blowing up an elderly Ukrainian man, a civilian, for the crime of walking down the street. . . .
What he fails to point out is that he, Vladimir Putin, is the ultimate bastard, the seminal traitor, to the Russian people. It is Putin who has oppressed them, Putin who has lied to them, Putin who has stolen from them. It is that egregious thievery, larceny on an unprecedentedly grand scale, that is the cause of his present situation. His kleptomania has come back to bite him in the ass, bigly.
“Everything [in Putin’s Russia] has been mobbed up, everything has been criminalized,” Moscow Never Sleeps tells me on today’s PREVAIL podcast. “They don’t have their equipment, because the money was stolen. They don’t have their contract, professional soldiery, because the money was stolen. They don’t have their reliable fifth column, inside spies and turncoats inside Ukraine. . . because the money ran out. And the money ran out for one very simple reason: they all stole it.”
Team Justice vs. Team Peace: Zarina Zabrisky
June 24, 2022
Four months after the invasion, Zarina is now in Ukraine, reporting on the war.
The journalist and writer Zarina Zabrisky calls in from Odesa, Ukraine, to talk to Greg Olear about the situation on the ground in Ukraine, the popularity of President Zelenskyy, the enigma of Macron, the Putin sympathies of the New York Times, the Davos conference, the fallacy of Team Peace, and what the future may hold for Putin and Russia. Plus: “867-5309 (Ginni).”
The editorial board of the New York Times, too, has taken this collaborator’s stance. “[I]t is still not in America’s best interest to plunge into an all-out war with Russia, even if a negotiated peace may require Ukraine to make some hard decisions,” the board wrote in a recent op-ed.
“Confronting this reality may be painful, but it is not appeasement,” the board writes—a brazen bit of Orwellian doublespeak.
Zarina Zabrisky, today’s guest on the PREVAIL podcast, who is in Odesa covering the war for Euromaidan Press and other publications, spoke on this topic. “There’s a very simple explanation for all of this—the fashionable term, I think, is Peace Team versus Justice Team. So, the so-called Peace Team, that the New York Times gladly jumped on, is just nothing but the Russian lobby,” she says. “I’m sitting in Ukraine, I have nothing to lose. Call things what they are.”
It is rare in this 50-shades-of-grey world when things are starkly black-and-white, but there is no ambiguity—none—about the cause of the war in Ukraine. Putin is to blame, full stop. And anyone saying otherwise is spewing Russian talking points.
“One country in this world currently is breaking all international laws, and nobody in their sane mind, unless they’re brainwashed or compromised by the Kremlin, should be in this Peace Camp,” Zabrisky says.
“There’s only one camp: Justice.”
Ukraine vs. the Evil Empire: Victor Rud
September 16, 2022
This was recorded eight months after the invasion.
Greg Olear welcomes back Ukraine expert Victor Rud, chair of the Committee on Foreign Affairs for the Ukrainian American Bar Association, to discuss common misconceptions about Ukrainian history, Russia’s long-standing aims in the country, America’s “strategic slide,” Putin’s brazen violation of international order, and how credibility of will establishes deterrence. Plus: a new moving company.
The Russian Empire, however, did not really go away. It merely changed guises, trading the two-headed Romanov eagle for the Communist hammer and sickle. There was no lasting independence for Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and so on, whose citizens had been living miserably under the tsar’s rule. All of those countries were simply rolled up in the new confederation. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was the Russian Empire with different branding. But unlike in Austro-Hungary or the Ottoman Empire, the borders, already vast, remained more or less intact. And the United States just let this happen.
“All the empires had gone essentially down the drain, and yet the Russian Empire was reconstructed—with, ironically, American money, American capital,” explains Victor Rud, chair of the Committee on Foreign Affairs for the Ukrainian American Bar Association and my guest on today’s PREVAIL podcast. “We approached the reconstruction of the old Russian Empire without regard to the fact that it was, as any empire is, a multinational state.” The Soviet Union “was simply a new moniker that was placed on a reconstructed Russian Empire that of course [had fallen] apart during World War I.” Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points, Rud laments, “didn’t extend to the nations of the Russian Empire, including Ukraine.”
This had dire ramifications in the country Putin is currently trying and failing to take over. Ukraine had a brief flirtation with independence at the end of the Great War. But Stalin, recognizing both the fierce will of the Ukrainian people and its strategic importance as the breadbasket of Eastern Europe, did everything in his considerable power to keep Kyiv under Soviet rule. The Great Purge—it was just as Orwellian and awful as it sounds—eliminated a generation of Ukrainian intellectuals and political leaders. During the Holodomor, or Great Famine, of 1932-33, Stalin intentionally starved to death millions of Ukrainians, with the highest number of fatalities being in the Kyiv and Kharkiv regions. . . .
The Russian Empire should have been hacked apart at the end of the First World War, like the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman. For a variety of reasons, it was allowed to remain intact during the interwar period, and generations of strongmen kept it that way for decades. It lasted three quarters of a century longer than its expiration date. The breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991—with Ukraine’s declaration of independence providing the coup de grâce, as Rud points out—was neither “geopolitical catastrophe” nor “genuine tragedy,” but a long-overdue correction. The real tragedy is that Putin can’t get this through his botoxed head.
Photo credit: Vadim Chuprina. The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, in Kyiv, 2013.
TGIF🎉🎉🎉⚖️🤞🏻Looking forward to 8/25 season opener!