Excerpts: Interview with HumanReAction Podcast
Following the terrorist attack on Crocus City Hall, I spoke with David Herbst from the HumanReAction podcast about the incident, as well as US-Russia relations more broadly. Below, find excerpts from and a link to the members-only episode. I’ve also created a clip compilation featuring segments quoted in this transcript, likewise linked below.
On the nature of terrorist networks and potential ties to Western intelligence:
“The lack of centralized decision making in terrorist organizations makes it particularly difficult to track who sent an actual order… it gives room for people to question whether Ukrainian, Western, US intelligence may have been involved, because when you have so many layers of compartmentalization, decentralized decision making, it’s easier to sneak your way in there and then launder any involvement through a number of subsidiary, intermediary groups.”
On the history of Ukrainian ties to Islamic terrorism:
“Indeed, it’s not entirely strange that even regular non-aided Islamic rebels from the Islamic State would try and flee to Ukraine. There’s a great 2020 article, actually, from Ukrainian independent media, talking about how Ukraine has been a travel hub for Islamic State fighters for years now. It’s a known problem.”
“And so even if we do take the ISKP [Islamic State — Khorasan Province] angle at face value, and accept it as a story, that doesn’t necessarily mean that there wasn’t a Ukrainian connection, even if it wasn’t a Ukrainian government connection. You know, Putin talked in a speech about how it appeared they [the terrorists] were fleeing to Ukraine, and that they had some sort of compatriots in Ukraine who would create a window for them to enter the country. Now, you could interpret that as Ukrainian special forces, you know, intelligence services doing it, or it could be a sleeper cell of the Islamic State that’s already located in Ukraine, who would have created some sort of diversion or otherwise allowed their entry into the country.”
“There’s an informational fog of war. We don’t have access to KGB phone records and calls… and we don’t have access to whatever intelligence the US is making to to justify its claims. The Biden administration was very, very clear from the very start that Ukraine had absolutely zero involvement [in the attack], and Russia rightfully asked, ‘Well, how can you be so sure?’ You know, if you can make such a confident statement, surely you must have information to vindicate that statement. But as of now, they have not given any reason for their assessment that Ukraine was not involved.”
On 1990s Russia and the rise of Vladimir Putin:
“One thing that I think people in the West, particularly in the United States, have to understand — to understand Putin’s rise — is just how chaotic and unstable Russia was in the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union. You know, obviously, the Soviet Union wasn’t necessarily the greatest place in the world to live, but post Soviet fall 1990s Russia was somewhat of a hellscape: organized crime ran rampant, people lost all their savings, opportunities and jobs were hard to come across, there was lots of alcoholism, Russia’s life expectancy, especially among men, plummeted following the collapse of the Soviet Union. And so in that sort of chaos, Russians really wanted to seek stability, they wanted a stable leader.”
“I believe it was a week or two ago, the George Washington University National Security Archives released a US embassy assessment from 2001 or 2002 I believe, where they openly say that, you know, Russians really do strongly support Putin, partly because he’s, I believe they called him a ‘giant among midgets,’ that is, that he was a somewhat decent leader among an array of really bad choices for leaders otherwise, and as well, that, at the very least, they thought that he could protect their pensions, and that he could mitigate the chaos of organized crime that had been prevailing there in Russia.”
On the anti-Russian nature of the US foreign policy establishment:
“With the fall of the Soviet Union came the collapse of the job market for so-called kremlinologists. You know, you had these scholars, these national security officials, these intelligence workers, who had spent years, decades, of their careers focused on countering the Soviet threat. And once that Soviet threat was gone, they either had to invent a new threat in which they could be a specialist, or they’d be out of a job. And so that’s where we saw the remnants of that that Cold War-era, anti-Russian, anti-Soviet diplomacy leak over into the subsequent generations. And I think that’s also reinforced by the fact that much of our diplomatic corps, much of our national security and intelligence apparatus, are all from these elite schools with professors who hold those same sort of views. It’s a feedback cycle, it’s an echo chamber.”
“To this day, especially after the the spark of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, they’ve [the anti-Russia foreign policy establishment] really doubled down on that position, because they get to write a bunch of books and articles for money about this, they get to make media appearances about it, whereas if we had gone down the route of integrating Russia into the Western fold, those people would only have peace to talk about, and peace doesn’t get clicks and views, nor does it get them bigger paychecks for bigger programs.”
On Russia’s split messaging to liberals and conservatives:
“[Russia] sometimes plays into its perception as a conservative bastion for Americans and people in Western Europe. But at the same time, Russia tries to appeal to the global south, to the developing world, as a bastion of multipolarity, as a place that’s accepting of a world where all sorts of countries have a say and can independently run their own systems.”
“They’re oftentimes going to, you know, South America, the Middle East, Africa, and they’re portraying themselves more along the classical Soviet anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, anti-Western sentiment and playing into that, whereas they don’t really take that angle as frequently to English-speaking and Western audiences. Just because, you know, there’s different interests to play into there. And so it is kind of a split messaging. But at the end of the day, Putin really does seem to believe and take pride in Russia as a multi-ethnic nation, as a nation rich in culture and art from a variety of people. And that’s just geographically true.”
On “denazification” and Russia’s view on World War II:
“[Putin] is definitely playing into the historical memory of the Russian and the post-Soviet peoples, as well as the modern angle of these Ukrainian paramilitary groups being openly supportive of National Socialism. So, to go back to a point you made there, Russians call the Second World War ‘the Great Patriotic War,’ and that’s because when you look at the death counts — both civilian and military — it’s really not comparable, the Eastern Front and the Western Front. The Eastern Front was just an absolute bloodbath, both for the Germans and for the Soviets, and the Soviets and the post-Soviet sphere, and, you know, by extension Russia, take great, great pride.”
“So, even though World War Two has definitely become a big part of the American mythos and our national identity, it’s amplified and even greater for Russia and the post-Soviet sphere… But you also had many partisans, and many groups in those countries who, due to Soviet oppression in the 1930s, ended up siding with the Nazis. You know, you had mass starvation, you had political repression under the Soviet leadership, and so when the Nazis came and they were presented as a sort of liberator, many of these groups there in Ukraine, Belarus, [and] the Baltics ended up siding with the Nazis. Now, that partisan warfare extended well after the end of the war in 1945 in places like Ukraine, and Russia has ever since had a true vendetta against anything resembling Nazism.”
On the “nyet means nyet” memo and keeping Ukraine out of NATO:
“The big Russian contention, you know, the big ask that’s really going to be part of any end-term negotiations, I believe, is going to be assurances that Ukraine will not join NATO. It’s really what it has gone back to for years ever since that ‘nyet means nyet’ memo came out, where now-CIA Director William Burns — then ambassador for the US to Russia — said that it was the Kremlin’s firm belief and policy that ‘no means no’ regarding Ukraine’s entry into the NATO sphere.”
On the failed chance to integrate Russia into NATO:
“Once again, this whole situation could have at least in theory been avoided by starting negotiations early on in Putin’s reign to bring Russia into a security pact. Now, you can always argue, as many people do, that Russia would never have actually agreed, they would have made too ridiculous of demands and wouldn’t have been arguing in good faith. Well, okay, if that were the case, we still should have let it play out, and then we could have exposed this lack of willingness to negotiate in good faith. But I personally believe that they would have at least made a reasonable offer, one that could be negotiated on.”
“But now, we don’t really have the opportunity to go back and start considering [Russian integration with NATO], at least for years at this point. I would love for that to be back on the table, but it doesn’t seem entirely likely at this point. And, similarly, ideally I think we should have, as the West, supported very transparent elections, referendums, there in eastern Ukraine in 2014, or even after, in order to try and really determine how the people in these regions speak. As a libertarian, decentralization is kind of always the goal, you know, breaking down government into smaller and smaller and smaller territorial, local units. And so that’s why, in theory, I’m not opposed to the breakaway of the state of Ukraine, regardless of how new the national identity may be, as long as there is a genuine, non-coerced, non-manipulated will by the people to form such a political entity. But, by the same standard of sovereignty we give Ukraine, we have to apply to those regions in the east of Ukraine, who may not necessarily want to be part of that Ukrainian state that broke away. They may want to break away into their own political entity. But we ruined any chance to have such elections, any such referendums, because we instantly decried any efforts to do so as pro-Russian.”
On the human toll of the Russia-Ukraine conflict:
“As you noted, [there is] the human toll that cannot be lost, right? It’s something that I myself, as someone who is inundated in the 24/7 news cycle, I often lose sight of all the bodies that stack up there in Ukraine, you know, in the trenches. Whether they’re Ukrainian soldiers, Russian soldiers, civilians, it doesn’t matter — every single one of those is a loss of human life. And it’s the loss of a life of someone who’s far more intimately tied to the conflict and the information thereof than any Western consumer. Any NAFO cheerleader on the sidelines doesn’t have a shred of the informational accuracy that someone dying on the battlefield does about the whole situation. Their feelings are not nearly as relevant as those who might be willing to go charging into a trench for one cause or the other. And it’s something that I think greatly pains Ukrainian and Russian people more than it does in the West. That’s something, when I listen to interviews with Ukrainians on the ground, when I listen to interviews of Russians on the streets of Moscow or anywhere else, they’re almost always most concerned about the fact that they are killing a people so close to themselves.”
