Ukraine

“I think we'll see the start of great global conflict. We often rationalize the series of events that, that catalyze conflict after the fact, rather than Recognizing that there was emotional conditioning that allowed it to arise in the first place. I think we'r…”

“We should not want to add Ukraine or Georgia to NATO. That would do nothing to enhance the security of the United States.”

“I think to Sax's point, it's highly unlikely we're gonna end up sending military.”

“If we would just give up on that position or just reaffirm that Ukraine should not be admitted to NATO, it would enormously help defuse tensions with Russia.”

“I don't think he wants this problem long term. It's probably gonna be more like the situation we had in Georgia in 2008. He goes in for a year. He institutes perhaps some sort of puppet government or some government that's more favorable to him, and then he ge…”

“In 2008, he wrote a memo To Condoleezza Rice, who was then the Secretary of State, and what he said is, this is about Ukrainian entry into NATO, he said, Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite, not just Putin.”

“When I was thinking about the odds of this, just from a financial perspective and, you know, whether I should be doing something different and putting something on, I thought that there was zero chance that this would happen. Literally, I put it as close to ze…”

“Ukraine is not going to be a member of NATO.”

“However, we are not going to intervene militarily in that conflict, nor should we, because we cannot risk starting World War III. It is not a vital American interest.”

“If we had been willing to basically affirm That we believe in Ukraine's sovereignty, but they are not a part of NATO. That might have diffused this conflict.”

“The only end game now is regime change.”

“Any sort of assumption that leads to our belief that an alternative intervention or some other force can ultimately win against Russia is, is completely false because Russia has thousands of nuclear warheads.”

“By the way, Russia and the Ukraine combined account for roughly 25% of global wheat exports.”

“If we had done it preemptively, it would have made a difference.”

“And so I suspect, and you know, I could be completely wrong, is that we're much closer to a ceasefire than anybody thinks. And I suspect that you could see something in the next two to three weeks.”

“And unless Biden, hold on, if unless Biden stands up to his own State Department, we will not get a ceasefire, and we will not get a peace deal, and that will be disastrous for his presidency.”

“Humans today, I think, have the ability to synthesize and print food. And over the next couple of decades, particularly catalyzed by what's going on in Russia, Ukraine today, we're going to see these technologies accelerate.”

“The broad contours of what a peace deal would look like, which is there's three main pieces. Neutrality for Ukraine. The Russians insist that it not be part of NATO. They get to keep Crimea, which they annexed in 2014. That's been a fait accompli. And then som…”

“What the US should be doing is leading, they should be pushing for Lead, not bleed. Lead the way to a ceasefire, not to inflict maximum damage on the Russian regime.”

“Everybody knows we're not gonna go defend Taiwan. Everybody knows we're not gonna send our military to Ukraine.”

“Ukraine's gonna be neutral, they can't be part of NATO, they get some security guarantees from the West in exchange for that.”

“There is an expectation that we could see up to an 80% decline in planted acres in the Ukraine”

“I strongly believe we could have cut a deal on Ukraine a year ago to diffuse this whole situation before it turned into a war.”

“So we created a GoFundMe Campaign partnered with Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis. Ashton's an early investor in Flexport. And we raised twenty five million bucks to pay for shipping to deliver goods.”

“I don't see how the Russians win this. Like, this just seems impossible.”

“No American president has ever claimed that the United States has a vital national interest. In Ukraine.”

“No. I think the war stops and the Ukrainians want it to stop.”

“So, now we have this massive war in Ukraine that's fueling food and energy inflation. It's going to tank his presidency, and I don't even think there was any debate in his cabinet about this.”

“So I think that the end game is probably some organized, negotiated detente and ceasefire.”

“Wait until winter. And then that's only going to increase Putin's leverage. And that's when you're going to see a real fracture in the Western Alliance. This idea that Ukraine strengthened the Western Alliance, I think you will start to see the fractures from …”

“This is not going to help anyone in Ukraine to blockade Kaliningrad and prevent coal and building materials and steel from reaching Kaliningrad. That's not going to have any impact on the war.”

“And that is what we're going to end up with. The only difference is that it's going to be implemented by force and Ukraine will be destroyed in the process.”

“I'm gonna make a prediction, right? I think the Western Alliance is gonna fracture come this winter.”

“And so my guess is huge amount of money from the West and EU going into Ukraine. Ukraine agrees to let Putin keep some regions, some assets, Putin agrees to remove himself from certain regions and give up certain assets. Sanctions are partially lifted, but the…”

“Boris Johnson went to Ukraine and said, no deal, do not take the deal. We need to weaken Putin and Russia, not compromise with them.”

“I think there's an equal and opposite chance that that doesn't happen. That certainly could happen, okay? But I think there's an equal... An opposite chance that instead what happens is that we climb the escalatory ladder that Putin, I think we are backing him…”

“America is now giving Ukraine more and more advanced weapons. Okay. This sort of the long range artillery. They're telling them where to point the weapons. They're giving them the intelligence for it. They're training them on how to use it. They've got command…”

“We're so interested in helping and identifying with the Ukrainians that we've lost sight of an American interest that's separate and independent of Ukraine's desire for self-determination. I can understand and respect Their nationalism and their patriotism, bu…”

“The question is, did the US State Department do everything they could to avoid this war? And my point is, absolutely not. They should have taken this Ukraine issue off the table in writing before the invasion.”

“I can see the market taking off like a rocket if Ukraine gets resolved.”

“So I don't see how you're going to get a peace deal now. And so if you remove all the off ramps, what's left? Escalation. So it seems to me this thing's just going to keep escalating.”

“Two thirds of Kyiv is currently without power. 80% of Kyiv doesn't have water. 30% of the Ukrainian power stations have been destroyed. Nearly half of the country's without power. There's something like eight million displaced Ukrainians in the country. And ov…”

“And Fitch ratings agency says that Ukraine is headed towards default.”

“And it just shows how reflexively hawkish the media is, you know, it's like, Hey, can we just wrap up this war in Ukraine before we start another war with an even more formidable super power?”

“If we had just done those three things, there would have been no war.”

“If you're wondering why Putin seized Crimea, it was in direct retaliation for the coup that we backed in Ukraine in 2014. This is the origin of the conflict.”

“So I think he would have shut the door so ferociously on Ukraine and NATO, and anybody that crossed that line, he would have tarred and feathered publicly. And I think the end result would have been that Putin could have found an off ramp well before he invade…”

“The Russians actually have a six to one artillery advantage, which is why they're actually doing much better in this war than people are acknowledging.”

“I think we all agree the soft landing concept is over. We're going to be in a recession. The war is going to end there because we're not funding this and American, the American public is not going to want to see tens of billions of dollars going to Ukraine and…”

“Russia is basically using about 20,000 shells a day. The Ukrainians are using somewhere between three and 6000.”

“A deal was available, but the West chose not to take it.”

“If you're wondering why did the U.S. Give cluster bombs to Ukraine, it's because we're out of ammo to give, and it's all we've got left are these stockpiles of cluster munitions.”

“Because I don't think that we would have, if I was president, I don't think we would have gotten to the point of those things rolling in. Angela Merkel made some disastrous comments. Putin made a hard demand. We would have said hard no to Ukraine joining NATO,…”

“I do think Ukraine is on track to become potentially the next Vietnam or the next Iraq.”

“And then also in that same turning point poll, 95% of the attendees of that conference Were opposed to us involvement in Ukraine.”

“The top three candidates all have expressed significant either misgivings or opposition to our involvement in Ukraine. Trump, Vivek, and DeSantis, with varying degrees of strength, have basically all opposed Biden's policy, and they are the leading candidates …”

“For me, the number one issue is whether the president, the next president will seek to deescalate or end the Ukraine war, or they will seek to escalate it.”

“I'm sorry, but Biden has had the most hawkish policy on Ukraine that any president's ever had.”

“I think it is now a foregone conclusion that Ukraine will be admitted to NATO, and frankly, it's got to be now, I think, one of the penalties and one of the prices that Putin pays for his aggression.”

“Starlink is the fundamental communication backbone of the Ukrainian government and essential services, like first responders and that kind of thing. And, you know, it's used, we hope peacefully, relatively peacefully on the war front. It is the only thing that…”

“If you look at U.S. Policy towards Ukraine, we have made common cause with a number of these far-right, ultra-nationalist groups. Frankly, neo-Nazi groups. And this occurred before the current war.”

“The counter offensive failed.”

“Earlier this year, we used to have an ammunition stockpile in Israel. The United States did. It belonged to us, but it was there potentially in case of a problem in the region. And that artillery stockpile was basically taken and given to Ukraine.”

“The Wall Street Journal's news coverage of Ukraine was some of the most biased and inaccurate of any publication, any major Western publication”

“The Ukrainians are dying in much higher numbers, and Russia's a much bigger country. They've got something like five times the population.”

“If you look at what's happened this year, so let's just put a pin in what happened last year, because I think there's different ways of interpreting it, but if you look at what's happened this year, and certainly over the last five months, Ukraine has made no …”

“I keep these receipts of people who attack me on Ukraine, and then, like, six months later, you know, they all write a tweet admitting they were wrong, so I'll rub it in their face.”

“We armed Ukraine, but we also told Ukraine, you know, don't even think about raising NATO as a membership, as a way to go.”

“My biggest loser in politics for this year is Vladimir Zelensky, the president of Ukraine.”

“Well, Saxl like this one, but I think Ukraine might be the biggest loser this year as attention shifts to the brewing conflict in the Middle East.”

“As I've been saying for a while, it's not a stalemate. The Russians are winning”

“What was Russia demanding? They were demanding Ukrainian neutrality. They were not basically looking to conquer Ukraine. They wanted them to be neutral. So Ukraine did not have to give up its freedom. Okay. They just had to agree to be neutral.”

“I think the statements are correct, that Ukraine joining NATO escalates conflict, and we will find ourselves in a de facto global conflict, world war.”

“Clearly the right move here would have been to kick the can down the road and just tell Putin, we'll take it off. We'll take needle off the table for 10 years or 20 years, and then we could have outlasted Putin.”

“It turns out that as many drones as Ukrainians have been able to put on the battlefield, the Russians have even more because they're able to mass produce them in factories. They've got Bigger drones, better drones. And I think the most important variable in th…”

“This would have never happened if I were president. It would have never, Putin would have never done it.”

“So for 20 years, I heard that NATO if Ukraine goes into NATO, it's a real problem for Russia. I've heard that for a long time. And I think that's really why this war started.”

“And you know, it turns out that the month before the Russians invaded, Blinken told Lavrov that the administration was not only going to bring Ukraine into NATO, but that they thought it was okay for the United States to put nuclear weapons in Ukraine.”

“I would guarantee it.”

“Biden actually approved Private contractors now going into Ukraine and starting to fight. Americans will be on the battlefield as of, I think this was just a few days ago.”

“And what we're on track for is, at some point, Probably next year, Ukraine is going to collapse.”

“Ukrainian casualties, according to some sources, are somewhere between 30,060 thousand a month.”

“You know, I think we're sort of sleepwalking into Armageddon with you know, the Ukraine and the conflict in Gaza are just sort of the warmups to the China-Taiwan war.”

“She was in then the Obama administration as Hillary's spokesperson first, and then making a coup in Ukraine in February, 2014. Not a great move. Started a war.”

“This is not a conflict about Putin invading Ukraine. This is something a lot different that has to do with American power projection into the former Soviet Union, so it's completely different.”

“And furthermore, by getting bogged down in Ukraine, and now bogged down in the Middle East, it's become very difficult for us to pivot to Asia to deal with China, which is the principal threat that we face.”

“The real influence operation in this country is by the mainstream media. They're the ones who are spreading disinformation about the war in Ukraine and so many other issues on a scale that dwarfs what any of these, like, Handful of podcasters that most people …”

“For example, on the issue of Ukraine, the number one quoted source in the mainstream media is a think tank called the Institute for the Study of War.”

“The sources I've read suggest that the Ukrainians are losing about 30,000 troops per month. And that's just KIA.”

“I think that Ukraine within, it could be in the next month. It could be the next two months. It could be the next six months. I think they're eventually going to collapse. They're getting close to being combat incapable.”

“Ukraine, I don't want to see American blood spilled, and as long as there's a NATO, and I agree there should be a NATO, I'd rather see us spend money than put soldiers in harm's way.”

“Well, I would argue that Biden provoked the proxy war in Ukraine.”

“And since the Ukraine war broke out, I've surveyed Republicans when I speak. If it's 500 people here, 5000 people there you know, I've surveyed over a 100,000 people live in real time where I'll give them the mic. And so far of about a 100,000, maybe a little …”

“If you actually listen to what the Russians have said, there's only been two red lines. The first red line was they said they would not accept NATO expanding to Ukraine, and they proved their seriousness on that issue by invading Ukraine in February of 2022. T…”

“I think Trump is going to be a lot tougher on Putin than people think. And I think he's going to get a very, very a deal that's very, very bad for Russia and Ukraine.”

“If you look at it today, probably the largest defense contractor in the world is DJI. They got all the drones. Even in Ukraine, both sides are getting all their drone parts from DJI. Now they're getting it through different supply chains and so on, but Ukraini…”

“I don't think he would have invaded with Trump as president.”

“They cancel elections, they cancel freedom of the press, they cancel freedom of religion. Zelensky's political opponents, their assets have been seized, they've been in prison.”

“The idea of it has ended. It is now just about a border negotiation It is no longer a, you know, totemic struggle for freedom or whatever they, you know, the, you know, it was being sold to us as.”

“So my point is that it's militarily impossible to retake Crimea. The people of Crimea don't want Ukraine to retake it. They want to be part of Russia, and yet Zelensky cannot give this up.”

“At the end of the Soviet Union, there were a bunch of Soviet nukes that were in Ukraine. But as I understand that the launch codes were in Moscow. So these were Soviet nuclear weapons that happened to be on Ukrainian soil. And then when the Soviet Union came a…”

“If you were to look at any of the ratings of democracies in the world, Russia would be amongst the lowest scores. And the Ukraine would be in the high middle scores compared to the truly free countries.”

“A year ago, support for the war was in the sixties or seventies. Now it's collapsed to 24%. So the vast majority of Ukrainians now want a resolution to the conflict, even if it means making concessions.”

“Russia has five times the people, three times the munitions they have an industrial base.”

“There is no democracy in Ukraine right now. There's just not.”

“The real cause of this is the failure of the counteroffensive in the summer of 2023. Remember, we gave the Ukrainians something like a hundred billion dollars worth of weapons to retake that territory. And it was an abysmal failure.”

“Russia, Ukraine. I think it's going to settle out this year. I think there's a lot of motivating factors to get it settled out this year, economic and other political factors, but I do think it's going to settle out this year, and it's going to bring a bit mor…”

“All the patriots that were to hope to prevent missile strikes from Russia on Ukraine are now In the Middle East.”

“I think we're getting close to a deal on Ukraine, Russia.”

“Neither Iran or Ukraine have a Navy, and they both control waterways near their fronts.”