https://youtu.be/um-SEQDQidM
«The Russians won a propaganda war in a way which a propaganda war has rarely been won in this century, in the past century, in any other century.
[...]
Russia invades Ukraine because it looks like Ukraine could become a functioning rule-of-law state which would join the EU. It doesn't have a whole lot to do with America. What it has to do with is the possibility that a post-Soviet country, next to
Russia, where lots of people speak Russian, which is in some ways not so different from Russia, that that country could actually become a rule-of-law state, a democracy, and join the EU. That is what Russia needed to prevent in 2013, and that's what
Russia needed to prevent in 2014 when it invaded.
[...]
It was about actual democracy in Russia's actual neighborhood, which is an actual threat to Putin. The EU is also an actual threat to Putin, although they don't like to see themselves that way, because the EU shows that you can take flawed post-communist
states and with a little bit of encouragement, a little bit of aid and some norms, you can make them into prosperous countries. That would be very bad for Putin if his people actually believed that. So from Russia's point of view, it was all about
showing that Ukraine is actually a joke; it's never going to join Europe. I don't think we got any of that because we were taking neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians seriously enough. But that was a story about how Ukrainians had understood that for
their country to have the rule of law [...] the protesters on the Maidan, the million people who came out of the Maidan, when they were polled, the thing they said was most important to them was the rule of law, not language or all the other things that
we were obsessing about in the US. What they wanted was the rule of law. They wanted their country to be a normal country which could join Europe, and that's what Russia needed to stop. That's what it was all about. And we -- the Obama administration
said very little, and what it said it said very late about the Maidan. It's not something that we took very seriously, unfortunately.
[...]
In general, what Trump does for Putin is he normalizes the Russian way of doing politics. So Putin's view that democracy is a joke, you can lie all the time, politics is fundamentally about some rich guy becoming richer, corruption is normal, right,
Trump normalizes that for the whole world. [...] And so what Trump did was he took Putin and he made Putin normal. He put Putin in the middle. Putin was no longer something exceptional. Putin was now normal thanks to Donad Trump, and that had a
tremendously negative effect on politics around the world, I think. [...] The Trump administration was just a feast for Kremlin every day.
[...]
I think there's a fundamental misundestanding on the Russian side, on Putin's side, of people who are used to living in democracies, because in some ways he's right: we are slow; we're complicated; the various forces inside our countries end up canceling
each other out. But that doesn't mean that there aren't points where a fundamental sense of decency is involved, and I think in, not just in American public opinion but in European public opinion, invading Ukraine crossed that line. It crossed that line
for a lot of people. [...] And I think it is a misunderstanding that Putin has about us, that we are just as cynical as he.»
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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