Did America Just Switch Sides on Ukraine? | EYES ON GEOPOLITICS

dee takos (0:00)

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Hey everybody, we're back. Welcome ties on Geopolitics. I'm here with Jonathan Hackett, Marc Polymeropoulos. Milburn might be joining us, I don't know yet. Hopefully he does, if not, we will carry on without him. A lot happening over the last week as usual. Nothing really different.

The big story from The Telegraph, I haven't pulled up here because I'm prepared for these shows. Musk approached Trump to slow down Starlink in Ukraine and that's from Joe Barnes at The Telegraph. It came out a couple days ago.

After this went down, Musk was saying that the president and the DOD asked him essentially to do this, which so it seems to be like people are pointing the finger at each other. See, you know, I didn't do it, I didn't do it. So what happened was it seems that the Starlink vs. Starshield internet access in Ukraine was throttled. And so like their military couldn't use it to target or do whatever, or not target, it was actually defensive.

And the way they tested it too, because it came out of Ukraine is like they went over to an EU country that borders Ukraine, I'm guessing it's Poland. Is it Poland? I don't know, whatever, it doesn't matter. Went to a EU country and once they went over the border, the internet started working perfectly, they were going up to 180 kilometers an hour and it was working fine. They jumped back over the border to Ukraine, it doesn't work again. And we did see over the last few days a pretty huge bombardment of Kiev by Russia, over 100 Shaheed drones, like 30 plus ballistic missiles hitting anything and everything they can. So there seems to be a huge, huge rift going on. And before we started, I was saying like I wanted, what are we going to name this episode? Like, you know, did we switch sides to Russia now? Because it seems like we're doing a lot to help them out. Couple this with the diesel deal. You know, basically we had the Lindsey Graham Act that sanctioned Russia and Trump wrote up an executive order to ease those sanctions and like kill, like strip what was in that bill, which I don't know how that's fucking legal, especially because he signed the bill into law. But riddle me that this administration loves to be in contempt of Congress and break the law. It seems like they do it as easy as breathing. So this is where we're at. Clearly, you know, I don't know how you're not a European country or an allied country that's like, we could trust the America with anything anymore because the writing seems to be on the wall. So Marc, let's talk to me about it. What are you thinking? What are you tracking?

Marc Polymeropoulos (2:43)

So there's, let's talk big picture because you want to, you know, the title of the episode.

And so you can, you can title it two ways. You know, has Trump switched sides to Russia or, you know, was he ever on the good guy side? So, you know, I'm being a little snarky here, but, you know, there's a couple of things which happened this week, which it's going to be hard for the GOP defenders of Trump who are pro-Ukrainian. There are some, but it's going to be hard for them to kind of maintain the line that Trump actually has done anything good for Ukraine, despite, you know, there is the, there is continued intelligence sharing, and there is continued, the Pearl Program, in which we, in which the Europeans buy weapons from us, and then they provide them to the Ukrainians. That is going on as well. And so that's what the kind of the GOP defenders of Trump say. But the last couple of days have been pretty, pretty stark in what's happened. And, and I want to go to Jonathan in a second, so he can actually describe, because no one can get this right, so maybe he can. You know, Star Trek, Starlink, Star Wars. Yeah, it's just, it's fucking maddening. Rubio, Rubio, I'm joking, Rubio got it wrong in a presser as well. And so Jonathan, I think will be really helpful in unfucking that. But the two big things are the, you know, the diesel deal, which really means Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner win. That's just the overall notion that there is somehow money to be made for the Russians, and that's going to entice the Russians to settle. Now, this, I met with someone yesterday who's closely tied to the White House. That is their thinking. There is a logic to this. It's wrong, but that's their logic, is that Russia will never give up, and the only way to get them to the table is to entice them to bring them into the Voldemort. I don't agree with it. That's their thinking, and that thinking has won out. And in essence, that is, in my view, a betrayal of Ukraine. And then the other piece, and let's just put it very starkly, Jonathan's going to decipher what happened really specifically with, in essence, the satellite systems. But we have decided to withdraw a force protection measure for the Ukrainians that resulted in the deaths of Ukrainian civilians. And at the same time, by withdrawing this force protection measure, the US government doing so, I don't care if it's Musk, if it's Trump, if it's Bridge Colby, whoever it is, someone on our side did this. That led to not only the deaths of Ukrainians, but our US personnel at Embassy Keeve were at grave risk. And the thousands of American citizens, US citizens, by law, FBI, others were supposed to protect them. They were at risk as well. And what I think you need from that is a gang of eight briefing. That's the leaders of Congress. They can demand this. We've done this before. Congress is out of session. They're going to come back after the midterms. You're going to need a preservation order for all records on this. You're going to need hearings.