INTERVIEW: A Greg Palast Confidential: Ukraine

Greg Palast in his NYC office.
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A Palast Confidential: Ukraine

by John Kendall Hawkins

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Greg Palast is an investigative journalist who has written for the BBC, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, the NYT, and other publications. He is the author of several bestselling books, including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (2002), Armed Madhouse (2006), Billionaires and Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps (2012), and How Trump Stole 2020 (2020). His strong, incisive voice came to the forefront of alternate, independent journalism back in 2000 when he began reporting on Choicepoint and Katherine Harris, which together purged thousands of "felons" from Florida's voter registration ranks, a leading cause for George W. Bush's surprise victory in the state his brother Jeb was governor of. Palast later showed that none of the "felons" were felons and their largely Democrat votes should have counted.

More recently he's been caught up, like a lot of journalists, in the Trump Era farce that has cost so much time on the Climate Change front, underscored the unhappiness of the nation in general and its willingness to elect a clown for president. In his book How Trump Stole 2000, Palast showed how Trump would use select secretaries of state to disenfranchise votes from the left and secure Trump's election by subterfuge. It almost worked, despite his loud and early warnings. But a pandemic came along, forcing more scrutiny of the national vote count, and Old Joe, who nobody really wanted as president, won election. But then Palast became one of the first to point out how Trump and his associates would use the 12th Amendment to undermine the final House electoral college vote -- leading to the eventual largely comical catastrophe of January 6, 2021.

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Greg Palast:

Ok, let's cut the BS that it has anything to do with NATO expansion, OK? Ukraine asked to get into NATO 14 years ago. And NATO laughed it off. You can't, under NATO's charter, have a conflict with a neighboring nation and even be a member of NATO, it's a joke. And applying to NATO, it's not like being a "made" man with the mafia. It's not like you go out and do a war and then you get led into NATO. This is, like, ridiculous. So forget the NATO thing.

Also, frankly, I hate to say it, and I know my friends on the left won't like it very much, but we probably should have let them into NATO. Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons. Don't forget that in I guess it was 1994 that the United States, Russia, Ukraine and the UK signed a deal [Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances] in which Ukraine sent all its warheads to Russia, in return for a security guarantee [actually,"assurance," the difference is explained in the link above] from Russia, the U.S and the U.K. that if Ukraine were ever invaded, were ever a victim of aggression that the three countries Russia, U.S. and the U.K. would come to Ukraine's help. Well, you see how useful that is.

By the way, this is a dangerous thing for another reason. I think that our dear friend in North Korea saw what happened to Moammar Gadhafi when he gave up nukes. And now he's seeing what happened to Ukraine when the Ukrainians gave up their nukes. So we can forget North Korea ever giving up any nukes. In fact, I hate to say it from their view they'd be completely nuts to give up their nukes.

What does the Russian invasion have to do with? It's always the only two things that really matter in the world. Oil and religion, those are the keys now.

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RELIGION

Let's start with religion. I call this two different wars, not one. The first war which Putin won was the war in eastern Ukraine and the Crimea known as the Donbas. This is not Ukraine. So I wrote a story called "7 Facts About Ukraine" [see link above], and this is a war over men in funny hats, very dangerous men in funny hats. What do I mean by that?

In the Donbas and Crimea the population is almost exclusively Russian Orthodox. They follow the Kyrill, the patriarch of Moscow, except for 15 percent, which is Muslim because it used to be Tatarstan until, of course, Stalin removed the Tatars in 1943. And Sevastopol, which is in Crimea, is a Russian naval base -- always has been, even when Ukraine was independent from the Soviet Union. Remember, it was its own nation. It was never part of Russia, never. But the Donbas and Crimea have always been part of Russia since 1783.

In 1954, when Khrushchev became premier of Russia, and he was in a fight over control of Politburo, he literally lopped off Crimea -- lopped it off -- and the Donbas, and gave them to Ukraine, to his political buddy. Now, it didn't mean much, because technically, it was all under the Soviet Politburo, but the Donbas and Crimea were never Ukrainian. They are Russian speakers, Russian ethnics and [practice] the Russian religion.

And so, Putin took Crimea in 2014. But frankly, you know, people know Greg Palast as the expert on elections, not just U.S. elections, but worldwide. I found that the Crimean vote, which was overwhelmingly to return Crimea to Russia, was quite honest. And I have relatives there, and I could tell you that they see themselves as Russian, not as Ukrainian, and the main motivation, by the way, for Russia, for the people to vote to rejoin Russia is that at the time, Russian pensions were five times the size of Ukrainian pensions. Ukrainian pensions are 80 bucks a month. And so people were near starvation. So they joined Russia.

All right. So Putin, with justification, said Crimea is part of Russia. It is. The second is that the Donbas is Russia and part of Russia, and it is. And so when Putin, a month ago, took final control of Donbas, frankly, there was some justification, especially because the people in the Donbas were under artillery shelling from Ukraine. This current war didn't just start.

It started eight years ago in 2014, when there was bombing from both sides of the of the Donbas to Ukraine side. Fourteen thousand people have died. Three thousand Russian ethnic civilians, mostly children.

So it wasn't about Putin and his grand imperial ideas, and restoring the Russian Empire, by the way -- certainly not restoring the USSR -- but restoring the empire, it's that he was under pressure from Kyrill, the patriarch of the Russian church, who said, You can't let our co-religionists die. So again, religion is a big part of this. And so it was a restoration of the normal situation.

So but what's going on now? Two weeks ago, Putin won the war. He got the Donbas. He got Crimea. And yeah, I mean, it's true that Ukraine didn't sign off, but big frickin deal. Yeah, they own it now. So he won the war. So what is he doing next? Why this invasion of the non-Russian parts of Ukraine? Now, I've got to say I didn't predict it. I predicted that he would take the Donbas and Crimea at some point. He did, but I thought, Well, that's enough. He can go home a hero. But he's got a lot of pressure from Kyrill and the right wing in Russia. Because Kyrill is not happy enough, just taking the Russian ethnic and Russian Orthodox areas, he wants the Ukrainian Orthodox areas. Remember, Kyrill and the Russian Patriarchate were effectively thrown out of Ukraine. But now Putin has moved from the Russian areas to the non-Russian areas where he's despised and where Russians are despised.

OIL

So what's going on? Then we get to number two: oil. The price of oil collapsed with COVID in 2020. Forty three percent of Russia's state budget, which means their pensions, whatever, comes from oil and oil revenues. The price of oil collapsed, in fact, if you remember, there was even one day when the spot price of oil was negative, you had to literally pay people to take oil. This was devastating to Russia.

Covid. They had a massive, massive outbreak of Covid. They have their second rate vaccine there [sputnik]. And it didn't stop the epidemic, but that was nothing compared to the loss of funds from oil. So what do you do if the price of oil is down? You raise the price of oil. What's the best way to raise the price of oil? War. Blow things up, threaten the world. Well, just raise the price of oil. Russia is the world's number one exporter of oil and gas products. Today, oil hit $130 a barrel. It was $50 a barrel this time last year. I'm looking at nearly a $1 billion a day war windfall for Putin. So there you are. It's religion and oil.

Putin needs religion and oil to stay in power to get re-elected. I know that his elections are not [fair]. He kills. He poisons, jails and, you know, threatens to murder his opponents. But you know what? Even Putin has to worry about whether he stays popular. People don't care about who you murder in Russia. As long as they're getting something in return. So that's it. So as long as he can keep the price of oil up, he doesn't care about sanctions, you know? Think about it. He's making a billion bucks a day on this war.

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Palast:

No, there's not a lot of military aid. [This interview was conducted before the Congressional military aid package was passed.] Otherwise there'd be a lot more Russians dying. We've been actually pretty parsimonious with military aid, despite the fact that we have a treaty requiring it.

Yeah, let's go back to 2014. A lot of this kicked off in when the Ukrainian president was overthrown, and I agree with you with some help, not only from the CIA, but from the West. In 2010, the Ukrainians elected a guy, Viktor Yanukovych as president, and the U.S. said, Oh, that election was perfectly fine, perfectly legal. Well, we liked Yanukovych because even though he comes from the Donbas, by the way, and was a Russian speaker, he was for Ukraine joining, not just NATO, but the European Union.

Unfortunately, right after 2010, you've got the world economic crisis, Ukraine was flat on its feet. Ukraine asked the European Union and the Germans in particular -- who, you know, the European Union is basically the Fourth Reich -- for some financial help. Yeah, they had big debts. The European Union and, of course, Germany refused help Ukraine. So Putin stepped in and said, Well, I'll help you. I'll cover your debts. I'll take care of Ukraine. And so Yanukovych switched his allegiance to the Russians.

He ran in 2014 for re-election and won that election. Was it the cleanest election in the world? No. There are no clean elections in Ukraine, but he was re-elected. Remember, we were happy with him when he got elected in 2010, not in 2014. And 2014, when he switched to back Putin, we helped [oust him]. Well, you didn't need much help. Remember that he is Russian Orthodox and they had an uprising of the Ukrainian Orthodox right wing a lot.

And by the way, there were a lot of neo-Nazis and fascists we sent. And I sent my own team over. Zach D. Roberts, a great photojournalist, went over there, and first he was, like, Day One, he said, Oh, this is a great revolution. You know, he was very pro. You know, this is freedom loving Ukrainians looking to rise up against the oligarchs. By Day Two he realized, Wait a minute, this is the overthrow of the government. Half of these guys are f*cking, excuse me, skinheads, you know, they're neo-Nazis, you know?

And so then he realized the right wing influence, and you don't need the CIA to really help you do that. So what happened was you ended up with a right wing government under Under the Tymoshenko government, which was not elected, and then [led]the Russian ethnics and the Russian Orthodox who follow the Moscow church to declare themselves independent. That's the Donbas. Donetsk and Luhansk and, of course, Crimea, that led to a war. So eight years of warring.

Now. Then we get Volodymyr Zelensky. A Jewish comic who plays a president, it's like a funny West Wing and people like the character. By the way, I always thought that Martin Sheen should have run for president. But anyway, Zelinsky did. He said, Look, I play this guy on TV. It's just an honest, good guy. I can do that in the actual office. So Zelinski was elected overwhelmingly; he is, no question, the legitimate president of Ukraine. And he actuallyctried to cut a deal with Putin, which made him somewhat unpopular, because he was willing to negotiate with Putin over the Donbas and Crimea. He would not let Russia take sovereign control.

And so I think that Putin saw that there was weakness [from the Biden administration], the surrender and effort in Afghanistan. [Putin] noticed things like, you know, Obama laid down the red line in Syria. Assad crossed it and nothing happened. So Putin sees it as a free move. He is a right wing. You know, here's some weird thing -- people conflate Putin with the Soviet Union or socialism. He's a violent, violent anti-communist. I mean, he would make Joe McCarthy seem like a member of Democratic Socialists.

So, Putin is a violent, violent anti-communist, and always telling his people, Look out, if you don't have me, you're going to go back to communism and socialism. He sees himself as the Russian Pinochet, the former dictator of Chile. And he had an opportunity. He took it. And of course, he's got this huge bonus. Oil. His country was in a financially desperate shape last year, the last two years, and suddenly they're making money. And he gets to be heroic. Every leader in trouble knows when you're in hot water because the economy isn't doing well -- it's war, you know?

Palast:

No, that's not it. First of all, remember that until recently, we loved Putin and we loved the Russian regime because they got rid of the communists. We put Putin in power. When you talk about a fixed election, who fixed it? We put Putin in power, let's remember that. Ben Judah is a great expert on Putin and wrote a great book, Fragile Empire (2014). [Here's detailed study guide of the book from Liberty University that is the story of Putin's rise to power.] We start out with Yeltsin. First of all, we cut the deal where we sent the warheads from Ukraine to Russia. That doesn't make any sense to say that that was our way of threatening Russia. So the idea that Ukraine is threatening Russia is completely insane and that we would use Ukraine as a client state to threaten Russia is also completely mad. We wouldn't let them in NATO, we wouldn't let them in the European Union, and we told them to give up their warheads.

If anything, we were telling Russia, we're giving you a buffer state. But that wasn't good enough for Putin. Because it doesn't keep him in power. Right? Ok. Back in the 90's, when we have this crazy drunk Yeltsin, the people of Russia were literally starving. They were starving because when they overthrew the communist regime. They were taken over by a new regime from the US, Larry Summers and the economic shock gang.

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Oligarchs owned everything. And the oligarchs realized that the old Communist Party had renamed itself and refashioned itself and was absolutely going to win and defeat Yeltsin for re-election. So with the help of the US, the help of Bill Clinton, and the oligarchs spending billions -- they had a meeting in Davos, by the way -- they ended up being able to basically steal the election for Yeltsin for his re-election. But they had a condition because they knew that the Russian public still wouldn't buy him, even though they were able to fix an election they bought. So what they did was they told Yeltsin to hold a new election and they'll pick his successor.

So oligarch Berezovsky literally sent emissaries to Chile to see how Pinochet was running things. How can you have strong military control of the population while still not being a communist, but being an ultra capitalist? Because Chile was the only nation which you had basically a military dictatorship, which was combined with uber capitalism? And they wanted to recreate Chile and Russia, so they needed a new Pinochet. So they literally went to Chile and got a breakdown of what type of characteristics you want in a leader.

So they found this assistant to the mayor, the ex-mayor of St Petersburg, a guy named Sobchak, who had an assistant deputy named Putin. He was completely unknown. But they said this guy, who is a judo expert, he's super. He's focused, doesn't drink, unlike Yeltsin. Um, in fact, they had to do some publicity shots showing him drinking because people in Russia don't like teetotallers, they don't like drunks, but they don't like teetotallers.

So they talked Yeltsin into naming Putin prime minister, and naming him as successor in 1999, he ran for election, and, at first, when he was first chosen as prime minister, the first poll showed he had a 1% approval rating. One percent. And then he took over the war in Chechnya and just slaughtered everyone in Grozny, and the Russians loved it, slaughtering Muslims in Garani made him very, very popular again, wars of religion. So and of course, the world stood by and said, Oh, you're killing all these people in Grozny. Have fun. Glad it's all yours, and, if you remember, George W. Bush said, I looked into his eyes and I saw a good man, a good man. So we loved Putin.

Palast:

Well, yeah. Don't forget now, we go from Russia starving. Yeah. The economy, then under Putin took off, took off. Even though the resources were stolen. It did take off and people were way, way better off, in part because Putin, once he got the U.S. to do what he wanted, and made all kinds of promises about Ukrainian security and blah blah blah. Suddenly, he joined OPEC Plus. But Saudi Arabia realized it no longer had control of the oil markets of the world. There were too many independent players, and the price of oil was bouncing on the floor. The only way to control it is by Saudi Arabia creating a combine called OPEC Plus, which also includes, by the way, Kazakhstan. Exxon and the Russian oil companies, they were able to bring up the price of oil, which we are happy about because we like it for our oil companies, but up to a point.

So now we have tension because of this control of the price of oil. Right. And I think again, religion and oil, I'm saying that that's the only thing that matters in the world? Yeah. I'm laughing, but it kills people, religion and oil kill more people than the atomic bomb. So there you go.

Palast:

Supposedly, in their negotiations, Putin's saying that if Ukraine will recognize Crimea and Donbas as independent, basically part of Russia, that they'll pull back their troops. I don't believe a word of that because I don't. Nothing Putin says is worth a damn. Two weeks ago, he was promising all over the place that people who are saying that Russia would invade Ukraine were crazy warmongers. Nuts? Yeah, how dare they think of such a thing? We would never do such a thing, right? Here he is. So anything Putin says or promises is meaningless.

I don't know what Putin's going to do next. I don't know why. I'm really not quite sure why he's in Ukraine right now. I do see that re-establishing the Orthodox Church in Kiev is one. Re-establishing the Russian Empire and again, not the Soviet state, but the Czarist state. He's Catherine the Great, bald, and with the Black Belt. So it could be dreams of Russian glory, I don't know. You know, other than a statement, give me the Donbas and Crimea, which he has, so I don't know what he wants, but the couple of people I've talked to that seem to have some idea what they're talking about, say Putin is not going to stop until he controls Ukraine, period, and puts in a puppet government. And that will be that.