Mental War, Part Two: The Spirit of Alaska in Perspective
Источник: https://scottritter.substack.com/p/mental-war-part-two-the-spirit-of
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Hello and welcome to this special edition of the Russia House with Scott Ritter.
Once again,
Garland Nixon and I find ourselves in Moscow,
aware of the opportunity to speak yet again with our good friend Andrei Ilnitsky.
Andrei is a former lieutenant general in the Russian Armed Forces,
a senior advisor to the Minister of Defense,
and currently he is at the military university where he
is a senior lecturer, a senior researcher.
I understand that you're finishing up your doctoral thesis in a topic that we
discussed in great detail earlier,
mental warfare.
So congratulations on that, and I look forward to seeing whatever you can publish about it.

Thank you.
Well, it's too early to offer congratulations.
I hope that I will defend my thesis in the fall.
I hope it's going to be successful.
The theory of mental warfare is something that military political scientists have
discussed over the past three decades,
and that's been studied extensively by NATO and by China,
and that
is a welcome move for me as actually the author of this concept of mental warfare.

Well,
I want you to know that after our discussion in November,
I returned home and I researched the issue more deeply and I've been incorporating
discussions of mental warfare
into my overall analysis because you opened up uh my eyes into um you know what
else is happening when you look at a story you can't just look at you know tactics
and operations and logistics uh there's an information warfare aspect that goes
even deeper than that mental warfare is even deeper than simply information warfare
it's about manipulating the minds taking control of um
of thought processes collapsing societies from within.
And when you see that, it's alarming that it's being waged and nobody knows about it.
Nobody's aware.

Well,
you put it really,
really accurately,
like there's a difference between the cognitive operations,
the information war,
which is kind of operational level,
and the strategic level.
That's the goal-setting process,
and that's where the mental warfare is all about,
trying to change your mentality,
trying to change your thinking.
And right now in Iran,
there's a clash of civilizations,
and a large part of what's happening there,
of the conflict itself,
could be described as mental warfare.

I mean, we can discuss that.
Additionally,
if I could ask you to speak just briefly on the issue of who the mental warfare is
directed at.
In the West now,
one of the issues that we're seeing is the mental warfare is directed more at the
population of the internally mental warfare.
When the government is taking action, such as in Iran, that has very low...
approval ratings of the citizens,
the mental warfare has to be directed inward as opposed to an outside adversary.

Mental warfare is usually directed
the society and the government as a system,
and some specific individuals as the cells of society.
Take Iran.
We're seeing a showdown of civilizations, and a mental war is underway.
There's a complete misunderstanding by Israel and the US of
how and on what grounds Iran,
well,
following the decapitation of its leadership and following these high precision
strikes from the sea and from the air,
but after that,
Iran did not give up and did not budge,
did not sign the deal that Trump said he would achieve in two weeks,
but it actually got stronger.
And Israel and the U.S.
don't really understand how that could happen.
And Iran now has the strategic initiative.
It's about the different foundations of different civilizations.
It's about your own identity, your self-perception, the way you view yourself.
That's what we need to understand.
And again, mental warfare is directed at this.
It seeks to destroy axiological, fundamental,
issues, fundamental perception.
And to defeat Iran,
just like Russia,
these are thousands-year-old civilizations,
it's not enough to destroy some of the sites,
some of the facilities.
He can't just destroy us through war, through force.
It will only make us stronger.
The last time Scott went to the Piskorowski cemetery during his last visit,
you have this museum of the blockade,
the museum of the siege of Leningrad.
And if you look at it from the perspective of the Western civilization,
you know,
actually my granddad died there.
He served in the army and my grandma died because of hunger.
So,
from the perspective of the Western civilization,
this resilience of the Leningrad residents doesn't make sense.
A million people died.
Why?
Why did they do that?
But from the point of view of the Russians,
And I guess Iranians, that's normal.
That makes perfect sense.
That's part of our values, part of our principles.
And in any war garland,
conventional or contemporary warfare,
on top of just military aspects,
there are political goals and targets.
And in mental warfare, there are also the so-called civilization strategy, which is...
the ultimate target.
If you want to defeat someone,
if you want to defeat Russia,
you need to destroy our civilizational,
spiritual foundations,
our traditions,
dismantle our culture,
dismantle our vision of the world.
And once it's done, Russia will collapse.
But no one has ever been able to do it in a thousand years.
We can go back
as deep as Stalingrad.
We almost lost ourselves in the 1990s and Scott could see that.
He went to Vodkinsk and technology was barbarously stolen.
We cut down on our armaments and we also threw away our state-of-the-art technology.
We almost lost ourselves and our identity in the 1990s, but thanks to Providence,
Thanks to God's will and our inner strength, we survived.
We stayed afloat,
we went through it,
we didn't rush it through,
and we still remain the sovereign Russia that stands strong,
and we can discuss this.
And Scott and Garland, I think the chances for becoming who we are
sovereign power,
sovereign civilization,
these chances are actually increasing,
and we shouldn't blow this chance.

No, I mean, we live in a unique moment in history, and there's no doubt about that.
Getting back to mental warfare in Iran,
you know,
I've been trying to reverse engineer the problem.
I take a look at the goals and objectives of regime change.
We're going to kill one man and the regime is going to collapse.
Simplistic thinking.
And yet Israel and the United States,
both nations possessing sophisticated intelligence apparatus that should be more
informed about the realities of Iran,
they bought into this simplistic notion.
And you have to ask yourself why.
And so when you reverse engineer it, I mean, we have, of course, decades of history.
We have Mossadegh at the overthrowing of the prime minister.
We have the empowerment of the Shah.
We have the Islamic revolution.
the embassy takeover, Desert One, Marine barracks bombing, all this.
But to me,
the most important thing when we talk about mental warfare was a gentleman named
Jared Cohen.
Jared Cohen was a minor State Department official who had written a book based upon
his travels in the Middle East,
where he said the youth of the Middle East,
and he specifically spoke of Hezbollah,
are just like the youth of the West.
And all we have to do to win them over is give them access to our way of life,
give them access to our music,
our culture.
They want what we have.
And the vector was the Internet.
And Stu Cohen became a big proponent of what they call digital democracy,
opening up countries to
Facebook, to Twitter, to these technologies.
And,
I mean,
for instance,
he famously went to Syria to meet with Assad,
to get Assad to open Syria up to Google and things of this nature.
It worked in Egypt.
In Iran, he did this as well.
And if you remember 2009, I believe it was the Green...
It was Jared Cohen who called the CEO of Twitter and said,
keep Twitter going because this is what we use to communicate with the people in
the streets to make them be like us,
to get them to revolt and rise up.
So it's a vector to go in and manipulate.
a population to get a system to rot from within.
And we've been trying ever since.
We use different means now, Starlink instead of Twitter.
But the methodology is the same.
So why did we fail?
I mean, that's the question.
Why did we fail?
Why,
if we were very successful in getting this vector installed,
this mechanism installed,
what was it about Iran that defeated this,
the resilience of Iran?
And I think that's what you talked about.
You talked about thousands of years of history, but it's more than that.
It's a constitution that has a framework of governmental resilience that's
connected to the people.
And somehow Western intelligence missed all this.
So mental warfare isn't just a psychological game.
It's actually...
almost like a military operation where you have to do intelligence preparation of
the battlefield.
You have to know your enemy.
You can't just walk in and try and change people's ideas because in Iran that failed.
There's got to be a better preparation for that, right?

Absolutely.
True.
True.
The color revolution you mentioned,
the green revolution,
the technology of color revolution,
the technology of soft power,
that really works.
It's functional, and that has triggered regime changes in many countries, including in Ukraine.
However,
to change the spiritual,
the worldview,
the cultural,
historical foundation,
it requires systemic efforts over generations,
about two decades,
I believe.
Take Ukraine, that's an important part of the Russian world.
They tried to rewrite history.
They really did it in a systemic fashion.
They rewrote textbooks in schools, and the same applied to politics.
Kuchma first explained why Ukraine is not Russia, and then Yushinka.
and his other cronies and Zelensky's trying to portray Ukraine as anti-Russia.
Okay, why the US failed in Iran?
I think there's a proverb in the English language is that Israel and the US
have the clock,
the watch,
while Iran has the time,
and the time is on the side of Iran,
time is playing into the hands of Iran.
Because to dismantle civilizational foundations, as Garland asks, you need a strategy.
It takes time.
just an excursion.
It could be a powerful strike,
but if it's just an excursion,
it will not do you good,
it will not help you.
Take countries like Iran.
It is a vast country.
You can do precision strikes from the air,
but you cannot capture it,
and you need the boots on the ground.
I think you went to Iraq, and nothing happened.
A military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan didn't achieve the goals.
such a strategy failed, military presence failed.
So it's not a mistake.
I think these are civilizational divisions and it's the tail that wags the dog when
technology and the logic of tactical operations start to define some strategic
aspects.
You know it better than me,
I mean,
you and Garland,
but I think if you look at Tucker Carlson,
if you listen to you,
I actually follow your podcasts.
Or what about, let's look at Jock Kent, and previously it was Kirk, yeah.
So Kirk that was assassinated.
Well, this MAGA philosophy is all about going back to yourself.
It's putting America first.
It's not about dominance, but it's taking care of the Americans themselves.
It's taking care of this young civilization.
It was conceived just 250 years ago, but it has its own foundation, cultural, historical.
So thanks to this MAGA philosophy, they try to kind of go back to its own roots.
But so far, this movement, this attempt,
has hit a roadblock.
There are strong headwinds.
Previously, we thought it was just the globalist Democrats.
I don't know whether you agree with me or not,
but what we're seeing right now is that the Trump administration is also influenced
by the Israeli lobby and near cons.
And it's actually switched to a different type of globalism.
As we say in Russia,
it's a different type of eggs,
but only we look at it from a different angle.
So it's basically the same.
So the US as a civilization, as the society has...
is struggling to go back to its roots,
but I hope you will sort it out,
because there are a lot of common sense people,
there's a lot of energy,
there's a lot of,
you know,
spiritual potential,
part of it's been lost,
but as we remember,
the US started as a Christian civilization,
right,
the Protestants,
but it's a Christian civilization,
and they've been,
you know,
remember that the first Christians suffered a lot from the pagans in Rome,
they've been
persecuted, killed, maimed, tortured, but they survived, they stood strong.
So that should serve the role model for those who conceive operations to uproot
such foundations as religion,
faith,
culture,
history.
That should be the writing on the wall for those malicious actors.
So I think the U.S.
faced a completely different civilization in Iran,
and it's starting to sink in,
and it realizes it's a major blunder and not just a mistake on the intelligence
community's part or on the military part.
It's a strategic blunder,
but there's a chance for them to learn their lessons,
and we can learn the lessons as well.

Recently in Iran,
we have seen many interviews of people on the street,
and I've seen people speak about incidents as far back as the Battle of Karbala.
At the Anchorage meeting,
something that I thought was of interest,
and that was that Sergei Lavrov had on a shirt that was USSR,
and it was very popular.
And when Scott and I came to Russia,
um we found that these had sold out all over russia that people were buying these
it seems to me that um when a civilization finds itself under attack a physical
attack cultural attack mental attack that they reach back to a time of cultural
pride of victory um that there seems to be an element in russia and now in iran
that when they find themselves under attack,
they go back historically to identify with a time when they were strong and kind of
bring that to the forefront today,
a rebirth of a time when their civilization was strong and victorious.

Well, I've got a question.
Can I ask a question?
Scott,
you're an intelligence officer,
a military guy,
Garland,
a popular radio host and an author.
But in terms of planning military operations,
including in Venezuela and the previously 12-day war in June last year against Iran
and this current showdown,
just like planning the perception, shaping the perception of the US to the Ukraine war.
Do you take into account or should it be taken into account these factors that you
just mentioned,
the cultural aspects,
civilization aspects,
historical aspects?
Well, they don't seem to be rational.
It's kind of ephemerical.
You cannot count them in terms of the number of drones or aircraft or in terms of troops.
It seems to be quite a vague stuff, but we have to take into account in planning war operations.
Currently, it's not the Clausewitz formula right now.
It's not the classic formula that...
A war is an extension of politics with different means.
But it's like Orwell, it's like the politics is the war.
The war is the politics.
So maybe this time the US,
and the US is facing a huge challenge in this regard,
so maybe the US will do homework.
Do you think it will?

I know that we—I'll answer the question by starting off with a little anecdote.
When I was in Vodkynsk, it was the Cold War.
The CIA at the time was very focused on the Soviet Union.
They had an entire branch,
SOVA,
Soviet Affairs,
composed of some of the best experts on the Soviet Union.
The military had specialists in the Soviet Union.
And even though we viewed the Soviet Union as the enemy,
we did our best to understand the Soviet Union,
the culture,
the history,
you know,
and to treat that history with respect,
not to denigrate it.
We treated it with respect.
It wasn't us that disrespected the processes of perestroika and glasnost caused
some internal rot.
But when the Soviet collapsed,
I had already left the Marine Corps,
and I was asked by the CIA to come and do an interview to maybe come back and see
if I wanted to work for them.
And as I've mentioned, I never worked for the CIA.
I was with the Marine Corps, but I worked with the CIA.
And I received two commendations from Judge Webster,
the director of the CIA,
for my work in Vodkinsk.
not espionage, analytical work.
Don't worry.
But so I met with the head of the new SOVA.
They didn't call it SOVA.
It was the Office of Russia and Eurasian Affairs or something of that nature.
And I did a big interview.
And I thought for sure they would hire me.
Because after all,
just two years ago,
I received accommodation from the director of the CIA as one of the top analysts of
of the Soviet Union.
Mike Morrell was the man who ran Oreo at the time, and he was the final guy.
He went on to be the director, the acting director of the CIA.
And in the end, he came back and he said, well, we're not going to offer you employment.
I said, okay, but why?
I mean, two years ago, I was the best, and now you're saying you don't want the best.
He said, it's not that.
We don't want your expertise,
because we're approaching Russia completely different,
a completely different point of view.
We don't want somebody who's trapped in the analytical processes that are linked to
respect to history,
respect to culture,
respect to
languages.
We want people who view Russia as a system to be exploited.
And that was the entire approach.
So the decade of the 1990s,
was a decade where the CIA specifically targeted Russia to destroy itself,
to come in and get Russians to lose faith with who they are,
what they are,
to look to the West for solutions,
not to look internally for solutions.
And this was their goal and their objective.
And the CIA has continued to operate that way ever since.
But Vladimir Putin, when he became president,
was, from the CIA's perspective, an accident that shouldn't have happened.
And they've been trying to undo that accident ever since.
And as a result, they haven't respected what Vladimir Putin has done.
Because what Vladimir Putin has done,
in my opinion,
is to get Russians to believe in Russia again,
to get Russians to respect themselves,
to stand up and say,
we're not subordinated to the West.
We are Russia.
We have our history.
We have our culture.
And we are a unique civilization.
We're proud of whom we are.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
That's the way we viewed the Soviet Union is people who are proud of who they were.
But the CIA never respected this reality and continues to operate under the notion
that Russia as a society
can be manipulated, can be infiltrated, can be weakened from within.
And I guess the question is, is Russia strong like Iran?
Has Russia built the institutions necessary to solidify their positions so that
they can be resilient to this?
Because we're in a situation today where the United States is trying to destroy
Russia from within.
I'll give you an example, and it's one that you mentioned five days ago in a meeting
you had with Sergey Karaganov and others, the attack on history.
Garland mentioned that Russia falls back on its history, falls back on its strength.
And we saw this, the role of the great patriotic war in defining who Russia is.
That is a moment, even though it was a Soviet history, it's a moment that defines Russia today.
The Victory Day celebrations,
I mean,
the whole thing is this is a time when Russia stood up and defended itself against
all odds.
And yet in the West, we're rewriting the history.
And crudely so.
I mean, we have an American president says that, you know, America won the war.
Russia didn't win the war.
I mean, look, I'm proud of what America did during that war.
I have relatives who fought both in the Pacific and Europe,
and I will never denigrate their service.
But we can't ignore what Russia did, but that is happening.
We're rewriting Russian history, just like Ukraine rewrote Russian history.
And the question is, is Russia strong enough to resist this effort?
Has Russia learned its lesson from the past?
Or are there opportunities for the West to seep in?
And remember, we don't have to do it ourselves.
We just need to get agents of influence inside Russia to work for us.
It's not that Americans have to come to Russia to create problems.
I just have to get you to start questioning Russian history, start questioning Russian.
You become an agent of influence.

Well, I'll respond straight away in terms of agents of influence and this kind of technology.
They definitely produce a certain effect and they lead to an erosion in a mental
area in terms of the government and the public incrementally,
and that could have a snowball effect.
Remember,
there was Lieutenant General Shebarshin,
he was the last one,
the last head of the KGB.
He was a patriot of Russia,
a really smart guy,
and he said that there's only one power that can destroy Russia,
and it's only Russia itself.
Well, that's our traditional threat.
Back in 1917, you know, the abdication of the Tsar, that was a bad move.
And then six months later, we almost lost the country.
And then Stalin picked up, pieced it all together.
Garland recalled the SSR.
When World War II started, Stalin, well, he was a communist, right?
He turned to religion,
he turned to the Church,
and he actually addressed people,
brothers and sisters.
He went back to the roots.
That happened back in the 1990s.
In times of upheavals, during terrible times, would always rise up.
You know, I actually belong to this generation.
I all remember these jeans,
you know,
the bubblegums,
you know,
that used to be prized trophies or sneakers.
These were our ideals, and there was a shortage of it.
It was our dream.
But you need time.
It takes time and age to understand it's just bling, you know.
And Iran, indeed, is a role model in terms of resilience.
And Iran's civilization dates back to 5,000 years ago.
It's a different civilization, and faith plays an important factor in it.
That's why their constitution and governance is kind of a mosaic in nature.
It's kind of a patchwork.
And if we use our military terminology, it shows a higher rate of survival.
If you decapitate one person, it will not...
destroy the entire system.
Actually, they got ready for it.
They were preparing for this asymmetric war.
They split Iran into 31 autonomous military districts,
pretty autonomous,
and it can act in an autonomous manner,
but it also acts in sync.
And that's why this defines the viability of this civilization,
this history of 5,000 years old and their constitution.
Russia has got a different foundation.
We are more a top-down structure.
That's my personal opinion,
but the role of religion is not that strong,
and maybe that's not right.
Back in the 19th century,
Russians self-identified themselves as orthodox,
but it's a different time right now.
And we put a lot of focus today on what you both mentioned, history, traditional values.
We even have it as part of our national strategy blueprint.
And it's no coincidence that President Putin did an interview to Tucker Carlson.
two years ago,
and I think Fox News also did interview with him,
and he,
you know,
spoke at length about Russian history.
Sir Garland, you asked me about history.
So he mentioned a lot of facts about Russian history.
And it's not just a Russian,
a lecture on Russian history,
because he hoped that his interlocutors will understand why it's so important for
us.
You know, who owns history owns the future, and we've got history.
But it doesn't mean, Garland, that I've got a sweater with the USSR.
I was born in the USSR.
I used to be a pioneer.
I used to be in the Komsomol.
I'm actually proud of my parents, of my childhood, of my country.
It used to be called the USSR.
Right now it's Russia, but it's still the same God-saved
empire.
For thousands, it's been an empire and God has protected us.
But we don't want to go back to the USSR.
We don't have that sentiment.
We want to go back to our roots, to our identity.
And on this path, there are issues.
Yes, Scott, we're struggling.
And the elites,
in terms of the elites and in terms of our ideology,
in terms of the narratives that underpin Russian politics and in our culture and in
our spiritual foundations.
And as a sum up,
well,
you said that youth can be engaged in these games,
you know,
there are gadgets all over the place.
That's true.
But my friends can confirm,
and Sergei,
who is here with me,
our youth,
you know,
is really great today.
Russian youth is great.
Well, that's those who are in the age bracket between 25 and 30.
They grew up when we were part of the West and we started being ourselves,
but something happens,
it's all kind of part of our historical DNA,
cultural code,
as we call it.
So I've got four grandchildren,
I've got two daughters and a son,
and I think that the younger generation,
it's just their attitude,
and it's not just they love Russia,
they just feel Russians or Chechens.
Well, my friend, we did an interview.
Well, can you find a better Russian than this Chechen guy or Burat?
You know, I grew up in Buratia.
My father was a military guy.
I mean, they serve with dignity.
These are all Russians.
Well, maybe we have not.
reason to the 100% of this awareness, but we need to wake up.
Time has come to formulate this, to shape this narrative, to identify our goals.

I find it interesting,
maybe you could comment on this,
that certainly in the past 100 years,
Russia and China have had their differences.
Russia and Iran have had their differences.
But at a time when the three cultures feel under siege from the West,
it seems interesting to me that they've all come together in what appears from the
outside to be a fairly tight knit group.
And I say tight knit,
taking into account the problems that they had just a few short years ago and their
ability to bring their cultures together.
What are your thoughts on that?

Well, again, these cultures have united not against the West.
They just stand their ground.
They want to protect their destiny.
It's a union of the nations that want to live as they see fit.
They want to define their own political structure, their own economic goals as they see fit.
They want to be sovereign,
and that,
in this sense,
we are indeed similar to China,
India,
Iran,
and I very much hope that we will be on the same wavelength as the US,
and the US will also come back to its roots,
unless the world collapses and
embraces chaos, there is a renaissance of what we can call and make America great again.
It's a renaissance of your true identity,
of your historical DNA,
people looking back at history,
at your destiny.
Not every country will go back to it.
Take the Europeans and,
regrettably,
you know,
it used to be a Christian civilization,
you know,
their elites
They basically rejected their roots.
They shut down so many temples,
so many churches,
that satanic,
demonic parade of devils during the launch of the Olympic Games in Paris.

What about Italy?

They removed the crosses that used to hang there.
They are abandoning their own roots because it's easier for them to hand over their
sovereignty to someone else.
Their sovereignty, their security is just handed over.
That was the case prior to 2022, but that will no longer be the case.
There will be no longer the status quo.
The US is fully aware that they cannot take care of those toxic assets of those
European countries and take these monarchies in the Gulf.
They can lose yourself.
I think that's where the MAGA movement rose.
Maybe they will lose to the globalists, but it depends on you.

Well, hopefully we're up for the challenge.
Earlier you mentioned the opportunity or what happened in Alaska.
Garland mentioned it.
You referenced maybe we should talk about it.
So let's talk about it for a second in relationship of what we have addressed here.
One of the things about Alaska is that it wasn't just about the war.
It was about redefining Russian-American relations.
And the architects of this redefinition weren't your traditional diplomats.
This wasn't Sergei Lavrov sitting down with Marco Rubio,
backed up by the foreign ministry and the State Department with their technocrats
talking about
how to reconnect America and Russia.
It was two businessmen,
Steve Witkoff and Kirill Dmitriev,
who were sitting there talking about opportunities,
economic opportunities,
etc.
And it appears that the Russian government was positive towards at least the
possibility of this happening.
But when I look at it,
because I am of a certain age,
I just see the 1990s happening all over again.
I see Russia having built this nation that has learned to love Russia,
to be Russians,
and suddenly saying for us to truly prosper,
we can't prosper without American investments.
American investments were always the mechanism of trying to destroy Russia from within.
We did it.
We tried to do it during the Cold War.
Russia, the Soviet Union resisted.
In the 1990s, we were very successful at doing this.
Joe Biden tried to trick Dmitry Medvedev into allowing investments back in.
And Russia has been strong.
And then Russia purges itself of poisonous investments after the special military
operation begins,
when the West sanctioned itself into oblivion.
So Russia's in the strongest position it's ever been when it comes to resilience
against malign Western economic influence.
And here,
through the Anchorage process,
it just appears to me that Russia's opening the door to say,
come back in.
Is Russia ready for what would happen if they let American investment capital back in?
Does Russia understand what the true objectives are here?

Well, there is a grain of truth in what you are saying.
And Russians are pretty ironic about what we call the spirit of un-courage about Alaska.
But Garland,
Scott,
I feel that the West need to realize if they want to build a good relationship with
us,
we can survive without the West.
We can do without the West.
But, you know, Russia is taking the long-term approach.
We can outlast them.
Maybe,
you know,
these doves of peace sent via Twitter by this person that you mentioned,
by Trump.
Well, it's just some tactics.
But it doesn't mean that Russia's strategy is evolving, is changing.
No, it's defined by our cultural DNA and our president.
He's a true, a genuine leader and a diplomat of the Byzantine type.
He can combine diplomatic capacity and the military capacity.
You know, we always hurry to leave.
We all want to rush.
We need to tighten, accelerate.
We need to hit it faster.
to hit it harder, to intensify.
We always want to do something like this.
But everything happens at a certain time.
You have to take it one thing at a time.
You have to do it slowly but surely.
So I wouldn't overestimate what
Kushner-Tvitkov do and what Dmitriev do, and I wouldn't say that this is the mainstream track.
No, it's one of the tracks.
Why don't we suspend them?
No,
we take it with our open eyes,
we understand who Kushner is,
we remember about the Aramaic Accords,
we understand that
You know, they belong to the Zionist ideology, the Zionist doctrine.
It's fine.
It's their worldview.
We understand who Witkoff is.
Witkoff used to be a businessman, a successful real estate pro, a billionaire.
But so far, you know, it's President Trump who appoints these interlocutors, these negotiators.
We cannot appoint, right?
We cannot appoint them.
And again, these people
were also part of negotiations with Iran,
and then the strikes were made against Iran almost during the talks.
And we remember that photo,
you have Whitcoff,
Kushner,
and the foreign minister of Amman,
who was the mediator,
and they say that,
yes,
we've covered all the ground,
and Iran's ready.
And we saw that.
Russia saw that.
And the next day, the strikes took place.
But my personal take
You know, I think I'm in sync with Mr. Karaganov.
We need more energy in will, a will to win.
Well, that's my emotional take, but there's a deficit of a will, I agree, to a certain extent.
But maybe I'm not aware of everything,
you know,
I'm not aware of all the cards,
maybe I don't understand a bit.
And as I said, we need to do it slowly but surely and everything is fine.
Garland,
there used to be a German field marshal,
Minich,
he was German and he served in Russia actually.
So there were a lot of foreigners who served in the Russian army.
Barclay de Tolle, he was from Scotland.
and Marshal Minich,
and there were a lot of glorious commanders who contributed to our victories in our
history.
So Marshal Minich,
who served for the benefit of the Russian army,
he penned his memoirs and said,
Russia is governed by God himself.
I don't have any other explanation why it still exists.
He was a German.
Germany is all about ordnung,
is all about discipline,
you know,
and he is accustomed to rational,
common sense approach.
But he saw our own mentality, you know, Slavon approach, absent-mindedness.
Some people in Russia may be lazy.
We might, you know.
through our brains and different things, like today.
We have this Witkoff and Kushner, and we have these Miami talks.
It's a kind of a process for the sake of a process.
Okay,
and then Iran happens,
and the optics changed,
and the fog of war is starting to get clearer,
to clear up.
The fog of war is dissipating and it's becoming tougher,
clearer,
crisp,
clear,
and that requires,
I would say,
more focused,
more precise actions.
I'm sure our leader will rise up to the occasion.
We are just the military guys, you know.
I'm sure that Russia's leadership in general
is aware of that.
Although, you know, as a sum up, we still continue to live in the so-called dollar area.
I'm not an economist, but even I understand it.
Building a sovereign strategy in a dollar-driven economy is pretty tough,
you know,
just very tough.
But we've got the opportunities to do that.
We've got the people,
got talents,
high level of education,
our resources,
our army,
our infrastructure,
state infrastructure.
It's fully functional.
The past 20 years under President Putin, you know, it's a role model.
Scott, we've got a unique combat experience, a experience of victories to die.
It's contemporary.
So we need to have the will, the will and the desire to win.

The Iran,
excuse me,
the Ukraine conflict,
you know,
we have the model of Chechnya,
a bloody war.
And now it seems to me that they're very patriotic.
Chechens, the people are very patriotic to Russia, serving honorably in the military.
Particularly the British have made it clear that at some point when the conflict
ends,
they'd like to use Ukraine to continue to cause problems in Russia,
be it through,
you know,
terrorism or whatever the case may be.
Do you think...
that there is a possibility that Ukraine could end up similar to Chechnya,
that it could possibly be brought back into the family of patriotic,
the family of the patriotic lands of the Russian Federation.

Well, that's a pretty challenging question.
First and foremost,
the Chechen Republic,
well,
it's part of Russia in terms of our territory,
right?
Scott got his wife from the Caucasus.
The Caucasus can be united only by Russia.
Take Dagestan, take the Chechen Republic.
They are accustomed to living in an empire.
They can live honorably there.
Ukraine is a typical failed state.
It relies on just one ideology that was planted, implanted for the elites.
That's about being an anti-Russia.
And they provided the think tanks, the institutions and the funding for that.
And that's what's been happening there for 30 years.
So can we really go take Ukraine back?
Well, I'm more than...
Certain that, yes.
But if you ask me, Garland Scott, will Ukraine exist further on?
Will Ukraine survive?
And here's my answer.
If there's anything that remains in terms of anti-Russia,
I mean,
its armed forces,
something that will undermine its neutral status,
then Ukraine will not exist.
But the state of Ukraine could exist as a dematerialized neutral state.
Remember, we discussed that.
People is the future army of Europe.
Things are changing, but they wanted to become Europeans.
Well,
they wanted to have these 800,000 slaves who were trained to fight and who don't
know what to do.
Well, Ukraine will not exist like that.
It may fail.
It may collapse five years from now.
Who knows?
So Ukraine can only exist as a neutral country, as a big part of the Russian world.
You know, my father has Ukrainian origins, and my mother is from Leningrad.
There will be challenges, true.
There will be headwinds because of these maims,
because of these mutilations during that anti-Russia war,
and they've been pretty successful.
But if you dismantle those institutions planted by the West and they spent billions
of dollars,
USAID and stuff like this,
this Ukrainian elite is no...
They are sponsored by the West.
They are not Ukrainian.
They just threw Ukraine under the bus.
Out of a population of 52 million people back in the 1990s,
and that was the richest republic of the Soviet Union.
They had a great army.
They had the Western military district.
That was the most innovative district.
They had science, manufacturing.
Now it's been degraded to 20 million.
And no economic,
no ideological,
no military explanations that are out there for Ukraine to exist.
However, well, it can join the Russia world.
fully,
just like we reunited with Crimea,
or it can remain as an independent but a neutral state that would be friendly to
its neighbors.
There are no other options.
The other option is a delayed war.
We understand this.
I mean, if we don't address these goals, we need to demilitarize them.
We need to change this ideology to get rid of this Nazi ideology.
It needs to have a neutral status.
Any foreign troops need to be out.
The Ukrainian armed forces should not take part in any military exercises.
So Ukraine should not become a private military company.
In this case, Ukraine has a chance, otherwise not.

We're getting near to the end of the interview.
I want to ask this last question about Iran.

Bring it back to... We don't say the last question.

I'd like to ask the next but last.
Maybe we'll open it up to additional conversation.
I'm learning.
The return to the issue of Iran and the role that Russia could play.
Because, frankly, when I take a look at what the United States has done,
We have not been militarily defeated.
Nobody's defeated us militarily.
But we are being politically defeated, economically defeated.
And Klausowitz, war is an extension of politics by other means.
It means we're losing.
How do we lose gracefully?
How do we get out of this mess, a face-saving mechanism?
when we can't talk to the Iranians and the Iranians won't talk to us.
There's a role for Russia to play here, I believe.
But you've said that this is a new Russia.
This is a Russia that's about victory.
Is Russia capable of stepping into this Middle East disaster?
and helping find a diplomatic off-ramp without behaving in a manner that results in
the Russian defeat of America.
Is there a potential for compromise here?

So I'll start with a metaphor.
So there's the Schrodinger War.
Schrodinger used to be a physicist,
he specialized in quantum technology and he was one of the founders of quantum
technology So this Schrodinger war,
when it seems like a natural war,
you know,
people getting killed,
aircraft flying,
but it's not important The most important thing is about the media,
is the spin you put on those media reports
To an extent, what's happening in Iran is assuring a war, although people are dying.
So there are several questions you asked.
What about the off-ramp?
The US has to be honest and straightforward.
The US needs to withdraw with honor, and Iran just needs to back down, you know.
There is still an opportunity for this.
and this globalist lobby is pressurizing Trump.
They want to weaken the US,
and they want to egg Trump to continue this war,
the war that has no prospects.
I think Trump knows how to wind down a war.
As for Iran, it just needs to survive.
If it survives,
it will prevail,
it will win,
it will mean a victory,
and it's a victory for themselves.
Russia needs to take the lessons from Iran's resilience,
and Iran is also a partner of Russia in BRICS.
It's our neighbor.
Our civilizations have lived together for thousands of years.
We have different times, as you said.
We had our own fair share of discrepancies with China and Iran, but that's history.
We need to shape our own sovereign world.
It's just like Yalta 2.0.
So, Russia doesn't want to be a combatant in this conflict.
And if we want to be honest and straightforward,
like Ratcliffe said in the Special Senate Commission,
the head of the CIA said that Russia is an adversary.
Okay, then here's a question, how can an adversary be the mediator in this conflict?
Okay, it's up to Ratcliffe, you know.
Russia can be the mediator in the peace talks,
and not a truce,
but true long-lasting peace,
because our leader has a great tie,
a relationship with Trump.
And institutionally, historically, we've had great ties with Iran.
We have shared interests and shared destiny to an extent because we are neighbors.
So, Russia can play an important role.
And we do not reject this role.
We can play it.
But eventually, it will come down to the fact that Russia can play it without being forced.
You know, they need to offer and we will honorably deliver.
I'm pretty positive about this.

I couldn't think of a better note to end this conversation on.
Sir, I want to thank you very much for joining us today.
Garland, thank you for your question.
And I want to thank the audience.
You've had the privilege of listening to discourse you're not going to hear
anywhere else between Russians and Americans about the problems that we face
together and the problems we face in the world.
I want to thank you for joining us today on the Russia House.
And until next time, have a good day.