Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed international relations expert and contributor for The Epoch Times, Dominick Sansone, to comment upon the escalation of war between Russia and Ukraine and Putin’s popularity.
Leahy: We are joined on our newsmaker line by The Epoch Times columnist Dominick Sansone, who is an expert on Ukraine and Eastern Europe, and Russia. Welcome, Dominick.
Sansone: Hi, Mike.
Leahy: You were with us back on February 25th, before Russia invaded Ukraine. A lot has happened since. What is your take on the current situation there? And do you have any sense of a possible resolution that stopped short of a worldwide conflagration?
Sansone: Actually in October, I wrote a piece for The American Conservative, basically about how Kyiv was increasing the likelihood of war with Russia. And I basically said that the United States, the Biden administration, needs to make it clear that the United States is not going to militarily get involved and also induce Kyiv to return to the Minsk agreements, which were meant to sort of resolve the separatist conflict going on in the East.
Now, why did I do that? I don’t deny Ukraine’s right to defend itself, of course; they clearly defend themselves very well. But obviously, to anybody with half a brain, it was clear that the United States was not going to go to war in Ukraine with Russia for Ukraine’s right to join NATO.
So basically, we needed to induce them to return to the Minsk agreements, and look where we are now. Yesterday, President Zelensky basically said that he admits that Ukraine is not going to be a member of NATO.
Russia has laid down the same demands they always have: to cease attacks, to recognize the independence of those two southeastern republics, to accept Crimea as Russian, and to declare Ukrainian neutrality.
So we’re in the exact same position that we were before. It was a total failure of U.S. diplomacy under the Biden administration. And less than a month after I wrote that article in October – [on] November 11th, Veterans Day – Secretary of State Antony Blinken once again said that Ukraine will become a member of NATO.
Leahy:Â Let me just stop for a moment. That is very significant, isn’t it?
Sansone: Extremely significant.
Leahy: I don’t think anybody has really pointed that out.
Sansone: No. And that was before Russia began amassing forces on Ukraine’s border. He reiterated again what was basically said in 2008 at the Bucharest summit, that Ukraine and Georgia would eventually become members of NATO. And that was basically the point since that time; Putin’s been saying it for 14 years. He made it very clear that Ukraine is a red line for him. Right after that statement, he invaded Georgia to keep Georgia from joining NATO. We knew that he had forces on the border with Ukraine. We knew that he was going to invade.
That’s all our intelligence said. And again, we basically just threw a total failure of diplomacy. Through retroactive instead of proactive policy, we’re now in the position that we are in.
Leahy: Dominick, let me ask you this in your analysis, and you’re a Fulbright scholar in Bulgaria?
Sansone:Â I was interned with the Hudson Institute for a little bit. Right.
Leahy: So you know this area and you know Eastern Europe. But let’s see if we get this straight. In your assessment, if Secretary of State Blinken in November, had not said we want Ukraine to be in NATO, would Vladimir Putin have chosen not to invade Ukraine, in your view?
Sansone: In this past week. Putin basically said if it wasn’t now, it would be a later time. And I believe that’s again indicative of the Biden administration. It wasn’t going to happen the past four years under the Trump administration because again, Trump was too unpredictable.
Putin didn’t want to test him. Nobody really knew what the response would be, which, of course, is a good hand to have in international relations.
But under the Biden administration, this is going to happen eventually. I truly believe that. And part of that is because the United States’ continued claim that Ukraine is going to be a part of NATO.
Leahy: But now everybody’s backing away from that, right?
Sansone: Yes, including Zelensky. Again, this is not ideological. It’s not value-based. It’s clear power politics, realist foreign policy. Russia was never going to allow Ukraine to be a member of NATO.
That is the red line that [Putin] drew in 2008. But more than that, the Russian people, and I just want to mention quickly as well, that since last week, Putin’s approval rating among the Russian population has jumped from 61 to 69 percent, nearly 10 percent.
Leahy: What about these reports that he is in political trouble, domestically in Russia, because of the invasion. And it’s a brutal invasion of Ukraine.
I mean, they’re indiscriminately killing civilians. But are you telling me that he is more popular in Russia now, after the invasion, than before?
Sansone: According to the Levada polling center, which is a pretty reliable Russian polling center, we’ve used that in the West for a little while. We’ve used their metrics.
Yes, his popularity is increasing again because this is popular. People have to understand that not only Putin but the Russian people understand Kyiv to be the cradle of Russian civilization.
They consider it to be integral to their culture, to their history, and to who they are as a people. He was never going to allow Ukraine to be a member of NATO. And he said this. The Russian people, again, agree with this.
I truly believe that Russia would rather not exist at all as a country, or take the world down with it, than to see Ukraine as a member of NATO and see them totally encircled.
Leahy: How does this play out over time? Zelensky, by the way, is addressing members of Congress here in the U.S. today, asking for more aid. It’s been 19, 20 days. The Russians are having difficulty, more difficulty subduing Ukraine than was anticipated.
However, they appear to be continually making progress in circling Kyiv and other key cities in Ukraine. Is there an off-ramp here or does this escalate militarily?
Sansone: I think there’s an off-ramp. I think that again, negotiations have been ongoing there and, what are they, their fourth or fifth, going into their fifth round. I believe so. I think those demands that Russia has made, at least some of them are going to be met.
And that’s an article I wrote about a week ago for The American Conservative, which I laid those down and said that we need to use some of these different sticks and carrots to try to end the situation diplomatically.
What I’m more concerned with, and I think most people will also say, is the closening relationship between Russia and China, and what this entire thing has done to the United States geopolitical situation.
Again, the idea that through these crippling sanctions we’re destroying the Russian economy. Well, okay, but that’s undermining the United States’ entire international position, in addition to the nearly $118 billion gas deal that Russia has signed with China.
Now you see Saudi Arabia, who won’t pick up the phone for Joe Biden, mind you, and has just decided to denote oil transactions with China and Iran.
Russia has additionally now found an outlet for its discounted crude in India, a historic strategic ally for Russia. And they’re also talking about denoting that transaction, possibly in Yuan. So I don’t want to be overblown and say that Yuan has the likelihood of replacing the dollar, the world’s reserve currency, anytime soon.
Leahy: But it’s moving away from the dollar towards the yuan.
Sansone: I think it is. And we have to remember that China, they’re not looking at the next midterm election or the next presidential election. They’re planning 5, 10, 50, 100 years down the road.
Listen to the full interview here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Biden and his globalist puppetmasters WANT war with Russia, to destabilize and remove Putin, because Putin won’t play ball with globalist regime and S0ros.