RT’s Cross Talk: discussion of the $61 billion military and financial aid package for Ukraine now signed into law

In today’s edition of Cross Talk, I was pleased to join host Peter Lavelle and Sputnik International political analyst Dmitry Babich for a discussion of likely consequences of the newly signed law appropriating $61 billion in aid to Kiev.

Put in simplest terms, this aid package will prolong the war, continue the decimation of Ukraine’s male population and the destruction of its economic viability. It may also hasten our descent into WWIII.

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https://www.rt.com/shows/crosstalk/596708-us-foreign-aid-bill-ukraine/

Translation below into German (Andreas Mylaeus) followed by full transcript in English

RT’s Cross Talk: Diskussion über das 61 Milliarden Dollar schwere Militär- und Finanzhilfepaket für die Ukraine, das jetzt in Kraft getreten ist

In der heutigen Ausgabe von Cross Talk habe ich mich gefreut, mit Gastgeber Peter Lavelle und dem politischen Analysten von Sputnik International, Dmitry Babich, über die wahrscheinlichen Folgen des neu unterzeichneten Gesetzes zu sprechen, das Kiew 61 Milliarden Dollar an Hilfsgeldern zuweist.

Vereinfacht ausgedrückt wird dieses Hilfspaket den Krieg verlängern, die Dezimierung der männlichen Bevölkerung der Ukraine fortsetzen und die wirtschaftliche Lebensfähigkeit des Landes zerstören. Es könnte auch unseren Abstieg in den Dritten Weltkrieg beschleunigen.

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https://odysee.com/@RT:fd/CT2904-:c

https://rumble.com/v4s796n-crosstalk-bullhorns-ensuring-defeat.html

https://www.rt.com/shows/crosstalk/596708-us-foreign-aid-bill-ukraine/

Transcription below by a reader

Peter Lavelle 00:15
Hello and welcome to Crosstalk Bullhorns. I’m Peter Lavelle. Here we discuss some real news. With the passage of Biden’s huge foreign aid bill, it is important to ask, what is next? What is really the purpose of this aid? To help Ukraine win or only just starve off defeat? For now. To discuss these issues and more, I’m joined by Gilbert Doctorow in St. Petersburg. He’s an independent political analyst and author of memoirs of an expat manager in Moscow during the 1990s. And here in Moscow we have Dmitry Bobich. He is a political analyst at Sputnik International. All right, gentlemen, Crosstalk rules in effect. That means you can jump any time you want, and I always appreciate it.

00:51
All right, let’s start out with Dima here in Moscow. Well, we’ve had a week now to kind of digest the passage of Biden’s huge foreign aid bill, in an election year, of all things. And, of course, we have the bipartisan consensus of foreign wars and intervention. You saw the results after the vote was taken on the House floor with the waving of the flags and everything. For a lot of people in Congress it was a feel-good thing, but at the end of the day, even in mainstream media that is hardly fair or unbiased towards Russia, they’re even asking the same questions that all of us have been asking all along. I mean, fine, you can dedicate money and weapons, but is it going to make any difference? After a week of this here, Dima, what do you think?

Dmitry Babich 01:45
Well, first, some people just don’t understand that a huge part of this 61 billion that is going to be spent on Ukraine, a huge part of it is going to be spent for previous deliveries. I mean, the budget is going to compensate Pentagon for the deliveries that it already made, for the expenses that it already made. About 11 billion are actually going to be spent on NATO troops, American troops next to Ukraine, right?

And the other thing is that even though– I think it was Trump who insisted on that via Mike Johnson– even though formally it is a loan, I like the phrase from Senator Thomas Tuberville, a Republican from Alabama. He said, “Don’t let yourself be fooled. Not a dollar of this is going to be paid back. It’s not a loan.” We know the regime that exists in Ukraine since 2014. Once they get the money, forget it, you know, they never pay back. So basically, I think everyone is worse off. The war will continue longer. More people are going to die, probably in areas far removed from the frontline, because Zelensky will buy himself or just get for free long-range missiles. The American taxpayer will never get his or her money back.

03:16
And, again, Tuberville said, “Don’t let yourself be fooled; none of this is going to be paid. We’re going to print these dollars or we’re going to borrow it from China.” If Americans are concerned about their dependence on China, it’s going to increase.

Peter Lavelle:
Yeah, well, Dima, and I’ll throw it over to Gilbert, I mean, if you read the fine print of the bill, it’s a sweetheart loan. You don’t have to pay it back. It’s in the bill itself, it was marketed in a very different way. But if you look at the black and white, it is an absolute giveaway. Gilbert, I mean, it seems to me, and all of us have been watching this very closely, not since 2022, but since 2014, at the very least; much longer, actually, in many ways. This is just to starve off defeat. They don’t have a plan to win. They just want to avoid losing, I guess because it’s an election year. Gilbert.

Gilbert Doctorow: 04:09
No, I agree completely with this. And it is a substantial consensus among experts. But I wouldn’t necessarily say just opposition people, opposition to the Washington narrative. But even in mainstream, there is a consensus that this is not going to save, give Ukraine the possibility of recovering its territory. That is a lost cause. I think the consensus of experts, even moving into mainstream, is coming close to what Jacques Baud was saying about four months ago, that this war has nothing to do with Ukraine. It has everything to do with the West and Russia.

04:47
And Ukraine is being used and abused by the West callously, viciously actually, to the maximum extent to cause harm to Russia. I think what is more troublesome, more worrisome for us all, is not the 61 billion that’s been appropriated for military and budgetary assistance to Ukraine. It is what is going on just under the radar and not very far below it, because it is being picked up by some astute people. And by that I mean the dispatch to Ukraine of advisers, advisers to assist with the most advanced equipment is now scheduled to be delivered to Ukraine. This takes us back to where we were in the 1960s with the American advisers in Vietnam. And that was a time when there was still an understanding of red lines to prevent a direct military clash between the superpowers. That has gone away. There is no recognition of red lines, as Mr. Macron said in a very prevocative way, but in an accurate way, and the possibility of this escalating further, incrementally, is really there.

06:06
We have more and more NATO advisers coming in. We have more and more targeting of those NATO advisers by the Russian Ministry of Defense. And sooner or later, this becomes explosive.

Peter Lavelle:
Well, Dima, of course, I mean, many will say that this is going up the escalation ladder for the very reason that Gilbert just mentioned, is that you’re going to see more and more NATO troops going into Ukraine. But it belies the fact that no matter what the West does vis-a-vis Ukraine, the Russians know it’s directed against them, and it’s not changing the, moving the needle, as it were, on the battlefield. I mean, there are a number of experts that you and I and Gilbert and our audience follow Is that the Ukrainian lines are becoming weaker and weaker and there could be some kind of breakdown. What does NATO do then?

Dmitry Babich: 07:00
Well, NATO will say that just, you know, “‘The dictator’ cracked up to be stronger than we expected. Democracy is on the wane around the world. Autocrats are on the rise.” We’re going to hear a lot of that. The problem is that the United States and the European Union have become ideological states, ideological entities, and their control over the media is absolute. You know, look, one of the main characteristics of a totalitarian regime is that you mix common morals and politics. So during the last three months, the message that we had from the American media in Ukraine, from the European correspondents, it was “Ukrainians are dying, Russia is advancing, and you, Mike Johnson, is to blame for that. You didn’t give the money. So you are a bad man, you know, you’re personally responsible for something, for everything that happens in Ukraine, everything bad that happens in Ukraine.”

08:02
So there is that mixup of morals and politics, you know. In the same way, in the Soviet Union, if you were against Stalin, if you said something bad about Stalin, you just not, you didn’t just make a mistake. You were a very bad person. You had to be ashamed of yourself. So we see this used here and it’s just astounding how the media in the West changes its tunes. All of these few months before it was, you know, “Ukrainian army is starving, there are no munitions, all this because of Mike Johnson.” In fact, it was not true because the munitions delivered in 2022, in 2023, you know, most of this money is going to be just compensating, you know, Pentagon and the American military-industrial complex for that.

08:51
But they wanted to create that atmosphere. And suddenly after the money was given, actually physically, it’s not yet there and the munitions are not there, but suddenly the tone changed, you know. Suddenly we don’t have all of these sentimental articles about soldiers and suffering officers and weeping Zelensky. And the story that was just astounding for me was how Zelensky said, “How come we’re not Israel? I’m in shock, you know. When Israel was attacked by Iranian drones, everyone rushed to the help of Israel. Why are we not Israel?” And the answer is very simple.

Peter Lavelle: 09:32
But Dima, for the very reasons that Gilbert just said, It’s not about Ukraine. That’s what’s really tragic about it. You know, you know, Gilbert, this, you know, as we are on this program, counterintuitive here, the 61 billion– and it doesn’t really matter the amount. you know, people make the amount the center of the story. It doesn’t really matter– because all this does is that it speeds up the demise of what we know of Ukraine. This is going to speed it up, not slow it down, for the very reason that there’s no strategic plan that this money is going to forward. And that’s the tragedy of it all. We’re going to see massive casualties. And this equipment, as Dima has pointed out, is that a lot of it probably hasn’t even been made yet. So, I mean, this is really kind of unicorn stuff. Gilbert.

Gilbert Doctorow: 10:31
Well, on both sides, both on the Russian side and on the American side and allied side, there is a feeling that the coming months will be decisive. This act, if Congress, which Biden successfully, remarkably got through over the opposition of Trump, that is–

Peter Lavelle:
Well, that’s that’s a little unclear, Gilbert. I mean, he, you know, Mike Johnson went to Mar-a-Lago, they did the photo op. I mean, I think Trump totally, totally fumbled this one. And for a public relations point of view. Go ahead.

Gilbert Doctorow: 11:06
Yeah. Well, I think that the coming months are decisive for Biden in his re-election campaign, and this is a holding action. Whether it will hold or not remains to be seen. It is understood the same way by the Russians, that they have a period before them of several months to conclusively knock out Ukraine before this thing really goes off in a wild direction. So, I think we have to sit back, watch this closely, and see where it’s going. It could go into World War III very easily. It could also end in a capitulation by Ukraine very easily, for all the reasons that have been discussed.

They’re out of men, it’s not just out of munitions. And to speak about a Russian advantage of 5 to 1 or 7 to 1 in artillery shells, they’re speaking about that as if it were a new development coming from the failure of the allies to deliver munitions to Ukraine. That’s rubbish. It’s been 7 to 10 to 1 since February of 2022. So for the reading public who has been asleep for the last two years, this is news. For the rest of us, it’s not news at all. And you have to look for what spells the difference. The difference is they’re out of men, not out of munitions. And the men that they’re throwing in are unprepared.

12:36
Everything, virtually everything that the Ukrainians say about the Russian army is simply a reversal of facts. They’re describing themselves. And they’re putting up untrained men and the rest, and mobilization, all these lies are a description of their own situation.

Peter Lavelle:
All right. Gilbert, I have to jump in here. We’re going to go to a short break, gentlemen, and after that short break, we’ll continue our discussion on some real news. Stay with RT.

13:11
Welcome back to Crosstalk Bullhorns. I’m Peter Lavelle. To remind you, we’re discussing some real news. Dima, on the theme, going back about the appropriation of the $61 billion, which of course, depending on how you count it, I mean, some people pointed out 8 billion of it will be in cash, which I guess we all know what will happen to that very quickly, okay? Corruption in Ukraine has only gotten worse, it’s not gotten better, unfortunately. For the people of Ukraine, for the people that actually want their pension and all that, I don’t see why the United States taxpayer should pay another country’s pensions, maybe a topic of another program.

But one could be much more cynical. This is one big wet kiss goodbye. They’re washing their hands of it, because that’s going to need– that 61 billion will go up in smoke, quite literally, depending on how you want to interpret it. It’s not going to make a difference on the battlefield, as we’ve already discussed on this program. So this was just kind of a feel-good vote, remarkably– and maybe one of you or both of you want to address this– why give Biden a win in an election year like this? I’m simply mystified by it. Dima?

Dmitry Babich: 14:24
Well, let’s look at the figures. 46 billion of that amount, 61, is going to be spent on arms. The remaining, I guess, 15 billion is going to be spent on Ukraine. And as you rightly said, part of it will be in cash, and it is supposed to compensate the pensioners. Well, it’s very easy for the Ukrainian government to steal that money. And during the debate in the Senate, a few senators like J.D. Vance and others, they raised it. They said, “Look, you said it was one of the most corrupt countries in the world. How come we’re sending them our money?” you know. As for the battleground, the goals, the aims that Zelensky and his masters are setting themselves are just not realistic, you know.

15:12
To take back Crimea, there are 2.7 million people living in Crimea, you know? It has been a part of Russian Empire since 1783. The huge majority of the people there do not want, under any circumstances, to go back to Ukraine, you know. When American media was a little bit more honest in the 90s, look at the articles by Celestine Bohlen in the New York Times, by Steve Erlanger. They all wrote that Russians make up a huge majority in Crimea; they’re not happy with the Ukrainian government. Then they were not happy. Now they’re even more unhappy, because they get bombarded every day.

15:52
So when you have unrealistic goals, you can’t win, you know. And what’s going on smacks of a “meat for arms” deal, you know. The Congress, you know, the Congress passed this bill when? After Zelensky announced a new mobilization, 250,000 men will have to go to the army, that means to the front. And, you know, this terrible thing, the Ukrainian government is now requiring Ukrainians living abroad to come to the consular offices and sign up, you know, clear out their situation, their relationship with the army. Otherwise, they will not renew their passports. And all these millions of men will become illegals in Poland, in Germany.

Peter Lavelle: 16:39
Maybe Gilbert knows this, but that’s in contravention to EU laws, okay? I mean, these people are conscientiously opposing this conflict, but that’s neither here nor there. Gilbert, what bothers me and is what we’ve seen over the last few months, particularly if we want to consider the implications of the attack on the concert hall in St. Petersburg, it seems the U.S., because they’re the ones that are calling the shots here, they want to rely more and more on terrorism, which of course is something that the Russians will react to very, very strongly, obviously. So the asymmetricalness of it is becoming more and more obvious. Are you worried about that escalating?

Gilbert Doctorow: 17:24
I think it’s difficult to contain entirely state-sponsored terrorism. So the possibility of some sort of tragedy ahead cannot be excluded entirely. Nonetheless, the result of this appropriation and the continuation of the work, and particularly the result of Ukrainian anticipated use of the longer-range missiles to attack civilian targets in Russia, will be a further aggravation and a further intensification of what we have seen for the last two months, when Russia finally has been staging attacks on the generating plants, not on substations, to destroy the infrastructure of electricity in Ukraine and to target particularly the areas from which the most vicious attacks on civilians in the Belgorod region of Russia have been staged, and that is to take over, essentially, Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv.

18:42
And that, the exodus from Kharkiv, that has been shown on television, is going to continue and is going to become still greater. So I can see as one of the unexpected results of what is going on is a further extension of Russkiy Mir in Western Europe. I live in Brussels and I can tell you right now sometimes I wonder if I’m in Moscow. Because all I hear around me is Russian speech, and this is from the so-called Ukrainians who are now among us. That is a fact of life that I see and I don’t believe that there will be any return to Ukraine of those whom I now see around me in Brussels, but I’m sure you also see in Paris and Berlin and other cities.

Peter Lavelle: 19:29
Well, Gilbert, I mean, if you’re a young Ukrainian woman and you have a child and that child is already speaking or learning German or learning Polish or, you know, French, the likelihood of returning home to a devastated country is close to zero. Dima, very shortly, President Volodymyr Zelensky will no longer be the legal president of Ukraine. I thought it was quite interesting listening to the floor speeches about democracy versus authoritarianism, but Zelensky will be an unelected, I don’t know, whatever term you want– viceroy, dictator, strongman– there will be no legal legitimacy behind him maintaining power.

Dmitry Babich: 20:18
Well, I think that brings us back to this desperate question from Zelensky. “Why am I not Israel, why is Ukraine not a big Israel?” Because you are an unelected military dictator, and you have a dreadful security service, you know. Tucker Carlson just visited Ukraine, and when he came back to the United States, he said he heard the word SBU around himself all the time. SBU is the Ukrainian security s ervice, which people really fear. I mean, they fear it a lot more than Soviet KGB, you know, and certainly more than FSB here. So, the fact that he is not elected is just the smallest of his sins. In reality, of course, people did not support his actions, which led to this tragedy in the first place. It could be avoided 100 times before it started on February 24th, 2022.

Peter Lavelle: 21:21
You know, Gilbert, looking at some of the Western media coverage, most of it’s quite laughable and obviously tragic, because so many young men, particularly Ukrainian men, continue to die. But there’s the new mantra, I mean it’s being introduced, is that “Putin wants results by Victory Day”, by May 9th, you know. And I just kind of just roll my eyes. I mean, if there’s been any– if this military campaign, the “Special Military Operation”, as it was initially called, has no timelines at all. Haven’t they learned that by now. that– and maybe the tail end of that is that the big Russian offensive that’s coming, I don’t see that either. I think that they see what they’re doing is working, maybe not as fast as any of us would like, but it is working. That’s why they needed the $61 billion. Gilbert.

Gilbert Doctorow: 22:17
All of our whiz kids who are in Washington, and in Berlin, and in London, have the same failure to think outside the box. They project onto Russia what their own military campaign would look like, and then they draw conclusions that Russia fails here and there, because it hasn’t done what they expect.

Peter Lavelle:
Like the shock and awe, shock and awe. Why isn’t Russia using shock and awe?

Gilbert Doctorow:
So that’s where we began in February 2022, and that’s where we are today. They simply refuse to learn that there are other ways to wage a war, and there are other concepts of war-making than their own. And the Russian concept goes back, it wasn’t invented here, it goes back to Clausewitz, where military action is a projection, it’s a continuation and a handmaiden of diplomacy. So this is not appreciated. Diplomacy has gone by the boards in the United States and Western Europe, and they just cannot see. It’s really an intellectual, conceptual failure, to understand, that people can do things differently and have a different set of objectives. And that’s where we are today.

Peter Lavelle: 23:27
You know, Dima, eventually all conflicts come to an end, and in all conflicts there’s an element of diplomacy at the very end. What initiative has the West given Russia to engage in diplomacy, since the West has rejected it completely?

Dmitry Babich:
Well, I would look at it in a wider frame. What conflict have the United States and the EU ended since the EU in its present form sprang up in 1992? Not a single one. They tried in Cuba. It didn’t work. All the other wars were made by them, you know. They widened smaller conflict into big ones, like the protests in Syria, thanks to them, grew into a civil war. And we have many examples. But I would like to quote Senator Thomas Tuberville here. Speaking against this bill at the Senate, he said, “We need to work with Ukraine and Russia to end all this.” And then he added, “But that is called diplomacy. That’s not going to come from us.”

24:34
Unfortunately, I’m afraid he was right. Because working with Ukraine and Russia’s policy. Tell me, when it was the last time when the United States and the EU would work with both sides of the book. They always just supported one side. In Syria, in Libya, everywhere.

Peter Lavelle: 24:56
Well, you know, Gilbert, we’re rapidly running out of time, but Secretary Blinken went to China and scolded them for backing Russia in whatever form that he claims; there’s not a lot of evidence. But what I find really interesting when you see the Secretary saying, lecturing another country about helping another country in a conflict, well, what is the West doing with Ukraine? I mean, they don’t see the symmetry. These people have no sense of self– they can’t see how the other side would see the same problem, Gilbert.

Gilbert Doctorow:
Well, the other side simply cannot be right. There’s one way to do it, and that’s our way.

Peter Lavelle:
That’s right.

Gilbert Doctorow:
We have allies, but you don’t have any allies. You cannot have allies, by definition. You’re an axis of evil or whatever. And so there is this mental failure to put things together.

Peter Lavelle: 25:51
Yeah, well, I mean, the great Stephen Cohen, probably one of the greatest Russianists there ever was, he said during the Cold War “We needed to be in the other guy’s shoes to be able to see what’s going on.” That there’s an inability of doing that. And I think Dima is ultimately right. It’s very ideological. We have in all around the world, it’s the West that is ideological. Most the world wants practical results, and that usually happens in history when you’re practical.

All right gentlemen, that’s all the time we have. I want to thank my guests in St. Petersburg and here in Moscow. And of course I want to thank our viewers for watching us here on RT.

26:29
See you next time; and remember, Crosstalk rules.