Russia's military advances and escalating tensions with Europe — analysis with Stanislav Krapivnik
Glenn Diesen interviews former US Army officer Stanislav Krapivnik, now based in Russia, on the current state of the war in Ukraine.
Summary
Glenn Diesen speaks with Stanislav Krapivnik about the accelerating Russian offensive across multiple fronts in Ukraine, the targeting of civilian infrastructure by Ukrainian drones, and the broader geopolitical picture following the US-Iran memorandum of understanding. Krapivnik argues that Kostiantynivka has effectively fallen, that Sloviansk and Kramatorsk are now strategically exposed, and that Russian forces are closing in on Sumy and applying pressure toward Kharkiv. He contends that Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian and Belarusian civilian targets — including a school bus carrying children — represent a deliberate Western-backed terror campaign. He also argues that the US military was badly degraded in its Iran campaign, that European leaders are sleepwalking toward a catastrophic conventional or nuclear war with Russia, and that Russia's hardline faction is gaining influence as Western provocations accumulate.
Krapivnik spends considerable time on the post-war treatment of German POWs, arguing that American camps held over a million Germans — many of them teenagers — in open fields where large numbers died from starvation and disease. He draws a contrast with Soviet treatment of German prisoners, many of whom he says eventually settled in the USSR as citizens. He uses this history to support his broader argument that West Germany was never genuinely denazified.
On the question of a potential war with Finland or other Nordic and Baltic states, Krapivnik argues at length that Russia would not fight a conventional ground war on European soil but would instead destroy energy infrastructure, heating grids, and ports, leaving civilian populations unable to survive winter — a scenario he says deflates the enthusiasm of those imagining a conventional battlefield engagement.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and front-line overview
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. We are joined today by Stanislav Krapivnik, a former US Army officer now in Russia. Thank you for coming back on the program. At the very beginning of all this insanity, when everybody started saying you can't wear anything with the letter Z — and then came Army Group V — the Russian military really started trolling. There was a whole convoy of cars or trucks with every letter of the Latin alphabet written on them. Go ahead, ban them all. After a while the entire alphabet would disappear.
One of the main things I wanted to ask you about is what we're seeing on the front lines now, because this seems to be quite dramatic. The large city of Kostiantynivka is now — well, not sure if it's fallen yet, but it's over 90% fallen at least. And this of course leaves only Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, and after this—
Stanislav Krapivnik: Well, there's Druzhkivka in between.
Glenn Diesen: Yeah, in between. But essentially this whole conglomerate opens up, and that would finish off Donbas, which is quite significant. At the same time we see Russia moving closer to Sumy — another important city — and of course taking more territory, closing in from at least the eastern direction toward Kharkiv, which is the second largest city in Ukraine. In Zaporizhzhia, the Russians are coming in from the east, but along the Dnipro the Ukrainians have had some success. What is happening now across the front line?
Stanislav Krapivnik: About a week and a half ago, the Ukrainians said "we may have to evacuate Myrhorod — we may have to pull out of there." The fact is that Myrhorod was surrounded and fell six months ago. But news travels slow to Kyiv, and the European Union still thinks that Kyiv has turned this conflict around and is marching toward Moscow or some other ludicrous nonsense. They just don't admit to what they're losing, and they don't update their maps for as long as they possibly can.
The reality is, you're right — Kostiantynivka is basically gone. There's still a pocket of Ukrainian soldiers surrounding the southeast of Kostiantynivka that are being finished off. There's maybe about 10%, maybe less. There are delays because the Russian Ministry of Defense doesn't publish instantly. They usually wait until they've cleaned up the area before they announce they've taken it — which means sweeping every single building, every single room, every single basement to make sure there are no Ukrainian soldiers left over. There are usually a couple here, a couple there left over, trying to sneak out or change into civilian clothes. But having too many Nazi tattoos tends to give it away. And luckily they're all usually cooks and finance guys and truck drivers who never fired a rifle in their lives. It's amazing — just about every Ukrainian POW is a truck driver or a cook. It's a whole army of truck drivers and cooks. I don't know who's fighting. I guess the dead guys are the ones who were fighting. It is pretty pathetic. Just admit you're a soldier.
So that's Kostiantynivka. And there's another key element here. The Russian offensive in that direction has also branched off to the north. You've got Kostiantynivka here, Druzhkivka here, then Kostiantynivka, and you've got Sloviansk. This is coming up right here — it's still to the south, but it's heading up behind Druzhkivka. So basically you'd have that town surrounded from three sides, because the Russian front toward Kramatorsk is also closing in. The front lines are about five or six kilometers out from the edge of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk — where it all began, where the actual fighting started.
Druzhkivka is pretty much about 60% taken. Russian forces cut off the Ukrainians from supply about a month ago — fully cut them off — and now it's just raid, push, raid, push. They're not really trying to invest too heavily. They're just wearing them down because they know the Ukrainians are not getting resupplied. No point in risking too many of your own troops.
Once Sloviansk — once Kostiantynivka falls — all of Sloviansk is now under artillery and drone control, because it's in the low ground below Kostiantynivka and it's an easy view of those territories. In fact, in the beginning of 1944, the counter-offensive took those areas from the same direction, because you take the high ground and then you go south into the low ground. It's much easier to roll your enemy up that way. Plus you've got longer range for your artillery because you're on the high ground. High ground is still important.
Sumy, Kharkiv, and Zaporizhzhia
Stanislav Krapivnik: Sumy — Russian troops are probably about six, maybe seven kilometers out from the edge of the city, working their way through the forested areas to the northeast of the city. Even in winter, forests provide some amount of cover from drones because branches and drones are not friends. But during late fall and early spring, branches don't hide you from view. So once the Ukrainians know where you're moving, they can still use their limited artillery. The forests are now green, so it's even harder for drones because leaves and drones also don't get along too well. And now you've got coverage from above — the Ukrainians can't see where the Russian forces are moving. So it's much easier to move larger bodies of troops instead of very small teams, and to control the logistics.
Kharkiv is still pretty far away. Kharkiv is mostly an artillery, rocket, and drone duel at this point. Russian forces are still about 15 to 16 kilometers out. They're moving, but not as fast as they're moving in other areas.
When we swing further down into Zaporizhzhia — Ukraine launched three counter-offensives in Zaporizhzhia since February. The last one was in the western portion of central Zaporizhzhia. The Ukrainians tend to have much more success in their counter-offensives for grabbing land, but they can't hold it. They have success grabbing land because they don't give a damn about how many casualties they take. Quite literally, they'll take massive casualties. So they'll be able to grab a big chunk of area, get the photo ops, but then they can't hold it. Because once they've invested that area, they've lost so many troops and so much equipment that they can't hold it. And when the Russian forces reorganize and start rolling them back — as has happened every single time — they're constantly launching these counter-offensives.
The Russian offensive in that area is coming from really four different directions. Mala Tokmachka, which is a suburb town southeast, runs along the N08 — it's a long, thin town with villages around it used as part of the defensive build. Russian forces are in Mala Tokmachka fighting northwards. Russian forces from the west are about six kilometers out. Russian forces from Huliaipole — they took Huliaipole — are pretty close, which places them five kilometers from the north-northeastern portion. And there's another offensive heading even further north in a deep encirclement. The N08 is tactically cut off because of drones and artillery. That last fortified town of any kind of size in central Zaporizhzhia is in a tactical encirclement. It's pretty hard to get anything in and out. While there's not a full physical encirclement, artillery and drones make resupply nearly impossible. Once that falls, there are small villages all the way up to Zaporizhzhia city. That's why the Ukrainians are very desperately throwing everything they have into various counter-offensives in that area. They've all been stopped.
There are some other localized counter-offensives. It's very hard to tell with the Ukrainian side too, because when they were being pushed out last year out of a lot of those areas, they took a lot of videos of themselves with flags at different points in time. So when they come back, they start popping up those videos after the fact, and it's very hard to figure out whether they're fresh videos or videos from a year ago. That's part of their PR war.
After yesterday's strike on the Belarusian school bus, we may be seeing an expansion of this war. We'll have to see what Lukashenko says and does.
The evolution of drone warfare and civilian targeting
Glenn Diesen: The war has changed dramatically over the past four years. If you go back to 2022, it was pretty much tanks, artillery, armored vehicles. It changed to a large extent due to the introduction of drones. But this is also developing — we saw the jamming of drones emerge, and then they had fiber optic cables for the drones so they couldn't be jammed. And now we hear some stories about Russia being able to block drones guided by Starlink. How far along is this — is it already in place or still developing?
Stanislav Krapivnik: What the Ukrainians have started doing is putting Starlinks on their drones, and that helps them guide them deeper into Russia. Again, mostly they're hitting civilian targets. For example, there was a raid by Ukrainian drones last night — early morning — on Zelenograd, which is an island of Moscow to the northwest of Moscow. There were hits on a refinery area, but the hits are almost always on fuel storage or product storage. These vessels are allowed to burn out and then they're replaced. They make a big fire. Like I've said many times, if you hit a refinery, you don't get a fire. You get a very small fire — the computer switches off, closes the valves, nothing else gets pumped down the pipes, and then you replace the pipes and maybe some of the damaged vessels. You hit the storage facilities, they burn brightly, they make a lot of smoke, and you get lots of big pictures in the West: "Look, we're winning." Well, they're not winning. And those are relatively easy to replace because they're old technology. It's just a metal circular containment structure with an internal tank that fills up with fuel or raw oil.
But they did hit residential buildings, and this is a big difference right now. The Ukrainians — via the Americans, and I'm going to blame the Americans absolutely for this, because the US government is absolutely involved 100% in military funding, in satellite imagery, and absolutely in Starlink — so Americans are neck deep in civilian bloodshed. I know that's a surprise for everyone. I'm being very sarcastic. And the Europeans for that matter — the non-Russian Europeans.
The number one targets have now become an absolute terrorist war from the side of the Ukrainians. They're hitting civilian targets almost exclusively because they're losing on the battlefield. They're flying the drones directly into residential buildings. This isn't a matter of your drone being hit and falling. This isn't a matter of Russian anti-aircraft missiles going down. There are Panzer units placed on top of key government buildings in the cities, but those fire light missiles and mostly chain guns — they're not going to destroy a building if they miss. The heavier systems are all placed outside the cities. We don't use our people as human shields for PR purposes, the way the Ukrainians do when they put anti-aircraft systems right beside a school or a hospital, knowing that when it's hit it's going to have collateral damage everywhere. Then they go screaming, "Oh look" — or when a Russian missile or drone overhead falls down on some building, they can still get PR out of it. But the Ukrainian drones — you can see the videos — they're flying directly into apartment buildings, and sometimes into private single-resident homes.
We've also seen a very large spike of Ukrainians hitting buses, hitting civilian trains, hitting civilian trucks. And when they can't find those, they're going after just civilians. There are CCTV cameras everywhere, so you get to see the criminal activity of the West — the terrorist regime that the West is. And if the people in the West haven't figured it out: whenever you finally wake up and decide you don't want to be a slave and a serf, that will be used against you as well. Because whatever the empire uses outside of it, it will always eventually use inside against its own people. Once it perfects it against whatever enemy it's fighting. Just food for thought. You don't like your government — you may get a drone through the window one day. Welcome to reality. This is what your governments will happily do to you if they're doing it to somebody else right now.
Yesterday, the Ukrainians made this more of an international war. They droned a Belarusian school bus that was taking a team of young footballers to a resort in southeastern Russia. They had just crossed from Belarus into Bryansk Oblast, which is the next one over. The Ukrainian drone flew into the bus, killed the wife of the coach, injured two other adults and four children. There were 44 people in this bus. Last week they hit two buses — one thankfully with no injuries, another where they burned eight people to death and 11 more were injured on a passenger bus. They hit a train. Today there were videos from Bryansk where a Ukrainian drone flies through traffic and kills a truck driver who's just stopped at a stoplight. This is everyday Western terrorism in Russia, every single day.
Glenn Diesen: I feel like the message coming out of the EU — Germany especially — is leaning more and more toward this collective punishment. Not openly stating that civilian targets are okay, but in other spheres — for example, arguing that no Russian athlete or artist should be allowed into the EU because of Ukraine. The whole idea of no collective punishment does appear to be over, which kind of changes the whole mentality.
The Iran memorandum and its implications for Ukraine
But I did want to ask you about the end — well, not the end of the Iran war, that might be a bit naive — but at least the memorandum of understanding being reached, in which the US is seemingly scaling down its forward positions. How do you think the scaling down of the war in Iran will affect the war in Ukraine? You could have two competing views here. One would be that the US kind of ignored all diplomacy in Ukraine because Iran took all their focus. The other view would be that Iran was consuming their resources. The basic assumption is: is the United States trying to bring an end to the war in Ukraine or continue to push it? Because when I see Trump with the G7, they're still talking sanctions, still talking about sending more weapons, assisting in local manufacturing of weapons. So it all depends on what the US objectives are in Ukraine. If Trump wants to put an end to this war, the end of the war in Iran could be a good sign. If he doesn't, this essentially gives the US more space to create more havoc in that part of the world. At the same time, we hear about the US drawing down its troops quite significantly in Europe. Are they putting an end to the war or outsourcing it to the Europeans?
Stanislav Krapivnik: The US drive for hegemony hasn't ended. It has not gone away. Look — the British Empire, what's left of it, is in such a pathetic state. The Brits — the only reason the Brits have the Falklands is because Milei is in the pocket of the Americans and the Israelis and won't go take them. At this point, any Argentinian effort — any Argentinian boat that can get out to the Falklands, which isn't a very long sail from Argentina — would just take them, because there's nothing the British can do. Yet the British mentality is "we're an empire." It hasn't gone away. They're still trying to act like an empire. They're a chihuahua — flea-infested, with lots of sores on its body, rotting away as we look at it — but that chihuahua is still thinking it's a Great Dane and trying to strut around like one. That's the British Empire, which we know is a joke except for a few islands here and there.
What do you say about the Americans? The Americans still are an empire — their empire in steep decline. They've shown the whole world that they can't take on a regional power without getting smacked. They got their teeth handed to them. The US Navy has proven to be absolutely inept and inadequate to fight anybody except the smallest nations that they can bomb from the sea. They spent this entire conflict — except for the quote blockade, which they had about six destroyers and frigates enforcing, so lots of ships got through anyway — running circles in the middle of the Indian Ocean to keep from becoming future reefs. And there's a question about whether or not they were damaged anyway. Meanwhile, you had a mutiny — even if called a soft mutiny — on the Ford. Those 80% of the toilets don't clog themselves just because everybody had a bad dinner. They clog themselves because they're shoving whatever they can down and flushing it — ropes, t-shirts — to clog everything up, because they want to go home. They're tired of this. This military is in a very bad position.
I had a great talk with Larry Johnson, who is a friend of mine. We do a show every week. Larry was in a conference with a bunch of retired and some still-active-duty generals, and they want a war with Russia. They're convinced a ground war with Russia is winnable. And quite a few of them are convinced they won in Iran. This is the level of psychosis you're dealing with in the American elites, including these generals — who, by the way, the best do not rise. It's not just Trump who has started picking generals for their political and religious views. Generals in America have been picked for their political views for at least the last 30 years, if not longer. Not because of their talent, but because of their political views. Up to one star you can still get there on talent, but after that it's all strict politics. Two stars and up — it's all politicians. So these are the people you're dealing with. You're not dealing with exactly the smartest people in the world.
And yeah — Larry was just listening to people who think they won the Iran war. Thirteen American bases have been destroyed. The US capitulated in the memorandum. Whether or not this becomes reality going further, we'll live and see. To say that this conflict is over is a long shot. Then there's the Israelis — they are not planning on stopping the mass murder. Why should they? They're on a roll. Until Israel gets enough casualties that they can't swallow it anymore, until every family is whining and screaming, they're not going to stop as a society.
The problem here is that as psychopathic and opportunistic and bloodthirsty as Netanyahu is, his opposition — that'll probably come to power soon enough — is even worse. It's like asking: do you want the brownshirts or the blackshirts in power in Berlin? That's what you're dealing with. Is it going to be the stormtroopers or the SS? That's the next election in Israel, if they happen.
The Israelis are in a position to keep this war going because they're still attacking Lebanon. Trump has been able to talk the Iranians down from launching heavy strikes onto the Israelis, but that's only a matter of time. Because then Iran has to choose whether it loses face and becomes just another power like Turkey — that talks a lot and doesn't do anything when the Israelis act — or it has to back up its words with actions. I think Iran will back up its words with actions, unlike Turkey. Turkey doesn't even mind that Ukraine has sunk one of its cutters, military cutters. Never mind that Ukraine is attacking ships coming in and out of the Bosphorus straits in Turkish waters, or that it even hit a Turkish tanker. Erdoğan has basically shown himself to be another barking chihuahua that won't do anything once any pressure gets on him. I don't think Iran is going to go down that road. They have no reason to.
So right now, as far as resources — the US is very depleted. Without Chinese magnets — some magnets are getting through, there'll be some amount of contraband — from what my sources have been telling me, you don't want to know how many computer monitors and television sets the Americans are now scrambling to take apart to get the magnets out of. The Americans are taking magnets out of television sets. That's where we're at right now, ladies and gentlemen. Their maximum manufacturing rate is maybe 60 to 70 Patriot missiles a month. In a night flight of 500 drones and missiles, how much are you going to do? Thirty targets, maybe forty.
Glenn Diesen: That would be an interesting development if the US ended up dismantling washing machines for its equipment.
Stanislav Krapivnik: Those are magnets.
Russia's hardening posture and the boiling anger in Moscow
Glenn Diesen: Let me ask a last question about how you explain the large offensive now taking place on the Russian side, but also the more hardline position we're seeing — Kyiv being hit in ways it wasn't before, and overall in the Russian leadership there seems to be a change in mood. Putin in 2025 seemed to be all about diplomacy, all about finding common ground with Trump. Putin in 2026 doesn't talk that much about diplomacy anymore. And now we're seeing attacks on Kyiv which were largely spared in the past. Do you see a change in the Russian posture, looking at both the front line and the targeting of missiles and drones?
Stanislav Krapivnik: Yes. It's not nearly the change that the more hardline faction wants. And I'll tell you this — the way things are going, and I said this two years ago, if we don't respond hard enough, we're going to have to make an example, or we're going to have a nuclear war. And what I mean by an example is: sooner or later, we're going to get to the point where you drop leaflets over Lviv, you tell everybody you have 24 hours to get out, and then you drop a nuclear missile onto that city. Ladies and gentlemen of the West, this is nuclear war. Tomorrow it's going to be your cities. Back off. That may be the only thing left — short of direct strikes on the EU — that may wake up these idiots. And I don't know if that'll even be enough now. They've gone so far down the rabbit hole of insanity.
You've got General Naumann ready to strike into Kaliningrad and St. Petersburg and the Kola Peninsula and into Crimea and maybe the Urals — and hell, fly to Kamchatka — because where is the Luftwaffe with our 500 aircraft of all types and sizes, questionable how many of them can even fly? And do you hear anything from the German government going, "This is just a general talking, this is not our official policy"? No. That's the official policy of Germany.
Then you get the Netherlands building concentration camps for Russian POWs — apparently they've already built a bunch. And yes, by the way, everybody in Russia hears this. The beat for war is now in Russia also. Russia is preparing for full conventional and nuclear war with Europe, which will be the death ride of Europe. A good chunk of the European Union won't fight. We know that. The Greeks, the Bulgarians — they'll have revolution before they fight. The Slavics won't fight. Questionable about the Romanians. There are people waking up in Poland, but maybe not fast enough. But the Germans, the French, the British, the Norwegian countries, the Baltics — they're all hellbent on their own destruction. They're going to wind up getting destroyed, but they're hellbent on it. Their governments have gone well over the line of insanity, and the vast majority of the population backs them.
You don't see demonstrations. You don't see anything. Even counting that there's lots of police state action all over Europe — you do see demonstrations breaking out in England, you see them breaking out in Ireland. You don't see them anymore in France. And the Germans — well, the West Germans have always had this little problem. They always follow whatever little Führer they can find to the very end. And they've got another little Führer standing there by the name of Merz. So the West Germans as a majority will follow him to their own death, because that's just their mental state.
The East Germans have been denazified. The West Germans were never denazified. They removed the Nazi symbols, but they kept the Nazis. The West Germans were Nazis and they still mostly are Nazis, whether or not they put swastikas up these days or not. Der Spiegel had an article — the Americans opened up their archives that they took out of the Gestapo at the end of the war — and Spiegel had a link and the story: "Go see what your family was doing during Hitler's time. Maybe you're Nazis. It's cool to be a Nazi again. We're all Nazis." How long before the swastikas go back up officially in Berlin? That's the reality of it. They've normalized it again. Don't feel guilty, don't feel bad. And they never did. If you look at West Germany — how many of the first tier of the Nazi party were cut out? A lot of them wound up on the hangman's noose if they didn't put a bullet in their own head or take cyanide beforehand. But the second and third tier guys went right back into power and got promotions. That was the reality of West Germany. Or they got to immigrate to America and become very honored citizens. So that was the reality for the second and third tier Nazis — Nazi scientists, Nazi officials, SS, Gestapo. Most of them didn't face any kind of actual punishment, and some of them got very good promotions at the end of the war. Definitely the industrialists — they came back out seven years later and started forming the new European order 2.0, otherwise known as the European Union, otherwise known as the association of steel and coal producers. That was the bedrock of the EU.
So Putin has gotten much more hardline, but he's not nearly to where he's being pushed. And the continued terrorism by the West through their Ukrainian proxy is only pushing the hardline faction harder to strike the European Union and strike them hard. I don't know if this train can be stopped at this point or turned around. Turning trains around is very difficult. Stopping them is still an option, but I don't think this train is going to be stopped anymore.
As far as the Americans — sure, they're absolutely funding the Ukrainians. They're providing weapons, providing intelligence. Congress just sent another $9 billion. Nothing has really changed. The price tag has mostly gone onto the Europeans as opposed to the Americans. Americans are quote "making money off of it" — I'm not quite sure how much money they're making off it, but that's what the Americans are saying. But they're fully into it. Nothing has changed.
They got their teeth kicked in by the Iranians, which pushed them back — because Iran wasn't just a matter of taking over Iran. Iran is the gateway to central Asia and the Caucasus, to make it much easier to penetrate and try to attack Russia from the south and then get China from the west. Iran stood its ground and kicked the Americans in the teeth. So now they're having to back off, but they haven't stopped Project Ukraine. Nobody's canceled Project Ukraine. It's still on course.
But the main goal of the Americans is not to fight. You're right — they are removing troops. They have lots of equipment. Watch: when this war blows up, the Americans are going to say, "We're neutral, but we'll sell you weapons." And that's the whole point. Massacre and murder off the European Union. If they're willing to die for the American cause as proxies, why not? They're slightly higher-brand Ukrainians. And make money off of it. And then when the people pull themselves out of whatever rubble is left of central and western Europe, the Americans will come in and say, "We've got a new Marshall Plan for you. You'll be in debt to us for the next 200 years. We'll take all your brains, we'll take your companies, and we'll rebuild your agrarian societies for you."
Europe is going to die. It's scheduled to die. It's willing to die. It can't wait to die. Some societies commit suicide. Some organisms decide they no longer want to live, and it seems like the European Union and its member states — at least some of them — have decided they no longer want to live. They want to go out in a blaze of glory. And the Americans are more than happy to help the European Union die gloriously.
Glenn Diesen: I wonder if they reflect over the messaging they're sending. The Germans are now talking so openly about exactly what they want to attack in Russia. They're setting dates for when they expect war with Russia, talking about mass-producing long-range missiles to soften up Russian targets before such a war. And at the same time, these stories about the Dutch building camps for Russian prisoners of war — it begs the question: what kind of war do they think this will be?
I think often the assumption is that we'll send some troops into Ukraine, fight on the front lines there, tip the scales a bit in the other direction. I had a discussion recently with both Professor John Mearsheimer and Sergey Karaganov — the latter having played a key role in convincing Putin to change the nuclear doctrine. I found it interesting because they both seem to agree on this point: it's near impossible now for Russia not to retaliate, and if they do, the Germans would likely hit back with conventional weapons, and at that point there's no control over the escalation ladder. It would very rapidly escalate into a nuclear strike. Again, Mearsheimer and Karaganov also agree it's very unlikely the Americans would want to sacrifice Washington or New York for Tallinn or Berlin. So it's a very dangerous path we're on. I just don't understand what the calculations are here, or what kind of war Paris, Berlin, and London are expecting. The Dutch are building camps for Russian prisoners of war — do they expect to march into Russia, capture Russians, take them back? This is not going to be like the last five years. This will go into nuclear weapons so fast.
European miscalculations and the historical parallel
Stanislav Krapivnik: Well, it may not go nuclear. Honestly speaking, it may not go nuclear. But even a conventional war — you talk to some of these Finns. A lot of them are so brainwashed. Never mind that they've very quickly gone back to being the armpit of Europe, as Finland always was until they became part of the Russian Empire and Russia built them Helsinki out of what was a fishing village. I know that eats them up — they were the whipping boy for the Swedes for hundreds of years. And under Russia, they actually got self-rule as an autonomous portion of the Russian Empire — the first time Finns actually ruled Finns, probably since somewhere in the Middle Ages.
But you talk to these guys — they're all going to be super snipers and the stupid Reds are going to run into their gardens and they're going to whack them left and right. They're going to be real heroes, just like in video games. No, gentlemen. What the war is going to be like is: we close the border, we bomb all those bases, and then we take out your key infrastructure — your electric power plants, your heating grids, your ports. And then winter comes, and there'll be a lot fewer Finns by the time spring comes on this earth. Probably half will freeze and die from hunger. And that's how the war is going to be fought. We're not going to come marching into your country. We're just going to wipe you out by destroying your infrastructure. Try living a civilized life in a 2020s apartment building when you have no electricity, no centralized heating, it's minus 30 outside, and you've got no food coming in.
Finland doesn't grow food. Look where it is. It's swamp and forest. They all love burgers — if you've ever been in Helsinki, there's a burger joint on every corner. They don't exactly have a lot of cows. It's mostly milk cows. They're not exactly cow-grazing territory. Outside of fish, berries, and some limited agriculture — much of which probably requires gas and electricity — they really don't have much for feeding themselves at the population they now have. Finland was always a very thinly populated country for obvious reasons. Fishing and berries and small gardening isn't going to feed a large population. They have a large population for that type of terrain. They can't feed that population. If the ports are destroyed, if electricity is gone, the heating is gone — the Finnish population is going to halve very quickly back to its natural levels of primitive living.
And when you explain it to them, the steam goes out of them real hard, unless they're absolutely insanely brainwashed. Because as soon as they start thinking about reality — no, the Red Army is not coming marching into your garden so you can play Call of Duty. That's not how war is going to be. It's just going to be long distance. We're just going to destroy everything until there's not many people left after winter. And if we want to take some territory, we'll go ahead and take it. Probably not — maybe Helsinki just to make sure the ports are open to St. Petersburg.
They don't understand the warfare. They're all living in video games and movies from World War II. But even Germany — underground gas storage facilities. We've got weapons that can take that out. Imagine the big boom that happens. No gas in Germany this winter. That's an exact probability. When General Naumann stands up and declares where they're going to strike with whatever limited aviation they actually have, he kind of forgets that there are going to be counter-strikes, and Russia has about six or seven times more combat aircraft than Germany does. Russia outguns Germany in everything. Germany is a second-rate power at best — a de-industrialized second-rate power. Germany is meat. America will provide the tanks for that meat to burn in and barbecue. That's what they want. That's what the West Germans want.
German unification has been the singular worst geopolitical mistake of the last 200 years, flat out. Germany has been unified for less than 100 years as a whole — they had that big break in the middle — and it is marching toward starting a third world war. There's a Russian saying: the Germans owe us not because of what they did to us in our country, but because of what we didn't do to them in their country. If in 1945 the Red Army had shot and gassed every single German to the last child, the world would have clapped. There would have been no protests anywhere in most of Europe. They would have been extremely happy with that. And the Americans were discussing sterilizing the German men, making them into an agrarian society. There was an active plan built for that. Just the Cold War broke out and they decided they needed the Germans in fighting position. But look up the archives.
If we were like the West, there would be no Germans. There probably would be no Poles. The French would be a lot fewer. The Silesians would probably be gone too. We would have exterminated a very large chunk of Europe for everything Europe has done to us over the last thousand years. We're not Europeans. That's the reason most of Europe is still alive. That's why the Germans are still alive. They should be thrilled that we are not Europeans. We don't think like Europeans do. We're Eastern Slavs. We own half of Europe, but we're not Europeans. Because if we were, there wouldn't be a Europe left right now for everything they've done.
So if the Germans think there's going to be a Germany after this war — there will never be another Germany. It's the biggest geopolitical mistake ever. And by the way, it gave a reason for the French and the British to stop fighting each other — a fear of Germany — which has not been a good thing for everybody else either. Two world wars and marching toward a third. You can't have a country like that.
Glenn Diesen: People forget about the Morgenthau Plan — this was actually the plan, and quite horrific numbers of Germans were expected to die from it.
Post-war treatment of German POWs
Stanislav Krapivnik: Well, let's not forget the American POW camps for the Germans. Most of the American POW camps from 1945 — because Eisenhower gave a command to his generals: no prisoners. When the Allied armies crossed the Rhine, all German males were to be exterminated — no prisoners, kill everybody. His generals ignored him. Eisenhower is German himself, but his generals ignored him. They took prisoners. There was nothing set up for these prisoners. Before that, the Americans were shipping German prisoners to the US — there were lots of POW camps in the US. But when 1944 turned into 1945, there were no POW camps set up. So they just set up camps in open fields. And a lot of people in the American camps were kept there through 1946 into 1947. You've got to figure most of these guys were kids — 16, 17, 15 year old kids, the last dregs of German society being thrown into the war, or old men.
Read — most of these guys didn't say anything about it. There have been a couple of books that have come out from the American side too. Some of the generals, and historians going over the records years later, realize there was a genocide that the American military was conducting on the Germans — over a million dead POWs, where people disappeared from records.
If you read what some of these people at their old age are admitting — I've got one in an American military magazine, Command Magazine, which is a military history magazine. There's an interview from the late 1990s with a German POW. He says: "I was 16. I'm an old man now. I'm dying of cancer. I don't give a damn. I'm going to tell you the truth." Because all his life he was told: if you open your mouth about this, you're either a communist or you're a Nazi. He sat two years as a POW at age 16. He was taken prisoner. They pretty much just watched people die. Barely fed. They started in an open field, digging dugouts in the semi-frozen ground with their own hands to survive the cold. Most of his friends died from dysentery, from disease, from starvation. That was the American reality.
The French had it better because the French Foreign Legion was there to sign up anybody who wanted to. Plus the French were taking able-bodied kids off to work on the farms because they didn't have enough manpower, and they were getting fed on the farms. A lot of them wound up marrying the local girls and staying on those farms.
The Netherlands — look what the Netherlands did. In Belgium, they took those 14 and 15 year old kids as POWs, and before they let them go, they had to demine the fields with sticks. So you had 15-year-olds demining. A lot of them got blown up. That's Europe. That's how Europe plays games.
While the West lectures us about morality and how we're supposed to behave — if we were anything like most of Europe, there wouldn't be a German. There wouldn't be a lot of Europe left. The Russian military didn't do that. In fact, the Germans that got marched off — yeah, the SS mostly got executed. They got tribunal and executed. That was denazification. Most of the other Germans — my father was working in a factory since he was 14, so there were tons of Germans working there. And when the Germans were allowed to go back, most of them didn't go back. Because these Germans were no longer living in POW camps — they had apartments, and most of them had wives and kids. They'd married Russian women and just stayed, because they had nothing to go back to. Even if you had a family in Germany — are they still alive? Do they even remember you? Meanwhile, you've got a wife and kids here. It's a rare guy who is going to drop what he has here and leave. Most of them stayed. They became Soviet citizens. They had wives and kids. There were plenty of women around after the war, all things considered.
So when they say, "Oh, they all died" — no, they didn't die. Most of them became Russian Soviet citizens. That is the difference. That is the difference between us and the EU and the people that populate the EU.
Closing reflections
Glenn Diesen: We've already gone a bit over time, so thank you for taking the time. When I see these news stories — the Dutch building camps, the Germans making these threats, the Baltic states very evidently making their territory open for attacks — all of this makes its rounds around the Russian media as well. You can feel the tensions, the anger growing. And at the same time we see all these news stories: "Ha, look at this strike on Russia, look at this one — we're humiliating Putin." The anger is boiling, and I don't understand if the goal is to think that the Russians will somehow capitulate, or if they fail to see that whatever attempts Putin has had to hold back this boiling anger — it's not working anymore. It's a very dangerous situation. So thank you very much, and look forward to having you on soon.
Stanislav Krapivnik: Always a pleasure. Thank you, Glenn. Let's end on a positive note — there is still a chance to get off this train. The people need to wake the hell up.