Hey folks, Chuck Holton here. Uh, I'm just wanting to give you a quick update of what's going on in Ukraine. I'm back in Kiev. Now we've spent about a week down on the front lines, uh, in the south east and near dinette skin in the dumbass region. And now we're back here. Part of the reason we came back is because there's so much information coming out and down there, we just don't have much in the way of, you know, connection.
not a lot of bandwidth to get stuff out. It's a really large area to cover and it's hard to get around down there. And so we're so deep in the, in the weeds out there that we were missing stuff and unable to get some of the content we needed. So we came back here for the time being, and we're kind of keeping an eye on things.
Everybody wants to know if Russia is going to invade Ukraine. And I would say that this short answer to that is only Vladimir Putin ex. The long answer is that Ukrainians certainly don't think so. Because here in Kiev, they are going about their daily lives. As they have been the entire time. They, they, they believe that perhaps Putin will manufacture some sort of, uh, excuse for an incursion in around the dome boss or Denescu regions.
They really don't believe he's going to roll tanks into cave. If that were to happen, it could be bad here because there's three and a half million people in this city. And if they all needed to leave at once, there's just not the capacity in the public transport transport system or anything, it would be chaos.
So we're actually making ex-filtration plans now to figure out what we would have to do if something like that were to happen. Um, I think that right now, Putin is just playing a really high stakes game here with the west. His big sticking point is he says that the, you know, we've got to promise that Ukraine cannot join NATO, but if anything, this buildup on their border has made Ukrainians want to join NATO all the more.
I know there are a lot of people in states that say like, what's the, why do we care? What happens here? And I get that. I understand that. I mean, this is, it doesn't have anything to do with America's vital national interests necessarily, except for the fact that wherever the United States isn't Russia will be.
We've seen that around the globe right now in Syria, in Armenia, in Kazakhstan, in, you know, just a whole region. Russia is expanding its influence its ascendant in world geopolitics. While the United States is pulling back, uh, licking our wounds from Afghanistan and, and with, uh, a weak president, our adversaries are.
Being emboldened around the world. And that's one of the reasons why this happened now and not under Trump, uh, Vladimir Putin wouldn't have done this under Trump. I really, I really don't think he would have because, uh, they, we had a stronger president. The bottom line is it's going to drag on for some time.
I believe it's really hard to say what Putin is going to do, everybody. That's the big question. Everybody wants to know. We really don't know. There are tremendous number of ceasefire violations happening down in the dinette screens. Uh, mortars and artillery and automatic grenade, launchers and machine gun fire, and anti-tank missiles are all being fired across the red line into Ukraine.
Ukrainians are at some, in some instances firing back in order to suppress those fires, but they're not firing on civilian targets. Uh, I was down there. I can tell you that's not happening. Uh, the. Governments, the S of the separatists down there that are backed by Russia are working overtime to make Hollywood level videos and putting out all this information that is supposed to convince people that Ukraine is about to invade Donetsk.
That's not going to happen. That Ukraine is not preparing to invade anybody. I was just. They're dug in. They're not there. They're preparing to defend, not to attack Donetsk. Uh, governments say that they're capturing Ukrainian terrorists through are blowing things up. Uh, you know, they blew up a car in front of a government building in Danesi the other day and they blamed it on the Ukrainians.
Nobody was hurt. Uh, it, it was just after. Ridiculous false flag operation. Another false flag was there where they said that they CA they caught some Polish special forces. Like what does Poland have to do with this Polish special forces ended ask, plotting the blow up some Russian or some tanks or something with chlorine gas, uh, and this huge community of.
Hobbyists that a collect open source Intel got ahold of that video pulled apart, found that the explosions in the video came from a YouTube video from several years ago, from a training event in Finland that they, um, you know, the, the. That they said happened on this date was actually created several days before they said it happened.
And it was created from a mishmash of other videos that were kind of put together. You can tell all that stuff from the metadata when you download the video and they're the people making the videos are too stupid to wipe the metadata. So there you go. I mean, it's. Just sort of comical. It would be funny except for the fact that people in Donetsk are actually believing this stuff to some extent, to some extent, because they are living in a north Korean style government that doesn't allow any access to the outside world.
They've announced evacuations, internets of women and children. We're hearing from some women and children in that region that don't want to go and are trying to hide. We've also heard of that. They're mobilizing the. Military age males in that area. Uh, and conscripting them into the military to fight this Ukrainian invasion.
And they say it's coming. And we know for a fact that most of those people don't want to get conscripted and a lot of them are hiding out to try to avoid it. So it's obvious that Russia is working overtime to create a pretext for. Something down there so far, there's been no incursions that we know of.
No tanks rolling across the border. It's just firing artillery back and forth, and then making accusations in social media. Now the media battlespace is very. And, uh, right now I would say that the Russians are outdoing, the Ukrainians and the media battlespace, the Ukrainians are trying to build up their capacity.
They're kind of too little too late, maybe, but, uh, there, they put up a press office in and they're putting out several press briefings every day. I'm going to post, uh, some portions of their most recent press briefing on here on locals and a pretty quick. That's what we've got so far. Um, I don't know how much longer I'm going to be here, but we'll keep, you know, keeping an eye on things and I'll let you know what's going on.
Uh, thanks for paying attention and for subscribing and for supporting the podcast. And, uh, and me, I appreciate that. Please share it with your friends. Take care.
