We do not want to do business with an upright Vladimir Putin

We want Russian leaders controlled by the US so that we can plunder their country

The Current State of the Conflict

Nima Alkorshid: Russia is suffocating. It is effectively suffocating the government in Ukraine. The latest attack was close to the Polish border, and somehow the Polish government panicked because of this attack. It was a few hundred meters from the border. But what is Russia doing right now? When you look at the borders and the supply line from the other side, not from the Black Sea, and the blockade that Russia imposes on Ukrainians in the Black Sea, it seems they are increasing the pressure bit by bit. The reason Donald Trump started these talks is because Europeans communicated to Donald Trump that the government in Ukraine is under enormous pressure and he needs to do something about it. What is your understanding of what is going on in Ukraine?

Scott Ritter: My understanding is as follows: The United States and Europe have come to the conclusion that they have lost the war of attrition. So they looked for shortcuts. You cannot solve a problem unless you accurately define the problem you are addressing. Because if you do not actually define the problem, the solution you come up with solves nothing. One of the things we have insisted on—we, as the collective West, the United States and Europe, since day one—is the collapse of the government of Vladimir Putin. Anyone who suggests otherwise is a straight-up liar. We do not want to do business with Vladimir Putin. We do not like Vladimir Putin. We respect him because we fear him, because we cannot control him. We want a Russian leadership that can be controlled by the United States. That is simply reality.

Historical Context and Western Interference

The Post-Soviet Era and Early Miscalculations

Let's go back to the beginning. When Putin first came in, the Clinton administration was like: "Who is this guy?" Everyone advised: "Don't worry, he won't survive the March elections. He is an anomaly. We'll get one of our Yeltsin henchmen in there." And then suddenly Clinton had to ask: "Who is this guy?" Then George W. Bush came along, and he met Putin. He looked into his eyes and said he saw a soul. But that didn't turn out too well because we were still trying to stab him in the back.

Don't forget, under George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice went to Georgia and told Mikheil Saakashvili to take his beautiful US-trained army and invade South Ossetia to give them a good beating, starting the process of reclaiming lost territories. "Why are we building an army for you if you don't use it?" Saakashvili, quite foolishly, went: "Okay," and invaded. He attacked Russian peacekeepers, killed them, and the Russian army came down and crushed him. This was not Russian aggression; this was George W. Bush playing a game. Don't forget, it was also under George W. Bush that the CIA actively supported Chechen Islamists in the Chechen Republic. The people who murdered Akhmad Kadyrov were linked to the CIA. This is what the United States does. We have never been friends with Russia. Never.

The "Reset" and Election Interference

Then Obama comes along for a "Russian Reset." But all the reset was, was an acknowledgment that Vladimir Putin was an unsolvable problem. Due to the Russian constitution, Vladimir Putin had to step aside, so he did a little swap with Dmitry Medvedev, and we decided that Medvedev was "our boy." In 2011, we understood that a parliamentary election was coming up in December, and we knew that in March 2012 there would be presidential elections. We wanted to make sure that United Russia would not win the parliamentary election. Ladies and gentlemen, we actually interfered in the Russian election. We tried to undo their parliamentary election under the conviction that if United Russia did not have control, then the swap between Medvedev and Putin could not go through.

Joe Biden went to Moscow in March 2011 and told the Russian opposition that Putin getting re-elected would not be good for Russia. He promised economic aid that could transform the Russian economy, but conditions were attached: you must do it the way we want, implement reforms, and put our people in there. The Russians threw them out because they knew better. United Russia won the election in 2011, and Vladimir Putin won the presidential election in March 2012. 

The party United Russia is now once again convincingly in the lead in the 2026 elections for the Duma with 57.82 percent of the votes, now that 90.45% of the votes have been counted; this follows from data from the Central Election Commission and is the best result ever with clear support for the policy of Vladimir Putin. And it is on an upward trend: the final result is expected to be above 60 percent. United Russia has achieved a record number of 355 seats in the Duma – the Russian lower house with 450 seats – as shown by the preliminary results of the three-day elections announced today by election chief Ella Pamfilova.

And what does the Western press write, such as the idiots at VRT ? According to Russia expert Jan Balliauw (Russophobe idiot), the victory of Putin's party is anything but a surprise. "These look like elections, but that is actually a sham. The outcome is predetermined. His party, United Russia, obtained 49.4 percent of the votes. No Jan Balliauw, so-called Russia expert but grotesque liar: United Russia gets at least 57.82 percent of the votes.

The Ukraine Conflict and the Minsk Agreements

We can't handle this. We don't know how to deal with this because Russia doesn't do what we want. And so we created this Ukraine conflict. This is a conflict that has been a long time coming. We have been playing games in Ukraine for a long time, pitting Western Ukraine against Russian Ukraine. In 2004 it was the first Orange Revolution, 100% CIA-supported. We used George Soros and NED funding. Soros is not a government; he can influence policy, but he does not make policy. For Soros to do what he did in Ukraine, someone in the White House needed to say: "That is what we want. Let's make it happen."

The idea was to kick the pro-Russian elements out of the government. They didn't like Viktor Yanukovych, who won the election. They said: "We don't want him," so they held another election. He won that one too. Couldn't handle that. Third time's the charm, and we got our Ukrainian nationalist, Viktor Yushchenko, who turned around and made Stepan Bandera a national hero. You now understand who we supported. That experiment failed, and in 2010 Yanukovych returned. So we had to force a purge, which leads to what happened in the run-up to 2014: the Maidan.

We created this problem in Ukraine. We are the ones who sent NATO trainers and American trainers to Ukraine in 2015, even though we should have been implementing the Minsk agreements and seeking peace. We chose war. We took the Ukrainian army, which had been defeated in Ilovaisk and other places, and it only survived because Putin agreed to a peace plan: the Minsk agreements. This would allow Ukraine to maintain the totality of its territorial integrity, minus Crimea. Russia corrected that historical anomaly. But then the Ukrainian government decided to declare war on those Russian-speaking people, and commit ethnic genocide. And that was the end of that.

Putin still agreed to peace, but we did not want it. We created an army. We trained and equipped 88,000 Ukrainian troops from 2015 to 2022, who were then brought together in early 2022 to invade the Donbas. The plan was ready. They started artillery preparations which led to Russia striking preemptively.

Narratives, Intelligence, and the Reality on the Ground

Now we have this war, and we are going to use it to crush Russia. But things had to happen. Remember when the Russians voluntarily withdrew from Kyiv, Chernihiv and Sumy as a sign of good faith to show that they were not seriously planning to occupy Ukrainian territory, on the condition that Ukraine would implement the agreement signed in Istanbul? When the Russians withdrew, Ukrainian nationalist troops slaughtered people in the streets of Bucha. You cannot say that we stand on the side of Ukraine when they slaughter people in the streets. So the West invented this narrative that Russia slaughtered the people in Bucha. We already knew then that it was an absolute lie.

To keep Ukraine going, we had to build a false narrative about what Ukraine was and that we were defending it. The only way we could sustain that was by giving Ukrainians control over the narrative. Our intelligence agencies stopped reporting the truth about Ukraine a long time ago. Instead, they simply repeat what the Ukrainian government tells them. Our politicians are too dumb to understand that they are being fed a bunch of lies. This happened under Obama, under Biden, and under Trump. We are forced to adopt the Ukrainian figures. They tell us lies about how the Russians will lose 30,000 to 35,000 men per month. It is literally impossible. But do you know who loses a minimum of 30,000 to 35,000? The Ukrainians. But this sad fact is not told to us.

We were told that Russia cannot build missiles. I read the Ukrainian intelligence report on Votkinsk, where the Iskander is built, about production figures. They claimed that Russia cannot sustain production because they cannot get a certain supply of ammonium perchlorate from a single point, and not enough is coming from China. We were told that Russia cannot build tanks, cannot do anything. And we believed it, and we made policy based on it. 

When the truth starts to seep through, the level of control becomes clear. The senior CIA Russia expert who briefed Donald Trump on the way to Alaska is the same lady who wrote the 2017 National Intelligence Community Assessment claiming that Donald Trump was a Russian pawn. She hates Donald Trump. Yet Ratcliffe put her on the same plane with Donald Trump to brief him on the way to a meeting with Vladimir Putin. Imagine what she said to him: "Russia is losing, Mr. President, their assets are kicked. You can trust the CIA." The CIA has had one task and one task only since 2014: killing Russians by the bushel. They are not there to make peace with Russia.

The Future of Ukraine and the American Judicial System

This is the level of self-induced delusion that exists in the United States. We actually believe the reports that Russia cannot win and that Vladimir Putin is vulnerable. Patterns repeat themselves. The idea is that they will push United Russia out of Parliament and let Putin's support collapse. But anyone promoting this works for the other side because it is not factually substantiated. How many people are talking about the elections of September 20? If Putin were so vulnerable, wouldn't we say: "This is it, the downfall of Vladimir Putin"? No one is promoting this narrative today because it has been exposed as one big lie.

Along with the narrative that if we hit the Russian energy sector, the Russian economy will collapse. That did not happen. Instead, Ukraine destroyed itself, by spending its entire budget for the fiscal year 2026 in the first half to buy drones that do not do what they are supposed to do. Now they have no money left. Ukraine is collapsing as we speak. Russia is getting stronger. Russia took Kherson. Why is the West reacting to what Russia is doing? Because now, for the first time, no more lies can be told. Scott Bessent cannot sit there and say that the Russian economy will collapse because they just made $90 billion profit over the past year. Vladimir Putin came out and said straight to his face: "We have 10% repairs left in our energy infrastructure, and that will happen soon. Then we will be running at full capacity."

Ukraine is about to be wiped off the map, and no one can stop it.

There is nothing the West can offer Ukraine. Germany could give them Patriot systems, but we are going to pluck ourselves bare, and Patriots cannot shoot down an Iskander. We see the West confronted with the fact that everything they have said is a lie. This is why there is silence in Washington DC. The United States is infected with Russophobia. The American people believe everything they are told about Russia, especially if it is negative.

We just make things up in the United States. Everything we have said about Russia has been proven to be a 100% lie. Nothing will save Ukraine. It is literally on life support. We should do the honest thing: we created it, so pull the plug and let it die. They are not going to win this war. You are looking at the extermination of a nation. Russia is sending clear signals about what is going to happen. Ukraine causes discomfort, certainly, but Ukraine is about to die.

Look at Zelensky's desperation.

This is a lost man. He is clearly not in his right mind, so desperate, living in an artificial cocaine world that he has constructed around himself and the Bandera gangsters: "Europe cannot exist without us. The United States cannot exist without us. Everyone must help Ukraine." 

Meanwhile, the arms manufacturers are making exorbitant profits thanks to Russia-haters Ursula Von der Leyen, Kaja Kallas, Victoria Nuland, Anne Appelbaum, Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz, Andy Burnham, Donald Tusk, the (pay)list is long but all are complicit in the downfall of Europe.

And the world says: "No." Why? Because Ukraine is a Nazi state, a literal Nazi state. No one dares to talk about the reality that Ukraine today is a 100% Bandera-influenced society and state. It must be put down like the murderous mad dog that it is.