Welcome to The Socialist Program. This is the audio of our monthly seminar. Subscribe and support

this programming at patreon.com slash the Socialist Program to join live once a month and ask Brian

Becker your questions and listen to them as soon as they come out. Thanks so much for your help in

keeping this independent show going. We can make this program with you,

but not without you. We really want to be able to focus people's attention on Ukraine because

of the grave danger of a possible war, a broader, wider war in Ukraine, but it could easily become a regional and even global conflict. So

all of that is coming in the rest of this week. I think that people should recognize the

centrality or the importance of Ukraine because the most important part of the issue for Russia is, of course, the geography of Ukraine.

And as we've talked about on the show, and many of you will have already heard some of this,

Ukraine is a vast space. It's a demographically and geographically divided country. It was the second

largest republic in the Soviet Union after Russia. It was considered to be the breadbasket

of the Soviet Union. Crimea, which, as you all know, had a referendum in 2014, where the people voted overwhelmingly

to associate or affix Crimea to Russia following the Kudata, the right-wing anti-Russian

coup d'etat that took power in February 2014, Crimea was always, always part of Russia.

As were the eastern parts of Ukraine, certainly the people are ethnically Russian, culturally

Russian, speak Russian, but even as early as the 10th century or the 11th century, Ukraine and Russia have been very connected.

In fact, in the 11th century, Kiev was the capital of what was then called Russ or Russia.

And Kiev became the capital of Russia or Kiev-Rush as late as 1625.

So the idea that the United States and NATO would be using Ukraine, Kiev, and the eastern

parts of Ukraine, which are, again, demographically Russian, as a staging ground

for very advanced weapons, which are pouring into Ukraine now. That started earlier. By the way,

Barack Obama didn't do it. Obama would not send the level of high-tech weapons that the Trump administration

...