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Hey, what's going on? Welcome to another episode of Soft Rep Radio. I am your lucky host to get to interview these two magnificent writers and historians starting with Craig Reed and James Rife.

James is a total historian has written books on many things and including the Ukraine conflict, which has been going on for about six months now when you're listening to this, you know, it's the year 2022. It's let you know.

So for the last six months, we've been hearing about the conflict in Ukraine, and I'm going to bring on James and Craig to fill us in on why they're going back to the 800s. Why is Vladimir Putin trying to bring back Peter the Great and Catherine the second, the great. Why is he obsessed with this? Please now let's hear what you have to say. Welcome to the show.

Oh, thank you very much. The relationship between Russia and Ukraine goes back to the dark ages and a lot of ways. And as Craig and I have talked about, it's really a tale of two cities between Moscow and Kiev. And around in the ninth century, Kiev was the cultural and social and economic center of the Slavic world. And Moscow was arrival.

And ultimately Kiev was cut short by the Mongols in the 13th century. So Moscow surpassed it. Long story short, Ukraine is a borderland between Central Europe and Eurasia. It's in the same geographic position as Poland. You got Russia to the east and then the Germans, Austro-Hungarians and Romanians to the west. So they're squeezed.

So during its history, Ukraine has been controlled by the Poles, Lithuanians, on and off by the Russians. And it's a messy, chaotic history. My background is in Russian and modern European history. It's why I stayed in college. So I knew all this going into the war.

But a lot of short of it is Ukraine was a founding state of the Soviet Union in 1922. And the breakup in 1991 was traumatic for the Russians. And the Ukrainians had mixed feelings about it. And there's a lot of reasons for that. And the eastern part of the country, they're more Russian-based. Whereas in the west, they're more open to the west, the Western Europe.

So there's a split inside Ukraine itself. Exactly. And Putin has played on that. Of course, he's throwing in a lot of overtones from World War II, making his arguments that Ukraine somehow, you know, infested with Nazis, which is really not true. But that's how he's selling it to his own population.

So this conflict goes back to Putin really, you know, way wants to rebuild the Soviet Union. He's always lamenting the collapse of the Soviet Union. And he's fought smaller wars with Chechnya, Georgia, South Ossetia. And he's picked off pieces of them to rebuild that spirit of influence.

So in the current conflict, which really began in 2014, when he engineered the secession of Donbass region.

Crimea, which is bluehead, yeah, Crimea. And then Luhansk and Donetsk, oh, blast, as they're called. And that just triggered the war because the Ukrainians counterattacked on what they called an anti-terrorist operation. It launched eight years of low-grade warfare between the two sides.

And that brings us to February 24th in which Putin has engineered this hostless, host cell invasion. To try to take Ukraine whole hog, it looks like at least a good chunk of it.

So it's a really messy chaotic history. It goes back a thousand years. Ukraine has its own national identity, has its own language, has its own way, its own culture.

So there's a misperception out there among the general public that Ukraine has always been part of Russia, it has not.

So it's a sovereign country since 1991. And apparently Putin wants it back. So here we are.

Now, if I understand this correctly, like it, you know, I was reading through your book in 1954, it was given to, you know, its own statehood. And it was annexed because so it could be Ukraine just to get rid of the nuclear arms because they had so many that 16 hundred years ago.

And they said, hey, we'll make you your own state. You agreed to these terms. And they did. And Russia was supposed to have this, you know, parlay. You're not supposed to mess with them. And then here comes Russia after they've agreed and lived up to their end of the deal to try to take it back. You know, I'm baffled by it because it's like Mexico trying to come take Utah.

Yeah. And I think it's a calculation that Putin has made that there is a treaty on the books, the Bucharest memorandum in which the United States and the United Kingdom Britain agreed basically guaranteed Ukraine security if Ukraine would give up its nuclear weapons and Russia signed that treaty.

And I think Putin has made a cynical calculation that he can, you know, reneg on that treaty and there be no consequences.

He's found out, you know, that that's not necessarily true. It hasn't happened. So, but yeah, Ukraine's been sovereign since 1991, the breakup of the Soviet Union. It's had its own problems. It's by no means peers driven snow.

I mean, they've had a lot of their own corruption problems. They've had political instability. They had a couple of revolutions. The most recent was in 2013, 2014, which I'll always precipitate the invasion of Crimea and then Donbass.

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