Hello, welcome to a new episode of Realpolitik. Today I'm going to be talking about the word

unprovoked and whether or not the Russian invasion of Ukraine was in fact unprovoked as we keep

hearing repeated from Western leaders. To give you some context, we're going to go through a little bit

of what was happening in Russia and geopolitically in the 1990s to try to give some context as to what

happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union and what led us to the crisis that we see in Ukraine

today. As a reminder, this episode is live, meaning that if you

want to post any questions on comments, please go ahead and do so. I will be looking at them

halfway through and near the end of the show, and I will try to address them as best as I can.

By now, you know, I always try to start these things with a map, and this is a map of the

alliances in Europe in 1989 before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain.

For those of you who are old enough to remember, there were two competing geopolitical

blocks.

NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, led by the United States, obviously, and the Warsaw

pact, the counter alliance to NATO, which obviously was led by Russia, as well as a number of socialist satellite

states, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and obviously East Germany.

If you remember your history from the time, Germany was divided.

Berlin was, and still is obviously, in the east of the country, it was a divided city,

half of it governed by pro-Russian authorities, half of it governed by the Federal Republic of Germany,

aligned with the United States and a member of NATO in good standing.

And you see this string of buffer states trying to separate Russia from NATO.

You see Finland and Sweden, both of them refusing to join either alliance.

The Finns, because they had lost the winter war against the Russians and lost a, I think,

...