Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast. This is your weekender edition.

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It's unlocked.

I think this is information that we need to get out.

Nick, we have worried about this for a while.

We have talked about the circumstances leading up to this.

We're recording this just so everybody knows where we are in terms of information and in terms of

the rollout of events.

We're recording this on Thursday, February 24th, around 7 p.m. Eastern.

And what has happened is that after months of buildup and after months of telegraphing and years of telling us what

he wanted to do, Vladimir Putin announced that he was authorizing what he called a special

military operation to demilitarize and de-nazify Ukraine. Immediately, a full-scale invasion into the sovereign nation of Ukraine

commenced. Hundreds of people have already died. We have seen the full force of Russian aggression

at this point. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin has announced that if any foreign

nation gets involved, except for Belarus, I mean, if Belarus wants to come in and kill some people,

that's fine, I guess. But if a foreign nation interferes that they will suffer greater consequences

than any in their history, obviously a threat of nuclear war, we've watched some half-hearted sanctions that we got to get

into roll out. We have watched the media absolutely fail in every regard possible, and we've

watched the right wing predictably fall behind Vladimir Putin. But before we get into all that, Nick,

what's your initial reaction on this thing? How are you feeling?

You know, I'm not a war general. I've never served in the military. I have watched a lot of

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