Here’s the fourth episode from Adjutants Lounge, all rights are Ben and Phil.

Half an hour transcript for everybody, the rest for paid subscribers. Might release for free to everybody in future, might not.

Full audio for free here

Transcript

00:00:01 Ben Skipper

Hello and welcome to another session of the Oceans Lounge. We're continuing the Russian way of war. This is part 4. I'm joined, as always by Doctor Phil Blood. Phil, how you doing?

00:00:14 Philip Blood

Hey Biggles I'm doing very well. Thank you very much.

00:00:20 Philip Blood

Well, I'm not. But you know, yeah. Who wants to hear about marriage? Least of all you.

00:00:30 Ben Skipper

Actually sounds so cold and hot.

00:00:33 Philip Blood

You are you red people, all technology and no human being.

00:00:41 Ben Skipper

I'm I'm saying nothing. I actually I was really last week I was privileged to meet, meet some of the young men or women at the moment who are sort of aspiring to, to join, join, join the the Mother service.

00:00:54 Philip Blood

Of the outlook.

00:01:03 Ben Skipper

We call it the 100 year experiment, will actually be getting 104 years. So I think that proves the point and I, you know, it's speaking with the youngsters and it and it's nice to see that you know the the RAF is.

00:01:14 Ben Skipper

There's definitely future.

00:01:18 Ben Skipper

Our future leaders are looking good. You know, they're they're, you know, they're they're taught by some very excellent staff. All staff are excellent. Without doubt, all of the PTI I thought was a bit shady. But I always thought.

00:01:31 Ben Skipper

That about PCI.

00:01:34 Ben Skipper

They they they scared me.

00:01:36 Speaker 3

And.

00:01:37 Ben Skipper

Before we crack on, if you've not listened to any of these sessions before about the Russian way of war, listener discretion is advised we're going to be talking about some things that will.

00:01:50 Ben Skipper

Will feature trigger topics, so this is listener discretion 100%. Also, if you're new to the series, please do listen to the previous three episodes. This is this, this series of podcasts is reflecting what's occurring.

00:02:08 Ben Skipper

Umm.

00:02:10 Ben Skipper

In in Ukraine, were assisted by a whole host of bits and pieces that firmly have access to as well as interpretation. We this is these podcasts are not the bill and end all. They're not definitive, nor are they stabbed in the dark. This is going off what we know and and previous.

00:02:31 Ben Skipper

Knowledge going from from operations elsewhere.

00:02:36 Ben Skipper

So yeah, well, what, a week. What difference a week makes, as they say?

00:02:42 Philip Blood

Yeah. I mean it's not been.

00:02:46 Philip Blood

It's not been very nice, can I? Can I just make a disclaimer for one second?

00:02:54 Philip Blood

A lot of people think that I'm this cold hearted, calculating analyst of genocide.

00:03:03 Philip Blood

And I haven't really been posting how I.

00:03:07 Philip Blood

Cope with the emotional side of all of this because people assume that because you're a cold hearted, calculating, genocidal analyst that you don't have any emotion. Well, actually we do and I just want to point out.

00:03:23 Philip Blood

That standing mine by by my professional quote, ethics as such is not to.

00:03:34 Philip Blood

Ignore the fact that I find myself in a strange position with not only former students and colleagues who are both.

00:03:43 Philip Blood

In the both sides of this conflict, Ukrainians and Russians.

00:03:48 Philip Blood

But over the weekend I heard a friend of mine's Russian wife got slapped around. And I'm just.

00:03:58 Speaker 3

Quite.

00:04:00 Philip Blood

Emotional about what's been going on and have been for since the whole thing started and just haven't been putting out there on social media and Twitter. I don't think that does anybody any good. I do know that some of our friends.

00:04:17 Philip Blood

I'm not going to mention any names. They have quote, skin in the game.

00:04:24 Philip Blood

My way of dealing with this conflict.

00:04:28 Philip Blood

Is to try and identify.

00:04:31 Philip Blood

The salient points that I think the public needs to understand so we can all better engage.

00:04:39 Philip Blood

Against Putin and try and put an end to this war ASAP. So.

00:04:46 Philip Blood

That's my qualifying point. I'm sure that will cheer everybody up because.

00:04:52 Philip Blood

What's coming is going to be pretty horrible for.

00:04:54 Philip Blood

The next hour.

00:04:59 Ben Skipper

Never mind. My computer made a funny noise.

00:05:02 Philip Blood

Did it.

00:05:03 Ben Skipper

Yeah. So apologies if that, if you pick that up on the recording.

00:05:09 Ben Skipper

It's sad that you have to do that, if I'm honest. The stuff we're talking about this this is away from. From we we're talking about contemporary issues. We're talking about contemporary news.

00:05:22 Philip Blood

I got a stack of DMS about what a loaf loathsome character I am. The only reason they followed me was so that I would follow them, which is generally my policy, and then they wanted to send all kinds of unpleasant remarks. Yeah, I mean, wars bring out the best and the worst in people. We seem to be in a.

00:05:42 Philip Blood

Odd place and I would say this.

00:05:47 Philip Blood

I'm kind of forgiving on this front because nearly everybody on Twitter that I'm watching and coming across have had no.

00:05:56 Philip Blood

Experience of what?

00:05:58 Philip Blood

This kind of genocidal war causes, I mean, if they do, if.

00:06:03 Philip Blood

These people who are.

00:06:05 Philip Blood

Tweeting the nonsense that they've been treated in the last 48 hours had lived in the 90s with uh social media. They have been bouncing from 1 genocide to the next.

00:06:19 Philip Blood

Would be utter confusion that every one of those genocides was completely different.

00:06:26 Philip Blood

And I think it's important that we, you know, when we discuss it today, as I have done all along, there are different kinds of genocide, many, many, many, many different kinds of genocides.

00:06:38 Philip Blood

And they don't all require war to trigger them.

00:06:44 Ben Skipper

You don't want to be a classic case. Case in point, the 90s, yeah.

00:06:50 Ben Skipper

And you know.

00:06:52 Ben Skipper

This is one thing that I picked up on that the the the genocide that is happening is genocide in Ukraine at the moment.

00:07:00 Ben Skipper

That there was something I'd seen over the weekend, so we were saying this is the first time this had happened in Europe since 1945 and I was aghast because no, it isn't. And I can say it's actually from personal experience because I was there, you know, former Yugoslavia, Kosovo.

00:07:19 Ben Skipper

In what is now north, north and N Macedonia.

00:07:25 Ben Skipper

So it is.

00:07:26 Ben Skipper

You know, we forget these. You know, this is all within very much living memory. So this isn't the first time what it is. It's in an area that we can pretty much.

00:07:37 Ben Skipper

We find it easy to identify with.

00:07:40 Ben Skipper

Because it's far closer geographically to home.

00:07:45 Speaker 3

I.

00:07:45 Philip Blood

I still remember this in the 90s. I think I just started my pH. D When things were getting hot again in former Yugoslavia.

00:07:55 Philip Blood

And.

00:07:57 Philip Blood

I've been volunteering to help with collecting war crimes evidence which basically meant either talking to victims or people who had relationships with victims.

00:08:09 Philip Blood

For collecting evidence and what have you and.

00:08:12 Ben Skipper

Yeah.

00:08:14 Philip Blood

Well, to cut a Long story short, I got quite angry with the whole thing. Much young.

00:08:20 Philip Blood

Then very hot headed. And I remember being in a group with scholars and I said I just hope that.

00:08:28 Philip Blood

The German Air Force joins in now and bombs the hell out of these *******. And remember my German colleagues turning around to me and saying you're a warmonger.

00:08:38 Philip Blood

And.

00:08:40 Philip Blood

It kind of spoke about.

00:08:43 Philip Blood

The way the way people.

00:08:47 Philip Blood

Don't think.

00:08:50 Philip Blood

What they're hearing, they didn't, you know, we'd had the conversation only an hour before that. I was doing this volunteer work. So they'd heard the kind of stories that I'd had to hear.

00:09:00 Philip Blood

And was recording and yet when I made the comment that NATO should be bombing or the German Air Force should be bombing Belgrade to stop this stuff.

00:09:11 Philip Blood

I was made the bull monger.

00:09:14 Philip Blood

There's a.

00:09:16 Philip Blood

And all of that's coming back, I mean, over this weekend, as I say, with the incidents have been going on and the things that I've seen and the people involved in this conflict.

00:09:25 Philip Blood

I'm seeing the same thing happen.

00:09:27 Philip Blood

All over again, it's like.

00:09:30 Philip Blood

Does anybody ever learn? I mean, you know, I've gone from 1960 from the 1960s when I saw children.

00:09:39 Philip Blood

Burning under American aircraft.

00:09:44 Philip Blood

Petrol bombs? What do you call them? Napalm bomb.

00:09:47 Philip Blood

Hitting villages and children running out of them. Burning.

00:09:52 Philip Blood

To watching you know B50 twos, bombing forests and Hercules dropping Agent Orange on forest and great men saying we're going to put them back in the Stone Age.

00:10:04 Philip Blood

To.

00:10:05 Philip Blood

You know everything that happened in the 80s, nineties Afghanistan, then Iraq, then Yugoslavia.

00:10:12 Philip Blood

Then Roy and then back to Yugoslavia. Don't. And then Grozny. I mean, it's like it's it's just been a never ending.

00:10:21 Philip Blood

For me, I mean, you look back, I don't think there's been a year gone by when there hasn't been a disaster and that's including Biafra, Bangladesh, Somalia, Ethiopia, uh Yemen. I mean, when does it end? It's just gone on and on and on.

00:10:37 Philip Blood

And every time the end of these things happen, somebody says, oh, we have to stop it.

00:10:42 Philip Blood

OK, good idea. Good plan. But we never do. We go back to it again within within days, weeks.

00:10:50 Philip Blood

We're at it again. I think that's a huge. That's a huge humanitarian calamity for me. And now I don't.

00:10:57 Philip Blood

Fit the normal.

00:11:00 Philip Blood

Post.

00:11:01 Philip Blood

Now Holocaust military historian mould, but I'm not really.

00:11:09 Philip Blood

That interested in all of this military stuff. For me, it's the humanitarian side to understand how the military works, to prevent them from doing this stuff.

00:11:19 Philip Blood

That's how we should be thinking.

00:11:23 Philip Blood

This glorification of war, you know.

00:11:27 Philip Blood

Military logistics to the point of ad nauseam.

00:11:33 Philip Blood

I just don't have much time for anymore. Maybe when I was, you know, a teenager, I'd be interested in tanks and lorries.

00:11:40 Philip Blood

And what have you?

00:11:41 Philip Blood

But I think once you've got collected this knowledge and you understand.

00:11:46 Philip Blood

An awful lot about what's how these things work. You know, you shouldn't really be spending your time.

00:11:53 Philip Blood

Whether you're a professor or whether you're a senior writer or what have you.

00:12:00 Philip Blood

Pontificating about.

00:12:02 Philip Blood

What irrelevant was and how railway trains and trucks tyres burn?

00:12:09 Philip Blood

And.

00:12:09 Philip Blood

Whatever other nonsense that goes on.

00:12:11 Philip Blood

There.

00:12:12 Philip Blood

I mean it it I think what actually has shocked people this weekend.

00:12:16 Philip Blood

Is that they've actually seen?

00:12:20 Philip Blood

What Putin has been doing for 20 years now in Europe.

00:12:25 Philip Blood

That's a shot.

00:12:28 Ben Skipper

I don't, I don't think actually. I I think it's common combined with Shelby's and disbelief, but also.

00:12:34 Ben Skipper

That I don't think people fully appreciate how.

00:12:38 Ben Skipper

Close this is to to being exceptionally dangerous because it is.

00:12:42 Ben Skipper

Europe.

00:12:43 Ben Skipper

It is something on the doorstep it is.

00:12:44 Ben Skipper

Part of and and I.

00:12:47 Ben Skipper

Part of me still, you know, eats gonna help and think that people still haven't made the connection.

00:12:53 Philip Blood

But I think these pretend historians and politicians and scholars who, you know, fill the airwaves with crap.

00:13:00 Philip Blood

I think nearly.

00:13:01 Philip Blood

All of them have never actually been to the Ukraine or Poland or any of these places in the east.

00:13:08 Philip Blood

Or have even come across frontline Russian soldiers. I mean, OK, I have.

00:13:16 Philip Blood

UM.

00:13:20 Philip Blood

And I don't want to spend my time deciding whether the milder tanks are.

00:13:25 Philip Blood

Serviceable or what have you? I mean that just it's that's all irrelevant. What?

00:13:31 Philip Blood

What I do know is if you train an army which might be waning in its prowess and its capability after a decade of invincibility theories.

00:13:41 Philip Blood

What's it going to do?

00:13:44 Philip Blood

And the trajectory that I've seen where armies are losing their capability is to resort to.

00:13:53 Philip Blood

Genocide.

00:13:55 Philip Blood

I'm now more convinced of it than ever I initially thought.

00:14:00 Philip Blood

And you know, with this book that I've just recently written about genocide in the sense of the Holocaust and German soldiers committing the Holocaust, it struck me then that the one factor that made a very, very great difference with these soldiers using military tactics to commit genocide and Holocaust.

00:14:19 Philip Blood

Struck me that it was compensation for.

00:14:25 Philip Blood

Reducing prowess.

00:14:27 Philip Blood

That's not to say that they weren't good soldiers, or they were all bad soldiers. It was the fact that they were compensating for their previous capability as large power armies.

00:14:39 Philip Blood

By resorting to methods which were.

00:14:43 Philip Blood

Illegal in in the way of war and.

00:14:47 Philip Blood

It it struck me at the very beginning of this war.

00:14:51 Philip Blood

Everything that I'd read, everything that I'd understood about the rational army over the last 30 years told me that this army wasn't the same army that marched proudly into Afghanistan in 1979.

00:15:05 Philip Blood

Something happened.

00:15:07 Philip Blood

I can't put my finger on it, but something happened.

00:15:12 Philip Blood

I think somewhere.

00:15:14 Philip Blood

Sorry to interrupt you for a minute, but but I think somewhere in the.

00:15:19 Philip Blood

In that period, between 1989, when the wall came down round about the time when Yeltsin had taken power in 9293 and turned the tanks on to the White House in Moscow, somewhere in that period, the Russian army acknowledged it could no longer fight wars.

00:15:40 Philip Blood

In the way it always believed it could since 1945.

00:15:45 Philip Blood

And that the decline in confidence as a fighting power was compensated by an increase in the capability of bombardment and destruction from a distance.

00:15:58 Philip Blood

And that this factor gave the front end fighting power, which it which was already, which was always there but was now the compensation.

00:16:11 Philip Blood

And that the compensation for what? Well, it was the fact that the infantry were no longer bolstered by large armies of people that you could dispose of by sending them over to the front to swamp the German lines and then send in the guards armoured units afterwards, which would clean up. You don't have. They no longer had those capabilities.

00:16:32 Philip Blood

Anymore. And they had to resort to a different style of fighting.

00:16:36 Philip Blood

And in that moment, there was the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet power. And I think that actually hit the Russian army quite hard.

00:16:45 Philip Blood

And Russia, where or we've assumed, has always been very strong in certain fields.

00:16:51 Philip Blood

Actually.

00:16:53 Philip Blood

Was a bit of a paper tiger in places, and the only things holding it together was the capability of the Air Force and the missile systems.

00:17:02 Philip Blood

The helicopters.

00:17:04 Philip Blood

You know those gunships and the artillery?

00:17:08 Philip Blood

Because in the other units.

00:17:11 Philip Blood

The Riff Raff were not being trained to fight in the way of cannon fodder.

00:17:17 Philip Blood

Yeah, as they had in the past and they didn't have the capability to fight.

00:17:22 Philip Blood

As advanced infantrymen, perhaps, perhaps, I'm suggesting, as British soldiers have been trained, round about the time of the Iraq war, when Richard Holmes went to visit his regiment and could say then that his infantryman fought in a very.

00:17:38 Philip Blood

Capable way. I don't see that being replicated ever by the Russians since 1998.

00:17:48 Philip Blood

There's been this problem and I think the problem has been accentuated, which is why you needed the military reform in 2010.

00:17:57 Philip Blood

And why it went down the route of all that heavy artillery, all that missile edge, all of those support vehicles. And yet the tanks and the infantry weapons started to fall away.

00:18:10 Philip Blood

I think that was the recognition that they that they were no longer no longer militarily, a great power.

00:18:19 Philip Blood

The thing that you do then is.

00:18:21 Philip Blood

How do you disguise that?

00:18:25 Philip Blood

And I think what you do is you turn to genocide.

00:18:29 Philip Blood

So you pour the guns onto the cities and you commit crimes.

00:18:34 Philip Blood

And a similar situation I saw occurring with the German army in the Second World War.

00:18:40 Philip Blood

And then I've seen how you use limited resources in Colonial wars.

00:18:46 Philip Blood

And it's always the same factor. If you don't have the power.

00:18:50 Philip Blood

That you once had to to dominate your military opponent. If there is a military opponent not always in colonies, but if you can't, if you do not have the confidence to dominate your military opponent.

00:19:05 Philip Blood

You have to resort to something else and the nature of violence changes.

00:19:13 Philip Blood

And I think Putin.

00:19:15 Philip Blood

As institutionalised genocide, not just in the Russian World War, but the entire strategic thinking.

00:19:24 Philip Blood

And so he's compensating for its great power, being able to project power like the Americans project power.

00:19:33 Philip Blood

He's projecting violence. It's compensating for power with violence.

00:19:42 Ben Skipper

I would go with that and I'll tell you why. As as you've been talking.

00:19:48 Philip Blood

I was rambling.

00:19:49 Ben Skipper

No, no, no, actually, no. You you made a very good point and I'm going to go back to a couple of couple of areas you discussed and the first one was the the Pre collapse subject military.

00:19:59 Ben Skipper

You know, for if we if we take the that that sort of line in the sand of say 1988?

00:20:07 Ben Skipper

Spending in dollars was some 250 billion per annum and this is going off 2015 figures.

00:20:16 Ben Skipper

And then understand me, it dropped.

00:20:20 Ben Skipper

Really dropped considerably, you know quite sharply. In 1991, the year of the the Duma, the, the, the failed sort of approach.

00:20:29 Ben Skipper

By the company style line is there. There's no spending at all.

00:20:34 Ben Skipper

Whether that was punishment would be involved in that, I don't know. But something military expenditures has steadily grown, but nowhere near to the extent that it has been. You know, if you look by 2018.

00:20:48 Ben Skipper

Its expenditure in billions was 63.1 billion. Now you can compare that to.

00:20:56 Ben Skipper

You United Kingdom, they only spent.

00:21:01 Ben Skipper

But 7 billion more than we did on their military. So you're looking at a country the size of the United Kingdom versus the country size of Russia, with have an infinitely larger physical army. So they've never fully invested. They've never fully caught up with the investment. And that has reflected in the the poor quality of.

00:21:21 Ben Skipper

Armour, which I'm just gonna sort of talk about briefly in a moment, but also within that.

00:21:27 Ben Skipper

Because of the nature of the Soviet military, then the professionalism of the soldiers which they have been addressing has been lacking because they can't attract the the, the, the quality of individual to conserve with them. Because most of the quality will come from the the educated of upper working class and.

00:21:47 Ben Skipper

Little classes and these are the guys who are able to get away with not doing.

00:21:53 Ben Skipper

Military service. These the guys who've got the the parents and the money and the contacts to get away with not doing it. So you always have the poorly educated leading. The poorly educated is it's a self fulfilling prophecy of disaster going, you know then one of the things that people keep saying is you know, I've heard it several times in the news has been.

00:22:12 Ben Skipper

Well, actually, you know what? They're using our daily kit. Guys hate to shock you. Even if you look at the most recent. You know, you look at some of the British kit. Yeah, 3400 series, 60 years old, the M1 World Three series coming up to sort of, you know, say again, 60 years old.

00:22:31 Ben Skipper

Challenger isn't particularly new, 20-30 years old. Same with Abrams Abrams 1985. So it's it's almost a false equivalency. But the difference here is that you have the professionalism you have.

00:22:43 Ben Skipper

A professional army.

00:22:44 Ben Skipper

You know if.

00:22:45 Ben Skipper

We.

00:22:45 Ben Skipper

If we equate it with the British and the military and the British and the Americans versus the Russians, we have a professional.

00:22:50 Ben Skipper

National armies on the British American side. We have a large conscript army on the Russian side. You've got Lance who are signed up for 18 months. They're interested. They don't care. With that comes Paul discipline.

00:23:03 Ben Skipper

With that poor discipline, you know combined with.

00:23:08 Ben Skipper

Lack of pay.

00:23:10 Ben Skipper

Poorly paid, poorly LED, poorly equipped. We're looking at the morale thing, you know which Neil pointed discussed.

00:23:17 Ben Skipper

So there's a lot more to this and it's and it's like key factors in it, poor discipline. So what you're seeing is a reflection of like you very and you are absolutely on the now with this it is the decline, it is the visit, it is the, it is the physical decline manifestation of a decline of military power it carves in itself. We saw this.

00:23:38 Ben Skipper

In Yugoslavia.

00:23:42 Ben Skipper

It's.

00:23:44 Ben Skipper

It's it's sort of.

00:23:46 Ben Skipper

It it's almost the ending is it's the beginning of the end for Russian military power. That's what says, beginning the end of the campaign in the Ukraine, and we'll come on to that in a minute.

00:23:56 Ben Skipper

But the fact that these acts of genocide.

00:23:59 Ben Skipper

All crimes are happening. Should not be a surprise to them because they were happening in 1999 in Chechnya, the 2nd Russo Chechen War. They happened again in Georgia. They happened again in.

00:24:12 Ben Skipper

Area.

00:24:13 Ben Skipper

Why are we surprised? We should have? We should have been not waiting this, but we I cannot believe the West being in the West have been so naive as not to expect this to happen purely because it's Europe or purely because.

00:24:25

Well, I.

00:24:25 Philip Blood

Think there's? I think there's two arguments there. The 1st the 1st is.

00:24:32 Philip Blood

Mostly what's been what most of all of this activity has been dictated by what we see and what we hear and what we read on Twitter or Telegram or one of Instagram or any of all of this stuff.

00:24:46 Philip Blood

And that's really only been around since what, 2010. So you have a, you have gaps in memory. I I think it's very interesting that you have a certain amount of memory from 2010 forwards, maybe a little bit about the Iraq war, the odd bit about the Twin Towers 911 scenario.

00:25:08 Philip Blood

But mostly it's quote modern stuff, and then in that modern period post 2010, you've had this burgeoning military history, especially from Britain and America.

00:25:23 Philip Blood

Which is entirely focused on the Second World War, and that entire interpretation of world events has come from the age of Total War.

00:25:36 Philip Blood

So the fascinating thing here is you, we we live in an age where we've got this modern war going on, which for some of us oldies is an extension of a war that's been going back to 1999. But we're competing with young people who are or younger people.

00:25:55 Philip Blood

Who are drawing analogies to battles like Stalingrad and and Bagration?

00:26:02 Philip Blood

And projecting it onto this war A because they've got nothing else to cling to, but also because their own books come from that period.

00:26:16 Philip Blood

And.

00:26:17 Philip Blood

I'm. I'm loathe to say it, but I do get the impression that a lot of the nonsense that that was going on until we got with how people were selling their books.

00:26:30 Philip Blood

Most of them not very relevant. I'm still unclear and have been since the start of this war. How one American historian can adopt.

00:26:41 Philip Blood

Naval outlooks to land war in the Ukraine. It doesn't work for me. I I have been in Group meetings with people and I have been shocked to learn.

00:26:58 Philip Blood

How a lot of this so-called expert.

00:27:03 Philip Blood

Knowledge.

00:27:04 Philip Blood

Has been received and filtered and accepted as the.

00:27:11 Philip Blood

Proven answer to what's going on in the Ukraine? I listened to one the other day.

00:27:16 Philip Blood

And well, I I was so shocked I didn't know what to say really. My only my only response was to say that.

00:27:27 Philip Blood

In, well, 50 years of academic and.

00:27:32 Philip Blood

Enthusiast history of German arms. Since 1870, everything I heard was.

00:27:41 Philip Blood

Irrelevant.

00:27:43 Philip Blood

Then wrong. I think that that was the that was the most fanciful thing I was actually hearing things about the German armed forces.

00:27:52 Philip Blood

Which were hard to believe. I mean, just utterly discreditable. And, you know, I laughingly joke on Twitter about melting MG 42 gun barrels.

00:28:03 Philip Blood

I.

00:28:05 Philip Blood

Yeah, I've read thousands of documents, literally 1010 thousand documents for my first book and just under 60,000 documents and related works for the 2nd and 3rd.

00:28:17 Speaker 3

Books.

00:28:19 Philip Blood

And I have yet to find melting gun barrels of German MG40 twos, or that any of that is relevant to the present war that's taking place in the Ukraine.

00:28:36 Ben Skipper

And and we and and we, we're all it's almost full circle, isn't it?

00:28:39 Ben Skipper

Really it is well worth repeating this false equivalency. We are we going to carry on doing this comparing contemporary events with the wall that finished almost 80 years ago? Well, why are we still doing this? Why are we thinking that Stalingrad, which is an entirely?

00:28:56 Ben Skipper

Different situation in so many ways.

00:28:59 Ben Skipper

If you actually read the books, you would know instantly, so we even draw a parallel between what is happening in Ukraine and what is what happened in Stalingrad as part of four blue.

00:29:10 Ben Skipper

It's akin.

00:29:12 Ben Skipper

To turning up in a Formula One race in a Kettler car, you know.

00:29:15 Philip Blood

Well, I mean, this last week over the weekend was some bright spark came up with the idea that it would take a million people, a million Russian soldiers to occupy their Ukraine.

00:29:26 Philip Blood

And it was so ludicrous.

00:29:30 Speaker 3

Such such nonsense.

00:29:35 Speaker 3

I mean, I was.

00:29:36 Speaker 3

Staggered.

00:29:37 Philip Blood

Just the the that the idea that any occupation by a dictatorship requires such numbers in itself is a bizarre.

00:29:48 Philip Blood

It's a bizarre idea. I mean, you might need a million if you're going to do it the the American or Western way of war, because you'll need all those civilian supporting agencies to make the things work.