As you probably know, and I've talked about it in past shows, Putin is amassing troops and weapons on the Ukrainian borders since for the last few months, there's about a hundred thousand Russian troops on the Eastern border of Ukraine. There's already a piece of Eastern Ukraine that is occupied, if you will, by Russians who are affiliated, ethnic Russians who are affiliated with Russia, but who are Ukrainians technically, and there is ongoing shooting between Ukrainians, people from the Ukrainians and these Russians insurgents on the sliver on the Eastern border. What I thought I'd do in order to make this a little bit more interesting, and just in the beginning, and we're not going to do this the whole time, is I thought I'd put up a map of Ukraine, which might, I think, because I don't know how many of you know where Ukraine is, know who it borders with, know anything about Ukraine, so I figured I'd put up a map, I like maps, I don't know if you guys like maps, but I really like maps, and I think that if we have a map in front of us, that makes it a little easier to talk about, so hopefully you can see that, let me know, whoops, let me activate the chat, let me know if you can see the map, can you see the map, this is a map of kind of Eastern Europe and Russia, oh god, I have to also copy down the super chat question, so once again, let me, Michael's jumping into $20 super chat questions, which is great, but let me just copy those down, because otherwise they'll disappear for me on the super chat, and then we'll go back to the map, and Daniel says he can see his house on the map, it's not a satellite image Daniel, it's a map, map don't have houses on them, anyway here's the map, I don't know can you see my mouse as it travels along the map, but this is, you can see Ukraine kind of in the center of the map, let me see, can you see the, can you see the mouse? Anybody see the mouse? Okay, so Ukraine has a Eastern border with Russia, you can see it down here, this is down in the Black Sea, this kind of islandy looking thing that is Crimea, which the Russians took a few years ago from Ukraine, and Russia is now occupied claiming it's their territory, so they don't consider it occupation. Ukraine's capital is Kiev, which is up here close to the Belarusian border, but not too far from the Russian border, this area on the eastern side of you on the eastern border of Ukraine is where the Russians kind of have occupied a sliver of that as in, you know, ethnic Russians have claimed that that is, it is West Ukraine and Kiev, which are particularly interested in aligning themselves with the West, they do not want to be under the influence of Russia, they are not interested in being a satellite state of the Russians, they would like to see themselves integrated into the European Union and into Europe, they are, you know, advocates of and believers of kind of Western values that aren't interested in being under the thumb of Vladimir Putin, the authoritarian dictator of Russia. To the north of Ukraine, you have Belarus, Belarus is a satellite country of Russia. Belarus is a dictatorship, you might have followed some of the news out of Belarus earlier last year where Belarus, there were a lot of demonstrations of those demonstrations were crushed. And then the Belarusians kind of imported imported Muslim immigrants into Belarus, put them on the Polish border to try to come into Europe just to antagonize the Europeans. This is Poland Poland has a border with Ukraine and it kinds of it's northeast sections Slovakia has an eastern border with Ukraine. Hungary has an eastern border with Ukraine and Romania and Moldova have eastern borders with Ukraine, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Lithuania to the north that does not have a border with Ukraine, but has a border with Belarus, Latvia, which has a border both with Russia and Belarus and Estonia, which only has a border with Russia. All of those countries are NATO countries. All of those countries belong to the NATO Alliance. Ukraine does not belong to the NATO Alliance. Belarus does not belong to the NATO Alliance, neither does Moldova. So what you have here is Moscow's excuse for putting troops on the Ukrainian border and threatening to invade is that they want to prevent Ukraine from becoming a NATO member. If Ukraine becomes a NATO member, then you have NATO troops all along the Russian border and they don't have a buffer between Russia and eastern European NATO countries like Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and the Baltic countries. So that is the excuse Putin is presenting. What's really going on here is that Putin long ago has said that he, you know, hopefully this map you can see here is Central Europe, here's Germany, here's the Czech Republic, here's Austria. You can see Italy, Netherlands. You can see all of Western Europe here, but I'm going to close that. So you get a sense of where Ukraine is, where Russia is, why Ukraine is important to Russia. Ukraine is important to Russia because Ukraine is a barrier between NATO countries, between Eastern European countries that have aligned completely with Western Europeans and with NATO and between Russia. Russia would like to believe, and Putin has said, that the greatest tragedy of the 20th century was the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He believes that Russia is a grand empire that should have massive influence, particularly over Europe and Central Asia. He wants to be able to maintain his influence over all of Eastern Europe. He would love NATO to retreat from Poland, from Slovakia, from the Czech Republic, certainly from the Baltic states, so that he, Putin and Russia can reassert their own influence over that part of Europe, which he thinks justly belongs somehow to a mythical and imagined Russian empire. Russia is, in Putin's perspective, the dominant player in Eastern Europe and should be the sense of gravity for Eastern Europe. And the fact that some of these Eastern European countries, like Poland and like the Baltics before the West, is an offense to Putin. Ukraine has expressed its interest in being a part of the West over and over again. It did so for the first time, I think it was in 2005, in the Orange Revolution, when they overthrew and established a kind of a democratic government in Ukraine and voted in a pro-Western president. At the time, back then, there were discussions about Ukraine joining NATO. Those discussions never led to anything, and it wasn't actually achieved. After that, the president of Ukraine to power was much more aligned with the Russians. It was incredibly corrupt. And in 2014, the Ukrainians in their Maidan revolution, a truly heroic many Ukrainians lost their lives as part of this, forced the pro-Russian president to run away, to escape to Russia, replaced him with a president who was pro-West. And in a recent election, I don't know if you know this, but a comedian who played the president of Ukraine on television was elected president of Ukraine. And he is definitely very pro-West. So Ukraine is expressed through voting its interest in being a part of the West. Now, part of the complication for Ukraine is Ukraine has never developed its natural resources. Ukraine probably sets up quite a bit of natural gas, but nobody is invested in it. You'd probably need to frack. Nobody's invested in the natural resources in Ukraine and Ukraine. Today is completely dependent for natural gas, for heating, for power on Russian natural gas. But more than that. Thank you for listening or watching The Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening. You get value from watching. Show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbrookshow.com. 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