108: Operation Spiderweb Shows Reforms in Security Services
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Hello and welcome to the June 21st edition of Ukraine Without Hype. I am Anthony Barnaway. In our last episode, I was still in Romania.

I guess we can start out our episode with a bit of some updates on what's going on. That turned into more of an adventure than I wanted it to be. There were some problems with scheduling bureaucracy and all that. I had hoped that Romania would be a bit more of a vacation, but it was mostly just doing bureaucracy, which is the thing I hate most in the world. But...

That is done with, and I'm moving on to the next steps in my residency process, or renewing my residency anyway. Let's start out by plugging some other projects that are going on right now. So, as you may know, I also do narration for the documentaries at Kyiv Independent.

We recently put out a new documentary called "No God But Theirs." It is a chronicle of essentially the religious crackdown on the city of Melitopol in Zaporizhia region by the Russian occupation authorities.

basically any Christian group that is not a Russian Orthodox is targeted and suppressed by the occupation authorities there. Often feels like I'm one of the few people talking about how this war is in fact a religious war, it is a holy war, as stated by the Russian Orthodox Church, in order to kill the heretics and schismatics.

So it's good that Kyiv Independent has done this documentary going very far into depth on that strategy happening in one individual city. It is often underreported, though

There is also Simon Ostrovsky, who has done a lot of work through PBS, I think is his employer, working on this reporting on the suppression of Protestants in particular in the occupied territories. So this question of religious liberties, of Russia seeing this as a holy war, there has been some more coverage of that recently.

And that's something that I appreciate as that is one of my focus topics. And also looking through New Voice of Ukraine, that is Romeo and I's main employer. He's editor in chief of the English language division. I work on the Patreon and some of the business things there. We put out question and answer videos. This most recent one was on OpsCamp.

Operation Spiderweb, action taken by the security services of Ukraine to destroy a significant amount of the Russian bomber fleet. I'll be covering some of that topic later on in the episode, but that video I did for New Voice of Ukraine was about an hour long, and I'll be condensing that to about 10 minutes in this episode. So for more details on that operation, please go to New Voice of Ukraine, our YouTube channel, our Facebook page,

and our patreon patreon.com slash nvua and as always if you want to support ukraine without hype you can go to patreon.com slash ukraine without hype their support is always appreciated the day that this episode is being going out that's the anyway the time that i hope to finish editing it june 21st is midsummer avana kopala and like many other cultures throughout the world you

Ukraine does have its own summer solstice festival. And here it is, Ivana Kupala. So Ivana Kupala, the shortest night of the year. And Ukrainian tradition is a bit of a couple's holiday, I guess you can call it. A lot of the traditions are almost a way of doing matchmaking for young couples throughout history.

It's a very common day in Ukrainian culture to have weddings. There's dancing around fires and jumping over fires to symbolize who will get married in the future. Like they'll jump over a fire together. It's also a day that has largely been attached to witchcraft. It is as well in some of the more Western traditions. So there's also a lot of ritual ceremonies.

cleansing and bathing and things like that in order to drive off evil spirits. And on the opposite side of that, it's connected to a lot of medicinal and herbal knowledge to use traditional medicines to both keep away physical ailments, but also spiritual ones. So it's very, you know, witchy, very pre-Christian in a lot of ways. And one of those fun holidays. I don't know if I'll be able to do much on Saturday, maybe Sunday.

I'm going to try to get to one of the celebrations for it. It also is a part of summer. There's all these other celebrations and marches and things like that. It's when people are most outside, though it is kind of cold this summer. There was Book Arsenal, which happened while I was in Romania, unfortunately. It's one of my favorite events of the year. It's where all the publishers, writers, illustrators come together at the

arsenal this big arts exhibition hall right across from the patrisch lavra and ever since the full-scale invasion has really become really the cultural event of the year of promoting ukrainian literature promoting ukrainian culture and promoting the spread of ukrainian culture around the world and its prestige the weekend after that came fan con the big

comic con event like thing of the year and I talked a lot about it last year and because time no longer exists it feels like I just did that

episode, kinda. It's still very fresh in my memory. So to double down too much on that, the one thing I very much enjoy about Ukrainian Comic Cons is how diverse they are compared to American ones, where at American Comic Con conventions or things like it, similar branding, it's very focused on comic books, movies, and anime, whereas at Ukrainian Comic Cons it's

Basically, every geek interest that you can think of all shows up at the same place. Very big on Warhammer K, for example. And K-pop. I love K-pop now. And also this month is Kyiv Pride. Last year, the Pride parade was crazy.

cut off pretty soon from threats of counter-protesters. This year it was allowed to go on a little bit longer. There were a few more public events this year than there had been in the past. There were some unfortunate incidents where they had wanted to hold an event at the Bodenhaa

exhibition center. The police would not allow that to happen because of some threats from counter-protesters, but they instead moved it to directly in front of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. There were like a dozen or so counter-protesters that really didn't do anything. And then for the Pride Parade itself, that came a little bit later. I wasn't able to go to that one, but there was a much higher turnout this time around. I think in excess of a thousand people were there. There were counter-protesters after that, but I think

The counter-protester number was something like 300 or something, so smaller. I don't know. They're stupid kids, and really, homophobia is the strongest tool of Russian influence, both in Ukraine and in... Well, obviously the strongest tool of Russian influence in Ukraine is the army, but the strongest political tool that they've had in the past has been promoting these kind of homophobic, more culturally conservative political...

strains. And with those direct Russian influence agents, such as the political parties in the Prohovna Rada that were more pro-Russia, as well as the Russian Orthodox Church being weaker, means that the political opposition to LGBT rights is weaker along with them. But now, moving past these, I guess, life updates into the news, this is now a

news collection episode. In our last combat update, I was describing how the summer offensive was really getting started, and now we are starting to see where it's going. So working north to south on this. The offensive by the Russians into the Sumi region, when I last gave this update, I said that the Russians had made a small incursion into the Sumi region, but had

Several tens of thousands of soldiers backing them up, something like 30,000 soldiers ready on this axis. And in the time since that episode, we have seen whirring updates in that direction. The Russians were able to capture about a dozen border towns in the Sumi region. When this was starting out, it caused a lot of worry.

because there is not much distance in between the city of Sumy and the Russian border. So if Russia is able to make any gains towards the city of Sumy, it can quickly put Sumy under firing range. The magic number here is about 20 kilometers. Once you hit 20 kilometers, then more and more

Russian weapons are within range of that target. It's of course already in range of a lot of drones, but as that distance is closed, it opens the door up to

rockets, artillery, etc. So far, the Russians are just outside of that range. Sumi is not yet in that extreme danger zone, but it is still under pretty serious attack pretty much every day something is happening there. And I say that people were more worried at the start because there was a pretty rapid advance of the Russian forces

for the first about two weeks or so. Thankfully, that seems to have slowed down some. Ukrainians have been able to organize a stronger defense. Thankfully, this offensive seemed to have slowed down following much of the pattern that happened with the Russian Kharkiv offensive.

of last year, where they were able to break into Harkiv Oblast, they were able to take a bunch of these border towns until hitting more prepared defenses and getting ground down because of that. Unfortunately, in the case of Sumi...

The physical features that can operate as more of a physical barrier, as a natural physical barrier, are much deeper into Ukrainian territory than with Kharkiv. With Kharkiv, as soon as they hit the Vovshka River, they couldn't go no further. With Sumy, the Olesnya River...

Well, spring, it's not a big river. Stream, I guess, is still a ways away. And if they are able to hit that natural barrier, then yes, they are in that danger zone to Sumy City. However, in an interview with New Voice of Ukraine, the army spokesperson made a statement

that they did not think that Sumy was the main goal of this summertime offensive. They saw it as a way to pull Ukrainian soldiers away from the Donbas region, away from Zaporizhia and away from the Neuropetrovsk region, which does make sense. The Russians simply have more soldiers, and so they are able to

benefit more from stretching out the lines by causing Ukraine to have to defend in more areas and overall making more of Ukraine less safe. And if we look at Donbass now, Pokrovsk is still holding. That front is really not moving at all. But that offensive I mentioned last episode about how the Russians were able to penetrate the highway to the east of Pokrovsk, the highway running from Pokrovsk

to Constantinivka, they have been able to take more territory in that area, really gouging out

a lot of the connecting tissue in between Prokhorovsk and Konstantinivka. And because of that, this area to the south of Konstantinivka, which includes Turetsk, that pedal's still going on in Turetsk, that is real bloody slog that's happening down there. That is urban fighting over this not very large city that has just been raging for so long.

long now and the lines there have simply not moved much there have been ukrainian defensives in toretsk that were quite ill-advised and disastrous but also the russians aren't exactly faring much better but

but as a part of that territory it's now being cauldroned this area south of Constantinivka is now being surrounded on three sides or at least the highway to the south of Constantinivka is kind of where that cauldron starts to begin it's not a super narrow cauldron there's still plenty of ways in and out just looking at the map there's like

three or four different routes that I'm seeing to supply the area south of Constantinivca, but that is where the fighting is going to be happening the most, I think, in the near future. They really want to get to Constantinivca

And as always when we talk about Donbass, that is where the battle will happen. For the last three years, Krasnoyarsk-Syriac is where they have been trying to reach, and they are getting closer to formally beginning that battle for the city. And then from there into the rest of that, Slovyansk-Kramatorsk,

urban conglomeration. But further to the west of that front, I was mentioning again last time how the Russians were trying to touch the border with Dnipropetrovsk region. The Russians were kind of throwing a lot of lives away in order to do that. There's several different locations where the Russians were basically bum-rushing the Oblast border with Dnipropetrovsk. We're

where they would reach that Oblast border before just getting wiped out by Ukrainian artillery and drones. They really wanted that propaganda win. Now, it does seem like they have done that in at least one, maybe two different locations there right next to each other. It's still not that much of a strategic win. There's nothing really there. There's

There's no supply lines there. There's no important defensive features there. They're just trying to reach that border to say that they also have Russian soldiers in a region that they have not yet been able to reach before. So I think making too much of a deal out of this plays into Russian propaganda. They are making suicide charges to this area just in order to say that they got there and

But like I said last time, does an Oblast border really mean that much in terms of a strategy? No. Though the weakness there then becomes that the defenses in that part of the Patros region are not as built up because the region had not seen combat yet. The fact that there are no...

important strategic points there to fight over the flip side of that is that there's no great places to defend from either it is more vulnerable it is less urbanized than dunbas

Or at least this part of the Patros. Of course, the city of Dnipro is a huge city, but that's still pretty far away at this point. But yeah, that's purely propaganda stuff. Try not to get too distracted by it. And I guess the final combat action was some of these...

covert actions. And I'll drop in the mention of Operation Spiderweb right now just to pin it, though this will have its own section at the end of the episode of Ukraine being able to do this covert action of over the course of a year and a half, placing intelligence assets into Russia, building a drone army and using that drone army to destroy about a third of Ukraine,

of Russia's bomber fleet. That's crazy. Outside of that, there was also the destruction of one Iskender launcher, a ground-based Iskender launcher, that was in the Bryansk region of Russia. And then there was the assassination of Mikhailo Khritsay. Khritsay was the occupation collaborator who was put in charge of the city of Bryansk.

Pridyansk being what was once basically a resort town on the Azov Sea. Now it is one of the main centers for torture camps that the Russians are using. Pridzai was the person put in charge of this city, and he was killed by the Defense Intelligence of Ukraine.

as frequently happens to collaborators and occupation officials. Our next section here, we'll be talking about some of the missile strikes. And this was a really annoying week. Did not sleep super well throughout a lot of these attacks. There were a bunch on Kiev this month, but the biggest one was on the night of the 17th to 18th. An attack that included a couple of missiles and

something like 400 drones. It's an absurd number of drones. There's a bunch of landings throughout the city, but the largest individual mass casualty event took place at an apartment building in the Solomonsky district of Kyiv where a Russian missile struck an apartment building flush, not intercepted, not nothing, and collapsed an entire section of

of the apartment. So basically from one stairwell to the other, that's kind of a common thing you see is that there's these retaining walls that segment off individual apartment units and everything in between two of these retaining walls completely collapsed. At least 28 people were killed, most of them at that apartment building and 134 injured. Social media watched, especially this one family waiting outside and

This pile of rubble waiting for news that their son may have hopefully survived, and he did not. The Chobik family was basically wiped out. And also, there was an American who was killed that night named Fred Grandy. I really do not want to make it sound, of course, like the life of an American is worth more than anyone else by bringing this up. There's always...

the thing I agonize over when talking about individual casualties. But this was this American who was an artist, I believe from Seattle. And the reason he was in Kyiv was because of the funding cutoffs by the Trump administration. And he felt as an American that his country had turned its back on Ukraine and felt like he had to do something about that

himself personally, so he came to Ukraine and joined volunteer efforts to clean up

rubble. And that's where he was struck and killed. And he became part of the rubble that he came to pick up. And people often ask journalists in Ukraine, it's really the most common question that we get, is what people can do for help? Is it safe for me to come and do that? And I have to say, on one hand, the best thing that anyone in the West can do themselves is

a combination of political advocacy and direct donations. You don't have to come here to help and do your part. There are other ways. And we always post our link tree of different

people that need financial support. When someone comes to Ukraine, there is that question of safety. They do not feel particularly unsafe in Kyiv. I say this even after I just described how I couldn't really sleep this week because of all the attacks. But overall, if someone was to say that they wanted to come to Kyiv and join a volunteer group and he didn't pick up rubble or

cook rations or weave camouflage netting or any of the many things that you can do in ukraine as a volunteer doing it in kiev or in lviv is the safest way to do it and being one of the crazy people who goes out to the front in a high lux and tries to run supplies in and run refugees out is not

for everybody. But there are things that anyone can do. But Fred here, he did the thing that I said would be safer, and he was still killed for it. There's no guarantees in life, and especially in time of war, when those sirens go off, when you hear the buzzing of the drones, when you hear the explosions of the sky, it really is a lottery of who lives and who dies. And often, somebody loses. When death shows up at the sky, it's

It gets somebody. And Fred here was a reminder of that. So again, he is not more important or more special than anyone else who was killed that night.

night i am very cautious again not to treat american life as more important but he did the thing i specifically said to many people that one could do and that's where it got him not that i'm taking no responsibility for anything like that it's just one of the things that weighs on your brain of the realities of war i suppose also in these attacks one of the offices of boeing was

was hit. So that big promise of the mineral deal of Russia won't want to attack Ukraine anymore if Ukraine is so interlaced with American businesses that attacking Ukraine means attacking Ukrainian businesses. Well, Russia just attacked an American business and no one has even really heard of it outside of Ukraine, I think. There were two Ukropostas that were blown up. Ukroposta is the post office here.

And within a day, they were set up elsewhere. Rain or shine, or missile or drone, the mail is always on its way. On a different night, Odessa was attacked really heavily, though thankfully there were no deaths on that night. It struck a lot of the city center, including the Dolphinarium Beach. If you go to Odessa, if you're coming down from the...

center of the city, down to the Black Sea, to the beach there. That is the beach that most people encounter first. There is a fountain that's very famous in

It's really imprinted on my memory as a part of Odessa, because whenever I go to Odessa and I go down to the beach, I pass by it. And that got hit. And there's not much there. It is a beach. I'd rather things hit a beach at nighttime when there's obviously no people than an apartment complex. But as a visual metaphor, watching this very...

famous part of Odessa tourism on fire, it's impactful. But between all these, the big change that has happened is that one, there has been less missiles. That seems to be the case. These latest attacks have included fewer missiles than some previous attacks. And a large part of that is probably because

Ukraine blew up a lot of their bombers. However, there are a lot more drones. Zelensky himself even pointed this out, that last year to say that 100 drones were a part of an attack would mean that it was a large attack. Now there's no such thing as an attack that includes less than 100 drones. This had an excess of 400 drones. A drone is easier to shoot down than a missile.

A drone does less damage than a missile, but quantity counts. If Russia is able to increase the amount of drones it's producing, and now North Korea is producing more drones for them as well,

If they're able to more easily overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses using these drones, it can lead to deadlier attacks. And as American support is vanishing, and they have said as much that there's not going to be another aid package, that means less air defenses to hold off larger air attacks.

And that's very bad. Next we have a raft of smaller news items. Some of these may have slipped past your attention. The first I'll talk about is these prisoner exchanges. And though the Ukrainian

Russian peace process, I say with sarcasm in my voice, has been an abject failure. I've explained why it's an abject failure. It could never be anything other than an abject failure. One thing that we did get out of them is a larger group of prisoner exchanges. So thankfully there are now hundreds of Ukrainians who are safe back home when previously they were in Russian territory.

prisons and prison camps. So that is undeniably a good thing. However, with this larger batch of

exchanges we also get a lot more horrifying stories of what these people went through most of them are the same as always starvation torture sexual assault electrocutions and the soldiers that are returning home look gaunt look brutally attacked and that's very clearly on purpose by the Russians they want to say that this is your fate if you join the Ukrainian military and we catch you we will torture you nearly if not to

to death. Though one of the larger, more shocking incidences of torture that we saw from these exchanges was one Ukrainian soldier being returned home with Slava Russia, glory to Russia, carved into his abdomen by surgical tools. He obviously had a surgery on his torso, something on his insides was fixed by a Russian doctor, but as that Russian doctor sealed him up,

he gouged glory to Russia on his skin. And this is a doctor who did this, a doctor who's supposed to sign an oath saying,

to do no harm. Ukrainian doctors are bound and very closely monitored to treat the Russian prisoners of war the same as they would anyone else. It's supposed to be a neutral act of doing medical care. But the Russians have enlisted their doctors into joining in on the physical and psychological torture. But what is...

one more war crime in a book of so many. And the other shocking thing that came out of these prisoner exchanges is that as a part of prisoner exchanges, there's also exchange of dead bodies, the repatriation of corpses. One army will overrun the position of another army and clean up the dead of the other side and on occasion trade them for their own fallen comrades. This is

really standard. It happens with a certain degree of regularity. Everyone wants their dead returned to them. But it turns out Russia doesn't really.

because Russia, as a part of returning these bodies, included the bodies of Russians. They used their own corpses to send back to Ukraine and just saying that they're Ukrainians. Some of these had even been disinterred from other graves. So the Russian army was literally digging up their own graves in order to grave rob Ukrainians.

and take that dead body and send it to Ukraine as payment in a deal, just so they wouldn't have to... I don't know how much of this was maliciousness and how much was laziness, but whatever that group together is so macabre, or just so they wouldn't have to actually send Ukrainians back home. Let's just sit with that information for a bit, this torture by...

Russian doctors and mutilation by Russian doctors in addition to desecrating their own dead just to piss off the Ukrainians. Though as a part of this, they're making a big show of, hey, we're returning all these bodies, but the Ukrainians aren't accepting them. The Russian propaganda line on that was, well, Ukrainians don't want to have these bodies back because then they'd have to pay the families and the Ukrainians don't

They don't respect their own people when really, as it turns out, in the afterward of all this, the reason why Ukraine was delaying the return of some of these bodies was because they knew that Russia was not sending Ukrainians back as promised and had to screen them for their actual identities. That's why it took longer. But the whole time...

the Russian propaganda was screeching of how inhumane Ukrainians were as they were doing all the things I just described them doing. So whenever Russia starts to moralize, you know they're doing something real bad. Our next smaller piece of news is domestic

It's a change to some law, and that law is that Ukrainians are now allowed to have multiple citizenships, while also simplifying some of the naturalization procedures for soldiers in particular. Beforehand, Ukraine did not allow dual citizenships, though, because it also doesn't really recognize the concept. It means...

that no one's really checking. So as long as you were a private citizen and had both Hungarian and Ukrainian citizenship, no one would care. It would take more notice if you're a big politician, but even some big politicians had multiple citizenships. We've talked about that before. I don't need to go into that whole spiel.

But this has always been a problem, exactly because that multiple citizenship scenario had to be so secretive, so don't ask, don't tell, and now it can be fully above board. And legalizing something that everyone already does usually has benefits. Something is lost when you have to drag something underground, we have to make it more secretive, and now they have to worry about that.

The other side of this bill, this is not fully gone through and signed and all that, but it has passed in some of the reading, is that it is possible to take Ukrainian citizenship without having to give up your previous citizenship. And that will have a lot, a lot, a lot of benefits. One of the main problems I think that Ukraine has had

add as far as connecting it with the West is that this barrier of not allowing multiple citizenships of if you want to become a Ukrainian citizen, you can't also be Canadian or American or British or Australian citizen.

It meant that there could be less connections between Ukraine and those other countries. Of course, look at Israel. There's a lot of engagement between Israel and diaspora, and that has reaped tremendous amount of economic and political rewards. Armenia has been very aggressive with this as well. Armenia wants Armenians to come to Armenia and become Armenian citizens. Because of that, there's now a lot of business connections, especially between Armenians

Armenia and California and has allowed, has been a factor in allowing the Armenian IT field to become as successful as it currently is. And, you know, lots of other examples around the world. Now Ukrainians can do the same. If you are a part of the Ukrainian diaspora, you are able to come to Ukraine, get that Ukrainian citizenship.

which family connections is one simpler way of doing that and taking part in the economy, though there is always the issue hanging over all this, which is mobilization. If you are a military-aged male from Canada or the U.S., take up Ukrainian citizenship, come to Ukraine,

Well, now you can be mobilized and you can't leave Ukraine, I think, is how this would work. So people may not want to make that decision for themselves, though maybe some will want to because they feel it is their home as well. There's also a lot of couples in Ukraine where one partner is foreign and the other is Ukrainian, and the foreign partner did not take Ukrainian citizenship because they didn't want to give up their old one.

that will no longer be an issue and will make family life a lot easier for those families. And finally, for the military, there has been a lot of complacency

complaints from within the foreign volunteer world that establishing residency, establishing some long-term contacts in Ukraine after they leave the military is, up until this point, extremely complicated. The military was not necessarily a path to citizenship. There were some long-term volunteers that were

given citizenship, some Russians, for example. And if you're an American or a Canadian or something like that, then it's not as big of a deal to not have a backup plan for after the army, because just go home, come back to Ukraine on a tourist visa or something. But if you are a Belarusian citizen, if you are a Russian citizen, then you're not going back to your home. By joining the Ukrainian military, you are now considered like a terrorist in

in those countries, would be arrested, could be killed. So these Russians and Belarusians especially were in a very tight legal spot where they had to stay in or they could get deported. That will now be fixed. They can take up Ukrainian citizenship, be Ukrainians, as long as they serve a contract of one year in the military. And finally, there was the normal naturalization path, which I'm actually kind of on, if I so choose. What happened is that I have had

temporary residence for a long time now. Right now I'm going to try and get permanent residency, and the only thing that would prevent me from applying for Ukrainian citizenship now is that my Ukrainian language isn't strong enough. I have to basically become fluent in Ukrainian, pass this language test that is not for the military, that's a separate category,

But as a civilian under the normal conditions, because I've lived here more than five years, if I can pass these tests in Ukrainian language and history and civics, then I could become Ukrainian citizen. But I don't.

have fluency in Ukrainian, so that's not super an option right now. I don't know. If anyone's listening out there who wants to be Ukrainian citizens themselves, the army awaits for five years in a language test. These next two smaller stories will be international in character. Since our last news update, there was the Polish presidential election. It was won by the conservative candidate Krasnoyarsk.

Karol Noroski. Since then, there has been a lot of concern of what Poland will do with this president. I think a lot of these concerns have been unwarranted. And though this incoming president has stated a bunch of times that he did not want Ukraine in NATO and is going to make a bigger deal out of the various historical and memory-based problems that Poland has with Ukraine, especially

revolving around the Second World War and the Wallin Massacres. I again have to reiterate that the president in Poland is not a deciding office. It's not America. And the outgoing president of Poland is

Andrei Duda has already stated that he is still backing the NATO bid of Ukraine. And though these are two different people and can have two different policies, they do come from the backing of the same political party. And that political party wouldn't be allowing Duda just to make declarations that they're going to go back on.

immediately thereafter. This does seem to be the continuing process of the Polish conservatives, the PIS party. So I'm not as concerned as a lot of other people have been, but this is also connected to the NATO summit. He made these statements in connection with the NATO summit that's happening. And that NATO summit, whenever we talk about summits, we always say that they aren't really that important and you just have to glean one or two things from them that might somehow be relevant. And in this case, the thing that was relevant, what's

that Zelensky was not invited. This may sound odd considering the fact that a lot of NATO countries have made larger pledges of support to Ukraine. Germany has recently stated that Russia was an existential threat to the country. There is rearmament happening, but they did not want to make Trump mad. And they thought that having Zelensky at this NATO summit would make Trump mad. And I just have trouble understanding

understanding slash tolerating a lot of the European stance toward America right now, where on one hand, yes, they obviously recognize that they're going to have to go it alone apart from America. They have made these statements that there has to be no one independent and a Europe that can stand on its own two feet and all that. And how everyone seems to know on some level that Trump is abandoning them, has no interest

in European security, and yet they still have to jump through all these hoops just to keep him happy. They're still afraid of him and they need to learn not to be afraid, just make the decision. And now for this segment about Operation Spiderweb, again

Again, as I talked about at the top of the episode, I got into far, far more detail about this in my video at New Voice of Ukraine. I'll be dropping that video in the description. Consider that to be an appendix to this episode. Now I'm going to skip over a lot of the detail. Go over to that other video I made.

For more of the detail, but to just speed run through what happened, the security services of Ukraine entered into the territory of the Russian Federation and in the city of Shekchelyabinsk

which is in Siberia near the border with Mongolia, they were able to set up a factory to produce these light attack drones. These drones did not have a very long range, they did not need to have a very long range. However, their navigation systems were quite foolproof in a way. They relied on dead reckoning rather than GPS and their

Their targeting was AI-assisted, not completely AI-driven, but AI-assisted. They were still controlled by actual pilots, but this AI-assistance...

was trained to attack weak spots on planes and was trained on planes that Ukraine already had available to them that were similar to the targets they were going after. So once these drones were loaded up onto trucks, the drivers of these trucks were not told what their cargo was and were told to just drive to a location

next to a Russian airbase. This occurred in about four or five different locations throughout the Russian Federation, but there were two bases where the attacks were most successful. One near the city of Irkutsk in Siberia and the other in Murmansk, which is in the Arctic Circle.

As these drones were driven closer to these airbases, they just start flying out of these trucks, again to the surprise of the person driving the truck, and started swarming towards these airbases, towards these strategic bombers that Russia had sitting out. We know that these strategic bombers were very likely going to take part in an attack on Ukraine that night. They were being loaded up with missiles. They were all fueled up.

which means that attacking those fuel tanks blew up much more easily than if they weren't going to go on an attack run. And so these drones, which had already been trained to attack a fuel tank, attacked the fuel tank, blew it up, big explosions, and overall 41 Russian aircraft were damaged in some way. Though of course not all of them destroyed.

The biggest target of these attacks were again these strategic bombers that take part in launching missiles from Russian airspace towards Ukrainian apartment buildings, for example. The Ukrainian agents who took part in this attack had already skipped the country by the time that it occurred.

And in the days after this attack, Russia had to essentially shut down a lot of their truck-based shipping and logistics because they had to inspect every other truck to make sure that none of them was carrying a fleet of drones in the back, which had economic consequences for Russia. Though, as I explained in that video, apart from the size of this attack, what surprised me that this was the security services of Ukraine that did it.

I have never put in especially large amount of trust in the security services of Ukraine. After Maidan, a lot of the people who would form the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics were members of the security services of Ukraine who defected and joined with Russia. The head of

the security services of Ukraine at the time, the SBU, defected to Russia and during the full-scale invasion was sent to Kherson region and Zaporizhia region to set up his own security agencies. So this former head of the Ukrainian FBI is the person who is currently overseeing a lot of the torture and

and suppression and horrible things that are happening in occupied territory. In the 90s, they were a part of organized crime. The head of the SBU under President Kuchma, Leonid Derkach, was a mob boss. He was a mafia boss in his own right. He was an associate of Simon Mogilevich, the highest-ranking member of the Russian-speaking mafia at the time. He is currently living in Moscow. He did a lot of stuff there.

in America as well, where he made connections with Rudy Giuliani and Trump while he was in America. That's a whole other tangent to go on. And the son of Leonid Derkach, Andrei Derkach, was a part of the Giuliani investigations in Ukraine.

A lot of shady figures involved in all that. But Leonid Derkach was a part of a bunch of straight-up assassinations of opposition figures, including Georgi Gengadze, the journalist who was one of the founders over at Ukrainska Pravda. Derkach had him killed. And as I just kind of described in our history episode, the horrific behavior of the SBU at that time was what led to...

the Ukraine without Kuchma movement that eventually was able to get Dirk Hatch kicked out of office after there was these tapes that were released showing that he was the person who authorized his assassination. And then once you get to the Yanukovych years, of course, they're a part

They were the main thing that Yanukovych was using to suppress the democratic movement. So of course, when the democratic movement won, a bunch of them fled to Russia, as I had already described. And in the time since Maidan, there had been reforms, but they're still seen as dirty. Earlier we had an episode about defense intelligence, where I explained in much closer detail of

How defense intelligence became the more prestigious of the two, I would say, most of the time when you hear about operations that take place, it's defense intelligence that did it. And the fact that defense intelligence did a lot of these things, that defense intelligence is the one hunting down the remnants of the Wagner Group, is doing a lot of these assassinations. SBU is doing them as well, but defense intelligence always got better press, partially because people just trusted them more.

because they weren't involved in all the dirty dealings that the SPU was. Since the full-scale invasion, there is also news of how the security services in Kherson region specifically, how that office had been basically bought by Russia, which is why the Russian attack on Kherson was so fast, so quick, and there are so many things that should have happened, such as blowing up the bridges, that didn't happen, because they basically bought out

the local SB and when I was in Mikolaev earlier on in the war and I was questioning some government officials they could not say directly why Mikolaev was so much safer and so much more immune to

to these Russian moles than Herson was, but through their looks, through what they weren't saying, it was very clear that the officials in the Mykolaiv region knew exactly what had gone on in the Herson region and were very closely on guard that it didn't happen there as well. They could not say to me directly, you know, so I'm not going to quote them, of, yes, we understood that Herson had been completely undermined by the Russians beforehand and

services were bought out and all that and other horrible things that could have happened. But obviously, that's what they were not saying. So yeah, then throughout the course of the full-scale invasion after this, the new head of the SBU was very thorough, it turned out, in rooting out a lot of these Russian moles, these Russian influence agents, and it certainly helped his case that a lot of the Russian agents, once they were activated, even

immediately turned to Russia. A lot of the sleeper cells that Russia set up burned themselves very, very quickly. So that was one benefit of Russian arrogance. But this new head of the SBU has really cleared it up and it had always still been understood. It had always been...

The unspoken truth amongst journalists, amongst politicos and observers and analysts that the SPU was still not clean. They still had leaks and moles. But then we saw this...

This operation where the SBU was able to, for a month and for a year and a half, put together this massive operation deep, deep into Russian territory. And nobody said a single word. There must have been a lot of people working on this and the Russians weren't even tipped off. There was no signs that the Russians had any idea what was happening. So really the story behind the story here that I take as

as almost more important part of it is that the SBU had its redemption moment

Were they able to show that they could do something this huge? I mean, they've been doing other things as well. I'm not going to say that they've just been sitting on their hands throughout the entirety of this war. They had carried out so many attacks, both within occupied territories and in Russia itself. There are very elite units that are connected to the SBU that have carried out stunning military battlefield successes.

I'm not saying that the SPU is like worthless or something, but I am saying that there's always that question mark over their head.

And in this case, they have shown they're able to do this massive, massive operation without anyone leaking, without anyone even thinking that what they were doing was happening. And that is stunning to me. This would have been impossible 10 years ago. Somebody would have said something. 10 years ago, the SBU had only recently stopped being co-workers with the Russian security services. These Ukrainian security...

spies and these Russian spies were basically the same culture. They knew each other. They went to the same schools. They went to the same vacation spots. They were family with each other in a lot of cases. They're both descendants of the KGB and they kind of kept that going. And even after they had their divorce in 2014, it was always understood that it wasn't full. Now it seems to be full. It seems to finally be basically a clean break with Russia. And

And that is so, so important. And the final topic that we'll be talking about this episode is regarding Iran. And we are certainly not the main place anyone's going to go to for news of the war between Israel and Iran. That is not our area of study. I mean, it's my quite literal area of study through both understandings.

undergraduate and graduate school, but I'm here now and we're talking about Ukraine. This is a Ukraine podcast, which is not an Israel-Iran podcast. So I will not make this a running thing of covering this war. However, I do have things to say about how this will affect Ukraine, how people in Ukraine are taking the news of various aspects of what's happening during this other war. And to do that, I do have to give some background of what's happening right now.

So for the next couple minutes, as I'm describing, the Israel-Iran war will be the only time that I will actually be covering the events of this war, probably not going to promise, but focusing on the Ukraine aspect. So what happened in brief is that Israel...

claimed that Iran was very close to finally developing and deploying a nuclear weapon, and so had to act preemptively in order to prevent Iran from nuking Israel. That's basically the story they gave. It's full of holes. No other intelligence agency agrees with this assessment. What really happened is that one by one,

Iran's proxy forces have been debilitated. I'm not going to say destroyed. None of these organizations, none of these militant groups are destroyed, but they are heavily suppressed. Hamas is fighting for its life in Gaza. Hezbollah was severely degraded.

Again, not destroyed. People seem to think that Hezbollah's gone now. No, they still have their arms. Lebanon government has not been able to disarm Hezbollah as people were saying they were going to because obviously they couldn't. Like, the conditions that allowed Hezbollah to exist...

still exist, therefore Hezbollah will continue to exist, but they basically have no ability to do any fighting at the moment. Syria, the Assad regime is gone. Russia, busy with Ukraine, leaving Iran as the final ultimate goal. Israel saw the opportunity, it's a cooperation from the American government, it saw openings and weaknesses in Iran, capitalized on them and did this attack.

This right now is mostly exchanges of missile strikes, as well as Israel operating largely freely in Iranian skies doing bombing runs. A lot of the Iranian military leadership has been assassinated. A lot of military production sites have been hit. Different sites connected to the Iranian nuclear development infrastructure have been hit, though not all of them. Some of them really

really can't be hit. And currently, Iran and Israel are locked in an exchange of missiles. Israel seems to have three basic goals here. The top level goal is to physically destroy the Iranian nuclear program. Number two is to destroy other parts of the military and leadership infrastructure of the country. And the third is

is to provoke some kind of revolution within the country and regime change. On the first goal, the Israelis have been able to destroy a lot of sites connected to the Iranian nuclear program. However,

The big one at the Fordow fuel enrichment plant is in deep enough of a mountain bunker that nothing Israel has can reach it. The only people in the world who have a bunker buster strong enough to do that is the Americans. Right now, Israel is trying to get America to join in on this war so that it can use this massive ordnance.

penetrator bunker buster bomb. Though it's unclear whether that will actually happen, Trump gave his I'll decide in two weeks statement.

which can mean literally anything. That's just him saying that he hasn't made any decision, and very well may never make a decision. Russia has been given two weeks for the last several months now, but that's kind of necessary to make this a strike, is American involvement. And the only way in order to give the weapons that could do this to Israel is to also give

them America's B-2 stealth bombers. Possibly. I don't know. It doesn't seem like the Air Force is super happy about that idea, though. On the second goal, to just destroy as much stuff as possible to

to make it so Iran is crippled for as long as possible. I mean, yeah, that seems like a pretty big success. They destroyed a lot of stuff. That's not exactly a thing where they can set a strict quota of we're going to destroy 80% of Iran's military stuff. They can kind of call it whenever they want. They can...

and call it a victory because there's already been such a massive amount of destruction on Iranian government and military sites and civilian sites as well. But this last one of regime change is the craziest one to me. The idea seems to be that if they bomb the Iranian state enough, if they destroy this

the military and security services enough physically and then

the Iranian people will rise up and overthrow the government themselves. And quite frankly, we have not seen any sign of that happening. If anything, we have seen more support, not necessarily for the government, but for Iran as a country actively in the process of being bombed by a foreign army. And nobody enjoys that. So there have been mass demonstrations in favor of the government, of course, covering Russia. Of course, we know that the presence of protest doesn't necessarily mean they're organic.

But we have yet to see any opposition activity on any significant level. There is an active insurgency in the Balochistan region. The Balochs exist in both Iran and in Pakistan and have insurgencies in both. It all gets very complicated, but they're really the only armed resistance to the state. The

Biggest protest movements in recent years have started in Kurdistan. There are a lot of people in Kurdistan who would be more than happy to have their own autonomy there. But the Americans, the Israelis, all seem to think that there is this huge amount of support for Kurdistan.

the former Shah of the Pahlavi dynasty or the son of the last Shah. There just isn't. I mean, there's a ton of support for the Shah in the diaspora in LA where there is not an insignificant amount of support for the Shah in Iran, but

Still minority is pretty not nor nor near even nor near 50%. So this delusion that if Israel just bombs Iran enough, there will be this massive demand for their monarch back. And you've just put Pahlavi on a secret armored train to Tehran.

then the people will rise to place him on his rightful throne. That is just dumb. Why would you ever think this? There has been no opposition or protest movement in Iran

that seemed to even acknowledge the Shah as an important figure because he isn't. He's basically just an American at this point. And the groups that are most in position to do anything against the Iranian government, the Bullocks, the Kurds, the communists even, are like pretty anti-

A monarchy. So who told who what that made them believe these things? I really hate the Beltway sometimes of how they just get these little ideas stuck in their head that make no sense whatsoever. It's like Russia assuming that all they had to do was show up in Ukraine and the people of Ukraine would have a spontaneous revolt in order to bring Yanukovych back into power.

No. No, that's dumb. That said, the Iranian regime does rely...

On the image of strength, which is now shattered, or probably, it is weakened. The stage is set for future opposition activity, but apparently not yet. Now for the Ukraine angle here. In a way, with the denuclearization of Iran being what seems to be priority A here, that does connect to other attempts to restrict or destroy Ukraine.

Iran's nuclear program. And on that, we do have to talk about the Iran nuclear deal under Obama. On one hand, I'll just say, all right, I think that deal was a success for the time it was working until Trump pulled out of it. However,

The background of that deal is also the background of a lot of Ukraine's problems. At the time, Obama considered this Iran deal to be the number one foreign policy goal of the United States and everything else would only be second fiddle to it.

Which means that as they were working on this nuclear deal, Russia invades Crimea. America still needed Russia to put pressure on Iran for the nuclear deal. America did not want to piss off Putin at the time. So what happens is that during this invasion of Crimea, there were many, many reasons why

why Obama did not want a confrontation with Russia. There were a lot of assessments that the Ukrainians would not be able to resist anyway, considering that there basically was no Ukrainian military at the time, or only a few thousand people, really. So when the decisions were being made in Kiev of what to do with this Russian invasion, and the Ukrainian government ultimately made the decision to basically do nothing,

A part of that, though not all of it, there are other considerations again, was because the Obama administration said,

that they would not back a military option. And again, part of the reason they did not want a military option was because they needed Russia. At the time, if there was a strong enough response from America, from Europe, who immediately swat Russia's hands down, we would not be where we are now. And that really has little direct to do with this, except that this deal that Obama basically traded quickly

Crimea away for to get was immediately canceled by Trump when he came into office. So it all became completely worthless. It made America's word on commitments completely worthless because this was such a big, heavy deal that was just tossed away like

like tissue paper. And now that it has developed into this full-on kinetic war, there's really no assurances that it will do anything for Ukraine's diplomatic position even now when the thing that originally got in Ukraine's way, even if it's taken off the

the table, it doesn't look like it will do anything for us. Americans and the Russians will now take part in their own diplomatic negotiations over what to do with Iran, over what kind of military response they can agree is allowable, over if there is some kind of regime change situation, if there would be some kind of division of influence within

within Iran. Russia's going to be involved. China is going to be involved in any kind of post-war scenario. And America, which still has plenty of Iran hawks, as we are seeing now. People were saying that Trump, he's not a neoconservative. He doesn't have the same aggression towards Iran as anyone else. I mean, obviously that's not the case. America greenlit this operation. And America is still very much interested in Iran, and so there's going to be political trading of what to do with Iran in the future that

America could very well use Ukraine as a bargaining chip with. Again, so that will be our segue into how I think this can either help or hurt Ukraine. So one, this idea that there will be negotiations in the future of what to do with Iran that

That will involve the United States, Russia, China, and probably India. What will America trade away in order to gain something in Iran? I think part of that will probably have something to do with Ukraine. The other way that this is now hurting Ukraine is that immediately before this operation took place,

America took a shipment of thousands of drone intercepting missiles that were going to be sent to Ukraine and instead sent them to the Middle East in order to counter any Iranian attacks there by using their own drones. So all these drones attacks, in our segment talking about these drones attacks, I was saying how they're just undervalued.

hundreds and hundreds of them now in order to overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses. Those anti-drone missiles would have been very useful this week, but apparently no. On that point involving other resources, there's now going to be a war of attrition between Israel and Iran to

to see who can defend each other's missile attacks better and who can send more missiles the other person's way. And at the moment, Israel certainly seems to be winning that war of attrition, but it could still go on for a while. And in that time, Israel will become the primary purchaser of air defenses in the world. They

They have the resources to do it backed up by the United States. And you know who else is trying to buy air defenses? Ukraine. Ukraine's now going to be in competition with Israel to get air defense assets, and I think Israel will do a better job of that. I think they'll have the money, I think they'll have the political support, especially

especially, mostly, through Washington to do this, and they'll win out. Patriot missiles, those drone, anti-drone missiles, everything, Israel gets first dibs. And that scares me over here, because that means we'll be dealing with what can be scraped up on second call. And politically, it looked like America was finally going to do some kind of anti-Russia legislation under Trump. The Senate...

had a bill ready to go to pass additional sanctions on Russia. It had about eight on Russia. It had about 80 votes. Like that's, no, there's only a hundred senators. That's most of them. Bipartisan effort. The Senate had always been more pro-Ukraine than the House of Representatives, but now

not only would this mean potential more sanctions on Russia, it would also be a confrontation between Trump and the rest of his party on Ukraine, and it seemed as though the Senate Republicans were pretty confident that they could push something forward. That is now being delayed and

until at least next month and let's see if that ever happens and to transition between my hurt category of my help category i'll do what people think will help but will not actually do anything which is that a lot of especially israeli commentators i've been seeing have been really focusing on the fact that iran use that russia rather uses iranian drones on ukraine and by destroying the

Iranian defense production plants and drone caches, that means that Russia will be less able to do its own drone strikes. And that's not actually true. That was true two years ago. Now, Russia builds its own drones. And it builds a lot of its own drones. It does not need Iran. There are parts that they get from Iran. Iran is part of the supply chain to build these drones. But they're not

required. And now North Korea has license to build Shahid drones as well. We're not going to look at fewer drones because of this. But okay, how can Ukraine benefit from this? One,

Iran is part of Russia's axis and any weakening of this axis will help Ukraine in one form or another, even if not in all the ways that people are saying there are downstream effects. If Iran is removed from the board, even if the government is not overthrown, it will still definitely be weakened capacity. And there are other non-military production ways that Iran helps Russia. I

that will likely be degraded in one way or another. Russia wants to use Iran to be one of its main export routes for oil and natural gas to basically ship natural resources through Iran down to the Indian Ocean and from there export to Russia.

you know, India, China, other places. And this route seems more feasible than a direct overland route through Siberia. Russia has been having to deal with the fact that most of its pipelines and other things are built to export to Europe, and with a lot of that reduced, if not completely cut off, reduced, then it has had to look for other routes, and this is one of the routes they saw the most promise in...

We'll see with anything happens to that in the future. And finally, there is the kind of diplomatic view on this, which is that as Iran was being attacked, Russia did basically nothing. And just like with Syria, the main response from within Russia commentator world was to blame their own proxy for not being good enough. In Syria, the rebels were tearing their way through the Syrian army.

Russian commentators were just saying how pathetic and weak and terrible the Syrian army was, and look what happens when we walk away from these idiots for even five minutes. That seems to be the same response they have to Iranians. These Iranians were so corrupt and incompetent that they allowed this attack to take place right after a very similar attack happened in Russia, by the way. The Israelis also did the build a bunch of drones inside of the target country

and then used those drones to attack short range, they kind of pulled the same trick in Iran. So maybe don't criticize the Iranians when you fell for the same stuff. Russia has no military capacity to back up

iran and really they aren't exactly anti-israel either they've maintained very pretty pretty good relations with israel throughout this entire thing and so this whole axis of resistance of iran and syria and hezbollah and hamas all together to go to war with israel and on the way go to war with the people of syria and lebanon as well but

This axis of resistance has been a very potent propaganda tool to say that we are this anti-imperialist block of nations that are fighting against Western imperialism.

And Russia is the guarantor, along with China, of this axis of resistance that turned out to be complete nonsense. One by one, the members of this axis of resistance have been torn apart, and Russia did nothing about it. We talked about this when we were going over the end of the Syrian civil war. We talked about this during the Azerbaijan's invasion of Nagorno-Karabakh. These places where Russia is supposed to

have security guarantees they don't show up for. They don't have an overseas empire like they thought. All they have are these proxies in Africa, these military juntas that they backed, and most of those military juntas are in a very bad position right now throughout Britain, Faisal, and other countries in the Sahel. So this Russian world is once again exposed to be extremely fragile.

But that is a whole other rant that I'm developing with the idea that the Russian Empire is weak, but it's still strong enough to kill a lot of Ukrainians, and there is no opposing bloc coming from the West to resist it. I know, that's in the drafts. But that will end our episode for this week. Changes are happening in the world that have the potential to either help or hurt Ukraine more.

More than the other and probably both, but let's see where those dice fall. We have more drones to worry about. We have this offensive, this summer offensive to worry about. And Ukraine with IHUG will be here to inform you on how it goes. So, and right before releasing this episode, updates we do have.

America has bombed Iran, including the nuclear facility that I mentioned, as well as two others. I'm not going to be staying up any later than I already have in order to see what the results of this bombing are, but there we have it. America has bombed Iran, and we'll just have to see what comes next. Thank you all very much for listening this week.

It was a very busy month for me involving bureaucracy. And again, thank you for your Patreon donations that helped me pay for this extremely expensive and burdensome process of immigration. Thank you all very much for that. So patreon.com slash Ukraine without hype.

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Victor, William Lewis Brown, Yellow Duck, Zay Perry, and Marcus Nashkis. Thank you all very much. You're what make this all possible and what makes my immigration process possible. And until next episode, thank you all very much. And Slava Ukraini!