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President Trump will meet with Vladimir Putin this week: “The underlying cause of this trouble” · The Daily Article

• 0:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Greetings on this Monday, August the eleventh, twenty twenty five.
• 0:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to Denison forums, Daily Article Podcast.
• 0:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Today's Daily Article is authored by our CEO, Dr. Jim Denison, and narrated by Chris Elkins.
• 0:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: President Trump has announced that he will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska this Friday.
• 0:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: In related news, Putin told the US he would halt his war with Ukraine in exchange for land in eastern Ukraine and global recognition of Russia's claim to the territory.
• 0:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: We also learned yesterday that the White House is considering inviting Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky to Alaska as well.
• 0:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: How likely is it that Ukraine would make such a land exchange, or that Putin would honor a peace achieved in this way?
• 0:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: These questions point to a larger question foundational to the war and its global consequences.
• 0:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Putin claims for Eastern Ukrainian regions.
• 1:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: as well as the Black Sea Peninsula of Crimea, which he annexed in twenty fourteen.
• 1:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: According to an analysis by the ISW, the Institute for Study of War, if Ukraine does not concede these lands, Russia's occupation of them through military means, quote, is neither inevitable nor imminent.
• 1:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: As Russian forces will face serious operational obstacles in what are likely to be multi-year endeavors.
• 1:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Even if Ukraine were to concede these regions on its border with Russia, would Putin stop there?
• 1:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The ISW paper states that Putin has recently claimed that all of Ukraine is Russia's.
• 1:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: To this end, the analysis reports that Putin remains committed to, quote, replacing the democratically elected Ukrainian government with a pro-Russian puppet government, reducing Ukraine's military, such that Ukraine cannot defend itself from future aggression and destroying the Ukrainian state, identity, and culture, and subjugating the Ukrainian people."
• 2:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: According to Paul The Neary, a leading expert on Russia Ukraine relations, much of the Russian elite, including Putin, rejected Ukraine's independence from the very moment it happened back in nineteen ninety-one.
• 2:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is the underlying cause of this trouble, in quote.
• 2:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here's the larger question, why is Putin so antagonistic toward Ukraine?
• 2:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Arab philosopher of the Fourteenth Century, Ibn Kaldun, reportedly observed Geography as destiny.
• 2:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: He could have been speaking of Russia and Ukraine.
• 2:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ukraine is part of the vast European plane.
• 2:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: This region is flat.
• 2:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: with no natural features to deter and invading force.
• 2:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Accordingly, in the last five hundred years, Russia has been invaded across its western border by the Poles in XVI-O-Five, the Swedes in XVI-O-Seven, the French under Napoleon in XIII-II and the Germans in both World Wars in XIX-IV and XIX-IV.
• 3:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: to Putin controlling this border is vital to his nation's security.
• 3:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there's the issue of warm water access.
• 3:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many of Russia's ports on the Arctic freeze for several months each year.
• 3:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Its largest port on the Pacific Ocean is enclosed by the Sea of Japan, which is dominated by the Japanese.
• 3:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: This halts the flow of trade into and out of Russia and prevents the Russian fleet from operating as a global power.
• 3:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is why Russia
• 3:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: annexed the Crimean Peninsula in twenty fourteen and insists on controlling it.
• 3:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the eighteenth century, Peter the Great took control of Ukraine as well as most of what we know as Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
• 3:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: This formed a huge protective ring around Moscow.
• 4:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The fall of Russia in nineteen ninety-one cost Russia territory with its border ending at Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan.
• 4:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: As long as a pro-Russia or even neutral government was in power in Ukraine, Russia could be confident of its buffer zone with the European plane.
• 4:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: But when a more pro-Western government came to power in twenty-fourteen, Putin responded by seizing and annexing the Crimean Peninsula.
• 4:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: On February the twenty-fourth, twenty-twenty-two, he invaded Ukraine itself.
• 4:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Vladimir Putin has long seen himself as being on a historic mission to rebuild the Russian Empire, a goal with which many of his people agree.
• 4:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: As Princeton history professor, Stephen Cotkin notes, quote, many Russians view their country as a providential power with a distinct civilization and a special mission in the world.
• 4:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: In quote, Putin often compares himself to Peter the Great, who founded the Russian Empire in seventeen twenty one.
• 5:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Putin's hometown is St.
• 5:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Petersburg, a city named for Peter and built on land he conquered from Sweden.
• 5:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Putin says he shares the eighteenth-century Zars goal of creating a Russian Empire as it existed prior to nineteen seventeen.
• 5:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: This would call into question all of the former Soviet states as well as a large part of Poland which was part of the Russian Empire.
• 5:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Going back to Ivan IV, also known as Ivan the Terrible, in the fifteenth forty-seven, Russia has typically been ruled by a quote-unquote Tsar derived from the Latin Caesar, meaning Emperor.
• 5:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: In seventeenth twenty-one, Peter adopted the title of Emperor and proclaimed the Russian Empire, though he continued to be called the Tsar as well.
• 5:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: According to Oxford historian Andre Zoren, the term Zarr has been deeply rooted in the cultural mythology of Russia for at least five hundred years.
• 6:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: To this end, Putin keeps statues of four of Imperial Russia's most revered Zarrs in the corners of his Kremlin cabinet office.
• 6:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: A towering bronze statue of Peter the Great looms over Putin's ceremonial desk.
• 6:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Putin says of Peter, he will live as long as his cause is alive.
• 6:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Peter the Great tortured and killed his own son for allegedly conspiring against him and enslaved five hundred and forty thousand people to Bill St.
• 6:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Petersburg, many of them Swedish prisoners of war, as many as one hundred thousand died during the project.
• 7:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The British Ministry of Defense likewise estimates that over one million Russian troops had been killed or injured since Putin's invasion of Ukraine began.
• 7:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: For Putin, these are merely means to the end of his personal power in his quest to restore Mother Russia.
• 7:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: He treats the rest of his citizens with similar disregard.
• 7:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: In my visits to St.
• 7:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Petersburg over the years, I marveled at the historic beauty of the city that grieved at the enormous number of homeless people, many of whom freeze to death during the brutal winners.
• 7:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: What Nietzsche called the will to power tips all of us to be the ZAR of our own empire and exploit people as means to our ends.
• 7:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here we find another reason we need what only Jesus can do in our fallen hearts.
• 7:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Christ was the most powerful person who ever lived.
• 7:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: He could calm stormy seas, heal disease bodies, and even raise the dead back to life.
• 8:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And yet, we know from Matthew twenty verse twenty eight that he came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.
• 8:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: When we make Him our Lord by submitting to His Spirit, we similarly exhibit His sacrificial love noted by Galatians five verse twenty two, a power that ends wars, heals marriages and families and restores nations.
• 8:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: But we can seek our own transactional power or submit to the transforming power of God's Spirit, but we cannot do both.
• 8:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Choose wisely today.