George Barros
speaker
576 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 6 Jun
George Barros’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
They think they can wait out the Europeans. And time will tell whether or not we, the collective international community, are able to continue keeping the Ukrainians in the fight. This government, US government, they currently accept there's no military solution to this war. Frankly, as a student and a historian, I have to disagree.
If you look back in history, pretty much all wars actually have a military solution. It's just a question of on whose terms and when.
Yeah, precisely. I mean, it was not too long ago that Putin articulated the theory of victory, and his theory of victory continues to be the same. It's that it doesn't matter that the Russian military pound for pound is not as good as the US military. It's not the most professional military. They're advancing at a very slow rate. They're taking a horrific loss.
But Putin assesses that fundamentally, he can stomach a war of attrition. And as long as the West is not willing to continue keeping the Ukrainians in the fight Putin's going to win. And so Putin wants to protract the peace process. He wants to protract the negotiations.
He doesn't want to agree to a very straightforward 30-day ceasefire because Putin thinks that he actually can tactically win this thing by stringing everyone along.
Somewhere in the middle. I actually agree that there's tremendous vulnerabilities the Russians have taken, particularly on the economics. I'm actually sympathetic to that argument, but I would argue that Look, Putin is banking on the tempo of fighting going down. The real thing that's bankrupting the Russians at really banging up their economy, their inflation rate,
their unemployment, or rather not the unemployment, the labor shortage. There's not enough Russians to go around between the military and their domestic economy and their monetary policy. It's the war. I mean, there's a massive disruption to the Russian economy because of the war. The Ukrainians kill and wound on average 30 to 45,000 Russians per month.
Those are 30 to 45,000 people whose families are entitled to benefits. They are wounded veterans who are entitled to lifetime benefits. They are people that can no longer work in the domestic economy, contributing to that labor shortage. Putin is banking on that number coming down a little bit. He wants the tempo to slow down.
He's waiting for the American aid to run out so that maybe instead of taking 45,000 casualties per month, it goes down to something like 10,000 casualties a month, which then the Russians actually can deal with. But at the current rate of which the Russians are being lost and the high price going for a head breach, it's not sustainable.
Mike, to put it into perspective, it's insane how much the average Russian service member gets paid to go fight in Ukraine. The one-time signup bonus for fighting in Ukraine offered by Samara Oblast is 40,000 US dollars. One-time signup bonus. That's not including your salary, not including other benefits. That's why they're able to attract
tens of thousands of Russians per month, but it's bankrupting the Russian economy. I mean, their liquidity and their sovereign wealth fund, it's down from what it used to be around 100 billion US dollars before the war started in 2022. It's now down to somewhere in the bulk cargo, 45, $46 billion. And it's scheduled to be at the end of this year.
Yeah. This is on Wikipedia, it's in Google. If memory serves me, I believe the average or median annual salary in Russia is somewhere on the order of like $13,000, $16,000 a year.
Granted, Russia has an extreme level of wealth inequality because there's the very, very rich guys that live in Moscow and Petersburg, and then there's the people living out in the sticks in Siberia who make next to nothing. So it's very skewed.
I mean, Russia has a population or had a population of 150 million people before the war. Ukraine was around 40 to 45 million people. So, they're working with a little over a three to one manpower advantage net. But the Russians, despite this, they've not been able to decisively dominate the Ukrainians. I mean, the Russians only occupy 18 and a half percent of Ukraine.
And at the current tempo of operations, it's going to take them well over 80 years to occupy all of Ukraine.
Well, I think there's several things that Putin would consider to be a victory. If he could, for example, achieve a de facto veto over the NATO alliance and have the NATO alliance redo its charter and have the NATO alliance and the NATO side preemptively say, as part of an agreement, it's okay. As part of the agreement, you can't get into NATO. I think that'd be a massive win.
Because as you know, NATO's charter includes an open invitation to any member state that meets the membership criteria. But if we change that and then allow the Russians to have a veto over NATO, that's a huge win.
I think Putin also wants to, at a minimum, continue seething in war fighting for the territory of the four provinces that he declared annexed back in fall 2022, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson Oblast, none of which the Russians occupy in their entirety.
and which would likely take a current pace at least two to three years to finish war fighting, assuming that there's not a massive collapse on either side. But it's a tall order and I think there's no... Realistically, I don't really think there's an end in sight. You don't think it's an end in sight to the current conflict, to the war? In the short term, no.
Because look, if the last piece of American aid is going to be that presidential draw, the President Biden authorized for the part of the office, Putin's just going to outweigh it. That aid is scheduled to last through maybe a few more months, certainly not get the Ukrainians through the summer. We'll have to see what the Europeans end up doing. What extent can they offset Americans?
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