They're stealing the children. Ukraine is fighting back.

Welcome to Phil and Ted's Sexy Boomer Show. I'm Ted Bonnitt.

And I'm Phil Proctor. Remote.

Yes.

Once again, lewis, delaware.

Let's get on with the show, shall we?

Yes.

Piedemo PI. Demo.

Ah. That was russian and ukrainian, ladies and gentlemen.

No,.

Boy.

Okay. She only speaks Ukrainian, ladies and gentlemen.

You bet. You should see her nail polish. It's blue and yellow. It's fantastic. We're talking about, of course, Dr. Olga Popel.She is a medical doctor here in Los Angeles for ucla. A rheumatologist. Yes, you're talking to our audience.And her passion besides that is being the president of the Southern California Holodomor Genocide Committee, which is here in Los Angeles and committed to the dissemination of education about the holodomor, which was the Ukrainian Genocide of 1932. 1933, That's correct. Welcome to the show.

Oh, thank you so much. A pleasure to be here.

We want to talk about what's happening right now in Ukraine because the Gulf War has swiveled away the spotlight to the Middle east from Ukraine. We also have a current administration that has been not very supportive of Ukraine, say the least. And yet Ukraine is fighting on.You don't mess with Ukrainians, man. Ukrainians have so much practice. Ukraine is geographically a doormat between competing powers. It's a very invaded country.

Ukraine has had a lot of torrents pouring through it because not only of its geographical position, but also the great riches that it has in land and agriculture and minerals, coal in the east.And if you think the determination of Ukraine has been noteworthy in the last year or so, I would ask you to expand your timeline to maybe 100 or more years.Ukraine has wanted to be an independent country for hundreds of years and has had to deal with these challenges, a lot of which are Russian imperialism in those span of several hundred years. Ukraine was an independent country between 1917 and 1920.But the end of World War I and the resolution of the Treaty of Versailles, the powers be determined that Ukraine needed to be partly Polish and partly Russian. And then, of course, came the Russian Revolution.And then came many years of the Bolsheviks trying to solidify their hold on all of Russia, spanning to the Pacific Ocean and down into the Ukrainian territory.And again, Ukraine was denied its aspirations to be an independent country when FDR very unfortunately was somewhat blindsided by his, perhaps his relationship with Joseph Stalin and the need for the Red army to win World War II.And also by his interview with the Moscow editor of the New York Times, Walter Duranty, who was I Don't know what quite the right word is, but shall we say, on the right side of Stalin in his reporting.And he enjoyed favoritism by Stalin in his style of living, in his accommodations, which were, you know, very comfortable, given what the condition was in Soviet Russia at the time.And so he reported, and he reported to FDR directly that really all these rumors of there being a genocide in Ukraine, of there being famine in Ukraine, of people dying, of hunger falling on the streets, starving, of malnutrition, was just exaggeration. The harvest had not been particularly good, so maybe a few people weren't eating as well as they have been before.That there was absolutely no man made famine. This, of course, was incorrect.And other journalists, such as Malcolm Muckridge in Britain and the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, reported otherwise from direct observation. Gareth Jones traveled to Moscow. He spoke Russian fluently, and under the credentialing of being a secretary to Lloyd George, he was admitted.He got permission to travel to Ukraine as long as he went with a Kremlin bodyguard, so to speak.

Yeah.

You know this story, right, Phil?

Yes, I have heard it.

It's told in the mainstream movie, Mr. Jones, by a Polish director. And he jumped. Gareth was no fool. He jumped the train. He knew that he wasn't going to see anything real if he was escorted by a Kremlin lackey.So he jumped.

A minder. They call them minders.

There you go. So he saw the real deal. He saw children orphaned. He saw people with bloated bellies dropping dead. He saw piles of grain just being allowed to rot.

This was during the Holodomor in the 30s.

Yes. This is part of what created the Holodomor. Exactly. The Holodomor is an amalgam of two Ukrainian words.Holod for starvation, hunger, and moored for death.

And this is the breadbasket.

That's right.

Right. The grain that Ukraine sells to everybody around the world. And yet they were being starved.

They were, just as in 2022, the reverberations of decreased agricultural produce from Ukraine due to the what is called euphemistically, the full scale invasion. What I like to call the ongoing genocide of Ukrainians was felt worldwide. The drop in exports and grain, but.

Also eastern Ukraine has a lot of mineral spoils.

Yes.

Does Putin really have this vision of reforming the ussr? Is that part of it too?

In my opinion, Putin has the same Russian imperialistic desires as the czars did.

I agree. I agree entirely.

And Phil, perhaps you know this, but Stalin's mother once asked him Because Stalin himself was Georgian, was plucked into politics out of seminary. He was a seminary student. His mom once asked him, well, what are you actually doing in Moscow?And Stalin said, well, you know, like the czar used to do, Mom. That's what I do.

Wow.

So this imperialistic mindset, I think, is what drives Putin to reconstitute not just the Soviet Union, but the Russian imperialistic state. That whole empire, a mine set, since.

They want to mine the country for its material wealth and its rare elements, I imagine. Right?

They do. They do want to do that.The Nazis wanted to mine Ukraine not only for land expansion and labor, because they called Ukrainians subhuman, as they called other parts of the population of Eastern Europe. They actually loaded up that rich, dark earth of Ukraine onto trains to take into Germany. So, yes, Russia.

That's amazing. I traveled with the Ale Russian chorus in 1959 to the Soviet Union, and we sang in Kiev and also in Lviv.And Lviv is in the middle of, like, the breadbasket.

Yeah.

All the wheat is grow. Oh, my God, it was so beautiful. We sang in an open field with the golden grain around us.And it reminded me so much of the Midwest in our own country, where I grew up, the state of Indiana.And I realized immediately what an incredible country it was and quite capable of sustaining itself and becoming a beacon, if you will, for the rest of the world. It's tragic what has happened to them now.

Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that.

And tough.The story that is the most moving is this story of the children that Ukrainian authorities have identified, more than 20,572 children who have been unlawfully deported or forcibly transferred to Russia. Only 2,133 have been returned.The rest have been stripped of their identities, indoctrinated into military camps, or put into forced adoption OR institutions.Across 210 locations in Russia and Belarus, researchers fear that this is an underestimate because Russian authorities falsify identities and erase records. This, according to an article in the Guardian. This is horrific.

Yes, it is.

You told me when we met that the babies, the infants are being taken and given to predominant families in Russia with new identities.

Yes. The Russian parliament, called the Duma a few years ago, just really shortened the adoption process significantly.So these Ukrainian babies, their names are being changed on their documents. Their identifying features are being changed on their documents. They're being adopted into Russian families, and they will be raised Russian.They will be raised loyal Russian subjects. The older children are either in militarized camps with the intention of putting them into the army. And sending them to the Ukrainian front.Some of the children have been reported to be sent to North Korea for vacation.

Oh, no.

Some of the children that have escaped have reported trafficking of the young girls and the young boys. So it is a horrendous, horrendous situation.The number of identified children comes mostly from the work of the Yale Humanitarian Research Laboratory, which was closed down due to the Doge behaviors last year. And they used remarkable technology to identify Ukrainian children and where they had come from. Most of these children have families.They're not orphaned. They weren't abandoned. They weren't scooped up for humanitarian reasons by Russian authorities.

They were just kidnapped.

They were kidnapped, some forcibly.If they really were interested in humanitarian care for these children, they'd be talking to the International Red Cross and trying to reassimilate them with their Ukrainian families. But that is not at all what is happening.

Many of the children have been taken to Crimea.

Yes.

And parents, desperate, are risking their lives to go into Russian occupied territories of Crimea to try to find their children. That sounds frightening.

This is exactly right. And several of these people have been forced to do videos saying that this child was taken for humanitarian reasons. He's been treated very well.He hasn't been limited in any of his activities and so forth. So it's a very desperate situation.And, in fact, the International Court of Justice has issued arrest warrants for Putin for war crimes, this being among them.

There was a meeting yesterday in Brussels at the European Commission, where delegates from 63 countries and international organizations gathered to discuss how to bring these Ukrainian children home. What do you think its prospects are?

I think tough, because, of course, Putin and his regime are not. Are not vulnerable to public opinion. They're not really vulnerable to international opinion.There are exhibits in America that are trying to bring attention to this issue of the children that are lost in the savages of Russia. The National Mall had an exhibition, 280ft long, 8ft tall, of tiny teddy bears. Each teddy bear representing one of the forcibly abducted children.We're hoping to bring that exhibit here to Los Angeles, working with the Museum of Tolerance in trying to do a joint effort to sponsor this event.

Their back channels. Also Turkey, Qatar and other neutral states have been involved in mediating about 100 of the returns.And the EU officials would like to increase mediated returns because they are safer.But the vast majority of returns are undertaken by these parents and other family members who are risking themselves to go into enemy territory to try to retrieve their kit.The EU's foreign policy chief said getting children back was even harder than prisoners of war because you can exchange prisoners of war, but because Ukraine hasn't deported any Russian children, you can't exchange children for children. So it's a far more difficult negotiation and they really rely on international support.Speaking of which, who's benefiting from Trump's international policies?You have NATO upended and Putin can make a good argument that back in the day the nuclear treaties were agreed to under the pretense that after the wall came down and we would not encroach on Russia with NATO alliances and NATO and the US Broke that agreement. Putin has a beef with that and feels threatened by this encroachment of NATO, Finland, Poland, the potential of Ukraine.

Yes.

Is that a fair argument in Putin's favor?

I must admit I don't want to at all represent that. I'm an expert in that history of NATO. I do know that at times he hasn't seemed bothered by the joining of certain nations to NATO.And at other times he has drawn the line, particularly in his speech to Brussels, I believe it was in 2007, when he pretty much told everybody, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to take back what I consider mine, starting with Ukraine. I mean, this is a long paranoia. If we lose Ukraine, we lose our power.Personally, I don't think that he has, other than a self serving rationale for having that argument. I don't know of any country that's invaded Russia. I don't know of any country that's invaded Belarus.The way he lost influence in Hungary was through a democratic election, which was remarkable. And now he has lost one very important veto within NATO because Peter Magyar will not be voting the way Orban voted.Peter Magyar's foreign minister will not be secretly telling the Russian foreign minister what the EU has discussed. So I would say I'm not very persuaded by that argument at all.

Fair enough.

Olga, I have to say how incredibly impressed I am with the breadth of your knowledge about all of this and how in heaven's name have you dedicated yourself to it. Tell me a little bit about yourself in finding your way into this extraordinary position that you are now.

Oh, that's so kind of you, Phil. Thank you for the question. I obviously come from Ukrainian, very solidly Ukrainian parents. My mom's family was from Kyiv.My father's family was from the western part of Ukraine in Lviv, which you admired. And I very much so congratulate you on your good taste. You must go back.

I'm not sure I'm not sure.

And I'll teach you some Ukrainian while you're at it.

Mary Ladna okay.

Well, we came here when I was three years old here to the United States. And my father was a very strong Ukrainian nationalist.He worked in the resistance during World War II and he became kind of a social worker for Ukrainian refugees into France. I was born in France. I really admired my father quite a bit. He was a speaker of nine different languages, which is in the usual European tradition.And he was a master in chess. He tied with Bobby Fischer at one time. So he was a great, great intellect, huge interest in reading and history, a professor of languages.And so I think for my family I had a great respect and love for my heritage language and for my heritage culture. And then when I got my daughter, I knew for sure that she needed to share in that richness. And so we made sure that she learned the language.I was the director of the Ukrainian Language School here in Los Angeles. I became a member of the Hol d' Mor Genocide Commemoration Committee. November is the month of commemorating that genocide internationally.About three years ago, I was working with the office of California Senator from Napa Valley, William Dodd, and we passed a proclamation.He passed a proclamation following that tradition of November being the month that California commemorates Holodomor and the 7 to 10 million sacrifices of that genocide. The first plaque memorializing that genocide is in Los Angeles in Gloria Molina Grand Park.And then I just wanted to expand the efforts of that committee beyond an annual commemoration. So we've been doing exhibits of artists, American Ukrainian artists, who have works based on holodomor.We have a relationship with the California Teachers Cooperative, which is a state supported department for genocide awareness, Holocaust, Armenian, Holodomor. And they gave us a grant. We established teaching materials, had our first workshop just last month.We're really delighted at the response it received and going to expand that across the state.My passion comes really from the beauty of the Ukrainian culture, language, music, its uniqueness, and my American aspirations for democracy and freedom.

Yeah, that's relevant here as well.

Yeah, I love my American country.

There's a robust Ukrainian community here in Los Angeles. My wife is of Ukrainian descent. So we've been down to the cultural center, which is downtown la, kind of, yes, west downtown la, I guess.And if anyone's curious about Ukrainian culture and want to meet people, I highly recommend getting in touch. What would be the best way for somebody here in LA to get in touch with the Ukrainian community?

The website for the Ukrainian Culture Community center, excuse me, has a phone number we don't have permanent staff there, but we return phone calls. My organization has a website.We're delighted to connect with people that are interested in either more knowledge about our topic or about the Ukrainian community at large.

Getting back to the children, the sad part about this is that this is nothing new. This happens everywhere happened here with Native American children being taken to erase their culture. It was part of a conquest.

It's part of the definition of genocide.

Let's look at the war a little bit and what's happening, because we're not getting a lot of coverage right now.

Sure.

With the world's attention having turned toward the Middle east, we're not getting a lot of news about Ukraine. Reuters reported that Vladimir Putin said on Saturday that he thought the Ukraine war was coming to an end.And those remarks came just hours after he had vowed victory in Ukraine at Moscow's most scaled back Victory day parade in years.Was the victory parade scaled back, you suppose, because everybody was at the front or they were afraid about Ukrainian drones coming in and bombing them?

That was their argument that I read that they were concerned that Ukrainian drones would be targeting, diving in on military hardware, which is their usual big show during the May Day parade. I mean, their May Day parades are there. Big fantastic.

Which Trump tried to replicate last year. Oh, God.

On his birthday. That's right.

So humiliating. So. So you think he's spread too thin.

The situation in Russia? If this was a democratic regime, they would be facing catastrophe and ruin yesterday.Authoritarian regimes handle criticism and difficulties in a whole different manner. So currently he is facing a labor shortage. Part of that is because he's got over a million casualties since February 2022, when he went full out.Because you understand the war really started in Febr of 2014 when Ukrainians en masse came out on the public square, the Maidan in Kyiv in January. Ukrainian winters are nothing to joke about.And they ousted the Russian puppet, Yanukovych, who now has a nice mansion in Moscow with his huge gold bread loaf. I don't know if you saw any of the videos. Did you feel of Yanukov?

No, I didn't see that.

Yeah. When Yanukovych left at midnight with a plane load of gold bars and whatever he could stuff, his private residence in Kyiv became very public.They opened the gates so you could see his private zoo. You could see his many exotic, expensive cars. You could see his chandelier that had no taste but plenty of money behind it.And he had things like huge gold pieces in the shape of a bread loaf. On his diamond.

Very terrifyingly familiar.

Except the difference was that his was real gold.

Yes, that's true. So he's having a shortage of labor. Part of that he's staunching by getting people from Kenya, Cuba and so forth.

North Korea.

Well, we're talking soldiers. Yes, he's getting mercenaries from various places. He's also coaxing young people outside the country to come in to be factory workers.So for example, he had a program of work study for 18 to 22 year old Kenyan females that would come expecting to, yes, work a little bit, but they were going to study and they were going to get educational credentials. Well, they found themselves in a dorm and they did a lot of studying about how you manufacture drones or how you sew uniforms and so forth.For the Russian effort, some of the African countries are now saying, you know, that's going to come to an end pretty soon.

How can you sustain a million casualties, even a state the size of Russia?

By having mercenaries, by not, not doing too many mobilizations of your own people and buying mercenaries to come in.His other efforts has been over the last year to register all cell phones in the country so that he knows who's on the cell phone and where they're at.

Oh, boy.

And most recently, you may have heard about his interest in limiting social media. So he used to do this mostly in the outskirts outside of Moscow, outside the privileged Russian elite set.But recently he applied that social media dampening to Moscow and there has been a backlash.For example, a very popular social influencer, a Russian lady, Victoria Bonya, who currently lives not far from Monaco, got a real drop in her Instagram income when he did this. He gave over control of social media to that special unit of security.

Oh, that got Trump elected 2015.

And not only that, but poisoned Alexander Navalny. They're now in charge of keeping control of who's on social media and what social media says.And she did a, she did A what, an 18 minute program which reached like 13 million Russians saying, you know, the people are afraid of you, but I am not. And you seem to be out of touch with what the usual everyday Russian is facing.You know, the inflation, the interest rate out of the central bank is 13.5 or 14.5% right now. In Russia, you know, they have earned more money with the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.But Ukraine, as you were alluding to earlier, has been so incredibly creative with its drone technology.

Yeah, they're being called a drone superpower. They're exporting this technology to other countries. In Iran.

Yes. Ten year deal.

Yeah. So.Which we sort of turned our nose up at as a country to our disadvantage because now we're sending multimillion dollar missiles to knock out $30,000 drones. It's like the equation is changing so rapidly, we're depleting our supplies.And now Trump wants to raise the budget for the military to $1.5 trillion.

May I suggest, however, that part of the reasoning behind it is because of the warmongering manufacturers of the armaments.

Yeah.

It's still a dollar. It's a dollar game. And one other thing. You're a rheumatologist. I'm a rumor.

You stole my line.

Oh, I did. One of the rumors I've heard is that Putin is so paranoid right now that he's living in a bunker.

Have you heard that he's had some poisoning attempts and he has increased his security immensely. For example, his staffers cannot use a phone that has Internet access.Many of his generals and senior advisors are having security cameras put into their residences, their private residences, so he can keep track of what they're doing, where they're going, et cetera. And yes, I have heard that he's spending a lot of his time in bunker territory.

And of course, our president wants to build a big, beautiful bunker underneath his big, beautiful ballroom. All right? And this is the parallel between the Soviets and the Trump administration. It's surprisingly similar.

You look at what's happened since Trump came back to power and these big decisions to upend NATO, to turn their back on Ukraine, to allow Russia to sell more oil. Now, who's benefiting most from Trump's policies besides his crooked cronies? Putin.And they do believe in the long game in terms of cultivating assets. And in the 90s, when Trump had destroyed so many businesses, the banks in New York wouldn't give him any money.And the only place they could get money was Russia. And he was laundering lots of money through his condos and Trump Tower.He was teaming up with Russian oligarchs to build the Trump SoHo in downtown New York. Is Trump an asset?

It is hard not to feel that way, even in 2016. It is my understanding that he got rid of any support for Ukraine on the Republican platform in his presidential election.And for six months, his supposedly unpaid campaign manager was a consultant to all the Russian oligarchs.

Manafort.

Manafort. Exactly. Exactly.And the investigation that was published did not establish a direct communication between Trump and the Kremlin, but it definitely recognized that there was Russian influencers and Propaganda misinformation in the Trump campaign line.

After Trump had his falling out with Epstein, Epstein sought out the Kremlin. And Epstein's sex crimes. He recorded everything. We know that.

Yeah.

So did he give Putin video? There seems to be suspicious behavior towards Putin from Trump.Remember in the first term when he had the two Russians come into the Oval Office and he expelled all the American, the US People?

Lavrov was there.

When Putin speaks with Trump personally, they get everybody out. That whole charade up in Alaska recently, it's like, what's going on?

No translations.

What's going on here?

So, Phil, we have a word for this, don't we? It's called compramat.

Compramat, that's right, yes. Can you explain what it means?

In other words, compromising material, Correct?

That's right. Compromising material. Compromise, blackmail.

In our remaining minutes, let's be somewhat hopeful here. Vis a vis the war, Russia appears to be losing battlefield momentum. This is another excellent article in the Guardian.Russian casualties may exceed replacements. Ukraine said its military had killed or wounded about 35,000 Russian soldiers in a month in March and April, overwhelmingly from drone strikes.Ukrainian refinery attacks against Russia have slashed export volumes of oil. Daily Exports fell from 5.2 million barrels a day to 3.5 million barrels, which exposes Russia to a fall in oil prices. Not right now.Because of Trump's handiwork in the Middle east. He's doing quite well. But if the strait does open, then they're going to have a real financial issue.Despite House Resolution 6856 that loosened the sanctions on Russia oil and Ukraine is becoming a missile and drone superpower. The arrival of cheap interceptors on the front line in the early spring has given Ukraine fresh hope.It can knock out all but the fastest Russian missiles, the hypersonic missiles. As the Patriot missile stocks become scarce that we gave them.Ukraine said its interceptors shot down 33,000 drones during March, double the month before. And it has begun to export the technology to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the uae, which are all countries that have been attacked by Iran in the spring.But the impact of a drone war on children, on civilians in Ukraine, this is a new form of warfare. These drones are cheap and plentiful to kill individual soldiers. What do you know about all of this from your perspective, Olga?

Well, we all are quite aware that the drone technology has really changed the whole dynamic of modern warfare. The Russians are using drones to hunt people down.In fact, the Wall Street Journal had an article about Russian drones hunting down civilians in Kharkiv, which is in Eastern Ukraine. And then when they get a, quote, unquote successful strike, they posted it on their Russian social media.The Ukrainians, perhaps even motivated by the fact that they could see dwindling support from America, got extra creative and have now an incredible juggernaut of production internally of drones. And in fact, in April, that was the first month in the last two years that Russia experienced a negative loss of territory.Ukraine gained territory last month, and some of their strikes, for the first time are acquiring Russian positions with unmanned drones.

What's your feeling about this? Is the tide turning?

It's very early to say, because, as I say, the controls on a leader in an autocratic country, especially such as Putin's country, where the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church calls Putin's leadership a, quote, miracle from God and exhorts Russian soldiers, Russian young people, to join the army. Because this is a religious mission. This is a mission of spiritual renewal and fighting against the evil forces.

The external threat.

Yes.

Works every time.

Isn't it happening in the Trump administration?

Everywhere. What about Chernobyl? That's in Ukraine.

It is in Ukraine. And the Kremlin response to Chernobyl was one of the things that brought about the dissolution of the Soviet Union.Again, Ukraine was feeling the sense that it was not important. Days went on of radioactive exposure. You know, some people didn't survive that.

It blew east over Europe as well.

Blew east over Europe, Exactly.All of that exposure, I think that was one of the things that started galvanizing the dissolution of the Soviet Union, so that in 1991, just what, four years perhaps after Chernobyl, Ukraine had a referendum about, do we stay with Russia as the Soviet Union itself is falling apart, or do we become our own country? Every single.We call them states in America, they call them oblasts in Ukraine, every single oblast, including Donetsk and Luhansk, which are now occupied, and Crimea. The majority of the voters in each one of those parts said, no, we are Ukraine. We are a separate country.

And then there's also the largest nuclear power plant in the world.

Is that. Yes. Which is now Russian occupied.

It's Russian occupied. How dangerous is this?

Very dangerous. Because the stress those people are working under.

They're occupied.

Yes, exactly.

And trapped.

Exactly.

Okay, so there's a risk there to the whole world.

Exactly.

Lastly, the Ukrainian exile community in Los Angeles, we've met some, we helped some that came in initially, came over the Mexican border. They're doing very well, the family we know of. How is the exile community holding up? And are they vulnerable to ICE now?

Very, very vulnerable.

Is ICE rounding up Ukrainians.

There is no one place to round up Ukrainians.But most of the Ukrainian refugees that have come into the United States came under Uniting for Ukraine and that humanitarian protection status is expired.And so there is no adaption resolution, though we hope that Congress will vote for Resolution 3104, which would give the Ukrainian refugees an adjustment so that there could be an extension of their stay here under protected status. But that has not yet come.

Another reason for people who want to help to get in touch with the Ukrainian Cultural center and see what they can do to help.

Yes.

Olga Popol, thank you so much. It's such a pleasure to have you. Thank you for taking time for your incredibly busy schedule to come to our show and explain what's happening.Olga Popol, president of the Southern California Holodomar Genocide Committee. And you are still fighting the fight on behalf of Ukrainians and thank you with many others.

Thank you so much.

And we wish you all the best and we hope for a positive outcome.

I do as well.

Thanks for listening. I'm Ted Bonnitt.

I'm Phil Proctor.

We'll talk to you next week. Take care.