Zhirinovsky the Terrible: Veteran Politician Explain Why He Would Be a Stronger Leader of Russia

- Today, the CEC has officially launched the presidential campaign. From this day forth, the candidates for candidates can become official candidates. Here is one of the veterans of the Russian political battles, Vladimir Volfovich Zhirinovsky, good evening! Before we start our conversation…

- Mr. Zhirinovsky, we weren't expecting it from you. Right this way, please. What we mean is that 30 minutes before the show, you posted on Telegram, and we didn't even know you had an account. Telegram is so trendy nowadays. So, you posted this statement. Let's read it together with our viewers.

"I'm more democratic than Putin, and I won't destroy our country like Navalny or Sobchak. I'll free Russia from the nasty communist legacy. I will conduct a historic reconciliation of Tsarist, Soviet, and modern Russia so that we stop dividing our past and present. We're a single nation, a single land, a single history, with good and bad alike".

 

- Do you approve of that?

- Yes. I said it today, and I had said it before.

- So you have a Telegram account, that's official? How do you even find time to do all that. Previously, you mentioned all other candidates are irrelevant, and only you and Putin matter.

- And the Kremlin ones.

- Well, it's all clear about Putin. Please, tell us, if you're going to compete with him, what makes you better than Putin?

- You've just shown the footage of our officers being humiliated, and tomorrow they're getting recalled. I'll never allow such a thing. They did the same thing in Georgia. Our units were stationed in different regions of Georgia, they were harassed by the Georgian police, the soldiers were thrown on the street. They were told to "get down on the ground." They searched them, stole their rations, humiliated them in every possible way, insulted them, interfered with them. It lasted for several years.

Finally, we withdrew our military, and then the war broke out. Georgia had previously attacked our peacekeepers multiple times. As soon as the Georgian militants slaughtered our first peacekeeper, I mean, they cut his head off at the Georgian-Abkhaz border... I would have invaded Georgia right away! Instantly! Saakashvili would have been arrested and Georgia occupied. I would have ended it quickly. No full-scale war. We didn't do this. We lost a hundred peacekeepers. A hundred! It was at the Georgian-Abkhaz border. Why did our Russian boys have to die? From privates to officers.

- That was the beginning of the war.

- That was in the last years. And then they started directly firing at us in August. They withdrew the Georgian peacekeepers. That was the first sign that they were up to something. We weren't responding. Most of our peacekeepers died while our army was crossing the Caucasus. They shelled Tskhinvali. We responded too late, too slowly, and too weakly. We should have punished them preemptively. Our government didn't use the measures that I mentioned for fear of being charged with something.

-That seems a bit extreme, no? Mr. Zhirinovsky!

- What?

- Your measures are a bit extreme.

- Yes, they are. Bold. Hard. But then, nobody will insult and humiliate us. Georgia would have been dealt with. Ukraine. On the night of February 22, Yanukovych calls me in the Kremlin. "What should I do? They'll kill me." Says he's being hunted. I say: "Go to Kharkov. I'll send a division there. from the Southern Military District."

- "In the Kremlin" is meant hypothetically, I mean, if you were the president. Let's point that out.

- Yes. The situation would have been different. Yanukovych would have stayed. Kiev's regime wouldn't have a chance to form. It was absolutely illegal. They had no right to do anything on February 23. Ukraine would have had their legitimate president—Yanukovych. Kharkov. From Kharkov, I would have helped him return to Kiev. And now, we're in trouble. They're trying to sabotage our Olympics. I would have warned them: "If you try to sabotage the Olympics, we will take certain measures to end this mess, this humiliation of our athletes."

- What kind of measures? Sometimes, you sound like North Korea.

- How so?

- You're threatening them.

- I wanted to occupy Georgia and liberate Ukraine from Kiev's regime. Isn't that enough? No one has ever done this. These are my ideas. Even Brezhnev was afraid to do this.

- Mr. Zhirinovsky, there would have been a lot of casualties. People would have protested.

- What casualties? Where? When? They all fled from Tbilisi.

- There's no public support.

- Who told you that? The Russians were looking forward to seeing our tanks. They would have greeted us with flowers. They were counting on us and we abandoned them. Today, Ukraine's SBU has turned into a Gestapo, and even worse. They are torturing every Russian they can capture, as soon as they recognize their speech or see their passport, they start messing with them, bullying them. They have reported it, it's always on TV. More than 10,000 have been killed. Can you imagine that?

The US would have destroyed Ukraine if three American soldiers had died, or five, or ten, or a thousand. 10,000 Russians were murdered and our president hasn't said a word. "Oh, Russians died, who cares." What have we done? We've ignored the tragedy of the Russians in the west of Ukraine. Talerhof, a concentration camp. At the beginning of WWI they kept Russian prisoners there. For two years, without any barracks, under snowfalls and the scorching sun, our people were dying in those wastelands. Hungarian Uhlans used to tie Russian peasants to their horses and drag them four kilometers to the next village. We ignored that.

Ukraine is being Ukranized by the communists. There was a VKPb decree, and a decree of the Ukrainian Communist Party, that decreed the Ukrainization of the Russian population. It took place between 1920 and 1939. They made Russians say they're Ukrainians. If you want to get hired, apart from your degree you need to submit a certificate that you completed "Ukrainology" courses, meaning you've been brainwashed, became a Ukrainian. Russian delegates were shot in the parliament of Vienna. Did we respond? We ignored everything and only supplied Ukraine with communists. If anything was written about it then, nobody would have been surprised with what's going on in Ukraine. Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev created Ukraine.

It had nothing, only Kiev and Zhitomir. It had one third of its current territory. We gave them huge territories. Why?

- A small remark, if I might. You've frequently mentioned the word "Russians." Who are those Russians? If…

- The ethnic Russians that have been living in Kievan Rus since the dawn of times that identify as Russians. They might live in Transcarpathia or Lvov. There was a patriotic party called the Union of Russian People. There were more Russian patriots than in St. Petersburg. There, in Lvov, which is now a center of anti-Russian nationalism. They wanted to conquer the western regions of the Russian Empire. That's why they were dividing the church. Today, hundreds of Russian Orthodox churches have been occupied.

I would have sent our airborne troops there the moment they captured the first one. We do nothing! Oh, by all means, let them capture the churches, beat the believers, murder the priests. Come on! Priests are being murdered! It's not the Middle Ages! Even Hitler opened new churches and never killed a single priest. And they are killing them right in front of us. We're not responding to this humiliation. We're recalling our officers. You know what that means? Moldova is recalling its ambassador. It's preparing a provocation.

- We received the information today.

- It's all a huge provocation. We must begin to act. Look, we're still being blamed for WWII. Either we didn't participate or we were the aggressors. If Stalin had attacked on June 20, 1941, the war would have been on Polish territory. We're always retreating. The Tsar never retreated. He always advanced. He got involved in WWI. OK, the Russian Empire collapsed. Brezhnev got involved in Afghanistan. The USSR collapsed.

Mistakes! We were constantly making mistakes. But that's our past, we can judge neither the tsars nor the Soviet leaders. But today, the truth must be spoken. We must take tough and resolute action. We must not excuse anyone who attacks Russia.

- We asked you, what makes you different from Putin? What makes you better? So you are our radical, aggressive, and fearless presidential candidate?

- The tough one. Putin is a cello. Remember, he's got a friend in St. Petersburg, I've forgotten the name.

- Raldogin.

- Raldygin?

- Raldogin.

- Our orchestra is playing in Palmyra.

- Raldogin.

- No, the conductor.

- Gergiev.

- Ye! Violins and cellos. I'm the drum! I'll make them tremble in fear. Tanks, jets, airborne troops—everything.

- Well, first there were the troops and then violins and cellos.

- Let them quake. They're cowards. Europe will be done in 23 hours. No one will dare to say anything.

- Why do you need this?

- To make them give our trillion dollars back. That's our money. Our people's money. They won't mess with us. Nord Stream, build as many as we want. Make it four pipelines!! South Stream — five pipelines! Turkey shot down our airplane? Bomb their air force! Destroy ten of their airplanes. Ten! Take out all of their air bases! In five minutes, our missiles will destroy everything. It's fine, we can do without their tomatoes.