RUSH: He’s a Trojan horse, he’s a figurehead, he’s a placeholder. Joe Biden doesn’t know where he is half the time! He literally has debilitating mental acuity issues.

REPORTER: How high is the threat of a Russian invasion right now?

BIDEN: It’s very high! Very.

REPORTER: Why?

BIDEN: Because they have not… (cough) They have not moved any of their troops out; they have moved more troops in, number one. Number two, we have reason to believe that they are engaged in a false flag operation to have an excuse to go in. Every indication we have is they’re prepared to go into Ukraine, attack Ukraine. Number one. Number two, I’ve been waiting for a response to Putin for my letter that — uh, my response to him — it’s come to that Moscow embassy they’re faxing it here — not faxing, sending here — I have not read it yet. I cannot comment on it.

President Biden said that he expected President Vladimir Putin of Russia to carry out an invasion of Ukraine within “several days,” but that a diplomatic resolution was still possible. https://t.co/4j6sETYMVo pic.twitter.com/lcz6mp49CY

— The New York Times (@nytimes) February 17, 2022

BUCK: Welcome back to Clay and Buck. You heard there the words of Rush about Biden that he has “mental acuity issues,” absolutely true, and then you’re hearing today the commander-in-chief who is weighing in on the issue of whether there’s going to be a war in Ukraine, a major Russian invasion. It feels like every 12 hours, Clay, on this issue, it feels like the momentum shifts. Their troops are moving away; diplomacy’s working.

Putin’s actually been shelling and things are getting more tense. Oh, it looks like the diplomatic path is bearing fruit. This… It’s remarkable. We’ve never really seen this. Your point before, there maybe have been deadlines. To the Taliban, hand over bin Laden or we’re coming. Obviously, they didn’t hand him over, and, you know, they got what they deserved. Saddam, leave or we’re coming in. But I can’t remember a time where we’ve seen this level of invasion is imminent; actually, it’s not. Invasion is any second; actually, we don’t think so. It’s bizarre.

CLAY: Yeah, and when you do game theory, which I know you guys in the CIA did all the time.

BUCK: A lot. The CIA nerds love their game theory.

CLAY: I like game theory, too. I think it’s an awful lot of fun, and for people out there who haven’t engaged in it, you sit around and try to consider the most likely outcomes, what is gonna happen. It’s sort of like chess in the mind associated. Buck, the thing I keep coming back to that doesn’t really make any sense to me from the Russian perspective: I still don’t understand what Putin is gaining or losing other than the psychological homeland-related factors of Mother Russia needs to be powerful and he’s trying to appeal to that Russian ego based on everything kind of going into the toilet for lack of a better way to describe it, in the post-Cold War era.

So if he were on the edge of Ukraine and there was something where I could say, “Okay, he’s clearly negotiating for this,” but it seems to me like the only real benefit is that Russian psychological approval of expanding the homeland and the belief that Ukraine is a part of Russia. Do you know what I mean? It’s not a rational behavior that he seems to be engaged in, which is why trying to strategize his motivations and movements is so difficult to predict.

BUCK: You have to think about it from a Russian perspective. What’s fascinating is we don’t even… You should always know what your opponents really think. You know, in this country I think it took a while for people to realize that there were jihadists in, let’s say, Iraq who would reference battles that had occurred or reference battles that had occurred in the eighth century or the Balfour Declaration at the beginning of the twentieth century. People would say, “Wait, what? They’re doing this because of that?”

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: “There’s Sunni-Shi’a bloodshed in southern Baghdad because of what happened over a thousand years — the answer is “yes.” At least that’s the mentality in some — and in Russia, you have to remember Putin has presided over the creation of a Russian middle class that did not exist before. In fact, Russia was — the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian people were — humiliated. Now, the creation of that middle class is really just the result of the fall of the Soviet system.

CLAY: And capitalism worked.

BUCK: Yeah. Of course, then they divvied up state resources, but they do have a lot of fossil fuels and Russia does have it. It’s very rich in natural resources. So Putin does have a baseline of support within his own country. And for a lot of those people, the Russian psyche is they have been humiliated, and they feel like they have this whole NATO alliance that… Now, again, I’m not trying to say this in any way to say what Putin’s doing would be justified or make any sense.

But to mirror image their mentality, at least the people who support Putin and are around him, they’re saying, “Why should our country have been…? I’m sure you can get a Russian to say, “Imagine if someone had just taken California from you, Americans. Wouldn’t you want it back?” Now, we could say that’s crazy and everything else, but there is… You know, “irredentism” is the word. There is this desire for the regaining of lost territory and lost prestige — which, to us, may not make a lot of sense, of course.

But with their historical sense, it’s quite different. So that’s the only thing I believe you can point to here — and the resources. Ukraine is pretty mineral rich. There’s coal, there’s natural gas, there’s stuff beyond just the narrative of Kremlin and Putin glory here. So you add that all together, Clay, if they think they can steamroll the Ukrainian military in a couple of weeks with less than 10,000 casualties and flip this government and control the country, they think that’s a win.