The Tribune
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4:21 · 528K views · Mar 3, 2025
A recording of the leaked 2014 phone call between US diplomat Victoria Nuland and ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt about the future of Ukraine's government, republished by The Tribune.
HN commenters cite it as primary-source audio in geopolitical arguments about US involvement in Ukraine, favoring listening to the call over reading the transcript.
4 comments from Hacker News
I also fully support not just reading the call transcript, but also listening to the leaked call so you get Nuland's firm tone. I would reserve very skeptical judgement on the "annotations". Those weren't part of the call. Listen to: this video > No, that does not mean they have "decided" who is going to form the next government. That claim is just Russian propaganda Anyone with a rational brain who separates themselves from biases and emotions and carefully listens to the call would realize there is no propaganda involved here. Also, for better clarity of judgement, please perform a thought exercise and consider what would happen if a foreign government's members were discussing the personal choices , makeup and "talks" for members of the next American government.
> the wording is open to interpretation, but not in the case of Ukraine. Nobody considers the Ukrainians and Russians living in the Donbas as a separate ethnicity or people; not they themselves, nor anyone else. that is an unsubstantiated claim that's actually false and doesn't even preclude the right of any group of people in sufficient majority to exercise self-govern, by their mere will and manifestation, so i'm not going to even bother debunking it (again). > There was no coup. "Ukrainian MPs have voted to oust President Viktor Yanukovych and hold early presidential elections on 25 May." (BBC, 22 February 2014). that vote didn't reach the required 3/4 of the threshold required by the constitution for impeachment. the subterfuge employed to ignore that requirement was that yanukovich had allegedly relinquished his position, which actually means he had to flee the country for his life because of the threat of the nazi nationalists (armed by the us and on the loose around kiev), as did many of the 122 deputies that weren't even present in the voting. so you arm extremist groups for years, groom ngos to stirr up discontent funded by usaid and ned, then weaponize legitimate protests with violence, which then spirals out of control as the legitimate government overreacts in the crackdown, then you make huge international media fuzz about it, then you threaten the president to flee, then you hold a sham vote to impeach him, then you instate a "provisional" government you already
There's that emotional thinking again. _We_ started that war when we funded a coup there in 2013 and hand-picked[1] their rabidly anti-Russian government. We also funded and condoned their neo-Nazis, without whom none of this would work [2]. Mostly Russian-speaking Eastern Ukraine disagreed with that kind of thing. After all, it was mostly them who elected the president that we overthrew. West Ukraine started shelling east trying to subdue them, calling it an "anti-terror operation". Russia provided "lethal aid". Things escalated. The conflict did not start in 2022. Suggesting that we can just go ahead and build tactical nuke bases right next to where ~70% of Russia's population lives, and Russia should just roll over and let it happen, is idiotic and reckless. Here's John Mearsheimer telling you _exactly_ what was going to happen, in 2015: [LINK] [1] this video [2] [LINK]
For reference, John Joseph Mearsheimer (/ˈmɪərʃaɪmər/; born December 14, 1947)[3] is an American political scientist and international relations scholar. He is R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. I'll just leave the Nuland leak: this video But yeah, lol. This is russian propaganda. You can find Kissinger giving this analysis in the 90s