One clip circulating recently, purportedly sourced from a late 1990s Russian TV show, includes a debate that seems to describe a now painfully familiar plot involving the two neighboring countries.

But where and when was the show recorded, and did it really hit the nail on the head with regard to Russia’s conflict with Ukraine?

The Claim

On October 18, 2022, a Twitter user shared a short clip in Russian, featuring three men discussing a potential conflict with NATO, which received thousands of interactions.

The debate appears to include some strikingly prescient analysis, including Ukraine’s future efforts to join NATO, Russia potentially seeing this as a “red line” that will eventually lead to “war,” and the West’s eventual involvement.

The presenter speculates that the U.S. could get drawn into the conflict, which would likely involve China too.

“I know that in some U.S. academy they held a drill, the year was 2025, and [the] hypothetical scenario is America is at war with Russia and China,” the show’s host claims. “And the reason was that Ukraine began a war with Russia, on the side of NATO.”

“There is a group of people in the U.S. who support Ukraine joining NATO for the purposes of creating a conflict, and turn Ukraine into a buffer state,” one of the pundits then chimes in.

The video, which was succinctly captioned “1997 [Russian] TV Show”, received more than 7,500 views just on this post, and was also shared widely on Telegram and Reddit. Discussion around the clip has framed it as a prophecy or prediction that is coming to pass.

The Facts

The clip has indeed come from a Russian TV show recorded sometime in 1997.

The show’s host, Alexander Lyubimov, was a prominent TV presenter in the 1990s in Russia, with this particular scene clipped from a June 1997 episode of Odin na Odin (“One on One”), a primetime news and politics show in Russia.

The two guests featured on this episode are Leonid Kravchuk, Ukraine’s first president who at the time of recording was a Ukrainian Rada MP; and Sergey Karaganov, a Russian political expert and TV pundit.

The episode, which first aired on June 1, 1997, can be viewed in almost its entirety on the official YouTube page of VID, the production company behind the show.

Notably absent from the 25-minute YouTube video, however, is the segment from the tweeted video, which includes Lyubimov’s speculation about the Pentagon’s “war games” in preparation for a future conflict.

Given that the channel is verified as VID’s official page, it seems likely that the copyright holder itself edited the episode, though the reasons for removing that section of the discussion are unclear.

Newsweek reached out to VID and Lyubimov for comment.

Addressing the underlying narrative surrounding the clip, it is fair to say that the discussion appears to anticipate a military conflict between Russia and Ukraine. But as for other claims contained in the minute-long segment, they barely amount to a “prophecy.”

NATO’s “expansion eastwards” has historically been a huge point of contention between the West and USSR (and then Russia), effectively since the treaty’s inception.

Moscow’s claim, positing that it was promised NATO would not accept new members that it sees as part of Russia’s sphere of influence, has been widely contested.

But the possibility that Ukraine would end up being the crux point of that power struggle has always been on the cards, perhaps even inevitable, and thus amounts to simply an educated guess rather than some sort of visionary forecast.

The same is also true of the notion that Ukraine may become a “buffer” state between the East and the West, though that has not yet materialized (albeit it may in the future), experts that spoke to Newsweek have noted.

“Since the fall of the USSR, many in Russian political & intellectual circles had thought that a war between Russia and Ukraine would happen one day, hopefully not in their lifetime. Empires always end in blood… This didn’t happen at the fall of the Soviet Union, because both sides were weak; but the idea that this would occur one day, had been circulated for more than twenty years in Russia as in Ukraine. So, I don’t see there anything new or surprising,” said Stella Ghervas, Professor of Russian History at Newcastle University.

Others also noted that the narratives are not in any way new or visionary.

“The only people who think this nonsense is in any way unusual are those who weren’t paying attention during the 1990s,” Keir Giles, a senior consulting fellow of the international affairs think tank Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia Programme, told Newsweek.

“This kind of thing (NATO buffer zones, attack on Russia etc) was absolutely standard during all the time when lots of people in the West thought Russia was no longer a problem.”

Notably, in a major delineation from the narrative purported by Karaganov, Ukraine was not “on the verge” of joining NATO before Russia’s invasion.

“The only people who think [the video clip] bears any relation to what is happening today are the deranged Russian conspiracists who think Russia’s war on Ukraine was to pre-empt a Ukrainian attack on Russia, and that Ukraine wanting closer trade relations with the EU in 2013 was exactly the same as NATO making a grab for Sevastopol,” Giles concluded.

While the country is now attempting to fast-track its application (primarily as a security measure in response to the invasion itself), most experts are skeptical that it would be granted membership in the immediate future.

The next claim, made by the host, that the Pentagon had been organizing secret military exercises to simulate a potential NATO conflict with Russia or China is attributed simply to a source and is therefore mere speculation on his part. Newsweek has reached out to the Pentagon for comment.

That said, given that both countries for decades have been seen as ideological and geopolitical adversaries, such a development would hardly be surprising. Past reports indicate that these kinds of scenarios involving various actions by Russia have been played out by the U.S. military in the 1990s.

Still, Newsweek has been unable to find any evidence of the specific event purported by Lyubimov. As for the 2025 date mentioned by Lyubimov, only time will tell if the claim proves to be a hit or a miss.

Crucially, contradicting the scenario portrayed by the pundit, neither NATO nor China is yet directly involved in the conflict, though that possibility cannot be ruled out as the war escalates.

All in all, while the discussion in the clip offers insightful analysis of the status quo at the time, and where the Russia-NATO relationship may have been headed in the future, with some informed speculation added in, the only accurate “prediction” voiced by the participants, at least so far, is regarding the direct military conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

Update 10/21/22, 9:12 a.m. ET: This article was updated to include further expert comments.

The Ruling

Needs Context.

The clip from the show is real, and can indeed be traced back to a 1997 Russian politics and current affairs show. One of the participants does accurately predict that Russia will likely be engaged in a war with Ukraine, but other elements of the predicted scenario are either verifiably false, unevidenced, or yet to be tested.

FACT CHECK BY NEWSWEEK