FACT-CHECK: Did America’s Most Popular Podcaster Joe Rogan Just Parrot a Bunch of Kremlin Propaganda?

Ukrainian heavyweight boxer Wladimir Klitschko on Sunday called out hugely popular entertainer and commentator Joe Rogan for, Klitschko said, broadcasting Kremlin narratives and factual errors about Ukraine to America’s biggest podcast audience.

Kyiv Post fact-checkers found that, by and large, Rogan was wrong and Klitschko was right.

A martial arts enthusiast and holder of three black belts, Rogan during a Saturday broadcast of “The Joe Rogan Experience” attacked Ukraine and its President Volodymyr Zelensky for committing aggressive acts against Russia and bringing the world to the brink of a Third World War.

In a profanity-laced diatribe during a two-hour interview/chat with US entertainment industry performer and executive Scott Storch, Rogan tore into Zelensky for, in Rogan’s view, provoking Russia by ordering missile strikes against targets in Russia.

“Zelensky says Putin is terrified. F**k you man (Zelensky)! F**k you people! (Ukrainians). You f*****g people are about to start World War III! They (Russia) fired an intercontinental ballistic missile for the first time ever. It’s the first time one of those has ever been used. It’s f*****g insanity because those intercontinental ballistic missiles can have nukes on them. This one didn’t. But if it does, the whole world changes, and it changes because the military-industrial complex, and because of the money that’s going to Ukraine.”“It’s a proxy war. The whole thing is f*****g insane. Come to the negotiating table. Sit down. Work this out. Stop killing everybody,” Rogan said. He went on to ask his producers to find a CNN report praising the Ukrainian missile strike against Russia Rogan “had heard about,” but during the broadcast they didn’t locate it.

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Rogan went on to say of Ukrainian missile strikes against Russia: “Let’s f*****g calm everybody down and stop being so f*****g tribal. You’re so crazy that you think that everything the Left is doing is right because you’re on the Left. This is insanity. And for anyone that’s a Left-wing progressive person that somehow another missiles (sic) are a good thing, God d**n it. God d**n it you people. You’re out of your f*****g minds. It’s never the answer. This is craziness. Especially with Russia. God d**n! That’s the s**t that keeps me up, man.”

Rogan’s remarks about US foreign policy and the Russo-Ukrainian War were sandwiched between a discussion with Storch about a robber exhibitionist in Manhattan, and then comment that, in Rogan’s view, incoming US President Donald Trump’s leadership skills put America in a strong position for negotiating with the Taliban, China, and Russia.     

Ukrainian Wladimir Klitschko,  younger brother of Viltaly Klitschko, the undisputed world heavyweight boxing champion from 2011 to 2015, in a Sunday video posted on the platform Twitter/X hours later, took Rogan to task for, he said, repeating Russian state propaganda talking points about Ukraine.

A longtime top contender himself, Wladimir held multiple heavyweight world championship belts between 2000 and 2015. The elder brother Vitaly is the Mayor of Kyiv.

“You are repeating Russian propaganda, (in fact) Putin’s Russia is in trouble. They want to scare you and people like you. His (Putin’s) war supposed to last three days. It has lasted three year thanks to the heroism and sacrifice of us Ukrainians. So they are using the only weapon they can use: propaganda,” the younger Klitschko said.

Kyiv Post fact checks of Rogan’s points found direct contradiction of the factual record of the Russo-Ukraine War, and at times repeated Kremlin official state narratives almost verbatim.

Klitschko’s response was accurate as regards the content of Russian propaganda, but his suggestions that Russia’s warfighting effort was weakening and that its national leadership was frightened could not be proved, and that there was evidence contradicting that claim, fact-checkers found.

Rogan claim 1: The Russo-Ukrainian War is a proxy war between the US and Russia H2 Please

This is false. Russia, in 2022, invaded Ukraine with the objectives of eliminating Ukrainian independence and, by many measures, the Ukrainian people. At the time, the main US response to that invasion was not to intervene in Ukraine’s support because Biden administration leadership was sure Ukrainian resistance would collapse.

US arms support to Ukraine by value is less than by Europe, and US financial support to Ukraine is substantially less than Europe’s, so it is inaccurate to say the US is fighting a nuclear superpower proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, or that the US is Ukraine’s only source of support. From the European perspective, the Russian invasion of a neutral country and the ignition of a major war on NATO’s eastern flank is an existential security threat.

Rogan claim 2: Ukraine is about to start World War III

This is demonstrably false and repeats almost word-for-word Kremlin warnings that continued Ukrainian resistance to Russian invasion could lead to a nuclear exchange initiated by Russia.

From the point of view of logical cause and effect, and also per classic international law about a nation’s right to self-defense, Russia initiated hostilities. Were Russia to use an atomic weapon against Ukraine – it would be a Russian, not a Ukrainian decision to employ that nuclear device.

Rogan claim 3: The Western military-industrial complex is responsible for the Russo-Ukraine War

The war started when Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24 2022. It is possible to debate why the Kremlin leadership made that decision, but in any case, it clearly wasn’t because major American arms manufacturers like Raytheon or Boeing put the Russian government up to it.

Rogan claim 4: Russia just launched the first ICBM fired in anger ever

This is technically and operationally false. On Saturday, based on debris found by Ukrainian emergency response teams searching the impact site, a Russian missile, with a range well short of cross-oceanic reach, struck a mixed residential-industrial area of Dnipro. By definition, the missile was not an ICBM, but an IRBM, an Intermediate Range Ballistic missile. 

The Russo-Ukraine War has seen Ukraine launch approximately 100 of its own IRBMs, and about 50 US-donated IRBMs. Russia, by Ukrainian counts, in a systematic bombardment of Ukrainian homes and businesses since Fall 2022, when the bombardment campaign was kicked off, has launched more than 11,000 medium- or long-range missiles at targets in Ukraine, of which around 3,000 were ballistic missiles. 

Rogan claim 5: The Russo-Ukraine war can be ended by both sides “working it out”

This is a grossly simplified and, by many measures, an absurdly optimistic analysis of a hugely complicated subject.

Any negotiated end to fighting in the Russo-Ukraine War would require not only a cessation of actual hostilities, but resolution of responsibility, and potentially material compensation for an estimated half-trillion dollars’ of property damage, the forced migration of 3-4 million Ukrainians, and the death or injury of, probably, at least 200,000 Ukrainians. Were any peace deal to encompass transfers of sovereign territory, or security commitments, or mandated force levels, or a third-nation presence, negotiations would become correspondingly more complicated.

Rogan claim 6: Ukrainian missile strikes against Russia are “never the answer”

As noted, Russia has fired 11,000+ missiles at Ukraine. Rogan is arguing Ukraine should not defend itself by the same means, which is unreasonable assuming Ukraine and Ukrainians have the right to exist.

 Moreover, Ukrainian missile strikes against Russia have been effective, repeatedly.

One of the best-known successes scored by Ukrainian missile gunners was against Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, which came under Ukrainian missile fires early in the war and since then has repeatedly lost warships. Currently, about one out of three of the warships the Russian navy deployed to the Black Sea at the outset of the war is now on the bottom of the Black Sea, and by deadweight tonnage more than half have been sunk or destroyed. In October 2023 the Russian navy abandoned its home base in Sevastopol, in the occupied Crimean Peninsula, because of the threat of continuing Ukrainian missile strikes.

Three days before Rogan attacked Ukraine for dragging the world closer to World War III, Ukrainian air force bombers launched 10-12 missiles at a Russian army headquarters in Russia’s Kursk region. Subsequent satellite overflight imagery and Ukrainian intelligence estimates indicated the missile strikes demolished the headquarters, killed a senior Russian general and dozens of his staff. According to unconfirmed reports, a North Korean general present at the scene was badly injured as well. Speculative reports have placed the number of North Korean rank and file killed in the strikes at 4-500.