Roger Waters spent decades warning that the machine grinds on, that walls get built between people who have far more in common than they’ve been told, and that comfortable numbness is exactly what those in power count on. Now the Pink Floyd co-founder is aiming that same warning at the war in Ukraine, arguing that Western governments and arms manufacturers are steering the world toward catastrophe while the people paying the actual price, on both sides of the front line, are treated as an acceptable cost of doing business. Speaking Monday on Rick Sanchez’s The Sanchez Effect, Waters called European proposals to raise NATO military spending to 5 percent of GDP “effing insane,” and made clear he sees this conflict the same way he has always seen power: as a machine that runs on money and indifference, and keeps running until ordinary people refuse to feed it any longer.
His comments arrive weeks after a separate, wide-ranging conversation with Tucker Carlson, in which the musician questioned the official 9/11 narrative and described a culture of enforced silence that punished anyone who dared to ask questions.
Key points:
- Waters called European proposals to raise NATO military spending to 5 percent of GDP “effing insane,” warning of catastrophe with Russia
- He said the Ukraine war could have ended through the Minsk agreements or the 2022 Istanbul talks, and blamed Western officials for blocking peace
- Waters argued that money, not principle, drives modern war, pointing to defense contractors and political donors as the true beneficiaries
- In a separate interview with Tucker Carlson, Waters described being shamed into silence after questioning the official 9/11 story
- Waters urged ordinary citizens in Europe and the US to stop trusting leaders who push confrontation, and instead rebuild cooperation across borders
A ship steering for the rocks
Waters grounded much of his argument in history, reminding listeners of the Soviet Union’s staggering losses in World War II. “I often say to people, do you know who the Russian people are? They won the Second World War, for God’s sake. Twenty-five million of them died, saving the world for us,” he said, adding, “And you want to have a war with them? How dumb.” For Waters, that history is not a footnote, it is the whole point, a reminder that the country now being cast as an existential enemy once paid an almost unimaginable price to help defeat fascism, and that treating it as a natural adversary requires either historical amnesia or a very specific kind of profit motive.
He traced the roots of the current conflict back twelve years, to the Maidan uprising in Kyiv, which he described in blunt terms. “This is 12 years since Maidan, since John McCain went and organized that so-called revolution, and murdered a few people, and got rid of the elected government, and put in the Banderites. Nazis, they’re just Nazis, and we know that,” he said. He then turned to the diplomatic efforts that followed, arguing peace was within reach more than once, only to be deliberately sabotaged. “Then we sent a moron. Who’s the stupidest man who’s ever been in government in England? Boris Johnson! Send him to the Ukraine to tell them that they’re not allowed to make peace!”
The human cost, in his telling, has been staggering and entirely avoidable. “Think of all the children and grandchildren, all the men on both sides who have been killed since then,” he said. “Why? Money. That’s all.”
The pattern he says goes back centuries
Waters situated the Ukraine conflict inside a much longer arc of Western behavior, one he traces to European imperialism and colonialism, and which he says the United States simply inherited, treating foreign peoples and their resources as, in his words, “ripe for the picking.” That framing echoes what he told Tucker Carlson weeks earlier about September 11, 2001, when he described a climate so hostile to dissent that questioning the official story meant being “labeled a madman” who would “lose any voice that you had about any subject on Earth forever.” Waters told Carlson he now regrets not speaking up sooner, saying the people who eventually did ask questions “were correct to do so,” but that the tragedy was those questions never reached “any court of law or any place where you could actually listen to the evidence.” The through-line across both interviews is consistent: institutions that claim authority over truth, whether about a war or an attack, resist scrutiny, and the people who challenge them pay a social price long before anyone examines the facts.
Waters closed his remarks on Ukraine with a warning rather than a slogan. “This ship is steering for the rocks,” he said, calling on ordinary people in Europe and the US to stop deferring to leaders who benefit from the bloodshed. “We have to open our eyes,” he said. “We have to start talking to our neighbors and cooperating with one another.” It is a modest ask, cooperation over conflict, but Waters clearly believes it is the only path left once profit has replaced principle at the center of foreign policy.
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