Judging Freedom - Aaron Mate : Is Ukraine the US’s Proxy or Partner?

Episode Date: September 24, 2026

Aaron Mate : Is Ukraine the US’s Proxy or Partner?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Undeclared wars are commonplace. Pragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression with no complaints from the American people. Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government. To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected. What if sometimes to love your country you had to alter or abolish the government? Jefferson was right? What if that government is best which governs least? What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What if it is better to perish

fighting for freedom than to live as a slave? What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now? Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, September 24th, 2006. Aaron Matae will be with us in just a moment. I'm going to ask him this intriguing question. He knows such a great deal about Ukraine. Is the United States of America, excuse me, is Ukraine Ukraine America's proxy or America's partner in the war against Russia? But first, this. If you're serious about preparedness like I am, head over to prepare with a judge.com right now. Let me tell you why. Our partners over at My Patriot Supply are the experts when it comes to emergency food,

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More protein, more variety, more substantial meals when you need it most. Go to prepare with the judge.com now to take advantage of this great offer. The food is easy to prepare, packed and durable buckets, and designed to last 25 years when stored properly. This is not the time to assume you'll find out what you need later. build your 90 days of real food security this offer ends on september 30th so go now to prepare with the judge dot com Aaron welcome here my dear friend thank you again for your really skillful professional superb performance as the emce at the integrity media awards a banquet last week in Chicago i know how difficult it is to keep things moving and you did a really standout job

Before we get to your analysis on Ukraine, and you brought us a fascinating clip from President Zelensky's former spokesperson, which we'll get to in a few minutes, I need to ask you about this week at the UN. Our friend Jeffrey Sachs, Professor Sachs, has described President Trump's speech as deranged. And, of course, I draw your attention to the threat to annihilate, but invite you to. comment on on any part of the speech that you wish trump is so contemptuous of international law and the u.n. charter that he violates it in the heart of the u.n. under the u.n. charter not only is aggression illegal but the threat of aggression is illegal and that's exactly what trump did threatening to end iran's existence and prevent it from ever rebuilding again it was extraordinary and this wasn't an off-the-cuff remark that we're accustomed to from trump this was deliberate so

So his team sat down and decided to violate the UN charter inside the UN by threatening Iran with annihilation. It speaks to how rogue this government is and how their strategy of regime change in Iran suffocating its people is not working. So he just feels the need to continue to posture and look like a tough guy. And you look at his speech, there's so many falsehoods. it would take a long time to fact check, but he increased the number of Iranian dead in the crackdown that happened in January, which was used as a pretext for this regime change campaign. The numbers keep changing. Initially, Trump administration officials were saying it was 30,000 and 40,000.

I think in his speech, Trump said it was now 72,000. So the number keeps increasing. And, of course, what gets left out by Trump, and unfortunately, so much of our media, including, unfortunately, some progressive media, it's omitted that the U.S. deliberately caused those protests, that the Mossad bragged about arming rioters who attacked police forces and civilian sites across the country that never gets mentioned, and that security forces in Iran were killed

because they were facing off with armed vigilantes, armed by the Mossad, if you listen to Israeli officials, and Mike Pompeo, and, of course, all of that is omitted. And another irony here, he's lamenting this fake death toll, while meanwhile the reason what we're in this mess is because Israel was given impunity to kill way more than 72,000 people inside of Gaza. The number could be in the hundreds of thousands at this point, and we'll never know because Gaza is destroyed and Israel blocks access to equipment to clear out the rubble and from independent monitors for coming in and assessing from themselves. It's interesting that you mentioned that because the president, to Peschkin in his speech in which he threw down the gauntlet and touched the third rail

of American politics that Israel has nuclear weapons, used the 72,000 figure, the lowest figure of all the estimates we've seen, The Lancet, the British Medical Journal said it was 186,000 a year ago, so you know, by their estimate, they're counting human bodies. it's well over 200,000 after Trump finished his talk I'm going to use Joe Loria's phrase

which was truly unconscionable the talk he claimed that the United States and that would be the United States negotiators that would be Whitkoff and Kushner sat down with

Foreign Minister Arachi and his team for three hours hours, acclaimed that our colleague, Muhammad Miranda, who's in touch with the negotiators, flat out denies. Well, I do know there was some contact, actually, between the two sides. I don't know how long they sat for. But from what I've heard, there was some contact.

But the idea of a deal being reached by Donald Trump, I mean, forget. it. What he's doing now is what he's laying out, which is simply to make the Iranian people suffer. Keep U.S. soldiers in harm's way by imposing this blockade, which is aimed at preventing Iran from exporting its goods and receiving goods, and getting the population to hopefully rise up because they didn't do that the first time when he bombed their country and destroyed so much of their... That's all Trump is going to do. And so the idea, as Iran knows, in terms of economic pressure is the Trump is cause because of his war on Iran.

If you listen to the White House, they say, well, listen, it's not really our problem because we don't even rely on the energy that comes through the state of Hormuz. So they feel insulated from the costs of their own regime change war, which makes a prospect for a deal, I mean, even more unlikely. And I just don't think it's going to happen. In the wee hours of the morning today, I think the opinion came out about 2.30 in the morning. I saw it when I got up at four, Judge Timothy Kelly of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, who was nominated to the bench by President Trump, I think it

might have been in his first term, ordered that the press passes for CNN, MS now, and Politico that had been physically taken by Secret Service at the orders of the White House immediately, rarely do you see that word in an order? In the thousands of orders that I signed as a judge, I don't think I ever use the word immediately because it takes some time for the order to be signed and certified and in the hands of the person who's ordered. Nevertheless, Judge Kelly ordered that the press passes be served immediately.

As you and I are taping this, it's 10-10 on Thursday morning. They still don't have their passes. They were still barred access to the White House this morning. Does that surprise you, Aaron? No, of course, not. I mean, this is an authoritarian administration that only wants pure sick offense asking questions inside these news conferences.

You know, I will say it's hard for me to have sympathy for some of these outlets. MS Now was the biggest purveyor of Russiagate propaganda. It was so derelict in Trump's first term. Their coverage was truly, truly awful. So it's hard for me to have sympathy and to treat some of these people as like, as journalists of colleagues, because I do think there is a lot of propaganda that comes out on these networks.

And Trump, in his first term, was the target of it. I mean, the whole Russia-Gate thing was such a obvious scam, and the media was so derelict in covering it. But, and that fed this need for revenge from Trump. He wants retribution, and he's taking it out in a really, you know, obviously unconstitutional, extreme way that I would never defend. But I just want to point out that all these outlets that are now crying foul, there's been no self-reflection on how derelict their own role has been and how they've taken part to polarizing the country by accusing one half of the country of being basically controlled by Russia. That's what the argument was in Trump's first term. And also, none of these outlets had any sympathy or solidarity with Julian Assange, the real target of an attack by the Trump administration on press freedom. You know, Judge Kelly had two tools available to him.

First Amendment because this was a decision made by the White House based upon the evaluation of the content of someone else's speech, absolutely prohibited by the First Amendment, and the Fifth Amendment, because this was a denial of a privilege without due process. No rules were set down, no hearing was held, no charges were filed. He chose the lesser of the two, which is what almost all judges would do when you have more than one way to bring about the end result, you choose the less grandiose way. If I had been Judge Kellia would have written a treatise on the First Amendment, but he did follow the general rules for judicial construction. Choose the lesser way. It's easier for the litigants to understand,

and it's easier for the appellate court to rule. We'll see where they go. As we go to Ukraine, which is one I want to spend some time talking to you about. I want to play this clip that you sent us this morning, which is President Zelensky's former press spokesperson, giving sort of a broad overview of the horrific harm to Ukraine by the steadfast maintenance of this war and the refusal by Zelensky to recognize the inevitable. I'm not sure what we've numbered it.

I think it's number 19, Chris. Some time ago, near events, now vice president of the United States, back then as a senator, wrote a remarkable essay in the New York Times, pointing out that the meth in Ukraine does not adapt. Data say gave many of us hope

that someone saw the world through our eyes and understood what we were living through. More than two years have passed since he wrote it, and the math still does not add up. Let us start with the Muslim question of all. How are 25 million Ukrainians, half of them pensioners, supposed to defend 500 million Europeans from 140 million Russians? Are you not ashamed? Since it gained independence in 1991, Ukraine has lost over half of its population. Then 52 million people lived there.

Today, even by the most optimistic estimates, that figures around 25 million and the decline is accelerating. Nearly half the population are pensioners, the birth rate is catastrophically low and the war keeps taking lives and driving away those who simply want to live. Last year alone, almost three times as many people died as were born and in the first half of 2026 the things got worse, four times as many people die as were born. Up to that, roughly 300,000 only official immigrants and the real figure is surely far high. And by conservative estimates, Ukraine is losing more than 600,000 people every year. At that rate, within 10 years, the population could fall far with low 20,000.

These are catastrophic numbers. The war has made Ukraine a place where life and a hopeful future feel increasingly impossible. This is simple arithmetic. Arithmetic that shows my country vanishing before your eyes to the warm applause offered to a man on a red carpet. a man now in his eighth year in power, who always finds a new reason why the war cannot be stopped just yet. Much to unpack here, but I want to start with big picture.

What do we know about the nature and extent of U.S. intel and military involvement that would allow you an expert on Ukraine, because of all extraordinary research and writing you've done, to answer the big picture question, is Ukraine America's proxy or America's partner in this war? Oh, well, it's absolutely a proxy. We've learned in the year since Russia invaded that the CIA built at least 10 bases inside of Ukraine in the years after the Maidan coup, that the CIA essentially rebuilt one of Ukraine's main intelligence agencies from scratch to ensure that it was under full control,

that the head of Ukrainian military intelligence, who's now a top aide to Zelensky, was essentially a CIA asset that when he was wounded years ago, he was flown to the U.S. and treated in a U.S. military hospital. That's how much of a U.S. asset he is. And there's so many examples. And by contrast, the Ukrainian public, from the point of view of Washington, has been something to overcome.

I mean, 2014, overthrowing a democratically elected president, who had the support, if you believe, U.S. polls of half the country and was still popular among a plurality of Ukrainian citizens. There are cables from even before the Maydan coup where U.S. officials acknowledge that Ukrainian public opinion is the main obstacle to Ukraine joining NATO. And rather than saying, let's respect Ukrainian public opinion, their response was, we need to ramp up our propaganda efforts inside of Ukraine. And there's one in which Victoria Newland advises their colleagues to essentially treat NATO as a four-letter word. Like don't say NATO so overtly, but still pursue NATO integration quietly because it was so unpopular among the Ukrainian people. And when their propaganda campaigns didn't work, the next best step was to back the overthrow of the democratically elected president, Yanukovych, who was trying to keep Ukraine neutral in line with the majority of Ukrainian public opinion and its declaration of state sovereignty.

So Ukrainian people have always been treated, not as partners, but as an obstacle. And it's that process that has let the U.S. turn Ukraine into a proxy. And now we can see the results, as just laid out there by Yulia Mendel, Zelensky's former spokesperson, exactly by the way what John Mearsheimer predicted more than a decade ago when he said that if Ukraine continues on this current path of being a U.S. proxy, Ukraine is going to get wrecked. Do we know how many Americans, how many Europeans, how many officials of NATO have been killed? We have strong reason to believe that American, that the bodies of dead Americans were in coffins and placed on the cargo plane of CIA director John Ratcliffe. That would mean the Russians swept up these dead bodies who they killed.

embalmed them, put them in coffins, and notified the Americans you can come and get them. Do we know how many people have died from the West? I have no idea. That's not something I've looked into. And, you know, I kind of avoid speculation like that. What I do know is a lot of Ukrainians have died. And if you listen to Julian Mandel, she was delivering those remarks to the European Parliament remotely because she was supposed to speak there in person.

But because Zelensky put sanctions on her, when she showed up for her schedule remarks, she was barred from coming in. So someone who served Ukraine, who was Olenski's top spokesperson, is trying to share her concerns about this war that's destroying her country, couldn't even speak before the European Parliament. And that's why she had to deliver it remotely over her computer. And what she's saying there, the world, at least Ukraine's so-called allies, don't want to hear. I mean, imagine it's a former Russian spokesperson. It's spoken about Putin in the way that Yulia Mendel speaks about Zelensky, that he's leading her country to destruction as he's getting applause on red carpets around the world. Imagine if a former Russian spokesperson had said that.

That spokesperson would be on the front pages of every single major newspaper. Does anybody here pay attention to Yulia Mendel despite her insider experience and her dire warnings for her country that everyone here is supposed to care about? No, it's absolutely shameful. And it underscores a point that so many of your guests have made over the years, but you're not allowed to articulate this elsewhere, which is that those who claim to be defending Ukraine and saving its future are the ones presiding over its destruction. Right.

Here's President Zelenskyy, steadfast or crazy, depending on how you want to look at it. As ever, yesterday at the UN, we need more. more, more, more weaponry from the West. Chris cut number 13. Even the richest countries in the world can't find enough missile interceptors. Current production is simply not enough. And even those who spent years building up interceptor stocks have already used a large part of them. Unfortunately, this is the reality even in the Gulf where countries really worked to build strong anti-ballistic system.

anti-ballistic defense. So we need a new program. We need Freya join these common efforts. And yes, sometimes it may seem that Ukraine is focused, focused only on war because we speak about weapons. We speak about defense and sanctions against the aggressor. But Ukrainians did not choose this war. We choose not to die, not to lose our country, our families, not. not to lose our independence, our freedom. I think he is correct when he said Ukrainians did not choose this war. He did after being bamboozled by Boris Johnson and Joe Biden. Yeah, and even before that, I mean, the gap between his public image that's been cultivated for him here in the U.S. and the reality, it's so unbelievably wide.

He was told early on by the Biden administration that you're not getting into this. NATO. But publicly we're not going to say that because we're going to leave the door open because it was seen inside Washington as this bit it would be such a humiliation if they dare to acknowledge that Russia has security interests and that Russia is entitled to a sphere of influence. Unlike the U.S. which can have a sphere of influence everywhere, Russia can't even have a sphere of influence in its own, in its own neighborhood, including in a country where large swast of it used to be a part of Russia and millions of people identified with Russia. No, you can't possibly have any recognition of Russian interests there.

And NATO, despite being unpopular in Ukraine, must be allowed to pretend that it's expanding into there. So Zelensky let himself be used. And then, as you said, after his own officials negotiated a peace deal with Russia, he listened to the U.S. and the U.K. and walked away. And that was back then Joe Biden was saying, as much as it takes for as long as it takes, now Joe Biden's off the scene. And Zelenskyy's reduced to appearing before the U.N.

and pleading for more aid. And he says that Ukrainians choose not to die. He's choosing to send Ukrainians off to die. And Ukrainians are so resistant to that that we can see now every single day, new footage of Ukrainians resisting being kidnapped by Zelensky's forces. Ukrainian is resisting being kidnapped, meaning young men kidnapped, put into the military with no effective trading and sent to the front lines. Young working class men, because it's not people who are well connected,

who are part of the elite who are being sent off to die. his young working class people, including in ultra-nationalist strongholds like Leviv, which was always the heart of the movement in Ukraine that refused any kind of accommodation with Russia. Even there, you've had massive crowds resisting these kidnappings. And Zelensky is presiding over this. Still in establishment media, we don't have an accurate picture here because proxy war propaganda is so strong. But all this means Ukraine's continued destruction. And just recently, you know, about a month ago, you were still hearing people on CNN saying that Ukraine's winning the war because they managed to have some dramatic visuals of some things being blown up inside of Russia like the equivalent of Amazon, some warehouses.

Meanwhile, Ukraine is in dire straits. They're not begging for a ceasefire. And Ukraine just announced they didn't, they're $27 billion short on their budget. And it's Europe that will have to foot the bill because Trump, while he's happy to keep, you know, selling well, weapons, he's not going to fund them anymore. So what an utter disaster foremost for Ukrainians, but also for the Europeans where this war continues to be fought and is causing so much havoc. Larry Johnson, Scott Ritter, Professor Amir Shimer, Colonel McGregor, have all said the same thing about the coming winter. There's woefully inadequate energy to, uh,

heat homes and buildings this winter in Kyiv. Yes. And you know, if you look at when Russia started targeting energy infrastructure, which of course I oppose, I mean, it is collective punishment. But if you look at when Russia did it, it starts in mid-October, 2022, not February 2022 when Russia invades, but, you know, nearly 10 months later, October 2020. And what happened then? Why did Russia start targeting them? That was after Ukraine hit the Kerch Bridge that connects

Russia to Crimea, which is a major, you know, infrastructure project. And also the Nord Stream 2 pipeline was bombed. Right, right. So if you look at the ICE. And Biden boasting about it. And Biden boasting about it. And also, and after Ukraine walked away from the Istanbul talks. So it was only after all these events, Ukraine walking away from diplomacy, Ukraine attacking the Kerch Bridge. And somebody, whether it's the CIA or it's Ukrainian intelligence or both blowing up one of the biggest infrastructure projects for energy in the world, it's only then that Russia launches this campaign. And even then, Russia was saying we're doing this to force Ukraine to the negotiating table. Even Ukrainian officials admitted this, that they're trying to get us to negotiate.

That was Russia's aim here. So collective punishment is still illegal, but it's clear what Russia was trying to do. and Ukraine, under Zelensky's rule, has been willing to countenance all this because, you know, Zelensky will always have power no matter what. He has generators. He's fine. It's his people who have to be subjected to the consequences of his own decisions. Aaron Monta, great analysis, as always, my dear friend. And thank you again for last Thursday. Thanks for accommodating my schedule this morning. All the best to you. See you soon. Huge as well. Thank you. Thank you. Coming up next, if you're watching us live in 34 minutes,

at 11 o'clock this morning on all of this, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, at two this afternoon on all of this, particularly an analysis of what Presidents Trump and Zelensky told the UN, the golden boy, Max Blumenthal. Judge Napolitano for judging for you.