Judging Freedom - Col. Macgregor - Ukraine & Russia Latest

Episode Date: August 18, 2022

Colonel Macgregor would also like to discuss the following: US must arm Ukraine now, before it’s too late by Debra Cagan, https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/3605064-us-must-arm-ukraine-now-before-its-too-late/ #Ukraine #Russia #PutinSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Save $80 with code SPACE80 at Talkspace.com. hi everyone judge andrew napolitano here today is thursday august 18 2022 it's about 3 25 in the afternoon my guest today really needs no introduction to the judging freedom audience he is colonel douglas mcgreg, our go-to person on military matters, particularly with respect to Ukraine. Colonel McGregor, always a pleasure to have you here. You are a fan favorite, and I appreciate you coming on the show. Thanks. We have read recently in media reports, I have to start my question out with that because I don't know if this happened or not. I don't know if the CIA leaked it and the media picked it up without attempting to verify, or if it happened, that Ukrainian forces have been destroying Russian depots in Crimea.

Is this true? And if so, is it a big deal? Well, the first answer is that the Russians are very tight-lipped right now. They're not really telling anybody anything about it. We can confirm one explosion, and that could be any number of different things. It could be sabotage. It could have been a quadcopter that flew overhead with ammunition strapped to it or something, dropped it on some flammable substance. We really don't know, Judge. But to tell you flat out that this is important is wrong. This is not a game changer. I would judge this all to be largely irrelevant. Is Crimea now culturally, politically, geopolitically a part of Russia?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. It has been since 1776. An interesting number in Russian history as well. That's right. Americans need to understand that for about 500 years until 1776, the Crimean Tartars, who were initially part of the Golden Horde that conquered most of Eastern Europe and held Russia as a tributary state, and subsequently became part of the Ottoman Empire, they waged war on the Christian Slavs to their north in Ukraine and Russia. They captured tens of

thousands of slaves and brought them back to Crimea from where they were shipped to Constantinople and then sold in the slave markets. So the Tsars, before they were even Tsars, when they were princes of Moscow, were trying desperately to defeat the Tartars, drive them out completely. It took them 500 years. Remember, these are the same people that destroyed Kiev completely in the 13th century. So bottom line is, number one, this was a stronghold for the Mongols, for the Tartars. And the Russians finally took it under Catherine the Great in 1776, and he eliminated that connate completely and stopped the slave holding. Secondly,

you had the Crimean War from the end of 53 until the beginning of 56, that is 1853 to 1856. The Russians lost the war in Crimea to the French, the British, and the Ottomans, who together were allied against the Russians. And the great fear at that point was that the Ottomans were so weak that the Russians would simply overwhelm the Ottomans. But the Russians lost the war in the Crimea because they had no connectivity to Crimea at that point, no rail lines, no logistical infrastructure, the roads were terrible, they were embarrassed. All right, how does Crimea get back into the Russian orbit after the Crimean War? Well, ultimately, everyone involved in the war decided they had no interest in holding on to

it. And so when the Russians agreed that they would turn over other areas like Romania, Wallachia, Moldova, Bessarabia, as it was called, to the west. The Turks said, we'll essentially recognize them as effectively independent states. Then everybody said, well, we're not really interested anymore. And so the Russians got to keep the Crimea. Then the Russians went through a massive modernization effort to ensure that what happened to them in Crimea would not happen again. The next time the Crimea is physically taken is in 1941-42, when the Germans took it. And the Russians, or at that point, the Soviets, sustained enormous casualties. Remember, we think the Soviets probably lost twice what they admitted, probably more than 40 million dead fighting the Nazis in Russia. And so retaking the Crimea again cost the Soviets a lot of casualties. So it's become kind of a national catharsis that Crimea must remain in the hands of Russia. And Putin has since 2014 and 2012 poured enormous money into building bridges

and rail lines and everything else into the Crimea. And one of the reasons they wanted to drive the Ukrainians out of the area around Crimea is that the Ukrainians were stopping the flow of fresh water into Crimea. So bottom line is no one's going to give that up who's a Russian. It's a done deal. But the point of the news reports is, and maybe this isn't the first time, maybe it is, you'll know when I get the question out of my mouth,

that the Ukrainians have gone on the offensive. If they are, at least that's the point of the article. I know you're laughing. That's why I want you on here to clarify all this. So the New York Times and NBC News, where we all read this stuff, is claiming a revivification of the Ukraine military strength because they're going on the offensive and attacking behind the Russian military lines. Educate us. It's unworthy of any serious attention. As I said, there may have been some sabotage.

It might have been a quadcopter dropping ammunition. It certainly was not evidence for any rocket attacks from so-called HIMARS systems because the evidence is pretty substantial. They've almost run out of any more rockets to fire. What is the state of the military conflagration between Ukraine and Russia today? Well, as you'll recall, a few weeks ago when we spoke, I said that there would be a Russian offensive in August and that the Russian army had been largely withdrawn,

that is the regular army, and replaced by mercenaries, Chechen forces, the Wagner types, and effectively reservists and locals to fight the Ukrainians. Well, that's now stopped. You did say that, yes. No. This offensive is beginning. The Russian army is back, and they are crushing the remainder of the Ukrainian defenses in the south in preparation, I think, for a strike to Odessa.

And this will make Ukraine a landlocked country. And I think we're going to see something similar in the near future up in Kharkov. So that offensive has begun. There is no Ukrainian counteroffensive. There's nothing with which to attack. And if you look back in July, the Europeans have effectively made no new commitments in terms of shipping equipment to Ukraine. Is the resurgence of the Russian army and the resurgence of these attacks, which you predicted a month or so ago, the reason for a ridiculous article on the website The Hill, signed by a group of former American ambassadors to just about all

the countries in the area? Well, I think it's part of it. Let's be frank. This war is lost. Ukrainians have probably lost 60,000, 70,000, killed over 100,000 casualties easily. They've got nothing left. And the pipeline, which was never very good in terms of delivering equipment and ammunition, has dwindled. It's almost turned off. And you add the corruption into this business with so much of the equipment disappearing onto black markets and being resold. The war is effectively lost. And I think at this point, that's why you get this letter that says the U.S. must push now to arm Ukraine.

Well, it's too late. It's a dead end. And the other thing is everybody on that list, if you look at them carefully, they all go back to the late 90s in the Clinton administration. These are people that pushed us into the Balkans, which is I'm sure you're aware and others are aware is now falling apart. Right. The problems in Herzegovina and Bosnia, the problems in Kosovo, these are insoluble. And the only way they can be preserved in the setting that we created in the 1990s is for foreign forces to be there on the ground. How apparent is it to American intel and to American troops in non-uniforms on the ground what you've just articulated? Number one. Number two,

isn't it dangerous for American troops out of uniform on the ground to be there in the midst of, or right now at the beginning of, a massive Russian offensive? Well, the answer to the first question is yes. People in the Intelligence Committee know that this war is lost. They know the Ukrainians have sacrificed all of their best capabilities, their best forces. They have no means to launch some new counteroffensive in the offing with Ukraine. They've been predicting Ukrainian victory since the 24th of February. It's always been an illusion. It's smoke and mirrors. It doesn't exist.

So, yes, that's the first part. The second part is I think there is, as you implied, a real sense of desperation now. And so the people that have brought this disaster to fruition cost us billions of dollars and frankly destroyed Ukraine in the process and hundreds of thousands of casualties and millions of lives. They are now desperate to somehow or another rescue it. And the only way you can do that in their minds is to lie, frankly, about the true state of affairs on the ground in the country and hope that you can get more money and more equipment out of President Biden and his friends. One of our viewers asks, why doesn't Putin just bomb Kiev into the Stone Age? Well, because first of all, Kiev is still an ancient city with a long and important

religious cultural legacy that the Russians honor and always have. You know, all the great Russian composers and poets, every one of significance spent summers in Ukraine. All of them visited Kiev. It is practically Jerusalem in many respects to many of the Russian Orthodox Christians. So he's not going to do that. Secondly, he's never been interested in that. This is the big lie that was perpetrated early on. Putin wants to rebuild the Russian empire. No, no one wants to go back and look at the Minsk Accords. What did the Russians want? They wanted the Russian speakers, in other words the russians living in eastern ukraine to be treated as equal partners with the ukrainians they wanted them to

allow wanted the ukrainians to allow them to have their own language their own communities and the russians wanted independence virtual independence autonomy for the the two republics in the east in recognition for ukraine the ukrain, I think, would have done that, but we installed a government there that was responsive to our demands, and we wanted a war thinking that we were going to somehow or another wear out Russia. And remember, there's a certain progressive leftist mentality that says, no matter how wrong you are, no matter how much it costs in terms of blood and treasure, if you persist long enough, eventually your enemy will give up and go away.

The people that signed that letter have signed on for that illusion. Don't Anthony Blinken, the Secretary of State, and Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense, and William Burns, the head of the CIA, know what you have just articulated about the dilapidated state of the Ukraine military and in the inevitability of the Russian surge, which has now commenced? I think so. I don't know. What do they tell old Joe? What they think he wants to hear? Are they finally telling him the truth? Well, you know, look, if we start talking about President Biden and, you know, whether or not he's really all there and how much he understands and how much he just repeats, we waste a lot of time on that. Let's look at the people around him and those that stand in his immediate vicinity.

OK, the people around him are globalists, but they cannot escape reality. They are ideologues. Ideology is the secular version of religion. So in a sense, they're true believers that refuse to come to terms with reality. It doesn't matter what actually happens. They will never admit to doing anything wrong. These are not realists. There's no realistic appraisal of what is or is not in the interest of the American

people. And this is the biggest problem. Is it in our interest for this war to rage on in eastern Ukraine? Well, from the very beginning, it never was. Do we have an interest in seeing all of these Ukrainians killed, their lives ruined? No. Do we have an interest in seeing all of these Ukrainians killed, their lives ruined? No. Do we have an interest in seeing large numbers of Russians killed? No. This is insanity. I want to get you a press pass and get you to the next press conference that Tony Blinken holds, because somebody needs to put these questions to him. What is the American endgame here? Well, the endgame has never been articulated other than to say we want to weaken Russia to ensure that Russia will never do this again. Well, if you don't want Russia to intervene in a state neighboring Russia, that's an easy solution.

Don't try to build a base there for U.S. and allied military power that threatens Russia. That's easy. This is a lot of nonsense. Everyone fails to understand something else. And, you know, we talked about this a little bit, but Americans need to really know this. The Russian army is actually quite small. If you go back to what the Russians have maintained under arms historically under the Tsars in the late 19th century, early 20th century, then subsequently the Soviets, this army is a fraction of that size. You've got barely

400, 450, 500,000 men in it, and most of those are temporary. In other words, you've got a professional standing force, about 200,000. Then they're augmented by some draftees, and those in turn are augmented by some reservists. You don't attack NATO with a force like that. That's ludicrous nonsense. You know, you once had the president's ear, not Biden, Trump. Yes. And the president had, like everybody watching and listening now, or nearly everybody, tremendous respect for you. I'm wondering why Putin didn't do this under President Trump's watch, because you would have advised him, and he probably would

have accepted that advice, to stay out. Why would Putin have waited until the neocons and globalists surrounding Biden were in there, spending more in American cash than Putin spends in a year for his entire Defense Department? Absolutely. Well, the first thing to keep in mind is that I think Putin not only personally liked Trump, but I think President Putin thought that President Trump would build a new rapport with Russia. President Trump is not known publicly for the way President Trump is privately. We always see President Trump speaking off the cuff, very, very, what's the right word, spontaneously to the crowd. And with much bellicosity. Yes. But in private, President Trump listens. He really does. He'll ask you a question,

and he will listen, and then he'll follow up. Colonel, I can attest to that myself, having been and still am a friend of his for 35 years. I'm going to amend your answer and say Putin probably thought that Trump would be reelected. elected. Oh, I think he did. And he was really among the first to discover the extent to which there were efforts to subvert and undermine his reelection. But I think he really believed that President Trump could forge a new relationship with Russia. And again, nobody understands how much cooperation we enjoyed from the Russians going back to 2001. We couldn't have walked into Afghanistan and done much of anything without the enormous help from them in terms of intelligence, from the arms that they provided to the Northern Alliance which fought on the ground effectively to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban.

Boy, there's a phrase from the past, Colonel, Northern Alliance. Let me get back to Intel before we end. You told us, your colleague Scott Ritter told us, your colleague Phil Giraldi told us that the intelligence briefers in the Oval Office are notorious for telling the president truth as they understand it to be. Do you know? I know you're not in there. You once were, but you're not there now. Do you know if in their minds we have reached that point where they have to say, Mr. President, this is going nowhere. This is a Putin victory in months. One would think so. At this point, it's indisputable that's why these silly reports from the new york times are just glitter that have no basis in fact but again we don't know what goes on in this administration the only thing i can say is that inside the intelligence committee there are always people who try to present ground truth. That ground truth is

subjected to modification and change based on the agenda in the White House in many cases. Has it always been that way? No, but it has gotten that way certainly over the last several years. And I think with President Trump, I don't know that he was always told the truth about a whole range of things because we know that he was told that at one point there were only three or four hundred soldiers on the ground in Syria, and there were upwards of 2,000. Americans. Yes, and these are bold-faced lies. And I'm sure that we know that there are Americans not in uniform, on the ground, either operating as mercenaries or contractors, whatever you call them, in Ukraine. And you asked earlier, could they be killed? Of course. But the majority of

them are so far back that the probability of being hurt is probably low. In other words, if you're going to stay west of the Dnieper River, you're probably not going to be at risk. Last question. How long do you think the surge will last before the Ukrainians have nothing left with which to resist it? Well, I'm not sure they've got a whole lot right now that makes much difference. So I think this surge will go on until the objectives are secured. I think until Ukraine is a landlocked country, which means Odessa has to fall and that stretch of territory that reaches over to Romania and Moldova has got to be taken. But before the winter comes. Yes, because, you know, you've got the muddy season.

I mean, you can operate through it. They did the last time in February and March. It was muddy and miserable, but it's not something you want to do if you can avoid it. So I'm sure there is some sense of urgency to get it over with. And I think they can't. But the Ukrainians, there's not much they can do about it. Colonel McGregor, always a pleasure. Thank you for your candor. Thank you for your analysis. I can tell from the comments we're getting, very much appreciated. All the best to you, sir. Thank you, Judge. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.