Judging Freedom - Dam Destroyed _ What is the Russian_s Strategy Col Doug Macgregor

Episode Date: June 6, 2023

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Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, June 6, 2023. It's about 2 o'clock in the afternoon here on the east coast of the United States. Colonel Douglas McGregor joined us again. Colonel, it's a pleasure, as always. Thank you for spending the time with us. Colonel, I'd like to start with the hot news of the day, and that is the explosion of the Ukrainian dam. Obviously, there's a lot of theories as to what caused it, but let's watch the explosion and watch the waterfall. We can actually talk over it. Can you tell where the explosion came from, Colonel? Well, it's difficult to be certain, but based on the information that has begun to come out, it looks as though this happened within the dam structure. And more specifically, it may have something to do with the electrical works, the turbine inside, whether this is the result of deliberate explosives or damage that occurred last year, no one knows.

But more and more people are concluding that neither the Ukrainians nor the Russians deliberately destroyed this dam. And the concern at this point, from a military standpoint for the Ukrainians, is that it makes their operation much tougher because the flooded areas, specifically on the eastern side of the Dnieper, make it very difficult for their forces to move through these muddy areas. And obviously, it makes an airborne, not necessarily an airborne, but a river-based assault almost impossible. The larger concern though is the nuclear power plant up in Zabarisha. And how does this water affect the nuclear power plant? Well, just before I came on, my friend Chuck Spinney pointed out to me that there were concerns because we don't know if all the reactors are offline. The Russians and the Ukrainians tried to move most of the reactors offline.

We think one may still be operating. Of course, water is used to cool the reactors. Will the drop in the water level in the river up near Zavarozhia have an impact on the availability of the water? We don't know, but that's a valid concern. A nuclear accident, of course, would be catastrophic. What do Ukrainians use that for? Power, ordinary power for business and for homes? Well, they have, yes, of course. But once the war began and the Russians got control of it,

they largely shut it down so that it would not be at risk of running out of control. And what is the body of water from which all this spillage is coming? Well, the Dnieper River, and they created a reservoir within the Dnieper River. In fact, the area that some of your viewers will be familiar with, where that used to be called the Cossack Sish. In other words, it was a Cossack Ukrainian state in the 15, 1600s was actually where the reservoir sits today. And they used to have an Island in the upper river,

which was the center of it. All of that was flooded out by the Soviets who were trying to harness it for power. And ultimately they built a nuclear power plant there, which has provided important power for the entire state of Ukraine. Right now, it's very minimal, if at all. So the only concern we have is we just don't want to run out of water that is used to cool any of the reactors, assuming any of them are still online. I am fascinated with your conclusion from your own observations and from your sources

that this is more likely than not explosions from within the dam and not intentional. My rather naive, or at least legal, as opposed to military way of looking at this was cui bono, you know, to whose benefit? And I thought, well, the Ukrainians blew up their own dam in order to flood the lands to prevent the Russians from moving across those lands. And I'm happy that you corrected me. Has anybody taken credit for this? No, I think there's been a lot of finger pointing.

The Ukrainians, of course, blame everything on the Russians. If the sun comes up two minutes late tomorrow morning, the Russians are responsible. The Russians didn't do it. That's obvious. There's just no incentive for them to do that. They could have done it months ago had they wanted to do that. And I don't think the Ukrainians wanted this because it's obvious that they've been assembling some amphibious forces for potential use behind the Russian defensive lines. That's now out of the question.

You're not going to have a water level high enough to support it. And then when you get out of the little bitty rubber boats that they use you have to walk through very very muddy terrain so you're just a target so no if anybody did benefit accidentally i suppose you could make the argument that the russians did somewhat simply because instead of a 900 mile defensive line they're now looking at an 870 mile or 8-mile defensive line because the areas are so muddy and flooded on their left flank that nobody can get through there anyway. So if someone looked at the explosion and said the offensive has begun, the contrary is true. The flooding of the dam probably, correct me if I'm wrong, Colonel, impeded the imminence of the spring offensive. Yeah, I think that's reasonable to assume. And again, when we talk about the offensive, if I could just digress for one second.

Sure. If we look over the weekend at the three major attacks along this 900-mile front, the largest being down near Zavaryshia, these attacks were disasters for the Ukrainians. They lost almost 4,000 men killed and wounded, 54 tanks, 210 armored personnel carriers, 134 trucks, several jet fighters, two helicopters. The Russians, by comparison, had 71 men killed and 210 wounded. Of course, their defensive lines are intact. So I think all they managed to do over the weekend was confirm what we've been saying from the beginning, which is this defense is tightly integrated and any attempt to move into it and attack it is going to result in massive losses. So the question is, if they were just probing attacks and there is still yet an offensive

to come, what's it going to look like? I don't know. Colonel, is Ukraine falling apart? Yes, absolutely. Morale is in the basement, the cellar, if you will. It's very tragic. The military leadership over there knows it. They're frantic. The question is not what happens after the so-called counteroffensive fails so much as it is, has Ukraine got anything left at all at that point? And if the Russians move, and I suspect they will, they're just going to overrun most of the area east of the Dnieper and eventually cross the bridge up at Zaborizhia or at any number of places and move south to Odessa. Here's a video prepared by the Ukrainian government.

Now, I know we're going to talk about D-Day in a few minutes somehow I can't imagine Eisenhower having done this but here's a video prepared by the Ukrainian government sort of announcing and warning and please Colonel Pay pay careful attention to the very end which is different from the first three quarters of this. Plan like silence.

There will be no announcement that it has started. There you go. What were those jets at the end, Colonel? I don't know. I don't know. I didn't recognize them, frankly. You didn't recognize them as american f-16s i'm not saying they are i'm just trying to figure out it's very different from uh from the rest and it would seem to implicate that the spring offensive in quotes yeah going to be an invasion of russia uh, I suppose, you know, we could add our aircraft to their arsenal,

but then you're running the risk of being at war with Russia, which I don't think even this administration at this stage wants to risk. The rest of it, I'm sure there are Ukrainian commanders in the field that are asking where those troops are and why he can't have them. Why they're in front of cameras with their fingers on their lips. I mean, what does this accomplish, if anything? It's inconceivable to me what they expected to accomplish other than to send the message that somehow or another they're more ready and capable than they are. I mean, those people were all beautifully uniformed. None of them looked like they'd been in combat for any length of time. They were all extremely well fed. Normally,

if you've been in combat for any length of time, you've lost weight. Your uniform is worn out. You don't look pristine for the camera by any stretch of the imagination. Even the small arms that were depicted there and the equipment, it's all brand new, clean equipment. So maybe these are obviously not part of the equipment that included 54 tanks destroyed, including some unknown number of Leopard tanks, by the way, that were gaining control of even the areas of Ukraine that President Putin and the Russian Federation have claimed for years are legally parts of Russia? No, I haven't seen any evidence for that. I mean, the areas they've claimed and incorporated are under control. There are no fifth columnists blowing things up now.

They have been penetrated, as we've discussed before. I think the SAS was responsible for the attack on the bridge to Crimea. They may have done some other things, but no, I don't see any other. SAS is British? Yeah, the British Special Air Service. That's the equivalent of what we would call special operations forces. And they're very, very good. There's no question about it. And it's very risky to send them behind the lines like that, but they appear to have done it. They may have had a hand, by the way, in the recent drone attacks on Moscow.

Can the attacks on Russia, inside Russia, alter the course of this conflict? No, absolutely not. I mean, you're talking about pinpricks. You know, just because you manage to get off a lucky shot and kill one person isn't going to change the outcome if you're fighting an entire company of infantry. Well, the same analogy holds for, you know, you're fighting an entire company of infantry. Well, the same analogy holds for, you know, you're fighting Russia. If anything, it reinforces and reaffirms in the minds of the Russian people the criticality of getting on with this thing and crushing the Ukrainians. I mean, as I've said

before, President Putin is the one who's exercised enormous restraint. It would be very easy for him to go before the camera and emote about what had happened and how it threatened the motherland and so forth and justify massive attacks on Ukraine. He didn't do that. He essentially dismissed them and then pointed out that they would continue their strikes in the future.

Al Jazeera is reporting, but we don't have the actual clip of this or we'd run it Here's the English translation of what they're reporting I'm going to suggest that this could have been written by Victoria Newland But it came out of the mouth of President Zelensky Quote, the destruction of the dam Confirms that Russian forces must be expelled from every corner of Ukrainian land. That, of course, is, I would think, fanciful, impossible, even inconceivable if he's including Crimea.

Yeah, I think it was Matthew McConaughey, who in a recent film was talking about Fugazi. He was describing people that are trying to predict what happens in the marketplace with stocks and bonds and so forth. He just says, oh, Fugazi, Fugazi, Fugazi, forget it. You can't predict anything. You don't know what's going to happen. Don't worry about it. The point is to move the client's money from his pocket into yours. Well, I think that describes Zelensky brilliantly. Lots of Fugazi, please send more money. None of it's going to work. So it's ridiculous.

Gary, can you run the clip, please, of Secretary of State Blinken? Colonel, this is Secretary of State Blinken last weekend in Helsinki. As I've made clear by virtually every measure, President Putin's invasion of Ukraine has been a strategic failure. Yet, while Putin has failed to achieve his aims, he hasn't given up on them. He's convinced that he can simply outlast Ukraine and its supporters, sending more and more Russians to their deaths, inflicting more and more suffering on Ukraine's civilians. He thinks that even if he loses the short game, he can still win the long game. Putin is wrong about this, too.

The United States, together with our allies and partners, is firmly committed to supporting Ukraine's defense today, tomorrow, for as long as it takes. So President Zelensky called President Putin a cornered animal. I would argue that Joe Biden and Tony Blinken and Lloyd Austin have painted themselves into a corner with this nonsense about as long as it takes. I mean, should a war end by a ceasefire now or a ceasefire a year from now after 100,000 more humans are dead and 100 billion more American dollars have been wasted? Well, my first inclination is to suggest that Blinken's middle name is Fugazi. But then there's a second point that needs to be made, and that is this inhumanity

towards Ukrainian people. It's inconceivable to me. This is a thing with which I've had great difficulty from day one. Obviously, nobody gives a damn what happens inside Ukraine to the human beings living there. And that's outrageous nonsense. That is the antithesis of everything we say we represent as Americans. So they should be ashamed of themselves. As far as coming to an inclusion conclusion here, look, he talks about outlasting. Putin thinks he can outlast us. Judge, he's already done that. Take a long, good look at Germany.

Germany is sliding into a very deep recession. And it shouldn't be a surprise to anybody. Cheap energy is the lifeblood of scientific industrial power and economies. Germany is being industrialized by their own leadership. Just yesterday, I watched a speech that Schultz arrived to give. He couldn't give it. He was booed off the stage. People yelled at him and screamed at him.

He kept saying, we are fighting Putin. We have to fight Putin. And people just said, nonsense. Boo, forget it. The Germans never believed that the so-called Russians were coming. Nobody in Europe, in Western Europe, believed that. This is nonsense that we've spun out of it. I go back again. If you're going to say that the Russians were incompetent and incapable, then how can they simultaneously be bent on conquering Eastern Europe and Central Europe? It's a lot of nonsense. The whole game is almost up in the West. And I think Germany will be the bellwether. At first, I thought it would be France, but now I'm

beginning to think it'll be Germany. I don't see how this Schultz government can last. Is the West tiring of the war? Oh, absolutely. Except for the Biden administration. Well, I don't think that this is an enormous burden for anybody sitting in the U.S. Senate. I mean, I don't see them losing any sleep over how many people die in Ukraine or how much money is wasted on this proposition. But then again, we just saw them sign up for another enormous debt ceiling and continue to pretend that debt doesn't matter. I think we all know that's going to end badly for the United States and the West. So these are just irresponsible

human beings in charge in Washington. The question is what we Americans are going to do when the whole thing implodes. And I think it's coming. How significant in World War II was what was set in motion on June 6, 1944, D-Day? Well, Americans are routinely treated to these horrific numbers, and they are horrific, involving Soviet losses during the Second War. When I was in Moscow in 2001 at the General Staff Academy, the historian there briefed me personally, because I asked him, and told me that they had counted 39,900,000 dead, including more than 15 million Soviet soldiers. And he said, we're still counting. The Russians have since changed their numbers. They moved them to 26 million. I think they've now moved it up to 32 million. The truth

is it was at least 39 million dead and were presented this as evidence for victory. Well, that's not what sealed Germany's fate, contrary to popular belief. We provided something under the so-called Lend-Lease Program, thanks to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that provided enormous quantities of equipment. And if you put that slide up, Americans can see this. This is from Albert Week's book, Russia's Lifesaver, Lend-Lease. And look at all the materiel that we provided, railroad equipment, trucks, wheeled transport. When the Germans were fighting the Soviets in Stalingrad in November of 1942, they found all of the Soviet troops riding on American wheeled trucks and Jeeps. And when the Soviets made films of Stalingrad,

they cut out every photograph that showed anything from the United States. Colonel, did we sell this? Did we lend it? Or did we give it to the Soviets? FDR gifted everything, which in today's numbers would be hundreds of billions of dollars. The Soviets were never asked to repay a dime. You say FDR. You didn't say the Congress. No, FDR acted on his own. There was no bill passed at the time authorizing FDR to ship anything he wanted to the Soviet Union. In fact, in 1941, in July, the first meeting was held in Moscow with Stalin by Harry Hopkins. And when that meeting was held, it was held by Harry Hopkins only. The U.S. ambassador and the U.S. defense attache were excluded from the meeting.

And during that meeting, the entire lend-lease program was set up, and Stalin provided a list of what he needed. For instance, you saw on that chart, petroleum. We shipped so much petroleum, that is oil, to Russia during the Second World War that the Russians actually resold great quantities of it to the Japanese against whom we were fighting. How did we get petroleum from the North Atlantic to Russia during World War II? Well, it actually went across the Pacific under Russian flag. And because it was under Russian flag, the Japanese didn't sink it. So it was delivered largely to Vladivostok. See, this is the bizarre history of the Second World War. And, you know, we helped

the British as well, and we charged them for everything. And they were effectively bankrupted by the Second World War. And FDR wanted to do that because he was determined to destroy the British Empire. He actually said that he thought the British Empire was evil, but that Stalin's state was not. Oh, my goodness. I guess he never said that to his second cousin, Winston Churchill. Well, you know, Churchill wasn't much help because Churchill never objected and Churchill ran his country into the ground. I think a whole new story about the Second World War needs to reach the public. They need to know what the truth is. My only statement, the reason I'm concerned about this, Stalin begged us repeatedly to attack in the West. He wanted us to attract 80 divisions of the German armed forces

to fight in the West. When we landed at Normandy, the Germans had 40 divisions there, and eventually it rose to higher numbers, 60, 70 divisions. Of course, they were all grossly understrength. Instead of 12,000 or 13,000, there were only 5,000 Germans in these divisions. But nevertheless, the Normandy invasion was critical to the Soviets because once we came ashore, we did draw off most of the best forces that were readily available to fight the Soviets in Poland. And your historians will remember that in June of 1944 and on the 22nd, the Soviets attacked in Operation Migration. And that attack reached all the way to Warsaw and effectively liberated all of white Russia and took them into the Baltic Littoral and right up to the Carpathian Mountains.

In other words, it advanced Soviet national interests, but it didn't help us at Normandy, but we certainly helped them. And we haven't even talked about the bombing campaign. We lost 18,000 heavy bombers, we and the Royal Air Force, penetrating German air defenses. And those bombers did something for the Soviets that no one else could have done. We destroyed the petroleum industry in Germany. We stopped the shipment of oil. By the time the Russians attacked in June of 1944, the average German aircraft had about two hours of flight time with fuel, after which it crashed. So one can argue about who won the war. The point that needs to be kept in mind is without us,

without our bombing campaign, I don't think the Soviets would have ever reached Minsk in white Russia. Happy D-Day, Colonel, and thank you very much, as always, for your insight. The history lesson is very much appreciated, and I can tell from the comments, very well received. All the best to you, Colonel. Thank you. Thank you, Judge. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.