Judging Freedom - Dr. Gilbert Doctorow: A Small Ukrainian Victory?

Episode Date: August 8, 2024

Dr. Gilbert Doctorow: A Small Ukrainian Victory?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, August 8, 2024. Dr. Gilbert Doctorow joins us today. August 8, 2024, 50 years ago today, Richard Milhouse Nixon resigned the presidency of the United States under threat of impeachment. I was a law student at the time and believed it was part of a coup, and I was miserable and upset. I'm miserable about other things today, and we'll get to them. We will talk about what happened to my friend and good friend of the show, Scott Ritter, in the past 24 hours. But before we do that, there's breaking news in your end of the world that we need to discuss. What happened in Kursk. Did the Ukrainian military actually invade Russia and take over a portion of the geography by expelling Russian military and security forces from that area?

Yes, this is the second kind of incursion into the Russian Federation territory. Not territory that they have seized since 2014, but territory that everyone acknowledges were the traditional boundaries of the Russian Federation. The first incursion was in an area called Belgorod. Belgorod is rather close to Ukraine's second largest city, Kharkov. This is a border between Russia and Ukraine. And there was an incursion by a group of self-proclaimed freedom fighters, that is Russian nationals, who had gone over as defectors to Ukraine and who had reconstituted themselves as a force to oppose Putin. And they were given arms and support by the Ukrainian military.

They went across, they caused some havoc, they destroyed houses and killed people, and finally they themselves were mostly killed and driven out. That was Belgrade. Now, the Russian-Ukrainian border covers several oblasts, not just Belgrade. And to the north of Belgrade is the oblast or province of Kursk. It's been on my personal map because we have close friends in Moscow who come from Kursk and who go there every year where they have little apartments because they say the place is lovely, wonderful climate and so forth. And they're there now, unless they have followed some other Russians and fled in light of what has just occurred. So Kursk is on my personal map. Kursk was

invaded at 5.30 in the morning yesterday by a 1,000-man force. The numbers I'm giving you come from the Russian military command. This was the presentation made to President Putin late yesterday afternoon. Gerasimov was the reporter. And he said there were 1,000 troops, and they crossed over, they destroyed houses, necessarily killing people, and destroyed some civil infrastructure. According to Gerasimov, this is late afternoon yesterday, about 315 of these 1,000 were disposed of largely by local Russian forces, that is by the FSP, the equivalent of our FBI, as a border guard militia, and they countered

the invaders. And then there were aircraft as Russian jets overflew and attacked the invaders and so forth. The 315 who were taken out, one third of them were killed outright and two thirds were maimed and were no longer capable of combat. Some of them were presented on Russian television last night. The question is, what was this all about? Well, I have my own interpretation, which I'll set out now as briefly as I can. It was to grab attention. The Ukrainians are getting battered on the field of battle. We can go into that in a moment.

Their losses are enormous. How big was revealed by a former defense minister, now secretary of the Security Council of Russia, Sergei Shoigu, two days ago, when he said that 120,000 soldiers and officers had been neutralized by the Russians in the last two months, 60,000 per month, 2,000 men per day. This corresponds almost directly to what we see in the daily reports of the numbers of Ukrainian casualties inflicted by the Russians. Now, that is twice the number of men who are recruited presently by dragooning them into the Ukrainian army. This terrible result on the battlefield has to be somehow covered up. It's not, it doesn't make good reading for the Ukrainian public, and it doesn't look good

to Ukraine's backers in the West, first of all, the United States and Germany. So they have engaged in a number of distractions. The event in Kursk is a distraction. It's a very powerful distraction. It's a very, very costly distraction to Ukraine. Why do I say that? Because the forces as described by military experts on Russian talk shows last night, and I have in mind the great game, which I think is the most authoritative such show, these experts said that this was the best equipped and best trained Ukrainian brigade that they're aware of. They were using strictly NATO equipment, and they were following NATO military doctrine. All right, which brigade are you talking about?

The brigade that invaded Kursk or the brigade that suffered 60,000 losses a month? No, the 60,000 losses a month is the general Ukrainian army, which is manned by under-equipped and under-trained people who have filled in the slots of those who've been slaughtered in the preceding months. Got it. And they're nothing more than cannon fodder. The group that attacked Kursk was not cannon fodder. These were among the best equipped and trained Ukrainian forces today. And the additional point that was made by, again, these military experts is that this is a perfect example of how U.S. and NATO are using Ukraine as target practice, as a field to try out new tactics and new equipment,

high-performance equipment against the Russians. NATO and the United States have not fought against peers in, what, 50 years or more. They've used their equipment, including the Abrams of the 40-year-old tanks. They've used this equipment against vastly inferior peoples whom they could and did destroy, satisfying themselves about their superiority. They have not faced a peer equal. And that is what they're facing.

That is what Ukraine is facing in the Russian army. And NATO forces are using this, every opportunity in Ukraine to try things out. So they have instructed, they've given full instruction to the Ukrainian invading force in Kursk, what to do, how to behave in line with the latest NATO thinking, and they've given them the most advanced equipment. Here is President Putin yesterday at that meeting at which you referenced where he was given a report at what happened in Kursk. Here's his response, cut number 13.

We will have to start with the events in the Kursk region. As is known, the Kiev regime has undertaken yet another large-scale provocation, conducting indiscriminate shooting from various types of weapons, including missiles at civilian buildings, residential buildings, and ambulances. Immediately after our meeting, I will have a meeting with the heads of the relevant departments of the Ministry of Defense, the general staff of the FSB, referring to the border direction of the Federal Security Services Activity. Is there any legitimate military target in Kyrtsk? No, there's nothing whatsoever there. Not in the area that they attacked, just across the border. The city, of course, which is what gives the province its name, is perhaps 100 kilometers

further away. And I assume that military assets also would be further away from the border, because otherwise they're within artillery range, which wouldn't make much sense. So the mission had a public relations importance for the Ukrainians. It was to show that they're still capable of staging attacks. They hoped for a much bigger breakthrough than force through a big invading contingent. If they should succeed, the objective would have been to compel the Russians to withdraw forces from the front lines where they are mowing down the Ukrainian regulars and to save the situation in Kursk. That didn't happen.

The Russians have not removed a single soldier from their front lines and they're continuing their powerful advance of several kilometers a day into the Donetsk oblast that is still held by Ukrainians. What remains of the Ukrainian military's ability to resist the westward movement of Russian forces? Very little. The towns, it's curious that in going back six months, every time the Russians were engaged in combat with Ukrainian forces over this or that hamlet or town, all of our newspapers were saying that has no strategic value and that this is just another case of the Russians sending waves of men to death to achieve nothing. You don't hear that anymore. You pick up the New York Times, you pick up the Financial Times,

and they're telling you outright that every one of these towns going down has strategic value because it is the nexus of supply to the defenders of Ukraine from elsewhere along the line of confrontation. And the Russians are moving inexorably towards two towns, Kramatorsk and Slavyansk. This is in the western part, Donetsk Oblast. These were the towns where the Russian Spring, which is what people call the 2014 Russian Renaissance in the Donbas region. These were held, Savesk held out for 85 days,

this kind of Alamo in local lore, against a vastly superior Ukrainian army. I think the Russians will cease that once again, and reestablish control over the whole of Donetsk oblast in a month or two ahead of us. But that's we're getting ahead of ourselves, right? The point is that the Russians that the Ukrainians were staging a public relations stunt, the same as Mr. Zelensky's flyover of the F-16s in the background to his address to the world media two days ago, was a public relations stunt which has no military value, but was intended to show that Ukraine is still there, is still fighting, and desperately needs support to win its objectives. That's all it is. Okay. Switching gears, in the middle of July, the Secretary of Defense of the United States

and the Russian either Defense Minister or Foreign Minister, I think Defense Minister, his opposite number, had an emergency telephone call. They hadn't spoken in a long time. Can you tell us what that was about? Well, we didn't know what it was about until earlier this week. The Russians were very secretive about it. And of course, the United States didn't say a peep. The only news that we heard is that the call was initiated by the Russian side, by Belousov. It was received by Lloyd Austin and that Mr. Belousov gave pass some news which very much surprised Austin about Russian concerns, that there were plots underway, which, if realized, could unleash an uncontrollable escalation of the present conflict

in the direction of a nuclear war. That was all that we know at the time. This is July 13th, I believe. As we found out from Mr. Ryabkov, a deputy minister in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, several days ago in an interview that he gave to Russian television, the content of this call was the following, that Bielosov told Austin that the Russians were aware of a plot to assassinate both himself and President Putin during the July 28th Navy Parade Day in St. Petersburg. This should be stopped. Well, as we know, it didn't take place.

There was no assassination attempt. We assume that Mr. Austin did what was necessary to stop the Ukrainians. And by the way, for good measure, Repkov set the principle behind it as well. Now, that was quite stunning information. It was, in one respect, it was good news because it showed that despite all of the hostility, the ill-feeling suspicion between these leaderships in both countries, they're still capable of doing something pragmatic and for self-interest when the occasion arises.

That's good news. Whether or not this has any broader bearing on other communication channels, which were shut down long ago and which may save all of our necks if there is some misunderstanding or some incident that could spin out of control. I can't say. Nobody can say. Do you have any independent evidence to verify the existence, not of the plot, but of the phone call, any independent evidence that, in fact, the Russians called the Americans to say there's a plot to assassinate President Putin, you need to know about it? Well, this may or may not satisfy the question you posed.

Mr. Ryabkov, as we know, is very outspoken and is very strongly a defender of Russia's national interest, much more so than his very gentlemanly and mild-mannered boss, Sergei Lavrov. And the next day, I read this article on a news portal called Mail.ru. They carry a lot of strange things, and I always view what I read there with a certain skepticism. But the next day, this was another portal with the Yandex, which carried an article that originated in Rassiska Gazeta, whichata which is rossi's kakaziata is a government pro quasi governmental newspaper the one of the best newspapers in in russia for all kinds of things including their cultural reviews but my point is that that is pretty official if it's in the And they were saying that Mr. Ryabkov was misinterpreted, misquoted, and that he never said directly, in answer to the reporter's question, whether there was such a plot.

What he said was that there was evidence of some kind of linkage between the phone call and the threatened assassination. Well, that's really a finessing thing. I think what was at issue was either a difference of opinion on whether this should be publicly aired between Ryabkov and his boss, or more likely, as we're speaking about governments and governments have bureaucratic inviting, it could have well been that the Ministry of Defense or the FSB were peeved that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had spoken about something which was not really under their purview. Let's switch gears to a hot topic this morning, and let's begin it by watching Chris cut number 18.

Based upon their questions, it appears that they are primarily concerned about my relationship with RT and Sputnik. More specifically, that I am receiving direction from RT and Sputnik, and I'm being compensated for this. And that means that I am working on behalf of the Russian government. I let them know in no uncertain terms that that is absolutely not what's happening, that any compensation I get from RT and Sputnik is the same as I get from any journalistic entity that I provide articles or video products for. I am a journalist and I get compensated for my work. That, of course, was our good friend and friend of the show and regular contributor, if I may, superstar on the show, Scott Ritter. Last night, I'm not sure where he was when he was making that, but his home had been the subject of a search warrant issued by a federal magistrate judge in Albany, New York, which dispatched the team of FBI agents to confiscate documents and electronic devices.

It is apparent from the comment he made there and the comments he made in front of his home after the FBI left that he is the subject of an investigation, a federal investigation for a potential violation of FARA. FARA, F-A-R-A, is an acronym for the federal, now I forget exactly what it stands for, but it's the Foreign Agent Registration Act, excuse me, and it requires Americans who are agents of a foreign government, except for Israel, to register as foreign agents. What you just saw was a tweet that Scott sent out last night acknowledging a financial relationship with RT and Sputnik, but denying that he is a foreign agent. Scott is also perhaps the most articulate or among the most articulate defenders of the Russian military operation in Ukraine and among the most articulate critics of the Israeli military operation and genocide in Gaza. Scott believes he has been

targeted by the federal government because of his outspoken and fierce criticism of the government's support of the Ukrainians and support of the Israelis. What is your view of this, Dr. Rowe? Dr. Well, the first thing I want to say is I have great respect for Scott Reuter's achievements and his personal bravery over the course of his military and post-military career. His role as one of those who warned against going into Iraq over the phony charges by the Bush administration, Bush Jr. administration, of their having weapons of mass destruction was credible given that

he was one of the chief participants in the verification processes for what was there in Iraq. He has been on the side of the angels in many instances, but I think he has suffered from poor judgment in his dealing with the Russians. He spent, as far as I understand, he spent a couple of years in Russia. And so I'm surprised that he didn't pick up this question,

which those of us who were Russian experts going back to the Cold War period knew perfectly well. There's where are the red lines? Where don't you go? And he just stomped across red lines. And even his statement, which you have just shown, is self-incriminatory. When you read the language of Fara, he's crossed the red lines. But that's not for me to judge.

That will be judged in the court by people who are vastly better informed than I am on the details here. What is true is my concern that two generations of Americans have not understood the Cold War and how you behave in circumstances when you are backing the cause or at least sympathetic to the cause or understanding, just understanding the cause of an adversary. How do you avoid becoming Tokyo Rose? And you do not accept payments of any kind or favors like travel. That is air travel, hotels and the rest of it. You do not touch that if it is being offered to you by a country, by a foreign country, and particularly a foreign country that is in such hostile relations with the United States.

Let me stop you for a minute. I want to play a clip from Scott on this show on June 4th, which plays into, in fairness to you and your views of this, Professor, the gravity of this situation. Chris, cut number 17. Plus, there's the Mir Tvoritz hit list run by the Ukrainian intelligence services that I'm on, which marks you for death. They actually assassinate people. They have made two attempts against me on previous trips to Russia. The State

Department has never condemned the Ukrainian intelligence services for marking U.S. citizens for death simply because they disagree with what they say. Free speech means nothing in the Biden America today. It actually, free speech has not only become something that gets you targeted for your passport removal, that's an inconvenience that I am confident will be dealt with in due course. They're marking me for death, Judge, and that's something you don't come back from. Professor Doctorow responds, let's play number 16 as well, which is from the same episode of Judging Freedom. The State Department, using government-appropriated monies for this purpose, created a Center for Countering Disinformation as an adjunct of the Ukrainian president's office. They did this in 2022. One of the first things that this Center for Countering Disinformation did under the guidance and

direction of the State Department of the United States was to issue a blacklist of people that they called information terrorists. And on that blacklist were a large number of Americans, including myself. And this list, this center since that time, and here's the important thing about being called an information terrorist. That's a specific term being used by the Ukrainians backed by the United States government. They said that an information terrorist must be hunted down and brought to justice the same way any terrorist would. And so I've been accused of saying things that make the Ukrainian government unhappy. They now say that I must be hunted down and arrested, detained, killed, as would any other terrorist in the world and other Americans as

well. They have made me, this center, again, with the U.S. State Department's support, has put out a list that, you know, a weekly list where they say I'm the number one threat to truth. Obviously, whether the FBI raid was legitimate or not, whether it was based on probable cause or not, I will assume it was. I'm familiar with the procedure. I've signed many search warrants myself in my prior career. This can have a chilling effect on free speech. And obviously, he is one of the government's foremost opponents of its foreign policy. Your comments on the effects on freedom of speech of this kind of law enforcement, your comments on the State Department paying for people who would put an American on a hit list.

Well, you say that he is foremost. I agree with you. But let's put this in a context. are receiving 30, 50, 100,000 views when they give an interview and state an opposition position to the official Washington narrative. 10 people, 15, 20 people. This is a very limited number of individuals who are so prominent and so visible as Scott Ritter surely is among the top of them. Now, would he then be on the radar screen of authorities? Well, he would be on the radar screen of any country under similar circumstances. And you don't have to vilify the American judicial system or the American security forces for following him closely. Now, supporting or backing the terrorists in Ukraine is a different story.

There, any support that American authorities give to the vicious neo-Nazis who are calling the shots in Ukraine and who are able to issue such death threats against American citizens, that all connections between the United States and those groups should be flushed out, should be investigated, and those who are engaged in this should stand before court for violating American freedoms. But that's a separate issue. That does not excuse Scott Ritter from crossing the provisions of the of the FARA Act if he did that has to be proven in the court but certainly exposing himself to such charges by admitting that he received monies from RT and so forth. Why does FARA apply to AIPAC and the Israeli foreign agents who are Americans?

Well, you're exposing hypocrisy of the most base variety. The United States is enthralled to the Israeli leadership and to Mr Netanyahu. Anything that Israel does is by definition good. Unfortunately, with that position, we are marching ourselves towards the cliff in the Middle East presently by enabling the genocide in Gaza and possibly being drawn into the conflict with Iran. And Mr. Netanyahu is doing everything possible to incite. Professor Doctorow, thank you very much for your time and your insight. You are, even if I don't agree with everything you say, I respect your sources and I respect your analysis. I'm just talking about Scott now. And I am deeply grateful for the time that you've given

us on the show this morning. I hope you come back again next week. Well, thank you for allowing Contrary and Rue, because among ourselves, we really should be exposing different positions and not all sing from the same notes. You know, you're such a gentleman because you know that, Scott, as my friend, you sent me the contrarian view ahead of time so that I would know what you were going to say. And I'm happy to provide you with a forum. You're a gifted understander of the Russian mind,

culture, military, politics, and government, and we welcome you here. Thanks so much. You're welcome. We have an interesting day coming up for you remaining today at two o'clock this afternoon, Eastern, Max Blumenthal at three o'clock this afternoon, Eastern, Professor John Mearsheimer. At four o'clock this afternoon, Eastern, the Intelligence Community Roundtable with Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson. And at five o'clock this afternoon, Eastern, Colonel Douglas McGregor. Let me say that Scott Ritter, in my view, is an American patriot and an American treasure. He is my dear friend, and I am happy to give him a forum on this show whenever he wants it. We will let the judicial system play out

to the extent that he has been targeted because of his political views and his exercise of the freedom of speech. This is reprehensible. And those who have targeted him should themselves be prosecuted. Justin Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.