Judging Freedom - Dr. Gilbert Doctorow : Will Putin Change Tactics?

Episode Date: October 22, 2025

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Text fees may apply. Hi! Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, October 22nd, 2025. Dr. Gilbert, Dr. O, joins us now. Gilbert, always a pleasure. My dear friend, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for accommodating my schedule.

Is President Putin, in your view, under any pressure from whatever source, elites, military, intelligence, ordinary folk, to accelerate the execution or prosecution, I should say, of the war and bring it to a quick end? I think he's under considerable pressure, not from his immediate colleagues, because they form a unit, but from the broader elites in Moscow for certain. As to the general public, they are concerned, their lives are being disrupted by the war, as I have. have seen since my arrival here a day and a half ago, considering what has changed since my last visit in May, it is clear that the war is impacting on ordinary Russians.

All right. I need you to explain that because I was in Moscow for a week in March, and I was in Moscow last week, and I didn't notice any difference. I didn't see any gas lines. The gasoline cost less in Moscow than it does in Manhattan when you do the conversion from rubles to dollars and from leaders to gallons. I think I did it accurately. But please tell me how you believe or how you have ascertained what you've observed as to how the special military operation is negatively impacting the Russian population. Well, I was there last in May. So it's like five months ago. And what I've seen since my arrival is a considerable variance with my own last visit. That you wouldn't have seen something untoward in Moscow is a result of what Moscow is and

represents and who runs it. Mr. Sabianian has the best air defenses in the country. He is the best city manager or general manager in the whole country. Therefore, the problems which I see around to me now in St. Petersburg are of a different nature than what you could have or would have seen in Moscow because of Moscow's special place and special quality of management. St. Petersburg does not have quality management. Mr. Baywalf is the, who has been in here for six years, was a corrupt and incompetent person, and it is, again, it is a black mark on the president that he has tolerated this known corrupt person to hold the position of mayor in or governor in this second most important city in the country but what i want to get to was not a criticism of the local

administration but a statement of the facts my flight in here was was late i came on turkish airlines from istanbul it's set out late without any explanation but clearly because of the plane that we were on which was very modern very new but none of the worn look that but i'd had on on other Turkish airline planes, it wasn't a technical problem. It was a problem on the ground here in St. Petersburg that discovered after we landed. So you were flying, you were flying Istanbul to St. Petersburg. Correct. And it wasn't just our plane that was delayed. I assume that all air traffic was delayed somewhat because of a drone attack. And then that was my supposition. and I wrote an essay yesterday based on supposition that this, not just the plane was late,

that there isn't much to rely on, but what I found when I landed, that our taxi driver had a hard time getting out of the airport because parts of the airport controlling access to the airport was no longer working. His GPS wasn't working. He couldn't find his way to my town, which was a 15-minute drive away, because he doesn't know the area, and his GPS or his navigators, as they call it in Russian, was not working consistently. Now, it wasn't just his. The Russians have systematically, for big occasions, like Victory in Europe Day, this May 9th, they have shut down a GPS or they have given false information on GPS to direct any incoming drones or

other projectiles in the wrong place. That means the taxi drivers heating an online directive to come to you, come to a place five kilometers from where you are. And nobody knows why you don't meet. Well, that's one thing. GPS was not working. The other thing is that the mobile internet wasn't working. Now, that doesn't sound like much to people who don't know what that means.

Having no mobile internet means you have no ATMs working. You have no way for retail outlets to take credit cards. All right, so periodically, the government shuts down the internet in order to frustrate the Ukrainians' use of drones. Yes, that was periodic and very rare. Now it's not rare, and now it's happening every few days here. And that tells you that about that explains why I say that the home front has become the war zone, which was not, the case in May. And it's not just Petersburg has hit that way, but many other towns when you hear occasionally, oh, this plane airport or that airport has been closed in Russia.

You can be sure the same thing is happening there. And this is not a small deal. If all retail outlets can no longer accept payments because the system is down, that's a lot of loss. Well, how long was it down for? I mean, did you, did the cab driver eventually achieve GPS coverage so that he could take you to your destination? Let's remember, this was at 2 o'clock in the morning. So it already, the urgent closing had already passed. And he did get his GPS and he did get us to our destination. It's the whole day.

This whole day here in Petersburg, nothing's working. And that's not just as simple as it sounds. I was supposed to register with the authorities as a foreigner. That's a legal requirement. people staying in private homes have to do. And I was down at the municipal offices, and I couldn't do anything because their system was shut down. So that is the government systems in Petersburg was shut down because of the unreliability of Internet service. I guess I was being, for lack of a better word, pampered because I was in Moscow.

Well, Moscow and more generally, the events that you were going to were among the most prestigious in this country. And the authorities would take every possible precaution so that you and the other hundreds, if not several thousand, the level of disturbances to normal life that are now going on in Russia because of the drone attacks. What about inflation? Have you detected that since you were last in St. Petersburg? No, paradoxically, not at all. However, at the low end, so I did a little survey yesterday already of the supermarket of different categories, economy, middle class, and upper middle class.

And at the lower end, and we have a lower end here in this rather prosperous community where I live, because there are residential units, there are apartments, for military officers. They are, as a cadet corps here, there always was going back to Tsarist Times. And so you have foreign military trainees, Russian military trainees in this area, and they are generally speaking, economy class customers. And the selection, the offering there in the supermarket is a part of a chain that serves them, has been curtailed considerably since my last visit. Fresh greens, fresh dairy products, less.

A variety is curtailed. All right. So how are you able to attribute the paucity of certain products in a grocery store to the prosecution of the war? I think it relates to the wallets of their basic clientele. I was about to say that in the upper middle class, supermarkets, there has been no curtailment of the product assortment, and they're getting everything, and I don't see any price inflation. In fact, to my surprise, I saw a price deflation. I was at the

fish counter in this upmarket supermarket chain, and the prices of fish that you know well from the States, like Dorad, I think it's Seabream, I just forget the translation, that it was 35% cheaper than on my visit of May. A local specialty fish would people love it for the good reason. It's salmon trout. These are three-pound, four-pound fish that are farmed in Lake Laudega, the biggest natural freshwater lake in Europe that's just near Petersburg. They were going for 10, 12, 11, 12 years a kilogram when they were 15 and 16 in May. So some prices have come down, to surprisingly, but that the, it is the wealthiest would benefit from that. So the real issue for the broader public is the security and the pricing of hydrocarpets,

a fuel for the car. And I haven't gone to stations. I haven't seen any lines at stations, but I did listen to Business FM, which is a business radio station based in Moscow with a subsidiary year in Petersburg, who yesterday were reporting on a spike. in prices for fuel on the commodities exchange in Moscow. And they had the deputy prime minister Novak, who was formerly the energy Tsar in Russia for 10 years, reporting that, oh, we don't have any imports of fuel right now. Well, that isn't comfort to people. Russia is supposed to be an exporter of refined hydrocarbons. Have you discerned a grumbling, a mumbling, a disenchantment, a center of frustration,

or have you discerned a collective will to sacrifice a la World War II, or have you discerned neither of these in your communications with ordinary folks? Now, we're not talking about the elites. No, I'm dealing with ordinary folks. When I speak about taxi drivers, this is my source of information. can't get more ordinary than that. Correct. Correct. But are they disenchanted?

Are they grumbling? Are they angry at Putin? Do they wish the war to end quickly? Do they express that to you? Does this happen all the time, or did it just happen at two in the morning when you landed in St. Petersburg? Well, the whole day today has been going on. I ordered a taxi this morning from Yandex, which is the main taxi provider, of course, the whole country, very sophisticated technically.

And the taxi went to the long address. They said your taxi is waiting for you, but that wasn't waiting in front of my house. So it wasn't working. As to what people are saying, out of the list of possibilities that you gave me, I choose one. And that is, people are experiencing difficulty, and they want the war to end quickly. But I didn't sense that as being criticism of Putin as such or a grumbling as such. But it is a feeling that the war should end soon. And that is the people.

The people are not the ones who Mr. Putin listens to or has to listen to. He has to listen to the elites. And the elites, I think, are more direct in their analysis of the connection between these daily inconveniences and the way the war is being conducted. Let's talk about the way the war is being conducted. My initial question to you, and you've given a very thorough and expansive answer, was, is there any pressure on President Putin to change his military strategy? Now, the West is reporting, and I think you agree with this reporting, but of course, correct me if I am wrong, that in their 90-minute telephone conversation, which occurred while I was in a Russian television studio last week,

President Putin told President Trump, Zelensky better get realistic, or Ukraine will be destroyed. Now, the use of that word destroyed, I don't know what it is in Russian, and I don't know if there's more than one variant of it, but translated into English, it's a very harsh and meaningful work, Is that your understanding as well?

The President Putin said to President Trump, tell Zelenskyy to put up, get realistic, or Ukraine, quote, will be destroyed, close quote, translated from the Russian to the English. I think that is all accurate. And it's not just my pulling this out of the thin air. As I've mentioned, since you know that one of my points, and I want to be sure that people understand

and it's not my only point of information about Russia. And the little taxi drivers also count, as well as many other sources. And doing super-democrat tours as a method of understanding the general economy that the U.S. embassy and intelligence officers in Moscow knew very well in 1970s and 1980s. So there's a whole combination of points to methodology. But listening to television, one week ago, Vladimir Shalov, who was not just a call, show, host, like people would imagine I'm running meet the press in the States. But a person who is in the inner circle of the top management of all Russian news,

together with Kisilov, who is the boss of bosses, and together with Putin himself, whom he has interviewed and so forth. He is at the top, and he's very close to power. And he was saying on Russian television precisely that, let's face it, it, we are in a war. And this should be not in a special military operation anymore. And we should, since the Ukrainians are interested in doing everything possible, to harm us, we should not hold back. We should flatten the center of Kiev. We should give a warning to the population of Kiev. Let me stop. Let me stop you. Who are you quoting or paraphrasing here?

Vladimir Solvio and the words that he used are precisely the words that you just gave me coming from Trump. So what Salviov was saying on air was exactly what Putin was saying on a private conversation to Donald Trump. We will destroy Ukraine. Wow. Why is Putin saying that now? Is he feeling pressure, running out of patience, running out of manpower, running out of ammunition? No, I think he's feeling pressure. And as I said, the pressure would be coming from the broader elites in Moscow.

I don't think this is, people will say, oh, it's the oligarchs who are doing it. I don't believe that at all. But I do think that the thinking population of Russia is highly concentrated in the city of Moscow, which is the country's largest city. And that's outside the narrow circle of Mr. Putin, who are dealing in a collegial way with him, there are a lot of people who are not in a collegial way with him and who have had enough of this war.

I want to see it over. So if we assume, as you do, that Vladimir Siloviev, a highly regarded serious, television personality in Russia, speaks for the Kremlin, and says things like the population, I'm quoting you now, of Kyiv should be warned to evacuate the city ahead of Russia's bombing them flat. He's not making that up. He's not expressing a political opinion. He's saying what he honestly believes the Kremlin wants him to say, or the Kremlin is saying to him.

The Kremlin wouldn't allow him to say that if it didn't back it. It is much too political statement for this man to be standing up on television and saying, because he just dreamed it up himself. No. He is doing the work of his boss, Mr. Putin. Will the special military operation, I don't know if I'm going to use the proper word, be transformed into a war, which, of course, would mobilize and affect everybody in Russia in some respect,

but without getting into that, at least for now, do you expect this transformation to occur? I expect it this transformation to occur if, and the whole threat was made in the context of the planned transfer of Tomahawks to Kiev. We don't know the status of that now. We don't know the status. It seemed to be an abeyance.

It seemed that there will be a, meeting in Budapest between Trump and Putin, which would agree the terms for ending the war between them, which would then be imposed on Mr. Zelensky, who could or could not be sitting in the next room. That meeting is now, according to the Financial Times, and some American news, sources canceled. According to the Russians, they're still playing, that is Russians, I mean in the state television. They're still pretending it will take place. I was not pretending. Here's our friend, Foreign Minister Lavrov, on this very topic yesterday.

Chris, cut number 14. For quite some time, Zelensky aspired to do that. Markron Steymer or Sula von der Leyen have been doing that from some point in time when they stopped mentioning a studio. defeat upon Russia, they started calling for an immediate ceasefire. Back in the day, Macron said that these ceasefire should be unconditional without any preconditions, and among other things, he publicly stated that nobody would be able to restrict the weapons supplies to the Kiev regime. that means that when it all became clear why they needed this truth.

But most importantly, this would mean not only an opportunity to pump the Kiev regime full of weaponry, to incentivize its terrorist attacks, namely attacks against civil infrastructure and civilians in the Russian territory. Before you respond, here's another one from Foreign Minister Lavrov yesterday, 14, Chris. I was surprised to read today that, according to CNN, the Putin-Trump meeting might be postponed. The dishonesty of many Western media outlets is well known, and CNN is no exception. I want to officially confirm that Russia has not changed its positions compared to the understandings reached during the lengthy negotiations between Putin and Trump in Alaska. We remain fully committed

to this formula. Those who are now trying to convince our American colleagues to change their position simply want to stop the war without addressing its causes. That would mean leaving a Nazi-like regime in control of part of Ukraine, a place where the Russian language is banned and the majority population is oppressed, we remain committed to what President Putin and Trump agreed upon in Anchorage, a long-term, sustainable peace, not a ceasefire that leads nowhere. We understand that. They want to address the root causes. They've been consistent on that since day one for two and a half years now. But do the Russians believe that the Budapest conference is on or off? Well, that depends which Russians are talking to.

All right. The guy that we just heard is pretty high up there, the foreign minister. All right. Mr. Solveyorf is not at that level, but he's not, but he is not to be ignored. And he went one step further, what Mr. Lavrov didn't touch upon, which I think you in particular will appreciate and savor. As Solvio, named Marco Rubio, as the traitor in the trunk camp, who has who has scuttled the planned summit. Wow. All right. I wish we could carry on,

but I have another commitment in a couple of minutes. Gilbert, this is a fascinating conversation with you as all of our conversations have been. I'm deeply grateful for them. I'm especially grateful when you're able to come on air while you're traveling. Thank you very much.

We'll look forward to seeing you next week, my friend. My pleasure. Thank you. All the best to you. Fascinating. fascinating stuff and of course our other guests will be happy to comment on it as the day and this week proceed the day will proceed with aaron matte at 11 o'clock phil geraldi at 3 o'clock and professor geoffrey sacks at 530 this evening judge napal tano for judging freedom Thank you.