Judging Freedom - How Much is NATO involved in Ukraine Offensive_ Scott Horton

Episode Date: June 7, 2023

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Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, June 7th, 2023. It's about 1115 in the morning here on the east coast of the United States. Scott Horton from Antiwar.com joins us now uh scott always a pleasure uh thank you very much for joining us do you think ukraine is falling apart as a result of uh of the west the military assistance of the west extending the war The country itself or the, it's military, you mean? Either way you can address it, however you see fit, Scott. Well, I mean, certainly in the far east of the country, you know, many of these cities have been absolutely decimated. So whoever gets to keep them is going to have a hell of a project to try to rebuild them again. As far as, you know, how things are going in Kiev and Lviv and the other major cities west of Kiev there, with all the American billions that Biden is pouring

in, I suppose they're holding it together. As we talked about before, plan A here, the assumption was the Russians were going to roll right over the Ukrainian military and we'd be backing an insurgency all along. So it could come to the point where the government maybe crumbles and Zelensky has to flee to Poland and run a government in exile and his forces end up, you know, like Saddam's Fedayeen, end up having to fade out and then take up as irregulars fighting the guerrilla war against a Russian occupation. On the other hand, both sides have been, as is to be expected, overestimating and overstating their own strength and gains and overstating the other side's losses and weaknesses. So like, for example, there's been all this talk about the summer offensive

or the spring offensive that got kind of put off here because it was such a wet and rainy spring. But then, so nobody really knows what's going to happen, right? The headline is that all the forces that are going to participate in the new offensive have been trained in Germany on Western materials for months now. They were sending the kind of poor and untrained kind of conscripts from Nowheresville off to the meat grinder in Bakhmut while the real army was getting ready for the coming assault. There are some reports that say the coming assault isn't coming. There's not even going to be a major offensive. There are some reports that say the coming assault isn't coming.

There's not even going to be a major offensive. There are others that say that, boy, the Russians can sure expect the worst. Now, once it's unleashed, I really don't know how to judge that other than to see, you know,

right. Here's a president. To Zelensky just last week, this is about three days before the dam was attacked. We'll get to the dam in a minute, saying we're ready. In my opinion, as of today,

we are ready to do it. We would like to have certain things, but we can't wait for months. We strongly believe we will succeed. I don't know how long it will take. He's talking, of course, about the spring offensive. And then after the dam exploded,

and of course he blames the Russians for flooding their own troops, which would be absurd, but that's what he says. Quote, the destruction of the dam confirms that Russian forces must be expelled from every corner of Ukrainian land, which in his mind includes Crimea, which sounds like this statement was written by Victoria Nuland. I'll let you respond. Yeah. Well, remember when an errant defensive missile hit a farmhouse in Poland or a barn, I guess, in Poland and killed two people. Zelensky immediately came out and said this was a deliberate attack by Russia against a NATO ally. Time for you all to go fight, he said. Right. So, you know, when something blows up and he says that this only proves X or Y, I'm not willing to, you know, take his word for it on anything like that.

And in fact, you know, I don't think anybody really knows what happened to the dam. In fact, I read a story just a little while ago from the BBC where they had some, I guess, satellite or airplane pictures. I'm not sure, Judge, where they were saying, actually, it looks like the dam had been damaged over a period of days. So as far as I know, it was just a failure of maybe a lack of maintenance or some kind of thing just led to a failure of the dam. There may not have been an explosion. I saw one bit of footage that was purported to be an explosion as though it was a missile strike or a bomb going off. But then that was quickly identified as old footage. And I think even of a different dam.

So I don't know exactly what happened here. Of course, both sides, even if it was an accident, both sides are going to blame each other. If it was deliberate, then, you know, I don't know if the Ukrainians, I don't think they hit it with a rocket or a missile or something like that. Maybe they were somehow able to sneak in a bomb. The idea that the Russians did it, as you said, I agree, is very doubtful when this reservoir is part of the reason for the war, frankly. So the Russians can guarantee these freshwater resources for Crimea, because after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, shortly after that, I forget exactly how long it was, the Poroshenko government had cut off their freshwater resources, leaving them with

essentially enough for drinking water, but none for agriculture or anything else. And so it was important for the Russians as one of their major goals of the war is to re-establish that canal and that access to that fresh water for so uh colonel uh tony schaefer uh argues cui bono to whose benefit right uh and the benefit of the destruction of the dam is to the Ukrainians because it's flooding areas where there are Russian-speaking Ukrainians and Russian troops. Colonel McGregor argues, as you do, that the dam has been degraded. The Ukrainians may have toyed with damaging it and may have done some damage to it in toying with it. This is a year ago, and it finally burst. I guess we're really not going to know.

Gary, do you have the tape of the dam exploding and the water pouring through? Do you have that video that you can run now? I want to see if this is the same one that you saw. Oh, well, that's the water. Do you have the one with the explosions, Gary? Here we go. Now, this purports to be the dam.

This is three explosions. It's a primary explosion, a a secondary and a tertiary so i don't know if this is the one scott that you um uh came to believe was done by the ukrainians and then it turns out it's old footage or if this is of the same dam uh the source for all of this that's the same clip that i saw on twitter yesterday that was quickly identified as being old footage. As far as I know from somewhere else, it may have been, as you said, there was a previous attack on this dam. If you bear with me, I have here the quote from the Washington Post late last year. This is from antiwar.com by Dave DeCamp at the top of the page today. Andrew Kovalchuk told the Washington Post he camp at the top of the page today um andre kovalchuk told the washington post he

considered attacking the dam during the counter offensive um he considered flooding the river the ukrainians he said even conducted a test strike with high mars with a high mars launcher okay this is february this is february of 22 right uh, I, I'm not sure about that. I think this is the same. I think this is the same piece that I read. Yeah. So, so they did,

well, it was with the high Mars. So no, they got those later than February. It would have been, it would have been later in the year. Um, no,

this is when they were doing right. So as you said, that could have, that previous damage could have led to what happened today. You know what I mean? Right, right. Right, right. Right before the dam exploded, as if he's recognizing NATO getting some cold feet, Secretary of State Blinken in Helsinki said this. 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. That's right out of Joe Biden's

playbook. Today, tomorrow, and for as long as it takes. Have they crafted, I've asked you this before, Scott, have they crafted, as far as you know, an off-ramp for themselves, the administration? No, sir. I don't believe that they have. I think that you can absolutely take Blinken at his word for it, that that is their policy. I think his assessment of the Russian war is somewhat correct. If you wanted to add the weasel word so far in there, Putin, it's been more than a year. He hasn't been able to achieve his goals. America and its allies have flooded an inordinate amount of money and weapons and training in on the Ukrainian side, which clearly has made some difference in stymieing Russian forces. I think he's also right that Putin's policy is to wait us out and

that he can outlast us. But where I think he's just dead wrong is the part where he says America will never back down and will never turn our backs on the Ukrainians, et cetera. That's just not true. That's what Condoleezza Rice and Susan Rice said about Afghanistan. But we lost that war and eventually had to admit it and turn around and left.

Do you think the whole West, NATO, not the newer members, the older members of NATO, and maybe the silent parts of the establishment around Blinken, Biden, Austin and company are tiring of the war? Tiring of spending billions there? Tiring of seeing no Ukraine progress? No, I'm afraid I don't think that. I think the DC consensus seems to be firmly in their corner here. But the reality is what, as Barack Obama described it back after the loss of Crimea back to Russia in 2014, which is that this is the highest national interest of Russia. And it's just not for us. Ukraine is always going to mean more to them than it does to us. And you can hear it in the language of the Biden administration that Ukraine is really a means to an end. We could

be doing the same damn thing in Lithuania right now, I guess. But we're, as Lindsey Graham says, killing Russians without us having to do it. And so they look at that as a good. As long as they can keep it going on, they look at it as though it necessarily is weakening Russia strategically. And what's interesting about this, I'm sure Colonel McGregor has mentioned this to you, is that you can see that this is costing America and the West a lot more than it's costing the Russians. There was a new report that came out that said they've only spent less than $70 billion on the whole war. And we're in it way over $100 billion by now. And with all the opportunity costs and the rest that's going on, the real budget of what's being spent on this effort by the West has got to be, you know,

five or 10 times that. And so who's giving who? Another Afghanistan and Ukraine. If this is all about the major powers using the Ukrainians to weaken each other, maybe, as Putin said before the war judge, he said, you know, maybe they're trying to bait me into doing this. Maybe this is a setup. Well, maybe he decided that, well, you know what, I'm just going to turn it around on you and I'm going to invade, but he's the one backing the Mujahideen and we're the Soviet Union, you know? Yeah. I think the West is trying to use Ukraine as a battering ram against him. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I'm just saying it seems to be, you know, boomeranging back on the American side, just like it always is. Here's President Zelensky again, and again I'll read the subtitles

for the benefit of our friends who are catching the show on audio only, but he refers to President Putin as a cornered animal. All of our Western partners, they have to understand А будь-яким нашим партнерам західним треба точно розуміти, що вони не вірять. These are signs of a weak man. And that's how we have to act. A cornered animal. He is afraid of losing his life. He must be afraid of the strength of the world. He, of course, to whom he refers, is President Putin. What is this gain, Scott?

Man, it sounds like he's doing a commercial for non-interventionism. We're going to let, you know, who, look, let's say that this guy is the most sober and thoughtful and brave leader in Ukrainian history. He's got a beef with Russia. It has nothing to do with us. We're talking about, you know, you can hear sometimes some of the statements from the politicians in Lithuania and Poland, where, boy, are they tough with America standing right behind them. But are we really going to let these people determine this policy for us? Vladimir Putin our government says, to the point where his regime crumbles and falls. But Zelensky says, come on, be brave. You can't just let this guy threaten you with real war between NATO and Russia and the loss of hundreds of millions or billions of lives that that would entail. Because why? Well, because that would mean that he loses. That would mean that at some point we decide that, you know

what, we'd be better off negotiating with Russia for some kind of compromise rather than sticking with this policy that they must eventually leave every last inch of Ukrainian territory, as you alluded to before, including the Crimean Peninsula. When, come on, man, even Rand McNally says that that ship has sailed. The Russians took Crimea back in 2014, and they're not giving it up to Ukraine without some H-bombs going off somewhere. And so, you know, this is completely crazy. And that guy might as well be advertising for antiwar.com and why you don't let tin pot dictators of foreign nations determine your foreign policy. This is straight out of George Washington's farewell address. Correct. Correct. And entangling alliances. foreign country who is determining American foreign policy is Vladimir Zelensky.

Yeah. Because of the nerve that he struck with the Western globalists in Western Europe. And although we see some fraying of some of this in Germany and in France, but certainly we haven't seen any freeing with American foreign policy experts. Look at the word games that the Biden government plays. They go, look, we're giving them hundreds, well, already more than a hundred billion dollars worth of weapons. We're giving them all this training. We're giving them all the intelligence that they need. And, you know, numerous reports in the Post, the Times and the Journal for a year straight,

we're helping them kill generals. We're helping them target every time they launch a high mars they confirm the coordinates with the american satellite you know intelligence and all this all of their main battle plans are all run first through tabletop exercises in germany where they figure out exactly how the americans are running this, right? It's like the- Let me just stop you. The tabletop exercises in Germany reminds me of this piece you sent me early this morning and mentioned earlier in this show that the better Ukrainian troops have been training in Germany and being trained by NATO? Question. Are some of those trainers American troops and officers? Well, in Germany, they absolutely are. And we know that there are some special operations forces in Ukraine and the CIA Special Activities Division

paramilitaries have been there all along. We know that from reporting from The Intercept and The New York Times, and then the Discord leaks confirm that as well. Exactly what role they're playing in terms of leading forces on the ground or something like that, we don't know. But God forbid that we have American special operators killed by Russians in battle on the ground in Ukraine. That could really lead to an escalation. And see, this is the point, right, is the Americans give all of this aid to the Ukrainians, but then they say, hey, how the Ukrainians fight the war is up to them. And if they decide they want to take back Crimea, well, good luck. And if they decide that they want to attack inside Russia, if they want to do sabotage missions or support these militias invading inside Russia

drone attacks inside Moscow including on the Kremlin well that's just completely deniable well why is it deniable just because they say so when the world knows can't imagine Zelensky's people doing that without a U.S. intel knowing about it and and u.s government either saying go ahead or knowing about it and looking the other way which is the moral equivalent of saying go ahead that's the new story in the washington post and i really like seymour hirsch but this is another version of the story that has the ukrainians doing nordstream and it says that they learned from one of these uh discord leaks that a european intelligence agency notified the cia in june that the ukrainians were going to do it and the americans look the other way and let them do it so i don't know if that's the real story or whether uh it's the her story james bamford had a great

one in the nation saying he thinks the ukrainians did it with, you know, drones, unmanned submarines. Do you think that these attacks inside Russia, which just seem like little pinpricks, are going to change the culture of the conflict? Well, they very well could, right? I mean, so imagine if someone did even an ineffectual drone attack. Well, not just someone. Imagine the Russians or Russian sock puppets in Canada or something in the analogy did a drone strike on the White House where Joe Biden works and sleeps, right? Where the president works and sleeps. The Americans would take that as though it was the equivalent of the 9-11 attack, right?

They would not say, well, it was a symbolic thing and they set the flag on fire or something. No, they would absolutely flip out. And Putin has not. Putin has been a model of restraint. Well, I mean, this is the thing about it, right? As they say, this is the coldest psychopath in the world, and maybe he is, but I prefer him emotionless. The reality is that he can be provoked to actual madness if you push him that far, the same as any man or any especially strong man, leader of a country as he is. He might say, look, tit for tat, fine. I'm going to do something to Lithuania then. We're going to have a problem with Kaliningrad or we're going to escalate here, there or another place. And so, yeah, the deniability here doesn't work.

This is on the United sentence at the very end. You made a great deal about 1956 and fighting for freedom. You have a neighbor who was invaded by Russia, the very country. You grew up with pictures of tanks going into Budapest. Why are you opposing the European aid? No, no, it's emotional. It's tragic. So all of our heart is with the Ukrainians. We understand how much they suffer.

But I'm speaking here as a politician who should save lives. The most important thing for the international political communities to save lives, especially when you are convinced, as I do, that there is no chance to win this war. So therefore, what we should do far more energy invest into to convince everybody that the only solution is ceasefire. And then after the ceasefire, peace talks should start. And then we could back to your point, yeah? But do you really think there is no chance of Ukraine winning?

That's my point. And surely the main, surely they stand very little chance of winning without the aid which you are currently blocking. No, no. My position is that looking at the reality, looking at the figures, looking at the surroundings, looking at the fact that NATO is not ready to send troops, it's obvious that there is no victory for poor Ukrainians on the battlefield. Looking at the fact that NATO is unwilling to send troops it's obvious that even nato i'm paraphrasing doesn't think there can be victory on the battlefield

well look i agree with everything that he said there and it's this is war is a terrible tragedy did not have to happen at all, judge. But the reality is that Russia is a much stronger nation than Ukraine. And assuming, which I think is a fair assumption, that Putin is not going to change the policy and back down, he still has millions of fighting age males that he can conscript and send into this war for years on end. And, you know, the kicking him out of the European economy and out of European civilization and so forth, the way that they've done has just led him to redouble his efforts to expand his economic ties in Asia in a way that just makes the American economic war essentially a moot point. And so, you know, ultimately, yeah, they pushed

it this far. And the truth is that now they're going to have to negotiate over the Donbass. Russia claims four provinces of Eastern Ukraine, not including Crimea. Now we're talking about Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporozhye, and Kherson there. They claim four. Well, they're going to have to keep two. And we're going to have to figure out some kind of easement for the land bridge across the coast of Azov there between Russia and the Donbass and the Crimean Peninsula.

And that's where this war is going to end up one way or the other anyway. And people are just being killed for essentially nothing here. I hope that it ends soon rather than 100,000 more human lives wasted and 100 billion more American dollars wasted.

Scott Horton, what a pleasure to have you on such thoughtful analysis. Very, very much appreciated by my audience. Thank you for joining us, my dear friend. Absolutely. Happy to do it anytime, Judge. Of course. More as we get it. Tell your friends, if you like what you see. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.