Judging Freedom - Larry Johnson: Kursk Invasion a Disaster for Whom?

Episode Date: August 19, 2024

Larry Johnson: Kursk Invasion a Disaster for Whom?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Bay with WGU. WGU is an online accredited university that specializes in personalized learning. With courses available 24-7 and monthly start dates, you can earn your degree on your schedule. You may even be able to graduate sooner than you think by demonstrating mastery of the material you know. Make 2025 the year you focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu. Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, August 19th, 2024. Larry Johnson joins us now. Larry, thank you, my dear friend, as always. Do we know, sure, do we know what truly happened at Kursk?

What the Western media is portraying as a triumphant, but limited, Ukrainian invasion of a region of Russia. Well, let's talk about what really has happened, and nobody's picking up on it. And this is going to be determinative for the future. The United States and its NATO allies have invaded Russia. And let me repeat that. The United States and its NATO allies have invaded Russia using Ukraine as a proxy. They planned it. They helped organize it. They staffed it. They funded it. They supplied it. There were even some U.S. personnel and NATO personnel, you know, citizens fighting alongside these Ukrainians. Can you imagine the reaction in the United States if there was a military invasion across either the Mexican or Canadian border into U.S. territory that resulted in the death and capture of American citizens? Do you think we'd sit back and go, oh, no big deal, we're just, you know, things happen?

Or would you view it as an act of war? So what's happened, this is now entering a new phase because despite the propaganda that initially was put out where the Ukrainians, yeah, they captured a bunch of border guards. They captured some lightly defended units. They took control of stores. You got lots of videos of these cats, you know, were looting grocery stores and such and making fun of it and having a big laugh.

They put it on video. The problem is the Russians have now caught them. Some of them are dead and many of them are tied up as prisoners. So what Ukraine has put itself in is they're in a position that they cannot sustain. Because every day you fire off a round of ammunition, you're going to have to replace that. Well, where do you replace it? You don't run down to the army surplus store and buy it. It's got to be sent to you. And yet one of the things they're doing is they're blowing up bridges behind themselves so that they can't even have a route of egress. I mean, this is so dangerous. And I know I've heard Scott talk about it. He's been in touch with some contacts in Russia. And they've been very

clear to him that there's going to be a response on the Russian part that the West won't see coming, and it will be significant. It's not just going to be a sternly worded letter. Will this prove to be a disaster for the West and for Ukraine? Yes. Well, it's already proving to be a disaster. When you look down into the Donbass, where the Russians are offensive, it's accelerating. There's picking up momentum.

So the town of New York, not your New York City, but the New York in Ukraine has fallen. Pokrovsk is in the process of falling. And that is a really key hub that has the Ukrainians panic. But it's not just those two. It is literally up and down that line of contact. And, you know, we can't even get a straight story out of the Ukrainians or frankly out of NATO in terms of what was the objective of this Ukrainian operation around Kursk. Was it to attack the nuclear power, take control of the nuclear power plant? Or was it to force the Russians to divert troops to the Kursk region, take them off the front and the Donbass and ease pressure on the Ukrainian troops? Or was it to embarrass Putin as if embarrassing him would somehow win the war? Any kind of military operation needs to have a pretty clear objective, what you intend

to accomplish by using force. It's the same with self-defense. If you're just going to try to beat somebody just to beat them up and pound them into the floor, well, what happens if they got brothers and cousins and they come back after you? You know, you always got to think these things through. So the Ukrainians launched this operation. They had to basically cobble together some units from the front that was trying to hold back the Russians.

And now they've weakened those positions in the Donbass to such an extent that, you know, in the past, you know, like eight months ago, you're looking at maybe the Russians progressing a half kilometer or less a day. They're now moving two to five kilometers a day. So significant movement over the territory and sort of the pace of the decline of the Ukrainian military force in Donetsk and Luhansk is accelerating. Did Russian intel see this coming or was there a failure of Russian intel? Can I say yes?

Explain please of Russian intel? Can I say yes? Explain, please, Mr. Johnson. So, yes, they had the information that this was coming. And, yes, they failed to act on it in a timely fashion to prevent it. And this is not the first time that you've had this kind of thing, whether in Russia or the United States or any other major country that's been involved with any kind of military operations. But I know that the, I'll call it the spin that's been put out after is that the Russians set this up as a trap for the Ukrainians. Yeah, but they could have set the trap without having lost some of the personnel that they did early on and have them be taken and captured by the Ukrainians.

So it was both. You know, it's like two know, it's like, it's like, you know, two beers taste great, less filling. Right, right. All right. Is there a public angst over a Russian military and Russian intelligence leadership coming from the rank and file military and the rank and file intelligence officers? I think the anger has been dissipated by the fact of who Putin has put in charge

of the operation now in Kursk. Very well respected, very popular guy. He's the one who actually headed up Russia taking back Crimea in 2014. So he was leading the troops back then. Who is that, Larry? His name is, I think it's Demon. It's D-Y-M-A-N, D-Y-M-U-M. I'm not sure on the spelling. But, you know, some people said, oh, boy, Putin, he's really damaged by this. He's in trouble.

He's on the ropes. And so what are the images you saw yesterday? It was Vladimir Putin flying to Azerbaijan to visit on a state visit, visiting with his counterpart in Azerbaijan, getting off the plane, very relaxed, you know, no sign of tension, greeting the other leader, not hanging his head, not, you know. So there's a whole lot of propaganda spin that's coming out. And that's really all the United States and the West have left. What's really noteworthy is throughout this entire Kursk operation, you haven't seen the F-16s show

up anywhere. Because in theory, those F-16s are there to help provide some cover for ground forces. That's not happening. So they've got those squirreled away. I think we really could be coming to the point where Russia may end up striking some NATO bases in Romania and Poland that are, if they're actively involved in supplying weapons and intelligence that's being used to attack now inside Russia, they're targets. I know that terminology is very important to the Kremlin

and even to the Russian people throughout history. What is the difference between a war and a counter-terrorist operation from the vantage point of the Kremlin? And let's not forget special military operation right that's what this originally was yeah so it starts off as a special the special military operation is uh let's define what war would be war would be eliminating all communications, taking out the entire grid immediately, taking out satellites, taking out all ISR. It would require the likelihood of civilian casualties because you'd be striking certain centers and areas that right now the Russians have considered

off-limits in order to minimize civilian casualties. Possibility that civilian casualties would go way up, that would make it a war. What makes the turning into a counterterrorism operation is, you know, basically, unless these terrorists, as they're being labeled by the Russians, the Ukrainians running around Kursk, unless they surrender immediately, they're going to be killed. And the Ukrainians running around Kursk, unless they surrender immediately, they're going to be killed. And in some cases, they may still be shot. So, you know, they are treated quite differently. So up to this point, Russia really has pursued a limited military strategy with respect to Ukraine in terms of its special military operation.

It is not, you know, it is still allowed some of the Western ISR, you know, the intelligence surveillance reconnaissance capabilities to operate. Once they go to a war footing, those come down. Those are targets. And, you know, I understand the Russians have wanted to avoid expanding this and letting this get out of hand. But I think the West is forcing their hand. That they say, okay, you want a total war, then you'll get a total war. That's where we're headed. Do you know from your sources, Larry,

if Americans, American human beings, American citizens, whether CIA, whether contractors, whether military, were involved in this invasion of Kursk? Only from reports on the ground that they were hearing Americans, you know, people speaking with an American accent. Not a lot, but some. And, you know, it wouldn't surprise me. But the key to this is now you've seen across the board, not just with the United States, but UK and the Canadian pipsqueaks, where they're allowing their weapons to be used inside Russia.

They're encouraging it. They're talking about it openly. And again, it's just like, can everybody take a big, deep breath, take a step back and imagine that the shoe's on the other foot, that this was Russia or China doing that to us. Right. Would we view that as a threat that would require going to war? Yes, it is. That's what we're playing with here.

Larry, the Chinese floated a weather balloon over Alaska about a year ago, and the country went crazy over it. You can imagine how we would react if troops had crossed the Bering Straits from Russia into Alaska. Yet, and you can guess where this comes from, the Washington Post headline over the weekend is, Putin rattled, Putin in a panic. This is what the CIA wants the public to think. Right, yeah. The boy, we got him on the run. And again, I had an acquaintance send me that,

oh, see, Putin's in trouble. And I said, what, really? Did you watch the video of him walking off the plane? I mean, you can tell body language. You can tell somebody's stressed out. He was just relaxed, sauntering, you know. He's not upset or worried about this because, you know, they're taking care of business. Not taking care of it in the way the West thinks that the Russians ought to do, which again, it is hilarious in a macabre sense that the West,

particularly the United States, wants to lecture Russia on how to conduct military operations with our track record of failure. I mean, it'd be one thing if we had success, but we're like the guy that bankrupts a company and now we want to tell other people how they should be making money. Okay. And, you know, at that point, a little humility is in order that we should just, you know, shut up, mind our own business. Is Zelensky, Ukrainian President Zelensky, crazy enough to target Russian nuclear facilities? I think so, yes. You know, they are desperate.

You know, this is, you know, when you're winning, when things are going your way, you're not panicked. You're confident. You move forward with a deliberate sense of where you're headed whether you're talking about a person or a country or an army and that's what you're seeing right now in Kiev

is panic genuine panic on their side again this is the Washington Post headline about Putin all it's doing is projecting onto Russia what's actually taking place in Ukraine because they're run out of options. They're looking at the fact that their military lines are collapsing in the Donbass, that they're going to lose the Donbass. They've virtually had sort of control of it now for the last 10 years. That's going. And once that line breaks, the only thing that stands between the Russians and Kiev is the River Dnieper.

Actually, half of Kiev is on the east side of the Dnieper anyway. Here's President Zelensky yesterday saying that he's trying to create, this sounds absurd, this is what he says, trying to create a buffer zone inside of Russia. Cut number five, Chris. Today, we achieved good and much needed results in destroying Russian equipment near Turetsk, and all this is more than just defense for Ukraine.

It is now our primary task in defensive operations overall to destroy as much Russian war potential as possible and conduct maximum counter-offensive actions. This includes creating a buffer zone on the aggressor's territory, our operation in the Kursk region. Yeah, so he's mixing and matching here. So he's talking about what they're doing in Turetsk. Well, Turetsk is down, you know, way south of Kursk.

And so, and this goes back to the shift in strategy. Now the shift is, oh, we're going to create this buffer zone so it's going to force the Russians to divert troops up there. Hello? Russia has ample trained reserves. Ukraine does not.

It's a simple fact. The Russian army is estimated now to be in excess of 1.4 million men. That's double what they were two and a half years ago. But the Ukrainian army, by contrast, which back then was, you know, they had about seven, eight hundred thousand as well. Maybe another four hundred thousand in reserve. They're actually down probably below a half a million men. And, you know, which sounds like a lot, but it's not a lot when you're suffering just enormous

casualties. And I know my friend, Andrei Martyanov, who's really one of the best military experts out there in terms of following Russia, he's pretty certain that the actually death toll for the Ukrainian forces is now in excess of a million, which I think is entirely believable. This morning, our dear friend and colleague Alistair Crook told us, I'm switching gears now to Israel and Gaza and Hezbollah, that Netanyahu is in danger of a military coup because the fury at his leadership from Assad, Shin Bet, and the IDF has now spilled over into the public. And to make matters even worse, according to Alistair,

Ben Gavir, who's the rough equivalent of the head of their FBI, has assembled a small army. It's not like the IDF, but there are thousands of people in it, including police, border guards, the type of individuals that are subject to his command. Does any of this surprise you? No, no. We've had the, you know, sort of the indications of it now coming out over the last four weeks, where you had an open rift between the head of the military saying, hey, we, you know, we can't militarily defeat Hamas. Hamas is really an idea and getting immediate pushback from Netanyahu.

It'd be one thing if Israel and the Zionist contingent that leads it was they're all pulling in the same direction, but they're not. They're pulling in different directions. And you do have this real rift separating those like Ben-Gavir, Smotrich, the ultra religious, it's not even proper maybe to use the term religious, but they believe that all of that land is theirs and that nobody else, including any Palestinians that have been there for generations, have a right to it and must be exterminated. And they cite the scripture to say, justify the extermination

of the Amaleks. And Netanyahu himself has used that. Then you have a more secular, let's call it Western educated, less religiously driven group of people. Which Netanyahu once was. Once was. Well, yeah, he's a chameleon, moves back and forth. But you've got some of those professionals in the army, in Mossad and Shin Bet, who are pushing back. And I'm sure Israel does have the intelligence capability to collect. They can see what's going on in Iran now.

And all the plans that Israel had for attacking Iran and taking out key installations has sort of gone up in smoke because Russia has moved in. Russia has equipped the Iranians with advanced air defense systems and personnel to operate it, among other things. So the calculations that Israel must make in terms of how to plan any kind of attack, you know, they had to go sort of back to the drawing board. And they recognize that this is a much more formidable task. And at the same time, they're facing a step up in activity from Hezbollah. And Hezbollah just, they killed a chief warrant officer overnight, which is, you know, he's not quite a senior officer, but he's still an officer. He was killed with a drone. So Hezbollah is now demonstrating they can assassinate Israelis, just like Israelis have been assassinating members of Hezbollah. And

Hezbollah hasn't even begun to flex the muscles that it's capable of. And if they're coordinating with Iran, and I think I can't believe that they would not, there's a way that they can coordinate with Iran and launch an attack on Israel that Israel cannot counter. We've already seen Hezbollah rockets go into northern Israel, and the Iron Dome failed to intercept them. Was that failure because those rockets were moving so fast, or was it a cyber attack by Iran on the Iron Dome system that prevented it from operating? So there's, like I said, the dynamics at play here are so powerful and the potential so dangerous. You know, we're sitting between Ukraine and Israel. We're sitting on a hair trigger.

And if anybody doesn't know what a hair trigger is, it's on a firearm. You've got the trigger. It's literally, if you touch it, it'll go off. That's, I think, the situation we're in. Here's Secretary Blinken, as we speak, Larry, is in Egypt. But earlier today, Monday, August 19, he made a statement in the presence of Isaac Herzog, the president of Israel, not Prime Minister Netanyahu. Here's what he said. Cut number seven. I'm here as part of an intensive diplomatic effort on President Biden's instructions to try to get this agreement to the line and ultimately over the line.

It is time for it to get done. It's also time to make sure that no one takes any steps that could derail this process. And so we're working to make sure that there is no escalation, that there are no provocations, that there are no actions that in any way could move us away from getting this deal over the line, or for that matter, escalating the conflict to other places and to greater intensity. Let me get this straight, Mr. Secretary. The Israelis murdered the chief negotiator on the other side. The whole world that has a pulse can see that Netanyahu does not want a ceasefire. Does anybody believe what Tony Blinken just said? Well, it's actually, I think it's more Craven, cowardly on his part. All they're doing, they're wanting to get a deal that they can come back and sell to the American people. Hey, we got peace in the Middle East.

Whether or not it's actually a real deal, whether or not it actually changes anything on the ground, they want to do that in order to score some political points at home. Meanwhile, the peace talks that they started in Nusra and Qatar, they didn't invite Hamas. So you didn't have the representative of Hamas. How do you have peace talks about bringing peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians when the principal representative for the Palestinians, Hamas, is not at the peace talks? And guess what? Hamas rejected those talks.

Boy, there's a shocker. And then overnight, an Israeli delegation flew to Egypt. Apparently, they were going there for some longer talks. I guess they got on the ground. They were there for about an hour or two. They turned around and went back home. The process is falling apart. Lincoln's, this is just a desperate political move by the Biden administration. And they're not, they're doing everything else they can to stoke the fire by deploying so many U.S. naval and Air Force combat equipment into the region. It's just, like I said, we've scattered the gasoline about, we've got the gunpowder out, and we've decided it's time to smoke a cigarette. I think you used the perfect word when you said Craven.

I want you to see how Craven, this State Department, is doing. Ray and I talked about this extensively, if you'll remember, a little Palestinian girl trapped in a car. The family had been killed. The EMS comes to try and save her. They get killed. She gets killed. And now the Israelis are supposedly investigating this. This happened on January 29th. This is a montage that Chris put together of a very courageous and articulate journalist

grilling the two clownish spokespersons for the State Department and their answers about this tragedy. Cut number two. It's been over two weeks since Israeli forces attacked Hindra Rab's family, killing her aunt, uncle and cousins, being her trapped alone in her vehicle. We heard her pleas to the Red Crescent Society. Two medics were sent, all to be blown up, allegedly by Israeli forces. I wanted to ask about the status of the inquiry into this. So I think that question is appropriately directed to the government of Israel.

I will say on behalf of the United States, we have made clear to them that we want that incident to be investigated. They have told us that any updates on Hindra Job's the investigation in the killing of Hindra Job's family and the paramedics sent to save her. I don't have an update. My understanding is that the investigation is ongoing. So I'm wondering if you have updates on not just the investigations,

but actual accountability measures in response to these. And if not, how can this administration's approach of relegating things to months-long investigations while not changing policy, all as thousands more are killed, be a justified approach? Investigations in some cases take time. Secondly, it's been 101 days now since Hindler-Jopper family members, the medic, Santa Saber were killed. So first question related to that is, is there an update on the investigation into that attack?

I don't have anyone. I'm happy to go back and get you the latest. Okay. Okay. Is there an update into this investigation? Let me get you an answer on that and come back to you. Is it really an independent investigation if the alleged culprits are the ones conducting the strike? So what I said, we thought it's appropriate for the governor of Israel to investigate. Last month when myself and other colleagues asked about the investigation into this, the department said Israel said that they're still investigating and that israel also said that the un and red crescent

did not respond to outreach from the israeli government i reached out to the red crescent and they said that no the israeli government did not reach out so has the bayern harris administration followed up on this um alleged alleged lie by the israeli government or sought to confirm any of Israel's claims on the half-year-old killing now of this girl and her family? So we are in touch with our partners in Israel around the clock on a variety of issues. I don't have any specifics to read out

as it relates to this conversation. I'm happy to... It's now 197 days since him, the job was killed, her family members were killed, the medics said they were killed. What's the update on that? I don't have any updates for you this is the state department that ambassador charles freeman calls uh the worst in the post-world war ii era yeah yeah yeah and and ambassador freeman

has been a while around a while to seeing you know the good bad, and the ugly. In war, there is always the chance that you're going to kill civilians unintentionally, that there is no intent to kill civilians. But that's not what we're seeing in Israel. There's clear intent to kill civilians, including children and pregnant women and elderly men and disabled individuals, people with physical and or mental handicaps. I mean, these are not isolated incidents. And it's the same thing, the same reason that the Israeli soldiers also shot and killed three of their own. They were showing signs that, hey, they were surrendering. They'd

been taken hostage. They got free of their hostage takers, trying to get back to the Israeli side. shot unarmed so this is this is uh unfortunately just for evidence the inhuman conduct of the of these zionists i don't want to necessarily impugn all israelis but certainly those who are obsessed with zionism this is what you get. The murder of a little girl, pleading and crying for help, and heartless in killing that child. Thank you, Larry. It was very eloquent. Very, very eloquent. Appreciate everything you've done.

Thanks so much. We'll see you again Friday with the youngster McGovern and for the Intelligence Community Roundtable. All the best. I'll be there. Thank you, Judge. Okay. Wow. A little emotional there at the

end, but profound. Coming up tomorrow at 3 o'clock Tuesday afternoon, Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski and a surprise coming up on Wednesday. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. 🎵