Judging Freedom - Putin_s Plan for Ukraine Now - Ray McGovern

Episode Date: May 24, 2023

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Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, May 24, 2023. It's 4.15 in the afternoon here in Zurich, Switzerland, 10.15 in the morning on the east coast of the United States, from which the great Ray McGovern joins us now. Ray, always a pleasure. Thank you for joining us, my dear friend. Well, most welcome. Why did President Putin commence his military action in Ukraine? The short answer, Judge, is that he had no other options, no other options to defend Russia. You know, I'm one who believes that Putin recognizes his first responsibility is to defend Russia. He tried everything else for seven years since we overthrew the government in Kiev. And finally, he realized that he had been diddled. He acknowledged that he

had been diddled when the chief proponents or actually the overseers of the Minsk agreements. Now the Minsk agreements were agreements to stop the fighting in the eastern Ukraine and to give Donetsk and Lugansk a measure of autonomy. They all agreed on that and about a year ago the major people, Angela Merkel from Germany, Francois Allon from France, and Poroshenko, who was the head of Ukraine at the time, all admitted proudly that we used that seven years to build up the Ukrainian army to NATO standards with NATO weaponry. And so we really took Putin for a ride. He admits that. He's not going to get taken for a ride again. He saw an immediate threat. And when people say, Judge, that he had other options, well, you know, I think they have sort of a duty to explain at least one of those or maybe two of those options were. I asked John Mearsheimer, the authority on the realistic school.

I asked him on Monday night. I said, well, how do you what do you think what do you think they have in mind suggesting they had other options? And he said in a word, he didn't have any other options. He tried real hard. He was determined to implement Minsk. He was diddled. And then he saw all these other things happening on his border. He had no other options. What did he do in furtherance of his moral and legal obligation to defend the Russian people and the Russian homeland, short of military activity in the past seven years, while the West was building up Ukraine and while the West was

putting offensive weaponry in Eastern European countries under some fantastic and incredible pretext that it was there to protect these countries against Iran when you can't make this stuff up? What alternatives did Putin have? What did he do? Surely his intelligence community told him what was going on. Well, again, I search for alternatives. What I get back is he could have chosen peace. Peace is always an option. Why didn't he just act nonviolently? Now, I like nonviolence, but I don't make moral judgments on what happens outside in the world. That's not what intelligence officers do. We look at the facts.

Now, I laid out the facts exactly a month ago with respect to what you just mentioned. Russia's periphery already in Romania and Poland that threatened Moscow and part of their ICBM force, a strike of seven minutes now when hypersonic missiles become available to the U.S., which they will eventually, five minutes. Five minutes, okay? So I laid out all those facts. When you say five minutes, just so we all understand, it would take five minutes for those missiles to leave the position they're in now before they reach Moscow. That's correct. Putin not only knows this, he stated it publicly about six months, correct me if I'm wrong in the timing, five or six months before the special military operation in Ukraine began. Well, he did say it repeatedly. The most recent before the military operation was on the 21st of December, 2021. And then he spelled out, he said, he named the rocket or the missile that fires these things appropriately.

And then he said, you know, five, seven minutes. And he was talking to his top military judge. He was talking about the most senior admirals and generals and the defense minister. And he said at that speech, he said, so we need, we need something written down. We need assurances. And I looked at those guys and I could see them thinking, right, right, Vladimir. Wasn't the ABM treaty written down? Wasn't the, wasn't the INF treaty, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, wasn't that written down? Wasn't Minsk written down?

Sure it was. And it was approved unanimously by the UN Security Council. Okay. So what I'm saying here is that when he looked at those faces on December 21st and saw that, you know, he's going to have to go better than that. He called abruptly. He called Biden, what, on the 30th. So what was that? Nine days later. And he said, look, we have to talk. And Biden's people said, oh, wait a second. Our negotiators are getting together in Geneva on the 9th, 10th of January. Why do you have to talk now? Please, please. He has to talk to Biden. What did he extract from Biden? He said, look, I'm under great pressure. I need a commitment from you

not to put these kinds of missiles, at least in Ukraine. Can you do that for me? And Biden said, of course. And the quote is, Washington has no intention of deploying offensive strike missiles in Ukraine, period, end quote. That fell off the negotiating table. The U.S. negotiators were unwilling to discuss that. complained after talking to Biden one last time that he couldn't get Biden to even discuss that issue. So, I mean, there were a whole bunch of things that built up, including, and I always come back to this, Judge, it's the most important factor, including the fact that that Putin was able to get Xi Jinping to violate Beijing's principal stand on Westphalia, no violation of neighbors' borders, no, you know. He was up there on the 4th of February to launch the Winter Olympics, okay? So he says Xi Jinping looks like NATO forces are ready to pounce on Donetsk and Lugansk. They're diddling me still on Minsk.

We have these intermediate-range nuclear forces. We're not quite sure what's in those capsules in Romania and Poland. I'm going to have to go in there. What do you think? No, I wasn't a fly on the wall judge. But what I think the reaction by Xi Jinping was, who realizes China is next, he probably said, you mean after the Winter Olympics are over, right, Vlad? Oh, yeah, of course.

They're over on the 20th of February. On the 21st, Moscow recognizes Donetsk and Lugansk as independent countries. The next day, they appeal for help from Russians. Two days later, you have the invasion. Now, does that mean that I am justifying the invasion? No. It means that I'm citing the facts. It means that I'm saying this is why he went into Ukraine.

Now, if you want to interpret that as justifying, that's in the eye of the beholder. Let me tell you what it also means. It also means that the events as you have described them appear nowhere in mainstream

American media. And the cheerleaders for Joe Biden, whether they're conservative Republicans in the House or Democrats who will always cheer on a Democratic president, have never even been exposed to that understanding of events, have never even had articulated to that understanding of events, have never even had articulated to them how the West double-crossed Putin, how the West has been preparing for this for seven years. Am I right or am I over-exaggerating? You're right.

And that's the operative fact here, because we're reaching a crucial point, Judge. What's going to happen is these people around Biden are going to suggest escalating still farther. OK, that's going to come to what the Chinese used to call a no good end. OK, for everybody. okay? That's why Americans have to realize, look, you haven't been given the whole story. Putin didn't have any other options. It would be really nice if he was a non, it would be really nice if he was a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King. Well, nice for whom? Not so nice for the Russian people because he saw his duty as to defend the Russian people.

Now, I've asked this question before. Sure. Does the West plan to use or has the West been using Ukraine as a battering ram against Putin. That's very clear. They have done that. And, you know, let me, you know, it doesn't really matter what I say so much. It's what the only honest intelligence leader said two years after the coup that we arranged in Kiev. Let me read you two sentences here.

I think I have it somewhere. Let's see. I do. There it is. This comes from the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which, by the way, has since been marginalized. They're not in the play anymore, okay? Here's what he said. Lieutenant General Vincent Stewart, a Marine, okay? Quote, the Kremlin is convinced that the United States is laying the groundwork for regime change in Russia, a conviction further reinforced by events in Ukraine.

Moscow views the United States as the critical driver behind the crisis in Ukraine and believes that the overthrow of former Ukrainian President Yanukovych is the latest move in a long-established pattern of U.S. orchestrated regime change efforts, period, end quote. This is a congressionally mandated report that this general, who headed DIA at the time, stood up, manned up, and said, this is how we see it. Since then, DIA has been completely marginalized by the likes of John Brennan and other people who dominate what people are supposed to be thinking. I have never heard that quote before. But after listening to you and Larry Johnson and Phil Giraldi and Tony Schaefer, Colonel Davis, Colonel McGregor in the past months. That is about as succinct, profound, and accurate from my perspective,

an explanation of how we got to this point as I have heard. And you're telling us, you're telling me, all the people watching and listening to us now, that this Marine General, of whom I've never heard before, and I follow this stuff, has been marginalized because he said this either under oath or in a writing to Congress, which is the legal equivalent of saying it under oath? Right. Well, let me say, this is December 2015, so almost two years after the coup in Kiev. That's a time to reflect on this. Why do I make a big point about DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, being marginalized?

Because just a year or two later, one year later, actually, when the CIA picked handpicked analysts to say Russia hacked the DNC emails and the GRU, the Russian military intelligence organization, was responsible for that. Guess what? DIA was cut out of that. DIA was not consulted. Because DIA would have contradicted that with hard evidence. Well, I think so. But the point is, Judge, that DIA has the portfolio for the Russian military intelligence outfit. So the fact that they were kept out, the fact that the State Department was kept out, and the fact that James Clapper bragged that all 17 intelligence agencies agreed with this and then had to admit that he lied about that.

It was only three. And then, oh, there was only a couple that were handpicked from those three. I mean, the whole thing came up with this January 6, 2017 charade of an intelligence assessment which said Russian hack. We know they didn't hack now because we have sworn testimony from the head of the outfit that was supposed to look into the hacking. His name is Sean

Henry. The outfit is CrowdStrike. It's corrupt from the beginning and Sean Henry is a distinguished alumni of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And I've said, I mean, this is the same James Clapper who told Senator Wyden and others on the Senate Intelligence Committee under oath that the United States government was not spying on millions of its own people.

And because the members of that committee had already received a secret interrogation from him, which he said the opposite, they knew that he was lying right then and there. But obviously they didn't want to go into it. Here's Joe Biden a year ago, and guess what he's warning about? It's the last three words out of his mouth. Take a listen. War against Ukraine was never going to be a victory. Democrats are rising to meet the moment, rallying the world on the side of peace and security we're showing a strength and we'll never falter but look the idea the idea that we're going to send in offensive equipment and have planes and tanks and trains going in with american pilots and american crews just understand

and don't kid yourself no matter what you all say. That's called World War III. Okay? Now, he's the President of the United States at the time he says that. He theoretically knows what General, is it Stuart, articulated. He's aware of who fomented the coup? His boss, Barack Obama. He knows of the Western buildup. Is anything he says believable? Well, it was believable at the time, and it made a certain amount of sense at the time. We veteran intelligence professionals for sanity have warned Biden that he can't have it both ways.

He can't avoid World War III and escalate the way he has been doing. Now, I asked a psychiatrist friend of mine, do you think, after watching Biden recently, do you think Biden is compass menace? And he said, it's hard to say, but it doesn't matter. He's got the same advisors advising him when he was compass mentis. So there's something wrong, not only with the advisors, but with Biden himself. And if you're pooching, and that's my job, put myself in pooching shoes. My God, he's already called them crazy. How do you prepare with people who are crazy and have the kind of nuclear potential that we have? So, you know, it doesn't look really good, but the next couple of months are going to decide whether these crazy people up the ante. Suffice

it to say that Putin and his armed forces will be ready for that. Hide under your desk, folks. He's called Putin a war criminal. He's caused the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant. It doesn't mean anything unless he goes into Western Europe. How can the U.S. possibly have meaningful diplomatic relations with Moscow, with the President of the United States saying these things? Putin is the restrained one. Biden is the one who says whatever comes to his head. Judge, we warned that as VIP has warned Biden before he took office while he was president elect, don't fall into the trap of calling Putin every name in the book. Two months later, George Stephanopoulos sets him up and says, do you think that Putin is a killer? And Biden says, oh, yeah, he's a killer.

And it's gone downhill since then. So you're right. There are no diplomatic relations now. Our foreign secretary or our secretary of state does not talk with Lavrov. They're not serious people regarded by the Russians. So this makes it even worse than the Cuban Missile Crisis, for God's sake. In those days, we had teletypes, and at least we had the direct connection. Now, you know, if the balloon goes up, I don't mean a Chinese balloon.

I mean, if it really gets to the point where people fear nuclear escalation, there's no real reliable means of contact and there's no trust. So even if there were contact, there isn't even the measure of trust that existed between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev back in 1962. Here's President Biden last week at the G7 and of all God-forsaken places, Hiroshima, Japan. United States together with our allies and partners is going to begin training Ukrainian pilots and fourth generation fighter aircraft, including F-16s, to strengthen Ukraine's air force as part of a long-term commitment to Ukraine's ability to defend itself. I guess he forgot about his own warning about World War III. Now, some of the sophisticated, Doug McGregor tells us, Colonel McGregor,

some of the sophisticated artillery that he sent over there requires Americans to operate. Are American pilots going to operate those F-16s? And what happens when some of them come home in a coffin? Because these are planes that the Russians will shoot down no matter who's operating them. There are so many problems with the F-16. Let me just name a few. The pilots are one. The airfields, where are they going to fly from? Those airfields will be called belligerents, and they will be easy targets for Russian retaliation.

Legal targets under the laws of war. Of course, yeah. And, you know, how long is it going to take to do all this? Well, people tell me, Doug McGregor included, it takes a long time to train pilots. That's even more important than, well, also the ground support to repair these things. You need four hours for every one hour of flying time, okay? So they're going to be late to the party. And we told President Biden this, that's VIPs did about five months ago. First of May, I think, whatever that is, that's more recently. Look, this equipment, if you send it in, that's fine.

It's going to be too late because the Russians now have the option, having moved beyond Bakhmut, to take the rest of Ukraine up into the Dnieper River and then say, okay, now are you ready to negotiate in good faith now? Because we can go farther if you want, but we'd prefer not to burden ourselves with an Iraq-type situation where we have to occupy an unfriendly country. we'll stop at the Dnieper for the time being. We'll even negotiate maybe, but we need assurances that you're not gonna attack us again. Ray McGovern, always a pleasure, my dear man. No matter what we discuss, thank you very much for your time. You're most

welcome. Of course. Well, if you like what you saw, share with a friend. More as we get it. Even from Switzerland. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Mientras trabajas duro por el éxito de tus hijos, algo que no ves los puede estar afectando. Se llama estrés tóxico. Es la manera en que el cuerpo de los niños responde a experiencias difíciles.