Judging Freedom - Putin Speaks About Ukraine War _ Belarus Gets Nukes - Phil Giraldi fmr CIA

Episode Date: June 14, 2023

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🎵 Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, June 14th, 2023. It's about 1130 in the morning here on the East Coast of the United States. Phil Giraldi will be with us to talk about the latest of what the CIA knows and what MI6 is up to right after this. When it comes to carrying valuables or even firearms in your vehicle,

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Phil Araldi joins us now. Phil, always a pleasure. Thank you for joining us. What is the latest intel on the explosion of the dam in eastern Ukraine? Is there a consensus that the Ukrainians did this to obliterate Russian defenses or the Russians did this to impede the Ukrainian offensive or was just something that happened because it's an old dam with an old hydroelectric plant that hadn't been maintained properly or something else? Well, I keep hearing both sides of it, that essentially there are, if you dig far enough, there are motives for both sides to have done it. And I think that on the balance the uh the motive was much stronger on the

side of of the ukrainians for doing it because uh among other things that it makes the um sustaining the russian uh garrison uh in crimea a lot more difficult in terms of water supply in terms of road connections and that sort of thing so uh i tend to think in all probability it was done by the Ukrainians, possibly just to make the situation more crazy and to pressure NATO and the United States to speed up the supply of weapons and other support to Zelensky. Do you think the CIA or other intelligence agencies, when they give their analysis of the situation to the White House, is actually recommending more military supplies, or are they recommending a ceasefire, or don't they recommend? I would imagine that they don't recommend in a situation like this very much.

And I'll give you the reason for that. I believe there is what appears to be an overwhelming consensus within the administration as well as within Congress to provide whatever support is needed to Ukraine for Ukraine to win this. I think that's a crazy assumption. It's a crazy way of looking at this thing because Ukraine cannot win it, and it's just going to be a sinkhole for at least another year to come. But I think that the intelligence people would come in and provide an objective briefing in terms of order of battle, that kind of thing, who's doing what to whom, what we believe that the consensus is within the Zelensky government.

These would be the things that the intelligence community legitimately would be talking about. Do you think there's any red faces in this, either on the part of the administration or the intelligence community, with respect to the obvious conclusion by any objective observer, which you just articulated, that Ukraine can't win. And it is crazy, to use your word, that we should help them continue this battle because all it does is slaughter more Ukrainians and slaughter more Russian boys. Problem with my life. Bear with me.

There we go. Yeah, well, I agree with what you just said the uh the fact is it is crazy and for red faces uh I do keep hearing from people that are still in harness shall we say in the government uh in intelligence and and military uh that there are a lot of people at mid-level now in both of those organizations, both of those entities, who are beginning to come around to the view that this is another foreign policy disaster in the making, that the best thing to do right now would be to take whatever steps are possible to try to reopen negotiations between the two sides

and to come to some kind of settlement. Do you think that secret negotiations are going on, obviously, behind the scenes because none of us knows about it, and the public posture of, I want to negotiate, I want to negotiate, no ceasefire, that that's just posturing? Or do you think that that's real and there is no negotiating going on whatsoever? I would suspect, and I have no evidence whatsoever to support this suspicion, that we are being informed of the views of both the Ukrainian government behind Zelensky and also the Russian government. And we're probably getting this information from third party friendly governments who have decent relationships with both countries. And I would mention a number of European countries that

I believe fit that bill. And there may be others. So I would suspect, yeah, I suspect there are conversations going on. And we can certainly hope that the Biden administration will come to its senses, although I'm not optimistic. Is the intelligence community itself involved in these conversations other than monitoring them? Of course, we all know the intelligence community monitors everything, particularly in a war zone. Or would these be between mid-level diplomats of two or three countries, say U.S. to the Vatican, to Geneva, to Kiev, something like that? Well, it's a bit of that, but I think it's also,

it would be constructed in a way where the United States would be able to put across its views and perhaps make some suggestions. Like, for example, we know for the fact that even with countries that the U.S. is as implacably hostile to as Russia at the moment, places like Iran, there are conversations going on about Iran's nuclear program, which, of course, doesn't really exist as a weapon. But there are conversations going on, and I would suspect it's something like that. What do you think it would take, what kind of an agreement on the part of President Putin, and what kind of an agreement on the part of President Zelensky for a ceasefire as a predicate to peace negotiations? Well, I would think there'd have to be an understanding that the Donbass issue, which was presumably settled in 2009 with the Minsk Accords, but then was ignored

by the West, would be a good place to start, conceding that that is a legitimate national security interest for Russia. And also you would have to concede, but you could at least have a basis to be talking. If there are any conversations going on, Kiev to Moscow, for sure the American intelligence community would know about that, wouldn't they? I would assume that the American intelligence community is intercepting everything that goes on in Kiev in government circles. So they certainly would have that side of it. Whatever the U.S. government ability to penetrate Russian secret communications, clandestine communications is, I don't really know. But I would suspect that at certain levels in the war itself by supplying Russia or in any peace negotiations?

That's an interesting question. a player in this to be negotiating or at least being someone who will listen and perhaps pass messages along. So I suspect that there might be people in Beijing, in the U.S. embassy, who are talking to the Chinese about this. And if that's happening, the American intelligence community would know about it? Yeah, that would be done in a not exactly overt way, but it would be done in a way where that kind of information would be shared within the community. Back to the dam, do you think MI6 might have been involved with that since they seem to be out there on that type of behavior even more than your former colleagues? Well, it becomes a question of what kind of access MI6 would have to that facility and what kind of people they have in place. I just don't know what the truth is on that. I would suspect that if you have to look for the party who would have probably agents in place at the dam and have some

capabilities there, it would be the Ukrainians. We're going to take a break for about 30 seconds. When we come back, Phil and I will talk about what neighbor of Ukraine has just received Russian nuclear weapons, more powerful than those which were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945, right after this. You want to feel safe in your vehicle, and for you, that means easy, rapid access to your firearm. But safety also means your items don't fall into the wrong hands. You don't have to choose between safety and convenience. The Headrest Safe keeps your firearm where you can access it and no one else can. Just order your Headrest Safe, install it yourself when it arrives, and enjoy peace of mind.

It starts at theheadrestsafe.com. How close are we to President Putin using or threatening to use nuclear weapons? Do you know, Phil? Well, Putin strikes me as a very straightforward guy. The interviews he had yesterday with a bunch of press people in Russia uh which went on for hours apparently uh the candor of the way he was responding to sometimes critical questions by the the media uh was it was kind of astonishing uh he didn't give away any secrets in terms of Russian uh tactical plans or anything like that but but he was quite frank about objectives and how things play out. I think Putin has made it very clear that a nuclear weapon would be a last resort,

and it would basically be something they would contemplate using if NATO and the United States were to come into this conflict full force and push Russia right back against the wall. Since you mentioned, I wasn't going to go there, but since you mentioned those candid comments, and that did go on for about three or four hours, we have a couple of clips. Gary, can you play the first clip that you and I looked at earlier today? This is President Putin speaking very candidly in a large table. It almost looks like the table that the American president uses, the cabinet room, that long, skinny table, President Putin in the middle. But instead of Russian government officials, they, Russian journalists. I will read the subtitles aloud for the benefit of those who are experiencing judging freedom in audio only. They lost 160 tanks and over 300, 460 armored vehicles of various types.

This is just what we see. There are still losses that we don't see that are inflicted. The Russian Federation has also been using high-precision, long-range attacks. So there were actually more of these losses on the Ukrainian side. And so by my calculation, it's about 25, maybe 30 percent of the volume of equipment that was supplied from abroad. Here is about.

It seems to me that if they count objectively, they'll go along with it. But as far as I've seen from open sources, from Western sources, that's about what they seem to be saying here. So the offensive is on. These are the results to date of what I have just said. So he seems to be saying there that about 25 to 30% of the military equipment that the West has supplied has been destroyed. And he seems to be saying the West acknowledges that. Yeah, well, that is indeed what he is saying. And independent sources I've seen basically are coming up with, if not exactly the same numbers, but in the same neighborhood. In fact, sometimes quite a bit more than that.

Right. Gary, let's go to the second tape of President Putin taken from the same interview yesterday. But listen, this was not the first coup. And how did Yukashenko come to power in Ukraine? What, as a result of legitimate actions? Do you want me to show you how he came to power? We know that they came up with a third round of voting. What bloody third round? It's not provided by the Constitution.

This was a coup. But at least it was passed in a relatively peaceful way. And we communicated with them. I went there. They came to us. No, it came to a bloody coup d'etat. It has become obvious that we are not given any chance to build normal relations with our neighbors and the fraternal Ukrainian people. Wow. This is extraordinary candor, Phil, talking about what happened in 2014 when the Americans and the British, mainly the CIA, staged that coup that chased the popularly elected Ukrainian president all the way to Moscow. Are you surprised to hear this kind of candor from him?

No, I mean, not at all. As I say, he's always struck me as a very candid, outspoken person that says what he thinks. And, of course, he was, I think, actually, in a way, too gentle about what took place. He didn't mention the American and British role. He didn't mention Victoria Nuland. He didn't mention $5 million spent by the U.S. government to overthrow the existing government in Kiev. So there are a lot of things he could have mentioned. What was that $5 million spent on, just getting these hundreds of thousands of people to demonstrate in the streets?

Well, when you're spending that kind of money, this was over the course of about five years, I believe. A lot of it is used to support opposition candidates, to support opposition parties. A lot of this is done almost overtly by the National Endowment for Democracy. We're talking about CIA, but a lot of this actually goes through a different channel, through the State Department, political officers, and National Endowment for Democracy and other groups like that. So the fact is that this is the way the money kind of goes. It goes to the opposition one way or another.

If you have to pay a million dollars to get a rent-a-crowd out into the street, you do it. And it's the game that is played, yeah. So while President Putin was giving those comments to Russian journalists yesterday, President Lukashenko was speaking in a very, very dark way to a single journalist. Apparently there are some others watching, as you'll see in a moment. And he's talking about the Russian nuclear weapons already in Belarus and the more that are on their way. Again, I will read the subtitles. Belarus's Lukashenko says they have started taking delivery

of Russian tactical nuclear weapons. Quote, we have missiles and bombs that we have three times more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There, more than 8,000 people died instantly, 250,000 overall. That's from one strike, and this one is three. I don't know, up to a million would die immediately if, God forbid, this weapon were used. The storage of nuclear weaponry will be spread out. We have lots of storage facilities. We really have a lot of them.

We have already restored five or six of them. We will spread them out. We won't keep them all in one place. Is that terrifying or what? Yeah, it's terrifying. It really is. It's an escalation that I certainly, for one, would not have liked to see. Basically, insofar as I can figure out what the logic behind it,

it's to give Russian forces in the region a second strike capability that would basically outflank if NATO were to intervene through Poland or something like that. This creates another problem for NATO forces. a nuclear bomb, air quotes, like the one that was dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki that kills hundreds of thousands instantaneously and destroys many, many square miles of everything existing? Or is he talking about some sort of a tactical nuclear device that can be used to pinpoint the opposition's military. Yeah, he was very specific in saying these are tactical weapons. That means they have limited range and they have basically their, in spite of the fact that they're nuclear and have, you know, certainly the capability of killing a lot of people. They're nevertheless not a major bomb that one would use on a city or to knock out a military base or something like that.

This is something much more limited. Got it. Phil Giraldi, my dear friend, always a pleasure. Thank you very much for joining us. We'll see you again soon. Thank you. Judge Napolitano, more as we get it. Like and subscribe. We're up to about 162, 163,000 subscribers. Our goal is 175,000 by Independence Day, 4th of July. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. The Headrest Safe is quick and easy to use. Some may even call it a game changer.

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