Judging Freedom - Russia Strikes Kyiv, Odesa & Kharkiv - Col Doug Macgregor - 2_00p est

Episode Date: March 9, 2023

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Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, March 9th, 2023. It's about two o'clock in the afternoon here on the east coast of the United States. Colonel McGregor joins us now. Colonel, thank you so much for your time, as always. I want to start with the Chinese, Colonel. Quote, along with Russia, we can't afford to lose Ukraine, said a Chinese government source. How do you interpret that? Well, as we've discussed previously, the Chinese have this program, One Belt, One Road, which is really an attempt to reinvigorate the Silk Road that used to stretch across Central Asia all the way through Russia, Ukraine, and then into Europe and partially down into Turkey and the Middle East, if Ukraine remains unstable, in other words, if it remains a hotbed of controversy, a source of continual conflict with Russia, then that one belt, one road project collapses because they have to run the rail lines across Central Asia through Ukraine into Europe.

Now, if you're Greek or Slovak or Hungarian, you look at this and say, this is marvelous because these rail lines are going to help improve our position economically. Our prosperity will rise. We'll be able to do business with China without shipping things all the way around Africa or through the Arctic into China. But if you are an American and you view anything that China does as somehow another dangerous to American national interest, then you, ostensibly the Biden administration, want to keep the war in Ukraine going as long as possible in order to sabotage trade and commerce between Europe and China. President Xi has let it be known that he's considering visiting Moscow. I mean, how dramatic would that be? And what do you think he'd be

saying to Vladimir Putin if they meet together in their private moments? Well, I think he will go to Moscow next week. I'd be surprised if he didn't. And he's going to show up with his peace proposal. And I think his peace proposal is a fairly straightforward one. First of all, no preconditions. We're going to stop shooting. We'll regard the current lines as permanent for the moment, at least temporarily permanent, if you will.

And we're going to talk and see what we come up with as a solution to the war. I think Putin will be responsive in a positive way to that. Frankly, I think the president of Poland has already said that's something that he would support. I know that Orban in Hungary will support it. And I think Zelensky, whose back is increasingly against the wall, will view this as potentially useful. Now, we have said already we oppose any intervention by the Chinese, which I think is very stupid, because as I've said before, they have a very keen interest in what happens in Ukraine. They simply want the fighting to stop. I'm surprised at what you said, and of course I heard it before, but when you say it,

it's so credible, about the president of Poland. I mean, three months ago he was calling for an invasion of Crimea. Now he's saying ceasefire at the lines where they are. Well, effectively, he's saying let's listen to what the Chinese have to say. It would be foolish not to. He knows that ultimately Poland, when the war is over, will want to do business with China as well. This is the thing that no one thinks about when you go to war. What do you want things to look like when the war ends? You don't start a war and then hope that it's open-ended and perpetual. Has President Putin, as far as you can tell from observing him and listening to him,

given thought to what he wants and where he will be when the war ends? Oh, absolutely. I mean, from the very beginning, he said he wanted a neutral Ukraine. He wanted equal rights before the law for all the citizens of Ukraine, including the Russians. It constituted almost a third of the population. He made it very clear that he wanted the legitimacy of Russian control over Crimea recognized. Those were effectively his demands, if you want to put them that way, or conditions. I think those conditions continue. The problem now is that a lot of blood has been spilled,

and the Russians are not going to surrender territory where, frankly, the population is Russian to begin with and turn it back over to the Ukrainians. In fact, in Bakhmut, which has gotten so much attention now, the Ukrainians complain periodically that their positions are given away by the local population, which is Russian, to the Russians. Good God. I mean, the Russians aren't going to surrender Bakhmut. Here is the Deputy Secretary of State of the United States, Victoria Nuland, with a decidedly different observation about Crimea than the ones you've just given us, Colonel.

Take a listen. I can't wait to hear. There is a drone base in Crimea where the drones that the Iranians have given Russia are being launched from. There are command and control sites in Crimea that are essential for Russia's hold on all of the territory, including the land bridge. There are mass military installations on Crimea that Russia has turned into essential logistics and back office depots for this war. Those are legitimate targets. Ukraine is hitting them,

and we are supporting that. And we're starting World War III. I mean, she's really suggesting that we should be involved in attacking Crimea, which has been Russian since Catherine the Great. Let's be frank. We are involved in striking targets in Crimea. If we are directly involved, that's an act of war against the Russian state and the Russian people. She knows that, and she should exercise better judgment. She also knows that the position in Ukraine is hopeless. She's trying to do the thing that we have worried about most of all, drag us into the war. What is her endgame? Does she really, well, I guess we know her end game from her prior behavior.

She fomented and orchestrated the coup of 2014. She was largely responsible for the testimony from the Ukraine side given against President Trump in the impeachment, in the first of his impeachment. What does she want to do now? Does she really think that she can preside over driving Vladimir Putin out of office? My impression is that the people inside the Beltway have a very unrealistic view of Russia and the Russian state and its leader. And they actually believe much of what they say, which is extremely dangerous. I call it ideological blindness. They are filled with so much hatred for Russia and the government. They are incapable of seeing

reality. They don't understand that what they want to do will not happen. Colonel, are we able, is the American private enterprise, the military-industrial complex, if you will, able to manufacture ammunition as fast as the Ukrainians are using it? No, obviously not. In fact, the Washington Post had an article about the artillery problem, the artillery-ammunition problem, saying that there was no way we could do it. In fact, we would need many, many, many months, perhaps years even, to reconstitute the arsenal that we've turned over to Ukraine in terms of Javelin missiles and the various AMRAAM missiles that operate for NASAMs and other weapon systems. The 155-millimeter Artoria ammunition is now very, very scarce. The Europeans have practically no industrial base. The only one that can really produce very much quickly is Germany,

and they're now in a position that is so weak their defense minister says Germany is incapable of defending itself, therefore can't afford to send anything else overseas. The Secretary of Defense is a retired four-star career military. I don't know if he's West Point or not. You would know. Yes. Okay, career military.

He's presiding over the depletion of American defensive, and if we need it, offensive weaponry, which will take years to replace? Is that what you're telling us? Well, Judge, he was not appointed to the job that he currently holds as Secretary of Defense because they expected him to present resistance to dumb ideas. Nicely put, and in your usual diplomatic way. But this is catastrophic. It's malfeasance in office. Well, if you're worried about the defense of the United States, I'd say you're absolutely right, particularly in the category of missiles. In terms of 155 ammunition, I don't see any armies landing in the Western Hemisphere and marching on the United States. But as far as fighting a war overseas, which people have talked about for years, it's a non-starter. We don't have

enough ammunition to last us two weeks. I'd be surprised if we had a month's worth of ammunition sitting on the ground in Poland. Does the President of the United States, well, I know you can't answer this because you can't get in his brain. Do the people around him understand this when he says things like, we're going to fend Taiwan at all costs? I mean, that would be, in my view, I'm not a military guy, as you know, you correct me if I'm wrong, a military impossibility. Sure. Well, it's another place 6,000 miles away from the United States. That's the problem with Ukraine. If you're going to fight a major adversary, a continental power like Russia or China or something, the last thing you want to

do is make it easy for them and fight them on their doorstep. That is strategically stupid. That's the problem with this entire business in Ukraine. That's the problem with pushing NATO's borders out to the east. It's impossible to defend. In fact, Eisenhower felt it was impossible to defend NATO long before it had East European states as neighbors. He simply said, we don't have the resources on hand or the manpower. A lot has changed since Eisenhower left. Why did NATO stay in existence after the Warsaw Pact dissolved and Eastern Europe was liberated? Because Gorbachev believed what Jim Baker and George H.W. Bush told him. What was the reason for NATO after that?

Well, there were two things. On the one hand, from the European vantage point, they saw NATO, and I'm talking now about the West Europeans, because at that point there were no members from the East, as you point out. They viewed NATO as an insurance policy against another war in Europe. It was unambiguously defensive, and it was designed to ensure that no new wars broke out on the continent. We saw it in a very different light. We saw it increasingly as something that we could leverage in the pursuit of our foreign policy aims. And the aims, of course, under the Clinton administration are very similar to the aims today.

There's not much difference between Madeleine Albright and Strobe Talbot and Sandy Berger and the people who were there then and the people that you're listening to today. They're interested in pursuing a war on ideological grounds that will forcibly transform other nations and societies into facsimiles of us, in addition to which, obviously, subjugate those states and those societies to our global financial system. I think you have summarized the thinking of Victoria Nuland. She said it in a more pugnacious way. You've said it in a more diplomatic way. Let me segue a little bit. What is the state of the Russian military today, particularly infantry,

artillery, and tanks? Well, we have to go back and look at where Russia was in February of last year. And at that point, one of the reasons that we grossly underestimated Russia's military potential was that Russia had a very small army. You had perhaps 200,000 Russian soldiers, of which 150,000 or more, 170,000 were professional soldiers. In other words, soldiers that had been enlisted for pay. And the assumption was that this army would not last long, that this army was not motivated, the army was not sufficiently trained and disciplined and so forth. Well, I think those things were erroneous. But what the Russians concluded is that contrary to their expectations, they thought that this smaller force was all they needed for national defense.

They got an education in eastern Ukraine that that wasn't the case because they were facing a Ukrainian army that was larger, 450,000 regulars with another 200 plus thousand reservists. And they decided that we were going to back that Ukrainian force come hell or high water, as they put it. And that's why you had a dramatic change in Russia. So within a few months in the summer, the decision was made. We've got to mobilize more forces. We've got to expand the armed forces. Today, we've got about 740,000 troops in and around the theater that we call the Ukrainian War Theater. Of that, perhaps 550,000 are sitting in Byelorussia and down in southern Ukraine and in western Russia, ready to involve themselves, let's put it that way, invade, intervene, use whatever terminology you want. And they now have infinitely more modern, newer equipment than they did previously. They now have over 1,500 brand new tanks,

more than 2,000 artillery systems, rocket artillery, missile systems. The truth of the matter is that what we have done is effectively expand, modernize, and professionalize the Russian army, creating something that did not previously exist. And by the way, it's not going to go away now. Let me run for you a clip from our CIA friend who, of course, makes the opposite argument. So just to set the stage for the clip, he was boasting about how weak the Russian military was in Afghanistan. That's how the clip starts. And then eventually it's about 45, 50 seconds. Eventually, he comes around to his views of where the Russian military is today, decidedly different from yours. Jack Devine. Nobody knows Afghanistan the way you do, Jack.

But that was the death throes of the Soviet Union. That was not Putin with a modern army. Well, first of all, I dispute he has a modern army. He's now demonstrating to the world he doesn't have a modern army. He has a lot of modern weapons. Well, he has a more modern army now than Gorbachev had in the Afghan days. Yeah, but look at what the Afghanis had, AK-47s. Look at what technology has done for the Ukrainians and all the sophisticated technology from drones to cyber intelligence. His army is not showing itself very well. It's a surprise to all of us, although this is the second time I've been surprised,

because when I went in to do the Afghan program, I was assured they were 10 feet tall, and then every day they shrunk a quarter of an inch. So I think what's showing here, and I think it's the big story, he has paramilitary functioning as his cutting edge because his own army. Now they're fighting. Remember, Judge, you and I talked about dissent and how the things crumble when you start to lose. Watch the dynamic between the Wagner group and the military. All right. When he says paramilitary, he must mean Wagner. And before we get into whether Putin's political stability is crumbling, which doesn't seem like it is at all. Please assess what he said about the Russian military. Well, obviously, I think he's wrong, dead wrong. I think this Russian army is infinitely better

than what they had back in the 1980s, and certainly better than what we saw in the 70s. I don't want to waste too much time going back over the Afghan. No, no, no, there's no reason going through that and I don't remember how we got onto it. I was tweaking him. I can point to numerous examples that we have. We have some video examples, reports from Ukrainians that have come up through the system without being altered. The bottom line is that the Russians are proving to be very tactically competent. They've learned how to fight very, very effectively in this different environment. So I don't share his views at all. In fact, I think the opposite is the case. I think the Ukrainians

that began with a reasonably good force and a lot of very motivated people now have a few motivated people left, but the force itself is destroyed. And they are trying to fill it out with people, boys, young boys, women, older gentlemen from 40 to 60 that just are not up to the task. So I think he's dead wrong on all of that. But I think the Wagner group is interesting because people don't really understand what it is. It is a Russian national formation.

It was formed for different kinds of reasons. Originally, it was- Let me just stop you. Is this what you think he's referring to when he says paramilitary? Yes, yeah. And he doesn't know what he's talking about because there's nothing paramilitary about Yes, yeah. And he doesn't know what he's talking about because there's nothing paramilitary about the Wagner organization. They have tanks, they have artillery,

they are equipped just as well as the Russian army, in fact, with cutting edge capabilities, drones, and so forth. So I think he's sitting around thinking about Wagner as it may have been a year ago when it was really much smaller and designed for military assistance and advisory work, much like our own military assistance and advisory brigades, which are small and very light. now is brilliantly organized and equipped and it's being very effectively led on the ground. And this bickering between Wagner, his famous leader, Bergogian, who likes the cameras, he's sort of a bella figura. He wants to be in front of the cameras all the time and advertise himself. Putin is kind of sick of of it i'm sure but at the same time putin appreciates the hard work he's done putin's not going to allow that to get in the way of anything and garrasimov who is ultimately in charge what what has he said to the media lately nothing well who commands the wagner uh the wagner is it Progozhin himself, or is there some line of authority from the general who's been silent down to them? Yes, there is a line that goes from Gerasimov straight down to the top Wagner command structure, and that command structure reflects military experience,

talent, and organization. It's effectively a core size element designed to operate independently for brief periods of time. But they're now closely integrated with the Russian army. Whenever they've had serious problems breaking through, whenever they've needed more artillery or air support, they have gotten it from the Russian army. And they've also been supported by Russian elite light infantry formations like the airborne forces. So I wouldn't make much of the alleged dispute there at all. You have pointed out to me and to others that in the past 24 hours, the Russian missiles have been a barrage all over Ukraine. You pointed out that Ukraine's air defenses failed to shoot down a single missile.

You pointed out that the Patriot batteries, which we've given them, will not help against the cruise missiles. How devastating has this been in the past 24 or 36 hours on the ground in Ukraine? Well, I think you should put that map up. Gary, put the map up, please. If you look, this is the map of the entire Ukrainian state. And all the red circles and areas involve strikes from missiles and drones. And they're all precision strikes. It's virtually all over the country. It was an enormous and massive strike. Now, their focus, with very few exceptions, was overwhelmingly on energy

production and transmission. They wanted to bring the railroads to a standstill, which has largely happened. They wanted to deprive everyone, military and civilian, of energy, wherever they possibly could. That seems to have worked. Now, they know from experience that the Ukrainians will double down and try to repair the damage as much as possible, but the damage now is really horrific. It's beyond their ability to rapidly repair. Gary, can you put the map up again? Colonel, if you're sitting in the Pentagon, not you, Colonel Douglas McGregor, but if you're part of the group that's doing what President Biden wants them to do, and you see a

map like this, what do you say? What do you do? What do you advise? I mean, this is devastating. There's barely a section of the country that they haven't hit. Well, I think you conclude that the Russians can do what we can do. And I think that's important to understand. Secondly, you conclude that contrary to what was advertised early on, the Russians aren't running out of anything. They're not running out of missiles or rockets or artillery ammunition. Their factories, their manufacturing facilities are running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They're on a war footing and they're putting out all the material that the armed forces need. Now, there was no follow-up immediately on the ground, Judge, because we're in the mud. No follow-up by whom? By Russian troops moving into the areas

that were devastated by the missiles? No, because of the mud. And I've sent you some videos of the mud. It's legendary. Remember, you've got 10 to 15 feet of black earth soil. You drive a tank or a truck, anything, off-road, off an asphalt road, any paved road, you risk sinking 5 to 10 feet into the muck right away. That'll stop the best of tanks, will it not? Of course, it doesn't make any difference who you are. The Ukrainians are in the same bad situation as the Russians, except the Russians are not being bogged down, but the Ukrainians are.

How do you retreat or withdraw from contact with the Russians with all of your heavy equipment? It can't be done. And they're sinking into the mud and the muck too. I want to show you a picture from a drone of the devastation of a small village. This was taken this morning. It's a small Russian town called Zoloshiv, Z-O-L-O-C-H-I-V. I don't know where it is. It sort of shows the indiscriminate destruction of this village. I don't know if civilians have been killed. Just an example of what the

missiles that the Ukrainians can't shoot down are doing. Let's stop here for a second. First of all, this is near Lvov, which is the far western side of Ukraine. This is near Lvov, which is the far western side of Ukraine. This is over near the Polish border. Ooh.

So that's pretty profound that the Russians are destroying villages in that part of Ukraine. Well, you said the Russians are destroying villages. First of all, we don't know what was sitting there on the ground. Right. We don't know if it was an air defense site, whether it had a radar. I'm not suggesting war crimes. I'm just suggesting. I was in Artfall.

I appreciate the correction. They're attacking areas where they believe there's an energy source, but it's very far west. Yes, of course. But they may have also attacked it because there was something there, some supply depot of some kind. We just don't know. We didn't have a picture of it before it was destroyed. And remember, you have several layers of targeteers. These are people that study the maps, look at the photographs, and then certify the targets. Those targets are then transmitted to the various batteries and then fired. We haven't had any role in any of that. We don't know what happened. Sometimes those targets are not valid. Sometimes someone mistakes a building for something it isn't,

or it's being reported that something moved into the building that isn't there anymore. That happened to us all the time during the Kosovo Air Campaign. We struck things and only to find out, well, we didn't hit anything. Now, I'm not suggesting that this time with the Russians in Ukraine. I think they've got a better grip than we did in Kosovo. And why not? They've lived there with these people for hundreds of years. They know where things are. It's not a mystery. But the bottom line is we don't know what was there to begin with. They have tried to focus primarily on energy. They're trying to bring the state to a standstill. And they've just about achieved that. But they also hit some other

targets, a few air defense sites. But most of Ukraine's air defense is being stripped away. And that brings us to the Patriot battery. The Patriot was really designed to shoot down theater ballistic missiles. Now, those exist. The Russians do have theater ballistic missiles, and they could be used to protect against those. But they're not really designed to deal with drones. They can shoot down aircraft. But again, if the aircraft launches from a great distance, a set of cruise missiles, they may be able to shoot one or two or three down. But every time you shoot or engage with the Patriot, you're shooting two of your missiles. Now, if there are 50 or 60 targets, do the math.

You've just expended 120 missiles. Well, where are you going to get more missiles? Correct. How rapidly are they going to show up? Correct. And, you know, this is problematic. We've trained 90 Ukrainian soldiers to operate the Patriot system. But I can guarantee you there will be contractors there from the West,

Americans, Polish, German, in whatever uniforms, civilian clothes, to supervise this because it's just too complex after a few weeks of training to turn over to the Ukrainians. We're training Ukrainian fighter pilots in the U.S. to fly F-16s. How dangerous is that? There are 30,000 to 35,000 Ukrainians training in Germany, the Czech Republic, Great Britain, the United States, Canada. They're all over the place being trained in various ways. All of these people have to come back at some point and then plug back into the force. As far as the F-16s are concerned, I would not expect much from any pilot with only a few weeks or a few months

training, and I don't think we do. And my concern is that if that happens, if we actually provide those F-16s, we may end up doing something the Russians did during the Korean War, and that was that they actually sent their pilots in MiGs to face us, because the Koreans could not learn how to do it quickly enough. You mean that Russian pilots might be shooting down Ukrainian pilots or American pilots in F-16s? Well, if you're a Russian pilot and you see an enemy aircraft or you are a Russian air defense battery and you have enemy aircraft, you shoot it down. It doesn't matter who's flying the thing. And that's what we did during the Korean War.

We had some examples of that during the Vietnam War. It's very straightforward. You just can't train enough of the people, the indigenous population, to operate these things. All right. I have a couple more topics with you. Last Friday, Chancellor Scholz visited the White House. He had a private meeting with no press and no assistance, we understand, there with President Biden. I suppose it's dangerous to have a meeting

like that for an hour. What is the U.S. going to rely on? Biden's memory. But within 48 hours, on the front page of The New York Times was a piece in very vague ways, not quoting anybody at all, attempting to refute Cy Hersh's piece on the origins and the mechanics of the plan to destroy the Nord Stream pipeline. I'm thinking that the chancellor went to him and said, I'm going to lose my job if you don't give me some sort of cover. There's been nothing to refute what we know your Navy and your CIA did. And so somebody called him one of their favorite New York Times reporters

who wrote what they wrote. What do you think? Imagine if FDR had gone to the press and said, well, we had an attack on Pearl Harbor. We're not really sure who is responsible. There are several possible candidates for the attack. And we have some evidence that perhaps someone from Malaysia or Indonesia managed to launch attacks against us, but we're not sure. We're continuing to study the problem. It would not have worked. Well, Schultz is in that position right now. Schultz is literally presiding over a Pearl Harbor inflicted on Germany

by the United States. Correct. Correct. And what's he going to do if he doesn't stand up and behave like the chancellor of the German state and condemn us for what we've done? And he's not prepared to do that. He's afraid to do that. Then he's going to make things up. And he was helped in his effort to make things up. Probably what they talked about. President Zelensky has asked President Biden for cluster bombs. Now, I thought cluster bombs were the use of them as a war crime because, you know, they explode late and they kill people well afield from the target. So tell us how they work and do we have them? Well, I'm sure that we do. How many? I have no idea. I saw the use of cluster munitions in 1991. They were used by our artillery formations

and they spew out hundreds of bomblets all over the ground. Unfortunately, 10 to 15% of them do not explode. And what happened as a result was that children who lived in a village nearby where the bomblets landed would go up and pick it up, think it's a baseball or a ball of some kind, and toss it back and forth. And then eventually it explodes and harms the child or kills the child. It was horrific. And we were all upset over it. I was upset at the time when we were using them because they were firing these things right ahead of us in the path that we were going to take to reach the enemy.

And I kept asking, please check fire. Don't fire the damn ammunition. Use high explosive. That's fine. But no bomblets, please. And unfortunately, we ended up driving over them. Now, it doesn't hurt a tank or an armored fighting vehicle. But if you're in a truck or a Humvee or something, it does serious damage. And we had some casualties as a result of those bomblets. Your prognosis for the course of events in the next month or so as spring approaches in Ukraine? You know, I just asked that question from several of my trusted sources. What's the long range weather forecast? I'm interested to know when the mud dries out. And whenever the mud dries out and you have trafficable ground, I would expect that the Russians will move. Unless,

of course, there are peace talks and some arrangement is reached. But barring that, that could happen at the end of March, the end of April, the end of May, or even in June. In 1944, the Russians wanted to attack in May, but they couldn't do it out of Ukraine and white Russia because the ground wasn't trafficable. So they ultimately waited until about the 20th, 21st, and then it was postponed to the 22nd of June, which happened to be the anniversary of the invasion of the Soviet Union by the Wehrmacht. And that was called Operation Begrasion that had a devastating impact on the Eastern Front. The only reason I'm bringing it up is I'm sure the Russians are looking at the ground.

And when the ground is favorable, I'm quite certain they'll move. But until then, the last thing that you want to do is have someone advance deep and then find that he's alone, isolated, and no one can reach him because the ground everywhere else is not trafficable. So you want to have a maneuver-free operation. And right now that is not possible. So I suspect we'll wait until the ground is trafficable. So I'll watch the weather. Colonel Doug McGregor, what a fantastic lesson you've given. We appreciate

all your time and all your knowledge. Thank you very much. Thank you. Judge Napolitano, more as we get it, of course, for judging freedom.