Judging Freedom - Russian Rebellion & the Ukraine War w_Col Doug Macgregor

Episode Date: June 26, 2023

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Save $80 with code SPACE80 at Talkspace.com. Thanks for watching! Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, June 26, 2023. It's 2.45 in the afternoon here on the east coast of the United States. Colonel Douglas McGregor will be with here in just a minute with his take and his understanding of what happened in Russia over the weekend. But first this. When it comes to carrying valuables or even firearms in your vehicle, most people feel they have to choose between safety and convenience. A vehicle break-in occurs every 36 seconds in America. The Headrest Safe gives you the power to store cash, jewelry, medication, and yes, even your concealed carry firearm.

You'll never have to worry about taking your valuables with you again. Keep them safe with the Headrest Safe. Use promo code JUDGENAP and enjoy $50 off for a limited time at theheadrestsafe.com. Conor McGregor, welcome here. Thank you for joining us. So what happened over the weekend in Russia? Big picture. Well, let's make sure we understand what did not happen. This was not a coup d'etat this was not an attempt to remove Putin I think uh Mr progosian who is a well-known irritant to the high command in the Russian military decided that he would uh

make a spectacle of things because Wagner group is under threat of dissolution. There are a number of legal issues involved, but originally Wagner was invented by the intelligence community to go overseas to give the Russian state a certain amount of plausible deniability, but to operate primarily beyond Russia's borders. Obviously, Wagner has come back and has fought inside Russia. And he wanted to make sure that Wagner survived. Now, I'm not sure that it will, certainly not in the form that it once did. But that was one of his motives. The second motive, I think, which is important is that he's fed up, as many people are to be perfectly blunt, with the Russian high command. He thinks that the war should be prosecuted much more violently,

much more aggressively, and that it is in the interest of the Russian people to bring this war to a close as quickly as possible. So in his mind, he was sending a contingent to Moscow to signal to Putin, look, we're serious, we want to survive, and we want to win this war. I think some of the soldiers in Wagner were actually under the impression that they were going to rescue Mr. Putin. They certainly did not see themselves as removing the man at all. And clearly, there was nobody out there supporting Mr. Prigozhin in any sort of attempt to remove Putin. I think everyone was somewhat shocked by what Prokofiev

did, although given his past antics, I'm not sure they should have been. But this was not an act of high treason per se, as originally accused or alleged. And that's why Putin has not imprisoned him, has not had him executed, and has not imprisoned or incarcerated his soldiers. Is it fair to say that through intelligence sources, Putin knew what you've just characterized to us? He knew this was not a threat to his regime. He knew they meant no violence. He knew this was just another antic by his, as you call him, principal irritant. I don't know that that's the case. I think initially he was also taken aback by this action. I mean, you bring several thousand troops with you to Rostov to the scene of the theater headquarters, and then you send a contingent north towards

Moscow. It was frightening enough, or at least concerning enough, that 30,000 troops in the Moscow garrison were alerted. The Ministry of the Interior Division, along with a motorized rifle division and a tank division, they're all there. They were prepared to act. And then ultimately, we have aircraft and helicopters that were dispatched to take Wagner under fire. So I'm not sure that was clear, but it became clear to him in time. And I think one of the reasons for that was Lukashenko's willingness to intercede and speak directly to Prokofiev. And those two men have known each other for 20 years. So Lukashenko was a good choice for that. And even though, and we'll see this when I read some of Prokofiev's statements in a moment,

he makes a point that no one on the ground was killed. His people took out 12 Russian helicopters and killed 20 people aboard them. Well, I don't know about the numbers of helicopters, but he did not want to shed any Russian blood. That's quite clear. And when it became clear that that might become unavoidable, he halted the whole thing. We need to understand something. This is Russia. This is not the United States.

This is not the West. Progozhin and the Wagner Group are extremely popular inside Russia. The Wagner Group is the contemporary Russian equivalent of the French Foreign Legion. Whatever these men have done in the past, like the French Foreign Legion, they have fought with distinction for the Russian state and people. They are Russian patriots. If you try to undertake any action against the French Foreign Legion, the whole French country will stand up against you. They all love the Legion. This is also true in Russia. And so Putin had to consider carefully what was really happening, and he listened. And I think Putin has demonstrated he's absolutely not Stalin,

because we know what would have happened under the Soviets. He's very much like a czar. He recognizes these people are patriots, and he's taken the appropriate actions. And we'll see how it ultimately turns out. But there's no threat to Putin. Putin is firmly in control. We can talk about what he may need to do now, though, to strengthen his position. Before we get to that, and to your point about the popularity of the Wagner group, here's a series of clips taken by the American independent video journalist who's been on this show, Patrick Lancaster. These are clips taken in Rostov-on-Don and of Mr. Prokosian as he's leaving Rostov-on-Don in some sort of a vehicle.

I'll narrate because there are subtitles. We pray for you. Thank you. We are with you. How was the result for today? What. How was the result for today? What? How was the result for today? What's next? No, the result. Oh, the result is normal. Normal.

We energize them all. Good luck. Take care. Take care. What do you think about the Wagner? They are nice guys, really. Yes, we were not afraid at all. We are people of the same blood. What is the situation? Super, great, top level. No problems today? No problem. Can you tell us again? You know, there is no conflict. Everything is great. We love our

president. Our president is the best one. We love Wagner and our defense minister. Wagner is the strongest assault group in the world. Was I afraid? No. What is the situation? F-ing great. Really good. What are you going to do now? Work, work. Really? Keep working. Guys, you were great. This is also a victory. No matter who says what, we will win. So by noon, we were terrorists, and in the afternoon, we are great guys. Come on, you know yourself.

All right, this is all anecdotal, but very interesting, the soldier at the end. At noon, we were terrorists. At the end of the day, we were great guys. When Vladimir Putin called them terrorists, stabbed in the back, punishment inescapable, did he really believe that? Did he not know what he knows now? Did he think he was going to have to fight to preserve his presidency? I think he actually considered that that was a very real possibility. I don't think he understood the big picture, but obviously it was very quickly communicated to him, and to his credit,

he was able to say, all right, well then this is what's going to happen. And Lukashenko was, I think, instrumental in that process. How long will Prokosin stay alive? Well, most Russians don't live much beyond 70. They drink too much vodka. And I'm sure that that probably applies to Mr. Prokosin, but I don't see any evidence that he's in any danger of being executed to this point. And I think his Wagner group will probably not operate in the future as it has in the past as one body, effectively as an independent corps. I think we will see bodies to four or 5,000 Wagner troops

operating within the larger framework of the Russian army, though. Colonel, when Mr. Pergosian issued those bombastic, over-the-top denunciations of the defense minister and made other statements in connection with that, you and I reviewed them a couple of times. Was he capturing the views of the Russian public impatient with the war? Was he articulating the views of his fellow oligarchs, many of whom are to the right of President Putin politically? Judge, and again, I have to speculate. Let's keep in mind one thing right up front. These are Russians. These are not Americans. These are not West Europeans. Russians are different. They think very differently than we do. So we have to keep

that in mind. I think that Progozhin, who was unquestionably concerned about the Wagner Group, is one of those people who has been very unhappy with the slow, deliberate conduct of operations. He admires and I think esteems Vladimir Putin. I think most of them do. But he's frustrated with this so-called special military operation. He's been heard saying, let's get on with it. It's a war. Let's declare war. Let's crush these people. You'll recall we talked earlier, and he had mentioned, let's nationalize or nationally mobilize and fight this to the finish. There are a lot of Russians who feel that way. I think soldiers in the field right now are sitting there saying,

look, how long are we going to sit here? When do we attack? I understand that. I went through that in 1990 and 91. And many of us were very concerned when Colin Powell and others expressed the point of view that, well, perhaps we should have a Korean-like frozen war here. We can set up another DMZ. Here we're sitting in this sandbox and we said, we don't want to be here in 12 months. Let's attack and get this over with and be done with it. Fortunately, President Bush overrode him and we attacked, thank goodness.

The point is, I think that's the attitude in the Russian military. Now, there are people in the high command that hate Prokofiev, and I could understand that. He's an annoyance. Some of his criticisms were valid, some were not, but you can't dispute the effectiveness of his organization. Now what we don't know is what will happen in the future. I think Prokofiev will go to Brito Russia. I think that most of the Wagner formations will survive but end up elsewhere. What happens next is unclear, but I think the message was received by President Putin. The message is, let's fight and get this over with. And there are reasons why he feels that way.

And some of this has to do with, I think, recent pronouncements by Zelensky and Budova, his intelligence chief, about the wisdom of attacking the Zaborizhia nuclear power plant. Right. You know, the Russians have always feared this dirty bomb from the Ukrainian side, and then the predisposition to blame it on Russia, thereby creating a catalyst for a confrontation between Russia, NATO, and the United States. Mr. Putin doesn't want that. Nobody does.

Mr. Putin has said we'll move slowly, deliberately, making it very clear what our aims are, that they're limited. But you have people in the high command, and I think Progozhin was speaking for Putin has said we'll move slowly, deliberately, making it very clear what our aims are, that they're limited. But you have people in the high command, and I think Prigozhin was speaking for some of them, that are saying no. The way to fix this is to end it quickly before this kind of thing happens, before we have a larger war. So there are two sides of this coin. Colonel, we need to take a break. When we come back, what does Joe Biden have to say about this? And what does Admiral Kirby, the mouthpiece for the Pentagon, have to say about this? More with Colonel McGregor 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 here's um secretary blinken yesterday on cnn we've seen this aggression against ukraine become a strategic failure across the board russia is

weaker economically militarily its standing around the world has plummeted. It's managed to get Europeans off of Russian energy. It's managed to unite and strengthen NATO with new members and a stronger alliance. It's managed to alienate from Russia and unite together Ukraine in ways that it's never been before. This is just an added chapter to a very, very bad book that Putin has written for Russia. He has to know that none of that is accurate. No. No, in fact, Russia, Russian society is more cohesive now than perhaps it's been in decades.

And the Russian military is larger and more powerful. And the will to win is stronger than it's ever been. And I really wish we had similar cohesion here in the United States. So, no, that's utter nonsense. But what would you expect the man to say? No one in Washington is going to step forward and say, hey, we made a terrible mistake and we created a monster far greater and more powerful than the one we thought we were defeating. I wonder if the CIA knew about this ahead of time. There was a intelligence briefing to the Gang of Eight.

You know what that is. The Congress within the Congress, in my view, profoundly unconstitutional because they can't repeat what they hear. But that's another story for another time. But the intelligence community briefed the Gang of Eight on Wednesday. It could have been about something else or it could have been, hey guys, watch your television on Saturday. Well, a friend of mine who's in Hollywood, and believe it or not, I do have a couple of friends in Hollywood.

One of them said to me, you know, these people are like movie producers who've never produced a movie. Suddenly a movie shows up in the local theater and they step forward to take credit for it. And I think that's the intel community. They've got ideological blinders on. They're busy telling their masters what they want to hear. And I think large numbers of them are ideological fellow travelers with Blinken and the rest of them that want to wage this war against the Russians, something which I don't think Americans are slightly interested in at all.

Here is President Biden just about an hour ago. I also convened our key allies on a Zoom call to make sure we're all on the same page. It's critical that we're coordinated in our and coordinate it in what we're to anticipate. We agree. They agreed with me that we had to make sure we gave Putin no excuse. Let me emphasize, we gave Putin no excuse to blame this on the West or to blame this on NATO. We made clear that we were not involved. We had nothing to do with it. This was part of a struggle within the Russian system. Is this one of the times that you and I and everybody watching us now can agree that old Joe is right? Yeah, well, he is right in this sense that no, we didn't precipitate it. But gee,

it was interesting over the last 24 to 48 hours to listen to all the cheers erupting from places like CNN and MSNBC. You know, the usual suspects from Ann Applebaum to our friend Blinken and others, Max Boot. Oh, this is wonderful. We're getting rid of Putin. Putin is failing. It's all nonsense. We know that now. I wonder what Victoria Nuland is cooking up now.

I'm not going to ask you to speculate on that. Here's Admiral Kirby, and you won't be surprised at what he says. Our focus is on making sure that they have what they need to succeed, whether it's training, tools, equipment, and you're going to see another round of support announced from this administration for Ukraine in terms of weapons and capabilities this week. So we are focused on that. That's where our heads are. More weapons, more equipment that the Biden administration will announce. What do you think will become of the war? Will President Putin take seriously the lesson of Mr. Pogosian's episode and wage the war more aggressively, get it the heck over with? Or does he want history to recognize him as patient and methodical, for which some of us have praised him in the past?

Well, first, I think we may end up having another $6.2 billion mistake in the accounting system in the Pentagon so that we can save more money in the future. Since we shattered the debt ceiling, we've added $700 billion to the national sovereign debt. What a catastrophe. The first question you have to answer is, what about Germany? Germany's sliding into a depression, in my judgment. If it's not a depression, a very severe recession, I don't see any future for the German scientific industrial base or their standard of living right now, given what's happened. Macron is certainly not winning any popularity contests in France.

And I don't know what the story is on Sunak. Most people are pretty disgusted and don't see much difference between him and his predecessor. So if I were sitting next to Putin, I think Putin would probably say, if we're a little patient, we may see changes in Europe and those changes could produce peace. I'm sure that's in the back of his mind. However, he has the Russian population to think of. He may be a czar-like figure, but the Russian people want this to end and they want a

clear, unambiguous victory. I think he knows that. And I think he's going to try and do both the things that you mentioned. I'm not sure he's going to be entirely successful in doing them both, but I think he will take over all of eastern Ukraine, and I think he'll turn down on Odessa. Then I think he'll pause and wait to see what happens. But if nothing happens, we may well see another three or four hundred thousand troops added to the Russian military as they press further west. Are we still going to be talking about this conflagration whether you call it a war or a special military operation come the fall two three four months from about four months from now? I wouldn't be surprised it may not be militarily significant in other words the military piece of this may have been decided,

but the question is, what do we do? How do we react? No one in Washington wants to step forward and say, you know, I made a mistake. You know, this was the wrong course of action. Let's do what is in the interest of the Ukrainian people as well as Europe. We need peace in Europe. There's nobody like that.

Now, the good news is you've got Donald Trump, RFK Jr. These people are against the war. They have enormous support. They want to focus on what's happening at home. They want to focus on the border, restore the rule of law, all the right things. And that, I think, will ultimately win out. But in the meantime, let's wait and see. But I think we may see a far more aggressive, far more determined Russian advance than anything we've seen to date. Colonel McGregor, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Much appreciated.

Thank you so much for your time. Sure. Thank you, Judge. Of course. More as we get it. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. You want to feel safe in your vehicle with access to your firearm that's both secure and convenient. The Headrest Safe keeps your firearm where you can access it and no one else can.

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