Judging Freedom - Scott Horton : Russian Impatience with Ukraine War.

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

Scott Horton : Russian Impatience with Ukraine War.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Today is Thursday, October 2, 2025. Scott Horton joins us now. Scott, a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you. Thank you. Before I get to Ukraine, an area of your preeminent expertise, I'd like to ask you a few other questions. The Donald Trump, Stephen Whitkoff, Jared Kushner plan for Gaza, which is really permanent subjugation of the Palestinians under the neo-colonial dominance of a war criminal named Tony Blair. All right, that's a lot to unpack. But why would the Palestinians accept this?

Well, I think it's probably made to be rejected just so they can say, see, we rejected it. There's a real funny article in, well, not that funny, but it's got a funny title in the American Conservative this morning about the Palestinians don't deserve Tony Blair. What did they ever do to deserve him? The butcher of Baghdad, the destroyer of everything he touches, the destroyer of England. And so, yeah, I sure agree with that. But then, you know, as you covered with Aaron Matei on your show the other day, that this deal is basically made to be rejected. And Netanyahu, even there's the Axios article,

but how Netanyahu started changing the deal right after it was announced and saying that, you know, of course, there's never going to be a Palestinian state, which they give lip service to in there. And, of course, we're not leaving until they do everything first. and then we'll consider whether we'll withdraw. And in fact, we might not. We'll keep security control of the area, et cetera.

So it sounds to me like rather than, essentially, we could just ignore what Trump has said here with this deal and go back to just the day before that what Netanyahu told the General Assembly, which is he's going to take whatever he wants and nobody can stop him. Right, right. Colonel Wilkerson has been so harshly critical. of Tony Blair calling him the worst, most destructive cheerleader for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, second only to Dick Cheney.

That's unique territory in which to be. And Tony, Blair is probably a war criminal. I don't think I'm exaggerating by saying that, given what he and MI6 under his control facilitated. This kind of funny, not in the humorous sense, as the way you just used it, that they would pick a Brit to be the Governor General of a neo-colonial regime whose problems began when the British were, had colonized it.

Yeah, we'll call it a mandate. Tony Blair has a mandate to go and tell those Palestinians what they got to do. Right, right. And yes, as far as how illegal it was, I'm no one-world communist or anything, the UN charter was a treaty that was ratified by the Senate, just as it was ratified by the government of Great Britain. And it says that you can't start a war unless you have an agreement with the UN Security Council. And it was actually Colin Powell here and Tony Blair there who convinced

Bush. You're going to have to wait until the spring of 03 because we've got to take the time to go to the UN and try to get a resolution to legalize it. And you'll remember they got a first resolution that did not authorize war, only new inspections. And then they gave up. and didn't even try to get a second resolution to launch the war. So they did the same thing Tony Blair called it when he and Bill Clinton launched the war against Serbia in 99. He said, well, we'll just do a coalition of the willing and go ahead and launch this invasion anyway.

And, you know, his own, you know, whatever they call him over there, the attorney general or crown prosecutor or whatever guy had warned him that this is a war crime. We could go to prison for this, which of course is a joke because they're above the law, But they're definitely in violation of it. No question about that. What am I thinking of when I have an image of Colin Powell holding a vial with white powder in his hands? Was he testifying before the Security Council at that time? Yes.

And it was so funny because he's got George Tenet, the CIA director behind him, and it kind of looks like a file of crack, right? But like CIA drug. No, and he was saying, if this was anthrax, it could kill everybody in the room or whatever, which, you know, Saddam Hussein hadn't been making anthrax. since Colin Powell was helping him in the 1980s. So that's ridiculous. But yes, that was in January of 2003.

They had gotten an original resolution in the fall authorizing new inspections. But then in January, Colin Powell went to the UN and gave his ridiculous speech where he lied about mobile biological weapons labs, lied about ties between Saddam and al-Qaeda, and held up that bile of pretended anthrax and the rest. But that failed to impress.

And so France and Russia and China refused to vote for the war on the security council so they just went ahead and launched the war anyway and which by the way they didn't get an official declaration of war from the congress either correct more important but correct they got this crazy authorization for use of military forces which still exists and which was invoked as recently as trump in his first term as the justification for murdering general solomani did you get a chance i'm going to guess you did but if you didn't it's you have better things to do to watch the man who calls himself the Secretary of War. Chris has the picture of Colin Powell.

Chris is so good. There. That's it. That's the infamous picture. Did you get a chance to watch a Heggseth preening before the generals the other day? No, sir, I'm afraid I didn't, but I did read a little bit about it. I mean, I couldn't imagine Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton, George Patton, Curtis LeMay sitting there and being spoken to by a person in their view is a child as if they were

brand new recruits rather than four stars with 40 years of military wartime experience under their belts. Yeah. Well, the thing is, it's kind of too bad that he's a vet at all. I prefer, and especially a recent one, I prefer just a civilian be the secretary defense. And then I am for the civilian leadership, putting the generals and admirals in their places every once in a while that they should know. Because, you know, the Pentagon itself is the empire. It is a massive government program, as the soldiers in Vietnam, coined it, the self-licking ice cream cone.

And those generals and admirals, their jobs to find things to do rather than just to protect this country. And, you know, in exercising their so-called hegemony over the planet Earth. So they need to be whipped into shape, although I think he probably was not telling them it's time to come home. But I am for, you know, sometimes I do need to be reminded who's in charge and it's supposed to be civilians. And we've gotten into this bad habit recently of having, you know, four-star generals and so forth like Lloyd Austin and General James Mattis, service secretary of defense, which is supposed to be illegal. They have to pass a waiver to allow it. Correct. We should be doing that. Correct. But I am sure that for whatever their ideological predispositions, Madison and Austin forgot more than Heck Seth knows, certainly about military strategy. And then there's this. Chris cut number seven.

San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles. They're very unsafe places. And we're going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That's a war, too. It's a war from within. Controlling the physical territory of our border is essential to national security. We can't let these people in. We're under invasion from within. No different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don't wear uniforms. At least when they're wearing a uniform, you can take them out.

These people don't have uniforms. I told Pete, we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, national guard, but military. American cities as training grounds for American military. How dangerous is that? Well, it's as dangerous as you can get, and it's illegal. Of course, the Constitution says that they can only do that in a case of insurrection or rebellion or foreign invasion.

And the Posse Cometatis Act forbids it. And there are exceptions in Posse Cometatis. For example, they lied and pretended the branch to do. Davidians had a meth lab so they could borrow National Guard helicopters and M16 fully automatic rifles and so forth to attack the branch of Vidians with. And then, you know, I guess he's the president. So unless the Supreme Court tells him he can't, then he can go ahead and call it an insurrection if he wants.

And, you know, I know there are protesters, but is it really the case that the protesters are preventing ICE from doing their job that the national place? police, that Homeland Security and FBI and all of their teams, and for that matter, all of their joint task forces with state and local police, they really can't do their job without bringing in the National Guard. That really doesn't sound right to me. It sounds a lot more like excuse taking. And it's the kind of thing where if the Democrats were doing it, right wingers would be really upset, although maybe not in the case of immigration, but still troops on the street. We don't trust Bill Clinton or Barack Obama with that.

power, Joe Biden with that power, and Chelsea Clinton or God knows who could be next. So even if you love Donald Trump and trust Donald Trump, this is not the kind of power he should be exercising on the streets of the United States. Well, if he exercises this power, his successor will claim it. And his successor could be somebody that the right wingers will loathe, like Gavin Newsom or somebody like that. That's the problem with all this. Donald Trump is exercising power today that a pliant Republican Congress gave to George W. Bush,

probably never imagining it would be in the hands of somebody like Trump, but they don't think ahead. They just do what they are urged to do at the moment. I want to segue into your field of expertise, truly, truly expertise. Your book Provoked is the best book I have seen. in terms of research and analysis on the origins of the war in Ukraine. It is also the name of your podcast on YouTube with Daryl Cooper every Friday at 8 p.m. And I commend my viewers to watch. We also commend them to buy the book, not because I wrote a blurb on it,

but because there is nothing like it anywhere. I would say in any language, but honestly, I only read the English language. which once in a while I read some liturgical Latin. But there's nothing like your book. So let me prevail upon that expertise, Scotty. What is your understanding of the story with the so-called drones over Poland? Well, I believe that there was one story that said that it was a mistake

and that potentially it was some jamming of Russian drones over Ukraine that led to them being flown off course. But then there were reports from just a couple of days later about Russian planes violating airspace in the Baltic states. I forget if it was Latvia or Lithuania. And so, you know, I guess that kind of made that first explanation sound less plausible, and that maybe that was a deliberate provocation. And so if so, if the Russians, you know, truly are trying to escalate and or at least probe defenses and test resolve and this kind of thing, then damn them for that.

They shouldn't be doing anything to escalate this war as far as spreading it to neighboring states or even heightening the tensions with the NATO states. It's crazy for them to do that. You know, the rules of the road agreed upon by Burns and Lavrov at the beginning of the war was to keep the war contained inside Ukraine. Now, obviously, the Americans have been helping the Ukrainians strike inside Russia and keep threatening worse. And in fact, now they're even saying that they're going to give them,

or they're at least considering giving them tomahawk missiles, the range over 1,000 miles in order to degrade Russian supplies and, I guess, oil and weapons, oil refineries and weapons depots and so forth inside Russia. And, of course, there have been massive drone attacks for years going on inside those lines. And so to me, it's just another argument for trying to come to the negotiating table and figuring out a way to end this conflict right now before it escalates worse. And I know that all the Hawks would say that, no, you've got to stand up to the bully and all that.

But back to the matter, not willing to put our military on the ground in Ukraine in real numbers to apply. We have advisors that are just deniable. I mean, we're not going to drop an 80-second airport. We're not going to send in the U.S.A. So then that's it. The current status quo is Ukraine is losing slowly. Russia is winning slowly.

And yet we still have incidents like this is that should be reminding us. This should be our highest priority. Figuring out a way to end this conflict sooner than later. Why would the Russians in their right minds want to provoke the Polish military into getting involved in this? I don't know. It could be that they just figured that it would heighten the crisis in Western politics, that the European states maybe would figure out that actually they're not as tough as they've been pretending to be. And we'll find that they've reached their line and we'll start to back down.

I don't know. And like I say, you know, it could have been a mistake. Remember, there was a Ukrainian air defense missile that went off course and hit a farmhouse in Poland back to, years ago, or it was it three years ago now, and killed a couple of people. And Zelensky lied and said that they knew this was an attack from Russia. This missile came from Russia. And not only that, it was a deliberate attack. And then the Associated Press reported that America confirms that that's the case. And so they started pretending it's time to invoke Article 5 and escalate this thing. And we know that it was all, and the lie ended up falling apart by that evening. But that could

have been a major escalation right there, which in fact, again, on the point of the Tomahawk missiles. Those things can be tipped with H-bombs. And because Trump tore up the INF treaty last time, there's every reason to think, Judge, that if Russian radar operators are seeing Tomahawk cruise missiles fly into their country, that they have to consider the possibility that that's a nuclear first strike. And I'm not saying, if they're listening, I'm not saying it would be or that the Americans would do such a thing. But I'm just saying that's their job is to say hey colonel i mean this looks like a tomahawk cruise missile here and they have to take that uh with a level of seriousness that they don't worry about when it's an

attack them or you know one of those uh you know lesser kind of rocket so right this is the the kind of circumstance where tensions are high and mistakes can be made and things can escalate way out of control same thing with with russian jets over the baltics they could get shot down I believe they sent Italian jets to intercept Russian jets over, I think it was Latvia, a few days ago. Well, that could have been missiles. In fact, there was a circumstance with the Russians came up against the British in the Black Sea. And it was a British spy plane. And this is, I believe, in 22.

And the Russians attempted to shoot it down, but the missile malfunctioned. And so just by, you know, by a miracle or by happenstance. we didn't have a plane full of 30 Brits shot out of the sky over the Black Sea. That could have led to a massive escalation right then and there. And that was when we had Biden in who had no interest in the spirit of ramping things down, where at least Trump wants to figure out a way to end this thing if he can. So you have American intel directing Ukrainian military, how to reuse American hardware,

to reach deep inside of Russia. Can you imagine if the reverse were the case coming from Mexico? I mean, what would the Pentagon, not the hothead that runs it now, but what would even the normal Pentagon do in such a situation? Yeah, exactly. And in fact, never even mind striking targets inside the United States. Just imagine if the Russians had put the slightest. I mean, to make the comparison is absurd.

Imagine the Russians given this much support to the Taliban to fight. fight the United States and Afghanistan. Right. Billions of dollars, $300 billion, all kinds of missiles of, you know, of every description and, you know, all the food that they need and all the whatever logistics help and intelligence help that they need. Remember how badly the entire Washington and foreign policy establishment went into a panic over the absolute hoax by the liar, the disgraced liar Charlie Savage in the New York Times

that the Russians were paying the Taliban bounties to kill American troops in the summer of 2020. That never happened. Damn lie and Savage knew it was a lie and yet still they freaked out and accused Trump of treason again because Trump didn't do anything about it

even though it wasn't even true and they passed a resolution for bidding him from spending money to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan early over that hoax. But they were ready to go to world. I'm going to guess that Charlie out a favor to his CIA masters, and so he propagated the nonsense they gave him.

Do you sense any growing impatience amongst Russian elites, journalists, diplomats, officials with a precede slow pace of the war in Ukraine? You know, I really don't know. I should probably expose myself to more Russian media, you know, along those lines. I did see where they did a new call-up. of conscripts for, I believe, 139, 140,000 men. And now more or less, they send the volunteers to fight and they keep the conscripts for support in the back. But this is, from what I read, this is the biggest call-up of new conscripts since 2016. So that may very well signify

a new resolve by the Russians or perhaps a plan to go ahead and escalate the war and try to finish it sooner than later. Now, I know all your military experts tell you the same thing they tell me, which is the Russians are mostly fighting a war of attrition here. They are taking land and moving forward, but mostly the game is grinding up the other side. And that's what Zelensky and the Ukrainians say about the Russians too, by the way, is they don't even mind losing land because what they're doing is they're making the Russians pay a high cost just in men lost. And so that's what both sides say. But my favorite military analyst is Matt Williams, the He goes by Willie O-A-M here on YouTube, and he is an Australian veteran of America's war in Afghanistan,

and a real great guy, and he studies the battle map every day and shows where the Russians are moving inexorably toward Kiev there quite slowly, but they're getting it done. And, you know, there are disputing numbers and claims from all sides, but it seems to me like the Ukrainians are just blood. when they make these, just on their face, ridiculous sounding claims that they're killing four and five times as many Russians than they're losing on their side. That just doesn't sound plausible to me. And so, you know, even if it's approximately equal casualties, the Russians have a vast

advantage there in manpower. Here's perhaps the most dangerous person who gets to whisper into Donald Trump's ears every day or nearly every day addressing the very subject matter that you just mentioned the rather inept general Keith Kellogg, Chris. This is just two days ago, Scott. Cut number two. This is not President Trump's war in his sense. He has inherited this war and he's done everything he possibly can do to bring this war to conclusion from talking to two major principles and talking to allies and he's done a wonderful job doing it but he's

really trying really hard his comments this week that came after UN General Assembly were and he said kind of changed the landscape he's always been very very positive about trying to get to a conclusion but I think what's happened is the constant information he gets which is really good from the intelligence agencies from Secretary State all the way down the line kind of shows him that Russia is not winning this war if they were winning this war they'd be in Kiev they'd be in Odessa they'd be over the NEPA river that we added two new NATO allies. One of them, you know, Finland had doubled the size of

the border. The Russians have to have to protect. We added Sweden, which is a technologically advanced nation, especially when it comes to armament. So this is where I think they have an opportunity to challenge Russia much more aggressively. If they pick to do it, they've get the weapon system to do so. They've never asked for U.S. troops. They don't want U.S. troops on the ground. I mean, much of that is just nonsense, isn't it? so funny. You know, he used the exact words that General Wesley Clark used in arguing with me. I debated him for the fourth time on Pierce Morgan last week. And he said that exact same thing. If they were

winning, they would be in Kiev. They would be in Odessa and all this. So it makes me wonder whether he's been to the Pentagon like the good old days under Donald Rumsfeld when all the generals, all the retired, so-called generals would get their talking points before going to do cable TV. But you notice, too, he changed the subject immediately to Finland and Sweden join NATO. Well, yeah, what does that have to do with anything? Meanwhile, the map on screen while he's talking has this giant swath of red territory

in the east of the country. And he's saying that, well, since they haven't already completed a total victory, that means they're not winning in the present tense, right? As they move forward here, he's just bluffing. But I have to say, you know, there's a new Seymour Hirsch piece that came out, I believe this morning or maybe it was yesterday.

I read it this morning. And it said that he was talking to an administration official who said that, and this goes to like what Trump was saying, he's been told, oh, that Ukraine could win this thing. And that the Trump administration, he was told that the Trump administration's position has changed. I don't know if there's really some intelligence report. Maybe Charlie Savage can lie and let us know. that somehow they're basing this on the idea that that Ukraine could really make an advance here and so now the Trump administration position is that Ukraine will retake all of the country that they should not have to give any territorial concessions to Russia to end the war

which is just where we're right back where we were a year ago under Biden and Blinken running this thing And just, I don't know if that's really true, but that's completely crazy and wrong unless, you know, they're spreading a brand new novel virus in Russia. We haven't heard about the Russians still have manpower to spare in the millions, judge, right? This is a special military operation. They haven't done a general call up, a general mobilization to really, if it came down to it, they wanted to win this thing in a week. They could do it. Chris, can you put up the full screen? There it is. Chris can read my mind.

That is Scott's masterpiece. It is the standard against which all research pieces on the origin of the war in Ukraine will be measured. It's long, it's detailed, it's not difficult to read. It's everything you need to know in an intellectually honest and fearless way. and it also is the title. I said this earlier, and a couple of you have asked me to repeat it, of Scott's YouTube program,

ProVote, with his colleague Darrell Cooper at 8 p.m. on Friday. Scotty, a pleasure, my dear man. Good luck with the show. Good luck with the book. And thank you for joining us. Thank you very much, Judge. Sure. All the best to you.

Coming up, remaining today, at 2 o'clock, Matt Ho, and at 3. o'clock professor john meersheimer judge napolitano for judging freedom Thank you.