Judging Freedom - The Question of Manpower in the Ukraine Offensive against Russia - SCOTT RITTER

Episode Date: June 15, 2023

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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, June 15th, 2023. It's about three o'clock in the afternoon here on the East Coast of the United States. Scott Ritter is with us in about a minute to discuss the latest nonsense out of the CIA on Nord Stream and the latest nonsense out of the Pentagon about all the training of Ukrainian soldiers that the Americans have done. 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. Give dad the perfect Father's Day gift this year. The Headrest Safe.

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. Thank you for waiting. And Scott, thank you for joining us. Always a pleasure. What is your latest take from open sources and from your own sources on the burst of the dam in eastern Ukraine? Did the Ukrainians do it? Did the Russians do it? Who benefited and who was harmed?

It's 100% Ukraine. There's literally no doubt about it. No rational thinker could think otherwise. Russia gains nothing from this. Russia actually puts itself at a disadvantage on so many levels, threatening the water supply to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, threatening the water supply to Crimea, and the ecological damage, which has yet to be fully calculated. But what's happening in the Black Sea right now, no one's talking about. This is one of the greatest acts of eco-terrorism that has been committed in modern history. And everybody's silent about it because nobody wants to admit the truth that the Zelensky government is a criminal government, terrorist government that has carried out an act of eco-terrorism and terrorism That's the Russian bank. And most of the flooding took place on the Russian side. Moreover, the draining of the reservoir actually complicates Russia's defensive preparations by making what was an impassable water barrier now at least conceptually uh passable ukrainians will die

trying to do it but the point is everything about this complicated russia's life russia gains nothing from this uh ukraine did it what what damage was done to the black sea or what were the repercussions or reverberations down there uh as a result of this dam breach? Look, you had a tremendous amount of fresh water come sweeping down into the Black Sea, which is a saltwater sea. And when it pushes in that rapidly, it disrupts the entire ecosystem. It also brought with it all the pollutants, dead bodies, toilets, automobiles, houses, paint, everything all came sweeping down. If you take a look off the water of Odessa today, normally the water is clean. People can swim in it.

You can't swim in it right now because it's turned into this giant green slush of algae that is toxic to humanity. This is eco-terrorism. And, you know, again, no one's talking about it except the Russians and no one's listening to humanity. This is eco-terrorism. And, you know, again, no one's talking about it except the Russians and no one's listening to them. Do the Ukrainian people know that their own government did this and has lied to them about it? Or don't they care? They should care. No, I can't speak on behalf of the Ukrainian people. I don't know what they think. First of all, it's a diverse population. Remember remember there's a distinct difference between the russian-speaking uh ukrainian citizen who lives in kharkov and the uh ukrainian-speaking citizen who lives in the volv

they're two totally different people with two totally different ways of thinking etc so to speak about all of the Ukrainian people is impossible. But I will say this, there's no reason for them not to know. If they opt not to know, that's a deliberate act on their part, and that makes them complicit in the crimes of their government. What is the latest on the so-called spring offensive? Everybody seems to agree that it has started. Has it gotten anywhere? Okay, first of all, understand that the Russians have built one of the most complex, in-depth defensive networks in modern history. In fact, maybe in the history of the world.

This is designed to doctrine by the man who wrote the doctrine that's colonel general alexander romanchuk he wrote this new doctrine russian defensive doctrine after the special military operation began after the ukrainian successes last fall and then he oversaw the construction of these defenses and now he's been pulled out of the academy to command the defenses um and they're fully manned with highly trained personnel well-equipped personnel who are fighting doctrinally with air superiority, artillery supremacy. The reason why I bring that up is this is a triple-layered defense, but there's a fourth aspect to it, which is the gray zone and the flexible defense zone in front of the first barrier. Ukrainians haven't gotten out of the flex zone. They haven't

even gotten close to the first line of defense. They're probably never going to. Let me stop you for a second. Is the flex zone sort of like a buffer, like a demilitarized zone? It's not demilitarized. The gray zone is demilitarized. It's a sort of a no man's land that you have to come through. You come into the flex zone, you'll hit barriers, you'll hit troops. But the whole idea is to absorb the attack and then shape the advance so that the Ukrainians go where the Russians want them to go, i.e. into a middle of a minefield where there's pre-registered artillery fires. The helicopters already know they can pop up and shoot and then they slaughter the Ukrainians, which is exactly what happened. Now, war is dirty.

Let's not pretend that the Russians are doing this on the cheap. Vladimir Putin spoke about casualties, spoke about the high number of Ukrainian casualties, but he also said that the kill ratio is 10 to 1. So remember that for every 10 dead Ukrainians, there's a dead Russian, and there's a lot of dead Ukrainians. So that means that Russians are dying. This is war. It's complicated. It's hard. It's bloody. It's dangerous. But the Russians are fighting to their

strengths, and they're winning. The Ukrainians aren't even coming close to coming to the first line of defense. All right. Briefly, what are the three levels of defense? What do they consist of? Well, first of all, the defense is a main line of trenches with supporting trenches. Each one has barriers, minefields, they call dragon's teeth, the concrete teeth, and then they all have artillery fires. They're designed to break at a pre-designated point. You know how a well-designed car, when it hits something, collapses around the driver's compartment to save the driver? A well-planned defense collapses around the strong points letting the enemy go where you want them to go into what's called a fire cauldron and then the artillery rains down on them and slaughters them

and now if they break the first line of defense which they should if you're doing a good attack the first line of defense is designed to be broken. It breaks, collapses in, creates a corridor that they go down. They come up to the second line of defense, which is an impenetrable wall, and they get slaughtered there. Then the third line of defense is where the counterattack forces, they move out and clean everything up. So far, the Russians haven't had to break the first line of defense, fall back on the second line of defense, or employ their dedicated counter-attack forces. This is war. It's bloody, but there isn't a crisis going on right now on the front lines. How well trained, this is leading up to what I expect will be your strong comments about something General Milley said today. How well trained are the Ukrainian soldiers?

Let's put it this way. By law, we wouldn't be allowed to put American soldiers with this level of training into combat. It's criminal. It's criminal. How well or poorly trained are the Ukrainian soldiers compared to the Russian? The Russian soldiers are fully trained, fully equipped. They are experts in what they do. That's proven. You know, the Americans, there's a regiment down there, the 70th Regiment. It didn't do too well last year. It got overextended. The Ukrainians slapped

around a bit, a lot of casualties. Then it was filled up with these mobilized soldiers. And the West goes, ah, poor morale, mobilized soldiers. They're going to retreat at the first sound of gunfire and they won't be well equipped and they don't know how to use artillery. So they sent the two best brigades that the Ukrainians have into the 70th Regiment, which stood fast and slaughtered them because these are well-trained troops. They're well-motivated, well-led, well-equipped. Ukrainians, on the other hand, apparently they have some decent motivation, but they don't even know how to use the equipment they've been given. They've been given the rudimentary stuff, but it's not just about driving a tank. It's about employing a tank together with an infantry fighting vehicle so that you maximize the collective strengths of the weapons. They can't do it. They can't do it.

Here's General Milley earlier today. This is about 9 or 9.30 Eastern time this morning, boasting or stating, you can decide if it's a boast, about the Western, read NATO, and American training of Ukrainian troops. More than 6,000 Ukrainians are being trained right now at 40 different locations in 65 courses in 33 nations on three continents. Since the beginning of the war the United States has trained over 11,000 Ukrainians. We are currently training three battalions, a tank battalion and two territorial National Guard battalions. all in all the international effort has trained almost 60 000 ukrainian soldiers for this current operation of what value is a statement like that other than political it's purely political general miley knows i'll give you again just falling back on marine corps we can take a marine who's been

through his basic training through his advanced uh individual training uh an expert not an expert but competent in his weapons we put them into a marine unit and they can spend a year incorporating but before we deploy them we take six months train them up to the skill level necessary to be considered operational six months and this was a highly trained marine now we're taking guys who are recruited, signing up, signing the dotted line in March of this year. We're sending them off for a couple of weeks training. Then we send them to Germany for one month of fine arms training. These guys don't know what they're doing. They are incompetent in the greatest degree. And it's being seen. They're brave. Let's never, ever pretend that the Ukrainian soldiers aren't brave or determined. They're trying to do something they simply can't do. Combined arms warfare is extraordinarily difficult. Even the Marines get it wrong when they're trained. The Army gets it wrong. Everybody gets it wrong because it's hard to do. If I have you straight, what General Miley just said is the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for a few more weeks or

months. He's a four-star. He's a Marine. No, he's a soldier. Okay. Would be irrelevant and impermissible for American troops. Let me put it this way. If this was an American counteroffensive and the Americans suffered these casualties, Congress would hold a hearing and General Miley would come through and talk about the training that has been prepared. And he would be court-martialed for being criminally negligent because what he has done is taken people that we know are insufficiently trained for the task, and we put them in combat anyways. General Miley is a liar. He is a criminal.

He deserves to be prosecuted. And I would hope that the Ukrainians at some point to employ, with an operational doctrine that is broken, because at a minimum, you require a modicum of air support. There is no air support. The Russians are slaughtering these people before they even get near the front line. As they get near the front line, helicopters are going up. You know how many helicopters the Ukrainians have shot down, Russian helicopters, in a very intensive combat zone? Zero. Zero, which means they don't have air defense because the Russians have taken it apart. This is murder. This is mass murder. Here's General Miley, a few minutes after the clip we just ran,

ticking off a list of the military supplies that are on their way to Ukraine. He says it so fast you almost can't follow him. I'm sure you'll understand what this is. You can tell us what it means. Last week, the United States released another Ukrainian Security Assistance Initiative package totaling several billion dollars, two billion. This package procures critical capabilities, including Patriot munitions, Hawk air defense systems, artillery, rocket munitions, maintenance, sustainment support, and much more additionally this week we released our latest drawdown package of 325 million dollars from our current stocks we are providing ukraine air defense munitions gimler's long-range artillery artillery rounds 155 bradley's strikers and many other capabilities

any of it going to help well first of, the drawdown that he's talking about is stuff they're going to draw down and send to the Ukrainians. The numbers he's putting out there is several battalions worth. It's just not enough. It's a joke, and he knows it's a joke. To give you an example, he talked about $300-some-odd million there. Right now, the Ukrainians are losing about $70 to $100 million worth of equipment a day. So, Miley, good job. You're going to give them three days worth of equipment to go out there

and get slaughtered, you idiot. The other stuff that he talked about, several billion, which became $2 billion, is not drawdown. It is because we have nothing left to draw down. So, this is stuff that has to be built anew. So, we're now procuring the money, sending the orders in, and this stuff isn't going to be finished coming out the pipeline for months, if not years. It is meaningless. Again, General Miley should be court-martialed. He's an incompetent fool. Unfortunately, he's obeying the orders that he's been given. he look he's smart enough to know that every word he says is a joke and why he's not crying why he's not begging forgiveness for sending those ukrainian soldiers off to die because we knew they were going to die no one

believes this counter-offensive is going to succeed we know it's going to fail those 60,000 troops remember that's the third army that nat's built. People forget that. The first army, the Russians destroyed by June. The second army, the Russians destroyed by October of last year. The third army has been built. It's there now, and the Russians are destroying that. And there won't be a fourth army because there's no equipment left to give them. Scott, you're on a roll. I hate to take a break, but we need to take the break. When we come back, President Putin's view on how much damage the Russian military has done to Western supplies and the latest CIA nonsense on the Nord Stream

pipeline 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. attack the Nord Stream pipeline. I guess if they did that, it's because they didn't want them to be on top of each other as the CIA was destroying the Nord Stream pipeline. But these newspapers, in utter defiance of the incredible, accurate, courageous, in-your-face reporting by Cy Hurst, don't seem to care, and they all ran the story this morning. Well, the New York Times has always been a stenographer for the CIA.

The CIA dictates, the New York Times prints, publishes. And that's what's happening here. This is a cover-up. And notice the story just keeps evolving because none of it's believable. Again, we just come down to the basics. How did Ukraine get the thousands of kilograms worth of high explosives, which have been specially formed and prepared? How'd they get them onto a boat without anybody seeing? How'd they get that boat to the target without anybody seeing?

And then how did the divers get that stuff down to the pipelines without anybody seeing? The answer is they didn't. It can't happen. It couldn't have happened. This is just, it's a fantasy. It's a fiction, but they're going to keep throwing it out there because the last thing they want people to do is go, wait a minute. Didn't somebody write about this last year? What's that guy's name? Seymour Hersh. Hmm. Maybe you want to go reread that one because that's probably very close to what actually happened. Here's a president, as you probably know, had a three and a half hour, couldn't imagine Joe Biden doing this in a hundred years, had a three and a half hour press conference. He sat at a conference table in the Kremlin. There was about 20 or 30 reporters with him, and he talked. He took questions from them. Here he is with some very interesting, candid remarks about the nature of the military

conflict. It's in Russian, so I will do my best to read the English subtitles. During this time, they lost over 160 tanks, over 300, 460 armored vehicles of various types. This is just what we see. There are still losses that we do not see that are inflicted. The Russian Federation has also been using high precision long-range to attack. So there are actually more of these losses on the Ukrainian side. By my calculations, it's 25, maybe 30 percent of the volume of equipment that was supplied from abroad. 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. The offensive is on. These are the results to date of what I have just said. It's probably underestimating, I would think, if he says 25 to 30 percent of the NATO and U.S. supplied equipment has been destroyed by the Russians. What do you think, Scott? Well, a couple of things. First of all, he said what we have seen, which means that I used to do battle damage assessment. And that means that they have imagery. So this isn't guessing.

This isn't what we did in Vietnam where we said we fire off X number of artillery shells and we assume we killed this many. These are bodies on the ground. These are dead, destroyed equipment that had been counted by the Russians and calculated with great precision. I actually observed through their means of doing so. Right. And then they also have electronic warfare where they can listen to the Ukrainians talk about what's been destroyed as well. But Putin's not going to talk about that because that's classified. In that same meeting, and I'll get to that in a second, he said that they suffered around 7,500 casualties. And that's then you add 30% onto that. And so you're talking around 10,000 Ukrainian casualties. Now he did say something. He said that the kill ratio is 10 to one. So

understand that the Russians are taking losses, a thousand. And that's heavy fighting. Imagine America taking a thousand losses. That's heavy fighting. We know what that is. So there's heavy fighting going on. But here's the interesting thing about uh that press conference that was a press conference of war reporters many of whom report for uh telegram blogs and other blogs that have been very critical of the russian military and very critical of vladimir putin so what vladimir putin did is one of the bravest things a leader can do in wartime he invited all these critics into a room sat down and for three hours took their questions imagine president biden doing so imagine any american president doing something like that for three hours he brought in his harshest critics these are people who have been saying some of them

were threatened with arrest because of the the way that they were speaking about the Russian military, who came close to violating the law. And yet these critics, not all of them are critics, some of them are pro-Russian, but they're there. And these are people who are on the front line. They're not idiots. They're not in the back making stuff up. They're there. They're seeing this. They're watching their friends die. They're watching people die. They have questions. They ask the questions and the Russian president answered them without flinching, without blinking. Whatever you think of Vladimir Putin, that is the definition of leadership. How much longer can the war go on, Scott? Judge, we've had this conversation before, and I'm going to stick to

my assessment. This war is over by the end of summer, early August. The Ukrainians cannot sustain this level of casualties. Now that they've engaged in this counteroffensive, it will go until the 60,000 troops that General Miley prepared for murder are in fact murdered. Scott Ritter, always a pleasure. Everybody loves it when your blood pressure goes up Except my doctor Thank you for joining, my dear friend We'll see you again soon Boy, if you like that, like, subscribe, tell a friend

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