Judging Freedom - The Russian Offensive in Ukraine - Scott Ritter

Episode Date: February 16, 2023

Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Friday, excuse me, Thursday, Thursday, February 16, 2023. It's about 1.35 in the afternoon. Scott Ritter joins us now. Scott, you have been telling us and you have been saying in a number of venues that the Ukrainians should expect an overwhelming Russian force. How overwhelming? How soon? And from what direction? Scott Ritter Well, we'll start with how overwhelming. Basically, the Ukrainians are going to get swamped. They don't have a chance. There's nothing they can do to stop this. They have insufficient resources across the board.

And it's going to be bloody fighting. The Ukrainians have shown themselves to be tenacious defenders. But it's over. be bloody fighting. The Ukrainians have shown themselves to be tenacious defenders, but it's over. When's it happening? It's happening right now. Literally right now as we speak, the Russians are preparing the battlefield. They are launching a number of reinforced probes that have made considerable advances that are causing the Ukrainians to commit what few resources they have to plug the holes. And in doing so, they're creating additional opportunities so that when the

final green flare is fired and the Russians approach the forward edge of the battle area, they will do so in a location the Ukrainians are incapable of stopping, and then it begins. Is this the, and I think these are your numbers, Scott, and if I remember them and state them veterans, many of whom are what we would consider National Guard, so they're trained, some of whom are conscripts, some of whom are reluctant conscripts, but all of them are trained. They're not taking people off the streets and putting them on the battlefield. Well, actually, there won't be any conscripts on the front line. You know, the conscripts only constitute a minority of the Russian army, and they're going to be doing rear area support. The frontline troops are going to be exclusively volunteers or contract soldiers.

Of the 300,000 who were mobilized, 80,000 of the most experienced individual replacements were sent to the frontlines to plug the gaps. So you have about 220,000 who have received the organized unit training, the formal unit training in battalion brigade level, plus another 180 to 200,000 volunteers similarly incorporated. And yes, these are the ones that are appearing right now. I mean, there's been satellite photographs that have shown these forces accumulating along the border in these massive camps. Those camps are starting to empty, which tells you they are moving towards the front line. They will be committed where the Russians think. I think the main effort is probably going to come from the

north. I think the Ukrainians have, not Kiev north, but Kharkov north. I think therainians have uh have not not kiev north but kharkov north i think the ukrainians have uh stripped away their resources there and it's they are the ones now that have overextended defensive lines with no depth and i think the russians are going to come sweeping down and uh we'll see i mean you know i my crystal ball um you know is what it is a crystal ball which means it's useless uh well no it's not useless These are educated and sometimes informed by sources, I would imagine, predictions that you make. Is this going to be just a massive, continuous onslaught, almost the physical infantry equivalent of American carpet bombing at the end of World War II that won't

stop until it succeeds? Well, it won't stop until it succeeds. It will be a grinding, massive operation along the totality of the line, and the Russians will take what they have earned. They're not going to overextend themselves. They're not going to try and bite off more than they can chew. They will push forward. And as the Ukrainians either crumble or retreat, the Russians will fill that gap in a very methodical fashion. Is there anything that the Biden administration, the American government can do at this point to prevent, resist, or repel an invasion as massive as you expect? No, they can't. Look, they gave it their best shot this past summer where they injected tens of billions of dollars worth of equipment into available

Ukrainian reserves. They reconstituted them into functional mechanized cores, and they were committed to an offensive in the Karasov and Kharkov region, which seized some territory, but the reserves were destroyed, and the Ukrainians have not been able to reconstitute those reserves, and they're not going to be reconstituted in a timely fashion. I want to play for you a clip which is just two days old in Brussels. It's your friend, the Secretary of Defense, who obviously disagrees with what you just said, but I'm dying to hear your response to it. Secretary of Defense Austin.

Ukraine has been at this for a year, and so they have used a lot of artillery ammunition. We're going to do everything we can, working with our international partners, to ensure that we give them as much ammunition as quickly as possible. What are we giving them that can help them? It's of no value at this point. Well, I mean, the bottom line is this, and I hope everybody understood the despair that was in his voice. This was not the words of a confident man. This is the dejected words of a man who realizes the game is over. We're out of ammunition. And what he told Zelensky in Ramstein on Valentine's Day was, you're going to run out of ammunition sometime this summer,

and we don't have anything left to give you. We're going to try, but we don't. And let me tell you what happens when you run out of ammunition in war. You die. It's over. That's why I'm so confident in my assessment. They are going to run out of ammunition. I mean, even if they had ammunition, they were going to get beat,

but they're going to run out of ammunition. I mean, even if they had ammunition, they were going to get beat, but they're going to run out of ammunition. And when that happens, it is game, set, match, goodbye. There's nothing that can be done to stop the Russians. Okay. So let me tell you how correct you are. Before the same audience, but the day before, the Secretary General of NATO, Mr. Stoltenberg, said the following. The war in Ukraine is consuming an enormous amount of ammunition and depleting allied stockpiles. The current rate of Ukraine's ammunition expenditure is many times higher than our current rate of production. This puts our defense industries under strain. I guess he's right, but the Secretary of Defense chooses to ignore this.

I mean, this is basically what you have been telling us for 11 and a half months now, isn't it? Yeah, this was unknowable. I mean, now isn't yeah this this was a knowable i mean this isn't first of all i will tell you this and i will put my entire reputation on the line here because i know this to be a fact they knew this back in september oh they knew this back in september back then they've killed innocents knowing that this would be a failure and wasted 50 billion borrowed american dollars knowing it would be wasted. Look, the offensive that took place in September was the only chance Ukraine had at winning the war,

and it was no chance at all because the Russians literally gave up territory for lives and killed the Ukrainians coming in. No one's talking about it. They destroyed the reserves, and in doing so, they exposed the reality that Ukraine doesn't have the ability to sustain this fight. And the weak link is artillery. When the Russians are bringing 20, 40, 60,000 rounds a day, and Ukraine is firing 6, 8, 10,000 rounds in return, and Ukraine can't sustain that, and Russia can. And I've said this to you from day one. That's the reality of this war. And you know who agrees with me?

The commander of American forces, of allied forces in Europe, General Kibole, I think his name is. He spoke in Sweden last month, and he basically said what's going on in Ukraine today is of a scope and scale beyond anything NATO is capable of doing. We can't fight that fight because it's an artillery fight. That is basically just what Secretary General Stoltenberg said. He said Ukraine is consuming not twice as much, not three times as much, but many times as much. So it's got to be four or more that we as what we can possibly produce sooner we produce a hundred thousand rounds a month and ukraine uh will will uh will consume 110 000

rounds in about uh seven days all right so sooner or later they the ukians, and we, NATO, will run out of ammunition. We already are out of ammunition. We had a million rounds reserve and it's gone. We're now dipping into the reserves we gave Israel. But remember what I said, we had a million round reserve. It's gone. Now we're going to Israel and we're taking a quarter of a million rounds there that are the Israeli reserves and our reserves in case of a Middle East contingency, and we're going to give it to the Ukrainians, and they're going to chew through that. And like I said, by summer, everything will be gone, and there's no ability

to reconstitute. Defense industries can't catch up. They run out of ammunition, and they all die. That's just the reality. So I understand the quarter of a million rounds for Israel. Is our stockpile reserved for Israel or us clawing back what we've already given to the Israelis? No, Israel has allowed us to forward deploy emergency stocks of munitions that Israel could draw upon in case of a major war, or we could draw upon in case of a major war. So it's a sort of a joint reserve. And Israel has agreed to release these stocks to go to Ukraine. Is there any back channel negotiation that you're aware of, hinted at, or confirmed that's going on, whether it's in Geneva or Kiev, Moscow,

Washington, wherever it might be? Is anybody talking to Putin? Feelers are definitely being put out for a negotiated settlement. The problem is, and the Russians have said it straight up, we're willing to negotiate. I don't know why they're willing to negotiate, but maybe they like peace. If I were a Russian at this point in time, I'd just have Genghis Khan hat on and say, no, we're going to war. But the Russians are like, we would like to end this thing peacefully, but it has to be on our terms. You can't sit here at the moment we have swamped Ukraine, the moment we sacrificed everything

to get to this point, and now you want to tell us that in order to have peace, we have to retreat, give up territories, et cetera, will never happen. So they're speaking different languages. You can't come to a negotiating table when you're speaking totally different languages. At some point in time, Ukraine is going to have to learn how to speak Russian. And when they do that, and I don't mean literally, I mean, accept the Russian reality. And then and only then will there be a negotiated settlement. Just an hour or so ago, Ukrainian President Zelensky gave an interview to the BBC, in which he basically says, hang on to your seat while you watch this. He basically says, compromise is not a bad thing. We all compromise, but no compromise with Putin. Take a listen. Він, в основному, каже, що компромані. Тому будь-які компроміси

територіальні, вони будуть тільки послаблювати нашу державу. Питання ж не в слові компроміс. Чого його боятися? У нас мільйон компромісів в житті, вони щоденно відбуваються. Питання з ким? Компроміс з Путіним? Ні. Чому? Бо немає віри. Compromise with Putin? No.'s the language he spoke growing up. This is the most forced Ukrainian I've ever heard of anybody. That shows you how artificial this is. This is a Ukrainian president who can't speak Ukrainian, who's trying to speak Ukrainian, and it just sounds fake like every part of his text. He can live in fantasy all he wants right now, but soon reality will come crashing home and you know look adolf hitler in his bunker had flights of fantasy too about how he was going to

win compel surrender roosevelt died suddenly great victory um in the end he put a bullet in his head because it was all over hey zielinski it's all over dude i don't i'm not asking you to put a bullet in your head but you might want to like I mean, what will it take for them to recognize it? Chris Cuomo, whom I've known for years, he used to work at Fox and then ABC and then CNN, is now at a network called News Nation, did a compelling interview with Ukrainian conscripts who were 16 and 17 years old. He interviewed one who was pretty fluent in English, who said he had already been to the front lines and had seen the blood and gore, but was undeterred by it.

Do the Ukrainians conscript high school males? Is this how desperate they are? It appears so. I mean, again, I've heard about it. I can't say that I've borne direct witness to it, nor have I seen the formal announcements on this wave of mobilization for 16-year-old children. But I have heard those reports, and I don't doubt Chris Cuomo's reporting. Next to Secretary of Defense Austin is Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,

General Mark Milley. I think this will anger you substantially, and I'll tell you the bottom line is now, so that your blood pressure is ready for the clip we're going to run for you. Russia has already lost. Take a listen. NATO and its coalition has never been stronger. And Russia is now a global pariah. And the world remains inspired by Ukrainian bravery and resilience. In short, Russia has lost. They've lost strategically, operationally, and tactically, and they are paying an enormous price on the battlefield. So first address the substance of what he said, and then you probably have some comments on his tone and word choice, and then we can analyze why he's saying this when he knows it's not true and it's 180 degrees from what he said four months ago.

Well, first of all, General Miley, if you're listening, let me introduce you to the concept of strategic. Strategic goes beyond the battlefield. You know that, General. You're a general. Things like the economy, things like geopolitics, the economy. It ain't the Russian economy that's suffering, General. It's the Western economy that's suffering. Go talk to some economic experts. They do exist in the Joint Chiefs, and they will tell you that the Russian economy didn't contract as much as everybody

thought it would because of the most stringent sanctions in the world. And next year, it's going to grow. So your sanctions have failed. That's a strategic win for Russia. You say they're a global pariah. Why don't you send one of your defense attachés to follow Sergei Lavrov around as he went to Africa and he goes around the world where he's received with open arms by people who reject America's vision of diplomacy. That's a political one, a geopolitical one. Russia's kicking your butt strategically, General, literally. I mean, we can go into the fact that the Russian military has expanded to 1.5 million, defense industry's running on cylinders, and you can't produce any damn artillery shells. You're pathetic, General. Now let's talk about operational tactical. I'll just make it this easy for you, General. When you don't have artillery, you don't win operationally or tactically. Russia has a lot of artillery, a lot of ammunition. We don't. You

don't. Talk to your General who's in command of the U.S. forces in Europe and NATO forces. He just said, we can't fight this fight. We can't. We don't know how. We're not equipped. We're not trained. This is of a scope and scale beyond anything we've ever imagined, and we don't have the military to do it. So how incompetent is the Biden administration if the Secretary General of NATO says we don't have the ammunition, we can't even produce it, much less sell it or give it to you. The Secretary of Defense says we're with you no matter what. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says don't worry, you've already won because Russia's already lost. And all of this, or at least the last two, is defied by reality.

Does the Biden administration know what it's doing? Does Mark Milley, General Milley, believe what he said, or is he just mouthing the Oval Office's talking points? The answer to this question, we're going to go to time machine back to July of 2021, when Joe Biden got on the phone with Ashraf Ghani, who's the president of then Afghanistan, and the president of Afghanistan said, hey, Joe, we got 20 to 30,000 screaming Mimi Taliban coming over the border. We ain't got nothing to stop. The world's coming to win. What are you going to do about it? Biden said, whoa, whoa, whoa, stop. I need you to get your guy on TV and tell everybody everything is going to be okay, even if it's not true. That's a direct quote from the president of the United States. Even if it's not true, we must shape the perception. This was in July. In

August, we had the Kabul nightmare, flying out, retreat. It was all over. This is after 20 years of generals like Mark Miley parading before Congress, lying through their teeth about how we're winning in Afghanistan, we can prevail in Afghanistan, et cetera. Mark Miley, you're a liar. And you know you're a liar, but you're obeying orders because you've been told by Joe Biden to manage perception, to lie, say things, even if you know they're not true, to shape perception. But at some point in time, perception hits reality and that's about to happen. What happens when an otherwise respected, very high ranking, he's the senior military person in

the United States, is told a lie and he doesn't want to tell a lie what does he do resign we should he should resign he should take the four stars off throw it on the table and say hell no but what he's doing and then what should happen is everybody after the president goes okay leave next general comes up i appoint you i ain't gonna lie either and it should go all the way down the rank. Everybody says, we're not playing that game, Mr. President. You are the civilian leader. You need to go out and tell the truth to the American people. But you're not going to hide behind my four stars, my medals, my career to shape perception when it's not true.

But that exposes the absolute lack of integrity in Mark Miley. Absolute lack of integrity. He's saying things he knows isn't true. Switching gears to the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline by American Navy SEALs and American CIA at Joe Biden's orders. You and I both have, you've known for 30 or 40 years, Cy Hirsch, don't get mad at me, Bob Woodward, the best investigative reporter in the United States of America, My Lai, Massacre, Watergate, domestic spying, American torture, Pulitzer Prize,

notoriously known for meticulously documenting everything he says. Not a peep out of mainstream media, not a peep out of Germany, which lost the natural gas supply and whose property along with Gazprom's was destroyed. I think the mainstream media and the German civilian leadership was humiliated that they learned about this from Cy Hersh, not from the American administration. I referred to this in my column this morning called War and Indifference as a war crime, as the use of the military to attack a civilian target for no bona fide moral military purpose. And I'm getting a lot of negative and much positive feedback on this. Where do you stand? Look, the United States committed an act of war against an ally. We stabbed an ally in the back. It's an

economic Pearl Harbor. It was an attack on a critical piece of energy infrastructure without warning. Actually, with warning. I guess Joe Biden admitted that he was going to do it before he did it. But they did it. They destroyed it. The sad thing is that everybody knows we did it. Literally, everybody knows we did it. But the mainstream media has been silent. Cy Hirsch, again, I've known him for 25 years and, you know, I didn't know anything about this story before it was published. Normally we, you know, we talk weekly, sometimes daily, depending on his mood. But I had no clue this was happening until it was published, which is the way it should be. But he published his story because he recognized that this is perhaps one of the most important stories of

this era. This is a story that is resonating in Germany. He gave, he doesn't give a lot of interviews, and he gave an interview to Berliner Zeitung, I think it was, and it's resonating. German politicians are waking up. And this is the reality. This may, you know, the blowback from this, you know, because this shows just the short side of this of the Biden administration. We're going to shut down Russian gas, replace it with American gas. But the Germans are waking up. And the blowback could be, A, Germany no longer is a member of NATO. Why would you stay in a club that doesn't want you? Why would you stay in a club that stabs you in the back? B, America's military bases in Germany may be shut down.

There's a lot of movement right now within German politicians to do just that. And if the German people get angry enough, that could happen. C, the end of the European Union. Germany wasn't just stabbed by the United States, but by Norway, by Denmark, by Sweden, by Poland, all who were witting of this. So Germany may say, we are going to resume our role as Europe's strongest economy, which means we're dumping the thing that weakens us the most, the Euro. If it wasn't for Germany, there wouldn't be a Euro. And they may go back to the Deutschmark, and that's the end of Europe. And then the United States is going to be left holding this empty bag wondering how the heck this happened. It happened because Joe Biden and his advisors, Jake Sullivan, Victoria Nuland, William Burns,

and Tony Blinken are war criminals, war criminals, literal war criminals. But that's just international law. They also violated the Constitution of the United States of America with intent bypassing mandatory reporting requirements to Congress. This is an evil, evil administration because that's what evil is. When you violate the law to inflict harm on others without any legitimacy. And the goal here was to bring harm to the German people. Joe Biden knew that by blowing up this infrastructure

on the eve of what could have been a cold winter, thank goodness it wasn't, but it had been. There could have been dead Germans instead of just uncomfortable Germans, but he's destroyed an economy. He's put people out of work. This is Joe Biden, Mr. Scranton. I'm about jobs. My dad had a job. Well, you just put Germans out of work, Mr. President. You're evil. And all the people advising you are evil. And most mind-numbingly at all, you've handed Russia a strategic victory. You just made Russia look really, really good in the eyes of the Germans. Yes. A couple of observations which are consistent with yours. The one person who told the truth about this from day one was President Putin.

When the Biden administration said Russia destroyed its own pipeline, Putin basically said, what are you, crazy? We all know the Americans did this. I'm sure their intel, which I guess did not detect the explosives down there in June, but once they were detonated, their intel knew who did it. Second observation, every American president since Harry Truman, when the CIA was founded, has used the CIA as a secret personal private military. But this is probably the first time in American history that an American president has used the CIA and the military against an ally. So interesting. Article 5 of the NATO treaty says when any member of NATO is attacked, all the other members will come to its defense.

I guess they didn't contemplate that the attack would come from within NATO. No, you're right. Look, this shows the absolute... NATO no longer has a reason to exist. It hasn't had a reason to exist since the Cold War ended. But now that NATO has become... NATO, this has exposed the fact that NATO is nothing more than a tool of the United States

and that the United States is willing to actually break the tool when necessary. If you're a member of the United States, and that the United States is willing to actually break the tool when necessary. If you're a member of NATO right now, you need, again, I'm going to just say it straight up. The number one threat to NATO is the United States of America. We just attacked Germany. And if you think that's it, you don't think that we would attack others to suit our needs. NATO doesn't help anybody unless it helps America. And when Germany became inconvenient because it wanted to have cheap Russian gas, we stabbed them in the back. A couple of people that email us, and we get many, many, many, many emails or messages, I guess is the exact word when you're on.

Just want you to know how much they appreciate the courage, the tenacity, and the logic with which you explain all these things, Scott, with much gratitude and, of course, personal appreciation from me as well. Well, thank you very much, and thanks again for giving me the opportunity to speak with you and your audience. I just wish General Milley could hear this. I wish he could see it, because he knows your reputation for honesty is second to none. Well, again, he's in a difficult position, but it's sometimes, you know, that's how you judge a man of character that when, or a woman of character, a person of character, that when the going gets tough, they do the right thing. And right now I'm afraid that

General Milley is not doing the right thing. Scott Ritter, thank you so much. More as we get it, my dear friends, Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.