Judging Freedom - Ukraine Russia War - Could it Be Nearing the End? w/Matthew Hoh

Episode Date: August 16, 2023

Ukraine Russia War - Could it Be Nearing the End? w/Matthew HohSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, August 16th, 2023. Matthew Ho joins us now. Matt, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you for coming back on the show. Matt, are you at all surprised or taken aback that the Ukrainian spring offensive went nowhere and its offspring, the summer offensive, went nowhere as well? Thanks for having me back, Judge. And yeah, no, I'm not surprised. A lot of commentators are not surprised. I think you're not. Most of your audience is likely not as well. Just everything about it was doomed to failure. Just the size of the two forces when you compare them, the fact that the Russians took six months to dig in,

prepare fortifications, this was their plan. So you played right into the Russians' plan, as well as to just the fact that the Ukrainians did not have the necessary equipment needed. I was reading today where they're interviewing a Ukrainian brigade commander who says he has 30 engineers in his unit. You know, doctrinally, he should have several hundred to be able to breach any type of fortifications like the Russians have. And then, of course, they never have the air support or the artillery. Is that because of poor military planning or because people are dead? I think it's probably a mixture of both, a mixture of both. I think the Ukrainian army was not meant to be fighting this war. I don't think it was ever planned for the Ukrainian army to ever fight a war for longer than a couple of weeks.

Certainly go back 16, 17 months, everyone, all the bright people on this, all the people on CNN and in the Wall Street Journal, all the experts were saying how it would be over so quick. And to remember, you had many Americans and Brits and people in Brussels who wanted to see another Afghanistan happen. No lesser figure than the former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said such a thing, you know, suck the Russians in, bog them down, give them another Afghanistan. So expend Ukrainian lives, expend Ukraine, the country, expend their environment, their resources, their infrastructure in a trap for Russia. that you've had the same type of mindset, that same type of maniacal desire for blood other than our own to be shed, to try and somehow bring down the Russian government by catching them in this trap in Ukraine. And then that would bring about exhaustion and stress on the Russian economy, on the Russian people that would precipitate Russian regime change.

And of course, we're not seeing anything near that. Do the neocons from Hillary Clinton to Victoria Nuland to Tony Blinken to Jake Sullivan, I guess you got to put the president to the extent he thinks about this stuff in the group, but do the neocons, did they think that they could use Ukraine as a battering ram with which to weaken Russia and drive Vladimir Putin from office? Did they really think that? I really do think they believe that. I really think that they have. Did they not have available any intel showing them how powerful and well equipped the Russian military and well managed the Russian military is? Well, I think anyone who's a casual observer of American military

intelligence history for the last decades, going back to the Korean War, say, will know that American intelligence estimates are often wildly off. And it also depends upon even if they are accurate. It's so become so politicized. And I'm sure you've talked about this with our friend Ray McGovern over and over again, right? How politicized intelligence is. So what is even reaching the desk of the president? Maybe something that doesn't even resemble what the Central Intelligence Agency, what the Defense Intelligence Agency, what the State Department's INR, you know, all the various intelligence organizations we have even put together because there's such a process where it can be manipulated

to make sure that it adheres to the narrative. But then, you know, as well, if you go and you look back at, say, the discord leaks, which were leaked by the young air guardsman from Massachusetts several months ago, and you look at that and you see what the information being given to Mark Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, you look at that and you see what our intelligence community was telling the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff about Russian military strength. You go through those documents yourself and you find that it's incoherent. It doesn't make sense. One slide says one thing. Another slide says another. And then, of course, you have on the slides an asterisk, a caveat that says we get this information from the Ukrainians.

We don't trust it. And we're going to try and get our own information. But that was a year into Russia's invasion. So do we know how much money the American government has given to Ukraine or not? Not money, the value, the cost of the equipment of the Congress back when the Democrats ran the House under Mrs. Pelosi, enacted legislation that gave President Biden a $113 billion blank check. Do we have any way of knowing how much of that he has spent? And then I'm going to ask you about the quality of what we sent over there, which is deducted from the $113 billion. So do we know how much of that $113 billion remains, or is know how much of that $113 billion remains?

Or is this not a number that the public can put its hands on? It's a very difficult number to get your hands on. It really is. We have spent roughly about, that I have seen, about $90 billion worth of that $113 billion. And that may be less. And you've got to remember, too, that $113 billion was not all military assistance.

Much of it, a lot of it was economic assistance. We pay for the pensions of the Ukrainian government. We pay for the salaries of the Ukrainian government. We pay for the salaries of the Ukrainian army. So anyone who says this is not the salaries of the Ukrainian army, I guess we're also paying for and therefore controlling Ukrainian intelligence services as well. They're spies. Right. Although we have I don't even I don't think the Ukrainian government has control over their intelligence service. And we certainly don't. It seems that we have a very frustrating relationship from, say, our people in Langley or, you know uh, uh, you know, a DIA, uh, would like to see that it's, it's not

nearly the type of relationship that the United States had with the Iraqi or the Afghan, uh, intelligence and security services moved the Afghan intelligence service, the MDS, the U S really controlled that. And the, you know, it was an arm of the CIA in so many ways, not the same type of relationship with the Ukrainian security services. And there's a lot of doubt as to how much control Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, has over his security and intelligence services. And I think if you anywhere you would look to see where is power within Ukraine, you would find it, I think, in those Ukraine in the security services to a greater deal than you would see it, say, in the armed forces.

OK, I'm going to run a clip from Russian Defense Minister Shoigu. It requires that I read the translation. He's speaking kind of quickly. So I'm going to do my best to get all of the words in. You'll you'll see the subtitles and anybody watching us will see the subtitles. I'm going to read the subtitles for the benefit of our friends that are enjoying Judging Freedom audio only. And then I'm going to ask you some questions about what he says. Here he is just the other day. In real-life scenarios, our weapons show reliability and effectiveness. At the same time, the much-hyped Western weaponry has shown itself to be far from perfect. You can check for yourself at the exhibition of the weapons captured in Ukraine. Despite the comprehensive assistance of the West, the armed forces of Ukraine fail. An example of this is the publicized strategic counteroffensive,

the skillful actions of the personnel of the Russian armed forces. Their coherence and the high level of training make it possible to respond flexibly to the implementation by Kyiv of its plans of its Western curators. Preliminary results of combat actions show that Ukraine's military resources are exhausted. So he's making two points, Matt. One is that the equipment we've given them is subpar. I want you to comment on that in a second. The second is that the Ukraine military is exhausted. Start, please, first with, this is the defense minister of Russia. This is the equivalent of Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense in the United States, claiming that what we're sending them is subpar, not as good as what the Russians are using

against them. Agree or disagree? I think it's a mix. It's a mix. There's some propaganda in there. A bunch of months ago or late last year, the Ukrainians captured the newest tank the Russians are using in combat, the T-90M. And, you know, the same type of propaganda, this tank isn't very good, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But there's also some truth in it because we have sent

our oldest equipment. Certainly, you've seen that with our European partners where they have emptied out their stocks. They've given their oldest tanks, their oldest aircraft. I think it was Slovakia and Poland gave MiG-29s that they had to cannibalize their own aircraft in order to make those MiG-29s fly. So they said they gave 30 MiG-29s. The Ukrainians only really got 15 because you

had to take parts from 15 to make the other 15 work kind of thing, right? So what you have, though, is one of the reasons for this is you don't want these weapons being captured. This is why the Americans have been so reluctant, say, to provide the Abrams tank to Ukraine. Now the first six Abrams tanks out of 40 or so are arriving Ukraine. They are old M1A1 models that go back to, I believe they predate the Persian Gulf War. The reason why we are not giving Ukrainians our newer tanks, our best tanks, is to my opinion, simply because we don't want them captured because the armor on the Abrams is a very closely guarded secret. Right. So we don't want the Russians to understand how our armor works because.

All right. So they would capture the tank and reverse engineer the armor. Right. And we've already seen that happen with, say, the HIMARS rockets, which are the rockets that shoot about 50 miles. They're GPS guided. The Russians, of course, figured out how to jam the GPS. So this is one of the reasons why the United States has been so reluctant to give the Atakams missile, which we hear so much about, which is a 200 mile range, because we don't want the Russians to figure out how to defeat those missiles. It's not just the Russians. We also believe, rightly, that whatever information the Russians have, they're going to give the Chinese. And so that's who the

Americans are really so concerned about are fighting the Chinese. And so we don't want the Chinese to know anything about our weapons that they could learn by the Ukrainians losing them to the Russians. Got it. Okay. So to Defense Minister Shoigu's second point, that the Ukrainian military is exhausted. We know that the Russians have three rungs of defenses to prevent the Ukrainian military from going into eastern Ukraine. We know the Ukrainian military has not even approached, much less breached, the first of those three rungs. Is Defense Minister Shoigu's contention that the Ukrainian military is exhausted, propaganda or credible or something else? I think it's rapidly approaching that point,

which is something of credibility, of credibility. I really think it is. I think the Ukrainians with this offensive were incredibly reckless, incredibly stupid. You know, we've talked about before, Judge, this was political theater. So this great waste of human life was all done as a spectacle, right, to try and prove a point to the West, to prove a point to the American people, to shore up support for the Ukrainians at the NATO summit, to try and make these peace conferences that the West has held in Copenhagen and then just recently in Saudi Arabia to try and make them something. And so you have this offensive to show that this fight is worth it. This war is worth it. The Ukrainians with the grit that they have, they can win. And you see this, you see this in American media, you see this in the op-eds, right? Where it's like- I don't know if they see it anymore, but you certainly saw it for the first 16 months of the war. Right. And so I think what you saw with this offensive is that

these brigades that were trained and the training was minimal, the people who thought that somehow you're going to send Ukrainian soldiers to learn how to use these tanks and fighting vehicles and artillery and rockets together and train them in eight weeks. You know, I mean, just to create a rifleman in the U.S. Marine Corps, you spend over a year of training or close to a year of training before that kid goes to before that kid goes to his unit. I mean, that's just to create an infantryman. Right. I mean, so let alone you're thinking you're going to create this military that's capable of conducting these combined arms operations, which are very complex in the manner of weeks, you know, you're kidding yourselves and they were kidding everybody else. And so I think what they did, though, was where they had this reserve of maybe 10 brigades or so that they have committed into this offensive, rather than using that to strengthen their defense and then be able to

put themselves in a position where maybe they can negotiate a better settlement, they've exhausted themselves. They've used up that nerve. And now, of course, how much did they use up? And I've not been bullish, as you know, on the Russian army, certainly not like Colonel McGregor. But McGregor may be right, and I might be completely wrong here in a sense of the ability for a Russian offensive that would cause a Ukrainian army collapse because the Ukrainians have wasted so much. I mean, all these lives that have just been ruined. OK, add to this, and I think you'll agree with me from your military experience and your knowledge of what's going on there. Ukraine is the most mined country in the world as we speak. How much longer can this last? Active daily military engagement, Russian army versus Ukraine army. Well, I got to remember

the minds go both ways, right? So this would preclude and make a Russian offensive very difficult as well. And certainly you saw that in, say, the Bakhmut offensive, where my understanding is one of the reasons that the Russians were so held up, why it seemed so slow, was because they encountered these Ukrainian minefields, made it very difficult. My belief is that this is a stalemate. It's turning into a stalemate, barring what I just said about a Ukrainian army collapse. You have a ton of money going into the Ukrainian army, the Ukrainian economy. It will be propped up. It will become the type of thing that we did with Afghanistan and Iraq, where it can still stand. The house of cards can still function as long as that money is coming in. There's no fear of that money leaving. And of course, what we'll do here in the U.S. is we'll do something quite insidious

and quite nefarious and quite morally bankrupt, like tie aid to Maui, right? Our national disaster aid to making sure the Ukrainian army gets its weapons, which is what the White House is doing, right? But that's it. As reprehensible as that is, it wouldn't surprise me, wouldn't surprise me at all if that happens.

I mean, let's face it, maybe we'll get a little bit into politics, but I want to talk big picture in Ukraine. I got to throw this question at you anyway. Joe Biden doesn't have an exit ramp. He does not have a publicly acceptable, politically palatable exit ramp from this mess does that I can see. Do you agree? No, he doesn't. And this is the same judge. This is what happened in Afghanistan with Obama is he came into office. The Taliban were willing to negotiate. How did I know that? Because it was all over Middle Eastern, Central Asian,

South Asian newspapers at the time. The Taliban were saying themselves, when I was in Afghanistan as a State Department officer, twice I met with Taliban interlocutors talking about negotiations. That was completely shut down. No one on the US side wanted to hear it. We were going to surge in Afghanistan. We were going to be victorious. We were going to get a military victory for the Pentagon. We were going to show that a Democratic president is a better commander in chief than a Republican president. All those types of things. What happens, though, when you don't win? What happens when you put a quarter million man army into Afghanistan? Right. One hundred thousand American troops, 40,000 NATO troops, 100,000 contractors.

And you don't win, particularly when you rebuff the efforts of the other side to negotiate. Right. And that's what happened here in Ukraine. I mean, you had the opportunity to negotiate with the Russians before the Russian invasion. You then had negotiations that were occurring between the Ukrainian government and the Russian government, first in Belarus and then in Turkey, that produced a draft 15 point peace plan that the United States and the UK in particular pulled the Ukrainians out of. No, no, don't worry. We're going to give you everything you need to win. The Russians, Russia's a paper tiger.

Remember, it's just a gas station that's a country. All that type of vapid nonsense. How corrupt is the gas station that's a country? How corrupt is Ukraine? Is it as corrupt as we are told it is, the most corrupt nation in the Western world? According to Transparency International, it's about 145 out of 190 in terms of corruption. It is a very corrupt country. We've known this for quite a long time. We have to remember that in the fall of 2021, so before the Russian invasion, the Paradise Papers were released, which showed that President Zelensky had more than a billion dollars in hidden offshore

accounts, right? I mean, so the corruption went right to the top. It's well documented, and you see it in it. But again, you have the parallel to the Iraq and the Afghan wars where we were propping up these incredibly corrupt countries. And this is a danger, the real danger of certainly the other, there's moral dangers, there's aspects of governance, of civil institutions, what it means for a country to be corrupt, how it affects the people. But in a sense of warfare, you have a corrupt country like Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine. You cannot expect anything from your military. So what happens is 20, right? I guess Speaker McCarthy and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer are aware of this corruption because, as you know, because you and I both blasted this on this show and elsewhere, the Republicans in the House were unable to vote on Congressman Massey's proposal

to impose an inspector general over there so we would know where the cash is going. And the same thing, the Republicans and Democrats in the Senate couldn't vote on Senator Rand Paul's identical proposal for an inspector general. Here's President Zelensky bemoaning corruption. You tell me if this is credible. There are 112 criminal proceedings against officials of the territorial recruitment centers. 33 suspects, regional city and district military commissars, employees of the military medical commissions abuses in different regions. Some took cash, some took cryptocurrency. That's the only difference.

The cynicism is the same everywhere. Illicit enrichment, legalization of illegally obtained funds, illegal benefit, illegal transportation of persons liable for military service across the border. Our decisions are the following. We are dismissing all regional military commissars. Is it a pinprick towards eliminating corruption? Is it just propaganda for his people? Is he getting a handle on the problem

or is this just blather? I think it's similar to if you've got a tree that's completely rotted out on the inside and you're running around pruning its branches. I mean, what you have here in that case, if people aren't familiar with it, the entire leadership of the Ukrainian recruiting service, the people responsible for bringing people into the military was dismissed, fired, brought up on charges because it was so corrupt. And what you have then, that's just one example, you have overall system that how can that system stand? And again, back to Iraq and Afghanistan, you saw the same thing happen. You built this corrupt system. What happens in 2014 when the Islamic State threatens

the Iraqi government, the Iraqi army folds. Why? Because the Iraqi army wasn't an army. It was a business, right? It was a speculation. It was a racket. You have maybe the same with the Ukrainian army. If you have this where you have now sown such distrust, such distaste for the Ukrainian army, because you can get out of it if you have enough money. And if you don't, you're going on the front lines. And as some reports we'll see, you'll be dead in a day or two. How close are we, I guess, the U.S. or Russia to the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine? Oh, I think the Russians have warned about it several times. And I think you're a complete fool if you don't take it seriously. I'll also say that the United States does not have a no first use policy either and that the United States has usable nuclear weapons. So the smallest bomb we could drop, the B61,

can be dialed back to 0.2 kilotons. By example, the Hiroshima bomb was 15 kilotons, right? So you can see, and the Russians have similar types of weaponry. You can see how the argument is made that, look, it's barely a fraction of what was done to Hiroshima. So we can use this and then that will send the warning. I mean, this is when they talk about usable nuclear weapons and this idea of escalating the escalate. And of course, neither side having a no first use policy.

Only China at this point has a real no first use policy, which they're probably going to end up jettisoning. Take a look at this mini documentary, if you will. I don't even remember who produced it, but the name of it is on there, and we'll certainly give them credit for it. It's kind of terrifying showing the enormous amount of death and destruction that would be caused by these first uses. Watch this. Declassified mode activated. For context, population of nations engaged at war.

NATO member states have 944 million people. The Russian Federation has 145 million people. Stage one, nuclear war. Elapsed time. 1 hour, 12 hours. 13 hours. 14 hours. 15 hours.

16 hours. 24 hours. Total global casualties at 178 million people. Losses of nations engaged at war. NATO member states have lost 9.1% of their total population. The Russian Federation has lost 62.9% of its total population. Nuclear fallout. Elapsed time. 3 days. 6 days. 9 days. 12 days. 15 days, 30 days. Maximum radiation levels recorded, shown by degrees of latitude, in rem units.

Total global casualties at 186 million people. Stage 3, Nuclear Winter. 7 months, 8 months, 9 nine months ten months minimum temperature recorded shown by degrees of latitude in celsius degrees total global casualties at 548 million people end of the simulation why don't we have a no first use policy, Matt? Because of what Harry Truman did in 1945 as horrific and murderous and immoral and catastrophic and milit foreign policy establishment that is founded on two principles, one of megalomania and the other on profit. And that makes it so that you have people who are in charge of these things having the most maximalist position possible. Call that during the Cold War, going back into the 60s, say. the estimates that, you know, say Dan Ellsberg

revealed in his book, The Doomsday Machine, because Dan Ellsberg, the late great Dan Ellsberg was a nuclear war planner, was that the American military leadership saw the loss of tens of millions of Americans in a nuclear war as something that was sustainable, as something that was doable, right? That that is something that we can absorb that. We're going to kill more of them. We'll be able to still function. They won't be.

If you take that video you just showed, which is a terrific video, and you see that the casualties on the first day where 9% of US and NATO population is killed, but 62% of the Russian population is killed, you have a lot of generals and admirals who are very simple in their thinking, who would say that means we win. Right. And that promulgates it all and pushes it. American American generals and American generals. And to be fair, the Russians have their share and the Chinese will as well, because when you have this type of confrontation, again, this type of maximalist thinking, this is what you get. These are the people who get put in charge. Well, I'll say also about that.

The one thing I will criticize that video for, Judge, is that it stops at 10 months. And everything we know about Nuclear Winter is that it goes on for five years. Right, right. And so you can blame me for that. Okay. Producer Chris came up with it. We had a longer version, but I didn't want it to be any longer. So I asked him to edit it, and he did a good job of doing that. Because I want to show you. I was going to say, you go with nuclear winter, right?

And the idea being is that because of the soot that's in the atmosphere and the cooling and the blocking the sun, we can't grow food for years and years. Our animals all die. And so that's the whole thing about the end state of a nuclear war is we get to watch our children starve. As terrifying as this is, to me, the most memorable thing that you said, which requires a tremendous amount of courage. you're an ex-Marine.

You're still a Marine. There is no such thing as an ex-Marine. I know the culture. It's that we are an empire. You're right. We are an empire that thinks that we are the exceptional country and that we can do what nobody else can. Here's a very savvy mini little talk from the Russian president. By pumping billions of dollars into the neo-Nazi regime, supplying it with equipment and weapons,

sending their military advisors and mercenaries. Everything is being done to ignite the conflict even more, to draw other states into it. Hotbeds of tension are also smoldering in other regions of the world, and although the security challenges in each of them have their own characteristics, all of them are generated by geopolitical adventures, selfish neo-colonial actions of the West. NATO member countries continue to build up and modernize their offensive capabilities and make attempts to transfer military confrontation to outer space and to the information space. They use military and non-military means of pressure. And all this is happening

amid the destruction of the arms control system. The United States seeks, among other things, to adjust the system of interstate interaction. And that has developed in the Asia-Pacific region. Sounds pretty rational to me.

Yeah, it is. What we're living in here, Judge, and what we're seeing, particularly where President Putin talks about all these conflicts and potential conflicts around the world, it's a reality of the empire's making. When you go abroad looking for tigers, when you go abroad looking for dragons, you're never going to find them because you're going to be barging into people's homes. You know, this is the case of the Chinese. I mean, I graduated college in 1995. Since then, we have been sailing our aircraft carriers up to their coastline, humiliating them. And they have said continuously for the last 25 or so years, if you continue to do this, we will respond. I mean, this is the whole idea that people will push back.

You're very articulate and very courageous, Matt. You came very close to quoting the second president of the United States, John Adams, who, as you know, said, our friend Andrew Bacevich, I'm sure, has this emblazoned on his office. If you go about the world searching for monsters to slay, there will be no end to your search. Correct. Absolutely correct. And the idea that you're not going to have some type of reaction, some type of pushback is just preposterous. It boggles the mind that we have people who can forego that type of rational thought, but certainly that's what we do, that our whole government is filled with. We could talk about all other kinds of things that our government's doing, but certainly

with our militarized foreign policy, what did we expect? Why did we not expect these countries to push back? And we could see that, whether it be, say, what's happening in West Africa now, what's happening with China, constantly the tensions in Iran. I just read a quote the other day from an Iranian naval commander regarding this whole neo-tanker war we're seeing now in the Persian Gulf and now the United States, which is beyond idiotic, maybe putting Marines on other nations' tankers. I think it's a way to induce a conflict between the U.S. and Iran. But an Iranian naval commander said, look, you keep pushing us. What do you expect us to do? We're going to push back. And so the fact that that type of just reasonable, rational,

logical deducement of actions cause consequences is lost upon our leaders is something that really should scare the hell out of us. Matthew, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you very much for joining us. The viewers of the show very much enjoy your work. We'll see you again soon. Thanks so much, Judge. Of course. If you like what you saw, like and subscribe, tell a friend, tell your relatives. We're at 183,000 plus subscribers. Our goal is 200,000 by Labor Day. That's only two and a half weeks away. 20 minutes from now, 4.30 Eastern, Jacob Hornberger will make his case

on why the CIA, why he believes the CIA was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom, where, as you know, we're looking out for your liberty. Thank you.