Judging Freedom - Ukraine Russia War - Power and Patriot Missiles

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

#ukraine #Putin #russia #bidenSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This podcast is sponsored by Talkspace. You know when you're really stressed or not feeling so great about your life or about yourself? Talking to someone who understands can really help. But who is that person? How do you find them? Where do you even start? Talkspace.

Talkspace makes it easy to get the support you need. With Talkspace, you can go online, answer a few questions about your preferences, and be matched with a therapist. And because you'll meet your therapist online, you don't have to take time off work or arrange childcare. You'll meet on your schedule, wherever you feel most at ease. If you're depressed, stressed, struggling with a relationship,

or if you want some counseling for you and your partner, or just need a little extra one-on-one support, Talkspace is here for you. Plus, Talkspace works with most major insurers, and most insured members have a $0 copay. No insurance? No problem. Now get $80 off of your first month with promo code SPACE80 when you go to Talkspace.com. Match with a licensed therapist today at Talkspace.com.

Save $80 with code SPACE80 at Talkspace.com. hi everyone judge andrew napolitano here for judging freedom today is monday december 19th 2022 it's about 2 35 in the afternoon here on the east coast of the united states colonel mcgregor is with us again colon Colonel, always a pleasure. We have much to talk about, but I want to start by asking you about this bizarre incident that happened at a Polish police headquarters where, as I understand it, the commander of all the Polish police was nearly killed by some Ukrainian device, Ukrainian device that exploded in his headquarters. What can you tell us about this? Well, I can only tell you what I read in the article that was sent to me from Poland, that two grenade launchers were altered, I guess. One was supposed to be used for a speaker on some sort of stereo system. I don't know what the other one was for,

but they were given as gifts by a Ukrainian chief of police to the Polish chief of police with the hope of cultivating closer ties and cooperation. Somewhere along the line, the Ukrainians seem to think it happened after they sent it off to him, and that may well be true. I have no idea. A live grenade was found in this thing, and it accidentally or purposely exploded. We don't know. But it's very hard to imagine how something like this could have crossed the border

from Ukraine into Poland without being detected. I'm sure the Polish chief of police wasn't hiding anything. How would this have been delivered? Not through the mail. Well, I don't know. You know, the sad part here is you're well aware, as many of us are, that there's this long history of antagonism between the Poles and Ukrainians. So this opens up that whole ugly chapter for discussion. Was this intentional or was this in fact an accident? Nobody is able to answer it except it right now. The facts are what I sent you on email and that's all we know. What were the injuries to the Polish commander? Do we know? Apparently none. He had maybe modest scratches or

something, but no serious injuries of any kind were reported. Okay. Do we still have a president of Poland beating the drum and acting as if his troops are going to get engaged? I think we do. Do we not? Yes. Well, in the op-ed that I just finished that the American Conservative will have out tomorrow, I lead with the remarks of the Deputy Polish Minister of Defense, who is warning an audience on the 29th of November that this war is growing in intensity and Poland is likely to be involved in it, and hints at potential mobilization and a number of other things down the line. Now, since then, we've also had a source tell us that the Polish government is now looking at 200,000 troops that could be mobilized next year.

All of this is disconcerting because, remember, inside the NATO alliance, Poland is really alone in its enthusiasm for aggressive war against Russia. Nobody else, with the possible exception of the Romanians, is interested. Well, your piece is a scary one, Colonel. I mean, you start by summarizing the interview. We talked about this before, but we'll touch on it again. The general Zaluzhny had with The Economist magazine. And when he asks for 300 new tanks and 600 to 700 new infantry fighting vehicles and 500 new howitzers, you conclude he's not asking for assistance,

he's asking for a new army. and he must know that this is not possible. Well, one would think so, and I think they were trying to set the stage for a meeting with the United States in which they would get more other types of assistance, potentially convince us and maybe others in this so-called coalition of the willing to intervene and help them in some way. That's why I find it extremely disturbing because President Biden has said from the beginning that we were not going to directly engage the Russians in a military confrontation, yet we seem to be moving closer to that outcome. And the polls, of course, I think would actually welcome that, which is very dangerous. You know, this is a problem when you ally yourself with a relatively small state. The small state has a

permanent interest in leveraging your power for their benefit. Right, right. You point out that Ukraine hospitals and morgues are filled to capacity with wounded and dying Ukrainian soldiers. How many healthy soldiers do they have remaining? Do you know? The last word that I had was they had 194,000 quote-unquote effectives. And in the article, Zaluzhny mentions that he's got 200,000 combat-ready troops, people that can fight. He has another 500,000 people in uniform, but they're not necessarily soldiers. They may be police, paramilitary, other kinds of functionaries, but they're not fit for frontline duty. And I think that's a huge admission because it also tells you something about the enormous number of casualties that the Ukrainians have been taking. Why is General Zelensky saying all this in public? Is there some purpose or goal to this? Yeah, I think, again, he and President

Zelensky know what I know and know what anybody knows who looks carefully at the assembling Russian force and its enormous firepower, standoff attack and direct firepower. And he's being honest. He's saying, well, their attacks could be stronger than we think and we could be weaker than we thought later on in the article. In other words, it's a backhanded way of saying, look, this is very dangerous. We probably are not going to succeed against this kind of force. We've asked you for more. What are you going to do? In other words, the ball is in your court, Washington. And after all, we urged them to fight from the beginning. We've never come back and said, well, there's a point at which it makes no sense to fight off.

Would it be fair to characterize General Zelensky as the realist and President Zelensky as sort of has pipe dreams. And would it be fair to say that the Russians have far more respect for the general than they do for the president? Well, first of all, I have no idea, but I suspect that Zeluzhny, who's been on the phone before with his counterpart in Moscow, has at least a rapport with the Russians.

What that is and how well that goes, I can't evaluate, but they have talked. And I think Zelensky is being realistic and as open as he can. And Zelensky is permanently cheerleader for the war in perpetuity and has sold himself as Washington's man on the ground to lead the charge against Moscow. I don't think he can back down from that. He's made so many sweeping statements that are so ridiculous that you can't retreat. Is it conceivable that General Zaluzhny would work out some peace agreement with the Russians in order to save hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives, no matter what President Zelensky thinks about, almost sort of thinks about it, almost sort of pushing him out

of the way. He's got the pipeline to Moscow. Nobody in Moscow will say a word to President Zelensky. You know, Judge, we're now in the realm that I would comfortably call the twilight zone. All right. Who knows? I mean, we could sit here and speculate about that, but I think there are lots of people that are willing to pull out their weapons and shoot people down right now inside Kiev and the government who

might go that route. I think that they're stuck. They're going to fight and perhaps in the midst of this fighting, there will be a call for some sort of ceasefire. And again, the problem is you're dealing now with a Russian government that has given up on the West. Let's move from the East all the way to the West. Does General Zelensky have respect at the Pentagon? Does he have the ear of General Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or of Jake Sullivan, the President's National Security Advisor, or of Secretary

Lincoln or Secretary Austin, somebody who can get to the President on the phone in a few minutes? I'm sure that he probably has a line to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and potentially the Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin. And remember, you know, we've been down this road before with Milley. He leaked his rejected advice to the president to the New York Times when he said Ukrainians have done about as much as they can and they should negotiate. And that was rejected. And he was sent back out to recant and effectively sing the tune of inevitable Ukrainian victory. So at this point in time, even if he has a direct line, the man in charge is sitting in the White House. And I'm sure that no one in this administration at this stage wants to admit that they made a terrible mistake and put Ukraine's very existence at risk. Your greatest fear, and stop me if I don't have this right,

is that the man in the White House will pull an LBJ. And when his generals, when Westmoreland said to LBJ, we're going to lose unless we don't have another 125,000 troops. LBJ said, you got them. I don't know that you lose, Zaluzny would say that to Biden, but what's to prevent Biden from saying, I'm using your language, Colonel, you wrote this. It's brilliant. By the way, for those listening to us, it's called Downfall in Kiev and Washington, Colonel Douglas McGregor. And it'll be available tomorrow at the American Conservative at their website. Colonel, your fear is that Joe Biden wants to lead a coalition of the willing, which is to be about two or three NATO countries. Yes, I think that the people in Washington, and when I say people, I'm talking about virtually everybody inside the Beltway, has all drunk heavily from the Kool-Aid that says Russia is weak, Russia is incompetent,

the soldiers are no good, the army is weak, we can prevail. We have to stay the course with Ukrainians. Ukrainians can still outfight them. And if we need to go in to bolster the Ukrainians and try to establish under the guise of a no-fly zone on the ground, some sort of secure area in western Ukraine, down near the Polish border, in order to provide a safe haven for retreating Ukrainian forces or refuges or something else. We should do that because we can still dominate the Russians if we need to. And that was, see, LBJ knew that he had enormous leverage with the United States Navy and Air Force, not just our ground forces over

North Vietnam. We have no such leverage over the Russians. This is pure continental land combat, and they hold all the trump cards. And we have very few forces, and we're depending very heavily if we go in there on the Poles. And polls are very brave courageous soldiers that's a that's an irrational act on the part of an american i mean what what coalition would there be who who besides poland and romania would be in in joe biden's, and America, of course. Well, I'm sure you'd have some British special operations forces. Beyond that, who knows? I mean, the rest of NATO really doesn't have much to send. I mean, the force that was described in the interview that Zelensky asked for

is larger than any of the armies in Europe. So what are they going to send? And the answer is, I don't think we have much to send at all. And now they've already exhausted most of their supplies of ammunition and weapons. They've sent most of that excess that's either now in Russian hands, and some of it is still with the Ukrainians. But the Russians have captured a lot of equipment, destroyed a lot of equipment. One of our regular guests is an American named Matthew Van Dyke. Matt is the head of Sons of Liberty International, which he describes as all ex-military. These guys are young. They're all like in their late 20s, early 30s, who believe in the Ukrainian cause, who wear military fatigues, who are physically present

on the ground. I don't know if they carry weapons. They don't shoot. They're not close to where people are shooting or being shot at. They're training Ukrainians. Matt sent out a rather startling tweet just a few minutes ago. Here it is. Ukraine must conduct a major offensive now. Ukraine has the advantage this winter in morale and logistics. Russia will recover by spring and will never be this weak again. The next two months are critical in this war. Don't dig in. Advance. Now, I don't know if you know this fellow. He's a young man. He's on with us regularly. This is the first time I've heard him say anything like this, Russia will recover by spring. What do you think about this? It sounds to me like some of the ideas that

were hatched by Adolf Hitler in the spring of 1944 for offenses in the east when there was no capability whatsoever for offensive action in the German army. Sounds to me like his thinking behind the Battle of the Bulge when the German army couldn't fuel itself 100 kilometers without falling apart. So I think, I don't think, I'm sure the man is very sincere and believes in what he's saying, but I think he's dead wrong. And there's not a whole lot for the Russians to do between now and the end of January for them to be ready. I think they're very close to it. I want to go back to General Zeluzhny before I ask you about President Putin in Belarus. I want to make sure I understand the numbers. General Zeluzhny has

about 190,000 troops, and then he has 200,000 trained troops and reserves. So if he wants, he has about 400,000 troops. Do I have those numbers right? Well, he actually gave, again, I don't know that these numbers are trustworthy. Much of what comes out of Kiev has never been trustworthy. So take it with a grain of salt. Okay, but it's Zoluzhny who has a reputation for being truthful, no? No, no. None of the Ukrainians have been truthful about the conduct of this war. They've lied prolifically about everything. And he's saying they have 700,000, 200,000 in that category of fit to fight trained combat troops and then 500 000 of others police paramilitary okay and so forth now again i have no idea what's going on i do know that the nazi enforcers

are brutalizing people forcing them into uniform setting them to the front but these are ukrainian not these are ukrainian nazi enforcers young men, able-bodied or not, into Ukrainian military uniforms. Yeah, they're sending press gangs through Kiev and other cities at nightclubs, night spots, to see if they can find young men who may be there, and then pressing them into service, sort of what the Royal Navy did in the 19th century and the 18th century to keep the ships filled. So that's why I say I'm sure that Matt's sincere. And I do know that if you ask Ukrainian soldiers, they do speak very confidently of their future as though they have a chance to really win. And you heard that from German soldiers right up

until March of 1945. So I don't think that we should take that very seriously. I would imagine that President Zelensky's people are regressively controlling the media and what the Ukrainian troops and what their families back home hear. Well, I'm sure they are too, but he doesn't have to work too hard to control the Western media. That's already in his camp. Already is. Yeah, the CIA has done that for him. Yeah. All right, back to numbers available. What does President Putin have available? Is it 300,000 that are about to add to the fighting force that's there now? No, the numbers, once again, that were given were misleading.

He said, well, he has 200,000 fresh combat troops, probably more than that. You know, I said a few weeks ago that the numbers by January could go up to 700,000. Russian numbers. Russian, Russian numbers. And you just divide that roughly in half, because about half of that falls in the logistics and standoff attack and fire support. The rest of it are attacking forces, forces that go in on the ground to kill the enemy. So I think the Russians are, quite frankly, already outnumber their opponents dramatically. And they have been training very, very hard.

Now, you have to add to that number probably 75,000 Belarusian troops. And Putin, of course, is up in Belarus right now. What is he doing in Belarus? Belarus is another country, former Soviet satellite, but now a separate independent country. Yes, but they are fully allied with Russia. And Belarus is going to provide whatever is required or necessary for the Russian forces in their country to launch attacks against Ukraine. As I said, there are 75,000 in that army, and most of that is deployed along the border with Lithuania and Poland. But they have a secure base of support in Belarus for at least 100,000, 150,000 troops attacking north to south. is that the president of Poland is crazy. He's very, very anxious to begin a conflagration that historians will one day call World War III.

Well, that's again going back to the discussion earlier about a small state ultimately leveraging a large one. Will Joe Biden, who could get into Biden's head? Will pressure be put on Joe Biden, whether it's from the Pentagon or the globalists, to back Poland up? Oh, I think that that's very much in people's minds right now, that Poland is the springboard against Russia, and that we should be prepared to use that in order to rescue Ukraine from inevitable destruction.

That's why I wrote the article, because I'm afraid that we'll suddenly hear from Joe Biden on the television. Tonight, my fellow Americans, I've directed our forces to advance into Western Ukraine to provide a safe haven or something, a secure zone in Western Ukraine. And it's about peace, democracy, and freedom, all of which has got nothing to do with what's happening on the ground in Ukraine. And that's what we said about Vietnam. Only this time, you're not talking about Vietnam. You're talking about Russia, a great power. If he does that, the Congress will do nothing.

The Congress will do nothing. The president of the United States can't start a war on his own i'm familiar with the war powers resolution i think it's unconstitutional uh but it is the law uh but this will fall right into the hands of the globalists and we know their goal to remove president putin from power whether by embarrassment and humiliation or death. Well, that's why I think it's so important that people understand the meaning of what I've said in that op-ed, that whatever is said to justify a potential intervention by us in the western part of Ukraine should be dismissed out of hand as dangerous nonsense. The opportunity to do things differently ended a long time ago. If people were serious about trying to prevent the Russians from moving into Ukraine

or deterring them from going any further than a few kilometers, we had that back in February, March, and April. We could have sent vast forces over there very, very quickly. Well, of course we didn't. And Judge, we didn't do it because they're not ready. And we don't have ready forces now for a stand-up war in Eastern Europe. So this is all dangerous nonsense. Where is General Milley on this? I mean, what General Milley leaked was a truthful analysis of the situation, and they made him do the mea culpa. So when that happens, I mean, the White House and Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken and Lloyd Austin, they must know that Milley is a realist. They can get him to mouth their words. But when he asks,

when they ask for his advice, I assume he's telling them what he truly thinks we should do, which is to get the hell out. Well, on this occasion, I think he has told them the truth behind closed doors, that we should not involve ourselves in this. It's too risky. We don't have the forces for it. We don't have the logistical infrastructure. We don't have the ammunition, et cetera, et cetera. But he's not someone who is noted throughout his career for

standing up for much of anything. Do we have four stars in Europe right now? Yes, you have a four star at Supreme Headquarters of Light Powers Europe. And who's in charge of the 40,000 American troops in Poland? Well, I don't know. That could be the 5th Corps commander. The 5th Corps has a headquarters over there right now from Fort Hood, potentially. I don't know what the exact command relationships are, but you've got three stars, you've got a four-star, and then you have several two-stars. Really very top-heavy for a force that's only about 40,000, 45,000 troops. What was 45,000 trained, ready, and prepared to march?

God forbid, I'm even saying this, to march east? Well, I think they're prepared to defend the Polish border. I don't think they're prepared to advance into western Ukraine and confront an enemy like the Russians. But again, I hold the minority opinion. Remember, I told you at the beginning, you go into Washington and everybody says, oh, these Russians are terrible. Look at them. They got all this wrong and that wrong. And Washington, you and I are considered lunatics. Yeah, we're the lunatics because we're worried about a real war breaking out and not being able

to fight it. You should never even consider going to war unless you're reasonably confident that the terms of battle favor you and that you have a damn good chance of winning it. Why else would you go? This is not one of those occasions. And the Europeans are watching all of this. The only thing we can successfully do in a very short period of time is persuade most Europeans that we've lost our minds and that we're a dangerous partner. We may well see the North Atlantic Treaty Organization go out of existence very rapidly, de facto, as a result of this kind of behavior. All the things that we said we were fighting to preserve will go away. Colonel McGregor, thank you very much. No matter what we talk about, it's a pleasure to be enlightened by you. All the best.

We'll see you again soon. We'll see you before Christmas, I hope. Okay, thanks. If not, Merry Christmas. And back at you. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.