Judging Freedom - WHAT COULD RUSSIA DEMAND TO END UKRAINE WAR - Larry Johnson fmr CIA

Episode Date: June 12, 2023

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🎵 Thank you. Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, June 12, 2013. It's about 1130 in the morning here on the East Coast of the United States. Larry Johnson joins us today, 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. 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 judge nap and enjoy 50 off for a limited time at the headrestsafe.com larry johnson joins us now larry it's a pleasure uh welcome back to the show my friend thanks judge since last we spoke there's been a lot of speculation about the destruction of the dam in eastern Ukraine. What is your take as to whether the Russians did this as an

instrument of war, the Ukrainians did this to help them in their spring offensive, or it was just some sort of a neutral, non-military event? I think the Ukrainians did it as part of their ongoing offensive or attempted offensive. There was nothing for Russia to gain by doing this. There was something for Ukraine to gain in terms of pushing russian forces out of certain areas and then potentially creating an opening that they down the road might be able to do a cross river attack but uh the one i did see one video where there was an explosion there had been some speculation that this was just an old plant that had not been properly cared for and it just deteriorated on its own.

I don't think that's the case. But in any event, where we stand with it right now is Russia's evacuated the people that needed to be evacuated. It has not destroyed any of the Russian defensive lines, despite some of the earlier claims. And Russia's in a position that it can defend against whatever Ukraine decides to try to throw at it. It seems as though from comments from President Zelensky and public source observations and maybe from your private source observations, that the so-called spring offensive has begun. And if that's the case, it's hardly something to call home about.

Yeah. Well, it started, it looks like it started seven, eight days ago. And it has not been a concerted, it's not been focused upon one point. It's been more like a shotgun, a scattershot. And wherever Ukraine has tried to advance, as I've written about it, Scott Ritter has written about it, and General Doug McGregor has written about it, which is because Ukraine lacks air power, it doesn't have fixed-wing aircraft rotary wing aircraft, helicopters, that can fly forward, provide close air support for infantry formations, for tanks, for armored vehicles like the Bradley fighting vehicle to protect them, to provide some sort of protection from above

against attacks that they're going to face on the ground. Similarly, they don't have a lot of mobile artillery and air defense systems that can come along behind the advancing forces and take out any aircraft that the Russians are sending. So as a result, it's like in World War II, we had what was called the Mariana Turkey Shoot, where the U.S. Naval Force off the off the the philippines just shot down a massive number of japanese aircraft and what's happening now is massive numbers of ukrainian armor formations and vehicles are being destroyed and with the troops uh the the fatality rate for

ukrainian troops now i think is approaching eight nine ten to one and they can't continue to sustain such losses uh so it's just and they're being pushed into this by the West I mean this is really this is criminal what's going on I want to uh get back to the dam in a minute but the fatality losses of eight or nine to one, that's extraordinary. I think you told me, and our audience, of course, in a prior interview, that an offensive would require a two or three to one advantage for telling me that these Ukrainians are at an eight to one disadvantage. Do I have that right? Yeah. So normally the conventional military wisdom is that an attacking force should have at least three times the number of soldiers, vehicles, tanks as the defending force. They're going to need that in order to overwhelm the defended

positions. Well, in this case, Ukraine doesn't have that kind of manpower compared to what Russia has. And yet, it is attacking these positions and it's losing upwards, as I said, in some cases, 10 to 1. For every one Russian casualty, you're getting 10 Ukrainian casualties, which is just a horrific scale. The documents that Jack Teixeira is accused of being the sole person responsible for revealing, I've got to introduce it that way, so we're all talking about the same thing, indicated the awareness of the American government of a 7 to 1 kill ratio of Russia over Ukraine. Everybody except Jack Devine accepted that number. He insisted it was seven to one the other day,

which the other way, which of course is absurd. Now you're telling us it has become eight or nine to one. Correct. Now, because they're launching these attacks and some of it was predicated on the belief that U.S. night vision goggles would be superior to anything that the Russians had, and that's been a terrible mistake. 10 kilometers and fire their missiles at the the advancing armored vehicles tanks and take them out so they don't have to get up real close and put themselves at risk of being shot down by a surface to air missile shoulder launch such as a stinger so this is uh this is a west this is a nato plan and the problem is judge not since world war ii has the united states or

the nato countries fought maneuver warfare on an industrial scale such as is happening now in ukraine the russians have the russians have prepared and trained for that because they recognized they were going to have to defend against possible invasions of their country. So we have even our best generals don't have the experience in this. They don't have the training in it. It's all theoretical. Driving tanks around the desert in Iraq against very poorly trained Iraqi troops does not even begin to match what is taking place on the ground in Ukraine and learning some hard lessons because I think the NATO folks are

frankly shocked at how quickly these advanced Leopard tanks have been taken out of the battle I mean just just like that they they didn't last more than a couple of hours. What about those F-16s that the president boasted about when he was in Hiroshima? I gather they have not yet arrived, or if they have arrived, they haven't trained the Ukrainian pilots how to use them. Biden's like that parent that's telling his kid, yeah, I'm going to get you a pony for Christmas. He just didn't specify it was Christmas. Those planes are a long ways off.

They're not going to show up in the next month or two piloted by Ukrainian pilots. Now, there's always the possibility, and I've heard some rumblings about this, that in the desperation to try to save the situation, that NATO and the United States may actually put their own pilots and some of these aircraft and try to put them into the battle to help save Ukraine. If they do that, it's going to be disastrous for the West. If they do that, it's World War III. If American fighter pilots are flying American F-16s that have been sold to the Germans and repurposed for our use, and they're shot down and their bodies come home in body bags, it's war.

Yeah. No, I mean, that's where we are headed towards that. There is the Biden administration cannot take its foot off the gas, and they're not willing to step back and recognize what is taking place on the ground. It would be one thing, you know, I get accused of being a puppet of Putin and spelling out Russian disinformation, but facts are facts. The Ukrainian Air Force is virtually non-existent, and what it has is very limited in the operations it can carry out. They're not sitting there on

ample supplies of tanks, nor do they have factories that are cranking out tanks, or armored vehicles, or artillery shells, or artillery pieces. Russia has all that. Russia has probably, after the United States, the second largest air force, at least in that theater. And they continue to build planes, tanks, artillery pieces, shells. Everything they need comes internally. They don't have to rely upon some foreign supply. And I just beg people to wrap their minds around the fact. Once you understand that, then you'll understand why Ukraine cannot win this war, even with support from NATO. We're going to take a break for 30 seconds for a message from our sponsor. When we come back, President Zelensky, not very happy with the

Western response to the explosion of the dam 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 the headrestsafe.com. What do you think it would take for, we're back with Larry Johnson. Larry, what do you think it would take for the Russians to agree to a ceasefire? This is before we get to Ukrainians and before we get to their masters in Washington? It's going to require an end to all attacks

and all the territory that they control east of the Dnieper as well as surrendering the territory east of the Dnieper. It's going to require NATO to withdraw its missile systems, the Aegis systems that are based in Poland and in Romania, to withdraw that and the withdrawal of NATO troops from bases in Poland and Romania in particular. This is not just a conflict, and Russia understands this, it's not just a conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Russia realizes it is a life and death struggle with NATO, with the United States. They may not have initially believed that that was the case when they launched the special military operation a year ago, February.

But they understand that now. And so they're not going to say, oh, we'll cut any deal, we'll make any sacrifice. Russia is in the driver's seat right now. Okay, Russia understands this. The Kremlin understands this. Does NATO understand this? No, they do not. They persist with this nonsense that the Russians are poorly trained and they have poor equipment and poor morale. That's one of the

benefits of what's happening to the ukrainian forces the way they are being decimated and they're attentive that it is sort of a wake-up call to at least some of the same rational people still like left the nato uh hoping that some in the pentagon but Pentagon are waking up to this fact. But I'm hearing some uncomfortable rumblings that the Biden administration may be getting prepared to do something very, very stupid that will end up escalating this conflict, not de-escalating. Here's a rather uncomfortable remark from President Zelensky. He doesn't seem to be too thrilled at what he calls his Western indifference to the humanitarian suffering of the Ukrainian people. This is in Russian. There are subtitles for the benefit of our folks who are listening to this on audio only.

I'm going to override a little bit of the Russian and read the subtitles so you can all of our folks who are listening to this on audio only. I'm going to override a little bit of the Russian and read the subtitles so you can all follow along. Now, unfortunately, we see that at some level, the attack on the Kalakova hydroelectric power station and human tragedy caused by the Russian project, when international organizations that are supposed to protect life on a global scale fail to form and send a rescue mission to the occupied territory, even in a week when some global actors do not dare to come out with clear and strong statements condemning this

latest Russian war crime. Terrorists are simply fueled. Wow. Is he biting the hand that has been feeding him? No, I think he's giving away the game. Because when he

starts complaining that the West has not sent forces in there to, quote, conduct rescue operations, he's revealing what the plan was. Create this incident to create a pretext or a predicate that would force the West to come in and respond. I would note that over the last week, Ukraine's been putting out images claiming that it is its soldiers, its personnel rescuing the people down river, except they're wearing on their back that they're Russian police or Russian rescue services. The Ukrainians are using the photographic images of actual Russian rescue workers to take credit for what the Russians are doing because the Ukrainians aren't doing it. So your theory, Larry, is that the Ukrainians destroyed the dam to create a catastrophe to force the West to come onto the ground to alleviate human on the pretext of or for the publicly

stated purpose of alleviating the humanitarian catastrophe and when the West didn't show up Zelensky fumed yeah I think that was one of the prime reasons behind it uh as well of hoping to sweep away Russian defenses downriver and to create an opening for creating forces to cross but yeah he wants as long as you can get some more Westerners in there and get some Westerners killed then you've got the potential of expanding this war getting the United States and the other NATO countries more fully engaged and then Ukraine might and I emphasize might very remotely have a chance to try to prevail. But they don't understand the history with Russia with regards to these

kind of foreign attacks. What will it take for President Zelensky to say, okay, it's time to talk about a ceasefire? You've told us what the Russians will require. What will the Ukrainians need to see, or how much more will they need to suffer before President Zelensky becomes realistic? Once he's informed that there is no longer an effective army that can conduct military operations that can defend the capital, Once he understands that the Russians now will have an open road going into Kyiv, at that point, he may finally come to his senses. Personally, I believe, I think he's going to reach that stage because I think the anger on the part of some of the Ukrainian generals who feel that

they're forced to be necessarily sacrificed simply to placate political pressure not to achieve military objectives, that I think is going to be a determining factor in whether or not Zelensky survives. And of course there's a third party to these negotiations. I mean Zelensky can't do anything without permission from the Americans. What will it take for them, for our State Department, for our DoD to recognize that Russia is winning this war? And the longer it goes on, the more Russia will win, and the more the Ukrainian military, political leadership, and public will suffer? They have all the evidence they need right now to know that. It is just willful blindness,

determining that they're not going to recognize or accept because they're so focused upon They want bite. I am old wants to use this conflict as a basis for his presidential campaign feeling that wartime presidents will prevail without Understanding that you know wartime presidents prevail because they win and they're winning in this case Not only is the United States losing, but it's unable to create any kind of strategy that's viable for sustaining Ukrainian military operations against the Russians. I mean, that means that this war would have to go on for at least another year and a half if he wants to get the democratic nomination uh and run for re-election

as a wartime president it's june of 23 this conflagration this this war would still have to be on in the fall of 24 for joe biden to get his wish what kind of a human being i know you're not a shrink larry uh is willing to sacrifice the lives of innocents for his re-election campaign, a flimsy, tepid, dangerous, unlikely to prevail re-election campaign to boot. Well, and let's emphasize the fact that there are many policymakers, both in the intelligence side and the Department of Defense side, who genuinely believe that, OK, if Ukraine fails right now in this offensive, it's going to extend this conflict. The conflict is going to drag on.

I'm with Scott Ritter on this. I think this thing will be done by the fall because it's not like the United States has an industrial base that it could actually produce the ammunition and the vehicles and the tanks that Ukraine needs to stay in the field. They don't. But apart from that, you need soldiers who are trained. The training process is not accomplished in a week. It's at a minimum a three-month to four-month process. And they don't have a steady supply of young men running to sign up and say, oh boy, I can't wait to go sacrifice my life for Ukraine. They're doing just the opposite. They're hiding out, they're leaving the country,

and it's forcing the Ukrainians to try to dragoon people into the service. So I don't know where these people come up with this nonsense that they're going to be able to drag this out for a year and a half. That's what the West hopes. But Ukraine does not have the strength to do it, in my view. Larry Johnson, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, Judge. More as we get it.

Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. The headrest safe is quick and easy to use. Some may even call it a game changer. The Headrest Safe acts as a safety net, protecting your belongings while keeping them out of sight and out of bounds of others, serving us security while also keeping your valuables inbounds. That's what the Headrest Safe provides for me.

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