Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 1/5/23 Dave DeCamp on Putin’s Ceasefire and the Strikes on Russian Barracks

Episode Date: January 7, 2023

Scott is joined by Dave DeCamp of Antiwar.com to run through the latest news about the war in Ukraine. They talk about Putin’s announcement today that Russian forces would be observing a 36-hour ceasefire for Orthodox Christmas. They also touch on the Ukrainian strikes on Russian barracks that killed a number of sleeping soldiers and other news about the ongoing war and the prospects for peace.  Discussed on the show: “No Sign of Peace in Ukraine as New Year Approaches” (Antiwar.com) “Ukraine Claims Heavy Russian Losses in Waves of Missile Strikes” (New York Times) “The CIA Is Using A European NATO Ally’s Spy Service To Conduct A Covert Sabotage Campaign Inside Russia Under The Agency’s Direction” (JackMurphy) Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com and the host of Antiwar News with Dave DeCamp. Follow him on Twitter @decampdave This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and Thc Hemp Spot. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Pacifica Radio, January the 5th, 2023. I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all welcome the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm editorial director of Anti-War.com, an editor of the new book, Hotter than the Sun. Time to abolish nuclear weapons. You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,800 of them now going back to 2003

at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. And you can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton's show. All right, introducing our first guest today is anti-war.com's news director, Dave DeCamp. Welcome back to this show. How you doing, Dave? Good, Scott. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate you joining us here. We want to get caught up, especially on Ukraine news.

So let's start with a little bit of good news. ceasefire in Ukraine? Yeah, it looks like it. So Patriarch Kirill, he's the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. He called for a ceasefire for their Christmas, which is this Saturday, January 7th. So Ukraine initially dismissed it as a ploy, but then this news just broke that Putin has ordered Russian forces to implement a unilateral ceasefire for the Orthodox Christmas starting at noon on Friday and then continuing through Saturday.

So about a 36-hour ceasefire. You know, it's tough to say if this is going to be implemented, if it's going to hold for the whole 36 hours, but at least, you know, there's going to be some relief maybe for the people of Ukraine. Yeah, well, impossibly nudging the door open to further talks. And so now let's go ahead and cut to this important piece that you wrote for antiwar.com for the new year here. No sign of peace in Ukraine as a new year approaches is from December the 29th. You know, the big news is that both sides have said they're willing to talk. It's just that they drew their lines in impossible places. Is that right? Yeah, that's pretty much where we're at because Ukraine stance, according to their foreign minister, is no talks with Russia until after Russia withdraws from all the territory of captures and until after Russia faces war crimes tribunal, which is just completely unrealistic demands. And then the Russian side, you know, they're saying

that they're open for talks, but they're also saying that they're not. not leaving the territories they've captured. And we had Sergei Lavrov recently, the Russian foreign ministers, say that, you know, so they annex these four oblasts that they are in, but they don't control all the territory in them. But Lavrov said recently that they plan to, you know, capture all that territory. So that seems to be Russia's goal for now. But yeah, that position from Russia that, you know, these territories are now Ukraine,

that's not going to be acceptable for Ukraine at least any time in the near future. But again, they say that they're open for talks. So maybe they're willing to make some compromises. But it does seem like a pretty hardline position. And then you have the American side who, you know, one way talks could happen is if the U.S. starts leveraging aid and pressuring Ukraine to talk. But there's no sign that that's going to happen at least any time soon. Yeah, both of them saying, look, we're perfectly willing to negotiate the other side's unconditional surrender.

Yeah, okay, great. Yeah. But now, so listen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, Mark Millie, at the beginning of November, and presumably representing the views of the rest of the chiefs, too? He came out and he said, listen, Ukraine, you did a real good job taking back Curzon City there. We ought to talk right now before you get too far behind in this thing. And then, do I have it right? He was just completely shouted down by the weenies at the State Department?

Yeah, that's what it looks like. So his view was not popular, you know, among other Biden administration officials, the State Department, Anthony Blinken, and also the National Security Council and Jake Sullivan. You know, reports at the time said that there were some people in the NSC that thought maybe it would be a good time for talks, but it doesn't look like they've won. And it also said that there are people within the Pentagon, a lot of people in the military that thought it was a good time for talks. But I didn't see any indication that that's what Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense thought. And again, it looks like the people that just wanted to keep the fighting going are the ones that won. And we haven't really seen much from Millie recently about it.

it. So in other words, there's really no domestic pressure in the United States for talks now. Of course, the leaders of the Republican Party's only position is that Joe Biden is too weak, not too reckless, and that he should double down. Yeah, well, that's an important point that I made in that article because we've had all this concern from Democrats that, oh, Republicans aren't going to, you know, be sending A to Ukraine. But actually, the Republican leadership has been saying he's not, Biden's not sending enough. He's got to send them longer range missiles so they can hit Crimea. You have Lindsey Graham. I mean, he's not exactly leadership right now, but saying that Putin needs to be assassinated. I mean, so they're just being incredibly hawkish. Although, you know, this whole

situation right now with the House and Kevin McCarthy failing to win speakership, I don't know, maybe that's going to have some influence if he has to make a deal to do things a little differently when it comes to Ukraine. I'm not sure if that's going to happen because there is some dissent. it's notable among the House Republicans. It's not nothing, but unfortunately, it's not really enough right now. Yeah. And amazingly, historically, there's no kind of dissent from the House Democrats on this whatsoever, correct? Yeah, and it's really unfortunate, but, I mean, virtually nothing.

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It's a whole new era. We libertarians don't have the power, but we do have enough influence to try to lead the left and the right to make things right. Join us at Libertarian Institute.org. What did your ancestors really do all day? Beyond names, what were their lives like? With Ancestry's global historical records, you can discover incredible stories about how your ancestors lived and worked. And for a limited time, you can explore select occupation records for free.

Imagine finding your great-grandfather's RCMP records or discovering your ancestors' name in the UK and Ireland Nursing Register. Don't miss out. Free access ends August 24th. Visit Ancestry.ca for more details. Terms apply. All right, it's Dave DeKamp, news editor at anti-war.com. And now, I talk a little bit about these American weapons going over there because it's not just the weapons and the money, but it's also the training and the intelligence sharing.

And, you know, there's a report in the New York Times today that says that it wasn't just this one big attack or possibly it wasn't. The Ukrainians are claiming that they've got three major strikes on Russian infantry. I guess they're barracks, essentially, not in the field, but behind the lines there. And the Ukrainians claim to have killed more than a thousand of them. The Russians, of course, refuse to confirm numbers that high. But the idea there is that the Ukrainian military has been made much more powerful or some degree more powerful by all of this American money, training, and new weapons and so forth. So I wonder if you can tell from where you're sitting whether this seems to really be turning the tide on the battlefield or not, access to these high mars and so forth. Yeah, well, based on just what other military experts that I trust say, that these high mars artillery did make a pretty big difference for Ukraine on the battlefield.

And then these latest strikes, it seems like it's kind of a change in tactic that they're targeting, you know, where the Russian troops are housed. So the one strike that Russia confirmed, they said 89 Russian soldiers were killed, which is pretty significant in a single strike. Ukraine claimed 400 were killed in that strike. So who knows exactly what the death toll is, but they use the U.S. provided high Mars rocket systems. And then the Russian military basically blamed it on the fact that Russian soldiers were using their cell phones, and that's how they were able to target them. So when it comes to the intelligence sharing, we know that the U.S. is providing Ukraine. with targeting intelligence, and I'm not exactly sure if that applies to how they track the

cell phones or not, or maybe Ukraine can do that on its own. But, yeah, it just does go to show how intimately involved the U.S. is in helping Ukraine, you know, kill a lot of Russians. All right, Dave DeCamp from Antowar.com, we're talking about this piece, no signs of peace in Ukraine as New Year approaches. Can you tell us what you know or believe you understand about American CIA and or special operations forces on the ground in Ukraine? And also, what role America may or may not be playing in the strikes that the Ukrainians have gotten off inside Russia, including as deep as three or 400 miles into Russia. Yeah, so when it comes to the CIA being on the ground in Ukraine, you know, we've seen

two reports. There might have been more, but two reports that I've seen, one from the New York Times that says CIA operatives are on the ground in Ukraine, training or helping facilitate the flow of weapons. And then the Intercept also reported that the CIA and U.S. Special Operations Forces are also on the ground in Ukraine. And we do know that the Pentagon has confirmed there's U.S. military personnel in Ukraine doing weapons inspections, on-site weapons inspections that are based at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev. And they're thinking about sending more troops, you know, in the name of oversight. So that's one unfortunate thing here is that a lot of Republicans,

including the leadership are calling for more oversight transparency of this Ukraine aid, but it's being used, really, to justify more U.S. involvement in the war. And then when it comes to the strikes inside Ukraine, we've seen a few drone strikes target that one angle airs base, which is about 300 miles from the Ukrainian border inside Russia, and it houses Russian strategic bombers. After the first wave of drones attacked that, there was a report in Asia Times that said the drones used U.S. satellite GPS data to hit their targets, they cited, you know, unnamed NATO officials. So a lot of this is still, you know, unconfirmed reporting. But there's a lot of

reports that suggest the U.S. is really helping them with these strikes and that the Pentagon, you know, now backs them. Yeah. It's a huge escalation. This report by Jack Murphy about the CIA overseeing an allied state's sabotage missions inside Russia, as well. well. And there have been, I don't know about the correlations and the causations, but there have been a lot of important Russian military people turning up dead on the other side of the line there, right? I'm not sure about inside Russia, about Russian officials dying, but I know, you know, more so inside Ukraine, in the Russian-controlled territory. And then when it comes to what that Jack Murphy report is saying is that the CIA is involved with some of these like fires and

explosions that have happened at Russian military facilities and bridges inside Russia. So it's tough to know exactly how involved, you know, the CIA is in these operations, but just the fact that they may be directing sabotage operations inside Russia is just extremely dangerous. I mean, who knows where this is going to go. It's an amazing diffusion of responsibility here where the Americans give all these weapons to the Ukrainians, help them do all these escalatory things. then say, well, you know, it's up to the Ukrainians to decide that or not. And apparently, I mean, there's really some reality to that when the Ukrainians evidently tried to assassinate this Russian

ideologist, Alexander Dugan, this nationalist, and they ended up killing his daughter instead. And then the CIA went and burned them to the Washington Post and said, yeah, that was the Ukrainians that did that, or correct me if I'm wrong, was at the times, said, yeah, it was the Ukrainians who did that and we didn't want them to and we gave them addressing down for it, too, and told them no more assassinations of civilians, daughters inside, you know, on the other side of the Russian line, they could get us into a war here. Yeah, yeah, that was the New York Times, I believe, that said that, that, you know, the U.S. saying that it was Ukrainians that killed her. There were some bright signs, you know, including Millie's comments, what Biden said,

reports of Sullivan's speaking with Russian officials, you know, in the fall that may be, okay, they're going to wind this thing down. But going into the new year, it just seems like they're just continuing to ramp everything up unfortunately yeah all right well i'm so sorry that we're out of time there's so much great news at news dot antiwar dot com yemen and syria and all kinds of stuff going on israel palestine and of course ukraine it's uh the great dave de camp our news editor at antiwar dot com and check out his great podcast antiwar news comes out every morning thanks dave thanks god all right y'all and that's it for anti war radio for today i'm your host Scott Horton, editorial director of anti-war.com,

an editor of the new book, Hotter Than the Sun. Time to abolish nuclear weapons. Find my full interview archive, more than 5,800 of them now, going back to 2003 at scotthornton.org, and follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton's show. I'm here every Thursday from 2.30 to 3

on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week. You know,