Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 8/24/23 Kyle Anzalone on the Counteroffensive and Prigozhin Plane Crash

Episode Date: August 25, 2023

Kyle Anzalone was back on Antiwar Radio this week to talk about Ukraine. Scott and Anzalone take stock of the Ukrainian counteroffensive and discuss the reaction of American officials. They then touch on the political aspect of this war before finishing with a quick look at the reports that the Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin was killed in a plane crash.  Discussed on the show: “‘Fight Russia to the Last Ukrainian’ Is Official White House Policy” (Libertarian Institute) “US ‘Fears’ Ukraine Is Too ‘Casualty Averse’” (Antiwar.com) Scott’s recent interview with Daniel Davis “Prigozhin Believed to Be Dead After Plane Crash in Russia” (Antiwar.com) Kyle Anzalone is news editor of the Libertarian Institute, opinion editor of Antiwar.com and co-host of Conflicts of Interest with Will Porter and Connor Freeman. Follow him on Twitter @KyleAnzalone_ This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. 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: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Pacifica Radio, August the 24th, 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 the editorial director of anti-war.com, and author of the book, Enough Already. Time to end the war on terrorism. You can find my full interview archive,

almost 6,000 of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show and all the other video sites slash Scott Horton Show. And you can follow me on Twitter or whatever it's called now, if you dare, at Scott Horton Show. All right, now introducing our semi-regular guests here, anti-war.com's opinion editor,

Kyle Anzalone. Welcome back to the show. Kyle, how you doing? Doing great, Sky. Thanks for having me back on. Very happy to have you here. And lots of bad news to cover with you on the show this week. Let's start with the war, America's proxy war, of course. You have this important opinion piece from the Institute, which was the spotlight on antiwar.com earlier this week. Fight Russia to the last Ukrainian is official White House policy. Tell us what you mean. by that. So, Scott, what I did is I really tried to break down how the White House policy has evolved, particularly over the past two years since Biden has become president. And when they had opportunities to negotiate and what they did in response to potential negotiation efforts early in

the war and before the war, and that was rather than to talk to Russia about meaningful issues, they elected to arm Ukraine. And then they made these promises to Ukraine that they will give Ukraine everything it needs and that negotiations will only occur on Ukraine's terms. And so it pretty quickly became evidence, Scott, that those two pledges kind of come at confrontation because if you give Ukraine everything it needs, then you're going to provoke a direct war between the U.S. and Moscow to tape back the Crimean Peninsula, the amount of support that Ukraine would need. I'm sure it would be massive and it would take direct Western military involvement to do so.

And yet that is one of Ukraine's core demands is that they retake all the Ukrainian territory, including the Crimean Peninsula and the Dombas region. And that's just not going to happen. And so the Biden administration, rather than omitting that there's this conflict and kind of telling Ukraine that we're only going to give you a limited amount of support, they have continued to tell Ukraine that, hey, we got your back. We're going to support you through this whole war. But in reality, what they have done is just giving Ukraine enough weapons to keep them fighting against the Russians, but limiting their ability on the battlefield to not provoke a direct

confrontation with Russia. And so they've really just used the Ukrainian army to weaken what, you know, who they see is their geopolitical foe, and that's Moscow. And so the goal here for Washington is just to keep Ukraine fighting. longer and longer. Well, and of course, that's ironic because they've only militarized Russia, in the same sense that Russia's only militarized Ukraine. I mean, both sides are failing if their goal is to weaken the other militarily.

And Russia will probably double or triple their standing army after this. You know, I'm sure that's true to some extent, but, you know, as the anti-war activists, I do recognize, you know, there's a lot of other consequences that come with war. And in the long term, Washington will probably net some successes in weakening Russia some. Now, I think that's kind of offset by other things, which is just America's declining, standing in the world. And also the economic war against Russia has had other consequences. And, you know, we see that just this week by Brits announcing that they're going to admit, I believe, sits new members to that block and become Brits Plus. And so, you know, more and more countries and all the leaders of Brits nations went up there and said the reason we're doing this is because the American-led, you know, the world economy based in Washington means that whoever is in the White House could destroy the development of any country in the world at any time by putting on sanctions and kicking them out of the world economy.

And so they're saying enough with this and they're going to try to create their own system to get around it. Yeah, well, you know, it's funny because the American interventionists always call anti-war forces isolationists when they're the ones who have sanctions on probably 100 countries out of 200 in the world or more. Yeah, I think it's actually around three dozen, but it is a huge number of countries. And an increasing number of countries got under extremely strict sanctions and larger nations too. So isolating North Korea, Venezuela, or even Iran with sanctions is something that I think Washington probably did have the power to navigate at times. But now sanctioning all those countries, plus the trade war with China, plus, you know, the sanctions on Libya, Syria, other Somalia, other countries in the Middle East, and Africa and Russia

are all on the sanctions list. And so countries are deciding that they can't operate without, you know, having access the Russian, the Chinese, and all these other economies. And so they're forming their own block away from the dollar bat world economy that could, again, anybody could be sanctioned and kicked out of it at any time at the whims of whoever is in the White House. You know, it's interesting. So many countries in the world who don't have a dog in the fight between Russia and Ukraine at all,

they're taking the opportunity to go ahead and make this break from the American Empire. I guess I wonder, though, how successful they'll be. be in pulling this off. I mean, Lord knows America can just start bombing everybody's capital city. But even short of that, like if they want to replace the U.S. dollar, they got to have a stronger currency to replace it with. And they all have Federal Reserve syndrome printing money all day, right? So. Right. Well, I think one important thing is that this has been building for a long time. And that's why I think that this is probably pretty substantial. And, you know, for Washington, it will seem like something that is suddenly happening, but for years, more

and more countries have been joining things like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and, you know, some of these nations have started to do bilateral trade, either in gold, are using their own currencies as the exchanges, and just, you know, other countries have found little ways to avoid using the U.S. dollar to price all kinds of goods, you know, particularly over the past decade. And so with countries like Egypt, the UAE and Saudi Arabia joining Brits, I think it's going to be hard for, you know, the Washington to pivot so much from their foreign policy here. You know, we've put up with a lot from Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

And so I'm not sure if they're going to be able to really just kick all these countries out of the American in the dollar orbit or if they're going to just kind of have to, except that this, you know, growing block of countries are going to do trade that doesn't go through Washington. Yeah. Well, the insane lunatic Michael Flynn, who helped escalate and lose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but who was never guilty of treason with Russia, but is still a complete lunatic. Co-authored a book with Michael Ledeen, if you can believe it. He's got a big tweet going viral right now or whatever you call that website now, saying that, yeah, see, all the this is happening because of the weakness of Joe Biden. What do you think, Kyle? I mean,

that is just the kind of lowest IQ Republican critique of Democratic foreign policy for the past couple of decades. And is largely why you have such haunts in the Democratic Party like Obama and Biden take the positions that they do and rise to the top of the party because nobody questions their manliness and their strength, although with Joe Biden falling asleep everywhere he goes and constantly looking like he's confused, even as the American Empire is more aggressive almost everywhere than it's forever been, it just looks so weak because our president is so visibly weak. So I think that message is probably going to resonate quite a bit with Republicans just because of the visuals of the Joe Biden buzz, absolutely untrue.

Yeah, seriously. And, you know, especially they have this narrative about Biden with China. Because, of course, he is corrupt and took a bunch of money from Chinese government-connected corporations and all that, like in the laptop. But so what? The Republicans act like that means that he's owned by the CCP now? I mean, what's the reality of Biden's naval possible? in the Pacific, Kyle? Yeah, Biden's expanded on almost all of Trump's China policy. He's kept the trade war in place and has, you know, engaged in various rounds of expansion, including to preventing American businesses from investing in China, which is something

that Trump didn't do quite as much. And then particularly on the Taiwan and Philippines issue, the Biden administration has taken, at least rhetorically stronger stances than the Trump administration. On several occasions, Biden said he would use the U.S. military to defend Taiwan, and the U.S. has reasserted that it will defend Philippines claims to reefs and, you know, little shoals out in the middle of the South China Sea with our military. And, you know, that confrontation almost escalated this week when China was blocking the Philippines from, I believe, restocking a beached ship on the second Thomas shoal. And I mean, this is way out in the middle of the South China Sea in an area of the world that no Americans care about. Yeah, can you imagine that's how the world. I can.

That's how the world ends. Is America and China get into it over some reef that no one's brave enough to even pretend is important enough to be called an island? And it devolves into naval war and eventually H-bombs. I can see it with their government and with this one. It's anti-war radio. I'm Scott Horton talking with Kyle Anzlone from anti-war.com about all the bad news of which there's so much. Let's talk about the fight on the ground in Ukraine right now. Can you just kind of get us up to date on who controls what and how well either side is doing in the war right now?

Yeah. So, I mean, I guess the big news is there isn't much news as far as territorial changes. Ukraine, it's been, I think, close to three months now, three home months. They've launched this counteroffensive, you know, throughout the summer here. It was supposed to be a spring counteroffensive, and it got pushed back because the Ukrainians didn't have enough equipment, our troops to do. When they finally got enough, they said they went ahead and launched it, although we've now had American officials admit that Ukraine never had enough troops, training, and military equipment, particularly artillery and air force to, a successful counteroffensive. But Ukraine has, you know, for about 10, 11 weeks now been sending their troops into fortified Russian lines and making almost no progress. Ukrainian forces report

successful days are gaining, you know, maybe 100 meters at a time. I think one guy said that they fought for seven hours and got 100 meters. So this is what we're talking about in so many Ukrainian troops dying. It's really hard to get good casualty estimates, Scott, but we know that the U.S. trained this 47th mechanized brigade. And in the early days of the counteroffensive, it went to Russian's lines in southern Ukraine and was just completely destroyed. So a lot of Ukrainian casualties. And in the White House, they're concerned that Ukraine is becoming too casualty averse. And the White House went to our American military and Western military, leaders recently lectured the Ukrainian military command and said you're becoming too

casualty averse and what you need to do is mask all of your troops in one position and then launch a major counteroffensive to the south to try to separate the Russian forces in the Crimean Peninsula from eastern Ukraine. It doesn't seem like there's any chance of that happening. Daniel Davis, the retired American lieutenant colonel, has a fantastic article that was out last week in 1945, where he explains that they simply didn't have the equipment that they needed, and they marched right into a Russian bus saw with predictable consequences. Give me just a minute here. At the Libertarian Institute, we published books. Real good ones. So far, we've got Will Griggs Snow Quarter. Sheldon Richmond's coming to Palestine and what

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Yeah, we talked to him on the show. about that at the time as well and he was just saying that was it look we all knew the high watermark of the ukrainians counter strike against russia was last september the weekend of the 11th and they pushed the russians out of harkev and a little bit of luhansk and out of curson city and across the river and shortly after that the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff had said you boys ought to deal right now while you're only this far behind and not for further. But he was shouted down. Right. And just this weed scat, we had either the poster of the time speak with an American

official who said maybe Mark Millie was right and Ukraine shouldn't negotiate in November. Yeah. Who would have thunk it that Millie knows a little bit more about fighting than Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, Hillary Clinton's boy. Now, so talk a little bit more about these statements from the Americans criticizing the Ukrainians for being casualty averse. They've made a pretty big deal about well we've been training them

on maneuver warfare and they've abandoned it because I guess they're such wimps and they only want to die a few at a time instead of en masse and so they've switched back to this war of attrition which the Americans complain is not working

but geez if only they would listen to us I guess, is the New York Times yesterday, right? If only they would listen to us and do what we said, then they'd be doing so much better. But, of course, they'd have to die in a lot larger numbers. But anyway, who cares about that? Right. So the Americans wanted the Ukrainians to mass all their forces in southern Ukraine and then try to march them to the Sea of Azov and basically cut the Russian territory in Ukraine in half.

And the idea here was that they would use these combined armed tactics that would, you know, deploy different brigades at the same time to, I guess, you know, try to confuse the Russian defenses and help the Ukrainians break through. But, you know, this would involve sustaining heavy losses. And what the Americans say is that the Ukrainians just didn't commit enough forces and lives to this because they thought they would be willing to take more casualties than Kiev has been willing to take. Now, I don't think that's really true because, you know, we've had the reporting from Daniel Davis in his commentary on this, but also a mission from American officials to the Washington Post that basically those tactics that the West wanted Ukraine to deploy would require Kiev having an air force. And so that means, you know, modern fighter jets and more air defenses and more artillery. And they don't have those things right now. Ukraine's primarily relying on cluster munitions for their artillery. They don't really have access to a whole lot of conventional 155 millimeter rounds at this point. And so they're scattering the countryside with little bomblets, which I'm sure is going to present

a lot of, you know, if they ever do have any success in their counteroffensive is going to present problems as they try to advance on their own some munitions. But they also lack a lot of demining equipment and other just more basic things that they would need to launch a successful counteroffensive. And so with all of this, Ukraine started to adopt different tactics rather than using whole brigades. They were just sending small, I guess, platoons of soldiers forward and probing missions, trying to carry out demining. And the Americans say, well, you're not gaining territory fast enough. And so they want them to move back to the heavy casualty tactics of marching a lot of troops in one location. I'm not sure how possible that is

for Kiev right now, especially as Russia is starting to carry out more attacks in eastern Ukraine on Ukrainian lines. And so maybe moving troops to the south would cause, you know, Ukraine problems and showing up their defenses further north. Yeah, seriously, I mean, Daniel Davis, again, when he was on this show just a few weeks ago, he was saying, look, talk now. There is no position of strength to be gained here. And look at what's his stake. The Ukrainians, had lost and then regained the city of Harkiv, this extremely important city in the east of their country.

Now, they're at risk of losing it again, and they're at risk of even losing Odessa. Their last, of course, extremely important port city on, you know, to the west of Crimea, on the Black Sea. They could be landlocked.

The Russians could march all the way to Moldova. They should quit now, not later. And then here we are, a few weeks later, yep, Russians are making advances around Harkiv. Who's in charge of this? Somebody hired Jake Sullivan to call these

shots, really? It's completely crazy. And then, let's rewind a bit to what their recommendation is here. You guys, go ahead and take the casualties. We need you to mass and march all the way to Militipal.

I'm not sure exactly how to pronounce it. But this is a city in southern Zeprosia. It's like the last major city between the Crimean Peninsula and

Mariupil, right? And they say without air power you should just all massed together and march that way. And they might just be completely obliterate. They might lose their entire army trying to do that. But let's say, Kyle,

that they make it 60 miles to Melitopol. Now they're completely surrounded. It's like you parted the Red Sea, but then you didn't make it to the other side. Now you're just standing there. The waves are going to come crashing right back down again. They'd be completely surrounded by Russian forces and lose their army that way anyway. And that's the Americans' best plan after all their tabletop exercises and all this garbage. Yeah, I think so, Scott, because a lot of this has to do with politics in America.

If you look at the reaction to the Republican debate last night where there was one candidate who seemed, I didn't watch the debate, I saw some highlights who, you know, suggested that he didn't want to send more aid to Ukraine. And got thunderous applause at the debate for it, by the way. But when he, what, but the Democrats are really attacking him and basically saying that if you give in to Putin, if you make concessions to Putin, then he'll never stop. And that seems to be the, the Democrats response right now. now and how they're going to run in 2024. And so if that's the case, then Ukraine needs to make progress here to keep this work going. And the White House is willing to, you know, make that progress at any expense to Ukrainians. Think about that even if these tactics on the ground make no sense for the war.

They do make sense for creating a public relations perspective here. that the war is worth continuing. And I have a couple of different quotes from the Wall Street Journal, where they make this extremely clear that that is what's going on here, is they have to do something in order to impress Western donors to continue the effort. This is essentially a PR stunt rather than a real strategic move. But it is a real strategic move on the ground, and guys are being ground to bits. so I don't know what they think if they can extend the war, what army they think that they're

going to use to attack which place next, you know? Right. Well, and at the same time they're doing this, you would assume that they waged a successful counter offenses, Scott. They would absolutely need air power to maintain that territory, you know, especially going to the Sea of Ozzov there. And so with that, the West is dragging their feet on giving. Ukraine F-Sitz teens.

You know, now they're saying probably next fall is the earliest it's going to come. There sits are eight Ukrainian pilots that are just now entering English training that's going to take four months, and then it's going to take six months of combat training before they're even ready to fly, and, you know, who knows how much longer logistically to get the planes into Ukraine. And then what can you actually do if you only have six or eight pilots? But with only eight pilots, even if you have dozens of planes, I'm not.

sure how much, you know, a few pilots flying F-16s is really going to make a difference for Ukraine. We're talking about a massive country here with a hundreds of mile long front lines in this war in advanced Russian air defenses. And so with a limited number of pilots, you know, they're really just, I think, trying to drag Ukraine on here and to keep them fighting, thinking that one day they're going to get these F-16s when I'm not really sure that the West could transfer the F-Sitz-teens to Ukraine in the middle of the war without seriously provoking Russia because the Russian foreign minister

Lavrov has made it clear that the Kremlin will view these as able to carry nuclear weapons and so they will have to address the issue right away. Well, yeah, I think you can see they're deliberately taking their time on the F-16s. I think probably because they don't want it to be shown to all of their customers around the world, how easy it is for Russian air defense missiles to knock them right out of the sky. They were talking about, I saw one just a few days ago, they said

we're going to have to develop longer range standoff missiles for these F-16s to fire so that we can fly them, I don't know, over by the Moldovan border, I guess, and then fire them toward the Donbass from there. Might as well not even have a plane at all at that

point. Right. All right. Last question. Tell us what we know about the apparent death of pregozen here so a plane fell out of the sky yesterday in russia ten people are reported to be on board three crew seven people including a couple of people who are reported to be the the top lieutenants in the wagner group including the the co-founder of that with per gozen i i guess scott i'm very skeptical of all this there's a really good write-up by Dave DeCamp on it at Anti-Wore.com, and he covered it

on his show today, anti-war news. And I think there's fair reasons that people are skeptical, including that Pergozen owns two planes, and they were both in the sky at the same time. But my guess is that the reporting is probably accurate,

given that it's coming from all kinds of different sources, Western and Russian. And it wouldn't be surprising if somebody who attempted a coup in Russia fell out of the sky, Russia a few weeks later. And so there are, I guess, conflicting reports on who's behind it as well with some people speculating that the CIA or Ukraine did it. I'm not sure what their motivation would be versus the Russian motivation. It seems that I guess the Russian government would be

the most likely culprit to me, or the Russian military. Well, I could see the Americans having a motive in disrupting Russia's activities in Africa and that kind of thing. But obviously the Occam's razor is that this guy stepped on Putin's toes. It wasn't exactly a coup against Putin. It was a mutiny

against the leadership of the military, but it would be no surprise if Putin had made it known that he wanted this guy dead. Although, exploding his plane, blowing it out of the sky in Russia in such a theatrical fashion is you know, I don't know.

interesting. And it is reminiscent of the way that the CIA has assassinated people in the past. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Although I think it would be, especially since the start of the, in the buildup to the war in Ukraine, I think Putin has really made an effort to make parallels to what the West has done and what the West has said over the years as, you know, they've kind of built their empire. So I guess I won't be surprised if maybe he intentionally pit that method to replicate what the CIA did, too. Yeah. All right.

Well, anyway, I'm sorry we're all out of time, but thank you for all the great updates on all the very bad news here. Kyle, appreciate you. Yeah, thank you so much for having me back on, Scott. All right, you guys, that is Kyle Anzalone. He is Opinion Editor at Antivore.com, and he hosts the great podcast, Conflicts of Interest,

which you can find at antivor.com. And I'm Scott Horton, and that's it for Anti-War Radio for today. Find my full interview. archive at scothorton.org and i am here every thursday from two 30 to three on kpfk 90.7 fm in l a see you next week