June 24, 2023 - Bannon's War Room
48:53
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
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Pray for our enemies, because we're going medieval on these people. | |
| I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people. | ||
| The people have had a belly full of it. | ||
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
| I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big line? | ||
| MAGA Media. I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
|
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Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | |
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
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War Room. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Our President Vladimir Putin is facing a critical moment, a truly critical moment, after the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Purgoshin, a longtime ally of the Kremlin, and his troops had taken control of military facilities in the Russian cities of Voronezh and Rostov-on-Don. | ||
| Putin has accused him of treason and vowed to punish any armed rebellion, and says any internal turmoil in Russia is a deadly threat to its statehood. | ||
| Yevgeny Prigozhin rose to prominence as a close ally of Vladimir Putin, and now he's leading what Putin says is a rebellion against him. | ||
| I want to go to our senior international correspondent, Fred Pleitkin. | ||
| Fred, give us a better sense of who Prigozhin is. | ||
| Well, he's a very important man, or has been at least, a very important man for Vladimir Putin and certainly someone who has risen among the ranks thanks to Vladimir Putin, who's been given a lot of power by Vladimir Putin, but who has also done a lot for Vladimir Putin along the way. | ||
| And one of the things that we always have to mention, Wolf, is that Yevgeny Prigozhin came from very humble beginnings. | ||
| He was in jail for a considerable period of time in the 80s and then started off in the 90s selling hot dogs at a hot dog stand and then at some point became known as Putin's chef. | ||
| That's Putin's caterer. He was seen giving food to Vladimir Putin at various events and then managed to build an empire, also largely thanks to Vladimir Putin, on top of that. | ||
| And that's when, of course, he got involved in things like the Internet Research Agency with some of that propaganda work he was doing. | ||
| The U.S. saying that he played a big part meddling in the 2016 election, of course, was sanctioned and indicted for that as well. | ||
| And then you have the Wagner Private Military Company, which is sort of one of the things that he also took on there. | ||
| And this is something, Wolf, that we in our work internationally have been confronted with over the past couple of years. | ||
| If you look at, for instance, Syria around 2014, 2015, where we would go around Syria and you would already see people from the Wagner Private Military Company at that point still doing things like Base Protection for the Russians who were down on the ground in Syria. | ||
| That then, of course, evolved into more and more of a combat role, but then also doing shady economic dealings for Vladimir Putin as well. | ||
| In Syria, for instance, with the oil wells that the Russians and the Syrian regime took there, but then also in Africa, dealing with gems, also training African military forces. | ||
| But it really wasn't, Wolf, until the war in Ukraine, or the full-on war in Ukraine, where Wagner went, From essentially being a paramilitary company to being a full-on military, to being essentially a full-on army. | ||
| And Yevgeny Purgosyan himself says he believes that right now this is the strongest army that Russia has, and even sort of boasting that it's allegedly one of the strongest in the world. | ||
| And again, it was something that we've seen on the ground. | ||
| All of us who, for instance, were in the Battle of Bakhmud in eastern Ukraine, you know, many people came under heavy shelling by those Wagner operatives who all of a sudden had tanks, who had large artillery stocks, were shooting a lot of artillery shells as well. | ||
| And of course, Wolf, also using prisoners who they recruited out of Russian jails to then essentially be used as cannon fodder on the front lines. | ||
| So someone with a lot of brutal tactics, but also someone who now has a large arm at his disposal, which apparently now has turned on Vladimir Putin, Wolf. | ||
| Okay, Saturday, 24 June, Year of Our Lord, 2023. | ||
| Which side do the generals choose? | ||
| Who controls the nukes? | ||
| What happens as, quite frankly, the mainline mercenary troops are pulled out of the Donbass, which has stopped the Ukrainian spring offensive in its tracks. | ||
| We're fully loaded today. | ||
| We got Posobiec, L. Todd Woods, Harnwell from Rome. | ||
| We've got John Mills, Sam Faddis from the CIA, also trying to track down the one and only Eric Prince to get it all in. | ||
| Plus, we've got a lot of other news. | ||
| There's so much stuff breaking on the Biden crime family, Sequoia Capital, all of it, and capital markets. | ||
| Dave Brat's going to join us a little later. | ||
| Let's go to... Jack Basobiec, first. | ||
| Jack, give us your assessment. | ||
| You and I have talked throughout the night, obviously yesterday, about, you know, because remember, you've got to always watch the Kabuki theater when you're talking about these criminal elements like the KGB and the military in Russia, just like in the CCP. Is the Wagner Group... | ||
| Doing Xenophon's march up country, you know, a group of mercenaries that get sold out, as Xenophon did, you know, with the Persians, what, 2,000 years ago, and then the march back home. | ||
| Is that what we're seeing here, or is this something, is this really a coup, sir? | ||
| Well, of course, in this case, they're marching from the sea to inland, so I guess it would be Xenophon's march in reverse, not the sea, not the sea. | ||
| I suppose would be the titular line. | ||
| But, you know, this appears, this has all the markings of a suicide run. | ||
| This guy actually thinks that he's going to make it all the way up to Moscow. | ||
| And Steve, we have to be clear. | ||
| Purgosin has been making insubordinate comments for weeks, if not months, publicly about the Ministry of Defense. | ||
| Now, he's always careful not to come out and criticize Putin directly, but he certainly has had a longstanding, very public feud With Shoigu, the minister of fence, Grasimov, who's one of the deputies there, one of the generals. | ||
| And so this is something, Steve, that no other military in the world would allow a commander, someone down in the chain of command, To be speaking publicly this way about the top leaders. | ||
| You simply couldn't allow it. | ||
| When this happened with MacArthur and Truman in the Korean War, of course, he was taken out in France in the 60s. | ||
| Yes, they have a different command structure, though. | ||
| But isn't it true? That his mercenaries have taken the brunt. | ||
| And I'm not saying the Russian, you know, relatively untrained recruits are getting hammered. | ||
| But his mercenaries, the 25,000, have stood in the breach here. | ||
| And unlike other generals, he's taking care of these guys. | ||
| I mean, he's got some capital built up. | ||
| With these troops. And the big news to me is he took them out of the main line in Donbass and marched to Rostov, which is a couple hundred miles away and about a thousand miles away from Moscow. | ||
| But he took them out. But he does have credibility. | ||
| Let me just give you his quote, Jack. | ||
| Respond to this. His quote is, this is not a military coup. | ||
| This is a march for justice. | ||
| The president, that would be Putin, makes a deep mistake when he talks about treason. | ||
| We are patriots of our motherland. | ||
| We fought And are fighting for it. | ||
| Does he make a pretty strong case that the Wagner Group has really been the most competent of all and have really been at the tip of the spear of stopping the allies and Ukraine's fight in the Donbass, sir? | ||
| Steve, that's right. And what I want to be clear is that I was referring to the buildup to this situation now over the last just 12 hours. | ||
| He's made this move on Rostov, surrounding The military headquarters there in the south, of course, Rostov being a key resupply point for this Crimea. | ||
| When they're talking about the land bridge to Crimea, it's a land bridge to Rostov. | ||
| That's the point. That's where this all ends up. | ||
| Key resupply for all of the Russian forces. | ||
| Now, Putin has come out after, it looks like they were trying to do, there was a stunning video, just a stunning video Where Prigozhin actually walks into the courtyard and meets the generals in public. | ||
| Nobody drawing weapons. | ||
| Nobody firing at him. | ||
| No shots fired in this video. | ||
| He sits down with generals who appear to have been appointed by someone in the Russian high command to go and speak with him. | ||
| That conversation obviously doesn't go well. | ||
| Putin then comes out and declares this essentially to be akin to treason. | ||
| And essentially says there will be no mercy for traitors. | ||
| But hang on. The buried lead there is the generals here maybe have the power. | ||
| That video you're talking about and what people are discussing is that he wasn't put under arrest. | ||
| There wasn't a strong military punchback. | ||
| And the generals look like they're hearing his argument. | ||
| It's undecided. | ||
| It's up in the air whose side these generals are on, particularly in the South. | ||
| Am I incorrect in that? | ||
| Well, Steve, of course, the question is, were they following orders? | ||
| We've seen this with Russia before when they've negotiated with terrorists. | ||
| Usually they'll take the first 24, the first 48 hours. | ||
| They'll attempt to find some kind of peaceful resolution. | ||
| And then immediately after that, they will respond with severe force. | ||
| And so I post I put a post up on Twitter and Getter just now that if this guy thinks he's actually gonna make it all the way up to Moskva, he's going to be completely carpet-bound from the sky very quickly in terms of this. | ||
| The idea that you're gonna make a run during a war. | ||
| And Putin, of course, brought up that this is akin to 1917 and bringing up the original Bolshevik Revolution, the October Revolution that led to the creation of the Soviet Union that knocked the Imperial Russia, knocked the Tsar out. | ||
| Obviously, the Tsar's family was murdered out in the woods. | ||
| And then this knocked Russia out of World War I and set up the most bloody regime in human history. | ||
| So the idea that he's comparing Wagner to that... | ||
| Yeah, but doesn't he want, this is the uncertain nature of this, and remember, these are criminal elements both in Beijing, in Tehran with the Mullahs, in Pakistan now with the ISI, in Turkey with Erdogan, you know, throughout the Gulf, and particularly in Moscow with the KGB where we kind of abandoned the Russian people for the second time back in 89 and allowed the KGB really to stay in charge, the criminal elements. | ||
| Doesn't he want to draw the fire of Putin and show the nation that he's got these brave 25,000 mercenaries and bad hombres, but they've done a pretty good job. | ||
| I mean, they took Bakhmut, right? | ||
| Not the volunteers. | ||
| They took Bakhmut. Doesn't he want to show the nation and the world that Putin's out of control and going to come in and attack arguably the bravest soldiers they've had on the front line? | ||
| How would that play? | ||
| How would the generals decide? | ||
| Remember... Yeah, go ahead. | ||
| That's one of the big questions here because right now the only person that I've seen publicly supporting Purgosian, of course, is Zelensky, the president of Ukraine. | ||
| He's the only person that's out there publicly. | ||
| Erdogan says he's had a good call with Putin. | ||
| Iran has come out supporting Putin. | ||
| Of course, China has been quite silent in terms of all of this. | ||
| Obviously, this is a huge blow to the stability of the rise of BRICS. So I would imagine, by the way, that over there in the U.S. Embassy, the CIA was calling up every single possible group they could think of last night to come forward and say, all right, this is our chance. | ||
| Deploy out to Moscow. | ||
| Do whatever you can, guys. | ||
| Get there and blow up. | ||
| Because even if they're not necessarily... | ||
| There's some Internet rumors that Purgosian is doing this at the behest of the CIA. And I don't know if that's really worn out. | ||
| Clearly, clearly, this is one of the most crucial points of stability for Putin's regime at this time. | ||
| Now, Steve, to your question, though, about 25,000 loyal mercenaries behind Purgosian. | ||
| I haven't seen 25,000. | ||
| I've seen maybe at most, if you put all of the videos together and obviously take that with a grain of salt, because I'm sure there's a lot of fakes that are put in, not to mention that original video of this supposed alleged airstrike that took place. | ||
| He looks like he's maybe got a thousand guys. | ||
| And we're already hearing reports that these guys weren't told that they were going to be marching on Rostov. | ||
| They were being told that this was a regular troop movement, that they're on the way for R&R. This was a redeployment internally. | ||
| They had no clue what the leadership was doing. | ||
| And so in that first 24 hours, really just 12 hours of confusion, there was a lot that went down. | ||
| So the idea that he's got 25,000 that are willing to do this, I think that's a hard sell. | ||
| And keep in mind, The people haven't pointed out that there are still Wagner emplacements within Syria, throughout Africa, where this group has been used. | ||
| So there are potentially a number of options on the back end of this. | ||
| To see whether or not this group could be broken up, reconstituted, renamed. | ||
| Obviously, they've been used to great effect for many of these African regimes. | ||
| They played a massive role in the Syrian war. | ||
| One could argue that the best use of American money Would have been to pay this guy, who I'm sure is a guy that might take a high bid, to take him off the front line. | ||
| Because the fundamental news is that they were front line around Bakhmut. | ||
| The spring offensive is ground down. | ||
| I've heard from Democrats in Capitol Hill that if there's not significant achievement in the spring offensive, they're not even going to support Another mass cash infusion from the United States. | ||
| And we know that the MAGA... We've got 30 seconds, Jack. | ||
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Can you hang through the break? Again, again, yeah. | |
| Just hang with me. | ||
| Okay, we're going to keep Jack Pessoa. | ||
| We've got El Todd Woods. | ||
| His site has some tremendous, incredible footage up. | ||
| Ben Harnwell in Rome. | ||
| Sam Faddis is going to join us. | ||
| Colonel Mills. We're pretty packed here as we try to get to the bottom of exactly what is going on in Russia. | ||
| Where do the generals and the Arabians come out? | ||
| Who controls the new? To remember... | ||
| When the Russians flip on this stuff, like on the Tsar, you know, when the generals make a decision, sometimes it doesn't play too well for whoever's in charge. | ||
| Next, in the war room. | ||
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Here's your host, Stephen K. Vann. | |
| Okay, welcome back. I want to bring in L. Todd Wood. | ||
| First off, hey, Jack, real quickly, before I go to Todd, Jack's going to hang around for this segment. | ||
| Do you buy, I mean, what initiated this supposedly was with this fight between him and the generals and his trashing the Russian military, particularly the high command all the time, that they did an airstrike on him and killed a bunch of his guys. | ||
| Do you buy that? Have you seen any evidence of that that you can point to, or do you buy it? | ||
| I mean, Steve, that video was very suspect to begin with. | ||
| Again, you don't see any dead bodies in that video. | ||
| You see some trees that are knocked over a crater. | ||
| And look, if the Russian high command actually felt like they wanted to take out Pregosian, they have a number of options that don't involve airstrikes. | ||
| I mean, you pay some kid to go up and go Archduke Ferdinand on him, basically. | ||
| Yeah, shoot him in the head at night when he's sleeping. | ||
| Let's bring in L.Todd Wood. | ||
| Todd, you've got a site. Tell people about the site they can go to, Todd, to get all this information. | ||
| You've got a site that specializes in this. | ||
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Where do people go? Yeah, look, we've had tsarism.com up since 2015. | |
| I've lived in Kyiv. | ||
| I was a national security columnist for The Washington Times. | ||
| I've spent a lot of time in Eastern Europe and Russia. | ||
| Tsarism is our site that's been up for a while now. | ||
| It's grown into a global, really, empire with about 12 sites. | ||
| CDM.press is the main one. | ||
| You can find everything there. | ||
| But look, what people need to realize about this… But you also, you're a special forces pilot in this area, right? | ||
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Yeah, I flew STCL Team 6 and Delta around for years for the 20th Special Operations Squadron back in the day. | |
| Did you ever do any mercenary work like the Wagner Group, that type of stuff, Eric Prince type stuff? | ||
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No, but I was back during the Yugoslav War, the Gulf War I, that period. | |
| But we were running missions globally. | ||
| Tell me what your thoughts are on this, because you've got a pretty good sight. | ||
| Are you buying the fact that this is really an armed insurrection by this mercenary group? | ||
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What people need to understand is that these people are not fighting for God and country, right? | |
| I mean, they're fighting for the money, the beautiful women, and what they call the power. | ||
| These are the FSB, I'm being told, aligned with possibly Wagner, fighting the Ministry of Defense for resources, And criminal activity and money. | ||
| I'm being told that Wagner wasn't paid and that they're pissed off. | ||
| These are battle-hardened troops. | ||
| The National Guard around Moscow is weak. | ||
| I mean, Putin put it together years ago, but it's civilian forces essentially with uniforms on. | ||
| They're not that well-trained. Wagner is well-trained. | ||
| They're battle-hardened. They're bloodied. | ||
| You know, it's the fog of war. | ||
| But what people need to understand also is that the Russian military, this part of the world doesn't give a damn about human life. | ||
| I mean, they've been invaded for 2,000 years. | ||
| So they respect the strong man, and the Russian military really hasn't taken care of its people, but Boghossian has. | ||
| Talk about that for a second. | ||
| Essentially what you're saying, this is Bloods versus the Crips. | ||
| FSB is the KGB. It's KGB, Wagner versus the military. | ||
| But it's basically gangs in New York. | ||
| This is Bloods versus Crips. | ||
| And I keep telling people the CCP is the same way. | ||
| They got these factions. | ||
| These are gangs. These are criminal. | ||
| They're criminal mullahs in Persia, in Erdogan, in Turkey, in Pakistan. | ||
| And this new alliance, this new axis of evil are all criminal gangs, right? | ||
| From Beijing's the Don. | ||
| That's Don Corleone, right? | ||
| And you got these others. And that's why it's so humiliating for Putin to have to go on TV. But you're essentially saying this is gang warfare, right? | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. And then you've also got another layer. | |
| You got the Biden crime family, which is another gang. | ||
| Fighting for resources and access to Ukraine where they can do anything they want, run info ops against the U.S., etc. | ||
| So this is why Ukraine is so important to all of these power centers. | ||
| But I don't know how big this force is. | ||
| I know that the roads around Moscow are blocked. | ||
| People are trying to get out of the city. | ||
| The flights are sold out. | ||
| But there is allegedly fighting on the roads. | ||
| There's allegedly surrenders from the National Guard to Prigozhin's troops as they move forward. | ||
| Where he is, you know, MI6 is reporting two, three hours outside of Moscow. | ||
| I don't know if that's possible, but that's what we're seeing. | ||
| So it's definitely a follow-up. | ||
| Yeah. Ben Carnival, correct me, it's 1,000 kilometers, I think. | ||
| Todd, hang her for one second. | ||
| Poso, in fact, if we can do this in a boom, everybody on the screen. | ||
| Poso, we're getting fancy here in the war on a Saturday morning. | ||
| Poso, your thoughts. | ||
| Is this Bloods versus Crips, brother? | ||
| No. There's certainly an element of that. | ||
| I would also point out just for all of the mainstream media, I'm sure that's watching. | ||
| By the way, guys, and Nancy Pelosi, this is what a real armed insurrection looks like as opposed to some of the ones that you guys have been trying to throw around that President Trump was involved. | ||
| No, this is a real armed insurrection. | ||
| Now, as far as the actual forces involved, the numbers involved, whether or not people I've had that once Wagner, once those guys understand What they're actually up against right now. | ||
| And a lot of this really does fall down to Purgosian. | ||
| This guy, he's very independently wealthy over the past eight or so, ten years of warfare. | ||
| He's extremely personally wealthy. | ||
| It looks like they just confiscated a bunch of this money up in St. | ||
| Petersburg that they claimed... | ||
| Purgosian himself has admitted was going to be paid out to the Wagner troops, the Wagner forces. | ||
| Obviously, we're hugely in the fog of war here. | ||
| We have no clue specifically what's going on. | ||
| There's pictures of, they're saying this is a helicopter that's taking down. | ||
| Other people are saying, no, it's flares. | ||
| These stunning images out of Rostov of tanks with the ubiquitous, typically you'd see a white Z on the tank for representing Russian forces. | ||
| Now you're seeing red Z's that have been painted on them, but at the same time in these videos out of Rostov, as I said before, you don't see anyone firing. | ||
| Steve, I don't know if they can zoom in on any of these videos, but they've got the muzzle covers on these tanks. | ||
| They still have their muzzle covers on, so it's intended as a show of force, but the question as to whether or not these guys are actually going to pull the trigger on their own countrymen has yet to be lost. | ||
| But this is my point. The generals, okay, every one of these generals in the Russian army, They got the bank accounts in Cyprus. | ||
| They got the bank accounts in Malta. | ||
| These guys have been skimming money. | ||
| The whole area, this is what I keep saying, it's not our fight. | ||
| You know, Patton didn't, Montgomery, nobody would ever go into this part of the world. | ||
| There's this two Slavic nations slugging it out down in Ukraine, and now you're in the middle of this and keep saying, you're just going to metastate. | ||
| Every one of these Russian generals is totally corrupt. | ||
| When you talk about their troops and about the weapons they thought they had and the food they thought they had, they're skimming half of that and taking and putting their bank account in Malta and Cyprus. | ||
| But just like when the Tsar fell, just like when the Berlin Wall came down in 89, when Gorbachev and those guys, when the Bolsheviks got tossed, it's which way the generals and the KGB and security forces, they all say, hey, what's in my interest? | ||
| Putin's not, this is not a lock for Putin, right? | ||
| Because it's gangs in New York. | ||
| It's Bloods versus Crips. | ||
| And the information war part of this is just as big as anything, but the generals, what I find shocking, help me out here, Jack, they didn't really put up a big defense in Rostov. | ||
| He said he was going and he went and he was greeted, and at least what you see on video, they look like they're going to have a cup of coffee and hear the guy out, right? | ||
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They're having parties, Steve. | |
| I mean, they're having parties. | ||
| People are getting married in Rostov right now, out in front of the troops. | ||
| I mean, it's hilarious. Well, this is my point. | ||
| What are you seeing fighters? | ||
| Well, here's something people need to understand. | ||
| All right. That for anyone who thinks that if Putin is gone, that means that Russia is going to turn into some pacifist, liberal, open up with the Western order sort of state. | ||
| Do you really think that if there's a military coup inside of Russia, that they're using a thug like Krogosyan as their tool to put themselves, the Savlaki, in power? | ||
| Look, these guys that are supporting them, they're saying Putin's too soft. | ||
| They're saying that he's not going hard enough. | ||
| They want to use a strategic weapon. | ||
| You get to my point. | ||
| They're all skipping around. | ||
| They've wanted regime change on Putin from day one. | ||
| Is he the worst criminal they've got? | ||
| I mean, a lot of these guys are saying, hey, we've played two patty cake down in Ukraine, and we haven't taken care of it. | ||
| I don't think they're going to have a pride parade. | ||
| Are they looking for a pride parade before they get into Moscow? | ||
| Is that what these guys are looking for? | ||
| Steve, I mean, if there's going to be a parade, it's going to be a parade of every single general and leader they think was too liberal, was too soft. | ||
| Again, there are people inside the Russian, the Kremlin. | ||
| They have their own military industrial complex as well. | ||
| And there are generals within the Kremlin, the hardliners, who have wanted to glass Kiev since day one. | ||
| Since day one. | ||
| And those guys view Pregosian as an opportunity potentially to go harder on everything that's going on inside Ukraine. | ||
| So this idea that this instability within Russia is somehow good for Ukraine, good for Europe, ultimately good for the world, I think it is ridiculous. | ||
| I think it is short-sighted. | ||
| I think it is very, very foolhardy. | ||
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unidentified
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Steve, one point. | |
| Todd, hang on. I'm going to lose Jack here for a second. | ||
| Let me just get to Jack. Jack, who do you think controls the nukes? | ||
| I mean, isn't that the big thing here about who controls the nuclear weapons right now? | ||
| You know, an interesting thought that occurs to me is that Putin just moved nuclear weapons out to Belarus. | ||
| Hey, Todd? | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. Okay, just feedback. | |
| Okay, Jack Posobiec, can you hear me? | ||
| Yeah, here you are. Five by five. | ||
| Okay. Who do you think controls the nukes right now? | ||
| I mean, look, Steve, Belarus, of course, just received nuclear weapons from Russia. | ||
| Lukashenko is very much indebted to Vladimir Putin for sticking by him through the troubles over the last couple of years. | ||
| So the idea that Putin has lost control of the nukes, I think, is very short sighted. | ||
| I don't think that's a legitimate inquiry at this point. | ||
| I think that eventually what comes down here is that Putin essentially, just like Erdogan in 2016 with a failed coup attempt, Emerges stronger, emerges more in control. | ||
| I think that's eventually what you're going to see here. | ||
| I think this is half-baked. I think it's suicidal. | ||
| And I think that if any threat comes to those nuclear forces, negotiations are off and they will be shown no mercy. | ||
| Jack Posobiec, how do people follow you on social media? | ||
| Because today's a day you should follow Brother Posobiec. | ||
| Yeah, we're going to be throwing it down. | ||
| Of course, at Telegram Truth, the show is Human Events, 2 p.m. | ||
| every day. We've got all the receipts that we're locking down every day. | ||
| And look, I'm talking to folks in the region. | ||
| I'm talking to people that just got out of there, trying to see everything that's going down. | ||
| Thanks, Jack. Thanks for taking time away today. | ||
| Okay, we got Todd Woods is going to stick with us. | ||
| Harnwell in Rome. Sam Faddis from the CIA. Colonel Amills is going to jump in. | ||
| Didn't even time to get to jack the identity of the text messages on WhatsApp from Hunter Biden to a senior CCP official. | ||
| Pretty damning. All next in the world. | ||
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Here's your host, Stephen K. Mann. | |
| The fog of war. | ||
| The fog of war. You're in the middle of it now, an information war. | ||
| It looks like a shooting, maybe some shooting activity between criminal elements that are in control of Russia. | ||
| For the Russian people, we're always with you. | ||
| Make sure that you keep your head down because it's going to get, I think, gnarly there. | ||
| Todd Wood, there's all kinds of stuff I bring on Twitter and other sources that you have that say that... | ||
| Talk to me about this. Is it an airborne brigade? | ||
| A Russian Army Airborne Brigade that may have thrown in with the Wagner Group? | ||
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Yeah, we're being told, and of course it's hard to confirm, but the 217 Airborne Brigade of the Russian Army has allegedly joined and surrendered to Wagner and joined their forces as they approached the capital city. | |
| We're being told a third helicopter has been shot down and that Chechen troops are moving towards Rostov in order to help the fight and help restore order for the Russian army. | ||
| For the Kremlin. So, you know, these are reports we're getting. | ||
| Yes, it's the fog of war. | ||
| One point I want to make is the only guy who's whacked four or five hundred of these Wagner guys in one night was Donald John Trump in Syria when they decided they were going to approach an American position in Syria. | ||
| He sent AC-130s in and waxed them overnight. | ||
| That's a very unreported story. | ||
| But the only guy who's had real success against these guys is Trump. | ||
| Give me that again, because take that from the top. | ||
| That is probably the most unreported of all the quote-unquote fight against ISIS and President Trump standing up to Putin. | ||
| Nobody ever talks about the time he sent the... | ||
| People should know those are the massive gunships that can basically stay over target and just unload on you. | ||
| It's like hell on earth. | ||
| Talk to me about that, but what Trump did. | ||
|
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Well, I used to fly for AFSOC. I was a helicopter guy, but these AC-130s are brutal. | |
| They have small cannon and then 105mm howitzers in addition to other weapons, and they just fly in a circle and just destroy anything underneath them. | ||
| And in Syria, there was American positions, special forces positions near some of the wells. | ||
| And they saw a large force approaching them. | ||
| My reports were they called Moscow and said, are these your people? | ||
| And Putin said, no. | ||
| And so Trump sent in four or five, you know, sent in the AC-130s at night and just destroyed four to five hundred Wagner mercenaries in a couple of minutes. | ||
| And so, you know, this so the Putin not sticking up for Wagner is a longstanding problem simmering in Russia. | ||
| And this could be related to that. | ||
| Talk to us about Wagner and when you say these mercenaries, people out of jail. | ||
| He is unique. | ||
| And when you look at this war in Ukraine, and correct me if I'm wrong, he looks like he does take care of these troops better. | ||
| The Russian troops in the regular army looks like nothing more than cannon fodder. | ||
| He does look like he takes care of these troops. | ||
| To talk about these gangs and these criminal elements and these mercenaries, what are they like? | ||
| How are they motivated? | ||
| How does he keep them together? | ||
|
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Well, it's leadership, to be honest. | |
| I mean, you know, I talked to a source in Moscow yesterday and this person was telling me I used to think Prigozhin was an idiot and dumb and stupid, but I listened to him and he's very intelligent and he makes a lot of sense. | ||
| So this is what's floating around Moscow right now. | ||
| And he did go to the prisons. | ||
| He opens up the prisons. | ||
| He recruits guys and says, if you survive, you can have your freedom back. | ||
| So when you're talking to a murderer who's there for life, and these are Russian prisons, they're not nice places. | ||
| They're not the gulag, but they're not nice places. | ||
| And so when you give that guy an opportunity, he's going to be loyal to you. | ||
| And then if you take care of him and make sure he gets weapons and they see you standing up to the Kremlin demanding ammunition and more support, And sticking up for you, then you're going to support him even more. | ||
| So this is the force that is possibly fighting the Russian army, which are conscripts. | ||
| If you go back to Kursk, in the battles in World War II, they cared nothing about human life. | ||
| It means nothing. It's like a dime on the street. | ||
| And so for them to send a wave of young boys into battle and just see how they do, and if they come back, they shoot them anyway. | ||
| I mean, this is what the mentality of the Russian army You know, command is. | ||
| And so when you have a guy who's actually taking care of his people, you know, they're dying, but they're fighting for their own personal freedom. | ||
| I mean, they're going to be loyal to this guy. | ||
| So this is what is approaching Russia, the Kremlin at this point. | ||
| Talk to us, the last thing, about what way the generals turn here. | ||
| Who do they back? How important is this over the next 72 hours? | ||
| And particularly, who actually controls the nuclear weapons, the tactical nuclear weapons in this region, sir? | ||
|
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I think Putin obviously still has control of the weapons. | |
| But another thing is... | ||
| What evidence do you have to show that? | ||
|
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I don't have evidence. It's just an educated, you know, what I think. | |
| But I don't think he's let go of the nuclear weapons. | ||
| I don't see any evidence of that at all. | ||
| I think the Russian Ministry of Defense still has control of that. | ||
| And, you know, so that is a whole separate question. | ||
| But essentially, this is the fog of war. | ||
| And I don't know how this is going to go down, but it's going to be really interesting to watch. | ||
| The Chechens moving to help Putin is a big sign to me that they may be a little bit worried. | ||
| I mean, this is, you know, Putin has set up Kudurov down in Chechnya for a long time and paid him money to be loyal to him. | ||
| And these are fierce fighters, and he needs their help. | ||
| When you say a little bit worried, Putin, that was humiliating, particularly when you see the CCP's their biggest, you know, the partner that funds them. | ||
| And there's a report out yesterday that I think in 59 different technologies that were banned, the CCP's providing them military, direct military aid. | ||
| Would Putin have to go on TV? and make this humiliating, very angry that this guy's treason and I'm going to stop him. | ||
| That in and of itself is a massive loss of faith for him to have to go kind of try to convince the nation, right? | ||
| So isn't he plenty worried already to actually, this guy forced him to go on national TV and condemn him? | ||
|
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Yeah, and you have a force from the Tsarist days where you called the Apriština, which was basically a Praetorian guard around the king. | |
| And this is what Putin has activated around him, but they can be bought off. | ||
| So, you know, it's literally a chessboard right now as to who's going to maintain control and who could possibly take control of Russia. | ||
| These are oligarchs. These are the FSB who are in bed with the business. | ||
| You know, it's a kleptocracy, and they're fighting for power and money. | ||
| And that's all that matters. | ||
| Russia doesn't matter. It's power and money. | ||
| Given, you know, you hear from MSNBC and all these people, the unrest in Russia about this, is the perception by the Russian people that, at least in the Ukraine, they appear to be at least winning right now, that the Ukrainians, this spring offensive hasn't really worked, and as bad as the Russian performance has been, They're kind of back to the old ways they did it, that they at least are holding their own. | ||
| It doesn't look like the Donbass is going to be lost. | ||
| Didn't look like Crimea until Wagner left and who knows what happens now. | ||
| But are the oligarchs, I mean, in your sense and your reporting in your context, have the oligarchs still got Putin's back or they could be persuaded also? | ||
|
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That's the big question. And, you know, people talking about Russia being a threat to the West, yes, with their nuclear weapons. | |
| Their conventional forces can't even take Donbas right now. | ||
| So they're not a threat to NATO conventionally. | ||
| But who's going to maintain control is the big question. | ||
| I can't answer that. | ||
| Obviously, we'll wait to see. | ||
| But the Russian people have been motivated by the propaganda machine in Moscow and elsewhere. | ||
| A lot of young boys left the country, but a lot of them were motivated to fight. | ||
| If you can break that patina of God and country that Putin personifies, Then that will be bad for him. | ||
| But as far as I can tell, the Russians are just like, what's going on? | ||
| They're trying to get out. Russians are very good at survival. | ||
| That's an art form over there. | ||
| And they're trying to just survive this and see what happens. | ||
| Todd, your sights are terrific. | ||
| Where do people go to stay up to date when everything is going on in this, it looks like, armed rebellion over in Russia right now? | ||
|
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Well, armedforces.press or armedforcespress is one of our main military sites. | |
| CDM.press has everything. | ||
| And then SARism is our Russian Eastern European site, T-S-A-R-I-Z-M.com. | ||
| And you can find everything there for the last 10 years. | ||
| I think we have some of the best coverage out there. | ||
| Perfect. Todd, great job. | ||
| And your guy knows the region. | ||
| Having spent time over there. | ||
| Thank you, sir. You bet. | ||
| Thanks, Steve. Remember, 60 days basically from this weekend, Durban, you know, Putin was going to be one of the leaders of this, BRICS, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and now African Union and many other nations, Egypt's thrown in and many others, of this meeting for what we call the Durban Accords. | ||
| And this is going to be to create a alternative currency to the United States, to the US dollar. | ||
| Of course, who knows if Putin will even be around by then. | ||
| However, what we do know is that in times of uncertainty, What you should be doing today is go to birchgold.com and go talk to one of the Birch Gold advisors. | ||
| Now more than ever, if the central banks of the world are buying gold in record numbers, why are you not considering it? | ||
| Well, you should talk to an expert, right? | ||
| And what we'll do is we'll put you in touch with an expert. | ||
| Go to birchgold.com. | ||
| We're going to be coming out with a new updated element. | ||
| It's going to take us a few days. | ||
| We're working on it right now. | ||
| Hopefully have it early next week that you'll be able to get about what the Durban Accords are going to mean for you personally and what this means for the dollars, the prime reserve currency, and how that's going to impact your country, your community, your family, and yourself. | ||
| But go to birchgold.com slash Bannon right now and go check it out. | ||
| Ben Harnwell, the nations of Europe. | ||
| What has happened this morning? | ||
| Are there emergency meetings? There was a report in the Telegraph At the crack of dawn that the European leaders are going to have an emergency telephonic meeting, what's going on? | ||
| Good morning, Steve. Well, this morning, the foreign ministers of the G7 nations did have a telephone call that was coordinated by Antony Blinken. | ||
| On Monday morning, the foreign ministers of the European Union nations are due to have a meeting, but that was a scheduled meeting anyway. | ||
| It's not an emergency meeting that's been convoked, especially because of the Pregosian developments. | ||
| The soundings are that neither the European Union nor NATO will have, at the present time, an extraordinary meeting to discuss these events, but obviously that can change along with developments. | ||
| And the other thing worth noting is that Giorgia Malone here in Italy has convoked a meeting of her secret services, her intelligence departments, to be breached. | ||
| She's spoken to Austrian Chancellor Niemeyer. | ||
| But I think they're just basically bilateral conversations to coordinate and to remain appraised. | ||
| So hang on for a second. | ||
| We're going to go to break. I want you to stick around. | ||
| Ben's been covering this extensively. | ||
| I'm going to ask his opinion on this. | ||
| One heads up is that we do know that Russian forces in Ukraine continue to slug it out. | ||
| So that doesn't stop. And it looks like, Ben, the counteroffensive or the spring offensive, whatever, is on some sort of pause. | ||
| They've taken some of these villages. | ||
| They're still fighting. They're trying to regain Bakhmut. | ||
| But that effort at least has stalled for now. | ||
| But the frontline troops they had, really the ones that took the brunt in going to Bakhmut, were the Wagner group. | ||
| Now, whether they get 1,000 people or 25,000, I said, who knows. | ||
| But they are certainly clearly out of the front line. | ||
| In that fight for the Russians to defend the Donbass, and they're at least in Rostov or maybe even heading north in kind of what we call Xenophon in reverse, right? | ||
| Xenophon's march to the sea. | ||
| Remember, those mercenaries got traded, got retraded when they were fighting for Persia, Greek mercenaries fighting for the Persians. | ||
| All of a sudden, we don't need you, and we're not going to pay you. | ||
| They had to fight their way back, and now it looks like the criminal gang, it's gang versus gang, Bloods versus Crips, gangs of New York, one against the other. | ||
| And a lot of reports come out, we're trying to break it all down to you. | ||
| Key to your well-being, not just the cyber weapons that the Russians have that have been hit in the United States over the last couple of weeks, but the nukes, particularly the tactical nukes. | ||
| You know, it's very uncertain. | ||
| We do know one thing. The generals in Russia have skimmed a lot of money and have it in banks in Malta, Cyprus, everywhere else. | ||
| Where are they going to come out in all this next in the war room? | ||
|
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Here's your host, Stephen K. Vance. | |
| Okay, Sam Faddis joins us by phone. | ||
| A long career in the CIA, working on types of things like this. | ||
| Sam, help us make sense of this. | ||
| In your assessment, what's going on? | ||
| Please tell me the CIA has put a ton of money and they semi-control the Wagner Group, or at least control, you know, a couple of three dozen of these Russian generals. | ||
| Is that a reality? | ||
|
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No. I mean, I wish I could tell you that, and once upon a time that would be Would have been the deal. | |
| I mean, at least that we would have the access. | ||
| No. I mean, we're... | ||
| I suspect that when people started posting stuff on Twitter, that's when CIA Ops Center found out that this was going on. | ||
| So I don't think we have any warning, and we are reactive. | ||
| Having listened on some of the previous guests, I agree. | ||
| I mean, fundamentally what's going to happen here is the question is going to boil down to where are all the powerful figures and powerful generals Are they going to watch the Wagner group go into Moscow and depose Putin, who may have already run away, or are they going to intervene? | ||
| That's what it's going to come down to. | ||
| Right now, the fact that they have as yet not stopped the Wagner group, I think, would suggest that they're going to let it happen. | ||
| Isn't that the big tell, and correct me if I'm wrong here, that when he went to Rostov, he announced he was going to Rostov, he announced he was pulling his mercenary group off the front line around Bakhmut and Donbass, and it's not even an easy journey to get there, but he went basically to the land bridge to Crimea where Rostov is. | ||
| He announced he was going to go there, and he was met by the head of the Russian Southern Command. | ||
| And at least on the video, it appeared that they met with him and had a meeting with him. | ||
| There weren't any troops. I mean, there was some fighting and it looks like people punching each other out or maybe... | ||
| Vehicles going around Rostov, but there was no armed defense, and they certainly didn't put him under arrest. | ||
| Isn't that a, if you're sitting in Moscow, that's a bad sign, right, where my southern command maybe either teamed up or said, hey, let this guy, you know, they'll figure it out as they move north? | ||
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100%. Look, they're rolling north, as I understand it. | |
| There are varying reports on how close the Wagner Group is to Moscow. | ||
| But look, they're not fighting their way north. | ||
| I mean, as you say, there is some fighting, but basically they're rocking and rolling down a highway headed for Moscow. | ||
| Okay, well, and nobody's bombing, you know, nobody in any organized, effective way is stopping them from moving at 60 miles an hour down a highway. | ||
| So yeah, that's a pretty big tell. | ||
| I would also note that when Putin made his big, well, his hurried announcement, his video announcement, Earlier, as I understand it, it was recorded and broadcast, not live. | ||
| That tells me he was already worried at that point, that worried about anybody knowing where he was. | ||
| So he was going to record it and then boogie. | ||
| There are also the reports bouncing around that he's left Moscow. | ||
| So all of that so far smells like The guys that are going to determine how this goes are standing to one side, at a minimum letting it happen. | ||
| If you're some of these, you know, gang leaders, isn't it pretty humiliating? | ||
| I know the CCP, if you've got to come out and do a thing like Putin did and accuse a guy of treason and you're an armed rebellion, you're trying to start a civil war, you know, you're going to be stopped. | ||
| That in and of itself is pretty humiliating, right? | ||
| When you've got to go on national TV and essentially convince the nation, you know, you've got to set the narrative so that the nation's in back of you. | ||
| In and of, that is a massive loss of face. | ||
| Is the way that people like the CCP look at it, Sam Faddis? | ||
|
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Without question. And look, the Russians know the reality. | |
| I mean, whether the Ukrainians can retake all the territory that the Russians took, that's a whole different deal, right? | ||
| Whether they can go on the offensive and take back the territory is a separate deal. | ||
| But they know Putin certainly hasn't achieved his objective from that standpoint. | ||
| He lost the war. They know they're pulling T-62 tanks. | ||
| There were obsolete when I was a tanker 40 years ago out of mothballs. | ||
| They know he's bleeding the country white, and this is all about the fact that he won't admit that they have failed. | ||
| Yes, they see all of that, and at some point the calculus maybe becomes, you've got to go, man. | ||
| You're leaving us all to ruin. | ||
| We've got to find somebody else. | ||
| In fact, his diatribe called it out about the sources of war. | ||
| He said the denazification program and the securing of the Donbass was going on fine. | ||
| We didn't need to go to Kyiv. | ||
| We didn't need an offensive movement a year ago that we were taking care of this and we weren't going to lose it. | ||
| What kind of impact do you think that has on people? | ||
| That looks like one of the things besides the armed element that really triggered Putin. | ||
|
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Your thoughts? I think people know that, look, this is rewriting history, right? | |
| Everybody knows what you tried to do. | ||
| You tried to stage your own Schockenau, Blitzkrieg, you thought you were going to be in Kiev in 72 hours. | ||
| We've all seen now that the Red Army that took Berlin in 1945 has long since ceased to exist. | ||
| We know this is a disaster. | ||
| Everybody knows that. So you can lie all you want and broadcast. | ||
| I mean, you know, the Russians have had people lie to them for forever. | ||
| So it doesn't change the fact that they know they're being lied to and they know exactly how bad this is. | ||
| Can the Russian army hold Bakhmut and hold Donbass and eastern Russian-speaking Ukraine without the 25,000-man reputed mercenary army of the Wagner Group? | ||
|
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Yeah, I think so. | |
| I don't think that that doesn't equal they can hold literally every inch of territory. | ||
| But, you know, what the Russians have been doing for months now is building successive defensive lines. | ||
| So they long since recognized that the offensive was over, no matter what they say publicly. | ||
| And now they're just building this massive series of successive defensive lines to make it just Way too costly for the Ukrainians to ever be able to fight through that. | ||
| So the fact that the Ukrainians could bring them to a halt does not at all indicate the Ukrainians can now retake all that territory. | ||
| I mean, we're in a stalemate where we've been for a long time, and that's why we should have been trying, in my opinion, to talk this thing down and get these people to the table a long time ago instead of Pouring jet fuel on the fire and having Lindsey Graham dance around smiling, talking about killing Russians. | ||
| We should have been trying to bring this thing to a close. | ||
| Sam, real quickly, are you concerned about who controls the nuclear weapons right now? | ||
|
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Yeah, 100%. | |
| I mean, there are 40 different sites in Russia where there are nuclear weapons. | ||
| There are roughly 6,000 nuclear warheads there. | ||
| At least 1,600 of those are operational. | ||
| These are rough numbers. | ||
| We have this. So, you know, all those missiles are... | ||
| Sam, just hang on for one second. | ||
| It's a 90-second break. Top of the show. | ||
| I want to keep you on. Sam, heading out today to do grassroots MAGA work up in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. | ||
| Short break. Back in a moment. |
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