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March 9, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
20:32
Larry Johnson : Ukraine without US Intel (Live from Moscow)
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, March 10th, 2025.
Larry Johnson joins us.
He and I are here together in Moscow, in Russia.
We've been here together for five days.
We will talk briefly about the briefing that we just had at the Russian Foreign Ministry with just four or five people in the room and Sergei Lavrov himself.
And then I will talk to Larry about the significance of the loss of U.S. intel to the Ukraine people in the Ukraine fighting machine.
Larry, a pleasure, my dear friend.
What are your general impressions?
They don't want us to quote anybody, of course, until the foreign ministry puts its official transcript up on their website.
But what are your general impressions from the two hours we just spent In a room listening to Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
They said they're going to deport me because I didn't bring any of my Tommy Bahama shirts.
The emailers are saying, who is that guy with a necktie on?
A tie on?
It's an imposter.
No, it was a warm, friendly, genuine meeting.
There are a lot of people in the United States that have what I'll call a Hollywood impression of Russia.
They still think it's the old Soviet Union.
They still think it's a place where they lie and they present false images.
I had some North American that I know.
Send me a message about the Potomkin village.
You know, they used to make up villages and pretend that they, you know, they're like facades.
But that's not the case.
You know, Russia has, you know, over the last 25 years, I think they've really charted a path of what the United States could be.
Because instead of spending all their money on needless foreign wars, literally trillions of dollars.
They invested that money here in this country.
Now, is it to say that Russia is a utopia and that they don't have problems?
No. Do they have corruption at the local level?
Yes, but hell, look at the United States.
The Russians are pikers compared to us with the levels of corruption that we see across the United States.
What you don't see There's trash piled up in the streets, homeless people, drug addicts living in tents strung along the sidewalks.
You can walk safely at night without worrying about being mugged.
And so, you know, what we encountered at the Foreign Ministry was just a genuine level of openness and a little, you know, sort of hopeful.
Let's put it that way.
Hopeful that they're hearing some things out of Donald Trump that they have not heard out of either the Joe Biden administration or the first Trump administration or the Obama administration.
Russia simply wants to have normal relationships.
And unfortunately, the United States, we've been behaving like the drunken brother-in-law throwing up in their car.
And that wears a little thin.
Larry, I agree with all of your observations about cleanliness, about happiness, about economic prosperity, and I would add to it about Orthodox Christianity.
I mean, a very, very traditional, devout version of Christianity centering around the Russian Orthodox Church.
I attended a Russian Orthodox Mass, which...
In many, many ways was reminiscent to me of the old Latin mass, which you can still get in the United States, but sparingly, but the one that was universal before the changes brought the Vatican II.
Over to Minister Lavrov, I too detected, I wouldn't say annihilation because he's a cautious man by nature, but I detected hopefulness.
In anticipation of the Trump-Putin meeting, they know and they hope that this will happen, that this is going to be more than the end of the war.
They want a complete reset between the economic, political, military, cultural relations between the United States and Russia, and they want to involve other economic giants.
Like China and Mexico and Brazil in this reset as well.
And that optimism to me was clear in what the foreign minister told you and me and just two or three others a few hours ago.
Look, they're looking for a normal diplomatic relationship.
What does that mean?
Well, it doesn't mean we agree on everything.
It means that we may have disagreements.
But those disagreements are handled by talking, not by killing one another.
We have yet to learn in the United States, after 80 years since the end of World War II, that we keep getting ourselves embroiled in foreign wars that end up accomplishing nothing.
Other than bankrupting our country, leaving some of our citizens with traumatic brain injuries or physical handicaps that limit their ability to enjoy life.
And for what purpose?
Will we kill literally hundreds of thousands of foreigners, which doesn't exactly build goodwill towards the United States?
It really is time.
That we figure out how can we embrace peace.
We're not worried about making Russia our ally.
Let's worry about making Russia our friend.
Russia is willing to be our friend.
Instead of allies, that means you've got to have somebody you're against.
Let's just see if we can all get along.
As Rodney King said in the aftermath of those riots in Los Angeles so many years ago.
Before I begin to ask you about intel, I have to play a clip from our least favorite Republican senator in the United States Senate, the senior senator from South Carolina.
I would like you to explain what you think he was talking about.
Here is Senator Graham Criss, cut number three.
In terms of Russia, I will be introducing sanctions on their banking sector and on their energy sector next week, urging them to get to the table.
If they don't engage in ceasefire and peace talks with the administration, we should sanction the hell out of them.
Does he know what he's talking about when he says we should sanction the hell out of them as if we haven't done so already?
Graham is a buffoon.
He's a clown without the red nose.
You know, Russia is fighting a war for its survival, its existence.
And it has been a war that the United States has engaged as a proxy, along with Europe.
And Russia's not going to lay down and stop.
The record of U.S. broken promises with Russia is long and deep.
And so they've been played for suckers in the past.
They've been bamboozled in the past, and they're not going to let it happen now.
They recognize, okay, we trusted the Americans once too many times.
It was George W. Bush that walked away from the anti-ballistic missile treaty.
It was Hollande and Merkel of France and Merkel of Germany.
That basically did a charade with the Minsk-1 and Minsk-2 agreements and admitted later that it was all just a pretext to arm Ukraine so that they could go to war with Russia.
It was Donald Trump who walked away from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Agreement and the INF.
So, you know, time after time.
And they witnessed that they had a peace agreement, an agreement that actually Ukraine brought to the table.
And Russia was willing to accept it in April of 2022, and yet it was the United States and the United Kingdom that sabotaged it.
So, you know, here's Graham.
Oh, we're going to hurt their banking sector.
They don't understand.
Russia no longer cares about the West.
They don't need us.
They have their own sophisticated banking system.
As you and I talked last night with the wonderful gentleman we had dinner with, that the bankers in Russia, they know how to work the world.
It's the United States that's basically hurting itself, cutting itself off from economic relationships.
Russia doesn't need a damn thing from the West.
There's not one single thing that the United States exports that Russia needs.
Not true for the United States.
We need Russian fertilizer.
And we rely upon a significant portion of uranium produced and enriched in Russia.
The United States is—we're not the powerhouse we like to think we are.
Apparently, Senator Graham is ignorant—I don't want to spend an undue amount of time on him—of the need of farmers in South Carolina for Russian fertilizer.
And he's also ignorant of the need of nuclear reactor operators for enriched uranium, which we obtain from the Russians.
Those are the only things that we don't sanction.
So when he says sanction the hell out of them, that's just political hooey.
He really doesn't know what he's talking about.
I just hope, Larry, that he, because he plays golf with the president all the time, I hope that he's not whispering this craziness into the president's ear.
I know I said I don't want to dwell on this, but you can't beat me.
It's hilarious.
Here's Senator Graham then and now, and then Senator Graham yesterday.
So, Christopher, I have this right.
It's cut number nine, and then cut number two.
I want to tell you and your people, you're the ally I've been hoping for all my life.
Not one American has died defending Ukraine.
You've taken our weapons and you've kicked their ass.
And I'm very proud to have you as our ally.
So, what do I think?
Complete, utter disaster.
What I saw in the Oval Office was disrespectful, and I don't know if we can ever do business with Zelensky again.
Yeah, I am worried about cutting off intelligence and weapons to Ukraine as long as the fighting is going on.
If we pull the plug on Ukraine, it'd be worse than Afghanistan.
I don't think President Trump has any desire to do that.
But until we have a ceasefire, I would give Ukraine what they need in terms of intelligence and weapons to defend themselves.
I don't know who he talks to.
Alistair Crook told us a few minutes ago that in his view...
There's still a significant stockpile of American weapons available to the Ukrainians in Ukraine and in Romania.
However, and this is your field, the cutoff of Intel could be catastrophic because they don't know where Russian troop movements are coming from and they don't know where Russian military equipment is without U.S. satellites.
Are you of the same understanding on that, Larry?
Yeah, this is not a case of the CIA cutting off intelligence, because the CIA provides human intelligence, what people are saying.
This is military intelligence.
This is intelligence collected by what are called intelligence surveillance reconnaissance platforms, ISR.
Some of it is from fixed-wing aircraft.
Some of it is from satellites.
But it provides...
Precise details about locations.
It provides data that can be pumped, you know, inputted into these, you know, such as a Patriot missile defense system or a HIMARS.
And so without that, yeah, Ukraine is now blind.
And it has forced them to curtail their operations because, you know, this is going to be a forced ceasefire on the part of Ukraine.
Russia is not.
I'm going to accept a ceasefire, except along the conditions that Vladimir Putin outlined in June of 2024.
He's very clear.
One, the Ukrainians need to withdraw from Russian territory, which includes Kherson, Zaporizhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk.
Ukraine has to pull out of there.
Ukraine has to have a new election because Zelensky is an illegal...
President. He's serving in violation of the Ukrainian Constitution.
And believe it or not, Vladimir Putin is a lawyer, and he's a stickler for that part of the law.
So, you know, those two are critical elements that are going to have to take place before there's anything like a ceasefire.
And, you know, I think the Trump administration is doing what it can to force Ukraine down that path.
Foreign Minister Lavrov impressed upon you and me and the others in the room a few hours ago.
Was there adamance against any kind of a peacekeeping force?
He even sort of mocked it, saying the emphasis would be on force, not on peacekeeping.
So if President Macron and Prime Minister Starmer...
I think that French and British troops at the new Ukraine-Russian border would be acceptable to Russia.
They're crazy.
They'll be blown away by Russian troops the minute they set foot there.
And I think, Larry, that President Trump, not Senator Graham, but I think President Trump understands that.
Yeah, well, the Europeans are not to be taken seriously.
You know, there was a time when you could take them seriously, but not anymore.
They're like a yappy little dog with no teeth.
They've got grand ambitions.
They may think they're a Doberman pincher or a Great Dane, but the reality is neither France nor Germany nor England can field an army of any size or credibility.
They're not properly armed.
They're certainly not properly trained.
They don't have the logistics tail.
And so it's like children playing dress up and pretending to be something that they're not.
And that's where the Europeans are, but the rhetoric.
The Russians have to take what they say into account because they keep talking about wanting war and wanting to extend the war and wanting to expand the war.
Good Lord.
They're doing it where they haven't paid a price for this.
Are you of the view that Zelensky will be short-lived for the world if he were to stop the military resistance of the Russians, that the people around him would kill him?
Well, he may not have any choice in the matter, because what we've seen happen Now in the Kursk region over the last three or four days is the pace of the Russian advance in surrounding and destroying the Ukrainian invaders has accelerated.
And the Ukrainians now are openly talking about the massive casualties that they've suffered, and they're blaming Zelensky, Zelensky and Sersky, and probably the Brits as well.
This was a catastrophe of a military proposal.
They thought that if they occupied a small portion of Russia, not militarily, politically, or commercially significant to the rest of the country and nowhere near Moscow, that they could use it as leverage in negotiating.
And it's backfired on them, utterly, utterly backfired.
And I think you told me recently in one of our hundreds of conversations here in Moscow, That you're of the view that there are American soldiers of fortune in Kirsk, and those people also are fighting with the Ukrainians.
Those people also are not alone for the world.
Yeah, there have been some videos.
I don't know if this was genuine or was a propaganda piece, but they did show the Russians executing some of the mercenaries.
Because they're foreign fighters and they're wearing a foreign uniform, they're being treated as if they were spies and they're being executed.
There's not a good way out for these mercenaries.
When you think about it, this has been going on now for five months and the total losses are approaching 70,000.
In just six months.
So it's really a significant loss to the Ukrainian side.
And I think the Russians are feeling confident that they're going to be able to bring an end to this war on their terms.
They don't need a negotiated settlement.
If anyone in the West is proceeding from the assumption that, oh, the Russians are really suffering, the Russians are hurting, and they need to get out of this, Bollocks.
That's not the case.
It's just the opposite.
The Russians have not even mobilized.
And you and I have seen that, you know, driving around Moscow and to other parts outside the city.
This is not a nation that's mobilized for war.
This is why they call it a special military operation.
Larry Johnson, a pleasure, my dear friend.
I'll be with you shortly.
Thank you very much for joining us.
Thank you for interrupting your schedule to accommodate mine.
All the best.
Always, Judge.
Always a pleasure.
Thank you.
Coming up at the top of the hour, Ray McGovern.
Does Intel really want to leave Ukraine?
Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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