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June 4, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
15:51
Pepe Escobar : How Angry are the Russians?
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Thursday, June 5th, 2025.
Pepe Escobar joins us from five hours outside of Moscow.
Pepe, it's a pleasure, my dear friend, no matter what we have to talk about, even though we're going to discuss some dreadfully serious things.
Thank you for being here.
My pleasure.
Oh, thank you.
Notwithstanding your smile, how angry are the Russian people, the Russian elites, and the circle around President Putin over the drone attacks on the weekend?
Extremely angry.
We could define it as silent fury.
And everybody is waiting a devastating response.
Putin himself hinted that there will be a response.
Medvedev was not...
Basically, he said, the people who have to be punished will be punished, and what has to be blown up will be blown up.
And this is what Russian public opinion is waiting for.
There are, I would say, there are a lot of dissident voices, even among well-informed circles of power in Moscow, saying that...
Putin is taking too long.
The response will not be as devastating as it should be, and it will once again be judged as a sign of weakness by the collective West.
You wrote a captivating article, which I think came out just yesterday, called Waiting for the Ereshniks.
Yes.
That is a headline grabber.
An eye-grabber.
Do you expect President Putin to dispatch Oreshniks?
And if so, at what targets and in what countries?
But that's exactly the question that everyone is asking.
Not only in Moscow.
For instance, I am here in Nizhny Novgorod because of a global digital forum.
Immensely important.
A great deal of the global South is here.
And when we talk to Africans, for instance, when we talk to Pakistanis, when we talk to Venezuelans, everybody is waiting for the response, of course.
And all sorts of speculation.
Will it be a massive ballistic missile offensive?
Will it be a few Oreshniks?
Will it be a mix of both?
Or will they take their time?
The thing is, taking their time is exactly what the Supreme Council wants, because they want to establish exactly the chain of command leading to the attack, the drone, theoretically, Kiev drone attack on the strategic bombers.
We can say with a certain measure of certainty that up to now, they don't have the full chain of command.
The famous Putin-Trump phone call, one hour and 15 minutes maximum, it's being interpreted by the security agencies, in fact, as Putin extracting from Trump, swearing to all pantheons of all gods in the universe that he was out of the loop about the attack.
So we don't know because there were no leaks.
In Washington and no leaks in Moscow about the phone call.
Does the Kremlin believe that Trump and United States officials did not know?
And if the answer to that is yes, then who the hell do they think is in charge of American foreign policy?
Exactly.
And this is something that among people at the SVR, the FSB, think tanks, People who have transit with the corridors of power in the Kremlin and at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as well.
Up to which level Trump is out of the loop?
This is the number one question for everybody, in fact.
Which in itself is extremely worried because we're dealing with the presidency of the United States.
But this is what it comes down to.
Past few hours, coming here from where I was, I was checking what was going on at this moment.
We have the President of the United States and multi-megabillionaire Elon Musk reduced to the status of kids squabbling in a sandbox, which in itself is also pathetic.
Who's in charge?
Well, is there any question in the Kremlin's mind that MI6, CIA, and Mossad were aware of this?
Yes, absolutely.
And we can say that between SVR and FSB, it's practically the consensus.
Yes, this was a NATO operation.
Yes, it was basically conducted by a mix of CIA, MI6, Mossad, and SBU.
Because they work very, very closely.
Everybody knows that.
What is not established so far by the Russian investigation, which is very thorough, and it's taking some time.
Today is already Thursday, right?
Was it silos inside the CIA, silos inside the MI6, or did it come from the top on both cases?
And was there some sort of Mossad intervention in coming up with a scheme that has a certain similarity with the pagers exploding in Hezbollah's hands in Lebanon?
So this is part of the whole investigation.
And the fact that Medvedev quit for At least for a while, his figure of being the number one troll from the Russian government, let's put it this way, to be very, very serious in what he said in one of his latest tweets, is that the people will be punished.
So they already have, certainly they already have some names.
And what has to be blown up will be blown up.
We can always understand that this has to do with SBU and GUR in Kiev.
The Russians take out President Zelensky.
It's not in their interest, Judge.
Because even if Putin practically described in these past 24 hours, he described the setup in Kiev as a terrorist organization.
So what we're going to have is something that already happened before, but not really de facto.
It's not going to be an SMO, a special military operation.
It's going to be a CTO, a counter-terrorist operation.
Because for the Kremlin, for the SVR, for the FSB, for everybody at the top here, for the Siloviki, all the intel agencies and all the practitioners of realpolitik and actual deciding foreign policy here, they are dealing with a terrorist regime in Kiev.
So they will act accordingly.
I'm coming to the conclusion from all the people to whom I've spoken, not just on this issue, but on many other issues, that there is a rogue element to the CIA.
Yes.
By rogue, I mean it spends money, it does things, it kills people, but it doesn't answer to the higher-ups.
Is there a similar rogue element in MI6 and Mossad?
Or did Keir Starmer know about this?
Did Bibi Netanyahu know about this and Donald Trump didn't?
That's exactly what the Russians are trying to investigate, Judge.
And this might take, it took so far, what, four days?
It could take another week at least.
They want to be absolutely positive in terms of identifying the chain of command.
Because this, we have to go back to the cliche, but this is a red line that was established by President Putin himself.
This was a direct attack on one of the branches of the Russian nuclear triad.
It can be, let's say, the weakest link.
Especially because the TU-95s, they're not even being manufactured anymore.
But it was a direct attack on the nuclear triad.
And obviously it was a direct attack on the START treaty as well.
So that's why they're taking it extremely seriously.
And the fact that in the first 48, 72 hours at least, there was absolute silence by the people.
There was total silence in Moscow since Sunday.
The silence was broken yesterday, Wednesday only, and partially because the investigation has to continue.
Here's how some of that silence was broken.
The Foreign Ministry Special Envoy, Mr. Miroshnik.
Chris, cut number four.
This large-scale incident has Ukrainian roots.
Terrorist methods are internationally prohibited, but they're used at state level by Ukraine.
Kiev is fundamentally not satisfied with the dialogue being organized.
Therefore, immediately on the eve of the next round of negotiations, a whole series of terrorist acts was committed, which emphatically sought to force Russia to abandon negotiations.
But we do not consider it possible for us to take this kind of action, because negotiations and military activities will be separated.
And as for terrorist actions, I think that their organizers will receive appropriate responses.
There will definitely be no forgiveness or backing down in this sense, but their mission of forcing Russia to abandon negotiations by heavy pressure simply did not work out.
No, no forgiveness.
Pepe, are you there?
Yes, I'm back!
Can you hear me?
Yes, we can hear you and we can see you.
I don't know if you heard that full statement, but he basically said there will be no forgiveness for what was done, which is consistent with what you've been saying.
There will be no forgiveness.
And, of course, we can say straight away it was a humiliation for Russia.
There's no question about that.
Even though it was not as catastrophic as it seemed to be between Sunday and Sunday.
To Monday, where everybody was in shock, including the higher echelons of power.
So the response, it will have to be devastating.
And this also was part of what Putin tried to impress on President Trump on their phone call.
Even though there were no leaks.
This was part of the conversation.
What is the extent of the damage?
Alistair Crook says five to seven planes.
The Ukrainians say 41 planes.
What do the Russians say?
Well, I discussed this with Alistair.
We had a long conversation on Monday.
we more or less agree that at maximum of seven TU-95s and maybe TU-160.
I lost you for a second there.
You were describing your conversation with Alistair about the nature of the planes that were destroyed.
Do we still have you, my dear friend?
All right, it looks like we've lost him.
Chris will do his best to communicate with Pepe to see if he can re-log on.
Well, we know from what we have heard today from Scott Ritter, from Colonel Wilkerson, and from Pepe Escobar, that the Russians will take this with utmost seriousness, that the Russians plan and intend a methodical response.
Pepe, are you back with us?
Okay, the last we heard was your conversation with Alistair Crook.
You can't hear us.
Can you hear me now, Pepe?
I think we lost him.
All right, so the last we heard from Pepe was this conversation with our friend Alistair Crook who told us on Monday morning that his sources told him Six or seven planes destroyed.
What's been amplified since then is the typical Russian patients, methodical research to determine who was truly behind this before a fusillade of response is unleashed.
So we'll call it a show.
We trust that Pepe is well.
Now he's going to make you one more effort to come back with us.
Are you back, Pepe?
Are you back with us, my dear friend?
Can you hear us, Pepe?
Hello?
Yes, can you hear us?
All right, I don't think this is going to work.
So we'll finish this broadcast with Pepe trying to communicate with us.
And we'll thank you very much for watching.
Tomorrow, Friday, 7:30 in the morning Eastern, on all of this, Professor Jeffrey Sachs: Why Does the West Want War?
And at four o 'clock in the afternoon, as usual, the end of the day, the end of the week, the Intelligence Community Roundtable with Larry Johnson, who will soon be on his way to Moscow, and Ray McGovern.
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