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Aug. 26, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
23:10
Aaron Maté : How the Ukraine War Started.
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Wednesday, August 27, 2025.
Aaron Mate, my dear friend, joins us now.
Aaron, thank you very much for your time.
Thanks for accommodating my schedule.
I know you've been doing some writing and research on the origins of the war in Ukraine.
So if I may, a couple of questions about that.
When the CIA and MI6 toppled President Yanukovych in 2014, why did the new government begin shelling, killing Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the eastern part of the country?
Well, because the people that propelled the coup that overthrew Yanukovych were ultranationalists.
Recall that the Maidan, when it began in November 2013, this is the protest against Yanukovych because he delayed signing a trade deal with the EU.
There wasn't a clear goal of regime change.
It was mostly people upset that Yanukovych was, in their eyes, turning away from the West and aligning closer with Russia when in reality it was actually more complex.
Yanukovych had read the fine print of the deal that the European Union was putting before him and the European Union was asking him to basically cut off people's pensions, cut off subsidies for energy and basically make the cost of living higher for Yanukovych's constituency, especially in the east of the country, where it also was saying you have to cut off ties to Russia.
And Yanukovych recognized that for him, this would be a political disaster.
So he delayed signing that deal, which led to protests.
which the U.S. and their allies then exploited by trying to push for regime change and in the process siding with a small faction of hardline made-on elements, people like the Svoboda Party, which were founded with neo-Nazi inspirations.
And so after the coup, which was pushed by elements like Svoboda, the ultra-nationalists got a lot of senior cabinet posts in the new government, and they took up their movement's top priorities, which included essentially wiping out Russian culture in the country.
The first parliamentary act that was seriously taken up was to essentially ban Russia as an official state language.
And in response to this, you had people in the East rising up in protest.
And the ultra-nationalists, rather than trying to, you know, broker a compromise, took this as an opportunity to escalate their attacks.
And you had things happen like the Odessa massacre, which was in early May.
May 2014, where dozens of people who were protesting the Maidan and calling for their rights as ethnic Russians, they were burned alive in a trade union building by a fascist mob.
So events like that helped galvanize this protest.
And then you also had the CIA coming over.
John Brennan slipped into Kiev in mid April.
And according to a source that I spoke to who was there at the meeting, told his counterparts who he had helped put in office that you should launch an attack on the Donbass.
You should forget about negotiations and we'll help you out.
And lo and behold, two days later, that's exactly what the Ukrainian government did.
Is there a meaning?
meaning to the word meaning with significance to the word Maidan?
Well, Maidan is simply the square where the protest began.
Okay.
And this is the event orchestrated in part or at least promoted by Victoria Nuland and her colleagues.
Absolutely.
If you go back to that period, you look at the media outlets that were promoting the Maidan protest, promoting the coup.
So many of them have ties to US funding.
In fact, there was one Ukrainian outlet that just spontaneously emerged right as the Maidan began, like out of nowhere, all of a sudden there was a brand new Ukrainian outlet and it was funded by the U.S. government.
And Nuland bragged about this, that the U.S. had invested billions of dollars in promoting what she called Ukrainian civil society, which in real life means fronts for U.S. interests, fronts that the U.S. can use to promote its regime change agenda, to the point where, you know, after Zelensky got elected, he was elected on a mandate of peace.
And in the first stages of his term, He did take some genuine steps towards trying to make peace and towards implementing the Minsk Accords, which was the European brokered pact endorsed by the UN Security Council to end the war that began with the MEDAN coup.
And as Zelensky took steps, there was a really famous document put out by a group of so-called Ukrainian civil society members.
It's a bunch of groups.
And Ivan Kachinowski, who is a Ukrainian Canadian professor at University of Ottawa, he pointed out that if you look at the list of signatories, the vast majority are all funded by the US and their allies.
And what did this letter say?
The statement said to Zelensky, do not implement the Minsk Accords, that recognizing that ethnic Russians in the East have legitimate grievances, that would be a red line for us and allowing the Russian Orthodox Church to operate in Ukraine, that's a red line.
So at every turn, the U.S. through its funded organizations in Ukraine, its proxies, promoted confrontation.
All right.
So President Obama leaves office and President Trump comes in and Trump begins arming Zelensky's government to the teeth.
Is there any articulable reason for that?
Well, the reason why Trump armed Ukraine was because of Russia gate.
This was at the time when there was this all-consuming frenzy of allegations that Russia had waged a massive interference campaign to install Trump in office.
And that Trump's campaign was possibly complicit.
And it seems so funny to look back on now, but this was the dominant story of the first Trump years.
And nobody challenged it in establishment media.
Unfortunately, a lot of progressive media too.
And so with that consensus solidified that Trump was the product of Russia and that he might even be a Russian conspirator, the hawks in Trump's White House took advantage of this and to dispel the notion he was a Russian agent.
encouraged him to authorize hawkish steps that Obama hadn't even taken, including arming Ukraine.
And so many accounts have come out since the New York Times recently reported that all while Trump's opponents were, you know, just hyperventilating about him.
possibly being a Russian asset.
U.S. intelligence officials thought this was great because it meant that people, that this was this whole thing about Trump being a Russian asset was a good cover for Trump's administration to undertake hawkish policies against Russia and Ukraine, including building up, we learned from the New York Times, a number of secret bases and expanding their training and intelligence operations with Ukraine, basically turning.
Ukraine into even more of a CIA proxy.
So Russia Gate was the perfect storm because it encouraged Trump to escalate tensions with Russia, all while incentivizing the media and the political establishment to ignore what Trump was doing because they were so beholden to.
the conspiracy theory that he was actually doing what Vladimir Putin wanted.
I mean, you can't make this up.
The same deep state that was trying to ruin his presidency was encouraging him to arm the Ukrainians to wage the mental proxy war against Putin.
That's right.
And this is what so much of my forthcoming book is all about.
It's about how contrary to the view that we're ruled by elected leaders, when it comes to matters of war and peace, it's the entrenched foreign policy bureaucracy that gets its way.
And that's true as much about Trump as it is under Obama.
Obama, if you read all the accounts, he didn't want to arm Ukraine.
He was very worried about weapons, U.S. weapons going to neo-Nazis.
And he was very worried that this would provoke Russia.
And he also was worried that if we keep arming Ukraine, it's going to give Ukraine the false impression that they can win if we ultimately provoke Russia into invading.
So Barack Obama foresaw all of this.
But ultimately, if you look at the record of his administration, it didn't matter what he really thought because Victoria Nuland as a senior State Department official took it upon herself along with others like Daniel Fried, who's serving the State Department to basically undermine Obama's own professed policy of giving the Minsk Accords a chance.
And so Nuland encouraged an escalation.
And finally, when Obama left office, the same foreign policy bureaucracy that Nuland was a part of took advantage of Russia Gate to push Trump even more than Obama had been pushed.
And that's why they got the weapons sent.
That's why in Trump's first year, Congress also passed a measure solidifying Nuland's sanctions that she had designed and making it impossible for Trump to undo them.
And Trump signed that bill.
He signed it.
He didn't want to, but he signed it because, you know, under the storm of Trump-Russia allegations, he had no choice.
So there's a recurring theme here.
that no matter what the elected president wants, it's the hawkish entrenched voices that have their say.
And by the way, that's also true in Ukraine, because what happened in Ukraine after Zelensky was elected, the ultranationalist far right, which was very small numerically, but very large in power and the swear of the government, which had been empowered by the Maidan coup with the help of the U.S., they told Zelensky, forget it.
Like, no matter what you want, it doesn't matter.
And if you make peace with Russia, we'll kill you.
Multiple people in Ukraine's far right threatened Zelensky's life.
We've talked about a few of them before.
And in fact, one more just came this week.
The Times of London interviewed a guy named Sergei Cernecki of Right Sector.
Okay.
And this is what he said just recently.
If Zelensky were to give any on.
any unconquered land away, he would be a corpse politically and then for real.
It would be a bomb under our sovereignty.
People would never accept it.
And you can go back and see similar statements made to Zelensky right after he took office.
Another member of right sector said that Zelensky will hang from a tree if he betrays the Maidan revolution.
So this is a recurring theme in both the U.S. and Ukraine.
Whatever the elected president wants, it's always undermined by the entrenched talks in both countries.
So when Trump complains that Zelensky is being unrealistic by not ceding the territories that russia occupies is it fair to say zelensky has no choice well zelensky uh look if zelensky i think had had more integrity and more courage uh he could resign and say look i'm in an impossible situation where the far right won't let me make peace and and and the u.s up to this point hasn't
given me any help but he hasn't had that integrity he's he's chosen to be a tool of the far right.
I just wonder, and it's a counterfactual now, had there not been this convergent pressure from the ultranationalists in Ukraine coupled with Hawks in Washington?
Washington, who encouraged Zelensky at every single turn to ignore Minsk.
William Taylor, who was a top U.S. diplomat under Trump in Ukraine in Trump's first term.
William Taylor went to Zelensky personally and told him to ignore German efforts to save the Minsk Accords, told him it was a terrible idea.
So in a different world, had there not been this converging pressure on Zelensky, I don't know what Zelensky would have done.
I don't know who he really is.
But all I know is since then, he's turned into a complete tool of both Who is the international monitor about which you have spoken recently now blaming the war on both NATO and these nationalist fanatics.
His name is Benoit Paret.
He's a French national and he spent seven years deployed in Ukraine with the OSCE, which is a European-dominated monitoring group that was trying to impose a ceasefire in Ukraine and see about the implementation of the Minsk Accords, was the aforementioned pact to end the Donbass war that began with the 2014 Maidan coup.
And speaking to Paré, what he told me was that basically, in his view, Russia was provoked in Ukraine Not that the Russian-backed rebels were scot-free.
I mean, they committed atrocities of their own, but that he sees there's so many junctures at which there were provocations of the rebels, that Ukraine was the main obstacle to implementing the Minsk Accords because Ukraine's parliament refused to pass a law that would have allowed for greater autonomy for the Donbass, which was the key requirement of Minsk.
And the reason why Ukrainian parliament didn't pass that law is because in August 2015, when they tried, again, the altern ultranationalists, extremists held a deadly protest outside Parliament, at which security forces were killed and many were injured.
So this was a policy of what the Ukrainian American journalist Lev Galinkin calls veto through violence.
That whenever there were steps towards peace, Ukraine's ultranationalists, with the tacit or direct backing of the US, imposed a policy of veto through violence.
And Paret, being on the ground with the OSCE, he saw this up close.
And he reports.
and confirms, you know, what was previously known that in the days leading up to Russia's invasion in February 2022, there was a massive escalation of shelling coming from the Ukrainian government side onto the rebel-controlled side.
And that was taken by Russia and its allies that Ukraine was preparing for a major assault on the Donbass.
So, you know, it speaks to Russian claims that essentially the people of the Donbass were at risk unless Russia took action.
When Joe Biden was in the White House, he kept saying there are no boots on the ground, meaning American troops on the ground in Ukraine, which a lot of us interpreted to mean, okay, they're out of uniform.
So the phrase boots on the ground is technically accurate, but highly misleading.
Do we know if there are American troops there now?
they're now in uniform or out in Ukraine?
And do we know if American military from Germany is still directing Ukraine military in Ukraine?
On the issue of the Ukrainian military being directed from Germany, from US base, yes, that's still happening.
Although there was a recent report in the Wall Street Journal saying that Trump has rolled back the Biden policy of letting Ukraine use long-range U.S. weapons to strike inside Russia.
So militarily, that's been the one significant change from Biden to Trump is that Trump is not letting Ukraine strike inside Russia with U.S. weapons.
As for U.S. military forces, yeah, there are some there on the ground as advisors.
How many?
I don't know.
But even before Russia invaded, saying there were no boots on the ground is misleading because there were boots on the ground to train Ukrainian forces.
There was a massive training operation by the U.S. in Ukraine, starting with the 2014 MADOC coup.
Thousands of Ukrainian soldiers were trained by the U.S. and the goal.
as the U.S. Army admitted, was to increase interoperability between Ukraine and NATO.
So basically to turn Ukraine into a NATO proxy force.
Well, surely CIA and MI6 are still on the ground well if you believe the new york times account that the us uh after the made-on coup established at least 12 secret bases yes there's every reason to believe those bases are still operational wow um what's going on with si hersch is this documentary coming out about him uh critical or accurate or laudatory or what si hersch uh sat down with laura poitress who's a uh acclaimed documentary
filmmaker she's the one who sat down with edward snowden did she not yes okay she did and she won the oscar for it so she along with uh a documentary about Syhirsch going through his extraordinary career and it comes out this fall.
And it's not a hack job on Syhirsch.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
It's done with his full cooperation and I'm really looking forward to seeing it.
I haven't seen it yet, but I'm looking forward to seeing it.
But it has his full blessing.
He's happy with it.
Okay, I apologize for...
Chris, I think it's number 15.
We are destroying everything that is still left of the Strip simply because everything there is just one big terror city.
As part of the war, the IDF is moving the population out of the combat zones and not leaving one stone upon another.
I'm telling you, just look at the videos of what's happening in the Gaza Strip.
The population will move to the south of the Strip and from there, God willing, to third countries as part of President Trump's plan.
This is a change in the course of history, nothing less.
The bare minimum will reach the population simply so that the world won't stop us and accuse us of war crimes.
The IDF is finally conducting a campaign against Hamas' civil administration and not just focusing on the military infrastructure.
We are eliminating ministers, officials, money changers and figures in Hamas' economic and governmental apparatus.
For two and a half months, we did not allow humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip.
This created tremendous pressure on Hamas and that's a good thing.
But even pressure needs to be regulated so it doesn't blow up in our faces.
When the IDF recently resumed maneuvering with full force to conquer the Gaza Strip, when the IDF is moving the population from the last places where they still had a bit of food and our greatest friends in the world, those who support us, those who understand that we cannot stop just short of total victory in destroying Hamas when they ask us to help them to help us and to refute the lies of the region we need to wow there's a lot to unpack there we'll start with moving the palestinians out of gaza according to
president trump's plan as trump told netanyahu the us will help them find a place to force the gazans to go to He apparently has.
I mean, certainly Trump endorsed that idea in recent months when he talked about turning Gaza into a coastal, you know, like rebuilding Gaza and giving people the free choice to leave essentially calling for ethnic cleansing we all recall his horrible uh ai video where you know of trump gaza right and so yeah and so there have been you know ongoing reports of israel talking to different countries including south sudan of expelling
palestinians to south sudan recall gaza strip is itself a refugee camp the vast majority of its residents are either direct refugees or the descendants of refugees from people who were ethnically cleansed by Israel in 1948.
So most people in Gaza have a home that is theirs in what is now Israel that was stolen from them.
And now Israel, as part of that decades old ethnic cleansing project, which they began in 1947, 1948, wants to continue that.
That's been the whole, that's been the main goal of this entire Gaza operation, this whole notion that Israel is defending itself, which so many people, including critics of Israel like Bernie Sanders, endorsed, saying that Israel has the right responsibility to prevent another October 7th.
The real goal, the only goal, was to destroy Gaza and continue the ethnic cleansing project upon which Israel is based.
And people like to say, oh, Smotrich, he's, even though he's a minister, he doesn't represent the government.
He's just a, you know, a fringe example.
No, this is the face of Israel.
This is what it always has been.
He's just being honest about it.
Are you surprised that he was not only honest, he was open about it?
I mean, the Nazis tried to hide their genocide.
These people are openly flaunting it.
There's something about the Israeli mentality that is uniquely entitled.
You know, Benjamin Netanyahu felt comfortable coming to the U.S. and speaking before Congress and openly trying to stop the elected U.S. President Obama's nuclear deal with Iran.
What other head of state would ever do that?
Come to a foreign country and try to stop their leader, especially a leader that provides their government with so much financial support as the U.S. does to Israel.
What other head of state would do that?
So this is a fanatical state that has been given impunity by its U.S. patron for decades to commit evil.
That's what we're seeing now every single day in Gaza, what we're seeing in the West Bank, where Trump has just let Israel move forward with a settlement project known as E1 that will complete the cutting off of the West Bank, cutting off Palestines in the north of the West Bank from the south of the West Bank and also cutting everybody off from East Jerusalem, which is the center of Palestinian life.
And so Netanyahu right now is full impunity from Trump.
We just had Steve Wickoff say that essentially forget all the ceasefires and brokering.
Trump endorses Netanyahu's plan to continue attacking Gaza until Hamas is completely destroyed, by which he means Gaza is completely destroyed and there will be nothing left for any Palestinians to live for.
And they'll all have to leave.
And only Donald Trump can stop this.
As far as I know, I wish there was another solution.
But yeah, Israel's so reliant on U.S. support that a change in U.S. policy would.
make a very big difference.
It's what makes the Biden administration so criminal.
They adopted a policy of bear hugging Netanyahu, as Biden put it, rather than telling him to knock it off.
And Trump has taken that policy and continued it.
In fact, you can argue it's even more sadistic because now we have a full-blown famine in Gaza as a result of the Trump endorsed months-long Israeli starvation siege on the entire territory.
Aaron, thanks very much for your time.
Thank you for letting me go across the board on all these topics.
It was great being with you and Max and Anya and the others on Saturday and look forward to seeing you again next week.
Have a nice holiday weekend.
You as well, Judge.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Coming up at 3 this afternoon., Phil Giraldi.
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