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Sept. 17, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
23:23
COL. Lawrence Wilkerson : Is Ukraine Collapsing?
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Hi there, everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom.
Today is Wednesday, September 17th, 2025.
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson will be here with us in just a moment on Is Ukraine collapsing.
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Colonel Wilkinson, welcome here, my dear friend.
Always a pleasure and thank you for accommodating my schedule.
I want to pick your brain on drones over Poland and who you think initiated it, and was it a false flag?
And is this Ukraine's last gasp before the triumph of the Russian military?
But before we do, last week with United States approval and backing, the Israelis uh attacked uh a residential facility in Doha, Qatar, an ostensible ally of the United States.
The people they were trying to kill were Hamas negotiators whom the United States had invited to the uh negotiation.
There's been no reaction to this other than some lip service.
How can that be?
Well, there's been reaction, Judge, a significant reaction, I think.
Um for the Arabs, it's significant reaction.
What you've got is a rapprochement almost fully blown now, developing between Tehran, Riyadh, and other Arab states.
And this rapprochement is headed towards a unity in the Persian Gulf that I, for example, as a PACOM staff officer in 1984 and'85, was working to try to achieve post-Iran-Iraq war.
We uh failed miserably because uh we were opposed essentially by the president of the United States.
But nonetheless, we were trying to achieve a security rep uh situation, organization, if you will, much better than the Gulf Cooperation Council in that region that would secure the future of the region for some time to come.
Remember, we had a relationship with Iran at one time for 26 years.
But are you telling me that Netanyahu poked a hornet's nest?
Yes, very much so.
I'm happy to be corrected on that, Colonel.
And is it going to be more than just lip service?
I don't know, but it brings Turkey in now.
You may recall that Turkey actually sent troops to Qatar when it was opposed by Saudi Arabia and other of the Gulf states.
Right.
And doing its own independent thing, and it got very close to Iran during that time.
In fact, Qatar uh Qatari and Iranian uh relations are pretty solid right now.
So now it looks like that solidity is spreading to the other Gulf states because they don't trust the United States anymore, and they damn sure don't trust Israel.
Well, who who would negotiate with Israel when they when they murder the negotiators?
Exactly.
Uh I think they found uh what I have found long ago that Netanyahu in particular, but this government in general and Israel as a consequence is a duplicitous lying sack of uh you know proverbial horse turd, uh, and you can't deal with them anymore.
They'll turn on you in a heartbeat.
Look at what Ned is doing now.
He's discovered China, he's discovered China, he's gonna go to China through Iran, he thinks, but he's discovered China and our uh angst with China, and so he's now talking about China.
We want him as an ally as we fight China through Iran, of course, because that's the next war.
Who's who's talking about China?
Netanyahu.
What is he gonna do?
What is he gonna do with China?
They think he's a he's a murderer.
Well, he knows how much our concentration is focused on China now because of this huge power shift that's taking place.
He knows that what we're doing in the world right now with Ukraine, with the Arctic, with the Baltic and other places, uh Azerbaijan, Armenia, what we're doing is trying to thwart China, and we're doing Ukraine through Russia to try and thwart China.
So he's jumping on the bandwagon.
He's just he's an astute man, he's evil as hell, but he's an astute man, and he sees this as the new recipe for keeping the U.S. on his side.
But first, the way you get to China, that new railroad that now spans all the way from uh the major Pacific ports in China to Iran and on up the Persian Gulf.
The way to get to uh Iran is is to suggest China.
That's the bottom of the the southern, if you will, of the base road initiatives.
So he's he's a smart man, but evil is hell, but he's smart.
He's smarter than most of the people he's dealing with.
Is he going to attack Iran?
I think so.
I think so.
I think it'll happen before uh Thanksgiving, if not earlier.
What is your uh opinion of Netanyahu going on international television before the shooter of Charlie Kirk was caught and denying that Israel murdered Charlie?
Well, who does this?
He didn't just do that, Judge.
He misrepresented the letter and he misrepresrepresented the letter significantly.
Um the alt media, if you will, uh a number of people are after him big time for that because he lied.
He just flat lied.
He only read a portion of the letter.
What Kirk was saying, in essence, is what he was beginning to say to his Republican youth and other friends in the party and other friends in the MAGA organization, and that is he wasn't sure about Israel, and he damn sure wasn't sure about the current leadership of Israel and all the killing they were doing.
That was where Charlie Kirk was going.
Wow.
Let me uh transition to uh Ukraine and related uh matters.
Uh President uh Putin personally attended a uh uh Belarussian and Russian uh military war games, and he appeared in full military garb, and he requested that his counterpart from Belarussia do the same.
Is there any significance to this?
Well, you remember I I told you, I think I've been on so many podcasts I can't remember anymore, some time ago, that I think Putin has decided we're duplicitous, we're conniving, uh our power is diminishing, no question about that, and it's time to take exception in a broad way.
I think he's preparing for a war, and uh he's not uh insane in that.
Preparing for a war with whom?
Uh whoever comes uh a front of him and uh NATO comes to mind immediately.
Well, are we, as uh your uh friend and colleague Colonel uh Astor has suggested, closer to a war with NATO now than at any time since 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis?
Actually, we were closer in 61.
And in 61, we actually helped the GDR, East Germany, bill the Schanmauer, the wall of shame, the Berlin Wall.
We helped them build it because we knew if the GDR kept uh 10,000 citizens a week uh coming into the West, it would disappear, and that was existential for Moscow.
Very close to nuclear war, and Kennedy knew it and handled it very well.
Yes, even that, and yes, the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 62.
Yes, we are closer now to nuclear war than we've been since we invented the weapons.
You're talking about in the past 50 years.
Yes.
What happened over Poland?
Who whose drones were they?
Were they capable of doing uh damage?
Was this a false flag?
Is this the last gasp of Zelensky and company to try and engage another country in the war with Russia?
All of the above.
But I couldn't, I couldn't, I couldn't tell you uh how to determine which is which.
All I know it's a tempest in a teapot, and there was no real threat to anyone at any time, and most of it was probably just the what I'll call the after-effects of a large battle battlefield, but there's unquestionably some conniving in there to try and, for example, influence the Poles because the Poles had just said no troops in Ukraine, and the Poles are looking more and more like they might be sane people after all.
So these weren't sent by Moscow, but they were Russian uh drones.
How did they get there?
Well, there's so many.
Here's the first explanation.
There's so many drones flying around this battlefield that they could get there errantly.
That is to say they just flew off course or they were uh hit something, something hit them and pushed them off course.
Or you could say it was a false flag organizer uh operation on the other side of that coin and say that they were trying to you know get some kind of support continued for their uh conflict in for the conflict in Ukraine.
Now, Judge, I I keep emphasizing, I dealt with these people from 2002 to 2005.
I had just come off the most sophisticated working group I'd ever been on, the North Korean working group.
Really cooperation for every element of the interagency group, a wonderful group, uh very dedicated, and all kinds of political complexions to it.
But we all determined North Korea was a criminal state.
Judge, in 2003, I determined Ukraine was a criminal state, a kleptocracy is what I called it.
I had to deal with some of their leadership from Unoshiko to Temoshenko.
They were all corrupt.
Zelensky is a product of that kind of environment.
Now, I'm not saying the Ukrainian people are all that way.
They don't know what's going on at the top in Kiev and elsewhere.
They don't know how much they're being raped by their leaders, pillaged and plundered on a daily basis.
And this war is just another case.
And we have bought into that, bought into that in terms of the leadership pursuing this conflict.
And it's over.
It's done.
Putin is won.
It is over.
And they don't know what to do.
And Zelensky's got a billion plus dollars, and uh, you know, jet private jets and Bugatti cars and villas in Florida and villas in Switzerland.
And any moment he could be assassinated.
Any moment he could uh deed him out, leave the place.
But it's over for Ukraine.
And the only thing keeping it going are idiots in Europe and Donald Trump who can't make a decision.
He cannot make a decision.
He is utterly incapable of making a decision.
He's the man who said he would end the war in 24 hours uh upon inauguration and maybe even before inauguration, and all he's done is ramp it up.
That's it.
That's it.
He's made no decision whatsoever except status quote.
All right, Colonel, I don't want to give you a heartburn, but I have to play this for you.
You'll know who it is as soon as you see him and hear what he has to say, and I want your uh thoughts on it.
Chris cut number nine.
If he was winning, he'd be in Kyiv.
If he's winning, he'd be west of the Dnieper River.
If he's winning, he'd be in Odessa.
If he's winning, he would have changed the government.
Russia is in fact losing this war.
Now, they may make movements and see, well, they're advancing uh in the Donbass region in the desk.
But if you consider advancing, moving by meters, not miles, well then okay, that's successful.
But if the cost they're having, it's enormous.
And I don't think people truly appreciate it.
It's a number, but the numbers they have lost, when you're talking dead and wounded, well over a million, they left Afghanistan after losing 18,000.
We left Vietnam after losing 65,000.
They have lost over a million dead or wounded.
These numbers are World War II level numbers when you have when you think about it.
They're They're stunning in the loss.
And this is in and their first line units that they came and tried to take Kiev with a little over four four years ago.
Those first line units are gone.
So they've gone through a second or third or fourth iteration of wartime commanders.
They're pulling tanks out of mothballs, out of museums, put on the battle line.
They can't operate in large movements because the Ukrainians will kill them.
Does the man know what the hell he's talking about because he whispers into Donald Trump's ear every day?
He must he needs to put his brain in mothballs.
I've never heard such idiocy in my life, especially coming from a former four-star, three-star general, whatever the hell he was.
Um it's it's ridiculous.
He didn't even get the Vietnam casualty count right.
It's 59,000.
It's not 65,000.
Come on, General, do your work, do your work.
And in the Ukraine conflict, it's about 1.4 to 1.6 million Ukrainian casualties and maybe 350,000 Russian casualties.
And he doesn't understand warfare.
He doesn't understand the nature of the special military operation, which is not to take territory necessarily, except it is as it is incidental to destroying the Ukrainian armed forces, which he is doing quite thoroughly.
And he's taking few casualties doing it.
And he's got more tanks than General Kellogg can imagine would be on the battlefield at a single moment.
He's got more wherewithal to pursue this conflict into hell if he needs to.
But what he wants to do is get rid of any kind of capacity whatsoever within that rump state of Ukraine to harass him with military forces in the future.
And if NATO decides to stay with this rump state in a sizable way, he'll take out NATO too.
That's what I meant by he is ready to take on the fading downfalling empire if he has to.
Well, I mean, how can he how can he make a statement like they're taking tanks out of mothballs and out of museums when Putin is cranking out new tanks every month?
Yeah.
And artillery rounds at a rate that we couldn't even achieve if we took five more years to try and achieve it.
He's got a hell of a defense industrial base behind him.
And he's got the people behind him, basically.
These people must be in another world.
Here's uh President uh Zelensky uh last week boasting about his long-range capabilities, cut number five.
The Likabinus brou.
As precar's long-range fires, we were at the moment when practically the United States and other partners were thinking whether to give Ukraine long-range weaponry or not.
And we have found our own.
Now we have our own long-range capabilities.
We just lack financing.
Yeah, finanz.
There is financing for drones.
I'm not saying that to mock any of the partners, but it's not a solution, right?
Navishim sobupa Ukraine.
For 800 shahids per day at Ukrainian territory.
We need at least one 1,500 interceptors.
The price of one interceptor is 3,000 euros.
That is the answer to how to stop the Shahids.
And so that Russia does not want tomorrow to send 800 Shaheeds.
We must send 1,000 drones to their territory to retaliate.
So what we need from the partners to come to Shahids, we need financing from our partners.
These are not global decisions, these are Faz decisions that must be done today.
He matches Kellogg Judge.
He does.
I mean, would Trump allow?
Well, go ahead, and then I'll save my questions.
Go ahead, Colonel.
Well, I it it's just incomprehensible to me that he can't do the correlation of forces any better than he does.
I know that's an old Soviet term, but it's an excellent term.
Just look at the depth of Russia.
Just look at the depth of Russia.
Incredible depth from where they are on the front lines all the way out to Vladivostok.
The biggest frickin' depth on the face of the earth.
And he's talking about getting drones and things and fly them in there.
Russia could back up 600 kilometers and be out of total, you know, you know, any kind of deadly range if it wanted to, but it's not going to do that because it's destroying him.
And very soon, I'll make this prediction right now.
Before Christmas, Zelensky will be dead or gone.
Wow.
Will Trump allow Zelensky to fire the EROMs?
Ritter says they're not even built yet, much less less not there.
But would uh Trump allow Zelensky to fire long and middle range missiles into Russian territory?
As I said, this is getting into really dangerous territory.
Putin would be in his perfect right under international law or anyone's interpretation of current law and war to take on NATO assets in any of the countries that are such as Poland and Poland's no acknowledging this now internally, that are supporting the war in Ukraine against Russia.
He would be in his perfect right to take these on.
So that's probably the next step.
And it would be an Areshnik or some other kind of hypervelocity missile.
And you would disappear NATO assets as they existed in these other countries surrounding Ukraine.
That would be the next step of escalation.
He doesn't want to do that because he knows once he gets on that escalation ladder, he's making war with NATO virtually inevitable.
You just predicted that by Christmas, which is three months from now, President Zelensky will be dead or living elsewhere and no longer purporting to be the head of state in Ukraine.
That's what I say.
Does that mean that the special military operation will be over?
And whoever or whatever succeeds him will, I'm gonna use an old-fashioned phrase, sue for peace.
That's up to whatever the Ukrainians manage to achieve in a follow-on government.
And I I can't answer there because I So are we talking about somebody rational and the name is escaping me?
He's the Ukrainian ambassador to London, or are we talking about these uh supernationalists, these crazy banderists that have surrounded and threatened Zelensky?
There are quite a few of those left.
So if Putin can't root them out almost individually and take care of them, then they're going to be around and they're going to present a problem.
But I think it's going to be a problem that'll be residual and recurring over time in any kind of peace that is achieved rather than one that prevents a peace being achieved.
I as I've said many times, it won't be Russia if they if a peace broke out tomorrow and the UN put forces in between the two to uh waging war bodies, if that were achieved, it wouldn't be Russia that would break that peace.
It would be Ukraine right off the bat, and they would continue to break it as long as they could get away with it.
Colonel, what is it that causes you to conclude that Zelensky will be dead or gone in three months?
Because the situation on the battlefield is so dire right now that if Putin wanted to, he could close it off.
As Kellogg suggested that he should do, he could go back to old tactics, like for example, they used against the Wehrmacht from the Vistula all the way into Berlin.
He could go back to those kind of tactics and overwhelm the entire remainder of the country in quite short time.
He could come in from Belarusia as well as from the direction he's already headed in, and he could even come in from the south with additional forces.
There are lots of Russian troops ready to go, in addition to the ones that are on the battlefield.
So if he wanted to go back to that kind of blitzkrieg-like warfare, like the Russians conducted after Kursk all the way to Berlin, he could.
He doesn't want to because all he wants to do is destroy the remaining capacity of the Ukrainian military to be any kind of threat to Russia.
And hence his slow methodical pace, which General Kellogg just doesn't get.
Kellogg reminds me of one of those French generals like Fauch or one of the British generals in World War I, who thought the success on the battlefield was measured by the number of casualties you take.
Which is I'm glad I didn't live then, Judge.
Yes.
Thank you, Colonel.
Thank you so much for your uh passionate and and deep analysis of all this.
I hope you'll come back and visit with us again next week.
A week without Lawrence Wilkerson.
It's not a happy week here.
Oh, well, I wish other people felt that way.
I'm your champion, Colonel.
Thank you so much.
All the best.
Thank you.
Take care.
Right.
You too.
Uh coming up at three o'clock, Phil Giraldi at four o'clock on all of this, including the United Nations rather detailed and lurid report on the nature and extent of mass starvation in Gaza.
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