Feb. 15, 2026 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
25:36
Ray McGovern : Can Ukraine Rely on US Guarantees?
Ray McGovern warns Ukraine’s reliance on U.S. guarantees is misplaced, citing the 2026 Geneva talks where Russia blames Ukraine—not America—for drone attacks using NATO tech, including CIA-specific models per Scott Ritter. He argues Zelensky’s rejection of a 2023 ceasefire deal (pushed by Boris Johnson, Lloyd Austin, and Biden) cost Ukraine Donbas, Luhansk, and four annexed provinces, despite Russian concessions on neutrality and Crimea. With Budanov attending talks, McGovern calls it a provocation, while Russia demands security guarantees like a Dnieper buffer zone. U.S. broken promises—such as Biden’s 2021 pledge on offensive missiles—undermine trust, leaving Russia to seek battlefield victory first before negotiations, where economic and territorial terms clash. McGovern doubts U.S. negotiators’ understanding of Russian history, contrasting them with Kissinger’s direct diplomacy, and criticizes Rubio’s dismissive stance on Iran talks, suggesting both sides risk escalation by ignoring nuanced diplomacy. [Automatically generated summary]
Tragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression, with no complaints from the American people.
Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government.
To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected.
What if sometimes to love your country, you had to alter or abolish the government?
What if Jefferson was right?
What if that government is best which governs least?
What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong?
What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave?
What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now hi everyone?
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, February 16th, 2026.
Ray McGovern joins us now.
Ray, a pleasure, my dear friend.
Thank you for accommodating us.
We've been having internet gremlins, but maybe you'll bring us the luck of the Irish and they'll go away.
Is the Kremlin now sending senior officials to negotiate with Steve Witkoff?
Sure.
Vladimir Medinsky, who actually took part in the first negotiations, which resulted in an agreement initialed by both sides, the Russian and the Ukrainian side, back in April of 2023, okay?
Right after the invasion, six weeks after the invasion, okay?
Now, he's been at these talks before, but now they're making a big show out of it.
That is Tashis saying, look, Medinsky is coming again.
He's going to chair the negotiation team.
And not only that, but we have a deputy foreign minister, Galuzhin is the fellow.
He comes out of the woodwork.
I haven't heard of him before, but there are several deputy foreign ministers.
He's going to be there too.
And of course, Dmitriev is coming as well.
So it's a very high-level, relatively speaking, Russian delegation that's coming to, where is Geneva?
Just tomorrow.
And Witkoff and Jared Kushner are going to have their hands full because they're dealing with Iran as well.
And now they'd be dealing with Ukraine.
This betokens a seriousness on the part of the Russians that is sort of amazing given all the indignities they've been subjected to, including the attack on the state residence near Valdai.
Let me mention while I think of it, Galuzin, very interestingly, had a major interview just two days ago.
This is the deputy foreign minister who's going to be at the talks in Geneva.
And he talked about the attack on the president's residence near Valdai.
He said, that was really terrible.
Those Ukrainians, they're awful.
We have to make sure that they know that this disrupts our attempts together with the United States to put an end to this conflict.
Here's the last paragraph.
Kiev has to understand that anything like that drone attack on the president's residence makes it harder to resolve the conflict by diplomatic means.
As far as we can judge, says Galuzhin.
As far as we can judge, this is also clear to President Trump's team who are entrusted with the difficult task of forcing the Kiev regime toward peace.
Oh, so you know, it's taking sides here.
Who fired those drones at the residents?
The Ukrainians, okay?
Did they use NATO or even U.S. devised telemetry or the kinds of guidance systems that NATO has?
Sure, they did.
But the Russians, they're not holding the U.S. accountable.
They're blaming the whole thing on Ukraine, whereas they could act quite differently.
Isn't that interesting?
You reported, I believe, that the Russians gave the senior U.S. military attaché in Moscow a piece of one of the drones demonstrating indisputably its American origin and therefore connection to the CIA.
Well, that's what Scott said.
And I've talked to Scott back and forth about that.
Are you 100% sure that this could only be the CIA?
Well, we went back and forth and he said, look, you have your take on it, Ray.
I have my take.
And my notion is that if that was clearly a CIA operation or CIA-specific technology, the Russians wouldn't be sending the technology to Trump.
They'd be sending technology that said, look, NATO has its hands all over this, and it's Zelensky that's to blame, as they've been saying here, as Galusian just said, you know.
And he went into this in some detail with respect to the attack.
He says, this was really bad.
It puts back our efforts toward peace.
And Kiev has to understand that this has got to stop because it really makes it hard for our colleagues, the Americans, who Trump has entrusted the difficult task of forcing the Kiev regime toward peace.
That's as clear as you can get.
So that's what's going to happen.
Why do you think they're raising this attack on Valdez now when it happened a month or two ago?
Well, they've been raising it all along, but this is the most proximate raising to the Geneva talks to begin again tomorrow.
And he's just making it clear: look, the reason that we're meeting with the Americans again, despite all the sniping that's going on here, is because we hold the Ukrainians responsible for that attack, not the Americans.
And the Americans have a really tough job trying to persuade the Ukrainians that peace should be in the offing.
That's the deal here.
People need to realize that.
If Boris Johnson and Lloyd Austin and Joe Biden had not talked Zelensky out of the agreement, which was negotiated by that same Russian negotiator back in 2022, the Ukrainians would have retained a lot more real estate than they're likely to retain now.
They could have retained all of their real estate.
That agreement, we have the text, for God's sake.
They keep Donbas.
They keep Luhansk and the other four provinces now that they claim to be part of Russia.
So, you know, there was a ceasefire.
There was an agreement that Ukraine would not try to join NATO.
There were limits on the forces that could be arrayed on both sides, and there was a decision to defer any discussion of Crimea until later.
Ukraine could have been integral.
I mean, it's a very sad thing that over a million young Ukrainian men and women are no longer with us because Boris Johnson, on behalf of Tony Blinkton and Sullivan and Biden, went there and said, no, no, look, we got a better deal for you.
We'll support you for as long as it takes.
And look, we're all powerful.
We can face those Russians down.
The Ukrainians were crazy to accept that logic.
They should have looked at the map.
Yeah.
Is Zelensky still surrounded and largely threatened by the ultra-nationalists, the Bandaris, the Nazis, whatever you want to call them?
Or is he free to be rational in these negotiations?
Well, rational is a relative term, I'm afraid.
It's a difficult question.
I don't know the clear answer to that, but he's co-opted some of them.
Budanov, who's responsible for some of these terrorist attacks against Russia, now is his chief of staff, for God's sake.
And Budanov will probably be there, probably.
I think the Ukrainians said not only Budanov, but Budanov's deputy in the presidential administration.
So, you know, Budanov, the one the Russians want to assassinate?
Well, they'd like to.
He was the head of military intelligence in Ukraine and is widely regarded as the man behind all these assassinations.
Embassy Rebellion00:04:37
So it's sort of a kind of a slap in the face to put him at the table and to put his deputy there as well.
We have to see what comes out here.
It's interesting that they've agreed to meet again.
This time, the Russians have upped the ante by increasing the stature of their delegation.
As Trump, as the only thing I agree with when Trump says this, we just have to see what happens.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Can Witkoff and Kushner grasp all this, or should the United States have seasoned diplomats who understand Russian history and culture the way you, Ray McGovern, understand it there?
Well, Judge, we kind of differ on that.
I think Witkoff and Kushner are probably as proud as you and me.
Okay.
They're quick studies, and it doesn't really matter too much because they are speaking for the president of the United States.
Why is the Secretary of State sort of marginalized?
Because he's trouble.
You can't count him.
You can't trust him.
He wants to be president.
And look the way he's behaved toward the Ukrainians and toward the Russians.
So you had trusted advisors.
When I was working at the CIA, we had Kissinger and Nixon.
Kissinger was not the Secretary of State.
Bill Rogers was.
What did Bill Rogers do?
Well, he was allowed to go to the opera when we were there to sign the ABM treaty.
It was Kissinger that did all this hard work.
And one little anecdote, I think I may have said before, is when I got into the men's room there in the political section of the embassy in Moscow, there was big handwriting over the urinals and it said, Kissinger was here.
Take off on Kilroy was here, right?
And the butt of the joke was, yeah, he was at Moscow several times.
What he would do is on his way out in Helsinki, give a call to the ambassador, Ambassador Beam at the time, and say, Oh, I wanted to tell you that Thursday and Friday, I talked to Kasygan and Brishdev for a couple hours.
We're really making some progress on the negotiations.
I just want to let you know so that you're not blindsided when they refer to my visit there.
Now, the embassy was up in arms.
This is not the way you do things, you know.
He took us into the bubble and he said, Look, folks, we do what we're told to do, okay?
If Nixon wants to work through Kissinger and keep us in the blind, that's the way it is.
We have to do what we're supposed to do.
He was an old pro.
Everybody said, Okay, well, it looks like we may get a treaty out of this.
If that's the way it has to happen, well, we regret not being involved, but hey, these guys are making it happen.
And I do think that Witkoff and Kushner are smart enough to obey Trump's orders, and those orders would be very different from the ones they could get from Rubio if he were in charge.
Here is Rubio trying to sound like the Secretary of State, Chris.
Cut number nine.
We're dealing with radical Shia clerics.
Okay, we're dealing with people who make political geopolitical decisions on the basis of pure theology.
And it's a complicated thing.
I mean, no one's ever been able to do a successful deal with Iran, but we're going to try.
Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner will be traveling.
I think they're traveling right now to have important meetings, and we'll see how that turns out.
And we'll always comply with the applicable laws of the United States in terms of involving Congress in any decisions.
But right now, we're not talking about any of that.
We are postured in the region for one simple reason, and that is that we understand that there could be threats to our forces in the region.
We've seen them be threatened in the past, and we want to make sure that we have sufficient capacity to defend them.
If God forbid that were to happen, we'll follow whatever the law is on it.
And it depends on the circumstance that believes to it.
But right now, we're talking about negotiations.
We are focused on negotiations.
That's what we're for.
The president's made that clear.
If that changes, it'll be obvious to everyone.
And obviously, whatever the law requires us to do, we'll do.
And I clap because of the patronizing statement about Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, which follows, of course, on your observations, with which I'm in full agreement.
Yeah, I have to emphasize that Rubio doesn't like being marginalized.
Well, nobody would.
Focusing On Negotiations00:11:22
Neither does Lavrov.
Okay.
Now, Lavrov is not in the mix every time because he's got nobody to sit opposite him at the table.
Rubio is excluded.
So Lavrov resents this too.
And that accounts in some measure for his hardened tone ever since, well, particularly ever since Trump could not come through with prolonging the new start limits for one more year.
Here is Lavrov last week with that hardened tone, Ray.
Cut number six, Chris.
The people of Crimea, Donbass, and Novorossiy have expressed their will in referendums, and we will see through the process of returning these historically Russian lands to their native harbor, fully in line with the aspirations of these people.
The linguistic, cultural, and religious rights of those who remain under Kiev's authority must be restored, along with the elimination of another root cause of the conflict, the military threats to Russia's national security emanating from Ukrainian territory.
Well, there you have it.
I mean, Ukrainians are talking about a United States security guarantee.
What the heck would that be?
The Russians are never going to accept American troops on the ground, ever.
No, it's a delaying tactic.
It's an attempt to assuage opinions in Ukraine and in Europe that, oh, we got something going.
We are talking to the Americans about security.
There aren't going to be any security guarantees until this war is won by Russia.
Then that will come into play.
And that's the role that Witkov and Kushner are playing right now to keep the dialogue going against the day when the Ukrainians will finally say, okay, uncle, uncle, you've defeated our army.
You have demilitarized us.
Denazification comes next because we have no more army.
Let's deal.
And from their point of view, it will be a much poorer deal that they come up with.
Let me say a word about Novorossiya.
Lavrov has been mentioning, as others have been mentioning, Novorossiya includes more than the Donbass, okay, more than those four oblasts that are part of Russia right now.
Is this serious?
Well, it's boilerplate.
I mean, as Larry has admitted, it goes back to Putin in 2014.
It's a negotiating tactic.
It's the Russians saying, look, we have these four oblasts.
We're not going to give them up.
We could take more.
We could take Diepopetrovsk.
We could take Kharkhov.
We could take Odyssey.
We could do that.
And they can.
But I don't think the Russians want to do that.
I think they want to have a military victory, as Medvedev has said, as stage one, stage two comes in working the kind of deal with which the U.S. has to be part, integral part, so that their security interests will not be endangered as they were before when Ukraine was seeking membership in NATO and NATO was trying to welcome Ukraine with open arms.
That's over.
What is the significance of, you know, you always talk about the significance of paying attention to the word choice of Russian officials.
What is the significance of his, and correct my pronunciation, use of the phrase Novorossiya, loosely translated, again, correct me, new Russia.
Is this the generic term for all of those oblasts that contain Russian speakers and Russian cultural features?
Well, you know, I looked it up some minutes ago.
It goes beyond Doniesk and Luhansk, goes beyond Kherson and Zaporozhye.
Those are the four regions, four oblasts.
And they apply broader claims by including areas like Kharkov, Odyssey, Mikolaev, and Nypetrovsk.
So as I see it, it's a negotiating tactic.
Look, we've got these four.
We'll probably be satisfied with that, with a properly negotiated and guaranteed resolution to this thing.
But hey, we could claim all of the rest of it because historically our people have been inhabiting that for a couple of centuries.
And Catherine the Great, even though she's defiled, her statues are being torn down in Odyssey and elsewhere.
She was the one that claimed this.
All Russians know this history.
It's really big in Russian history books.
So Novorossiya is something they hang out that we could do Novorossiya, but be happy with those four provinces that are already part of our country under our constitution.
But we're not going to settle for anything less than that.
We might bargain on Odyssey.
I've been saying for years now that Putin dropped a big, big hint at one of those four hour long Q ⁇ As saying, Adiesa, ahies, it could be a yabluka razora.
It could be an apple of conflict, or it could be a way of reconciling irreconcilable or seemingly irreconcilable differences.
So Odyssey, in my view, is still up for grabs.
The Russians don't want to destroy that city for God's sake.
There's ample re, in my view, there's ample room for a negotiated settlement that lets Odyssey stay, at least titularly, under Ukrainian rule, okay, maybe a broadened rule, but allows Ukraine to have access to the sea.
Do the Russians want that?
They do.
Do they want Ukraine just to become a farm for the rest of Europe?
I don't think they want that.
So Ukraine can be a viable state.
The Russians would want that as long as their security interests are secured.
And that would involve the Quadron Sanitaire, a buffer zone, probably along the Dnieper.
And that's completely negotiable, given the fact that total Russian victory is in the cards this year.
And this time we can say this year for sure.
This war ends on the battlefield.
It doesn't end in a conference room.
Wrong.
It ends in the conference room.
Well, see, the Russians don't want a battlefield win only.
I've been trying to say this is stage one.
Okay.
They went on the battlefield, but that's not enough.
The whole deal here is to make Ukraine a non-part of NATO and make sure that it does not pose a threat to the Russians.
Now, Putin thought he had a deal.
He talked to Biden on the 30th of December 2021, and Biden said, okay, we have no intention of putting offensive strike missiles in Ukraine.
Putin, they just told the military nine days before that that would give him five to four minutes to decide whether to use his own nuclear arsenal.
Okay.
So that's, you know, if hypersonic missiles went into Ukraine, which is precisely what Putin told his military.
So he gets this call from Putin and the White House, to its credit, accepts it.
Biden's all alone.
He's home alone for Christmas.
And he makes this undertaking.
It's in the readout.
Read it.
The United States has no intention of putting offensive strike missiles in Ukraine.
What happened?
They reneged on it.
Two weeks later, our negotiators in Geneva pretended not to know anything about it.
And when Lavrov finally tracked down Tony Blinken, also in Geneva, on the 21st of January, he said, Tony, what's going on here?
And Tony said, forget about it.
We weren't involved in that.
He was home alone.
And we might be able to talk about limiting the number of intermediate strike weapons in.
So what I'm saying here is Ushakov was in on that.
He's still on it.
They have been taken down the garden path.
They're not going to be taken down the garden path again.
And it's all so unnecessary because as you pointed out, Judge, they had a deal in April of 2022.
And if Johnson and Biden and the others didn't come in and say, look, look, Ukraine, come with us.
we'll keep fighting for you for the very end.
You know, it was the betrayal really is by the United States working with NATO and it's come to a no good end.
But hopefully the first stage is do this.
Do I hope?
I don't hope anything, but I expect the Russians to win on the battlefield stage one.
Then the negotiations, they're already in progress.
They have high-level delegates tomorrow in Geneva.
Then they can say, okay, how are we going to prevent the Ukrainians from doing this again?
How are we going to prevent NATO from trying this again?
And they need the United States for that, because without that, they can't have any sense of security.
They don't want to go and take over any more of Ukraine than they already have, except for those portions of the Netsk and a little bit of Ugansk and Zaporozhye and Kherson.
But they can do that.
They're going to do that.
They're going to do it gradually.
And meanwhile, the negotiations, such as they are, and don't forget there's an economic aspect there too, because Dmitriev is involved.
Even our Secretary of the Treasury was involved there in Miami just three weeks ago.
So these things are real.
Don't give up on them because the Russians aren't, and neither is Trump.
It's going through the motions.
It's not like dead on arrival, as we thought, or some of us said many months ago.
These things are going on and there's hope that they can attenuate the worst effects of Russia having won on the battlefield but not having secured the peace.
Thank you, Ray.
Excellent, my man.
We'll see you on Friday with Larry Johnson.
All the best.
Thank you, Judge.
Sure.
We hope to have Alistair here to resume the conversation that the internet cut off.