Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter discusses Russia's advanced nuclear missiles...
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Alright, welcome.
This is Mike Adams of Brighteon.com and Brighteon.tv.
And today we have a very important interview.
First time guest, but someone that I think many of you are very familiar with.
And I think his voice is critical for our time.
His name is Scott Ritter.
That's right.
The Scott Ritter, former UN weapons inspector, United States Marine Corps officer, and now an author, an analyst, and he has been making waves with his commentary and analysis, and also a few enemies along the way, which we'll get to, but he joins us now to cover the latest news about Russia, Ukraine, NATO, Nord Stream, and the U.S. State Department.
Mr.
Scott Ritter, sir, welcome to the show.
It's an honor to have you on.
Well, thank you very much.
The privilege is all mine.
Thanks for having me.
Well, we really honor what you're doing and your presence here and your courage.
And I don't say this often, but I'm actually a fan of your current work.
I listen to a lot of your interviews and videos.
And people say this to me sometimes, but I may know you more than you know me because I hear about your passion for football and things you do in the off hours and your dogs and so on.
So just thank you for being the real deal, you know, for being authentic in what you do.
We appreciate you.
Well, thank you very much.
You know, you don't get any more real than this.
I'm a little disheveled, unshaven, but, you know, it is what it is.
This is what happens when you're a citizen activist and you're not backed by corporate media or anything like that.
So thank you again for having me on.
I appreciate it.
Yeah, absolutely.
In fact, let's just start with the big, big picture, if we could, because you have been, I think many people would characterize you as a dissenting voice against, of course, the establishment narrative, which we all know is just an incredible tapestry of fiction weaving by the State Department.
But if someone were walking in new to this conversation, like, what's going on in Ukraine and Russia, and what happened to Nord Stream?
What How would you summarize where we are right now, if you could?
A quick summary would be that the United States, since 1992, has treated Russia as a defeated enemy.
Of course, Russia being the successor state to the Soviet Union.
And we sought to keep them down.
We succeeded in doing that for 10 years under Boris Yeltsin.
A new president came in, Vladimir Putin, who wasn't going to play that game.
And we've been trying to get rid of Putin ever since.
And we do that by trying to destabilize Russia.
And one of the key aspects of destabilizing Russia was to expand NATO to Russia's border, to include stripping away Ukraine from a Russian sphere of influence, knowing that this would provoke It's a fight we thought we could win by sanctioning Russia, bringing about the economic destruction of Russia, and therefore creating the conditions for the people of Russia to rise up and remove Putin from power.
We miscalculated.
The Russians actually flipped the script.
Their economy is doing well and getting better.
Europe's economy on the other hand isn't doing well.
And the last time I went to the supermarket and looked at energy prices, we got some issues too.
There's also a shooting war on the ground.
We've turned what was a Russian-Ukrainian regional conflict into an existential battle of survival between Russia and the collective West, the United States, NATO, And some non-NATO European countries who are using Ukraine as a proxy to fight Russia.
And surprise, surprise, we're not doing well in that either.
You know, it's a year into the conflict.
And the fact is, the Russians have mobilized successfully.
They have positioned their military on the battlefield in a manner which Will lead to victory over Ukraine, a Ukraine that has been propped up by the United States taxpayer dollar, by NATO weaponry.
In brief, people say, well, how could you be so confident?
What I'll say is this.
This war is very complex, but by and large, it's a war that's defined by field artillery.
That's the number one killer of people, and the side that has the most guns, that can fire the most shells in the most accurate manner, Russia is going to be the side that's going to win.
Russia is that side.
But more importantly, the Ukrainians, who received a tremendous amount of artillery support from the United States and NATO, they're running out of ammunition.
And they will run out of ammunition this summer.
And because they've depleted NATO stocks, there's nothing left to give them.
And we don't have a mobilized defense industry to build or produce new ammunition.
So they're literally done.
This summer, if they don't find additional resources to provide ammunition, when the guns stop firing, the war is over.
And the Ukrainian guns look like they're going to stop firing, and the Russian guns will never stop firing.
Okay, we've got so many issues from what you just said there.
I took a few notes.
But let me just get this out of the way at the front.
Is it fair to characterize your position as essentially anti-war in the sense that you don't want people to die?
You don't want conflict.
You want a negotiated peace of some kind.
Is that a fair characterization?
I would modify it as such.
First of all, I'm a Marine.
War is my business.
Right.
So...
If you want a war, I'll give you a war.
If you want to die, I'll kill you.
I have no problem with this, so I'm not anti-war.
I did a tweet.
It got me in a lot of trouble, but it roughly encapsulates my position.
What I said is, I'm a dog owner, and I love dogs, and I would never want to bring harm to dogs.
If I find a stray dog, I'm going to take it in.
I'm going to take it to a shelter.
I'm going to care for it.
But if there's a rabid dog in the street, it needs to be shot.
And we need Atticus Finch, who is the lawyer from To Kill a Mockingbird, the World War I veteran sharpshooter who came out and shot a rabid dog in the streets.
And that's my position.
And I view Ukraine as a rabid dog, and I view Russia as Atticus Finch.
So even though I'm anti-war and I would prefer negotiated settlement, let's never forget that the Ukrainian government has embraced the ideology of Stepan Bandera, an ultra-nationalist who He fought alongside Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, has the blood of tens of thousands of Jews on his hands, hundreds of thousands of Poles, hundreds of thousands of Russians, and he is the national hero of Volodymyr Zelensky's Ukraine today.
My uncle fought in World War II. I have other relatives that fought in World War II. They fought against the Nazi threat, and so I'm not going to sit by and pretend that there's some sort of equilibrium between the Russians and the Ukrainians today This is actually a war between good and evil, and evil is defined by the odious neo-Nazi ideology of the Zelensky government.
And while I don't agree with everything Russia does, on this side, they're on the right side of history.
So I can't say I'm anti-war.
What I am is, you know, I would prefer that a peaceful solution could be found to these problems.
I would prefer that war didn't break out.
But a rabid dog is running in the streets.
And I'd prefer he didn't have rabies, but now that he does, he needs to be put down.
Okay, all right.
Thank you for that clarification, because, you know, the history of the work that you've done for the United States of America as a U.N. weapons inspector, I mean, at least my understanding is you helped negotiate some of the key treaties that probably prevented Western Europe from being hit by nuclear weapons over the last several decades.
And so, in a sense...
Your efforts, and you were really critical in this, is my understanding, but you can speak to it.
Your efforts helped secure the peace by preventing war in Europe.
And now, a lot of that's just being thrown away at this point because of the State Department and the interactions.
But go ahead and speak to that if you would, please, sir.
No, look, again, I'm somebody who understands the awful reality of war, and therefore, I want to ensure that we do everything humanly possible to prevent war, that war should be the absolute last option, that we should exhaust every possibility short of war before we make the awful decision to go to war, because to me, what war stands for is dead Marines.
And as a Marine officer, my number one responsibility is the lives of the Marines that the American people have entrusted to me.
So the last thing I want is dead Marines.
The last thing I want to do is put my Marines in harm's way for a cause that's not worthy of the sacrifice we're asking them to make.
And so this is why I am such an advocate for peaceful solutions.
I believe firmly that old men should yak, yak, yak, yak, yak until they're exhausted.
Nobody dies when old men or old women yak, yak, yak.
But when they stop yakking and they hand guns off to the young people and they start shooting each other, then we have a problem.
Now, again, if there's rabid dogs out there, give the guns to the ones who can take the rabid dog down.
I have no problem with that.
We cannot view using the military as the first option, the option of first resort.
You know, war isn't Hollywood.
We have a whole generation of people that have grown up believing in, you know, video games, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor.
I guess there's some better ones out there nowadays.
I don't know.
But, you know, when you die in those, you get to hit reset, you come back up and you go, hey, that was cool.
Right.
There's no reset button in war.
When you're dead, you're dead.
When the arm's gone, it's gone.
When the brain's addled, it's addled.
There's no recovery from that.
So we need to understand the awful cost of war, the awful reality of war, and make sure it doesn't happen.
Unless it's absolutely necessary, the absolute last recourse to a problem that if we don't solve it, will manifest itself in a direct threat to the American people.
And so this is why I have spent the best part of my adult life working to come up with solutions to conflict.
Look, I fought in Desert Storm.
And so I know that there are times when there are no solutions and you have to You have to unleash the dogs of war.
And then you do what you do.
And war is an ugly business.
There's nothing pretty about it.
There's nothing glamorous about it.
It's an ugly business.
But then you get it done.
And then you pick yourself up and you try and move forward in a manner that builds on the horrible tragedy of what's occurred in a positive fashion to prevent future wars.
And this is what I've been doing.
I did it as a weapons inspector in the Soviet Union to try and prevent nuclear conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union successfully.
And then I did it in the aftermath of Desert Storm, trying to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction so there wouldn't be a recurrence of conflict.
And I ran into a problem with my government because they didn't want Iraq disarmed.
They wanted Saddam Hussein gone, and they were using this process to get rid of Saddam.
And they wanted to tell lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to justify the 2003 invasion.
At one point, didn't they actually send you into a facility and say that your job is to find weapons, illegal weapons, even if they don't exist, or something along those lines?
Yeah, in March of 1998...
After meetings in the White House and State Department, a team that I was the chief inspector of leading was dispatched to Iraq, to the Iraqi Ministry of Defense.
That's like going to the Pentagon.
And they wanted me to inspect the Minister of Defense's office.
That's like going to the Secretary of Defense's office.
Now, imagine a scenario where Iraqi inspectors show up outside the Pentagon.
hey boss, we want to come in and inspect the Secretary of Defense office.
We wouldn't let him in.
We'd say no.
And the Iraqis said, if you try to inspect the Ministry of Defense, it's a red line, it'll be war.
So this was a deliberate provocation by the United States to use inspection teams to provoke the conditions for a war with Iraq.
Unfortunately for the United States, I'm somebody who, you know, I believe that our job as a U.N. weapons inspector was to implement the United Nations mandate of legitimate arms control through verification.
And I was able to negotiate entry into the Ministry of Defense with the Iraqi officials.
And I'm talking about the most senior people in Iraq.
And we did this because they trusted me.
They didn't like me because I was a son of you-know-what.
My nickname was Abu Azamat.
Father of all crises.
I was the bad guy.
I was the guy that came in and there was always a problem.
But I was always honest with them and they knew that I was doing the mandate I was given and nothing more.
So when I told them, trust me, if you don't let me in, there's going to be a war.
The only way you avoid this war is you have to let me in and you have to let me do my job without any interference.
And after a couple hours of back and forth, they finally agreed to let me in on my terms, on my conditions.
And we carried out the inspection.
We found nothing.
And we stopped the war.
And after that, I've been called an enemy of the state by American officials.
Sandy Berger called me a traitor.
Yeah, but critically, sorry to interrupt, but at that point when you found nothing, didn't the intelligence community at that time sort of wink and a nod?
They wanted you to find something, right?
Didn't they kind of say, you need to find something?
They wanted me to get blocked.
Oh, they wanted you to get blocked so they could say, okay.
So they could say they're hiding.
The idea was that I was going to go in because the Iraqis had said, we will never let inspectors into this building, ever, ever.
So the idea was for me to go there, get blocked, and then we could say they won't let them in because they're hiding something, and then they would launch the attack.
I screwed that whole plan up by getting in the building.
And doing the detailed inspection, and I didn't know what the outcome would be.
If there was something there, I would have found it.
I would have.
I'm that good.
My team was that good.
But we got in, and we didn't find anything, and we issued that report.
And in doing so, we prevented a war.
And at that time, I thought I'd done a great thing.
But my government called me a traitor, and that was the beginning or the end of my relationship with the U.S. government.
Right, so that was the turning point where then you became the, well, or they condemned you as the enemy, I guess, of, that was the Bush administration.
Clinton.
Okay, that was Clinton at that time, which then became Bush, but they never changed their stance on you from that point, correct?
No.
Certainly not today.
I've been a bad guy ever since then, apparently.
Okay, my.
And then now you've been added to the, what is this, the Ukraine?
You're number one, Scott.
You're number one on a list.
You've reached the number one status, which is always an important milestone.
But tell us about that list.
Well, there's actually two lists, and you don't want to be on either of them.
One is the Center for Countering Disinformation, a unique...
Because it's a purely propaganda outlet of the office of the president in Ukraine.
So they work directly for Volodymyr Zelensky.
And this is an office that was created by the U.S. State Department, actually, funded by U.S. taxpayers.
And they take anybody who speaks out in a manner that opposes the narrative being pushed by the Ukrainian government, by the U.S. government, by mainstream media.
If you dare challenge this, then you get put on this list.
It's a blacklist.
They call you a Russian propagandist.
They call you an information terrorist.
They call you a war criminal.
And the idea is to have you canceled, meaning by making this label, the idea is for you to be blacklisted and not allowed on any media outlets, et cetera.
They've also called for my arrest.
But fortunately, the U.S. government hasn't decided to act on that yet.
But this is the list I'm number one on.
But there's another list called Mir Tvoritz.
It's the world traveler list.
This is the list run by the Ukrainian Intelligence Service, and it's a hit list.
If you're on this list, you're marked to die.
And some people have been killed on that list.
They have actually killed people.
When they do, they put a red line through saying liquidated.
So they're bragging about doing this.
And so I'm on this list.
A number of Americans are on this list.
And the U.S. government's doing nothing about it.
Literally nothing about it.
We are being marked for death for exercising our constitutional right of free speech.
You know, you don't have to agree with me.
A lot of people don't.
And that's okay.
That's what makes America great.
We disagree.
We can have a debate, a dialogue, a discussion, or we can't.
It's up to you.
I don't care.
But we're exercising our constitutional right of free speech.
You should not be condemned to die For doing that which you are permitted under your Constitution.
And you should not be condemned to die in an organization that's supported by the U.S. government and funded by U.S. taxpayer.
That's an indirect way of avoiding the First Amendment prohibition against Congress passing laws that abridge the free speech of Americans.
Congress in this case didn't pass a law, but they passed a budget giving money to the Ukrainians so they can stifle free speech by threatening me and my family with death.
And it's something they have to live with every day of the week.
Absolutely, yeah.
But this is a critical issue that affects you and many other Americans, including people like myself as well.
You know, I've been blacklisted off every platform you can imagine.
That's why I had to build this platform, Brighteon.
I had to build it because they wouldn't let me on any platform whatsoever.
But of course, they didn't like me talking about big pharma.
For you, it's, you know, geopolitics and the State Department and war and so on.
But for me, it was big pharma and vaccines.
But a couple of key issues here.
They want to silence you not because the things that you say are totally insane and make no sense, although obviously some people could disagree with your characterizations of Zelensky or what have you, and that's fine.
Like you said, disagreement is okay.
But when you talk about Nord Stream, when you talk about the lack of munitions, when you talk about the expansion of NATO, these are all factual things that actually make a lot of sense with a lot of people.
And it's as if the State Department just wants to silence you because your questions make so much sense about those issues.
What do you think about that angle?
No, that's 100% correct.
I'll show you the absurdity of this.
Back when they formed this list in July of last year, 2022, Yeah, I was one of the first people put on the list.
And my number one crime, they listed at that time three.
I think right now I've got about six things that I'm accused of doing.
But the number one thing I was accused of doing back then Was to call the conflict a proxy conflict between NATO and Russia.
Which is now admitted by the State Department!
Not as the State Department.
The Ukrainian Minister of Defense has come out and openly said, no, this is a proxy conflict between NATO and Russia, and Ukraine is the middleman.
I was just telling the truth back when I said this first back in March.
But back then, that was an inconvenient narrative that you couldn't put forward.
Now, situations change.
So I'm expecting the Minister of Defense to be right alongside me on this list, you know, because we both believe the same thing.
I will say this.
But you said it first, which is your crime.
You said it first.
But you see...
Same thing happened to me.
When COVID came out, I said, of course that came out of a lab in China, in Wuhan.
Of course it did.
And for three years, you know, you're censored, you're called a conspiracy theorist, and then now the U.S. Department of Energy comes out and says, yeah, it came out of Wuhan.
And the FBI says, yeah, it came out of Wuhan.
Well, so Scott, your crime is the same as my crime.
We're ahead of our time.
It's the ahead-of-time crime.
Yeah, because I've been accused of other things.
For instance, people have taken umbrage over my characterization of the Bucha massacre that's alleged to have taken place in the first days of April of last year.
But all I've said is that when you have a Ukrainian government official going on social media warning people to stay indoors and don't worry about the shooting, that there's cleansing operations taking place, When you have the Ukrainian Intelligence Service put out on their webpage, the unit, the Safari unit, will be doing cleansing operations targeting collaborators.
And bragging about it.
And then you have a videotape of this safari unit in Bucha where the people are saying, hey, look, he's got a white armband or he's not wearing a blue armband.
Can we shoot them?
And the answer is yes, shoot them.
When you take all of that, and the end result is bodies on the ground wearing white armbands signifying some sort of sympathy to Russia, holding Russian ration packs, thereby meeting the definition of collaborator, You have a very strong circumstantial case that the Ukrainian government was involved.
And this is what I wrote.
I said, if there's going to be investigation We need to do a forensic evaluation of the bodies.
We need to determine time of death, mechanism of death.
We need somebody to go through the bodies and look at the angle of the bullet wounds, the type of round fired, because the Ukrainians use a different round than the Russians.
So a good forensic examination of these bodies, while they're fresh, will tell you exactly who is responsible.
And I firmly believe it was the Ukrainians.
But then these bodies were cleaned up, buried, disposed of in a manner that, you know, basically corrupted the evidence.
And suddenly everybody's coming out saying, Russia did it, Russia did it, Russia did it.
I'm guilty of asking questions.
I'm guilty of connecting the dots.
I'm guilty of putting forward a fact-based assessment of the situation that I believe will stand the test of time.
It certainly is inconvenient to the Ukrainians and the Americans and everybody else who has gone down that path.
I can go over and over and over again with these.
Another one I was guilty of.
I'm a ballistic missile expert, supposedly.
I've done a little bit of work in ballistic missiles in the Soviet Union and Iraq.
So I know them, and I know how to investigate things that deal with the ballistic missiles.
So when, in April, a Tochkou, which is a specific kind of missile...
Landed in Kramatorsk, a city next to a train station, killing a bunch of women and children who were getting ready to be evacuated.
The Ukrainians immediately said, the Russians did it.
The Russians did it.
And I'm looking at it going, well, first of all, from an order of battle perspective, only the Ukrainians have the Tochkou.
So we got a problem right now.
If you tell me the Russians suddenly brought them out of retirement, that's a different issue.
But when we do basic Analysis of the debris.
The missile flies on a given path.
When it lands, the warhead separates, and the missile body separates, so the impact crater will be ahead of the missile body.
So where the missile body is and where the crater is, you can draw a line that'll take you straight back in the direction that it was fired from, and it goes straight back to Ukrainian territory.
And then you look at the serial number, and you determine the batch when it was made, and the contract where it was delivered, and that serial number is linked to Tochkou missiles delivered to the Ukrainian military.
So all the forensic data screams this was a Ukrainian attack.
And yet I'm a Russian propagandist for daring to point that out.
Well, yeah.
I mean, Scott, your crime is believing in facts.
I mean, in our society today, you can't dare believe in facts.
You have to follow the propaganda.
But, you know, the best skill of the West is projection.
You know, projecting their tactics, their false flags perhaps, their crimes upon the enemy.
Now, you know, I have no doubt though, by the way, for the record, and you know, you might berate me for this, but I have no doubt that there are certainly some war crimes that have been carried out by certain segments of Russian troops as well.
And I think it happens in every war.
It happened in Vietnam with American troops.
But in the big picture, I've seen a lot of cases where the Ukrainian leadership, Zelensky, is blaming Russia for things that clearly were carried out by Zelensky.
And so, I mean, it's obvious at this point.
It's projection.
No, there's no doubt about it.
Look, again, war is hell and people are people.
You know, I'm very proud of the United States Marine Corps.
I believe that we train all of our Marines to a high ethical standard.
We have solid leadership.
We have solid Marines, but when humans are subjected to the pressures of combat, sometimes mistakes are made and sometimes those mistakes are criminal in nature.
One only has to take a look at what happened in Haditha, Iraq, where Marines were involved in the murder of Iraqi civilians, a war crime, to realize that every military is capable of these mistakes.
What separates these militaries From, you know, others is the ability to recognize a crime was committed to carry out the appropriate investigation and to hold those who perpetrated the crime accountable for what was done.
If Russians have committed war crimes, and I believe there's no doubt in my mind that Russians have done the things that could constitute war crimes in Ukraine, My firm belief is that the Russian government, the Russian military, has arrested these people and prosecuted these people, because it's not the official policy of the Russian government to perpetrate war crimes.
And there's so much evidence to prove this point.
But the Ukrainians, on the other hand, film their soldiers executing Russian prisoners of war.
They film their soldiers executing civilians.
They film their soldiers torturing people.
and they do it without remorse because they view the Russians as subhumans.
Yeah, that's true.
They call them porcs.
They do that.
But let's expand this war crimes discussion to the destruction of the Nord Stream Pipeline.
And I've said, and I think you concur with this conclusion, although some people obviously differ with this, the State Department differs, but it looks like to me it's compelling with Cy Hirsch's article, the evidence, and frankly we arrived at this conclusion before his article, long before, but the United and frankly we arrived at this conclusion before his article, long The United States...
Essentially, U.S. Navy divers set this up, and they detonated the Nord Stream pipelines that served Germany primarily.
So here we have an act of infrastructure terrorism against a NATO ally.
Now, Russia's not doing that.
Russia didn't blow up their own Gazprom pipeline.
Russia isn't destroying the infrastructure of Belarus, for example, but the U.S. is destroying the infrastructure of Germany, and then there's this massive cover-up.
That's the craziest thing.
This is history, like a dark history, unfolding.
What are your thoughts on Nord Stream and U.S. terrorism against its own allies?
No, I mean, it's exactly that.
I think most observers were struck on February 7th of last year when the President of the United States, in the presence of Olaf Scholz, the Chancellor of Germany, in a White House press conference, straight up said, if Russian tanks enter Ukraine, We're going to shut down Nord Stream 2.
It won't exist anymore.
And it wasn't the German chancellor who went, whoa, time out.
That's sort of like our infrastructure.
I don't know what you're talking about.
I reject this.
If this happens, this will be an act of war.
He was just silent.
Literally a scared boy look on his face.
It took a German reporter to stand up and say, hey, are you saying you're going to attack?
How could you do that?
It's German infrastructure.
I remember that.
It'll be done.
That's a confession.
That is a confession, yeah.
And so there's people in prison who have been convicted on weaker circumstantial cases than the one you can make.
about American complicity in this attack.
We have a confession from the President of the United States.
We have Tony Blinken, because one of the big questions that has to be asked is, qui bono, who benefits?
And Tony Blinken, the Secretary of State, instead of coming out and saying, oh my God, this is horrible.
Germany, what can we do to help?
I mean, you've just lost critical energy infrastructure.
We're going to investigate.
We're going to find the perpetrator.
We're going to help bring justice.
His first words were, This creates a tremendous opportunity for the United States to supplant.
So you're just sitting there going, so you benefit from this.
That's a problem.
And then there has to be the means.
Where's the murder weapon?
Well, good Lord, you have Baltic Ops 22 doing a mine, doing underwater mine clearing, deep diver exercises right where the pipelines are.
That's the murder weapon.
So even before Cy Hirsch wrote his outstanding article, It was a strong circumstantial case.
And then you have everybody covering it up.
I mean, you know, the Swedes go in, have the initial contact with the crime scene, clean it up, and then they seal the file and say, we're never talking about this because it has national security implications.
What?
You think if the Swedes has evidence that Russia did this, they wouldn't be screaming about it from every...
They know who did it.
They know America did it.
The Danes went in, cleaned it up.
The Brits went in, cleaned it up.
The only people not investigating are the Germans.
They just don't want to do anything because they know what the ramifications of this is.
You cannot be a NATO member.
If you've been stabbed in the back this way.
But Scott, I don't know how much you've been tracking this, but my area of expertise is food and the food supply.
I've had on a lot of guests about this.
And a story appeared recently that in the United Kingdom, they're not using greenhouses that they would normally use at this time of year.
In order to pre-grow crops that are going to become vegetables for grocery stores.
And why aren't they running the greenhouses?
Because they can't afford the energy.
Why?
Because Nord Stream was blown up and it affected all of Western Europe.
So now we have, it's not just energy for industry, right?
The metal smelting operations, the manufacturing, the automobiles, everything.
Glass manufacturing in France shut down.
It's not just that.
It's energy for food and also that natural gas It gets converted into ammonia and then urea and then nitrogen-based fertilizers.
And so the fertilizer plants are shut down.
And so now we're entering the spring planting season of 2023 in Europe, and they don't have the greenhouses, and they don't have much in the way of fertilizer.
So fast forward to the summer or the fall, there's going to be a lot of hungry, damn...
You know, angry Europeans because of the Nord Stream destruction.
And nobody in the media is covering the fact that Europeans will starve because America blew that thing up.
But that's the truth.
No, you're 100% correct.
But what's amazing is that the Europeans aren't even...
I mean, the only country where I see people waking up is Germany.
They have some very brave members of parliament.
We're standing up and demanding an investigation, literally pointing a finger at Olaf Scholz and his government saying, what are you doing about this?
We were attacked.
This was an act of terrorism.
This was an act of war.
What are you doing about it?
Why are you silent?
Why aren't you investigating?
Look, it's not a secret.
I'm very good friends with Cy Hirsch.
I've known him for 25 years, and I've had a lot of conversations with him about this article after it came out, and I told him straight up, I said, Si, you wrote the most important article this century, and it may be the most important article of the century, because what you have exposed is a crime by an American president.
Now, American presidents commit crimes all the time, but this is a crime against an ally.
This is a violation of the Constitution conspiring with your cabinet You've exposed an act of war by the United States against an ostensible ally and a friend.
And if Germany wakes up, this is the end of NATO. This is the end of the European Union.
This is the end of a lot of things, because Germany cannot be a member of a military alliance that allows the most powerful member of that alliance to carry out an act of terrorism, an act of aggression, to stab them, to carry out an economic Pearl Harbor.
And this means the end of the European Union.
Germany has the most powerful economy in Europe.
If they fall out, the euro collapses.
This could change everything because one And I think your pets there agree with you as well, kind of outraged, as we all are.
But, you know, the truth is that I think you're right.
This is a major turning point because it...
Begins the accelerated deindustrialization of Europe.
You know, we're seeing the shutdown of BASF out of Germany.
They're moving operations to China.
Why?
Because Nord Stream was blown up.
They can't get the natural gas that they need.
They need the hydrocarbons as raw materials to make, what is it, 45,000 chemicals for medicine, textiles, industry, fertilizer, everything.
That's shutting down, folks.
How is Western Europe going to come back from this?
And then let's talk about munitions as well.
I think a lot of our readers were shocked to learn, I forgot which official it was out of the UK, like a former military official there, said that if the UK goes to war with Russia, the UK will last about one week, and then they're done.
They don't have any more ammunition for that.
And the US is running out of ammunition because they're sending it all to Ukraine.
And what about the German military operation?
Not very deep anymore, either.
You know, they're sending makeshift tanks or promising to, not even getting them there.
We'll send them into the future.
You know, we'll get you tanks in 2026, that kind of thing.
Talk about the industry that's backing or the lack of industry at this point in the West and what that means for this conflict, please.
Well, what I've been saying for some time now, for many years, is, you know, the global war on terror that the United States waged for two decades in the Middle East, It made us the weakest we've ever been.
And I'm not talking about because of what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq and in Syria.
I'm talking about the fact that we used to have a military that was organized, trained, and equipped to wage war.
Large-scale ground combat using combined arms operations in any environment, whether it be Europe, the Middle East, anywhere.
The finest military in the world, so that if we needed to, quote-unquote, shoot rabid dogs, we had the ability to do that.
Instead, we took this military and we destroyed it in the Middle East.
We restructured it.
We focused everything from recruitment all the way up to, you know, how we organize, train, and equip.
Focused on low-intensity conflict and things of that, you know, counterinsurgency.
The last thing we were training to do is carry out large-scale combined arms operations.
And this means that our budgets were impacted, everything.
So we stopped doing the things that are necessary, and we lead by example.
So all of NATO followed suit.
You mentioned the British Army.
It's not just that they're going to run out of ammunition.
There's large soccer stadiums in Europe that can hold 100,000 people.
You put the entire British Army in one of these soccer stadiums, you're going to have 30,000 unsold seats.
It's not an army anymore.
It's barely a corps.
They can't fight.
They can't even get a brigade up and running.
If the British were required to go to war today, they can't field a brigade.
That's the honest to God's truth.
The Germans, in order to get a reinforced battalion battle group sent to Lithuania, had to cannibalize their armored brigades.
Their brigades can't leave the barracks.
This is all of NATO. NATO can't fight.
And it's not just on the ground.
It's in the air.
An article just came out by the Royal United Services Institute that talks about the fact that NATO's Air Force is decrepit.
Old airframes, poorly maintained.
You know, we run out of artillery ammunition.
General Cavoli, the commander of U.S. forces in Europe, also Supreme Allied Commander, Gave a presentation in January in Sweden where he said, you know, the scope and scale of what's going on in Ukraine today is beyond the imagination of anybody in NATO. He basically said, we didn't conceive of war of this intensity.
We're not trained for it.
We're not equipped for it.
We're not prepared for this war.
If we had to go into that war, we would lose.
And one of the main reasons they would lose is because they have insufficient artillery ammunition.
The Russians on a slow day are firing 20,000 rounds On a high day, they're firing 60,000 to 80,000 rounds a day.
We produce 100,000 rounds a month.
It tells you right off the bat that we can't keep up with this capability.
But it's not just artillery, air to air.
We want to send our Air Force in.
First of all, our Air Force is not trained to do anything other than drop bombs on wedding parties and villagers.
I'm sorry, I don't mean to be too blunt on that, but that's all we've done.
We haven't engaged in air-to-air combat.
We haven't engaged in penetration operations against the world's most sophisticated integrated air defense, which the Russians have.
And if we tried to impose our power to project our air power into battle space controlled by Russian air defense, we would lose all of our aircraft.
If we had to engage in air-to-air We would run out of air-to-air missiles because we don't produce enough weapons to do that scope and scale that's taking place in Europe today.
And this is all of NATO. NATO is a paper tiger.
And the cost of trying to get NATO up to speed is astronomical, made even more so by what you just talked about, the high cost of energy.
How do you produce a tank?
You need steel.
How do you make steel?
In a furnace.
What powers the furnace?
Natural gas.
And if it's so expensive, you can't afford to keep the furnace up and running, and it shuts down.
And that's what's happening in Germany right now.
That's why a senior minister of their defense has said, don't give away these tanks, because we can't afford to replace them.
We can't afford to build the tanks necessary to replace them.
Stop giving these tanks away.
That's just a statement of fact.
NATO is a paper tiger.
You know who's not a paper tiger?
Russia.
Well, but NATO is really great at fighting via press releases.
I mean, they can whip up a mean word game, you know.
They have linguistic artillery, and they can catapult their propaganda that way very easily.
But I think versus kinetic, real-world Russian artillery, I don't think it holds up.
But can I ask you a technical question about weapon systems?
Sure.
Russia, I think it's the Sarmat-2 missile, at least as it's called in the West, it is reputed to have, I think, hyperglide reentry vehicles, which can, as I understand it, this is my question to you, these can move at hypersonic speeds. this is my question to you, these can move at They're guided, obviously.
They can evade, so they have evasive maneuvers.
And is this system up and actually running at this point, or is it close to running?
What do you think the real status is?
Because it's hard to tell from Russia's official announcements.
The Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed orders bringing the Sarmat into full operational status.
Now, that means that they have probably fielded a regiment's worth of missiles, maybe nine.
And they're still producing them, and as more missiles come on, they'll bring other regiments up.
But right now, there's at least one regiment of Sarmat heavy intercontinental ballistic missiles on operational duty right now, ready to fire.
Does the West have anything at all that can interdict that?
Nothing.
It's a weapon that hits us two ways.
First of all, almost all of our radars, early warning radars, and then the radars that guide our ability to intercept missiles are focused on, oriented towards the North Pole.
Because when you take a look at a map, that's the shortest route to come out of the Siberian launch areas over the North Pole into the United States.
What the SARMAT does, because of its long range, it can fire and come over the South Pole and come at the United States from behind where we have absolutely nothing.
So we wouldn't even know it was here until it hit us.
And then to compound the problems is that it can deliver multiple avant-garde hypersonic warheads.
These can be either conventional or nuclear.
But the bottom line is, Even if we did detect them when they released these warheads, these warheads are not coming in on a normal ballistic trajectory.
They will come in.
They're powered.
They'll maneuver.
They'll change direction.
They'll come down low.
They'll pop up at the end, come down, hit the target.
We can't stop them.
And these are very accurate, very modern warheads.
And the reason why, and this is important for Americans to understand this, Russia didn't want to build this weapon.
We made them build this weapon.
You see, we're the ones that backed out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty in 2002.
We're the ones that fielded ballistic missile defense systems in Poland and Romania and then lied about them, saying, That the Standard Missile 3 SM3 can't shoot down ICBMs.
And yet, two years later, we deployed the Standard Missile 3 Block 2A, which is specifically designed to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles.
We lied to the Russians.
And Putin basically said, well, if that's what you're going to do, then we're going to build systems that defeat this.
And he did that in 2018 when he announced these systems.
He basically looked Americans in the eyes and he said, we've been telling you for decades now not to do this.
We've been telling you there will be consequences.
But you didn't listen.
Are you listening now?
And there it is.
The avant-garde and the Sarmart heavy ICBM team, it's unbeatable, unstoppable.
It's a game changer.
It's a game winner.
If we ever have a war with Russia, I can guarantee you this.
We will not shoot down a single one of their missiles, and every missile they launch, their warheads will hit their target, and you and I and everybody listening to this program will be dead.
So that's terrifying at many levels, but also, on the other side, what the U.S. launches at Russia And my question to you is on this, but my understanding is that Russia has the most advanced anti-ballistic interdiction system in the world.
Is that the SA-400 system that can be outfitted for even ICBMs, or is it some other system?
What's Russia's ability to stop our ICBMs from striking Russian cities?
Russia has the S-400, which has a limited ICBM capability, but they have the S-500.
And I think they got a system called the S-550 that can do this as well.
These are advanced systems that are designed not only to shoot down ballistic missile warheads, but for all the people that get turned on when they, you know, We're good to go.
That's the problem with engaging in arms races, when you seek to acquire a technological superiority against a peer-level opponent.
And I don't know what people think Russians do, but they have the most advanced research and development programs for weaponry out there.
And when we take forever to roll out a system and we broadcast and advertise that we're rolling out this system, they have time to do what nations do, gather the intelligence and build the counter.
So they have the counter deployed, ready, tested before we even get the system in the field.
We don't want to go to war with these guys.
Anybody who thinks that the Russians are stupid people, they are greatly underestimating the intelligence.
And, you know, look, I interact with people from all over the world and all the people I've ever met from both Ukraine and Russia, by the way, are extremely high IQ.
They're the best programmers, engineers, mathematicians, physicists.
These are some of the brightest people on the planet.
There's no question about it.
And from both of those countries, by the way.
So, I mean, America is vastly underestimating Russia's weapons proficiency, I believe.
And then if you look at who are the actual woke idiots in the world, it's in the U.S. State Department.
You know, it's the U.S. administration right now.
That's like a cabal of woke idiots, at least in my opinion.
You may not use those terms, but that's what I think is going on.
There was a time during the Reagan administration where we had adults.
The state department was populated by adults.
My dog wants to be an adult.
We had cold warriors who cut their teeth on literally the beginning of the cold.
I'll give you an example, a guy named Paul Meachie.
He wrote containment theory back in the early 1950s.
He's the guy who came up with the National Security Directive 68, which created containment theory for the Soviet Union.
He was a cold warrior, and he ended up being the guy who negotiated the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, the treaty that I helped implement in the Soviet Union.
We had adults.
We had people who knew the real world and knew the risks that were contained in the real world and came up with solutions to these.
Unfortunately, you know, the reason why Paul Nietzsche had all these skill sets is I liken them to muscles.
He's a guy who actually went out there and worked out every day in the world of diplomacy and arms control and, you know, national security issues.
So that when he sat down at the table, he was a strong man.
Mentally, he knew what he was talking about.
Today, we have people that don't exercise these muscles, and so all their muscles have atrophied, and they're not nearly on the level of a Paul Nietzsche or anybody of that caliber.
We don't have those people today.
If you want to call them woke, I don't know what they call them.
I will call them totally ineffective.
I will call them inadequate to the task, and this is dangerous because We have forgotten critical skill sets.
We've forgotten how to negotiate in good faith.
We've forgotten how to deal in a reciprocal manner with our counterparts.
We're a nation that tolerates our president ordering an attack on an ally.
It's mind-boggling.
I say that's part, just to defend my use of the term woke, I think part of the woke worldview is that you make things change by wishing it.
So even in diplomacy, they think, well, we're going to beat Russia by wishing it so or by issuing press releases.
So kind of the woke worldview is the view that doesn't take reality into consideration and doesn't understand cause and effect.
I'm not disagreeing with you on woke.
Right.
No, I get it.
I'm just clarifying.
My wife gets mad at me sometimes when I use certain terminologies.
I have overused woke.
I probably share the exact same feeling you have regarding the term and how it should be applied.
My wife has asked me not to use that term.
Okay.
So I avoid it.
You have the anti-woke wife.
No, no, no.
It's sympathy for...
Because believe me, my wife is more anti-woke than I am.
Oh, okay.
She's just trying to protect me.
Got it.
Got it.
No, it's good to have a wife that's...
Helping to keep you safe, especially since you're on so many kill lists and things like that, right?
I don't need the woke people coming after me, too.
Yeah, you're going to have the wokesters coming after me.
We're running out of time here, but last question to you is about...
You know, the so-called spring offensive.
Now, I know Russia never officially announced there's going to be a spring offensive.
Why would they?
That's not what you do in the military.
But there was a lot of speculation that there would be a, quote, offensive of some sort.
But then again, the whole blitzkrieg approach doesn't seem rational from the way Russia is running its war.
What do you think the near future holds for us?
Like the next couple of months, what are we looking at in Ukraine?
Well, to get to the near future, unfortunately, just the way my analytical brain works, we have to go in reverse for a little bit and understand how we got here.
This is a war that's been fought in several phases.
The first phase, and I was one of the people early on that said, if Russia goes to war with Ukraine...
It's going to be a blitzkrieg.
It's going to be doctrinal.
They're going to swamp the Ukrainians.
This thing's going to be over in a week.
Mark Miley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, shared that assessment.
William Burns, the director of the CIA, shared that assessment because had the Russians gone to war against Ukraine, they would have swamped them.
This would have been over in a week.
But Russia surprised everybody by not going to war against Ukraine.
They carried out something called a special military operation, and the purpose of this It wasn't to destroy Ukraine, but to compel Ukraine to the negotiating table.
And we saw that.
Three negotiations that took place in early March in the Belarus city of Gomel, and then a fourth one scheduled for April 1st in Istanbul, Turkey, where there was a treaty, a peace treaty ready to be signed.
That was Russia's objective.
So when everybody says, I believe Russia was doing this, that, and the other thing, you guys are all wrong.
What Russia was doing in the initial phase of the operation was to get Ukraine to the negotiating table and to bring this conflict to an early termination.
But the United States and Britain, Boris Johnson, flew to Kiev, and we killed it, because we misinterpreted Russia's light approach to this conflict as weakness.
And so what we did is start to extend the conflict.
Now we roll into phase two, which Russia said, okay, if you don't want peace, then we are going to liberate the Donbas, the Lugansk and Donetsk regions, heavily populated by ethnic Russians.
We're going to liberate that and make them independent states.
And they began this offensive operation that was grinding the Ukrainian army down.
I mean, the Ukrainians have suffered horrendous casualties, and many of those casualties were suffered during this phase.
From, say, May to August.
But also during this phase, the United States and NATO provided Ukraine with tens of billions of dollars worth of modern military equipment, training, etc., support.
And the Ukrainians were able to reconstitute a force of about 70,000 troops, which they then used to launch an attack against overextended Russian flanks in Kharkov and Kherson.
And they drove them back.
This was phase three, the vaunted counterattack.
The Russians gave up territory.
To preserve lives, they consolidate their lines, and then they go into phase four, which is having burned through the Ukrainian reserves, Russia now mobilizes.
They go from their peacetime complement of 200,000 troops, and they mobilize 300,000 reservists.
These are experienced veterans with specific military skills, and about 120,000 to 180,000 volunteers who are receiving similar training.
From September until today, these forces are being trained.
Around 80,000 of them, the guys who had most relevant experience, they were trained up as individual replacements, and they were sent in to solidify the lines to reinforce these units.
The rest of them, over 300,000, are being trained in offensive-oriented, tank-heavy shock units, and they're still training.
Because the Russians aren't driven by the calendar.
They don't care about Western propaganda.
They don't care that Newsweek says there needs to be a winter offensive.
They don't care that the Washington Post says there needs to be an offensive.
The Russians care about results.
And they will launch the offensive when they're ready to launch the offensive, once their troops are properly trained, equipped, and logistically sustained.
But the important thing is, I believe the offensive has already started.
Everybody's going, where's the big offensive?
I said, have you seen what's going on on the battlefield?
Look at Bakhmut.
And Prigozin, the head of the Wagner private military company, PMC, has straight up said, this is a man, he's pretty good at trolling on social media, but when he speaks, he speaks honestly.
He speaks honestly about his own casualties, and he's spoken openly about the Ukrainian casualties, and he basically said, in Wagner's area of operations, from May until now, his troops have killed 110,000 Ukrainian soldiers.
That's just in his area of operations.
That means that numbers such as 300,000, 350,000 dead Ukrainians are not far-fetched.
This has been a very bloody war.
And this is because the Russians right now are engaged in offensive operations all along the front.
These aren't big arrow, you know, Operation Cobra type stuff.
This is putting pressure all along the front lines, forcing the Ukrainians to commit their last reserves, forcing them to, you know, use up precious ammunition, which they're running out of, by the way, and identifying the gaps, the weaknesses in the Ukrainian defenses.
so that when these other forces that are finishing up their training finally appear on the battlefield, they'll be able to identify the desired courses of action that they want to pursue.
The offensive has begun.
It's called preparation of the battlefield, and the Russians will strike when the time is right for Russia to strike.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is burning through everything.
They're out there begging for tanks.
Why?
Because all their tanks have been destroyed.
They're out there hijacking men off the streets.
Why?
Because they're running out of people on the battlefield.
They're begging for anything, a miracle from the skies, an F-16, something, to come and save us.
But Zelensky has said straight up, When asked, he said about American tanks, if I don't have these tanks and the numbers we need by August, it's all over.
And all over means Ukraine loses.
He also just recently said that if Ukraine doesn't win this war, then America is going to have to send its young men and women to die in Europe.
I mean, I'm paraphrasing, but it's pretty darn close.
He just said that.
That disgusts me.
First of all, regardless of where you stand on this, having a foreign leader...
Talk about committing American boys and girls into combat is unacceptable.
And I don't know why the U.S. government hasn't stood up and told him what they should tell him, which is to sit down and shut up.
We alone make the determination about when we send American forces into harm's way.
Not you, Zelensky.
You don't get to make that decision.
You don't get to define that.
You're not the engine that drives the American war machine.
But this man has been Pumped up and has an artificial sense of who he is, because everywhere he goes, he's treated as a hero.
Every word he says is treated.
I mean, Nancy Pelosi said of his speech when he spoke before a combined session of Congress, that it was the greatest speech ever delivered in the history of Congress.
LAUGHTER Wow.
Really?
A cross-dressing cocaine clown.
That's amazing.
And likened to Winston Churchill.
So this man is apparently, and he's now starting to believe it.
But if you saw the videotape when he made that statement, and you saw the desperation in his eyes, I mean, we can joke about maybe he was high on cocaine.
I don't know.
But this was a man who is definitely unhinged.
There was desperation.
This was a nervous man because he knows it's over.
He knows it's over, so he's doing anything necessary to get the support he believes he needs to survive.
And I have bad news for Zelensky.
Go talk to the South Vietnamese and ask them what happened in 1975.
Go talk to the Afghans and ask them what happened in 2021.
Go talk to the Kurds and ask them what's happening in the past, in the 70s, 80s and 90s and today.
We abandon everybody we claim to be friends with.
We're friends of nobody.
That's a sad statement, but it's a true statement.
The United States will not be there for Ukraine in the end.
We will abandon Ukraine like we've abandoned everybody else when the going gets tough.
When the going gets tough, Yeah, far too many lives lost.
And the one thing I want to see, and we're going to wrap this up, Scott, but I think you agree with me on this.
We don't want to see people dying.
And we wish for safety and health and freedom for all people in our world.
and people like Zelensky are just getting his own Ukrainian citizens killed and it's all being funded by the U.S.
The blood of the Ukrainian men, it's on our hands, America's hands, as much as Zelensky's hands right now.
And it's a shame.
100%.
The bottom line is everybody who sits there and says, well, I support Ukraine, therefore we need to give them more weapons.
All you're doing is guaranteeing The further destruction of the nation, the further slaughter of Ukraine's men, the further dislocation of the women and children, further destruction of infrastructure, all you're doing is guaranteeing that the Ukrainian nation you claim to support is going to die the most horrible kind of death.
The best way to support Ukraine right now is to encourage the most rapid cessation of conflict.
Bring this war to an end.
And the easiest way to bring this war to an end Is stop pouring fuel on the fire.
Stop sending weapons.
Stop doubling down on stupid.
Yeah, okay.
That's a great summary, Scott.
I want to thank you for your time, but also give you an opportunity here.
How can people follow you, give out your websites, social channels, show names, things like that?
Go ahead.
Well, I think the easiest way to follow me is on a website I've created called scottriterextra.com.
That's where I have a substack.
There's no paywall on it, so you can access everything.
If you want to support, that's your business.
But everything I do, for instance, if you send me a link to this show, that's going to be put on my substack.
Every podcast I do goes on the substack.
Every article I write goes on the substack.
So that's sort of a one-stop shop for the work that I'm doing.
Okay.
All right.
That's great.
And you do – it's almost, I think, a daily show that you do on Scott Ritter Extra, it seems like it, or almost daily?
I do it twice a week.
Oh, okay.
But I – like today, this is literally the – Sixth podcast I've done today.
It might seem like I'm doing a Scott Ritter Extra.
There's a lot of international interest.
I've done a show for Bulgaria today.
I've done a show for Germany.
I did a show for Macedonia today.
It's a diverse audience.
Now I'm doing one for the United States here with you.
Well, we thank you for your time, and we hope for your safety, and we also hope for peace as the outcome here, but also the end of tyranny, global tyranny that's being pushed, sadly, by, right now, the U.S. State Department.
Got to reel them in and return to a world where we respect the rights of other nations to exist, I think.
But that's just my take on it.
But thank you, Scott, for joining me today.
We really appreciate your time and your analysis.
Thank you very much for having me, and thanks to your audience for listening.
Absolutely.
All right, folks, that's it here on Brighteon.com.
We're just speaking with Scott Ritter.
And again, his website I just mentioned is ScottRitterExtra.com.
You can find him there, share his podcast.
You'll also find a lot of his videos and interviews on Brighteon.com, which, of course, is a free speech video platform.
And as always, feel free to repost this interview on other channels and other platforms.
Just give credit to Scott Ritter.
And thank you for watching today.
I'm Mike Adams, also known as the Health Ranger here, the founder of Brighteon.com.
God bless America.
Thank you for watching.
Take care.
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