Yesterday, Mike Adams spoke to Scott Ritter. Unfortunately, he did not highlight this as much as he could have because it is worth listening to.

I have taken a transcript and reproduce much of the interview, highlighting the key points.

I apologise for any wonky editing.

Start the video at 44′.

Destabilising Russia

A quick summary would be that the the United States since the 1992, has treated Russia as a defeated enemy, of course, Russia being the successor state to the Soviet Union. And we have sought to keep them down. We succeeded in doing that for 10 years under Boris Yeltsin. IN 2000 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 a confrontation with Russia and now we have the fight.

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 there. 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 look at energy prices, we’re we got some issues, too.

There’s also a shooting war on the ground, we we’ve turned what was a Russian Ukrainian regional conflict into a 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. Ukraine that has been propped up by the United States taxpayer dollar by NATO weaponry.

Field Artillery

People say, “well, how can you be so confident?”

What I’ll say is this, this war is very complex, but it 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, and the most accurate manner 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, are running out of ammunition and they will run out of ammunition this summer.

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 they’re done this summer, if they don’t find additional resources to provide ammunition when the gun stop firing the war’s over. And Ukrainian guns look like they’re gonna stop firing but the Russian guns will never stop firing.

A rabid dog

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 you don’t want conflict you want a negotiated peace of some kind is that is that a fair characterization?

I would modify it as such. First of all, I’m a marine wars my business, right? So if you want to 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 said in a tweet that  got me in a lot of trouble that 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.

Nazi ideology

So, even though I’m anti war, and I would prefer a negotiated settlement, let’s never forget that Ukrainian government has embraced the ideology of step on Bandera, a ultra nationalist who fought alongside Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, who has the blood of 10’s of 1000s of Jews on his hands, hundreds of 1000’s of Poles,  hundreds of 1000s of Russians.

And he is the national hero of. Zelinsky in Ukraine today.

A struggle between Good and Evil

My uncle fought in World War Two, I have other relatives that fought in World War Two. They fought against the Nazi threat.

So I’m not going to sit by and pretend that there’s some sort of equilibrium between the Russians and Ukrainians today.

In Ukraine, 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.  I would prefer that a peaceful solution could be found to these to these problems, I would have preferred them or didn’t break out, but a rabid dog is running in the streets. And I prefer he didn’t have rabies. But now that he does, he needs to be put down.

Experience as a weapons inspector

Okay. All right. Thank you for that clarification, because, you know, you’ve played a key role as a UN weapons inspector, Your efforts, and you were really critical in helping 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.

I’m somebody who understands the awful reality of war. And, and therefore, I want to ensure that we do everything humanly, humanly possible to prevent war.  War should be the absolute last option and 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 it’s not worthy of the sacrifice we’re asking them to make.

This is why I’m 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.

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, you know, 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 and 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 a rack 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 to disarm. They wanted Saddam Hussein gone. And they were using this process to get rid of Saddam.

They wanted to tell lies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction to justify the 2003 invasion.

Enemy of the State

So I, at one point, did they actually send you into a facility and say that your job is to find weapons, there are 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 minister of the Ministry of Defense

That’s like going to the Pentagon.

It’s like going to the Secretary of Defense eyes. Now imagine a scenario where Iraqi inspectors show up outside the Pentagon, “Hey, boss, we want to come in inspect US Secretary of Defense Office“.  We wouldn’t let them in. We’d say, no.

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, believed that our job as a UN 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 – we did this not because they trusted me-  they didn’t, they didn’t like me, because I was a son of you know. Their nickname for me was Abu,the father of all crises. I was a 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 my the mandate I was given and nothing more.

So when I told him, trust me, if you don’t let me in, there’s going to be a war. The only way you avoid this award is you have to let me in and you have to let me do my job without any interference.

And after a couple of 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.

We stopped the war.

After that, was called an enemy of the state by American official Sandy Berger.

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 an attack.

We prevented a war and at that time, I thought I thought I’d done a great thing, but my government called me a traitor.

And that was the beginning of the end of my relationship with the US government

On the government blacklist

Okay, my and then now you’ve been added to the what is Since the Ukraine war, you’re number one, Scott, you’re number one on a list of you, you’ve reached the number one status, which is always an important milestone. But tell us about that list.

Well, there’s, there’s there’s actually two lists and you don’t want to be on either of them.

One is the Center for Countering Dsinformation, a unique name, because it’s a purely propaganda outlet of the Office of the President in in Ukraine. So they work directly for Volodymyr Zelensky. And this is an office that was created by the US State Department actually funded by US taxpayers.

They they take anybody who speaks out in a manner that opposes the narrative being pushed by the Ukrainian government, by the US 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 propagandists, they call you an information terrorist, they call you a war criminal. And the idea is to to have you cancelled, meaning by late by making this label the ideas for you to be blacklisted and not not allowed on any media outlets, etc.

They’ve also called for my arrest, but fortunately, the US government hasn’t decided to act on that yet.

Myrotvorets, the Hit List

https://myrotvorets.center/

But but this is lesson number one on but there’s another list called Mirotvorets,

This is the list run by the Ukrainian intelligence service.

And it’s a hit list.

If you’re on your if you’re on this list, you’re marked to die. And some people have been killed on that 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 US government’s doing nothing about it, literally nothing about it.

We are being marked for death, for exercising our constitutional right to 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 to 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 US government and funded by US taxpayer.

That’s an 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.

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. I was one of the first people put on the list. And my number one crime, ( I think right now I’ve got about six things that I’m accused of doing). that  was accused of doing back then, was to call the conflict, a proxy conflict between NATO and Russia, something which is now admitted by State Department.

It’s not just the State Department,the the Ukraine Minister of Defense has come out and openly said, “No, this is a proxy conflict between Ukraine and between NATO and Russia and Ukraine is the is the middleman.”

I was just telling the truth back when I said that 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 a Minister of Defense to be right alongside me on this list, you know, because we both believe the same thing that I was.

The Bucha Massacre

I have been accused of other things, for instance of the people taking umbrage over my characterization of the Bucha massacre that, you know, that is 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 of the unit, the Safari unit will be doing cleansing operations targeting collaborators, and in bragging about 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 arm game, 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, their fight meeting the definition of collaborator, you have a very strong circumstantial case that the Ukrainian government was was involved in 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 Ukrainians use a different a different, you know, round in the in the Russian.

So a good forensic examination of these bodies, while they’re fresh will tell you exactly who was responsible. And I firmly believe it was 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 and 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, you know, assessment of the situation that I believe will stand the test of time.

But it certainly is inconvenient to the Ukrainians, and the Americans and everybody else who has gone down that path.

A Tochka missile attack on a railway station in Kramatorsk

Here’s 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 in Iraq. So I know them. And I know how to investigate things that deal with the ballistic missiles.

So when, in April, a Tochka-2 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 are ready 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 Tochka-2’s.

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, you know, the missile flies on a given path. When it lands, the warhead separates the missile body separates, so the impact crater will be ahead of the missile body. So where the missile the 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 that line 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 touch guru missiles delivered to the Ukrainian military.

So all the forensic data screams this was a Ukrainian attack. And yet I’m of Russian propagandists for daring to point

War Crimes

Now, you know, I have no doubt though, by the way for the record, and you might be rated me for this, but I have no doubt that there are certainly some some war crimes that have been carried out by certain segments of Russian troops as well. 

No, there’s no doubt about 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 the 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 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 of 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, you know, the Ukrainians on the other hand film their soldiers executing Russian prisoners of war, they fill in their soldiers executing civilians, they film their soldiers torturing people. And they do it without remorse, because they view the Russians as subhumans.

Nordstream 2

What are your thoughts on Nord Stream and US terrorism against its own allies?

 Most observers were struck on February 7 of last year, when the president United States, in the presence of Olaf Schultz, 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, it won’t exist anymore.

It wasn’t the German chancellor who went this is our infrastructure.  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, “Are you saying you’re going to attack? How could you do that? It’s German infrastructure.”

That’s a confession.

You know, there’s people in prison who had 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 as we asked is, Cui 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”

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 mind clearing, deep diver exercises, right where the pipelines are.

That’s the murder weapon.

So even before Sy Hersh wrote his outstanding article, it was a strong search of circumstantial case, and then you have everybody covering it up.

I mean, 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“.

You think of the Swedes had evidence that Russia did this hey wouldn’t be screaming about it from every rooftop.

They know who did it. They know America did it. Yeah.

The day the Danes went and cleaned it up. The Brits went and cleaned it up. You know, the only people not investigating are the Germans.

They see nothing, here, they know nothing. They don’t want to do anything because they know what the ramifications of this is that they do..

A stab in the back

North Stream was blown up and it affected all of Western Europe. It’s not just energy for industry, right, the metal smelting operations, the 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 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, it’s gonna be a lot of hungry 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

You’re 100%? Correct. If 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, who are standing up and demanding an investigation, literally pointing a finger at Olaf Schultz and his 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? “

I’m very good friends with Sy Hersh.  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, “So 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 to carry out an attack against the NATO ally, without notifying Congress, 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 and 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 senile narcissist in the White House decided that he needed a made for TV moment where he couldn’t have…

But you know, the truth is that I think you’re right, this is a major turning point because it it begins the accelerated deindustrialization of Europe. We’re seeing the shutdown of BASF out of Germany, they’re moving operations to China. Why? Because North 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 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 it’s sending it all to Ukraine.

And, you know, what about the German military operation? Not very deep anymore, either. You know, there’s the sending makeshift tanks or promising to not even getting them there. We’ll send them into the future. You know, we’ll get your tanks at 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.

The US military is not what it once was

Well, what I’ve been saying for some time now for many years is 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 in 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, large scale ground combat using combined arms operations in a in any environment, whether it be Europe, the Middle East, anywhere, the finest military in the world, so that if we needed to, “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 trying 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.

Nato cannot fight a war

So all of NATO followed suit.

You’ve mentioned the British army. It’s not just that they’re going to run out of ammunition.

You know, there’s large soccer stadiums in Europe that can hold 100,000 people. You put the entire British Army and one of the soccer stadiums, you’re going to have 30,000 unsold seats.

It’s not an army anymore. It’s barely a core, they can’t fight. They can’t 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 the commander of US forces in Europe, also Supreme Allied Commander, gave a presentation in January in Sweden, where he said, 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 it because they have insufficient artillery ammunition.

The Russians on a slow day are firing 20,000 rounds a day, on a high day, they’re firing 60 to 80,000 rounds a day, we produce 100,000 rounds a month.

I’m telling you right off the bat, that we can’t keep up with this, this this . But,  it’s not just artillery, air to air.,

We want to send our Air Force.

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.

If we tried to impose our power to project our airpower into battle space controlled by Russian air defense, we would lose all of our aircraft.

If we had to engage in air to air combat, 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 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.

Germany does not have the energy

So by what you just talked about the high cost of energy, you know, 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. 

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 But NATO is really great at fighting via press releases.

I mean, they they can they can whip up a mean word game, you know, that’s they can they have, you know, 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.

The Sarmat missile

But can I ask you a technical question about weapons systems – about the Sarmat? Is the Sarmat 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 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 at but right now there’s at least one regiment of Sarmat, heavy intercontinental ballistic missiles on operational duty right now ready to fire?

And does the West have anything at all that can interdict that?

Nothing.

It’s it’s a weapon that hits us two ways.

First of all, almost all of our radars, early warning radars, and then the radars who that guide, our ability to intercept missiles are 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 through 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 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 will they’re they’re powered, they will 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.

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 SM-3 can’t shoot down ICBMs.

And yet two years later, we deploy 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 well, there we are. The Avangard and the Sarmat, some heavy 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 launched their their warheads will hit their target.

And you and I and everybody listening this program will be dead.

The S-500 anti-ballistic system

My understanding is that Russia has the most advanced anti ballistic interdiction system in the world. I don’t know if that is that the SA 400 system that can be outfitted for even ICBMs or is it some other system? What what’s Russia’s ability to stop our ICBMs from 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.

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 when when when they rolled out the B 21 Raider, the new stealth bomber and everybody was like, “Oh my God, what a wonderful thing”. .

Russia is going to shoot that down.

They have a system that can shoot that down. They’ll shoot down the F 35. They’ll shoot down anything stealth we have.

That’s the problem with engaging in arms races.

When you seek to acquire a technological superiority against a peer-level opponent.

I don’t know what people think Russians do, but they had 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 the system, they have time to do what nations do, gather the intelligence and build the counter.

They have the counter deployed, ready, tested, before we even get the system in the field. You don’t want to go to war with these guys.

During the Reagan administration we had adults

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 that 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 in from both of those countries, by the way. So if 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 US State Department. You know, it’s it’s the US 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, during the Reagan administration, where we had adults.

The State Department was populated by adults.

For example a guy named Paul Nitze. He wrote containment theory back in the 1950s. He’s the guy who came up with the National Security Directive 68, which created containment 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 Nitze 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, arms control, and, national security issues so that when he sat down on the table, he was a strong man, not only he knew what he was talking about.

Today, we have people that don’t exercise these these muscles. And so all their muscles have atrophied. And they’re not nearly on the on the level of Paul Nitze or anybody of that caliber.

We don’t have those people today, if you want to call them woke, I don’t know what to 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 with our counterparts. We’re a nation that tolerates our president ordering an attack on an ally.

It’s mind boggling,

Russia’s new offensive

 But one last question to you is about 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 his war. What do you think the near future holds for 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 reverse for a little bit and understand how we got here.

You know, this this is a war that’s been fought and several phases

The first phase, and I was one of the people early on that said that if Russia goes to war with Ukraine, it’s going to be a blitzkrieg. They’re going to swamp the Ukrainians. This thing’s gonna be over in a week.

Mark Milley, 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 him. 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. The purpose of this 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 1, In Istanbul, Turkey, where there was 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 Kyiv and killed it, because we misinterpreted Russia’s light approach to this conflict as weakness.

And so what we did is sought 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 Donbass – 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. 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 10’s 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 use to launch an attack against overextended Russian flanks, in Kharkov and Kherson.

And then they drove them back.

This was phase three, the vaunted counter attack.

The Russians gave up territory to preserve lives. They consolidated their lines.

Then they go into Phase four, which is having burned through the Ukrainian reserves Russia now mobilizes.

They go from their peacetime compliment of 200,000 troops, and they mobilize 300,000 reservists. These are experienced veterans with specific military skills, and about 120 to 180,000 volunteers who are receiving similar training.

And 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. The Washington Post says there needs to be spinning your 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. Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner private military company, PMC, has straight up said – this is a man that 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 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 – 350 thousand 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 Operation Cobra type stuff. This is putting pressure all along the frontlines, forcing the Ukrainians to commit their last reserves, forcing them to use up precious ammunition which they’re running out of, by the way, and identifying the gaps, the weaknesses in Ukrainian defenses so that when these other forces that are have been 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.

The Ukrainians are running out of everything

Why? Because all their tanks had 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 and F 16’s, 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 in the numbers we need by August. It’s all over.

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, that’s I mean, I’m paraphrasing, but it’s pretty darn close.

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 US 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.

Zelensky is desperate

Not you, Zelensky. You don’t get to make that decision. You don’t get define that you’re not the engine that drives the American, a war machine.

But this man has been pumped up and has an artificial sense of, of who he is because everywhere he goes, he’s treated as a hero.

Every word he says is treated as a hero.

Nancy Pelosi said of his speech when he spoke before combined session of Congress that it was the greatest speech ever delivered in the history of Congress.

He’s been likened to Winston Churchill,  so this man is apparently every 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, you know, we can joke about maybe he was high on cocaine, I don’t know. But this was a man who is definitely unhinged, there’s 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.

And 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

Yesterday, too far too many, too many lives lost. And the one thing I want to see and we’re going to wrap this up, Scott, but but I think you agree with me on this. We don’t want to see people dying, and we wish for for the 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 US. The blood of the Ukrainian men are it’s on our hands, Americans hands as much as Zelensky’s is hands right now. And it’s a shame.

100% The the bottom line is everybody sits there and say why 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.