Transcript: Ukraine’s Last Stand? The Truth About the War in 2025 – Scott Ritter

I think what we have at play here is a very complicated game – and again, this is just reading tea leaves. Because they know how the Russians are going to respond, it is as predictable as the day is long.

This was, I believe, designed more to trap Europe than it was to trap Russia. And the reason why I say that is that Europe was talking about deploying troops, nuclear deterrence from France, all this stuff, and instantly Zelensky says, okay, I’m for a ceasefire with certain conditions. And Europe immediately did a 180 and went, great move, ceasefire, we’re on board, ball’s in Putin’s court.

So, Europe is now playing the game of ceasefire, and I think that’s what the United States wanted to do, is trap Europe and Zelensky into this process. And now they’re going to go to Russia, and they know what’s going to happen because Trump spoke to Putin. There’s no secrets here. Rubio knows what they said, so he knows what the Russian response will be, which is, yes, we’re all in favor of the ceasefire, hallelujah, thank you, but as you know, we have conditions that have to be met.

And so now the Russians say, ball’s in your court, and now they have to go back to the Europeans who have committed to a ceasefire, and it’s now a negotiation, and this gets Europe away from the nonsense of talking about deploying security forces and things of that nature and get down to the brass tacks of how do we get across the line with a ceasefire. This is the beginning of a negotiation, not the end of a negotiation.

[JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO:] Do you think that perhaps, even though you characterized, and I agree with the characterization, the statements by Rubio and Walsh’s amateur hour, do you think maybe this is just the opening gambit rather than their sincere belief that Vladimir Putin will say, oh, you want to stop fighting for a month, sure. We know there’s no way he’s going to say that. We know that they know there’s no way he’s going to say that. So why do they make a statement that will make them look ridiculous or almost sound as if they are ignorant of what President Putin told President Trump, and they can’t be ignorant of it?

[SCOTT RITTER:] Well, I think the answer is quite clear, because as soon as they said the ball’s in Putin’s court, statements came out of every major capital in Europe that repeated them, parroted it. This is a brilliant thing that you’ve done. The ball’s now in Putin’s court. The British said it. The French said it. NATO said it. Italy said it. The whole Europe said this is brilliant, we’re in concert. The ball’s now in court. So they have bought into this package, which means they’ve bought into the process. Now the process is going to go to Moscow, and it’s going to be very difficult for Europe to disengage.

See, the United States has sucked Ukraine into this. Now they’re going to go and hit the Russians. They know what the Russian response will be, but they need to get that articulated in response to something Ukraine’s put down. It begins a larger, broader process of negotiation that Europe can’t back out of now. I think that’s, in retrospect, it’s the only thing that makes sense, because otherwise we’re talking about two brain-dead people up there saying things that they know have no significance. The Russians will not accept these terms. Putin has made that quite clear.

ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Here’s a brief clip from the two-hour interview that Larry Johnson and I had with Sergey Lavrov on Monday. He does talk about, I asked him about NATO, and this is a response that’s 12 minutes long. This is about a minute and a half of it. Chris, cut number nine.

[LAVROV:] What he did, bluntly said, was that if you want us to protect you, to give you security guarantees, you pay what is necessary. It’s still to be discussed what is necessary, 2.5%, 5%, anything in the middle. But he also said that those who fulfill the criteria of the percentage of GNP to be contributed to NATO, then the United States would guarantee that they are safe and secure. But he doesn’t want to provide these guarantees, security guarantees, to Ukraine under Zelensky. He has his own view of the situation, which he bluntly presents every now and then, that this war should have never started, that the pulling Ukraine into NATO in violation of its constitution, in violation of the Declaration of Independence of 1991, on the basis of which we recognized Ukraine as a sovereign state, for several reasons, including that this declaration was saying, no NATO.

[NAPOLITANO:] That was in response to a question that I had asked him about NATO. I did not know until he mentioned it, that the Ukraine constitution prohibits its membership in NATO, and I did not know about the Declaration of Independence of 1991 or 1993, that also prohibited it. And now we have Russia’s public reliance on that declaration. Your thoughts?

Russian Legalism and Ukraine’s Neutrality

[RITTER:] No, I mean, Russia has been very clear. The first thing, I’m sure you picked this up in talking to Sergey Lavrov, A, let me say congratulations for the interview, and B, I’m insanely jealous, but we’ll put the water under the bridge.

The fact is, you learned the hard way, that the Russians are very thorough. There’s nothing superficial about any of the answers he gave you. And you’ve also learned that the Russians, that every fact matters, every word matters. I learned this a long time ago from Russian diplomats, that words matter, and you have to be very careful with what you say and what you write, because that reflects a position. And if you’re a serious person, you don’t commit to a position unless you mean it.

Ukraine’s independence was predicated on neutrality. That’s just the way the formation of Ukraine was. And the same thing with the 1994 Bucharest agreement about nuclear weapons, that Ukraine was to maintain its constitutional obligations of neutrality. So when Ukraine instead has this coup d’etat in 2014 and shifts to wanting to join NATO, that makes null and void all past agreements. And from the Russian perspective, that changes the foundation of their legal approach to the problem of Ukraine.

Prior to that, and a lot of people don’t recognize this, Vladimir Putin, one of the reasons why he was so hesitant in the aftermath of the coup d’etat, was because he didn’t want to be a part of it. Of 2014 and the failure of Ukraine to abide by the Minsk Agreements, is that he was cognizant of the fact that Russia had made certain commitments to Ukraine to respect Ukrainian territorial sovereignty and that Russia would do what was necessary to adhere to these commitments even if Ukraine was in violation of its obligations.

Russia didn’t say, okay, now we come in and do this. Russia in April 2022, the Istanbul communique said Kyrgyzstan will be returned to Ukraine along with the territory around Kiev, Sumy, etc. All Russia is saying is now because of circumstances, Crimea and certain parts of the Donbas aren’t going to go back to Ukraine because how Ukraine has treated the Russian population there. But the rest of Ukraine, Russia is saying, that’s yours. We don’t want it. It was only then when Ukraine continued the conflict at the behest of the British that Russia had to change its tune.

But the Russians are very legalistic. Every word matters. Every statement matters. And this is why, getting back to Marco Rubio and Michael Waltz, they’re in a lot of trouble because the Russians recorded every word that Donald Trump has ever said, not only to Vladimir Putin, but to the public about this situation. And as Lavrov hinted, he said, Trump has spoken very forcefully. The Russians have the archive of everything Trump has said. They haven’t forgotten any of that. And they will deploy Trump’s statements against Trump, against the United States as this negotiation goes forward. Because there’s a lot of inconsistencies between what Trump has said in the past and how the United States is posturing itself today.

The End Game for Ukraine

[NAPOLITANO:] So how does this war end? Does Zelensky just give up the ghost and then incur the wrath of the Banderist people that are around him? Are there new elections or does the military at some point say, it’s over, we’re going home?

[RITTER:] I think the military is already starting to vote in certain areas like Kursk, where they are retreating pell-mell. This war ends when, this war ends, meaning that Ukraine will have to accept the reality that it has been defeated. And as the defeated nation, it will have to make certain concessions.

Now Ukraine can be artificially stimulated to continue this fight by continued provision of weapons, etc. But it’s not enough. I mean, just to remind everybody that we’re at this point, three plus years into this conflict where the United States and Europe have poured in hundreds of billions of dollars worth of assistance, including the most modern technology imaginable, top of the line NATO equipment to Ukraine, and they’re still losing. There’s nothing the United States or NATO can do to change that outcome. Russia has achieved dominance and is exploiting this dominance as we speak. And every day that goes by, this dominance gets greater and greater and greater.

So eventually the Ukrainian armed forces are going to crack. I think the goal of the Trump administration is to get a ceasefire and conflict termination before that happens. But the Russians know one thing for certain, that no matter what happens, they’re going to win. They’re either going to win at the negotiating table or they’re going to win on the battlefield. But there’s no circumstance here where Russia comes out the loser.

The Syria Situation

[NAPOLITANO:] Switching gears to Syria, what is the cause of the ethnic violence or the violence against ethnic minorities by the Syrian government? Do we have a grasp on that?

[RITTER:] Of course we do. The Syrian government is al-Qaeda. Why are we fool ourselves? Al-Qaeda are headchoppers. Al-Qaeda are Salafists, Wahhabists, people with extreme interpretations of Islam that have zero tolerance for people who don’t worship Islam the way they do. The Alawites are not considered Islam, they’re considered heretics, therefore they are marked for death automatically by these people. The same with Christians who continue to profess their religion. The same with Sunnis who may deviate somewhat from the strict interpretation, violent interpretation of the Koran that Al-Qaeda has. The Shia are also considered to be heretics.

These people were chopping their heads off from day one. Now they’ve just done it in a massively organized fashion, targeting the Alawites because there was pushback by former members of the Syrian army with Alawite and non-Islamic fundamentalist Sunni background. But they’ve been killing Alawites from the very beginning, forcing them to crawl on their hands and knees, bark like dogs, before their throats are slit, their heads are cut off or they’re just gunned down. Now these guys are going in. They don’t view these people as human. They go into homes and they kill grandmothers, women, babies, infants, they murder them. This is what Al-Qaeda does. Why are we shocked? Why are we surprised? What bigger question is, why do we tolerate this?

[JUDGE NAPOLITANO:] That’s where I was going to go next. Why do we tolerate it? What is the position of the IDF in this? Are they just standing by and allowing this to happen?

[SCOTT RITTER:] The IDF could care less about the Alawites. The IDF could care less about the Syrians. The IDF doesn’t care about Arabs. The IDF is looking to exploit the situation to their advantage. They’re exploiting the weakness of the Jolani government, this Al-Qaeda government, to assert their presence in Syria, demilitarizing massive chunks of southern Syria, occupying deep into Syria. You’re creating the conditions where Damascus could fall in a moment’s notice if Israel so chooses. I mean, this is one of the major Arab capitals of the Arab world and Syria has lost control over their own security. This is what Israel wants. Israel actually likes this chaos, this anarchy, because it’s disruptive to their potential foes. The last thing Israel wants is a stable Syria that could actually unify its people to once again stand up to Israel as the Assad government did.

Free Speech and the Arrest of Khalil Mohammed

[JUDGE NAPOLITANO:] I wish that President Trump would stand up to Israel. Both Colonel McGregor and Professor Sachs, and I’m going to guess you’ll agree with this, the idea that Netanyahu is behind the arrest of this grad student, who has since received his degree, from Columbia University, Khalil Mohammed, ripped out of his student housing in the presence of his wife, pregnant in her eighth month, taken to Louisiana with no charges that are cognizable. I mean, no charges that mean anything filed against him.

When the charges were eventually revealed this morning at a habeas corpus hearing here in New York, it turns out that there’s no allegation that he committed any crime. There’s no allegation that he did anything wrong. The statement in the charges effectively offers he’s a danger to American foreign policy because Marco Rubio says he’s a danger to American foreign policy. This is the height of totalitarianism to do something like this in the face of a constitution that includes a First Amendment.

[SCOTT RITTER:] I agree. Free speech is absolute. It doesn’t tolerate violations of the law. You can’t disguise criminal actions as free speech. For instance, I can’t claim to be having free speech while burning down a house because I’m protesting something. But the mere fact that I protest or speak out or articulate policies or positions that are in opposition to the government, again, I just bring up the entire New York Times versus the United States. When the United States government, the Nixon administration, tried to prevent the New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg’s leaked documents, which was a violation of law, by the way. Ellsberg broke the law in doing this. The justice said, who wrote the opinion, said the purpose of free speech is to empower the people to speak out against the government.

I want to emphasize, against the government, especially when the policies of the government that are being spoken out against can result in American men going off to foreign shores and dying of shot, shell, and disease. This is exactly what we’re talking about here. These people are protesting against the policies of the United States. That’s not a crime. That’s a duty.

It doesn’t mean I have to agree with you. I happen to agree with Khalil in this case, but there are people out there protesting, for instance, in support of giving weapons to Ukraine. I disagree with this vehemently, but I don’t disagree with their right to demonstrate in support of this. That’s their First Amendment right. It’s absolute.

And you can’t come in and shut them down because you say that’s against the policy of the United Nations. That’s a whole reinterpretation of definitions. For instance, misinformation doesn’t mean to lie. It just means that you’re putting information out there that contradicts American foreign policy. Malinformation is information that makes it difficult to pursue American foreign policy. You could be telling the truth and be found guilty of misinformation and malinformation under this new construct.

This is an abomination against free speech, and I hope the courts stand up to the Trump administration in this case. This man deserves to be released. He deserves all the protections that are afforded to legal residents of the United States. As far as free speech is concerned, he has violated no laws. He’s broken no rules, no regulations. He simply says, I don’t agree with the policies of the United States.

That’s his duty and responsibility as somebody who has said, I want to live in the United States. If you want to live in the United States, you embrace the United States. You embrace citizenship in all of its forms, and a good citizen is one who raises his hands or hers hands and asks questions when there’s a disagreement with policy in the United States. The government does not get to dictate to the people what America stands for. We dictate to the government what America stands for, and this guy’s a legal resident saying, hey, I don’t like your policy. He didn’t do any violence. He didn’t break any laws. He behaved as a good American citizen. There’s only a better American citizen than most people who have citizenship.

[JUDGE NAPOLITANO:] More articulate than I could be on this, Scott, and of course I agree with you 100%. He can stand on a soapbox and say Hamas should win. It’s absolutely protected speech, and the government can’t harm a hair on his head.

Gee, I wonder why they took him to Louisiana. If you’re arguing for the freedom of an immigrant, would you, and you’re arguing for the confinement of an immigrant, and you’re the government, would you rather be arguing in Manhattan or in wherever, Louisiana? I was going to use a crude phrase to describe a non-existent town in Louisiana, but I didn’t want to use it.

[SCOTT RITTER:] Yeah, Patton described what is Louisiana, but we can’t say it here either, but they went to Louisiana because the judge down there is horrible to immigrants. They stand no chance, so they violated, I believe, again, I’m not a constitutional expert, but I believe I’m correct.

When you’re arrested and charged, you have to be taken before the jurisdiction in which the allegations are made.

ANDREW NAPOLITANO: The Constitution could not be clearer on that point, and Madison put that in there because the king was arresting people in New Jersey and shipping them to London for trial. That’s why the Constitution says all proceedings against persons shall occur in the judicial district in which the facts that form the basis of the allegation against them took place.

Oh, no, no, no. We have to send them to Louisiana. That’s where we house immigrants.

[JUDGE NAPOLITANO:] I hope this federal judge, who really didn’t rule today, other than to say you have to let him talk to his lawyers, I hope he stays right through this nonsense.

Russia and Traditional Values

[JUDGE NAPOLITANO:] Last thing I want to ask you, back to Russia, I was surprised, pleasingly so, at the attraction and influence of the Russian Orthodox Church having risen, I realize it’s 1,000 years old, but having risen out of the ashes of the repression of the Soviet era, and Foreign Minister Lavrov even mentioned that when he said, you know, there was a time when the Democrats and the Republicans in America shared the same values, but the Democrats don’t seem to share traditional values any longer. He mentioned abortion, transsexual things, and that type of thing. What are your thoughts on how this has happened? America becoming a haven for all sorts of crazy perversions, like people chopping up their bodies, and Russia becoming traditional in a way the likes of which Americans haven’t seen since before Vatican II?

[SCOTT RITTER:] Well, one thing I’ll say is while the Communist Party, the Bolsheviks early on especially, turned against the Orthodox Church because they were seen as an extension of the Tsar, Orthodoxy was never fully suppressed. I saw this when I courted my wife in Sukhumi, Georgia back when it was still the Soviet Union. He took me to the Orthodox Church where she and her mother would go. It was empty because they weren’t allowed to have formal service, but the church was there. They had a cross, they had icons, and she could go in and pray, and Georgians did this. Every Georgian wore a cross because they were Orthodox, even good Soviets. My wife was a member of the Komsomol, the Young Communist League, she was the head of it. But she wore a cross because she’s religious. When I was in Vodkinsk, we went to the church and there were church services every Sunday. And then when Perestroika came, we

[SCOTT RITTER:] I saw the revival of the church begin and how quickly the Russians flocked back to the church because they had never lost their faith. You see this in World War II. People may not know, but look up the icon of Our Lady of Kazan. It’s one of the most famous icons in Russian Orthodox history. During the battle for Moscow when the Nazi hordes were at the gates, Stalin had the icon of Our Lady of Kazan put on an airplane and flown over the front lines to bless the troops. Stalin, the communist, turned to the Orthodox Church because he understands at the heart of every real Russian is the Orthodox faith. And that’s just a fact.

There was a famous movie about fighter pilots and the mechanic was a mechanic of an airplane, a good communist pilot, but every time that plane would take off the mechanic would cross himself. They made that movie in the 1950s and what that movie is saying is that inside the heart of every Russian is an Orthodox.

And now the Orthodox Church is coming to the front. There it is, the Our Lady of Kazan. The Orthodox Church, I saw this when I was there this past Christmas. My host Alexander Zirionov took me to the Christmas Mass at the big church right by the Kremlin. I think you probably went there as well. A beautiful church. But you just see the way the Russians are with religion today. It is part of their life. It defines them and it defines their values, their culture.

These are a loving people. They have real Christian values. They want to help people. It’s sincere in everything they do. But they also, that religion defines their traditional family values. They are not tolerant of the things that Western society has become tolerant of. Their government manifests that intolerance as well in a way that reinforces traditional Christian morals.

You know this in American churches, Catholic churches, even traditional Catholic churches. You stand, you sit, you kneel. But I didn’t know this until I attended Mass in Moscow. There’s no place to sit. And you are packed in like sardines. It is so moving and so attractive to the public to be there. I was deeply and profoundly moved by it.

As I said in a piece I wrote, this old Slavonic Mass reminded me of the old Latin Mass which was ubiquitous before Vatican II and which Pope Francis has suppressed. Traditionalism of Christianity, of belief as well as of liturgy, public manifestation of the belief, was so profoundly moving to me. Profoundly moving. Even one of these cops that was interrogating me made the sign of the cross. They make it a different way. The hand goes up, right and then to the left.

[JUDGE NAPOLITANO:] It’s not a big deal. I’m a heathen from way back so don’t ask me to repeat what my very religious life does. Did you, just on a personal, how is the music? I just find the music in a Russian Orthodox Mass to be beautiful.

[SCOTT RITTER:] Spectacular. Absolutely. The choir that they have is just something else. It’s amazing.

Russia’s Perspective on American Politics

[JUDGE NAPOLITANO:] Here is something that Prime Minister Lavrov said which manifests his respect for tradition and his observation, you’ll like this Scott, that under Donald Trump the United States may actually be returning to normalcy. Chris, cut number 12.

[SERGEY LAVROV:] “I think what is going on in the United States is a return to normalcy. The United States has always been the country of two big parties who competed between themselves, who changed ownership of the White House. But the division during my years in the United States, which is starting from 1981, I’ve been there several times, serving for a long period. Compared to that time, the division now is absolutely striking. On that occasion the main dividing line between the Democrats and the Republicans was more taxes, less taxes, abortions, things which would be part of a normal Christian life and within this Christianity values the entire politics were built. Arguing with each other but within the values which everybody accepted.”

[JUDGE NAPOLITANO:] Within the values that everybody accepted, I thought his, and I’m not necessarily a Republican, I vote in the Republican primary because the locals are friends of mine, but for him to say a good section of America no longer accepts the basic values which we once all accepted and presumed were the ground rules, in my view, is a profoundly keen, articulate and even brilliant observation from the Russian perspective.

[SCOTT RITTER:] Look, the Russians know what they talk about. First of all, they’re students of history. The Russians have studied the growth of the Nazi party in Germany because that was a threat that manifested in an existential fashion. They understand what happened to Germany as a society during the Weimar Republic where all norms and values went out the window.

We have seen the movie Cabaret, it’s a brilliant movie with Liza Minnelli, great acting, but what they’re portraying is the decay of society where traditional values no longer exist. What is a man? What is a woman? What is good moral values? It’s just a total collapse of tradition.

And the Russians saw this in the 1990s as the West sought to infiltrate into the ruins of the Soviet Union and still the same kind of decadence. I mean, Moscow, Judge, you were in Moscow today when it’s really at its peak. Moscow in the late 1980s, throughout the 1990s, was a city in decay. Prostitution, homosexuality, you name it, they had it. And it’s the way the West operates to come in and insinuate these destructive value systems onto a conservative society to bring it down. They tried to do it in Georgia. Thank God, Georgia Dreams stood up to them.

And the Russians are looking at the United States saying, it’s happening to you. You’re allowing the things that define normalcy to be eroded and replaced by things that are insane, that represent chaos, anarchy, degeneracy. And I think the Russians are relieved. Many Americans aren’t, but I think the Russians are relieved that a president like Donald Trump has come back in and is articulating norms, principles, values that the Russians can identify with because it’s very difficult for the Russians to look at America and say, we respect your society when they peek up underneath the plan. They go, what the hell is going on in here? And no, you can’t bring that here.

So I think the Russians are looking at Trump with trepidation, but also with a little bit of appreciation because they’re starting to say, that’s the America that we know. That’s the America that we understand. That’s even the America that we respected. It doesn’t mean that we roll over and play dead to you, but those are people we can do business with. But the America of woke degeneracy isn’t something that Russia is comfortable with.

Conclusion

[JUDGE NAPOLITANO:] Scott Ritter, a pleasure, my dear friend. I hope my next trip to Russia, I was invited by Professor Dugan to give a lecture on the American Constitution to one of his government classes. I hope you can be there with me. But thank you very much for your time and for your extraordinary insight on all of this. We’ll see you again soon.

[SCOTT RITTER:] I’ll carry your bags anytime, Judge. You’re such a great man.

[JUDGE NAPOLITANO:] Thank you, Scott. All the best. Coming up at 3:05 this afternoon, Aaron Maté on all of this. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.

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