- 5/28/2025
Retired U.S. Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor delivers a sobering assessment of Ukraine’s future in the ongoing conflict with Russia. As Western support wavers and frontline losses mount, Macgregor asks the tough question: Can Ukraine actually survive? With brutal honesty and military insight, he breaks down the reality behind the headlines. 🧠⚠️
#DouglasMacgregor #UkraineWar #Russia #MilitaryAnalysis #CanUkraineSurvive #Geopolitics #EasternFront #UkraineConflict #NATO #WarUpdate #WesternSupport #GlobalTensions #UkraineCrisis #UkraineArmy #ProxyWar #TruthAboutUkraine #MilitaryStrategy #ColonelMacgregor #WorldNews #HardTruths #RealTalk
#DouglasMacgregor #UkraineWar #Russia #MilitaryAnalysis #CanUkraineSurvive #Geopolitics #EasternFront #UkraineConflict #NATO #WarUpdate #WesternSupport #GlobalTensions #UkraineCrisis #UkraineArmy #ProxyWar #TruthAboutUkraine #MilitaryStrategy #ColonelMacgregor #WorldNews #HardTruths #RealTalk
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Transcription by CastingWords
00:30Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
00:36Today is Wednesday, May 28th, 2025.
00:40Colonel Douglas McGregor is here with us to discuss, can Ukraine survive?
00:47But first this.
00:48While the markets are giving us whiplash, have you seen the price of gold?
00:52It's soaring.
00:53In the past 12 months, gold has risen to more than $3,000 an ounce.
00:58I'm so glad I bought my gold, it's not too late for you to buy yours.
01:03The same experts that predicted gold at $3,200 an ounce, now predict gold at $4,500 or more in the next year.
01:13What's driving the price higher?
01:15Paper currencies.
01:17All around the world, they are falling in value.
01:21Big money is in panic, as falling currencies shrink the value of their paper wealth.
01:27That's why big banks and billionaires are buying gold in record amounts.
01:33As long as paper money keeps falling, they'll keep buying, and gold will keep rising.
01:38So do what I did.
01:40Call my friends at Lear Capital.
01:42You'll have a great conversation, and they'll send you very helpful information.
01:46Learn how you can store gold in your IRA, tax and penalty free, or have it sent directly to your doorstep.
01:55There's zero pressure to buy, and you have a 100% risk-free purchase guarantee.
02:02It's time to see if gold is right for you.
02:05Call 800-511-4620, 800-511-4620, or go to learjudgenap.com and tell them your friend the judge sent you.
02:16Colonel McGregor, welcome here.
02:19Thank you very much for your time, as always.
02:22Colonel, I do want to spend some time discussing with you the likely fate of Ukraine as a country.
02:30But before that, a few questions about Israel.
02:33Is the Israeli threat to bomb Iranian nuclear sites while the U.S. and Iran are negotiating in Rome
02:46over this enrichment and other, uranium enrichment and other related issues, a realistic threat?
03:00I'm not hearing you, Colonel.
03:08I would say that the threat is indisputably real.
03:12How realistic is the operation in terms of expectation?
03:18That's another matter.
03:18But I think it's very real.
03:21I think that President Netanyahu says what he means and does what he says.
03:26And what kind of an impact is this going to have on the negotiations?
03:34What kind of a thumbing of the nose is this to President Trump and his negotiators?
03:42You know, I don't know.
03:44I don't think President Trump really figures that dramatically in the whole equation.
03:49I think everything turns on what Mr. Netanyahu decides to do and the enormous support for him
03:56that exists in the Senate and the House.
03:59I think at this stage, what would President Trump say?
04:04I don't know.
04:06He might say, well, I'm disappointed.
04:09But I'm going to support my friend Bibi and Israel.
04:15And I think that's what would happen.
04:18Do you get the impression that Netanyahu is challenging or testing President Trump?
04:29You know, I really don't.
04:32I think he has control.
04:34He knows he has control.
04:37And I think President Trump knows that he has control.
04:40It may periodically irritate or anger President Trump.
04:44And I think he knows that Mr. Netanyahu will have the final say.
04:50And I think thus far, Mr. Netanyahu has made it pretty clear what he wants.
04:54And he wants the application of the Libya model.
04:58And I see no evidence that he's walked away from that.
05:00Here he is yesterday on May 27th.
05:07This is the second time in one week he has equated in his own mind the phrase free Palestine
05:16with the phrase Heil Hitler.
05:19He's speaking to some Holocaust remembrance group at the Israeli foreign ministry in Jerusalem yesterday.
05:28Chris, cut number 11.
05:29The protesters themselves, many of them don't even know what they're chanting.
05:37When they're chanting free Palestine, they're saying really destroy Israel, destroy the Jews.
05:44It's the modern equivalent of Heil Hitler.
05:46That's what it says.
05:48When they say from the river to the sea, the sea is a few kilometers here.
05:53And the river is a few kilometers there.
05:56It means the end of Israel.
05:57That's what they're chanting.
05:59So they bought the demonization.
06:02They bought the vilification of the one democracy that is fighting a just war with just means.
06:08And here's what happens when this spreads and goes to the ICC.
06:13The ICC, the court that was supposed to establish really after the Holocaust in order to prevent another Holocaust.
06:22And the ICC declares that I, former defense minister, effectively the state of Israel, they'll issue more decrees.
06:29We're the war criminals.
06:30What does it say to democracies?
06:33What does it say to free societies?
06:35It imperils your right of self-defense.
06:38It means that this tactic of implanting yourself in a civilian population while sending rockets and murderers to murder civilians as you hide behind your own civilians, you are given effective immunity.
06:51And once this idea is implanted, it will spread and spread and spread.
06:57It will spread to your own societies.
06:59So for the future of civilization, we can't have that.
07:02It almost sounds like he's talking about what he's doing in Gaza.
07:10Is Israel a democracy?
07:11Can you be a can an apartheid state be a democracy?
07:15I think Israel is hardly democratic.
07:18And I don't know that you would get you would get anybody today watching what's going on inside Israel and describe that as democratic.
07:28You know, Stalin used to believe in something called prophylactic justice, essentially kill the citizen before the citizen has an opportunity to commit a crime.
07:40And I think that's where Mr. Netanyahu is.
07:44And if anyone is demonizing anything, he is demonizing Israel and himself, because that's his view of the Palestinians, that the best solution is the final solution for the Palestinians.
07:55And he doesn't like the fact that this is being rejected by most of the world, certainly not in the Anglosphere.
08:02The Anglosphere is very clearly under his influence, if not outright control and authority in many respects.
08:09But the rest of the world really isn't.
08:12And they see it for what it is.
08:14By the way, the ICC was not established to prevent another Holocaust.
08:18It was established to halt war crimes.
08:20And again, this is an attempt to place himself and his supporters at the center of the universe and to immunize them against any possible accusation of impropriety or criminal action.
08:35But that doesn't go down well with the rest of the world.
08:38He may get away with that here in the Anglosphere, but nowhere else.
08:42How can this phrase that Israel is fighting a just war by just means possibly be taken seriously by anybody?
08:51Well, I think we have to understand that there are people here in the United States that believe that.
08:56You know, I think, you know, everyone wants to separate Judaism from Zionism.
09:00And I'm sure in some cases that's true, but in many cases that certainly isn't true.
09:05And to this you must add millions of evangelical Christians who choose to interpret the Old Testament and passages in it to justify whatever the Israelis do as essentially blessed by God.
09:20How God in their minds would bless mass murder and expulsion from people's homes and land is beyond my imagination.
09:30I don't see any Christian in it, but nevertheless, they're there.
09:35So we have to accept the fact that, yes, some of what he says truly resonates here in the Anglosphere.
09:41I didn't know this, but apparently Cindy McCain, the wife of the late Senator John McCain,
09:47this is no reflection on Senator McCain's political and military views,
09:53is very active in the efforts to bring humanitarian relief to the Gazans.
10:02And she was asked about this on one of the talk shows on Sunday.
10:08Here she is saying there's no evidence of Hamas looting.
10:13These people are so starving.
10:15The minute the trucks arrive, they rush to grab whatever they can.
10:19Cut number six, Chris.
10:21Your organization announced at least 15 of your trucks were looted when they entered southern Gaza on route to bakeries.
10:30Israel has consistently said that the looting is being carried out by Hamas.
10:36Have you seen evidence that it is Hamas stealing the food?
10:39No, not at all.
10:40Not in this round.
10:42Listen, these people are desperate and they see a World Food Program truck coming in and they run for it.
10:49This doesn't have anything to do with Hamas or any kind of organized crime or anything.
10:55It has simply to do with the fact these people are starving to death.
10:58And so we will continue to go in.
11:00We will continue to go in with food and the kinds of supplies we need to help the bakeries operate
11:06and make sure that we can continue to do that and hopefully be able to do more of it.
11:10But again, we can't do this unless the world community puts pressure on this.
11:15We can't be allowed to sit back and watch these people starve to death with no outside diplomatic influence to help us.
11:22Obviously, her humanitarian instincts should be applauded.
11:27But from what you've said and what we've seen, it doesn't appear that any amount of pressure,
11:34except a phone call from Donald Trump, will stop the Israelis from their determination to slaughter the Palestinians,
11:42either by bombs or guns or starvation.
11:44Well, frankly, I don't think a phone call from Donald Trump would stop it because, as I said before,
11:51this is largely out of his hands.
11:54I think he's in a position from which he cannot easily escape,
11:58where the power to decide what we will do really rests with the enormous power and influence
12:05that Mr. Netanyahu exerts inside the United States, through the media, through his agents, the donor class,
12:14and ultimately in Washington itself with the Senate and the House.
12:19I mean, all one has to do is look over the last few days at photographs of,
12:24I think it was the director of Homeland Security, Christy Noem,
12:26praying at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, more recently Governor Abbott from Texas.
12:32And you have to ask yourself, well, these people are obviously not Jewish.
12:36What are they doing there?
12:37And they're not the first ones by any means.
12:39Large numbers of members of this administration have trooped over there.
12:43We've had other governors go there to sign bills into law that essentially transform Jews
12:50into a protected class inside the United States.
12:54And again, as I've said before, if I were in that position,
12:58I would not want to be transformed into a protected class in America, no matter what I was.
13:03But nevertheless, these things are real.
13:06You know, you talk about moral authority, and I am glad that she's speaking out, and that's a very good thing.
13:13But there was an example of something similar when Napoleon Bonaparte was approached by one of his staff officers
13:19and said, you know, the Pope in Rome is not going to like this, and he won't approve it.
13:24And the answer from Napoleon was, how many battalions has the Pope got?
13:28Well, I think today it's no longer a question of how many battalions anybody has.
13:34It's a question of how much money they have.
13:36And enormous quantities of money are backing this policy and ensuring that it will be carried out in Israel.
13:43And that is the policy of ruthless expulsion and elimination of Palestinians from Israel.
13:51I know we usually don't discuss American domestic politics, but I have to ask you this.
13:56It sounds as though your view is, if Donald Trump called up Netanyahu and said,
14:02the gravy train is over, the cargo planes are stopping today,
14:07the ones that are in midair are coming back until you stop the slaughter in Gaza.
14:13His hands are tied. He wouldn't get away with it.
14:15There'd be some catastrophic political response.
14:18Yeah, absolutely.
14:18And look, we've already seen evidence for this in Ukraine.
14:23What did President Trump say before he was elected?
14:27What were the views that he expressed?
14:28What did he say he was determined to do?
14:31What has he done?
14:32What is the outcome?
14:34He's done a 180-degree turn.
14:37And I see no evidence that this is necessarily something that he suddenly decided on.
14:42I think he's frankly given up or capitulated to the powers that reside in what some people like to call the deep state.
14:51I just call it the ruling political class and their donors.
14:54Well, when President Trump refers to President Putin as crazy on his own social media site,
15:05in his own words, in caps, when he says at an airport in New Jersey,
15:11I'm not happy at all with him.
15:14Something's happened to him.
15:15Something's wrong.
15:16When he publicly attacks President Putin, how does that resonate in the Kremlin?
15:23Well, I can tell you that he's destroyed whatever credibility he had.
15:29And remember that the principal guiding imperative from the very beginning,
15:33from the time the Russians intervened in eastern Ukraine,
15:37was to avoid a conflict with the United States and NATO.
15:41I don't think most Americans understand that because nobody tells them that, but that's true.
15:45And that's one of the reasons why they moved as quickly as they did to try and establish talks to end this tragic war.
15:53That's why they achieved, I thought, a potential solution in April of 2022 that we then sabotaged.
16:00And ever since then, the Russians have had to come to the realization that it didn't matter what they did.
16:07We were going to work tirelessly to destroy them.
16:09So they've recovered.
16:11They are now the leading, certainly the leading ground to military power in the world today.
16:17I don't think there is an army anywhere that could stand up to them.
16:22And I think they've exerted tremendous control over airspace as a result of their advances in air defense technology and so forth.
16:28My point is that President Trump doesn't have any credibility anymore.
16:32He makes it sound as though he and President Trump are both members of a golf club.
16:37And he's unhappy because President Putin decided to change something on the putting green.
16:45And he doesn't like it.
16:47And he just doesn't understand it because he thought they were friends.
16:51Well, this is all nonsense.
16:52This has always been the kind of problem that I think President Trump has.
16:56He personalizes everything.
16:58He thinks that the power of his personality is preeminent and all powerful.
17:03It isn't.
17:03Things in international relations are about interests.
17:09They are not about personal relationships.
17:12And he has utterly refused to listen to whatever President Putin has had to say or his ministers about Russia's legitimate national security interests.
17:23And so you get this ridiculous statement that, frankly, confirms the worst suspicions in the Kremlin, that we have no strategy except to harm Russia, if you want to call that a strategy.
17:35And it doesn't make any difference what they do.
17:37And so I think they're going to proceed to do what they think they must to preserve the security of their country.
17:43In the same interview at a Morristown, New Jersey airport at which the president was asked his opinion of President Putin, and he used disparaging words, he was also asked if he was aware that President Putin, it was reported by a Russian commander that President Putin narrowly escaped an assassination attempt by a Ukrainian drone.
18:10And he said he said he hadn't heard it, A, isn't it inconceivable that he wouldn't have heard it?
18:15And B, if such a thing happened, isn't it likely that American intel was involved in knowing which helicopter President Putin was in and where it was at a given moment?
18:27Well, keep in mind that the CIA, MI6 and the Mossad are all joined at the hip.
18:34So any of those particular entities could have provided that intelligence to the Zelensky regime.
18:41So it's not exclusively us.
18:43I mean, those three are heavily involved.
18:46That's the first thing.
18:47Second part of this is more serious.
18:50Could this have happened without him knowing?
18:52And I'm afraid the answer is yes.
18:54And I think it's yes for the following reasons.
18:58If you listen to him, he talks in a very cavalier manner about these things.
19:04And I think he's being honest with you.
19:06I don't think he's lying.
19:08He may not have heard it, or he may have heard something and chosen not to act on it because he didn't think it was credible or it didn't conform to his expectation.
19:18You know, we need to stop and understand what is not happening in this administration.
19:24You're familiar with the National Security Council staff.
19:27That was established under President Eisenhower.
19:31President Eisenhower had been through the Second World War and its aftermath.
19:35He was a big believer in the criticality of having very competent analysts on your staff.
19:41people that could analyze, understand, evaluate, and review material, and then present to the president, for his own consumption, their assessment.
19:53And he was very careful about who ended up on the National Security Council staff and who came in to brief him.
19:59Right.
19:59And so, as a result, Eisenhower believed in the staffing process.
20:04So, when he got a military operational plan, when he received a plea for money for some aspect of national security, it would be staffed.
20:16It would be thoroughly analyzed, brought back to him.
20:19He would review it, and he would make a decision.
20:21This is not happening inside the Trump administration.
20:25There is no such process.
20:28And as a result, it's hard to tell what the president actually knows and understands, because there's not much evidence that he reads and studies what's handed to him.
20:38He doesn't like to.
20:39And he has this habit of listening to his inner circle.
20:43He says, I trust these people.
20:45Well, they may be trustworthy from the standpoint of loyalty to him, but they may not be knowledgeable enough or insightful enough to providing what he needs to understand what's happening in the world, particularly what's happening today in Eastern Europe, or for that matter, in the Middle East.
21:00Well, right before we came on air, Colonel Reuters reports that Russia has amassed 50,000 troops at a particular spot in northeast Ukraine.
21:15Now, 50,000 troops, to my lay mind, seems like a lot.
21:20Is that a lot?
21:21And if this report is accurate, what does it tell you?
21:24Well, it's interesting, because I'd heard that there were more than 100,000 up in the northeast.
21:29Perhaps this is a strike force drawn from that 100,000, and there's an intention to strike across to Kiev.
21:38I don't know.
21:39I mean, we just don't know.
21:41And again, when you look at military operations that are being conducted, going back to this idea that, first of all, whatever the Russians did, President Putin wanted to make sure that nothing alarmed the West.
21:53Someone asked me recently, why didn't the Russians destroy all the bridges across the Upper River?
22:00And I said, well, they probably wanted to retain some for future offensive operations, potentially.
22:06Didn't want to foreclose that option.
22:08But I think they also didn't want to alarm the West.
22:12They didn't want the West to think that they were now going to isolate eastern Ukraine completely, kill all of the Ukrainian forces that were there, and then press to the river.
22:22Because that's not what they wanted to do.
22:24They wanted to find a way out of this morass and end the conflict.
22:28And I think that's the way we have to look at whatever they do.
22:31If they're doing something, it's after quite a lot of deliberation, and it could be what I just described, or it could be something else.
22:39If you look at all of the operations they have inevitably involved on the tactical and operational levels, you know, encompassing and circling and then destroying systematically what's inside the circle and then moving further on, but always very incrementally.
22:56This may indicate a desire to send something further west than they have in the past, in the hopes of potentially convincing the regime to evacuate Kiev or us, for instance, to intervene and talk.
23:10Who knows?
23:11But I really think at this stage they're making decisions on the basis of what they believe is in Russia's interests.
23:18And I don't think they're listening very much to us anymore because they've seen too much vacillation, too much change.
23:24They don't see the evidence for any coherent strategic framework.
23:28Everything is impulse driven, and the impulses come straight from the president.
23:33He speaks without a great deal of self-awareness.
23:36He simply says what he wants to.
23:38That may go down well domestically with his supporters, but it doesn't help us at all in the international system.
23:45Colonel, can Ukraine survive?
23:47I think that's an independent country.
23:53I think that's open to debate.
23:55Let's be frank.
23:56Ukraine, for most of its history, was never an independent country.
23:59It was a region.
24:01And if you look at Ukraine, certainly at the time that this 2014 coup occurred and we installed this government that's become a radical nationalist entity aimed at Russia's destruction,
24:14you could look at Ukraine in three parts.
24:18You could see the far eastern part of the country is Russian, fundamentally, culturally, linguistically.
24:24And if you want to attach ethnicity to it, you can attach that to it.
24:28Then in the center, you had some of it on the east side, most of it on the west side of the river.
24:33You had this sort of hybrid area where even the language itself is not really Ukrainian.
24:40It's not pure Russian.
24:41It's something of a mix.
24:43All those cities like Kharkov and Kiev at the beginning of this war were all Russian-speaking places.
24:50And then you have the far west, which is very different and is probably, in strictest terms, thoroughly Ukrainian.
24:58It does have a regional identity, but for most of its existence, it's lived under Polish-Lithuanian rule.
25:06Some of it was under Austrian and Swedish rule.
25:09Again, but it's different.
25:11So you have this country that divides into three parts.
25:14Today, the east is gone.
25:16That is now part of Russia.
25:17I suspect more of it will become part of Russia in the days and months ahead.
25:21The question is, what happens in the rest of the country?
25:24Because tens of millions of people have left, and most of the Ukrainians on their way out were asked, you know, when will you come back?
25:31And virtually all of them that were asked at the border in Poland, where my sources are, said, we're not going back.
25:37We have no intention of ever going back.
25:39So under those circumstances, the question is, can Ukraine independently as a sovereign state emerge from this and go on into the future as a viable entity?
25:51I suppose some rump form of it might, but not all of it by any stretch of the imagination.
25:58What will it take for the violence to end?
26:03I mean, if the Russians reach the Dnieper River, do they just stop?
26:08Does the State Department say to Zelensky, it's time to move to Paris or Miami or Tel Aviv?
26:16I mean, what will it actually take to cause this to end?
26:20The Russians are not going to agree to anything short of their demands, which have been regular, consistent, and systematic since day one.
26:27The quickest way to end this conflict is for President Trump to end any further aid to the regime in Kiev.
26:36Simply say, until you are willing to negotiate in good faith, no more aid, no more support.
26:43Secondly, to get all U.S. military, intelligence, and civilian personnel out of Ukraine and make it very clear we're getting out.
26:53We're no longer supporting this.
26:54Now, why would that end it?
26:56The reason it would end is because the Europeans cannot compensate for what we do.
27:01In other words, they can't move in and fill that vacuum.
27:05The Europeans at that stage are probably going to have to say, well, I guess we're going to have to come to terms with the Russians, frankly.
27:12And I think that would happen.
27:14But there's no willingness to do that.
27:16So if you're a Russian looking at this, you say, how do I end this without going to war against the United States?
27:22And I think the answer is that you press to the river and then you look around and see if there's any willingness to reconsider anything in Washington.
27:32And if there isn't, then you gradually cross incrementally at various places and continue your advance because you really have no choice in the matter.
27:41Remember, the worst thing that can happen is that whatever remains of Western Ukraine is this becomes this sort of pot boiling over with CIA, MI6, Mossad agents and elements trying to find ways to kill Russians, trying to find ways to re-stimulate the failed war against Russia.
28:06That's the problem.
28:08You know, neutrality would have been a great solution.
28:11But today, can the Russians really believe in any offer of neutrality that we make?
28:16What can they believe from anything that is said to them in Europe?
28:20Remember, we go back to the Minsk Accords.
28:21You remember that?
28:23They learned a hard lesson there.
28:24They believed and they were taken advantage of.
28:27So now they ask, well, how long can we do this?
28:30Now, the good news for the Russians militarily is if you control everything up to the Dnieper River, you are in a position to devastate anything on the other side that looks dangerous to you.
28:42In other words, you don't necessarily have to cross over and occupy anything if you don't want to.
28:46And I don't think they do for the reasons I just outlined.
28:50I explain the true nature of Ukraine, particularly its western edge.
28:55They want nothing to do with that.
28:57And in fact, there's a lot of evidence that in Moscow, the Russians would welcome the Poles to come back in because they know the Poles and the Ukrainians hate each other.
29:07And you'd end up having a Polish-Ukrainian war in the West.
29:10This place is a mess.
29:12We don't understand it.
29:13We know nothing about it.
29:15And so we treat it as President Trump has, as, well, this is just a misunderstanding.
29:20And I'm the big man with the big stick.
29:23And if I just beat everyone over the head and say, make peace, they'll have to make peace.
29:29Well, that's childish nonsense.
29:31There are hundreds of years of complexity involved in this whole thing.
29:35Conor McGregor, thank you.
29:37Your last soliloquy was an extraordinary analysis of this problem from your perspective, and it's deeply appreciated.
29:51Thank you for your time, my dear friend.
29:52Thanks for joining us today.
29:54Thanks for letting me question you on all of this.
29:56All the best to you.
29:58Thank you, Judge.
29:59Of course.
29:59Bye-bye.
30:00A great man with a brilliant understanding of the military necessities of modern life, as well as history.
30:09Coming up at 3 o'clock today on all of this, he's been shouting free Palestine all week.
30:17Phil McGover, Phil, excuse me, Phil Giraldi, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
30:21We'll see you next time.
30:51Bye-bye.
30:52Bye-bye.