| Time | Text |
|---|---|
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Russia's Miscalculation
00:04:41
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| I'm going to start out with the war in Ukraine because we've been living in that war ourselves. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And we're just overwhelmed by what we see. | |
| Yeah. | |
| The death, the carplex. | |
| The destruction of a country. | |
| I've never seen anything like that because we have not. | |
| You probably have seen it in person in war, but I've never seen war like this every day on our screens and just a country basically wiped out. | |
| From your standpoint, General, what is the goal? | |
| What is the reason that Russia is doing this? | |
| You need to step back a few years and reflect on a statement that Vladimir Putin made, where he talked about the disintegration of the Soviet Union was one of the, was the largest geopolitical mistake in the 20th century. | |
| What he was saying was when the Soviet Union came apart that essentially the whole world was paying a price for that. | |
| His objective has always been to restore the Soviet Union, to bring back those satellite countries that created the Soviet Union. | |
| The obvious one to start with was the Ukraine. | |
| And because he had, in his mind, he could justify through his propaganda, he could justify going after the Ukraine simply because at one time it was not only a satellite of Russia, it was part of Russia. | |
| And in fact, historically, at one time, it was Russia. | |
| And then Moscow sort of became the center of the nation of Russia. | |
| But he is trying to restore the Soviet Union, and he had to take the Ukraine first. | |
| But I got to tell you, Jim, and we can talk about this as you want to, this is a war of miscalculations. | |
| He miscalculated how the Europeans would act, because the Europeans came together. | |
| They were unified. | |
| He miscalculated how NATO would act. | |
| NATO did the same thing. | |
| He miscalculated how the tenacity and the war-fighting spirit of the Ukrainian people. | |
| And then finally, he very much miscalculated the capabilities of his military, which has been a miserable failure. | |
| A war that was only supposed to go about three days before they had the capital and were in the process of setting up a puppet government has now dragged on for five weeks, and it's going to go on even further. | |
| So Putin, I think as a result of this, ultimately, this will be his demise. | |
| Wow. | |
| Are you surprised that the Ukraine has fought back instead of surrendering to Russia and Vadimer Putin? | |
| No, Jim, and I was very clear in leading up to this, as I did media appearances. | |
| I said the Ukrainian people are tough people. | |
| Now, they have a lot of corruption in Ukraine as well, and people keep bringing that up as if they forget that we in America have corruption within our government. | |
| But they are a tough people. | |
| They are a people that have endured a lot of hardship throughout their history, and I am not surprised that they have fought. | |
| But I will tell you, they've exceeded my expectations. | |
| I knew they were going to fight hard and I knew it wasn't going to be a quick battle, but I'm going to tell you, they've even exceeded my expectations here. | |
| And I think that fundamentally they have already won this war. | |
| That we don't know what Putin's going to do in the future. | |
| He may level the entire country. | |
| He may ultimately occupy the entire country. | |
| But these Ukrainians have won this war because this is a Samson and Goliath event right here. | |
| And what you're seeing is you are seeing an outgun, outnumbered military that is held together by a common goal, and that is to defend their way of life. | |