Colonel Doug McGregor (ret.), a former senior adviser to the secretary of the defense, had the following to say on the Ukraine conflict to Fox News:
“Vladimir Putin is carrying through on something he has been warning us about at least for the last 15 years, which is that he will not tolerate U.S. forces or their missiles on his borders, much as we would not tolerate Russian troops and missiles in Cuba. And we ignored them and he finally acted: he was not going to allow Ukraine, under any circumstances, to join NATO.
“What’s happened now is that the battle in Eastern Ukraine is really almost over, all the Ukrainian troops there have been largely surrounded and cut off. You’ve got a concentration down in the Southeast of 30,000 to 40,000 of them and if they don’t surrender within the next 24 hours, I suspect that the Russian will ultimately annihilate them.
“That’s why Zelenskyy is meeting with Putin’s representatives right now. The game is over. He’s going to have to negotiate the best deal he can get. We’ve already told him, the President of the U.S. has, that if he opts for neutrality for Ukraine, we’ll back him. And I think that Vladimir Putin will do that for Western Ukraine. But that is Ukraine beyond the upper river. But behind it, in the east, where he is now, I’m not sure of what he is planning there, whether he forms another republic, annexed to Russia, because historically it has been Russian. But the territory west of Ukraine is not. He knows that and he’s happy to live with that as a neutral state.”
