The Russian president’s forces are « doing very badly, » and he underestimated the Western response, Barry McCaffrey said Sunday.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is in the midst of a « strategic disaster » with his invasion of Ukraine, believes Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star U.S. Army general. Russian forces launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24—drawing swift international condemnation. To justify the unprovoked assault, Putin bizarrely claims that Ukraine is being led by « neo-Nazis, » despite the Eastern European country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, being Jewish with family members who died in the Holocaust. The U.S., Canada and European allies have been united in implementing severe financial sanctions targeting the Russian economy, as well as Putin and other Moscow elite. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military—with support of many civilian volunteers— has outperformed many analysts expectations as its fought back against Putin’s aggression. McCaffrey, during a Sunday interview with MSNBC, said that President Joe Biden and his administration have « been brilliant in the way they handled this, moved forward as an alliance, not as a U.S. unilateral move. » « I think we’re going to see that across the board, Putin put himself in a strategic disaster. The problem is, how are we going to act to end this intense suffering in Ukraine—huge nation,40 million people—when the fighting in Kyiv gets intense? And in the coming weeks it’s going to be painful to watch, » the retired general said.
