Former CIA Director David Petraeus believes that Russian President Vladimir Putin has driven himself into an impasse in Ukraine, from which no desperate steps, including nuclear threats, will help him get out.
“Putin is losing despite significant but desperate steps. President Zelensky and Ukraine have mobilized much better than Russia,” Petraeus said, adding that Ukraine recruited, trained, equipped, organized, and deployed troops “incomparably better than Russia.”
Despite Putin’s bravado, Petraeus believes that “no annexations or even hidden nuclear threats will be able to get him out of this situation.”
Answering the host’s question about whether Russia could win a war with Ukraine, Petraeus said that he did not see how it was possible. “They can’t. He (Putin. – Ed.) can’t do anything at the moment,” he said.
The former head of the CIA believes that Putin will “continue to lose on the battlefield” and that his energy war against Europe will not produce the results he expects. “Europe will have a hard winter. The flow of natural gas will be greatly reduced, but they will survive it, and I don’t think they will stop supporting Ukraine,” he said.
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For Putin and Russia himself, the situation could become even worse, and “even the use of tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield will not change that in the slightest,” Petraeus said.
He also expressed confidence that Putin’s use of nuclear weapons in the war against Ukraine would provoke a very tough response from the US.
“This cannot remain unanswered. This does not mean that the answer will be nuclear. No one needs nuclear escalation. But we must show that this cannot be accepted under any circumstances,” said the ex-head of the CIA.
Petraeus said that in response to Russia’s use of nuclear weapons, the US and its NATO allies could “destroy all Russian conventional forces that we can see and identify on the battlefield in Ukraine, in Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, and on ships in the Black Sea”.
