CLARIFICATION: I doubt that a senior Pentagon official is going to be perfectly candid about US military capabilities in public at any time, let alone now. The same goes for a Russian official.
ORIGINAL POST
Colonel Douglas McGregor, former advisor to the Secretary of Defense and once one of NATO’s top strategists, talks with the Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate on the Ukraine war.
McGregor says the Russians have done what they intended to do, which is destroy the Ukrainian military [for the most part], without too many civilian casualties. The war is over as far as that goes. He says Putin has tried to minimize civilian casualties, the diametric opposite of what the Western media reports. He adds that both the Ukrainians and international volunteers are now simply cannon-fodder used by NATO to prolong the war in any way to destablize Russia, but that isn’t working, because polls show 70% popular support for Putin.
McGregor thinks about 2000 Russian soldiers dead is a plausible figure, although there is no confirmation, but the Ukie numbers for their own dead are propaganda. A large quantity of foreign military equipment has been captured. Whatever foreign equipment is shipped in is useless anyway as the Ukrainians cannot use it.
Russia’s demands are minimal: Ukraine must renounce their claim on Crimea [which is historically Russian anyway], recognize the Donbas as Russian, stay out of NATO and refrain developing nukes.
The Russians have tried to avoid the central portion of Ukraine, which is the agricultural region where the spring planting is about to begin. The Russians don’t want to destroy the wheat and barley. In Mariupol, however, the Ukrainians are not allowing 3000 civilians to leave through humanitarian corridors, so a disaster is in the making. McGregor argues that any Western interference in Ukraine, including the imposition of no fly zones, will lead to horizontal and vertical escalation of the war and the use of nuclear weapons, whose fall-out will spread by wind as far as Japan and Korea. He says the strike on a NATO base near the Polish border was a message by Putin to Poland to stay out of the conflict or become a target themselves.
McGregor says the Russians are behind the USA in detection capabilities so they tend to be paranoid and might make a mistake and believe a launch was imminent, when it was not, especially as it is not possible for them to know if US B52’s are carrying nuclear or non-nuclear devices. The unraveling of arms control treaties has also fueled distrust of the US.
Nonetheless, McGregor points out that the president has made good decisions in saying no to a no-fly zone or to boots-on-the-ground and most of the top brass also do not want war, as they know the US military is not up to the task. But the donors run the uniparty, and they, as well as the neocons and the “bombs-away club,” the American exceptionalists, do want war. McGregor doesn’t see why the winning side, Russia would want a false flag, but Ukraine or NATO might well engineer one as a last-ditch effort to widen the war.
Unlike the British empire which practiced “economy of enemies” and tried to see whom they could work with, American elitist Marxists believe in their supreme virtue and demonize and bully anyone who doesn’t fall in line, such as China. They are Wilsonians to the extreme.