Petraeus: Putin’s War in Ukraine is “Going Terribly for Him”

DAVID PETRAEUS, FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: In truth, it’s going terribly for him, I think, across the board. At the strategic level, he has essentially united most of the rest of the world, the U.S., NATO, the E.U., many other countries not part of those organizations. To have Germany over the weekend committed 100 billion euros in a one-time supplemental for defense, put Nord Stream 2 certification on hold, provide lethal weapons to Ukraine, keeping in mind that the first contribution they made was Kevlar helmets, and to commit to immediately spending 2 percent of GDP on defense, when they weren’t even at 1.5 percent of GDP, is extraordinary, really very, very significant. And then, on the battlefield, it’s going terribly. They have a flawed operational concept, proceeding along seven different axes of advanced, not weighting the main effort on Kyiv, where, of course, the main objective is just to topple President Zelensky and his government, and to replace it with one that is pro-Russian. They haven’t achieved air-ground integration. They haven’t employed their cyber capabilities all that effectively. They’re not performing adequate logistics. And they haven’t even achieved combined arms, in other words, infantry, armor, and artillery all together. And they’re facing a citizenry that universally hates them with forces that are fighting on their homeland, home field advantage, know the terrain and the people, and the citizens themselves, many of them volunteering to fight the Russians. So, you noted that I was part of an invasion force when I was a two-star general. I can’t imagine going into a country where everyone, again, wants to take up arms against you, as opposed to being applauded, as we were at the beginning. I mean, we were seen as an army of liberation at the beginning in Iraq, because no one loved Saddam Hussein. They hated him. Now, of course, an army of liberation can become an army of occupation pretty quickly if you don’t watch out, and we learned some tough lessons there. But I cannot imagine a more difficult situation for the Russians on the ground. They’re now going to be joined by the Belarusians, who are less competent even though they are, noting that, again, the Russian performance has been truly underwhelming, and the Ukrainian performance has been extraordinary. And here I should also note just the incredible leadership of President Zelensky. As you will recall, he was a comedian playing the president on television. He got elected president. No one really knew what to expect. And here he is providing enormous energy, example, inspiration, and very competent leadership, despite being target number one and his family target number two.