Top Army Colonel: ‘This is The Beginning of The End Of Ukrainian Resistance’

Retired Army Colonel Douglas MacGregor joined Tucker Carlson on Fox News Tuesday to discuss the latest developments of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, noting that the first phase of Russia’s incursion is over, marking the “beginning of the end of the Ukrainian resistance.”

“The first five days, we witnessed a very slow, methodical movement of Russian forces into eastern Ukraine,” MacGregor noted on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” Tuesday.

“That is Ukraine — the third of Ukraine, which is on the eastern side of this river, called the Dnieper. They move slowly, cautiously. They try to reduce casualties among the civilian population, tried to give as many Ukrainian troops and forces as possible the opportunity to give up, to surrender.”

“That is over, and the phase in which we find ourselves now, Russian forces have now maneuver to encircle and surround the remaining Ukraine forces and destroy them, through a series of massive rocket artillery strikes, airstrikes with Russian armor then slowly, but surely closing the distance and annihilating what’s left.”

“So this is a — this is the beginning, frankly of the end of Ukrainian resistance,” he added.

Carlson then asked MacGregor what Putin’s endgame is in this conflict, to which MacGregor replied that it’s to take a portion of Ukraine and establish a buffer zone separating NATO with Russia.

“I think Vladimir Putin set out to honor his word of 2007,” MacGregor said simply.

“In 2007 at the Munich Security Conference, he said: We will not tolerate the expansion of NATO to a point where your NATO, your border, is touching Russia, specifically Ukraine and Georgia. We see these as essentially Trojan horses for NATO’s military power and U.S. influence, subversion and so forth.“

“He then turned to several opportunities to reinforce that over and over and over again, most recently with President Biden in the hopes that he could avoid taking action to effectively clean out eastern Ukraine of any opposition forces whatsoever, and to put his forces in a position vis-a-vis NATO to deter us from any further attempts to influence or change Ukraine into effectively a platform for the projection of U.S. and Western power into Russia.“

“Now, his goal, as we see it, at the moment, is to seize this entire area of eastern Ukraine. That’s pretty clear. He is going to roll up to that river, up near Kyiv, he has actually moved over the river and is preparing to go in and capture that city entirely.“

“At that point, he has to decide what else he wants to do. I don’t think he wants to go any further west. I think he’d be very satisfied to hold that point. But he would like whatever emerges from this that we call Ukraine, whether it’s just the western side or it encompasses some of the east and the west of Ukraine to be neutral, non-aligned, and preferably friendly to Moscow, that he will accept. Anything short of that, his war has been a waste of time.“

MacGregor claimed the Biden administration should then respond by telling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to accept Putin’s terms because “there really is no choice.”

“I think President Biden and Sullivan, his National Security Adviser have already given some indication of their readiness to accept something like that,” he said. “They’re not going to have any choice. Either they accept it or then they put him in the position of having to do more than he would like to do, which would probably not go down well with NATO.”

“No one really wants Russian forces on their border, least of all Poland. So I think Sullivan and Biden will essentially tell Zelensky, if he is still the President at that point and if he is still running any semblance of the Ukrainian government, which is largely collapsing now. If he is still there, he is going to be told accept the deal, go neutral, because there really is no choice.”

Russia and Ukraine confirmed Wednesday that a second round of peace negotiations would resume soon, but Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned that a third world war would involve nuclear weapons and be “destructive.”