Douglas Macgregor: ‘Mr Putin has priced in the cost. In other words, he’s not a fool’

I have found the following interview very interesting, which is why I am providing a transcript of it... The clip is also embedded in the following article about the president of Ukraine: https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/the-man-who-sold-ukraine.

[Click on the picture with the right button of your mouse, then on ‘picture-in-picture’ in the menu and finally place your cursor on the picture at the bottom of the screen to display the ‘Play’ icon [i.e. the white arrow pointing towards the right] to start the clip, which will thus play in ‘picture-in-picture’ mode.
If it does not, click on https://paulzanotelli.ch/videos/colonel-douglas-macgregor_putin-has-priced-in-the-cost-he-s-not-a-fool.mp4.

MY TRANSCRIPT (and my emphasis)

Tucker Carlson:
With a conversation with Doug Macgregor about what is actually going on in Ukraine, and we’re honoured to do that. Doug Macgregor, thank you for joining us.

Colonel Douglas Macgregor:
Sure.

Tucker Carlson:
So the first question is ‘Where are we now?’ We keep hearing these reports about a Russian convoy coming into the capital city, etc, etc. But big picture: ‘Where is the war as of tonight?’

Colonel Douglas Macgregor:
Well, the first five days, we witnessed a very slow, methodical movement [of] Russian forces into eastern Ukraine – that is Ukraine, the third of Ukraine, which is on the eastern side of this river called the Dnieper. They moved slowly, cautiously; they tried 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 manoeuvred to encircle and surround the remaining Ukrainian forces and destroy them through a series of massive rocket artillery strikes, airstrikes, with Russian armour then slowly but surely closing the distance and denying, annihilating what’s left. So this is a … this is the beginning, frankly, of the end of Ukrainian resistance.

Tucker Carlson:

So the ugly stuff is just beginning.

Colonel Douglas Macgregor:
Yes, yes.

Tucker Carlson:

OK. So this is a question you don’t often hear ask, but it’s essential to our welfare here in the United States, to our strategic thinking about this. ‘What is Putin’s goal here? What’s his aim?’

Colonel Douglas Macgregor:

Well, I think Vladimir Putin set out to honour his word of 2007. 2007 at the Munich Security Conference, he said ‘We will not tolerate the expansion of NATO into 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 US 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 à vis NATO to deter us from any further attempts to influence or change Ukraine into effectively a platform for the projection of US 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’s going to roll up to that river up near Kiev. He’s 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.

Tucker Carlson:
How should the United States respond at this point?

Colonel Douglas Macgregor:
Well, I think President Biden and Sullivan, his national security adviser, have already given some indication of their readiness to accept something like that. 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.

Tucker Carlson:
Right.

Colonel Douglas Macgregor:
So I think Sullivan and Biden will essentially tell Zelensky – if he is still the president at that point, and if he’s still running any semblance of the Ukrainian government, which is largely collapsing now – if he is still there, he’s going to be told ‘Accept the deal, go neutral’ because there really is no choice.

Tucker Carlson:
You are hearing elements in the United States Congress – it’s almost unanimous in the media – calling on the Biden administration to enforce a so-called no-fly zone over Ukraine. What would be the effect of that?

Colonel Douglas Macgregor:
Well, you’d end up at war with Russia because Russians are not going to allow western aircraft, US aircraft flying over the battlefield in eastern Ukraine under any circumstances. And Stoltenberg, the Secretary General of NATO, flew to Poland to stop the Poles from essentially offering big 29 aircraft that were improved and modernised to the Ukrainians, allowing their pilots to come to Poland fly these into Ukraine. He put a stop to it, saying anything like that could lead to war and NATO will not go to war. And see, this is the interesting part: now everyone is talking about spending lots of money on defence and lots of money for NATO. But very shortly people are going to begin to ask why? Why are we doing? Because it’s patently obvious that NATO is not in a position to fight, not in a position to challenge the Russians. So I think Mr Biden’s problem tonight is not just his narrative is going to break down very rapidly over the next few days as it becomes obvious that this whole Ukraine business was a fantasy on his part. He … he’s going to end up trying to write checks that he can’t cash because we can’t afford a massive military build-up. We can’t afford to put more forces forward. And if we try to do it, it’ll be self defeating. So I think we’re in a real crisis now that no one is really … really figured it out yet, and that is, NATO itself and our position on the European continent – all of this is now at risk.

Tucker Carlson:
I think a lot of people were taken by surprise by this invasion.

Colonel Douglas Macgregor:
Hhm [of assent].

Tucker Carlson:
I’ll admit that I was also – not that, of course, we’re experts on Eastern Europe –, but the President and his team had said for weeks ‘In effect, we’ve got this under control. We have applied enough pressure on the Russians. They would be very unwise for them to do this’. That was a massive miscalculation, obviously. How did they screw up?

Colonel Douglas Macgregor:
Well, two things. I think that Mr Putin has priced in the cost. In other words, he’s not a fool. He sat down with Xi and Beijing and made it very clear what he was going to do, what his goals were in eastern Ukraine, and only eastern Ukraine, initially. And I think he got the conditions he wanted from Xi of support and assistance through this process because he knew what we would try to do to him: we would try to destroy Russia financially, economically in whatever way we could.

Tucker Carlson [who interrupts]:
So we’ve just created a …like a real alliance between Russia and China or in any effect there now is one.

Colonel Douglas Macgregor:
Oh, there’s a real strategic partnership. There’s no question about it because China needs Russia in order to secure Central Asia and all the routes to Europe. China wants to do business with Europe. That’s why the Chinese would like Mr Putin to end this quickly. But Putin insisted on those first five days slowing things down because he wanted to minimise damage to property and he wanted to minimise the loss of life, particularly upon …in the population that he was trying to bring into, effectively, a new Ukraine that is Russian. He’s … he’s essentially discarded that now.

Tucker Carlson:
So I just want to be absolutely clear on this point, because a lot hangs on it. So many of our leaders are beholden to Russia, have gotten rich from Russia, Joe Biden family, Nancy Pelosi, family. Pick one: they all have.

Colonel Douglas Macgregor:
Yes.

Tucker Carlson:
Putin would not have been able to do what he did – invade Ukraine – without the support of China – it sounds like what you’re saying.

Colonel Douglas Macgregor:
I think that’s absolutely true. If China …if China had not reassured him, ‘We will stay the course with you’, I doubt seriously that he would be doing this now.

Tucker Carlson:
So since everyone is in moral outrage mode and screaming the F-word at each other on Twitter, I wonder why China is not included in their outrage.

Colonel Douglas Macgregor:
Well, that’s a … that’s an important question that deserves a great answer, but I’m going to let you take that one on. I’m not going to go there tonight.

Tucker Carlson:

Doug Macgregor, [thank you …]

Lausanne, the above was published on the sixth day of the third month of the year two thousand and twenty-two.

Douglas Macgregor: ‘Mr Putin has priced in the cost. In other words, he’s not a fool’ (as interviewed by Tucker Carlson of Fox News on the first of March).