Col. MacGregor: We Have Russia All Wrong

Thanks To Western Government and Media Propaganda

Douglas Macgregor is a retired U.S. Army colonel and government official, and an author, consultant, and television commentator. He played a significant role on the battlefield in the 1990-91 Gulf War and the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

This man is amazing and tells you the truth. Also see my post: Ukraine is About to be Annihilated

You can listen to the YouTube video below and/or read the rough transcript below.

A rough transcript:

First of all let's understand that uh I, I don't think anybody in their right mind wants a direct military confrontation with Russia. The problem is that we in the west do not see Russia as Russia is.

We see it through this distorting lens. We either impute to it Soviet-like attributes or evil attributes —- whatever you want to call it. We tend to view it through the lens of our own notion of economic power and wealth and you you reach utterly false assumptions about Russia.

Assumption number one: Russia is really weak. Russia can't stay the course. All we have to do is double down and we'll attrit them. We'll wear them out.

No! It's the exact opposite. That's an impossible— as they've demonstrated already economically.

Secondly, their military is no good. It's no good because when they came in, they were soft. They didn't come in hard. They didn't do very well. They seem to have been defeated. All of which is erroneous nonsense, and completely misunderstands what Putin was about and what the Russians were trying to achieve.

So they believe in their heart of hearts that if we were to show up on the battlefield in Western Ukraine, cross the Polish border with Polish allies, maybe some Romanian forces too, that the Russians would be so intimidated and so afraid that they would immediately say stop. please don't come into this and they're wrong.

They're very wrong. In fact there's a real appetite in Russia to do real damage to our forces if they get the opportunity. So I think you've got a misapprehension of the danger and and the level of response that it will elicit. And now we have a much larger, very different Russian army in the field. This is now a wartime theater. Ukraine is no longer being treated with kit gloves.

Initially the Russians, they said no, the Ukrainians are our brothers slavs, we don't want to harm Ukrainians, we don't want to do damage infrastructure. We want to get along so that we can build a new peace. That's gone!

The Russians now have decided there is no way to negotiate an end to this. No one will negotiate in good faith, therefore we must crush the enemy. That's what's coming.

Gary: Putin's miscalculation about his ability only to go so far as what is domestically palatable, his phrase, and I think you'll really take issue — is the absence of training or the poor training of the Russian military.

MacGregor: Well the kindest thing I can say is that uh Dave Petraeus is largely divorced from reality and once again David Petraeus has embraced this fictional narrative along the lines that I described before, and that's part of what he's going to do because he is a product of the very people that are trying to push us into war with Russia now.

They pushed us into Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan —- not just to defeat the enemy, not just to remove the regime, but to stay and occupy and transform. And he was in the forefront of all this. I think he's just he's just sort of punching his ticket as a member of the in club with the status quo and that's the status quo that's ruling us in Washington.

They are largely divorced from reality. The Russian forces are not poorly trained. they're very well trained. As I mentioned before that I've watched several films that were made available to me through various sources in Europe. I was very impressed with the way the Russians operated. The Ukrainians, on the other hand, have taken such horrendous losses. They now admit to 35000 missing. They admitted more than 100,000 killed. You start adding up the numbers and you're looking at 150 000 plus who are dead.

Now they're trying to force teenage boys at the age of 13, 14, 15 into uniform. They're now telling the disabled that you're going to be mobilized. They're literally scraping the bottom of the barrel. These are hundreds of thousands of untrained people (on the battlefield) is the very thing that Petraeus is accusing the Russians of. It absolutely fits the description of the Ukrainian force arrayed against the Russians.

Gary: General Petraeus is saying things like ‘Russia cannot out-suffer the United States and Ukraine and Europe because Russia has suffered more casualties in 10 months in Ukraine than in nine years in Afghanistan.’

MacGregor: I think he's just reading for the from the script that is disseminated widely in Washington. He and Lindsey Graham and a whole whole range of people in Washington just keep repeating this stuff as though it were true and it's not.

We know that Russian industry is by no means on its knees. It’s quite the contrary. It is booming and they're exporting more oil and gas than they ever have. They're swimming in cash. The Russian population, if anything, is far more exuberant and enthusiastic about this war than I think Putin privately would like. He's acted to restrain some of the more radical nationalist elements that would like to go in and do the equivalent of wiping Ukraine off the map. But of course that's something that Putin thinks is ridiculous and has no intention of doing.

Gary: What kind of casualty numbers have the Russians suffered and is General Petraeus comparing apples to oranges when he compares, you know, an intense Street by Street Urban Warfare in Ukraine with trying to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan?

MacGregor: Well no, that is apples and oranges and there's something else worth mentioning. that after the initial entry into Afghanistan, the Russian dominated forces that had gone in there to begin with were largely withdrawn. They relied very heavily on reservists from neighboring Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and other Central Asian republics as they were called. Now they're independent countries and of course they were not terribly excited about being there and they didn't do very much to be quite frank. So it's a very different War the one you're describing. This is existential for the Russians. There's nothing existential about Afghanistan.

Gary: how bad uh or what's the category, err, what are the numbers, if you know them, of Russian casualties? You opined earlier that Ukraine may have 125 to 150 000 dead. How many Russians are dead as a result of the entry of the military into Ukraine?

MacGregor: I'm told some words in the neighborhood of thirty thousand at the most maybe thirty five thousand and an equal number of wounded. But bear in mind the Russians have set up a very elaborate medical support structure and they've gotten very good at evacuating the wounded. So their wounded have survived much more successfully than the Ukrainian.

So that's that's about right if you look at it from a one to five perspective which is pretty pretty much the standard right now. Of course at this point in time they've been killing Ukrainians at eight Ukrainians for every Russian, or ten Ukrainians for every Russian. Bakmut has turned into a particularly terrible Ukrainian bloodbath and hugely beneficial to the Russians.

Gary: From your experience as a tank commander, winter is here, the Earth is frozen solid in Ukraine. Who does this help —- the ukrainians or the Russians?

MacGregor: Well actually it's not frozen throughout Ukraine. Right now. During the day in southern Ukraine , near Odessa, Kharson, it rises to about 34 degrees during the day and drops down to about 20 at night. So you still have standing water in those trenches. So the south is not ready to support large quantities of tractor-wheeled vehicles.

The north is absolutely frozen solid but it looks more and more as though the Russians would like to complete their task in donbass first. They want to eliminate all the Ukrainian forces that are in Donbass.

Gary: so who who gains by Frozen Ground?

MacGregor: The Russians. That is very much in their to their advantage. I mean nobody nobody likes fighting in the mud. I mean mud is ugly for both sides but the mud makes it harder for a swift offensive than it would be if it were frozen.

Gary: how do the Russians move. They don't move on foot do they move in tanks are they moving trucks do they move trains how do the troops get from the Russian Ukrainian border into the inner parts where the fighting is

MacGregor: well they go a certain distance in tractor-wheeled vehicles, but most of the fighting that you see happening along the line of contact which is about 300 to 400 miles is actually on foot and it's very grueling and very demanding physically very slow and incremental. But remember this was always an economy of force measure. It was designed to grind up as many ukrainians as possible at the lowest possible cost to the Russians. That's what's been going on in southern Ukraine it continues. It's worked brilliantly. The theater Commander has said that continues until he's ready to launch his offenses. When the offensives are launched, it will be a very different battle. But the interesting part is that the Ukrainians have taken so many casualties in the South. We're beginning to hear reports that they're on the verge of collapse and that's why we're hearing about the teenage boys age 13, 14, 15 yos pressed into service, the disabled, and we're getting videos that are coming in now from Ukrainian soldiers —they disappear almost as quickly as they appear.

Naturally where some of the Ukrainian soldiers are saying, well the people in Kyiv better be hopeful that the Russians get to them before we do, because the Russians will probably put them in jail. If we get to them we'll kill them.

Because they see Zelenski's government is largely remote from them. They see no evidence that anybody gives a damn about them. They're running out of food. They don't have proper clothing. They're freezing. They're taking heavy casualties.

Gary: did President Zelinski do himself any good with that speech through a joint session of Congress two nights ago?

MacGregor: I don't think Zelinski was talking to anybody in Ukraine. I think he was he was basically talking to the collective West and he spun the narrative. I think behind the scenes he was very very blunt. I mean he came close to it a couple of times in his speech when he said ‘you've given us a lot but it's not enough.’ And you go back to that that uh interview that was conducted by The Economist. You listen to Zelinski, read that interview, read what's zalushny, the general says. These people are at the end of their tether and they told the people at the CIA, they told the people in in the Pentagon, they told the people in the White House; if you don't come in and rescue us we are going to be annihilated. We are not going to withstand what is coming. They're not fools they know what's coming. We have satellite coverage. We've shown them the pictures. They know what kind of force is going to attack.

Gary: the last area of our inquiry. President Putin, just about 72 hours ago, made some interesting statements I'd love your take on them colonel.

Here is President Putin: “our goal is not to spin the flywheel of military conflict but on the contrary to end this war we will strive for an end to this and the sooner the better of course and again all armed conflicts in one way or another with some kind of negotiations on the Diplomatic track. Sooner or later, any parties in a state of conflict sit down and make an agreement. The sooner this realization comes to those who oppose us, the better. We have never given up on this.” He’s he sending the West a message?

MacGregor: I think he's sending the West a message. He's also telling the ukrainians quite clearly that what he will launch, when he finally launches it, sometime in January early February at the latest, is a war-winning offensive. That this is designed to terminate the conflict. He understands the longer that this lasts the greater the danger of unwanted confrontation between us and him. He's very sensitive to that. He's not a fool. He doesn't want that. We shouldn't want it either. Then he's also saying, even when this happens, and I launch these offenses and I crush the enemy when the enemy surfaces and said we've had enough —-he will talk to them and he will negotiate the end of this. We are the ones that keep saying no negotiation. We're the ones that say “unconditional surrender” to you Mr Putin. That was effectively a Lindsey Graham's comment. He says “Mr Putin unless you go out in the middle of red square and shoot yourself through the head and commit suicide there can be no negotiated settlement.” This is absurd !!

Gary: is anybody Whispering into uh Tony Blinken, Lloyd Austin, Ron Clane, Joe Biden's ear it's time to sit down and talk?

MacGregor: Well, just remember he channeled deliberately, I mean, I assume that Bob Kagan or somebody like that wrote the speech for zelenski, because he channeled the neocon hero FDR. What very few people understand is when FDR demanded unconditional surrender in Tehran, Stalin told him why did you do that? This has made this war much worse than it would have been. We we wanted people to give up so wthat we can end this war and stop losing people. You've made this war last longer. And FDR just sat there and looked at him like, uh right, that's what we're doing.

(like FDR) We are prolonging this war.