On Monday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “America Reports,” Rep. Michael Waltz (R-FL) said that Putin wants “to sow panic within Ukraine itself and either achieve his objectives with a political collapse or make it much easier to do so militarily” with a smaller invasion. And that “talking tough about what we’re going to do after Ukraine is invaded doesn’t do the Ukrainians a whole lot of good.”
Waltz said, “Putin has been putting pieces in place now for months. I don’t ever think he was serious about diplomacy. I think that was buying time maybe on the outside chance he could have gotten some major concessions. But otherwise, I think this is always what he’s intended to do. Because, at the end of the day, he intends to recreate the old Soviet Union, and he got away with it by invading Georgia — by the way, during the Olympics, the 2008 Olympics in Beijing then — with a relatively weak response. He got away with it in 2014 invading Ukraine and taking Crimea with a relatively tepid response — the Obama administration literally threw blankets at the problem — and he believes he’s going to get away with it now, as well.”
He added, “[F]rom Washington’s perspective, you know, there’s a lot of frustration in Ukraine on the indecision, the lack of honoring the Ukrainians’ request for more sophisticated lethal aid, and putting sanctions on Russia in place now with the promise then to pull those sanctions back if Putin deescalates. But talking tough about what we’re going to do after Ukraine is invaded doesn’t do the Ukrainians a whole lot of good.”
Waltz further stated, “I do think this is the ultimate form of brink[s]manship on Putin’s part. He’s taking old plays out of the Soviet playbook. Remember, he was the station chief for the KGB in East Germany back during his career. And he’s pulling all of those plays out of disinformation, of brink[s]manship, and, I think, ultimately, he believes that he’ll receive a weak and divided response from the United States and NATO, just as he did in 2014. But he’s also, by telegraphing, hoping, as we discussed, to sow panic within Ukraine itself and either achieve his objectives with a political collapse or make it much easier to do so militarily with a limited — with a more limited invasion.”
He also said that Putin “knows that, because of our energy policies, and because of Germany’s failed energy policies and moving away from nuclear and towards Putin’s Russian [oil] and gas supplies, that he’s going to have a divided response. And I just can’t emphasize enough, guys, that Biden turning off American energy independence and moving us away from our own cleaner, by the way, oil and gas, we doubled U.S. imports from Russia just in the last year. And it’s going to have a huge inflationary spike on global oil. And every time that happens, that makes regimes like Russia and Iran richer and more powerful. He also knows that inflation is a huge political issue for Biden, all of which are playing right into his hands, and is going to put this administration on its back foot.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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