Moulton: Putin Doesn’t Understand ‘Urban Combat’ — Bitten Off More than He Can Chew’

Representative Seth Moulton (D-MA) said Wednesday on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” that Russian President Vladimir Putin didn’t “understand how brutal urban combat is.”

Moulton said, “It’s obvious that it’s going much more in our favor and the Ukrainians’ favor than we anticipated. The Russians are held up.”

He continued, “They’re not moving forward. They’re stalled right now. So we’ve never really considered the prospects of a Ukrainian victory. They are facing impossible odds, and yet their courage has been so extraordinary that they are not only holding back the Russian army, they’re beginning to degrade it.”

Moulton added, “We’re dealing with someone who is by some accounts a madman, someone who is not making pragmatic decisions, is not even acting in the way he acted in the past. He’s a vicious man who doesn’t even understand combat. This is something people forget about Putin. He’s a KGB agent. He thinks you can do everything with cloak and daggers. He understands assassinations. He doesn’t understand how brutal urban combat is. As someone who’s experienced that myself, I can tell you he’s bitten off more than he might be willing to chew or than he might be able to chew, or perhaps his forces are willing to chew. We’ve started to hear reports of degrading morale among Russian troops. When they’re actually told to assault Kyiv, and they start getting hit by snipers, by Molotov cocktails thrown from apartment windows, it’s much harder to attack a city than it is to defend it. We have to question just how far those troops are willing to go.”

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