There is “no reason” for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to meet with Vladimir Putin at this time, as the Russian president will continue doing what he is doing until his war effort starts to lose, retired U.S. Army Gen. Wesley Clark said on Newsmax Saturday.
“I mean, what’s he going to say to Putin: ‘Please stop abducting my children, please stop executing captured Ukrainian soldiers, please stop bombing my cities?'” asked Clark, a former NATO supreme allied commander, on Newsmax’s “Saturday Report.”
Putin, he added, is “going to do what he wants until he believes he’s going to lose. And without greater pressure from the West, including the Europeans and the United States, Putin is not going to relent in what he’s doing.”
Moscow is carrying out a threefold strategy, including stalling on talks in order to keep the fighting going, Clark said.
“Strategy No. 1 is what’s going on on the ground: Just keep throwing his soldiers in, even though they’re taking horrible losses,” he said. “He’s going to eventually bust through, he thinks. No. 2: demoralize the population by these cruise missile strikes and drone strikes.”
The third part, Clark continued, “is diplomatic. It’s keep talking, keep stalling.”
Meanwhile, Putin’s plans for fighting the war involve four stages and are currently in their second stage, Clark said.
“The third stage is going to come out of the south in the oblast of Zaporizhzhia, and they’re going to try to get to Odesa and take Odesa. And the fourth phase could come out of Belarus: Go in and try to isolate Kyiv,” Clark said.
He pointed to Ukraine’s military capacity but warned that aid has fallen short, endangering the war effort.
“Ukraine has the strongest army in NATO. It’s stronger than the Germans, the Brits, and the French all combined,” he said. “But it requires a lot of assistance in terms of equipment and munitions, and that has been cut down to just a dribble right now. We need to turn the tap back on for these people.”
Current sanctions against Russia are also insufficient, Clark said.
“I think you need to cut off all the Russian banks that are doing business with the West,” he said. “That hasn’t happened. Europe is still buying Russian oil. It’s going into Slovakia and Hungary.
“Cut it off. There’s a lot of technology that’s leaking through into Ukraine from German manufacturers, even from American manufacturers. We have the technology to detect that and to stop it. We just haven’t done so.”
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