When you if you watch what’s happening in Ukraine, there is a very brutal, almost World War One-quality of warfare underway. The Russians, who are not able to defeat the Ukrainian army tactically, have resorted to a strategy of destroying their electricity grid, destroying their water supply. Winter in Ukraine is very cold. Not quite as cold as Moscow, but very cold. And they’re deliberately, the Russians are deliberately trying to make life so miserable for the Ukrainians that they will give in and end up cutting some kind of a terrible deal. 

The problem for the Russians as the Ukrainians don’t seem inclined to give in. They’re willing to endure the hardships in order to try to defeat Russia. And has been pointed out by several observers, the really key tests will come probably in April or May of next year, when we’re going to go through a long winter. During the winter even in World War Two, there was very little combat, because it’s just too hard. The weather is too bad, the snow is too great. The freezing temperatures make it difficult for equipment to operate. So you’re likely to see…small skirmishes all through the winter, but then sometime around late April or early May, the two armies will collide again.

That gives a month to reorganize, train, retrofit, do the things they need to do. And we’ll begin to see what’s going to happen in this war, I think probably next May or June. It’s very tough on the Ukrainian people. I wish the Americans and their allies were providing them more rapidly [the] equipment they need, and the kind of equipment they need. Because I think it’s greatly to our advantage to defeat this Russian effort to conquer a neighbor. And I think it would be very dangerous for the world if the Russians could get away with it and actually defeat the Ukrainians.

So I don’t I don’t say this just out of interest in Ukraine, but an interest in America. We want to have a world where people learn, you can’t attack your neighbor. And that means we’ve got to make sure that the victim is capable of defending itself and is capable of defeating the aggressor. So stay tuned, watch what’s happening. I realize that the people of Ukraine are going to go through real hardship this winter. Lack of food, lack of electricity, lack of water, lack of heat, but they’re very tough. They’ve been through a lot over the years. They…they survived the famine that Stalin imposed on him, which killed about 10 million people in the 1930s. They survived the Nazi assault in World War Two. They survived a rebellion against the Soviets in the late 1940s. So the history of Ukraine has been a history of suffering and endurance and insisting on independence.