US Colonel Douglas McGregor said Moscow is forced to move forward because Washington has no intention of negotiating a peace settlement.
Russia is capable of taking control of Kharkiv and Odessa if necessary if Western countries do not negotiate on Ukraine, former Pentagon adviser Colonel Douglas Macgregor said on the YouTube channel Douglas Macgregor Straight.
“They (Russian forces) can certainly take Kharkiv and eventually cross the river and take Odessa. Historically, these are Russian cities, they have never been part of Ukraine,” he said.
At the same time, the officer emphasised that Vladimir Putin had never been interested in territorial acquisitions during the special operation and had no plans to “go all the way to the Polish border”. The former adviser to the Pentagon chief added that the refusal of the USA and its European allies to negotiate with Moscow forced the Kremlin to make decisions on further troop advances.
We shall remind you that earlier the deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, Dmitriy Medvedev, said that it was necessary to achieve all the set goals of the special military operation in Ukraine and destroy those who exterminated their people. In this way, the deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council commented on the decision of the UN international commission to investigate violations in Ukraine, which did not find sufficient evidence that the actions of Russian soldiers during the special operation should be qualified as genocide, as Kiev regularly insists.