Retired U.S. Army Colonel Douglas Mcgregor, who gained renown for his exceptional battlefield prowess in Iraq and was held in high esteem by the Trump White House, told Fox Business over the weekend that — contrary to the prevailing media narrative — he does not consider Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a hero, but a “puppet” who is putting “his own population at unnecessary risk.”
“The Russians are causing exceedingly little damage, much less damage than we inflicted when we went into Iraq, in 1991 or again in 2003,” Mcgregor observed of the situation in Eastern Europe. “Now I think they’re just surrounding the Ukrainian forces and they’re annihilating them. And this is inevitable. Mr. Zelensky is postponing the inevitable in the hopes that we are going to rescue him, and we are not coming. President Biden has made that very clear.”
Mcgregor was the “squadron operations officer who essentially directed the Battle of 73 Easting” during the Gulf War. He famously led a contingent through a sandstorm to the 73 Easting, where his forces destroyed almost 70 Iraqi armored vehicles with no U.S. casualties in a 23-minute span of the battle without requesting artillery support.
The colonel later made a name for himself by vastly outperforming his peers at a 1993 exercise at the Army’s National Training Center (NTC) at Fort Irwin and for advancing innovative Army reforms in his book Breaking the Phalanx.
When the Fox host noted that Mcgregor appeared to not “approve of Zelensky’s stand,” the colonel replied:
“I think Zelensky is a puppet. He’s putting huge numbers of his own population at unnecessary risk, and quite frankly, most of what comes out of Ukraine is debunked as lies within 24-48 hours. The notion of taking and retaking airfields, all of this is nonsense. It hasn’t happened.”
“You don’t think he’s a hero?” the Fox host further asked.
“No. No, I do not,” Mcgregor replied. “I don’t see anything heroic about the man. And I think the most heroic thing he can do right now is come to terms with reality and neutralize Ukraine. This is not a bad thing. A neutral Ukraine would be good for us as well as good for Russia. It would create the buffer that both sides want. But I think he’s being told to hang on and try to drag this out, which is tragic for the people that have to live through this.”
He also predicted how the conflict will play out in forthcoming days:
The end of this phase is still a few days away. The first five days, I think the Russian forces, frankly, were too gentle. They’ve now corrected that. So I would say that in another ten days this should be completely over. But the question is, what is it that Zelensky is going to do? The Russians have made it very clear that what they want is a neutral Ukraine. This could have ended days ago if he accepted that and then they could have adjusted the borders. The eastern part of Ukraine is firmly in Russian hands, but again, the Russians are not just seizing territory, they’re destroying Ukrainian forces, that’s their focus.
In July 2020, President Donald Trump nominated Mcgregor ambassador to Germany, but the colonel’s record of controversial remarks — including calling for martial law at the U.S. southern border to stop illegal immigration and the assertion that “Muslim invaders” go to Europe “with the goal of eventually turning Europe into an Islamic state” — caused the Senate to return the nomination.
He was subsequently hired as a senior advisor to the acting secretary of defense and was at one point on Trump’s shortlist for the role of national security advisor following the removal of John Bolton from the White House in 2019.
Mcgregor’s remarks have drawn criticism from other Fox personalities, such as correspondent Jennifer Griffin, who accused the colonel of being an “apologist” for Putin and called his stance “appeasement.”
Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wy.) also rebuked Mcgregor:
Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, however, has defended Macgregor from the criticism.
“Unlike many of the so-called reporters you see on television, he is not acting secretly as a flack for Lloyd Austin at the Pentagon. No, Doug Macgregor is an honest man,” Carlson said.
