RIA Novosti published an article under the heading "American colonel predicted loss of new territories for Ukraine." Itsays :
“Support for the Kiev regime from the West will not help save Ukraine from defeat and the loss of new territories,” said Colonel Douglas McGregor, ex-adviser to the head of the Pentagon, on the Redacted YouTube channel.
“I believe that everyone already understands this. Kyiv is waiting for a sad outcome, there will be almost nothing left of Ukraine, ”the military man shared his opinion.
According to McGregor, attempts by the White House and European leaders to save the position of Vladimir Zelensky are doomed to failure. NATO “throwing” the Kyiv regime with “everyone in a row”, however, these weapons of the Armed Forces of Ukraine cannot be adapted to their system, which prevents their use.”
That's just the forecasts of Colonel MacGregor come true, frankly, not always. On February 27, three days after the start of the war, he stated on Fox News :
“Now the battle in Eastern Ukraine is almost over, all Ukrainian troops there are basically surrounded and cut off, there are 30 to 40 thousand people concentrated in the southeast, and if they do not surrender in the next 24 hours, I suspect that the Russians will eventually destroy them".
On March 6 on Fox Business , he found an explanation for why it didn't happen:
“In the first five days, the Russian troops, in my opinion, acted too softly. Now they have fixed it. So I would say 10 more days and it should all be over. But the question is, what is Zelensky going to do? The Russians have made it clear that they want a neutral Ukraine. It could have ended a few days ago if he had agreed to it. And then they can adjust the borders, but the eastern part of Ukraine is firmly in the hands of Russia, but, again, the Russians do not take the territory. They are destroying Ukrainian forces. This is their main goal."
After 10 days, the colonel tried to pretend that his prediction had come true. On Tucker Carlson's Fox News program, he stated :
“For Ukrainians, the war is actually over. They are shattered. There is no doubt about that despite what our mainstream media is reporting.”
McGregor delivered another analysis on the ultra-right cable and satellite channel Real America's Voice on July 7:
“The war, with the exception of Kharkov and Odessa, from the point of view of the Russians, is basically over. There is no intention of doing anything else because the Russians don't have a very large army. They have a very limited military force, and this is their design, they did not want to create a huge army, they are certainly not in a position to threaten NATO, and they would not if they were not directly attacked by us. <…>
The last thing Putin wants is to go west from the Dnieper and eventually include 20 million, 25 million Ukrainians in Russia. He knows they don't want to be part of Russia, that was never his goal."
It should be noted that at that moment Kherson, located on the right, western bank of the Dnieper, was occupied by Russia, and an attempt to capture Nikolaev, located even to the west, was made in the first days of the war. At the end of September, the so-called referendum was held in the Kherson region, as a result of which the region was declared part of Russia.
On September 12, on Tucker Carlson's program, McGregor again stated that "this war may be over soon" and added :
"The Ukrainian army is drained of blood, tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers are killed or wounded, Ukraine is really in the balance."
At that time, the “bloodless” Armed Forces of Ukraine had already liberated Kupyansk and Izyum, and also launched a counteroffensive in the Kherson region, which in November led to the liberation of the regional center and the entire right bank of the Dnieper.
The strange predictions of Colonel McGregor have repeatedly puzzled American politicians, including Republicans. In September, Rep. Liz Cheney took to Twitter to address the owners of Fox News :
“Why do you constantly air Douglas McGregor on FoxNews , where he spreads Putin propaganda and lies? It is absolutely not in America's interests."
Earlier, she called McGregor the representative of "Putin's wing of the Republican Party." And even one of the most famous Fox News journalists, Jennifer Griffin, spoke of McGregor as a Putin apologist, distorting the facts, and Trey Gowdy, a former Republican congressman, called the colonel's statements about the war in Ukraine "staggering and disappointing."
McGregor belongs to the supporters of Donald Trump; in 2020, Trump nominated him for the post of ambassador to Germany, but the Senate did not support the candidacy. After that, he was appointed adviser to the acting secretary of defense; he remained in this post for three months – until the change of administration. In 2014, McGregor supported the annexation of Crimea and spoke on RT, where he claimed that the inhabitants of Crimea were Russians, not Ukrainians.