Ex-Trump official accused of sounding like ‘Putin apologist’ in viral clip

A clip of a former Trump military advisor has gone viral after he said Russia should be allowed to take what they want from Ukraine.

Ret. Col. Douglas MacGregor also claimed that Ukrainians are dying “pointlessly” in a “fight they can’t win”.

But he was quickly fact-checked by a Fox News reporter.

During yesterday’s broadcast of Sunday Night in America, the veteran claimed that Ukraine is not the “shining example” of “liberal democracy… everyone says it is”.

Referring to the ongoing conflict, he said he thinks the US “should stay out of it” before adding: “We should stop shipping weapons and encouraging Ukrainians to die in what is a hopeless endeavour”.

Trey Gowdy then asked if Russia should be allowed to “take the portion of Ukraine they want to take”.

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MacGregor answered: “Yes, absolutely. I see no reason why we should fight with the Russians over something they have been talking about for years, and we simply chose to ignore it, and more importantly, the population there is indistinguishable from their own.

“The thing that’s so disturbing is that on the one hand, we will not send our forces to fight, but we are urging Ukrainians to die pointlessly in a fight they can’t win.

He added: “We’re going to create a far worse humanitarian disaster than anything you’ve seen thus far if it doesn’t stop.”

Following the segment, the network’s national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin said she felt the need to correct some of the remarks from MacGregor.

She said she wasn’t sure that ten minutes was enough time to fact-check him “because there were so many distortions in what he just said.” She added that he sounded like an “apologist” for Putin.

She continued: “I think the world has seen what Putin is capable of and to blame NATO membership for what we’ve seen Putin unleash, we have seen his own words that he is talking in czarist terms, from a 19th-century view of imperial Russia, so what he just said was so distorted that I do feel our audience needs to know the truth.”

Griffin said she started her Fox career in 1999 in Moscow, and said she has been reporting on him since.

She added: “The kind of appeasement talk that Col. MacGregor, who should know better when he was in government, he was the one who was advising President Trump to pull all US troops out of Germany. That kind of projection of withdrawal and weakness is what made Putin think that he could move into a sovereign country like Ukraine.”

This isn’t the first time in recent weeks that Griffin has challenged her colleagues and guests.

The Washington Post has gone as far as saying when it comes to Fox’s punditry around Ukraine, “Griffin seems to have almost completely lost patience with all of it.”

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