How much pain can everyone take - from CBS Face the nation, It scared me
Comments by CBS News national security correspondent David Martin and Michael Morell, former acting and deputy director of the CIA and a national security contributor here at CBS.
DAVID MARTIN: Their original battle plan of advancing on these multiple fronts, north, east and south, just didn't work. So maybe they're going to try one front at a time here. But, at the same time that they are supposedly prioritizing, they are also sending in reinforcements for the first time into Ukraine. And they are keeping up this bombardment of the cities. Look, we began this war by overestimating the Russians. We shouldn't underestimate them now.
MICHAEL MORELL: We are now in phase two, in my view. And phase two is digging in defensively, as David said, fortifying, so that you protect yourself from these Ukrainian attacks. They're actually laying -- the Russians are laying mines, which is a defensive maneuver. And they want to be in these fortifications, so that they can lob their mortars and their rockets and their missiles at Ukrainian cities, in an attempt to break the Ukrainian will, so that I think they can continue to advance. That's what they're trying to do now.
(snip)
MICHAEL MORELL: So, we should not underestimate the willingness of Russia to accept pain, right? They have shown over their history that they are willing to accept a lot of pain to gain a victory, right? The Second Chechen War, the combat phase lasted 10 months, and then the insurgency phase lasted eight years. In Syria, their attacks on cities in Syria took a long time. So they're willing to take the time here in a way that I don't think we understand in the West.
MICHAEL MORELL: So, everybody's facing pressure, right? So, Putin is facing the pressure of economic pain at home, long lines, empty shelves. It looks like 1980s again in Moscow. He's facing the pain of dead soldiers coming home. Russian mothers don't like that. So that's his pain. The Ukrainian pain is the death and destruction of their country. The Western pain is the sanctions. They can't do business with Europe. I talk to a lot of companies, both U.S. companies and foreign companies. And their question to me is, when are we going to be able to get back to doing business here, right? So there's that pressure. And then there's the pressure of the costs to consumers around the world in terms of wheat prices, in terms of energy prices, right? Everybody's facing pressure here.
(snip)
DAVID MARTIN: Well, he is not going to get the planes in the short run. They just don't believe that 20 Polish MiGs in an uncertain state of repair are going to change the tide of battle, so why run the risk of escalating if it's not going to make a difference? Right now, there are not dogfights going on over Ukraine. There are too many surface-to-air missiles for any plane to operate safely. The Russians aren't really coming into Ukrainian airspace. They're attacking with long- range air-launched cruise missiles from Russian territory and from Crimea. So, the U.S., for now, is focused on these anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, plus finding some high-altitude anti-aircraft missiles, which the Ukrainians know how to operate. We could give them ours, but they don't know how to operate those.
https://news.yahoo.com/full-transcript-face-nation-march-023500811.html?fr=yhssrp_catchall
and scroll down to David Martin and Mike Morell
= new reply since forum marked as read
