Former U.S. Ambassador To Russia Admits: I Didn’t Expect Putin To Be So Evil In Ukraine
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Michael McFaul, the Obama-era U.S. ambassador to Russia, on Tuesday confessed his shock at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “evil” in Ukraine.
“I need to admit, I did not expect him to be as evil in the way he is fighting this war as he has been,” McFaul told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace.
“Let’s also remember. They could have cleared up Bucha. They could have hid that. They didn’t do that,” he said, referencing the massacre by Russian troops in the commuter town outside Ukraine’s capital Kyiv. “They left those bodies on purpose as a way to terrorize the Ukrainian people.”
McFaul, now a professor of political science at Stanford University who said he penned his first piece calling Putin an autocrat in 2000, also issued a blunt reminder about how Putin’s planned takeover of Ukraine has gone awry. The Russian army is now refortifying for a full-scale offensive in the east.
“Remember, Putin has lost the war for Ukraine,” McFaul said, noting the failure of the Russian leader’s “original intention to swallow up all of Ukraine because Ukrainians are just Russians with accents.”
Putin has “failed to take Kyiv” and “failed at his major objectives” in the war, McFaul added.
Watch the full interview here:
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
