A Fox News reporter chastised retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor on-air after he claimed Ukraine is about to be defeated by invading Russian forces and needs to negotiate.
Jennifer Griffin, a national security correspondent for Fox News, added to a growing list of examples in recent days in which she has pushed back on some of her colleagues and guests on the cable news network.
“I feel like I need to correct some of the things that Col. Doug Macgregor just said, and I’m not sure that 10 minutes is enough time to do so because there were so many distortions,” Griffin said on Sunday.
Macgregor sounded “like an apologist for” Russian President Vladimir Putin, she said, stressing that not even people in the Pentagon seem to know how far Putin is willing to take his aggression. Macgregor also noted how Russia, under Putin, has already invaded Georgia in 2008 and taken over Crimea in 2014.
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“The kind of appeasement talk that Col. Doug Macgregor, who should know better because when he was in government, he was the one who was advising President Trump to pull all U.S. troops out of Germany, that kind of projection of withdrawal and weakness is what made Putin think that he could actually move into a sovereign country like Ukraine,” Griffin said.
Macgregor, a former senior adviser to the secretary of defense and tank commander during the Gulf War, appeared on Fox News just minutes earlier.
He told host Trey Gowdy that Putin has long warned he would not tolerate U.S. forces or missiles on Russia’s borders, “and we ignored him, and he finally acted.”
The battle in eastern Ukraine is “almost over” with Ukrainian troops there largely “surrounded and cut off,” Macgregor said, adding that if they don’t surrender in the next 24 hours, “I suspect that the Russians will ultimately annihilate them.”
Macgregor said he believes Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is ready to surrender and is in talks with the Russians because “the game is over” and will “have to negotiate the best deal he can get.”
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Macgregor said he believes Putin would abide by a deal that would split Ukraine, leaving the western territory as a neutral state. He surmised the Russian leader has no interest in attacking NATO members, which would lead to conflict with the United States and other allies, and claimed, “We are impugning to him things that he does not want to do in our usual effort to demonize him and his country.”
In addition, he said Ukraine has a corruption problem, opined that the U.S. should stay out of the conflict, and claimed the U.S. is “urging Ukrainians to die pointlessly in a fight they can’t win” before warning of a worsening humanitarian disaster.
After Griffin criticized Macgregor, Gowdy, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina, said he was surprised by Macgregor’s comments. “I found his take on it stunning and disappointing,” Gowdy added.
