Russian victory over Ukraine will spell the end of the US-led NATO alliance — so says a former UN weapons inspector.
Scott Ritter, a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer who was a leading critic of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, was interviewed for YouTube channel The Left Lens about the Russian special military operation to "demilitarise and de-Nazify" the Ukraine.
He said NATO's decision to stake its credibility on backing Kiev in a proxy war against Moscow — in the wake of its "humiliation" in Afghanistan — would prove unwise and fateful.
"NATO and the United States are facing the kind of moral and physical defeat at the hands of Russia that will probably mean the end of NATO," he told presenter Danny Haiphong in the video posted on Monday. "I don't think NATO survives this."
"That doesn't mean that they're going to dissolve tomorrow," the commentator clarified.
But Ritter stressed: "I think people have forgotten that just in August of last year, NATO suffered a huge humiliation: the withdrawal from Afghanistan."
"NATO was struggling after that: 'who are we? what are we doing?'," he said. "And now they've stood up to Russia, to be brave against her, and they're going to lose against Russia without even fighting."
Russia warned in the months before the conflict that it would not tolerate NATO plans to continue its post-Cold War expansion eastward to include Ukraine, which would have allowed the US to station missiles just 300 miles from Moscow. Now Sweden and Finland, which shares a long border with Russia, have also applied for membership — without putting the issue to a public referendum.
Ritter reiterated a point he made earlier in the interview that Russian forces were destroying the arms sent by NATO members to prolong the war in Ukraine — and that Kiev was now asking for more donations of equipment than most western European armies even possess.
"By the time Russia finishes this, Russia will have an army that's the most seasoned, combat experienced military in the world, facing off against NATO forces who are poorly-trained, poorly-led and, guess what, now poorly-equipped because they gave all their weapons away," he said.
In recent years Russian forces have gained valuable experience in major conflicts in Georgia and Syria, where their latest weapon systems were proven in combat.
Ironically, US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin — a retired general who lobbied for military-industrial complex giant Raytheon before his appointment — revealed in April that Washington's goal in arming Ukraine was to "see Russia weakened".
Also on Monday, retired US Army Colonel Douglas MacGregor told Fox News' Tucker Carlson that US President Joe Biden's administration was sending token numbers of weapons to Ukraine to avoid acknowledging that it had lost its proxy war.
"It's hard, when you look at something this ridiculous, not to conclude that this is a face-saving measure on the part of the administration that really doesn't want to admit that this war was lost a long time ago," MacGregor said.