“There’s nothing that provokes Vladimir Putin more than weakness,” he told the BBC on September 10, 2014, over six months after Russia had illegally annexed Crimea from Ukraine.
Full Newsweek article here :
Putin’s Game Plan Predicted by John McCain in Resurfaced 2014 Clip
Published Jan 03, 2023
https://www.newsweek.com/putin-mccain-twitter-2014-clip-russia-ukraine-1770823
Although I can’t locate the article, a military historian; it might have been Max Hastings, wrote in 2014 that a president McCain or President Romney in 2014 would have redeployed combat assets from Germany to Kherson and Mykolaiv and asked the UK also to contribute.
That would have saved an unimaginable amount of unnecessary death and misery.
Never in human history has such a diabolical murder gang been allowed to get away with so much evil for so long.
John was one of a tiny number of senior politicians in the world to have fully sussed out the genocidal plans of putler at that time.
Whatever level of losses Ukraine is able to inflict on these fiends, it won’t alter putler’s calculus. He’s all in. Only such a catastrophic level of loss that makes the occupation militarily unsustainable can make him end his genocide. And even that needs to be combined with a comprehensive economic meltdown.
The “peace talks”; if they come, will be a two on one affair, with putler and a pro-ruZZia US regime ganging up on Ukraine.
If only…
John wins in 2014. He is very impressed by his opponent Barrack Obama He decides to mentor the political neophyte he brings him on his cabinet as Secretary of State (rather unlikely but McCain was about half way Democrat and genuinely like Obama). Obama;s style and natural charisma make him rather successful and he gains real experience instead of having only two years in the Senate.
With Mc Cain in charge Putin does ot riska confrontation with the west and insteads opts to try his hybrid war in Kazakhstan were he also has a large ethnic Russian population an only weak ties to the west.
Unfortunately Ukraine is never forced to deal with it’s kleptocracy and limps along as Europe’s “Sickly Man” much like the old Ottoman Empire of pre-WWI.
A great man was lost to the free world When John McCain died.