'He totally blew it': Retired general says Putin's hubris is leading to 'the total collapse of the Russian military'
On CNN Wednesday, retired Maj. Gen. James "Spider" Marks detailed how Vladimir Putin's "hubris" is leading the Russian military to ruin in Ukraine.
"You, as officials, say they've seen indications that some soldiers are suffering from frostbite due to lack of cold weather gear, fuel, food, other logistics problems," said anchor Pamela Brown. "Tell us more about that. Why do you think that is? Clearly, given what we knew leading up to this invasion, this had been in the works for a while by Vladimir Putin and those around him. How can this be?"
"Yeah, two things," said Marks. "First of all, hubris. I think Putin thought this would be a cakewalk. 48 hours. I don't need a senior command and control commander because I'm going to go take Kyiv. It will take me a couple days. Kharkiv, you'll fall immediately. And down south, we'll get Mariupol and Kherson and eventually we'll waltz our way over to Odesa. That's hubris. A misunderstanding, a strategic miscalculation that is huge. And Putin is in the intel business and he totally blew it. That's phenomenal."
"The second thing is that as a result of that, these soldiers came ill-prepared for any of that," said Marks. "They thought they would be living off — they would get into Kyiv and immediately be welcomed and they would have an opportunity to be replenished in short amount of time. That has been totally exposed. And these Russian soldiers, they've been cold, they've been hungry, wet, shot at, and I have to tell you. That is an incredible lack of leadership when you can't unscrew and loosen those problems and get support to your front line troops to get them to do the mission and to understand why you're doing it. It is a total collapse of the Russian military."
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