Free Republic

MacGregor: Up until this time at night we have had freezing but during the day it has gone back up to 40 even 50 degrees. It has to drop below freezing and stay that way for at least two weeks. So if it is now below freezing and stays that way you can do the math. Your looking for something happening no earlier than the 10th; probably no later than the 19th of December. And you're talking about concentrations of Russian troops all the way around the country. We've accounted now formally, these are people who sit in front of...

Col MacGregor: The military establishment that Putin and his government built in the last 15 to 20 years was designed preeminently to simply defend Russia. It was not designed for any offensive warfare against any neighbors. And I think that we failed to see that the reduction in the size of the force and the change in its orientation meant something very different from what it meant in Soviet times or even in the Tsars period. Mr. Putin went in to Eastern Ukraine with a set of assumptions that were not valid, but at the time he thought they were....

Dimitri Simes On our pilot episode of «Against The Trend» we will focus on the conflict in Ukraine and the geopolitical implications that it poses. Our guest today is Douglas Macgregor, Colonel of U.S. Army (Ret.), Ph.D.