WAR UPDATE: Military Insider Gives Terrifying Prediction & Reveals How Unprepared America Truly Is

**Tucker Carlson** (0:04)
Mr. Jermy, thank you very much for doing this. So in the United States, I think most people, to the extent they're paying attention, are watching what's happening in Iran and have a sense that what's happening between Russia and NATO, Ukraine, the United States, the festering war in Eastern Europe is a stalemate, and nothing really is happening there.
I don't know if that's true. So assess what you think is happening between Russia and Ukraine and its proxies right now.

**Steve Jermy** (0:35)
Yeah, I think you're right. I don't think it is true, Tucker. I think that the general sense in the West is that you'll hear from some people that Russia is losing on the battlefield and that the Russian economy is about to fall apart. I mean, I've heard it time and time again, and there's no evidence to support either of those things.
The battlefield issue is poorly understood, and I think the reason is that people don't understand Russia's motivations and they don't understand what the strategy is.
In an article I wrote recently on the coming war with Russia, I said that Klasowicz, who was the great political philosopher of war, said that the most important decision that a military man and a politician can make is to understand the nature of the war. I don't think that the West has understood the nature of the war with Russia. Nor, for that matter, with Iran. But what they haven't understood with Russia is that this is, as far as Russia is concerned, is an existential war. They are fighting to make sure that Russia is preserved. When you get people like Kayakalas saying that Russia must be broken up, who can blame them? I think, have we understood that? I think that would be a start. Unfortunately, we're approaching the war, it seems to me, as a negotiation, a negotiation with arms. If we increase a bit of pressure on Russia, then they'll eventually come back to the negotiating table. What they've missed, though, is that Russia, I think, has a clear strategy.
I can't be sure about it. I'm not in the Russian general staff, but I think it's got about five key phases. I mean, we know that the run-up to the Special Military Operation, Tucker, it was clear that there were so many warnings going back as far as 1996 Yet, unfortunately, we've ignored them all, notwithstanding the warnings not only came from Russia, but from some of our very best strategic thinkers, from George Keenan back as far as 1996, and from John Mearsheimer in 2014 But when you get to the start of the war, then it seemed to me as the war kicked off. I have to say, I did not see the war coming. I was involved in the offshore energy sector. But as I got to understand it, then the first thing that became obvious to me that this was not a war or a special military operation to invade Ukraine.
The reason was simpler. There weren't enough troops. Ukraine is about the size of half of Europe, and you're not going to do that with 190,000 troops. I cannot for a moment think that the Russian general staff advised Putin that they had enough troops to invade Ukraine. The stress was always about the Donbas. I think the first phase of the stress, it was really the use of military force to support a diplomatic engagement. Indeed, that diplomatic engagement actually went quite well. The Russians had opened negotiations with the Ukrainians after day one.
As we arrived in March, they were ready to sign, as both sides were, an agreement which would have stopped the war. There was no NATO, neutrality for Ukraine, self-determination for the Donbass. But that was ready to sign, and it would have been signed, I'm almost certain, if it hadn't been for Boris Johnson, no doubt with Biden's support actually going across and persuading Zelensky to fight Russia and that he would have all the support he needed. So that's phase one. I think at phase two, when it becomes clear to Russia that they are going to have to fight and are likely to have to fight NATO because of what are they're hearing, what you then see is what I would call militarist withdrawal in contact. So essentially what the Russians were doing, we're recognizing that actually the Kiev attack and the actions in the Donbass were although diplomatic, they would now need to withdraw to a line. And what they did was they withdrew back to what's known as the Serevekin line, which was a defensive line, instructed by the general who was the expert in Russia in defensive lines. And that from about September onwards, they then moved into phase three after the withdrawal, which is what I call attritional defense. And what that essentially means was meeting their two objectives. Their objectives were denazification and demilitarization, both of which were operational objectives. And the strategic objective, though, Tucker, was clear. It was to preserve Russia's security. And what defensive attrition means is wearing down the men and materiel of the Ukrainian army. And goodness me, we helped them a lot in that because we persuaded them to expand not one army, but two armies against that defensive line for not a single penetration. So you get to late 2023 And at that stage, I think what Russia does is they've started to, as the war got going, they started to mobilize and increase the forces. They need the industrial capacity. And so by late 2023, they're ready to move into phase three. Phase three was what I called offensive attrition. Not necessarily securing territory, but really going on and starting to continue, continue wearing down the men and material of the Ukrainian army. Don't forget, the Ukrainian army had no air superiority. None of the things that you want fighting an offensive or indeed a defensive war.