The equipment Washington sends to Kiev will never change the tide of battle, Eric Prince has said
Continued American weapons shipments to Ukraine are essentially senseless since they are incapable of changing the course of the conflict, Eric Prince, the founder of the notorious American private military contractor Blackwater, told journalist Tucker Carlson in an interview published on Tuesday.
The military aid to Ukraine is nothing but a “massive grift paid by the Pentagon,” Prince stated, adding that the latest major aid package worth $61 billion approved by the Congress and signed by President Joe Biden in April would end up lining the coffers of the US defense industry giants. Prince, himself a former Navy SEAL officer, resigned and divested from his company after the 2007 Iraqi massacre scandal.
“Most of that money goes to five major defense contractors to replace at five times the cost the weapons that we have already sent the Ukrainians,” the Blackwater founder said, adding that “it does not change the outcome of the battle.”
“The Biden administration believed that all this American weaponry would have saved the day. It has not,” Prince said.
The Russian military has published photos and videos of damaged and destroyed Western-made military equipment in Ukraine, including the US-supplied Abrams tanks. One of them ended up at a trophy exhibition in Moscow, alongside a German-made Leopard main battle tank and dozens of other pieces.
Kiev’s forces are already spread “very thin” and are about to face an “ugly summer,” according to Prince. “All the defenses that were supposed to be built by Ukrainians are much smaller or non-existent,” he said, mostly due to the “corruption issues.”
Moscow’s forces are “going to have a very good summer” and would seek to “absolutely humiliate the West and make sure they never have a problem with Ukraine again,” the Blackwater founder believes.
The interview came amid the continued Russian offensives in the Donbass and Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkov Region, where Moscow’s forces have been steadily gaining ground. Last month, Russia’s former defense minister, Sergey Shoigu, said that Moscow’s forces had seized the initiative and “dispelled the myth of the superiority of Western weapons.”
Prince also admitted that he had never believed that the Ukrainian forces could push the Russian troops out of the Donbass and Crimea. “The war should never have [been] started,” he said.
The only thing Washington and its allies are going to achieve in Ukraine is “facilitating the demise of the Ukrainian men” and “destroying” this nation “for future generations,” the Blackwater founder believes.
Moscow has repeatedly stated that continued Western arms shipments to Ukraine would only prolong the conflict, without changing its outcome. It also repeatedly accused the West of forcing Kiev to “fight to the last Ukrainian.” In early May, Shoigu said that Kiev lost more than 111,000 troops this year alone.
