Retired U.S. Army Colonel Douglas Mcgregor, who gained renown for his exceptional battlefield prowess in Iraq and was held in high esteem by the Trump White House, told Fox Business over the weekend that — contrary to the prevailing media narrative — he does not consider Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a hero, but a “puppet” who is putting “his own population at unnecessary risk.”

“The Russians are causing exceedingly little damage, much less damage than we inflicted when we went into Iraq, in 1991 or again in 2003,” Mcgregor observed of the situation in Eastern Europe. “Now I think they’re just surrounding the Ukrainian forces and they’re annihilating them. And this is inevitable. Mr. Zelensky is postponing the inevitable in the hopes that we are going to rescue him, and we are not coming. President Biden has made that very clear.”

Mcgregor was the “squadron operations officer who essentially directed the Battle of 73 Easting” during the Gulf War. He famously led a contingent through a sandstorm to the 73 Easting, where his forces destroyed almost 70 Iraqi armored vehicles with no U.S. casualties in a 23-minute span of the battle without requesting artillery support.