Russia

“And the president of Colombia told us he's caught those same Chilean protesters with Russian technology, trying to do these things in Colombia as well.”

“I think that, that Biden has not shown strength as the president that I served. We would have never been gone this far.”

“I said before the invasion actually began that Putin had already lost. He lost because he had done three things before invading that he shouldn't have wanted to do in the first place. That is, number one, unifying NATO. Number two, have more NATO troops move t…”

“Russia is not as good as we thought they were. We've seen failures in everything from their generalship to the lack of an NCO corps and to the performance of their soldiers. And of course, that extends into their equipment their shortages when it comes to supp…”

“I think that is a prevailing theory that despite whatever Putin was doing when it comes to modernizing his forces, there was a lot of corruption going on. A lot of people were telling him what he wanted to hear. And at the end of the day, you can see the perfo…”

“I do think the biggest challenge we face today is not Russia or China. It's our political dysfunction in Washington, D.C.”

“We've actually seen the Ukrainians more, use more of the drones primarily Turkish bought, purchased drones. So again, they're using it to great effect. That combined with the use of anti-armor weapons, the javelins and the N-laws, anti-aircraft weapons like th…”

“What I was trying to do as secretary of defense was actually push more forces East up to toward the Russian border in the frontline states as we call them.”

“Russia does have very capable engineers and technicians, but again, we just don't see that they've advanced the technology or expanded enough through production to really feel the force of that level of modernization.”

“Can Putin walk away with a loss? I don't think so. He's gonna have to find a face saving way out. I think folks are gonna try and help him do that. At this point, I think his tactics will continue to be the indiscriminate shelling of Ukrainian cities.”

“Because look, if we won't push it, put tough sanctions on Russia, which is, has one 10th the size of the economy of China, then we wouldn't do it to Beijing.”

“In Afghanistan, we wanted to get out. In Russia, we wanted to make sure their thousand nuclear warheads were contained, and we didn't want them to invade Europe, and a longer list for the Chinese Communist Party, but we were pretty clear about our expectations…”

“I think we'll see more and more of that. We'll see ever closer relationships. Frankly, the iron triangle, or if you want to include North Korea quadrilateral between Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea is likely to get even tighter.”

“That's why it's still going on, and why it's my expectation. It goes on for a while, but if you read just, if you read much history, certainly history of Europe, you, exhaustion takes place, and what seems impossible on Wednesday, a month from now, two months,…”

“I suspect that there will come a day when we'll all be surprised and they'll, they'll find a way to an accommodation that works for everyone there. And the only way to drive that is we ought to provide the Ukrainians with the things they're prepared to fight a…”

“Having now failed, having now demonstrably been unable to execute the, at least the military and diplomatic objectives of the invasion of Europe, I think Xi has even more leverage over Vladimir Putin today. Think think energy as their sole customer, near sole …”

“Their command and control systems were not very good. Of course, a lot of their generals had to come, come to the front lines and they were eliminated on the front lines because their command and control systems weren't good.”

“We've been watching the Russian modernization program over the last 10 or 15 years, you know, and so, I mean, they went from the, you know, T-seventy-two, T-eighty, T-ninety tank, they've modernized their aviation fleet and everything else. I mean, we saw this…”

“Every, every vote at the UN Council, Russia's backed India to the hilt for decades, consistently so, right?”

“China and Russia realize this. They didn't realize it before. And that is going to change where they invest their money. And we'll give them ability to catch up if we're not on top of this.”

“The consequences of stopping nuclear power 50 years later, you know, it's just been, it was just like a catastrophic mistake. You know, geopolitically, it's directly connected to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Europe is effectively funding Russia to invade Ukra…”

“If you surveyed every other person in the world who is living in America now, what's the one country they would want to live in? What system that they think is the best for their children? They would still choose this system. They wouldn't choose China, Russia…”

“The military intelligence structure, security is dominated by Russian influence and support.”

“Russia, I think can build 500 shahads per month. The group three shahad, 500 per month.”

“Venezuela is the sixth largest armed military arms buyer of Russia.”

“I had 20 years of responding to SVR. They never hacked and then released data. They suddenly did that in August, They always hacked for security reasons, and all of a sudden we're responding to them hacking universities. I'm like, oh, they increased scope. And…”

“And I do believe you know, Russia had the crown early, 19 nineties, early 2000, the best intrusions I saw. Was Russian operators on our networks. later in my career, especially around 2019, 20, 20 China, you know, really rapidly graduated to great capabilitie…”

“United States had had a mass emancipation in Russia had a slower mass emancipation between 18 63 and around 1900. Brazil had a mass emancipation of slaves in the 18 eighties. In every single one of those cases, the economy grew faster after slaves were freed t…”

“They funded the green parties, they funded the protests, and they turned off fracking in Europe because it's so good for the environment. They tricked everyone because obviously they don't want competition.”

“If the U.S. Does not provide enrichment To these countries, they will have to get it somewhere else as they build up their nuclear fleet, or they turn back on their nuclear fleet, and that'll be Russia, China.”

“If you look at the Industrial Revolution in Russia in the early 20th century, I think investment as a percentage of GDP got up to 20 or 25%, and then China was investing 40 or 50% in their industrial revolution of GDP, and now in AI we're investing, like, thre…”

“And in reality, no modern nation, even the folks that can create this capability, China, Russia, others will leverage it. Even they don't want to really, no one's ready for it.”