Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that if Russia is triumphant over Ukraine, a defeated President Volodymyr Zelenskyy "will almost certainly be executed."
Speaking last week at an event at the Hudson Institute, Pompeo was asked by Newsmax if a Russian victory in the two-years old Ukraine war would mean the death of Zelenskyy.
"I've never been asked that before," he replied, "But it's almost certainly true. [Vladimir] Putin would probably hall him off to the Gulag [the Soviet-era prisons in Russia] and then we'd hear he died a short time later"— an obvious reference to the announcement in February that Alexei Navalny died in a Russian prison in the Arctic after three years behind bars.
The former CIA director called Putin "a genocidal warmonger who can't do logic."
At the same forum, Pompeo was asked if he would consider another stint in an administration head by Donald Trump.
"Certainly," he said, revealing that he had met with the former president at his Mar-a-Lago home recently to discuss "a few important things." Sources close to Pompeo say the West Point graduate and U.S. Army veteran would very much like to be secretary of defense in a second Trump administration.
Pompeo later repeated his interest on joining Trump's administration to Fox News on Sunday. This prompted a hostile retort on X from former national security adviser and Pompeo nemesis Gen. Michael Flynn.
"So you can undermine him again?" Flynn wrote, "You did zip as Director of the CIA to expose the BS russiagate and you had every chance and ability to do it and you did even less fixing anything at the state department. And have you stated even once anything about the rigged election of 2020? We're waiting. We need to keep the RINOs out of the next Trump administration."
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