Much of the world thinks the United States may have been behind last week's suspected "false flag" attack against the Kremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin because of the "very poor leadership" under President Joe Biden's administration, former National Security Council chief of staff Fred Fleitz told Newsmax on Sunday.
"I did an interview on a Middle East network last week, and they did a poll during the interview," Fleitz, the vice chairman of the America First Policy Institute Center for American Security, commented to Newsmax's "Wake Up America." "Over 80% of the viewers thought the U.S. was behind it."
This is not only because of the administration's leadership but because Biden's "messaging has been terrible," said Fleitz. "He's not been leading on the world stage, and that makes it really dangerous."
Fleitz said he does think the incident "looks like a false flag attack," and if it wasn't, it was a "reckless and clumsy" attempt.
"This was definitely not an assassination attempt unless it was conducted by fools," said Fleitz. "The Ukrainian government, they're not made up of fools."
He added that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy "would not have put together something so sloppy."
Former Defense Intelligence Agency intelligence officer Rebekah Koffler, who appeared on the program with Fleitz, meanwhile, disagreed with assessments that Putin is "deranged," but said he is "evil" and "very calculated."
"He's a cold-blooded typical KGB officer," said Koffler, adding that she takes the notion that Putin could order a nuclear weapons strike on Ukraine very seriously.
"As a senior intelligence officer for Russian doctrine and strategy back in the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is the military counterpart to CIA, we conducted multiple war games of a Russia-U.S. war escalating out of original wars," she said. "Every single war game ended up in a nuclear war, so I take it very seriously."
And the "so-called" drone attack on the Kremlin was a "classic Russian false flag operation" aimed at allowing Putin the justification to "ratchet up this war into the next rung on the escalation ladder, which may include a nuclear exchange," said Koffler.
Meanwhile, she contended that China, with its push for diplomacy, does not want the war to end as it is watching Russia and the United States "depleting their respective combat arsenals" in Ukraine.
But Fleitz disagreed, commenting that China "doesn't want to see its ally, Russia, being worn down," as that is "bad for the Chinese economy."
"It wants the war to end so the U.S. does not win," he said. "I worry that it's the Chinese calculus to end this conflict. That would give it huge economic advantages. But I do think that President Xi [Jinping] disapproves of this war. He'd like to see it over."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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