If Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to hold out past President Donald Trump’s shortened deadline for a ceasefire with Ukraine, Trump will most likely repeat his first-term playbook and “break the Russian economy,” with sanctions on oil exports, former Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert Wilkie said on Newsmax Saturday.
“I think we’ll see an enhanced replay of what President Trump did in the first administration, which was really to break the Russian economy, break the Russian banking system, but this time, the impact will be on the one thing that Russia exports,” said Wilkie on Newsmax’s “Saturday Agenda.”
“He’s sending a message to China and to India that Putin is on the verge of having extreme sanctions put on any country that buys Russian oil and gas,” he added.
And Putin, said Wilkie, “cannot survive his war.”
“The economy cannot survive if Russia’s oil goes below $40 a barrel,” he added. “It’s sitting at about $43, and if Trump restricts countries from buying that stuff, Putin’s economy is going to spiral out of control and he can’t continue his war.”
Wilkie predicted that Putin will continue his actions up to the last minute of “trying to kill as many civilians as possible.”
“This is a traditional Russian barbarism,” he said. “He’s not making any headway on the battlefield, so he’s trying to terrorize the civilian population into submission again. Donald Trump holds all the arrows. Putin cannot continue if Donald Trump pulls these economic levers.”
But Putin won’t go to extremes, said Wilkie, as he’s “not a homicidal maniac like Hitler, or even to some extent, Stalin or Mao.”
“He wants to survive,” he said. “He wants to be rich. The pillars of his regime are rich people that he allowed to become billionaires, and I don’t think he wants to risk that. I think he will try to find some way to squirm out of this.”
Putin has also had 1 million casualties in less than three years with his war against Ukraine, including 500,000 or more dead on the battlefield, said Wilkie.
“We had 56,000 dead in 10 years of Vietnam,” he said. “We had 600,000 wounded. HE’s gone far beyond that and is not making any progress.”
It’s also “nonsensical” to think that Putin could turn to tackle Finland or Poland, “much less the United States,” as he can’t defeat Ukraine, said Wilkie.
Putin’s endgame, he continued, is to recreate the former Russian Empire.
“When Ukraine became an independent state, he considered that one of the great calamities in Russian history,” said Wilkie. “He wants to turn the Baltics into pliant clients of Russia and then threaten the former Soviet clients in Eastern Europe.”
Putin has also awakened “sleeping military giants” in Sweden and Finland, he said.
“Finland has more artillery tubes than any country on the planet, and they’re all pointed in one direction, and that’s Russia,” said Wilkie. “The last time the Russians came across the Finnish border at the beginning of World War II, they lost 380,000 troops in three months. So that’s not one that he wants to bite off on.”
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