Holt to Newsmax: Ukraine Too Much of a 'Disaster' to Join NATO

Ukraine is too much of a "disaster" right now to join NATO, retired Brig. Gen. Blaine Holt, told Newsmax on Tuesday.

"This is a disaster," Holt tells "Carl Higbie FRONTLINE" regarding NATO boss Jens Stoltenberg's announcement that Ukraine will become a member of the pact originally designed to fend off the Soviets. "You got a war between [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy and [Valeriy] Zaluzhnyy," the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

In an interview with The Economist published at the beginning of November, Zaluzhnyy described the war with Russia as a stalemate, a comment that did not sit well with Zelenskyy, who last week called for a new comprehensive mobilization.

"You've got [Ukranian] brigades in Avdiivka," a Ukrainian city at the forefront of the battle, Holt continues, "that want to fight each other and go after supplies. There's not enough bullets in the world to get this battlefield moved under the strategy that they never wrote — and they never planned."

Holt contined to say, "the Ukrainians are getting what they paid for, which is nothing ... and Ukraine is in a horrible mess — a million people dead, probably. And we're going to find out that Ukraine is probably going to have to sue for terms — where they're going to have a very weak hand. And this is the sober hangover that NATO is going to have to deal with."

On Thanksgiving, Davyd Arakhamia, a Ukrainian parliament member, appeared on Ukrainian TV noting that during peace negotiations in early 2022, the Kremlin proposed ending the war if Ukraine abandoned its aspirations to join NATO. Kyiv rejected this offer.

"They actually hoped," Arakhamia says, "until nearly the last moment that they could press us into signing this agreement, adopting neutrality. That was their biggest priority. They were willing to end the war if we took on neutrality, like Finland once did, and gave assurances that we wouldn't join NATO. That was essentially the main point. Everything else was cosmetic and political embellishments about 'denazification,' the Russian-speaking population, blah blah blah."

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