Russian leader's Ukraine paranoia

NBC:

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev raised the specter of a World War III on Tuesday as the rhetoric between the White House and the Kremlin over the war in Ukraine ramped up.

Medvedev, now a top security official, was responding to President Donald Trump's post on Truth Social berating his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, as Moscow continued to rain strikes down on its neighbor.

“What Vladimir Putin doesn’t realize is that if it weren’t for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia, and I mean REALLY BAD,” wrote Trump, who appears to be losing patience over the lack of a ceasefire deal, adding, “He’s playing with fire!”

Around three hours later, Medvedev took to X, writing: “I only know of one REALLY BAD thing — WWIII. I hope Trump understands this!”

That in turn drew an almost immediate rebuke from Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, who called Medvedev’s remarks “reckless” on X. Cautioning that Russia was stoking fears of another world war, Kellogg wrote that it was “unfitting of a world power.”

Trump, he added, has been working toward brokering a truce in the war, which entered its fourth year in February and has killed tens of thousands of people on both sides.
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The Russian war against Ukraine looks like a massive mistake.  The Russian leadership thought they could take Ukraine in a matter of days, and now they are over two years into the war, with the loss of thousands of troops in exchange for a few kilometers of dirt inside the Ukrainian border.  The fact of the matter is that the war has exposed the military weakness of Russia, and that is probably the opposite of what Putin was trying to do.