Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe and retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark told Newsmax on Thursday that the United States hasn't given Ukraine enough aid to make Russian President Vladimir Putin pause his attack on the neighboring country.
"The question is: What's it going to take to stop Mr. Putin from continuing to bomb children's hospitals and so forth?" Clark said during an appearance on Newsmax's "The Record With Greta Van Susteren." "And he's going to continue to do that until he thinks he's going to lose.
"So when we say that we're a friend in Ukraine, we'll be there as long as it takes and so forth, that's good. That's good, but we haven't given enough assistance. We haven't been strong enough to convince Mr. Putin that he won't win if he just keeps on keeping on, and that's the real issue."
In a rare daytime attack on Monday, Russia launched a missile barrage that killed three dozen people and struck a children's hospital in Kyiv.
When asked what it's going to take to make Putin rethink waging war, Clark stressed the need for the U.S. "to balance."
"I mean, we don't want to start World War III with Putin, understand that," he said. "But, on the other hand, I think you have to give military assistance sufficient to Ukraine to push Putin back and convince him he can't win.
"And we've penny-packeted that assistance. We've wiggled and worried and doodled and thought about it. And half the stuff that's been promised by allies doesn't get there, and some of the stuff we've sent hasn't been quite as operational as we thought it was.
"And we've just cut it too slow. You just can't succeed like that. You can't have Harvard academicians trying to secretly, definitively manage a war," Clark said.
NATO leaders gathered in Washington, D.C., this week for a summit commemorating the 75th anniversary of the military alliance. The most important developments to come out of the meeting, Clark said, were assurances to Ukraine.
"I think the big thing is NATO came together and Ukraine has been given a promise of much more in the way of weapons systems and an irreversible path to NATO membership," he said. "So the irreversibility of that path, I think, is the quantum step forward in this NATO summit."
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Nicole Wells ✉
Nicole Wells, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.
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