World Leaders Watch Closely as Ukraine War Enters Second Year

With the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the rearview mirror, Chinese Communist leaders are closely monitoring Russia’s struggles in the conflict, Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Jerry Boykin said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin badly underestimated the Ukrainian people’s resolve in his invasion of the former Soviet republic last year, Boykin believes, calling Russia’s targeting of Ukraine an “abysmal failure.”

Putin’s stumbles and the unified international response to the invasion led by the United States have not gone unnoticed by the leaders of the People’s Republic of China, the founding member of Delta Force said on Friday’s edition of Family Research Council’s “Washington Watch.” He noted Premier Chinese Xi Jinping has proposed a plan to end the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky indicated Saturday he was willing to meet with his Chinese counterpart.

Boykin said while Xi’s peace overture was somewhat “unusual and a little surprising,” Russia’s repeated setbacks in the war have been instructive to China in its own plans for territorial expansion. He told guest host Jody Hice that Xi is likely “assessing now what they have to do to be able to take Taiwan and not wind up in the same situation that Putin is in right now.”

Vldimir Putin stumbled badly in attacking Ukraine, Boykin explained. “This was a war of miscalculations on behalf of Vladimir Putin. He miscalculated the response of NATO,” Boykin explained, noting the North American Treaty Organization (NATO) has never been more unified.

Boykin, who spent 36 years in the U.S. Army, including four years as the deputy undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, now serves as executive vice president of the Family Research Council.

Putin also miscalculated the response of the European Union, he said. “And most importantly,” Boykin continued, “he missed it altogether in terms of the capabilities and willingness of his own military.” While Putin expected the speedy establishment of a “Russian-friendly regime” in Ukraine, many of his own troops did not share his commitment to conquer Ukraine.

Boykin said upwards of 200,000 Putin’s soldiers have been wounded or killed in a fight the Russian leader and his military officers believed would be over in a matter of days.

Boykin, who commanded the U.S. Army’s Green Berets as well as the Special Warfare Center and School, told “Washington Watch” he found it most interesting to see the extent young Russian soldiers have gone to in order to avoid fighting the Ukrainians. “Many of them just took off and walked back into Belarus. Others just abandoned their equipment, their tanks, their personnel carriers, their artillery pieces, and made their way back into Russia,” he explained.

Boykin noted Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine lacked the support of many, if not most, Russian citizens, citing press reports of the thousands who had been rounded up by Russian authorities for daring to protest the war.

In excess of 500,000 young men left the country when Putin instituted a far-reaching mobilization effort last fall to meet the military’s needs for manpower. Interestingly, nearly 22,000 Russians have sought to cross into the United States through the country’s southern border since October, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.

While it is difficult to appreciate from afar, the Ukrainian people are not novices when it comes to confronting hostilities on their doorstep, CBN News’s Chuck Holton explained in a February 24 appearance on “Washington Watch.”

Recalling being in Kyiv on the eve of the Russian invasion one year ago, Holton said: “The city was eerily quiet. It had all but emptied out very quickly.

“We were sort of baffled in the run-up to the invasion at the nonchalance that we saw in the Ukrainian people and what I took for sort of a lack of preparedness,” Holton went on. Yet the freelance war correspondent explained he soon discovered the Ukrainian people had been battling for eight years before Russia launched its major offensive in February 2022.

“They were inured to it already. They knew what it was like to be in a nation at war,” continued Holton, who served as a Ranger in the U.S. Army. He noted many people have returned to Kyiv, and, although it is still a city prepared for war, it looks and acts like any other European capital city.

“Kyiv is no longer empty because once people realized that Russia was not going to be able to take [the city], they came back and now there are more people living here than there were before the war because we have all the refugees,” Holton said, adding, “Russia didn’t count on the fact that Ukraine would fight back.”