Kurt Volker, the former U.S. special envoy to Ukraine, told Newsmax on Friday that the United States should consider removing self-limitations on support to Ukraine.
On "The Record with Greta Van Susteren," the former top diplomat argued for a staunch stance against Russian President Vladimir Putin and his campaign to target critical Ukrainian infrastructure, including power plants.
"Russia has unreasonable and unacceptable demands," Volker proclaimed, adding that "Putin has denied the existence of Ukraine as a state, and a nationality, and a people" in order to justify reincorporating the country into a "Greater Russia."
"All of this is crazy. All of it is insulting. All of it is incredibly dangerous as Putin tries to carry out this crazy ideology of his," he continued. "So, I think, of course, Ukraine can't accept any of these demands from Russia."
But Volker pondered the larger question of how long it would take for the U.S. and NATO to "push back on Russia's basic ideology" and demands that Ukraine be enveloped into the federation.
Putin "is desperate because his military is losing on the ground, and he knows it," Volker stressed. "And so, he is trying to compensate for that by making the population suffer. He's hitting the power supplies, which also affect water, they affect heat, they affect light."
The former diplomat specifically referred to a bombardment of Ukrainian key infrastructure by Russia on Wednesday that led to the Rivne, South Ukrainian, and Khmelnytsky nuclear power plants temporarily going offline.
"All three nuclear plants located on the controlled territory of Ukraine are already in operation, and they are gaining power," Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, the head of Ukraine's state-operated energy network, told state television Thursday. "After that, we will have the same or in a similar amount of generation to the one we had there a few days ago."
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