The Ukraine bombing of a bridge in Crimea is a "legitimate" target that not only caught Russian President Vladimir Putin's attention, but makes things "much more difficult" for him, Retired Air Force Brigadier Gen. Blaine Holt said Monday on Newsmax.
In an interview on "Wake Up America," Holt lamented that the hit triggered a response that resulted in "more war crimes" by the Russian army.
"That is a very valid military target that Putin built after his illegal seizure of Crimea," Holt asserted. "So nothing's good about that bridge. It doesn't cut off all logistics, but it certainly makes it much more difficult for the Russians. And then he did promise a response in kind. It's unfortunate that there's just more war crimes attached to attacking … civilian targets, and so he said he would do it, and he did it. And these are just piling on more war crimes in response to a legitimate military hit."
According to Holt, the world should take the threat of Putin resorting to nuclear warfare "extremely seriously."
"I've seen over the weekend a lot of folks marginalizing the idea that 'well, it wouldn't be so impossible to have a small nuclear weapon hit inside of Ukraine, and then we'd all just be fine as a world'," he said.
"We have not seen a nuclear detonation in anger since Hiroshima and Nagasaki and that is a very scary proposition that, depending upon how it were expended, could affect Europe very quickly, could … just spiral out of control with bigger and higher weapons."
Holt also was skeptical that a U.N. Security Council meeting expected Monday would be more than "a lot of brinkmanship."
"There'll be a lot of threats and there'll be a lot of accusations," he predicted. "The U.N. Security Council is pretty much hamstrung because China and Russia sit there with vetos."
"It'll be a theater," he continued. "There's not a whole lot that can be done right now, unfortunately, at the U.N. We shouldn't probably look for anything other than more of this terrible rhetoric that has everybody very frightened."
Holt also was critical of President Joe Biden making "a very unfortunate choice of words" by warning of Armageddon if Russia were to launch a nuclear strike.
"It's also in direct conflict with where his administration has been," Holt noted, saying it has created "weakness."
"If you go back to Alaska and then Kabul and then not deterring the Ukrainian war and the other things, that's how we get to this place where you've got a world leader threatening nuclear weapons because he feels he can," he said.
"If U.S. intelligence is sitting on information that nuclear war is imminent, I would expect our nuclear forces to be at a much higher state of alert than they are," he added.
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