An army source has warned Business Insider that Vladimir Putin has a political edge in Europe over U.S. president Donald Trump.
Retired Army Lieutenant General Ben Hodges claims that Trump’s stance on the NATO summit is giving Putin an advantage over the U.S. internationally. Hodges was charged with leading troops in Iraq and Afghanistan before he left the army in 2017.
“Right now, the fact that the American leadership of the alliance, at least at the presidential level, is in question, that’s a huge vulnerability. I mean, in all my army life, I’ve never imagined an American president not being 100% committed,” he said.
Russia reportedly has 1,500 nuclear weapons in its arsenal and despite the country’s size “capacity is limited” according to Hodges. The country’s two major economical pluses are its energy exports and weapons exports, which makes it vulnerable.
“Hodges added that because Putin “wants to reestablish a world order where Russia is once again a great power, he has to undermine NATO, and he has to undermine the European Union, and he does that by sowing distrust and creating or exploiting divisions between the nations, causing us to lose confidence in our institutions.”
Putin gave an address in March where he lashed back at governments who had “sought to win unilateral advantages over Russia,” as well as “introduced unlawful sanctions” to contain Russia’s development.
“You have failed to contain Russia,” he said during the speech.
The oil collapse in 2014 was devastating for the country, but Russia has made advances economically since then. It has since beat out the U.S. for top wheat exporter worldwide. But the Russian population also hinders the country and puts them on “the wrong side of a demographic equation” according to Hodges.
The Inquisitr previously reported that the Russian Ministry of Defense had released videos of nuclear weapons that top the U.S. Army’s. The weapons included a hypersonic missile with the capacity to hold a nuclear warhead, an unlimited range nuclear missile, an intercontinental ballistic missile, and a hypersonic air-to-ground missile.
Anonymous sources said that the air-to-surface missile had already been tested by the Russian military three times. Reports also claimed that it was being developed to use with strategic bombing technology.
Insiders claimed that at least two of the weapons in the tapes will be ready for launch by 2020. Kremlin is currently thought to have more nuclear weapons at their disposal than the rest of the world.
