Retired Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Sunday said Russian President Vladimir Putin is “a cornered animal” and urged the Biden administration to work to bring Russia and Ukraine to the negotiating table.
The Kerch Bridge, which links Russia to Crimea, was heavily damaged over the weekend in what Putin called “a terrorist attack” carried out by Ukrainian special services, according to The Associated Press.
“I think he’s more and more dangerous,” Mullen told ABC’s “This Week” of Putin.
Hours after Mullen spoke, Moscow struck central Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, killing at least eight people and injuring many more, in what appears to be retaliation for the bridge attack, according to AP.
Putin, in an address confirming the strikes on Ukraine, warned: “If attempts to carry out terrorist attacks on our territory continue, the measures taken by Russia will be tough and in their scale will correspond to the level of threats posed to the Russian Federation. No one should have any doubt about it,” according to The New York Times.
Mullen said Putin’s nuclear threats should be taken seriously. He also assessed the challenge for the Russian president in using tactical nuclear weapons.
“The winds all blow back onto Russia, so he would have to, in a way, contaminate his own country,” Mullen explained. “He could pick a symbolic target. He could pick Zelenskyy’s hometown, for instance, as a target, as opposed to having a big impact on the battlefield that would badly hurt the Ukrainian Army, which has fought so well.”
Mullen also criticized President Joe Biden for saying last week that the risk of nuclear “Armageddon” hasn’t been this high since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
“President Biden’s language — we’re about at the top of the language scale, if you will,” Mullen said. “And I think we need to back off that a little bit and do everything we possibly can to try to get to the table to resolve this thing.”
Mike Pompeo, former President Donald Trump’s secretary of state, called Biden’s remarks “reckless” and “a terrible risk to the American people,” in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”
John Kirby, the White House National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications, defended Biden, explaining that the president’s comments were not based on fresh intelligence about Putin’s thinking.
“What the president was reflecting was that the stakes are high right now, given what’s going on on the battlefield in Ukraine and given the very irresponsible and reckless comments made by Vladimir Putin in just the last few days,” Kirby told ABC’s “This Week.”
Asked how Putin could save face and end the war, Mullen said it would likely have to involve the four Ukraine regions — Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — that Russia annexed after staged referendums that have been widely condemned by Ukrainian officials and the West.
“I suspect it’s in the east, if you will, with those four provinces or some combination of them with respect to how it all ends,” Mullen said.
He also urged Secretary of State Antony Blinken to find a way for Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to get to the negotiating table.
“As is typical in any war, it has got to end and usually there are negotiations associated with that,” Mullen said. “The sooner the better as far as I’m concerned.”