Jennifer Griffin Explains to Harris Faulkner Why Biden Didn’t Put NATO Troops on Ukraine’s Border: Would Have Given Putin a ‘Pretext’ to Invade
Fox News national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin joined the Faulkner Focus on Thursday to discuss Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and helped to parse out whether President Joe Biden could have done more to stop the invasion.
Griffin began by explaining the latest state of play in Ukraine with a thorough breakdown of the military assets and artillery Russia has used on Ukraine and the targets that have been hit.
Griffin explained that Russia is currently in its “initial phase” of the invasion. “They are advancing right now, the Russians, on three main axes of assault from the south from Crimea to a town called Kherson in the center of the c`ountry and from the north from Belarus on two axes to Kyiv, the capital from the northwest and northeast.”
Anchor Harris Faulkner then turned the conversation to why the Biden administration didn’t do more to prevent the Russian invasion.
Griffin noted, “They knew they had very limited abilities to prevent this invasion. They tried but now comes the part where they will squeeze Russia. You saw the Russian stock market fell by half today.”
“Have you seen ours?” Faulkner shot back. “All those barrels of oil that they just hiked the price up. We’ll get into it later in the hour. The reason I ask you that question since early October we saw this coming. And we’ve had general after general tell us the sanctions weren’t going to work because they were baked into the cake as assets were put into place.”
“So when you say, We saw this and they saw this coming. I am just wondering why that was still the only strategy deployed?” Faulkner concluded.
Griffin immediately shot back, saying, “Well, Harris let me, I need to follow up on that because what you are talking about, if it’s more than sanctions, you are talking about sending U.S. troops to Ukraine.”
“No, no,” Faulkner interrupted waving her hand as Griffin smiled.
“Did you hear General Pittard, we had some other options that we could have done around in our NATO countries, it was an interesting conversation,” Faulkner concluded.
“Look we can Monday morning quarterback, but now it’s Thursday and trying to look forward. He said we can still do the things in terms of military bases permanently,” Faulkner added.
Griffin jumped back in saying “that is what they are discussing” today at NATO headquarters but clarified “if you had put those NATO troops into position before Putin crossed into Ukraine, you would have given him a pretext to go into Ukraine. This has been very calibrated because of the concern that Putin was looking for a pretext to go in.”
Griffin concluded, “There were very limited options at this late stage in terms of the last six months of preventing Putin from this using this massive, massive military force that he arrayed on the borders with Ukraine.”
Watch the full clip above, via Fox News
