Russian propaganda constantly uses foreigners to prove that the whole world is on the side of Russia. Also, propaganda pretends that the opinion of an American is the official position of America, and the opinion of an Italian is the official position of Italy, and so on.

Most often, to create the appearance that everywhere, and even in the United States, more and more people “support Russia” or “understand Putin”, or “believe in the victorious power of the Russian army”, they use American former military men, mainly supporters of ex-President Donald Trump . They often appear on the Fox News channel, and they make provocative statements, which are then used by Russian propaganda, but do not correspond to reality. One of these people is the former adviser to the head of the Pentagon, Colonel Douglas McGregor. In 2020 Trump nominated him for the post of ambassador to Germany, but the Senate did not support the candidacy. After that, he was appointed as an adviser to the acting minister of defense; he remained in this post for three months until the change of administration. In 2014, McGregor supported the annexation of Crimea and spoke on RT, where he claimed that the inhabitants of Crimea were Russians, not Ukrainians.

The last time McGregor's statement that “almost nothing will be left of Ukraine” in the near future was made public in the Russian media at the end of December.

Insider has collected the colonel's comments since the start of the full-scale invasion and found out that the colonel's predictions are not true.

So, on February 27, three days after the start of the war, he said on Fox News: “Now the battle in Eastern Ukraine is almost over, the Ukrainian troops are largely surrounded and cut off, now they have a concentration down in the southeast in 30 to 40 thousand , and if they don't vend, surrender the next 24 hours, the Russians will ultimately annihilate them”.

On March 6 on Fox Business, he found an explanation for why it didn't happen.

“At the first five days, the Russian forces, I think, were too gentle. They have now corrected that. So I would say another 10 days this should be completely over. But the question is, what is it that Zelenskyi is going to do? The Russians have made it very clear what they want is a neutral Ukraine. This could have ended days ago if he accepted that. And then they can adjust the borders, but the eastern part of Ukraine is firmly in Russian hands, but again, the Russians are not seizing the territory. They are destroying Ukrainian forces. That’s their focus”.

After another 10 days, the colonel tried to pretend that his prediction was justified. On Tucker Carlson's Fox News program, he stated: "The war is really over for the Ukrainians”, “They have been grounded to bits. There’s no question about that despite what we report on our mainstream media”.

McGregor delivered another analysis on the ultra-right cable and satellite channel Real America's Voice on July 7:

“The war, with the exception of Kharkiv and Odesa, as far as the Russians are concerned is largely over. There is no intention to do anything else because the Russians don’t have a very large army. They’ve got a very limited armed force and that’s by design, they didn’t want to build a huge army, they certainly are not in a position to threaten NATO nor would they unless they were directly attacked by us.

So the last thing, the last thing that Putin wants is to go west of that Dnieper River and end up incorporating, 20 million, 25 million Ukrainians into Russia. He knows they don’t want to be part of Russia, that’s never been his aim”.

On September 12, on the air of the same Carlson program, McGregor again stated that “this war may soon end,” and added: “The Ukrainian army is bled, tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers are killed or wounded, Ukraine is really in the balance.”

This was the day after the liberation of Izium, Balakleia and Kupiansk - and before the Ukrainian army liberated Kherson.

McGregor's statements are so strange that even his party members criticize him. For example, Liz Cheney even publicly asked the Fox News channel: “Why do you continually put Douglas MacGregor on @FoxNews to spread Putin’s propaganda and lies? This is absolutely not in America’s interest". Earlier, she called McGregor the representative of “Putin's wing of the GOP”. And even one of Fox News's most famous journalists, Jennifer Griffin, has spoken of McGregor as an ““apologist” for Putin” with “so many distortions”.