Czech President Milos Zeman lashed out at the US intelligence community for their claim that Russia would invade Ukraine, which so far has failed to materialize. It adds to their track record of making wrong predictions about crucial events, he argued in an interview published by the newspaper MF DNES on Thursday.
“The first was in Iraq, where no weapons of mass destruction were found. The second was in Afghanistan, when they claimed that the Taliban would never conquer Kabul. And the third is now,” the president explained.
The politician was referring to the US justification for the 2003 invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the assessment that the American-backed national government of Afghanistan would be able to defend against the militant Taliban movement after a scheduled withdrawal of foreign troops. On both counts American intelligence was seriously mistaken.
Washington has been warning for months that Russia was preparing a military invasion of Ukraine, and for weeks has been claiming that the attack was imminent. Some Western media went further and named Tuesday or Wednesday this week as the days Russia could have attacked Ukraine.
Ukraine’s President Volodymir Zelensky, who otherwise voiced skepticism about the purported Russian threat, made Wednesday a holiday celebrating Ukrainian national unity.