Gen. Jack Keane: US 'investment' in Ukraine denied Putin his ambitions, kept America's future secure

Fox News senior strategic analyst Gen. Jack Keane argued Tuesday that the "investment" the United States has made in Ukraine is well worth it, telling "Cavuto: Coast to Coast" that, for $66 billion, Ukraine is destroying the Russian army and decreasing the risk of a nuclear war.

JACK KEANE: The support among the American people to continue to help Ukraine is about 66%. So it’s pretty solid, but there are people in Congress, some of them Republicans, who have always expressed some concern about spending in terms of spending money on Ukraine. We have a $6 trillion budget; it is actually larger than that by a few hundred billion. We’ve invested, and I mean invested, $66 billion in Ukraine this year and that is like 1.1% [of the budget]. What are we getting for that investment? We have Putin, who we dismissed for years, and were not taking seriously despite Georgia in 2008, despite Syria, despite Crimea, and eastern Ukraine in 2014. Because he is a declining power, his economy is in the tank, he's a one-commodity economy, and we had a tendency not to take him seriously. 

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Yet all this time, all he has been talking about is that Ukraine is a part of Russia, and I’m going to make it a part of Russia. President Xi says the same thing about Taiwan, by the way. And also, and this is the important part, his design to bring back under the umbrella of Russia the former Soviet republics that are now in NATO, and that is largely the Baltics, particularly Poland, lesser degree Romania. We dismissed all of that, but I believe Putin has never given up on that. So for $66 billion what we’re getting is Ukraine is doing the fighting, they are literally destroying the Russian army on the battlefield, which would set them back for years and deny them the ability to ever accomplish under Putin any of his ambitions in terms of taking back some of the Soviet republics. By the way, if that would happen, that would mean war between NATO and Russia. The scale of that would be much greater than what it is right now. 

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