Economic “wreckage” is occurring across the globe as the result of Russian aggression, Erik Prince, veteran and founder of Unplugged Technologies, discussed during an appearance on Breitbart News Saturday, highlighting the Russian seizure of an American-owned business.
He described the war in Ukraine as a “very unnecessary slaughter that’s gone on for multiple years now,” calling for its end.
“There is no possibility that it’s going to end in some armistice moment of Ukrainian victory. There are thousands of people, thousands of soldiers on both sides, dying daily and very unnecessarily,” he began, laying out the bigger picture globally.
President-elect Donald Trump, he said, was elected to “pursue the strategic interests of the United States,” which he identified, in part, as keeping Russia away from “combining with China.”
“And you have for 100 years, it was the policy to keep German industry from combining with Russian resources. Now, all we’ve done is pushed all those Russian resources into a subservient role with the Chinese Communist Party,” he said, noting that in previous BRICS meetings, there has been an “equal relationship between Putin and Xi Jinping.”
“This last one in October was very different. That it was Xi was clearly on top, Putin subservient. That is not a good scenario for the United States. So settling this war, you know, Putin, yes, was the aggressor. This was a dumb thing. I’m sure if he had a chance to do it over, he would not wade into the mess. But I think settling it, freezing the lines and coming up with some hybrid approach is very, very necessary, because at so many levels, there’s economic damage going around the world, and especially the United States,” he said, noting that the neocons thought sanctions would “bring Putin to their knees,” but that is not what happened. “Their economy is actually doing ok.”
“But there’s economic wreckage happening all around now. There’s even American-owned businesses in Russia, like Universal Beverage Company,” he revealed, noting it was “started by a guy that came to America in the in the 80s,” who is now an American citizen.
He went back after the Soviet Union collapsed and started the business, which “now is effectively frozen by the Russian government,” Prince said.
“This is the kind of nonsense that must stop,” he said, describing this company as the “Campbell’s Soup of Russia.”
“The Russian government apparently did a decree, Vladimir Putin signed a decree to seize the assets of this company,” host Matthew Boyle said of AO Glavproduct, owned by Universal Beverage Company.
“What can the — what should the United States be doing here? Because, again, this is the first time we’ve seen an American company … the outgoing President, Joe Biden hasn’t done a darn thing about it, but the fact is that I would imagine that President Trump would be pretty upset about the fact that an American company was just seized by the Russian government,” Boyle later asked Prince.
“It’s not even a matter of being officially nationalized. It’s kind of allowing the gangster class of other oligarchs, as we’ve seen with other companies that have been Western companies that have been seized by the Chechen — kind of the Chechen mob has taken over some of that,” Prince replied, noting that there is a “good bit of gangsterism just below the surface in the Russian economy, and that’s the prime mover” for such malfeasance.
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Breitbart · Erik Prince – January 18, 2025
“And when you have this kind of not-normal-law-and-order commercial relationship, it promotes more gangsterism,” Prince continued, demanding its end.
All in all, Prince said pulling Russia “away from the war footing” and away from China is in the best interests of the United States.
“And now you have wreckage flowing downhill to the U.S. economy, to the European economy, and most of all, hundreds of thousands of dead Ukrainians and Russians unnecessarily,” he continued. “It is in our interest to pull Russia away from the orbit…from a subservient role that they’ve fallen into with China, to pull them back into the orbit of Europe and the West.”
Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern.
