Mitt Romney: "I don't think that anybody can really assess what's going on in the mind of Vladimir Putin right now"
Amid reports about Russian President Vladimir Putin's possible mental state and how that could impact his invasion of Ukraine, Republican Senator Mitt Romney said it's hard to evaluate his state of mind.
"I don't think that anybody can really assess what's going on in the mind of Vladimir Putin right now," Romney told "CBS Evening News" anchor and managing editor Norah O'Donnell on Tuesday. "The huge table with him sitting at one end is like Dr. Strangelove."
"He is not listening, apparently, to people who have contrary points of view. I don't know that that's something which suggests a mental imbalance or whether it's just a recognition that this is a dictator, that he's intent on conquest," Romney added.
When asked if he believed Putin would try to upstage President Biden's State of the Union address Tuesday night by launching an attack on Ukraine's capital, Romney said there's "no way of predicting what kind of illogical things" Putin may do.
"His invasion of Ukraine doesn't make a lot of sense," Romney said. "I think long-term you have to see that this is a very bad decision on his part. So I don't rule anything out. But I think it's more likely that we're gonna be focused on our country and what President Biden has to say about how we're gonna rethink the commitments and the priorities we have in our country."
The Utah senator said the U.S. and its allies should always be concerned about what Putin might do, especially because Russia has nuclear weapons, but said he did not believe that Putin would actually use them in his war against Ukraine.
"Well, people are always concerned, and I'm among them, for what kinds of things Vladimir Putin might do — whether he might use tactical nuclear weapons at some point if he were in a corner, with his conventional weaponry. I think it's extremely unlikely that he would move in that direction in the current conflict," he said. "But I think we always have to recognize that Vladimir Putin has well over 1,000 nuclear weapons aimed at the United States of America. And so to consider him somehow a friend or someone we can do business with ignores the fact that he is an enemy."
