ST. PETERSBURG, May 5. /TASS/. Russia has accumulated sufficient military potential to defeat Ukraine by late summer-early autumn, Scott Ritter, a former United States Marine Corps intelligence officer and former United Nations Special Commission inspector said on Friday presenting his book on disarmament.

"If Russia wants to win this war, there is no reason why this war wouldn’t be over by the end of summer - early fall. I personally believe that Russia has put together the military potential to defeat Ukraine militarily by the end of this summer/early fall," he said replying to a question about the prospects of Russia’s special operation in Ukraine.

Replying to a question about the future world order, Ritter said that, in his opinion, currently the end of the unipolar era is being observed with the US losing its position of a global hegemon. He cited BRICS as an example of unions of the future, noting that Argentina, Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia aspire to join this alliance as well. According to Ritter, such unions are based on a "common economic vision of how they want to operate the world today."

Ritter’s book entitled The Disarmament Race in Russian tells the story of concluding and implementing the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty).