Hollywood, July 31 (RHC)-- U.S. President Joe Biden is following a “suicidal” course in Ukraine and may drag the U.S. “stupidly into a confrontation” with Russia, acclaimed director Oliver Stone said during a recent podcast appearance. 

Speaking on an episode of British commentator Russell Brand’s ‘Stay Free’ podcast released on Friday, Stone blamed the conflict in Ukraine on the "neoconservative movement who started the war in Iraq," and who still occupy prominent positions in Biden’s government.

“Biden is an old Cold Warrior, and he really hates the old Soviet Union which he confounds again with the Russian Federation, which is not communist,” Stone continued.  “It seems that he’s dragging us stupidly into a confrontation with a power that is not going to give.  This is [Russia’s] borders.  This is their world.  This is NATO going into Ukraine.  This is a whole 'nother story.”

Stone revealed that he voted for Biden in 2020, a decision that he now considers “a mistake.”  “I was thinking he was an old man now that he would calm down, that he would be more mellow and so forth,” Stone said, adding that he now sees “a man who maybe is not in charge of his own administration.  Who knows?”

Back in 2016, Stone produced a documentary, ‘Ukraine on Fire’ -- explaining the role of the U.,S. in the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically-elected president, Viktor Yanukovich.  The film was highly critical of NATO’s eastward expansion, Washington's sponsorship of Ukrainian neo-Nazis, and the war on Donetsk and Lugansk waged by Yanukovich’s U.S.-backed successor, Pyotr Poroshenko.  The Euromaidan coup, he told Brand, “was a very deep plan to penetrate the Russian Federation.” 

Stone has repeatedly expressed this sentiment in the years since ‘Ukraine on Fire’ was released.  “Since 2014, Ukraine was no longer neutral but anti-Russian, and that’s what disrupted the balance,” he told the Serbian daily Politika in December, adding that “every war has causes and consequences.”

Though Stone was a vocal critic of former President Donald Trump and voted for his Democratic opponent in 2020, his views on the Ukraine conflict align with Trump’s.  The former president and 2024 Republican frontrunner has also named the same neoconservatives as key architects of the conflict, while accusing Biden of dragging the U.S. into “a Third World War.”