When we look at Ukraine, it’s not hard to figure out who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.
That’s what makes it so maddening that so many Republicans in Congress, led by their presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump, have been all but drooling to stay in his good graces and therefore, just as they did a u-turn at Trump’s behest and voted last month against a comprehensive package they once supported to control our southern border, they have wasted months refusing to even consider a $60 billion aid package that would help Ukraine stay on its feet in its ferocious fight with Russia. Because Ukrainian forces have been so short of ammunition that they’ve actually had to cancel planned attacks, and so short of anti-aircraft defenses that they couldn’t effectively defend against Russian missiles, Ukraine lost ground to its aggressor, and more Ukrainian civilians and Ukrainian soldiers died.
Is it far-fetched to say, the MAGA crowd is letting Vladimir Putin get away with it?
Polls suggest that a majority of members of Congress, and a majority of Americans, want the Ukraine package to pass. A joint Chicago Council on Global Affairs/Ipsos survey last month showed that six in 10 Americans favor providing both economic help and more arms to Ukraine.
They know who the good guys and the bad guys are. But we have a political system wherein our ex-president, who isn’t even president anymore, is getting his way. On March 11th, Hungary’s increasingly dictatorial leader Viktor Orban told Hungarian state television after meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, "He will not give a penny into the Ukraine-Russia war and therefore the war will end.”
Maybe nobody told that to Ukraine, which is outnumbered in men and arms and aviation but battles on to fight off its invader. And nobody told that to other allies in Europe or elsewhere who are doing their damndest to make up for the shortfall of American help, although their capacity without the U.S. kicking in cannot sustain it forever. While the MAGA representatives have sat on their hands and tied up Congress, the European Commission approved another $55 billion for Ukraine. They understand what our own recalcitrant elected officials don’t. Some of these are nations whose leaders grew up under the iron fist of Soviet rule.
Like the president of Latvia, which shares more than 200 miles of border with Russia (and a hundred more with Russia’s authoritarian ally Belarus), who told CNN’s David Andelman, “I do believe that… Russia does… want to destroy the set of universal values of democracy, human rights, rule of law as we know it… looking not back to the Soviet Union, but back to Peter the Great.” He told Andelman that he needs to be prepared for surprises. “One of the reasons why Latvia, along with Lithuania and Estonia did their best to join NATO and the EU was a realization, even back in the 1990s, that Russia was going to change and for the worse, not for the better.”
As it turns out, that was an understatement.
And it’s not just about Ukraine. Although Latvia’s leader said, “Many in Europe, especially in my part of Europe, believe the United States is still leader of the free world,” Poland’s foreign minister told CNBC, “The success of Ukraine is now a matter of U.S. credibility. And if U.S. support for Ukraine were to stop, I think U.S. allies around the world would notice and would start hedging.”
This is what Trump and his congressional toadies are allowing, even encouraging, to happen. They should reach back to the wisdom of President Harry Truman, who said in his 1948 post-war State of the Union, “We have learned that the loss of freedom in any area of the world means a loss of freedom to ourselves— that the loss of independence by any nation adds directly to the insecurity of the United States.”
But these MAGA minions don’t get it. They don’t see through the man they are following, Donald Trump, nor the man they are enabling, Vladimir Putin.
In Trump’s case, maybe they’re naive enough to buy his insistence, voiced during a Fox News interview, that by telling Ukraine’s president Zelensky, “You got to make a deal,” then telling Putin, “If you don't make a deal, we're going to give him a lot,” Trump will “have the deal done in one day. One day.”
For his part, Putin already said in an interview earlier this month, “It would be ridiculous for us to start negotiating with Ukraine just because it’s running out of ammunition.”
In Putin’s case, they ignore that he attacked his neighbor without provocation, and that now he is imposing his undemocratic ways on their lives, pressing further ahead with his Russification of the Ukrainian provinces he occupies. Not only has he reportedly deported hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children orphaned by the war into Russia and, in the provinces he controls, forced people to take Russian passports at risk of losing everything from driver’s licenses to property titles if they don’t, but during the three days of the “landslide” election he transparently engineered the week before last, uncooperative candidates, especially any who hinted that his war was ruinous, were disqualified from the ballot— Ukrainians reported that soldiers in baklavas forced them to vote for Putin at gunpoint.
Or maybe MAGA does get it, and wants something similar here. They’ve already demonstrated an undemocratic disregard for voting rights and fair elections, and from the words that have issued from Donald Trump’s mouth— “retribution,” “vermin,” “enemy of the people”— a disregard for citizens’ rights, and worse, is not beyond belief.
During the presidential election the middle of this month in Russia and its occupied provinces in Ukraine, Russia simultaneously was shooting missiles into Odessa. Another 21 people died, including the city’s deputy mayor. Then a week later, another 31 missiles, mostly Cruise missiles, were fired into Kiev. Then the next day, this past Friday, more missiles, described as “the largest-ever single attack on Ukraine’s energy system,” threw a million people across half the country into indefinite darkness and cold.
This is Putin’s way of doing business. After the Russian president declared the foregone conclusion of his election victory, he told people in Red Square that victory in Ukraine would continue to be the paramount purpose of his rule, to bring its people “back to their home family.”
He has a shamefully sick way of making that happen. Those here at home who support him— those who can’t figure out the good guys from the bad guys— are shameful themselves.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Yep, you basically summed up the trajectory of the villainous program Putin has instituted, and it is all because of the things he learned in KGB training, and that he believed in with all his soul. For him, these were destroyed by Gorbachev,‘a surrender of the old order. Human lives, there are in fact so many of them, are of no real consequence to a mind like Putin’s. For those of us living, really living, in the 21st-century, it is hard to appreciate the retarditaire Cold War mind of a man like V. Putin. For him, the present is the past, and it is the past that must continue to be present. Such a mind cannot adjust to the yearning of people to be free. Unfortunately, there are minds among his people that operate similarly. Though I don’t wish to overstate it, there is a part of me that feels sorry for the prisoner that Putin is. He is his own jailer, but the far greater tragedy is that he has sentenced his people to a future of loss and unhappiness. He has also bestowed terror on his neighbors and promises to continue being a bad actor. To put a positive spin on a dangerous and terribly sad state of affairs, I wish him a change of mind and I wish the Russian people a change of leadership.
Greg,
Although both of our fathers were Republicans, I don't think they would have been part of the Maga minions or in any manner supported Trump.