Slava Ukraini

I am stunned that I even have to talk about this, but it's 2025, and here we are.

I don't pretend to be an expert in Ukraine, but I am pretty well-educated about things adjacent to Ukraine. As I've mentioned elsewhere, my undergrad degree was in political science with an emphasis in international relations, and my minor was in history. I also was raised by a dad who, like all good Boomer dads, was obsessed with World War Two, and I inherited much of his passion. And, most important of all, I grew up during the Cold War.

Let's not bandy words: Russia is the enemy. They did not have justification to invade Ukraine.

On Sunday, a top Trump official, Steve Witkoff, went on the news circuit and made the claim that Russia was provoked into this war:

“The war didn’t need to happen,” U.S. envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff said on CNN’s State of the Union. “It was provoked. It doesn’t necessarily mean it was provoked by the Russians. There were all kinds of conversations back then about Ukraine joining NATO. The president has spoken about this. That didn’t need to happen. It basically became a threat to the Russians.”

So the way that Ukraine provoked the Russians is because it was seeking to join NATO, and therefore Russia is justified?

NATO was once an almost sacred organization for the United States' foreign policies. It was a collection of all our closest allies, who were committing to having each others' backs in case there was a war. And Ukraine wanted to be that--wanted to be our best friend, wanted to help us in case of problems--and we are now using that trust they had against them?

How dare Ukraine want to join one of the most stabilizing and important organizations of the post-WWII era!? For shame.

Adam Kinzinger, former US Congressman (who is best known for being one of the only two Republicans who would sit on the January 6th Committee), makes an excellent point: Russia is our biggest enemy and threat, and paying Ukraine to fight them--and decimate them, because Ukraine is seriously destroying huge swaths of the Russian military--is the safest and most economical way Americans could ever want to cripple Russia.

This war, you see, is not just in Ukraine's best interests--it's in the United States' too.

And that's to say nothing about the interests of our NATO partners, like Poland, who are sitting on the front lines of Russian expansionism. If Ukraine falls, who's next? If the United States decides to turn its back on NATO (and many Trump cronies, including my own abhorrent senator Mike Lee, have said we ought to pull out of NATO), then we are leaving our friends of 80 years to the wolves.

But here's the thing: there are war crimes. And the United States used to be a country that stood up against war crimes. It's estimated that more than 121,000 Ukrainian children--ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY ONE THOUSAND CHILDREN--have been kidnapped from Ukraine and taken to Russia. That's unconscionable.

War crimes:

• Russian kidnapped 121,000 Ukrainian children {source}

• Russia used chemical weapons on at least 465 occasions between 2022 and 2023 {source}

• Russia has targeted civilians, including aid workers and journalists {source}

• Russia sent captured civilians to concentration camps, where evidence of torture and murder took place {source}

• In what is known as the Bucha Massacre, at least 900 civilians were executed with a gun to the back of the head and buried in mass graves {source}

• In that same massacre, the Russians mutilated bodies of children, cutting off ears and pulling teeth {source}

• In that same massacre, there were civilians--including children--who were BEHEADED {source}

• In a terror campaign known as the Human Safari, Russians used drones to target civilians, including children, and then bragged about it--with video--on social media {source}

• Russia has targeted Ukrainian medical facilities more than 1400 times {source}

• Russians targeted at least 150 Ukrainian historical sites, religious buildings, and museums, which goes against Protocol I of the Geneva Convention and the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict {source}

• Russia has used sexual violence, including rape of both soldiers and civilians, and genital mutilation of both soldiers and civilians {source}

• Russia has executed at least 177 prisoners of war {source}

'

Now, I'm just an old-fashioned country lawyer, but IT SEEMS LIKE RUSSIA ARE THE BADDIES.

I'm not closing my eyes to the fact that there have been cases of Ukrainian soldiers doing bad things--particularly mistreatment of Russian prisoners of war. But look at the weighing of the scales.

Yesterday, Trump tried to make it sound like he was trying to prevent World War Three by forcing Ukraine into surrender. That is no more true than saying that Germany and the USSR were preventing World War Two by carving up Poland.

It's dominos. Allow Russia to knock down Ukraine, and Russia will be emboldened to do something next. This is a war of aggression. Russia invaded. They didn't invade to pre-empt an attack--the invaded because they wanted Ukrainian territory, and they thought they could take whatever they wanted.

Now it's up to us to decide whether they're right.