News Flash: Ukraine is Still at War With Russia
We must maintain support for Ukraine - for democracy.
No surprise really that since Hamas’ attack on Gaza on October 7, the media’s incessant disaster porn from Ukraine has shifted to Israel.
But Ukraine is still at war with Russia. Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is still claiming Ukraine rightfully belongs to him and said Thursday “there would be no peace until Russia achieves its goals”.
The dearth of coverage benefits exactly two entities: Vladimir Putin, naturally, and the American republican party that takes its marching orders from the twice-impeached, quadruply indicted sexual assaulting slumlord former host of Celebrity Apprentice, who also takes orders from Vladimir Putin.
The republican party wants nothing more than to leave Ukraine twisting in the wind, as it demonstrated this week when republican lawmakers met for a closed-door two-day Heritage Foundation-funded summit with Hungary’s hard-right prime minister Viktor Orbán, a staunch opponent of Ukraine aid against Russian aggression.
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden warned after meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that funding for supporting Ukraine will be exhausted by the end of the year — two weeks away — if Congress fails to renew support.
Biden is pressing lawmakers to pass a $50 billion supplemental aid package for new security to Ukraine, and the Senate announced Thursday it will delay its holiday recess to vote next week.
However, the concession Biden and Democrats are wrestling with is whether or not to give in to republicans’ persistent tantrums about immigration at the Southern border.
Kerri Talbot, executive director at the Immigration Hub, stated:
Democrats are definitely in a box because they really would like to move Ukraine aid as soon as possible but Republicans have made super clear that they won’t move the package without border security. It’s a sad day that they’re considering such horrible proposals.
But this is likely just another case of Lucy promising not to pull the football away from Charlie Brown. Republicans are notorious for dangling compromises in front of Democrats only to yank them when it looks like Democrats are taking the bait.
Sen. John Cornyn made his party’s intransigence clear when he told NBC News:
I think there’s a misunderstanding on the part of Senator [Majority Leader] Schumer and some of our Democratic friends. This is not a traditional negotiation where we expect to come up with a bipartisan compromise on the border. This is a price that has to be paid in order to get the supplemental.
Last week, Senate republicans refused to even allow a debate over whether or not we should continue honoring our commitment to Ukraine delineated in the Clinton-era Budapest Memorandum.
Supporting Ukraine is preventing world war three.
While there are progressive voices calling for “a negotiated peace,” other nations’ autocrats are watching how the United States reacts to Putin.
Chinese president Xi Jinping just met with Putin in October to ostensibly discuss trade at a time when there is growing concern China may invade Taiwan. Like Putin’s claim Ukraine is really historically part of Russia and not a separate country — and the largest democracy in Europe, not coincidentally — Xi claims the island democracy of Taiwan is really part of mainland China and should be “united by force” if necessary. He’s already asserted he is prepared to go to war with western powers over it.
We’ve seen this before. Its old trope tin-pot despots trot out to try to gin up nationalism and justification for aggression against a politically fragile and less militarily advanced target, like Adolf Hitler claiming Austria and Czechoslovakia were historically part of “greater Germany.”
The main thing preventing Xi from going ahead with it is international condemnation of Russia. If Ukraine’s western allies take their eyes off Ukraine’s fight for survival, it will provide Xi and other dictators permission to follow suit with their own invasions. If we just stay out of it, as many insist we ought to do, it will be emboldening autocrats all over the world at a time when more democracies are backsliding toward authoritarian regimes.
Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un to express North Korea’s “steadfast will” to expand Russian ties. Those ties consist of Un’s support of Russia’s Ukraine invasion, for which US officials assert North Korean weapons are being shipped to Russia.
Russia, China, and North Korea.
All strong-man autocracies.
All united against democracy.
Are these the new axis powers?
What should concern us here at home is the fact that our very own republican party is equally united against democracy.
Eleven Democrats on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party sent letters to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Avril Haines, and CIA Director, William J. Burns, requesting a briefing on the Chinese government’s exploitation of our embarrassing House Speaker selection to distract and politically enervate America.
In the letter, they state:
[O]ur foreign adversaries are leveraging current political dysfunction in the U.S. House of Representatives to discredit democracy globally in their efforts to promote an alternative authoritarian model of governance internationally, enhance their ability to form economic and national security alliances, and harm our standing with strategic partners.
Peter Beinart wrote for The New York Times:
In March, a Gallup poll found that while Democrats were 23 points more likely to consider Russia a greater enemy than China, Republicans were a whopping 64 points more likely to say the reverse. There is evidence that this discrepancy stems in part from the fact that while President Vladimir Putin of Russia casts himself as a defender of conservative Christian values, President Xi Jinping leads a nonwhite superpower whose regime has spurned the Christian destiny many Americans once envisioned for it.
And it looks as though the autocrats got their man in our House with the elevation of ultra-MAGA, hard-right, pseudo Christian Rep. Mike Johnson, echoing the GOP wish of cutting off aid to Ukraine in favor of giving it all to Israel.
As progressive talk show host and author Thom Hartmann wrote in his piece “How Trump’s MAGA GOP Increases the Risk of WWIII”:
Until the war [WWI] was well underway, nobody believed it would be anything other than a limited, regional conflict. And then it wasn’t — and all hell broke loose, killing 17 million human beings and wounding, displacing, or disappearing another 28 million.
World War II, on the other hand, came about because an anti-democratic bully axis of fascist strongman states (Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan) decided the world’s honeymoon with democracies was long over and, being “weaker” than tough-guy autocracies, we wouldn’t have the stomach to take on the bullies.
Sound eerily familiar?
We had Hitler apologists in American government during WWII just as we have fascist apologists in government now.
In a speech at the National Defense University in Washington, DC this week, Ukrainian President Zelenskiy asserted:
Putin must lose. You can count on Ukraine, and we hope just as much to be able to count on you.
Ukraine isn’t just a country. It’s a democratic nation struggling to survive in a world where more democracies are disappearing in favor of strong-man autocracies.
This is the outcome the American GOP wants, for Ukraine and for the United States.
Here is how we’ve been doing it:
The United States and allies have provided weaponry to Ukrainian armed forces that have helped Ukraine regain approximately 54 percent of the land Russia captured since the start of the war in 2022. We have also provided air defense and anti-missile technology that has helped prevent Russian airspace superiority. We are training Ukrainian soldiers in Poland and Germany to ensure this technology is used efficiently.
In addition, our aid includes approximately $9 billion for humanitarian assistance for Ukraine and other countries which has helped support vital civilian services like hospitals, schools, emergency medical services, and firefighting capabilities.
Our aid has also subsidized Ukrainians’ heat and electricity while Russia continues to weaponize its oil and natural gas supply.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has provided food and agricultural assistance, and provided support to European countries to accommodate Ukrainian refugees, half of whom are children.
The U.S. and European Union have frozen Russian government officials’ and oligarchs’ foreign assets, and instituted new sanctions on Russian banks.
We must maintain support for Ukraine — for democracy.
Thank you Ted, for telling it like it is with no soft edges. A chilling report but it pulls no punches. I can only hope that our American voters will wake up and realize that we can stop this dangerous slide next year by voting for a Democratic majority in the House and Senate and Presidency. I hear from a few too many voters that they have decided that voting is useless. Another dangerous rumor/fad that has spread amongst young people. If someone thinks a vote for Trump is the same as one for Biden they are being brainwashed. It’s beyond sad, maddening and terrifying.