I have to take issue with a number of comments made by U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., in his recent op-ed entitled “Zelenskyy doesn’t want or need our troops. But he deeply and desperately needs the tools to win.”
Blumenthal justifies the United States continuing to send billions of dollars to help Ukraine in its war with Russia by making the sweeping claim that if Russia is allowed to defeat Ukraine, Russian leader Vladimir Putin will be emboldened to invade other countries and then take over Europe.
“If Putin wins in Ukraine, he’ll roll forward against other nations — NATO allies that we have a treaty obligation to defend with troops on the ground. Ukraine is at the tip of the spear fighting our fight for independence and freedom,” Blumenthal wrote.
But the view that Russia is on a march of aggression is based on the idea that Russia invaded Ukraine without any provocation and if given a chance, Putin would do the same thing against other countries.
The fact is that the United States together with its NATO allies did provoke Russia into this invasion. There were two key provocations.
First, the United States instigated a coup in 2014 against the constitutionally elected and pro-Russian government in Ukraine led by Viktor Yanukovych. The new regime adopted a belligerent anti-Russian attitude and demanded that all people in Ukraine, including people in the heavily ethnic Russian area in the East, speak the Ukrainian language. A rebellion erupted in the East and the government, using United States military aid, waged a bloody campaign against residents of the area known as Donbas, which is on the Russian border.
Second, the United States reneged on its promise made to Russian leaders back in the early 1990s that NATO would not be enlarged by granting membership to Eastern European countries which had been part of the old Soviet bloc. The Russians warned that they saw expansion of NATO as a security threat, with their nation becoming encircled.
Despite Russian objections, the West went ahead and added all the Soviet bloc nations into NATO, except for Ukraine. Russian officials and others urged that at least Ukraine should stay neutral, in order to avoid war. Nonetheless, U.S. and Ukrainian leaders pushed the idea of adding Ukraine to NATO, further heightening tensions with Russia.
Putin said at the time of the invasion that the expansion of NATO was the reason for Russia’s decision to invade.
Sen. Blumenthal also makes the strange comment in his article that America was helping Ukraine protect “freedom.” But the present Ukrainian government has shut down opposition newspapers, closed Russian Orthodox churches and locked up political dissenters. These actions do not comport with a free society.
Finally, Sen. Blumenthal makes the outrageous statement that Americans “should be satisfied that we’re getting our money’s worth on our Ukraine investment” because we’ve spent “less than 3 percent” of our military budget in helping Ukraine to “degrade” Russia’s military.
Actually, the roughly 3 percent figure comes to a very substantial amount. The U.S. has given upwards of $140 billion in aid to Ukraine, much of it being military hardware. That money could have been better spent on funding human needs here at home — like building affordable housing, improving health care and revitalizing underfunded local public school systems, such as the one in Bridgeport.
Instead of continuing to support a highly destructive and deadly war in Ukraine (hundreds of thousands of people have died) Blumenthal should get behind peace efforts to bring this terrible conflict to a close.
Reginald Johnson is a freelance writer in Bridgeport.