How D.C. Emboldened Putin, According to Key Trump Impeachment Witness
Lt. Col. (ret.) Alexander Vindman, the whistleblower from Trump's first impeachment trial, told Haaretz how U.S divisions encouraged Putin to attack Ukraine, and why Israel should adopt a tougher stance on Moscow
Alexander Vindman feels vindicated. Nearly three years after the former National Security Council aide shocked Washington by telling congressional investigators about then-President Donald Trump’s pressuring of Ukraine to open an investigation into the son of his political rival Joe Biden, the world is now witnessing the importance of U.S. military aid to Kyiv – exactly what Trump threatened to withhold if Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy refused to help him.
Trump’s
first impeachment trial, in which Lt. Col. (ret.) Vindman’s testimony played a key role, boiled down to his attempts to withhold Javelin anti-tank missiles from Ukraine, in order to push Zelenskyy to “do him a favor” and taint Biden’s candidacy by digging up dirt on Hunter Biden.
In the five and a half weeks
since Russia invaded Ukraine, those missiles made it possible for the Ukrainian military to reportedly destroy many Russian tanks, seemingly derailing Russian President
Vladimir Putin’s war plans.
In a phone conversation with Haaretz this weekend, Vindman – an Iraq War veteran who immigrated to the United States from Ukraine with his siblings and father at age 3, said the then-U.S. president had been “really cheerleading for Vladimir Putin – in everything from taking Putin’s perspective on election interference to dividing
NATO.” This created an atmosphere of “hyperpolarization in the U.S. political establishment, which suggested that the United States was weak and distracted,” he added.
“It was a hands-off policy under the Trump administration, after the scandal and all the way into the Biden administration,” he said, claiming that the January 6 attack on the U.S. Congress also gave Putin the impression that America was too distracted with internal problems to thwart Russia’s ambitions in Eastern Europe.
Vindman called it “a particularly important milestone in [Putin’s] decision to go after Ukraine, due to the Russian perspective that Ukraine would not garner a great deal of support when there are other bigger issues.
“Trump was out there bandwagoning for Putin in a way that suggested the Republicans would not punish Putin for his aggression, so that half of the political elites in America would not go in heavy. That was Putin’s assumption.”
This hyperpolarization “also undermined Biden’s efforts” in the days and weeks before the invasion, Vindman said, noting that some Republican lawmakers had opposed bills to fund Ukrainian forces and suspend trade with Russia and its ally Belarus.
Vindman, 46, served as director for European affairs on the NSC from July 2018 until February 2020, leaving a few months after testifying in Congress against Trump. He said he had already predicted last year that even if the United States were to apply maximum pressure to deter Russia, moving U.S. forces into Eastern Europe and levying sanctions on Moscow, it probably would not have been enough to avoid the war – “because there was just too much inertia behind it.”
He believed, though, that the Biden administration had not been doing enough to head off the war, instead preferring “an explicit policy of being reactionary” due to a “defeatist attitude” that there was nothing to be done. “They thought: Ukraine is going to lose. It’ll be over in a couple of days; why should we take any risk?” he argued.
Despite that criticism, Vindman said the Biden White House also did some “terribly important things” – such as “setting the foundation for a concerted democratic world to unite around imposing costs” and “sharing intelligence really quickly” to reveal Putin’s plans.
Now, he said, the United States and other democracies should “shed this idea that this is going to be over soon and embrace this notion that Ukraine could actually win. As shocking as that notion is, Ukraine could win. And it’s in the democratic world’s interest to have Ukraine win – because with Ukraine winning, we don’t have to all exist in this environment where ‘might makes right,’ where the strong could prey on the weak. And it really puts Iran and China on their heels.”
Regarding Israel, Vindman said that as a Jew, he wants to support the Jewish state and that at times he finds himself “kind of struggling with how much criticism to offer.”
He argued that it was “very shortsighted to side with an authoritarian regime and sacrifice Israel and the Jewish people’s values based on some misconception of short-term interests, because that is really what’s driving Israel’s foreign policy right now, he said.
The country staying on the sidelines and not adopting a tougher approach toward Russia was “having an impact on the standing of Israel,” he warned. Vindman also noted that Israel had resisted Ukrainian requests for military assistance, and unconfirmed reports that Russia has used Israeli drones.
Ultimately, he said, what is happening in Ukraine is “close to genocide. Putin doesn’t believe in the fact that Ukraine is a sovereign, independent state. And the idea here is: if the free world had done more to defeat Nazism in the 1930s, we wouldn’t have had the Holocaust. We now have an opportunity to prevent genocide in Ukraine.”
orhandragas.com
