He lectures me about the virtues of the United States, his adopted country, a democracy that took him in after he and his family had spent a dozen years as stateless people, first as prisoners in a Soviet labor camp near the Arctic Circle and later as refugees displaced by the Second World War. Once here, in just a few short years he went from working in a factory to building a successful business and living the American dream. You can even be president. Today another war ravages the part of Europe where he was born—but this time, the U.
I do not need to wonder what my grandfather, were he alive today, would think of our current government. Not only is the U. In addition to my family connections to the region, I have lived and worked in Ukraine, including in , when, the day after the U. Trump has never visited the country, either as president or as a private citizen. You should have ended it. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal. This narrative is exactly opposite to the facts.
Ukraine engaged in multiple attempts at peace talks with Russia over the years, and even put forward a ten-point peace plan in late , which dozens of countries—including the G7, of which the United States is a member—support.
Trump was parroting the Russian worldview, echoing narratives that Russian media, Russian politicians, and Russian trolls have repeated for the past eleven years. Support our independent coverage of domestic and international politics by signing up for a free or paid Bulwark subscription. His five-year-term was set to expire last year, but in a country being hit with cruise missiles and kamikaze drones on the regular, with many Ukrainians mobilized or temporarily living abroad, and with almost a fifth of its territory under foreign occupation, it is difficult, if not impossible, to hold free and fair elections—not to mention illegal under the Ukrainian constitution.
Trump led an insurrection after he lost the election. While feigning concern about the Ukrainian democratic process, he sides with Putin, a man who has brazenly rigged elections in Russia since Share The Bulwark.
