Setting the record straight

| 3:00 pm EST March 5, 2022
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Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Semyon Vindman was born in Kyiv, Ukraine. He was brought to the United States at the age of 3 after the death of his mother and he attended school there. He excelled academically and finished his formal education at Harvard. Commissioned in 1999 as an infantry officer, Vindman received a Purple Heart for wounds he received from an IED attack in the Iraq War in 2004. Vindman became a foreign area officer specializing in Eurasia in 2008, and assumed the position of Director for European Affairs with the NSC in 2018.

For telling the truth at the first impeachment of Donald Trump, Colonel Vindman was subjected to a relentless campaign of bullying, intimidation and retaliation by the Trump administration. He took an early retirement when it became clear his promotion to the rank of full colonel would remain permanently blocked as long as Donald Trump was in office.

Vindman honoured both his adoptive country and the country of his birth by refusing to lie under oath despite enormous pressures to do so. He told exactly what happened, that the president of the United States tried to blackmail the president of Ukraine for personal and political gain. Vindman was despicably reviled with words and tweets by the criminal in the Oval Office and his career was ruined. The United States military shamefully refused to back him up.

This brief vignette was brought to you by a recent and pressing need to set the record straight. Today Donald Trump is bragging in the media and to anyone who will listen that had he remained in office, Russia would never have invaded Ukraine. Yet the only business Trump ever had with Ukraine while he was in office was to try to blackmail Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, by withholding a consignment of anti-tank Javelin missiles Ukraine desperately needed to fight the Russians. In exchange for the missiles Trump wanted Zelenskyy to announce (not carry out, just announce) an investigation into Joe Biden’s son Hunter.

The only dealings Trump had with Russia while in office was to do Vladimir Putin’s bidding by, among other things, siding with Putin at Helsinki against 17 different American national security agencies, undermining and criticising NATO whenever he could, pressuring members of the G7 conference to let Putin back in, and praising and envying Russia’s murderous and evil dictator every chance he got with words and deeds.

Ukraine-born Lt. Colonel Vindman was and remains an American hero. Vladimir Putin is a murdering monster who has imperilled the safety of the entire world. Donald Trump is a rapist, murderer and detestable traitor who remains Putin’s strongest and most influential American ally in the midst of Putin’s attack on the sovereign, peaceful and democratic nation of Ukraine. Just in case anyone is unclear on the truth of the matter and needed a brief refresher in recent American history, I thought I might take a minute to set the record straight. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.