(Column by Quin Hillyer, Feb. 24)
Eleven years to the week after Russian forces moved to steal Crimea from Ukraine, three years to the day after Russia began its murderous attempt to conquer Ukraine entirely, it behooves Louisiana’s House and Senate delegations to stand with Ukraine despite executive branch lies about who started the war.
Solidarity with Ukraine is not only the right thing to do, but also the one most likely to keep service members from Louisiana’s Barksdale Air Force Base from being forced into combat.
The key Louisiana players are all Republicans. For three years, Sens. John Kennedy and Bill Cassidy consistently have supported Ukraine. During those same three years, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and especially Speaker Mike Johnson have ping-ponged back and forth on providing Ukraine with material support. The latter three, along with their other Louisiana colleagues, should join Kennedy now in publicly pushing back against the false message from the Trump administration that Ukraine is responsible for starting the war and that Ukraine needs to make major concessions in negotiations with thuggish Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
Let’s set the record straight: Russia has been the aggressor all along, at times verging on genocidally so. And in 1994, the United States signed an agreement providing “security assurances” for Ukraine’s territorial borders in exchange for Ukraine relinquishing large stores of nuclear weapons with which it otherwise could defend itself. That obligation, especially against Russia’s perfidy, is important.
Ukraine not only lived up to the 1994 bargain, but diligently worked to operate as a pro-Western, representative republic. Russia repeatedly used pressure to try making Ukraine a puppet, but repeatedly was rebuffed by Ukraine’s voters. On Feb. 27, 2014, after Ukraine’s Russian-puppet president, Viktor Yanukovych, defied the overwhelming majority of his nation’s elected parliament and used deadly force against peaceful protests before absconding in fear and shame, Russia took advantage of the unrest to send tanks into Ukrainian Crimea. The Russian seizure of Ukrainian territory was utterly unprovoked.
For the next eight years, Ukraine did nothing to Russia, but merely asked to be left alone while building peaceful trade agreements with Western Europe. The Kremlin-directed attack on Feb. 24, 2022, however, was an attempt to obliterate Ukraine as a separate nation. Russia deliberately bombed hospitals, tortured civilians, used rape as a method of subjugation and abducted many thousands of Ukrainian children….. [The full column is at this link.]
