Dear Editor:
It is one thing to state a fact, such as that former President Barack Obama agreed to provide Ukraine with non-lethal military aid but not lethal aid, or to state an opinion, such as that this decision about lethal aid was a mistake, a criticism I share. It is quite another to spout nonsense about why Ukraine didn’t respond militarily upon Russia’s occupation of Crimea, as Messrs. Mirchuk and Martyniuk have done in The Weekly.
Ukraine did not respond militarily because it simply didn’t have any military readiness. It only had about five thousand battle ready troops. In the months following the Russia instigated and supported military revolt in Donbas, Ukrainian civil society and the diaspora had to raise funds to buy basic necessities for Ukraine’s military. And, thousands of volunteers were needed to help defend Ukraine because its military had been stripped of assets and run into the ground. The U.S. didn’t do that, Ukraine’s previous presidents and other officials had done that.
Furthermore, the attempt to tar a previous Democratic administration while remaining blissfully silent about the more recent outrageous attempts by former President Donald Trump to extort Ukraine, drag it into U.S. domestic squabbles and then lie about it having been Ukraine, not Russia, that had intervened in the 2016 election is, shall we say, less than candid?
During the last four years we have been inundated by more than enough lies from Mr. Trump and his Republican enablers to last us a hundred years. Let’s not build upon that woeful record.
Summit, N.J.