Russian journalist says families are pressured not to talk about their relatives killed in Ukraine, local papers don’t report their deaths
Bill Bostock – March 30, 2022
Russian journalist says families are pressured not to talk about their relatives killed in Ukraine, local papers don’t report their deathsUkrainian firefighters work amid the rubble in Kyiv on March 21, 2022.FADEL SENNA/AFP via Getty Images
A Russian journalist says families are told to supress news of military relatives killed in Ukraine.
“They say, now there is no need to make a fuss,” the Siberian journalist told the BBC.
Russian state-run media is heavily censoring news of the invasion and is painting it as a success.
A Russian journalist says families of soldiers killed in Ukraine are being told to keep silent about it, and that newspapers are told not to report fatalities.
“All local media outlets were instructed by regional government not to publish any data on losses in Ukraine,” the journalist, who works in the Siberia region, told BBC World correspondent Olga Ivshina.
The journalist said that “there are cases when local officials put pressure on the relatives of the victims, ordering them to stay silent,” according to Ivshina.
“They say, now there is no need to make a fuss, we will find a way to commemorate your boys later.”
After weeks without addressing losses in Ukraine, Russia said last week that 1,351 of its soldiers had died in the offensive.
Its total was vastly less than the numbers Ukraine says it has killed. A NATO official estimated that a more accurate estimate was between 7,000 and 15,000.
According to Ivshina, Russian journalists are also being targeted for reporting on war deaths.
“There is evidence of growing pressure on local journalists in Russia who report on the military losses – some of the earlier publications about soldiers killed in action were deleted. Sometimes it happens in a day or two, sometimes within an hour,” she tweeted.
Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, Iryna Vereshchuk, recently said that Russia was refusing to provide Ukraine with lists of missing Russian troops so that their bodies can be returned, the Guardian reported.
“The Russian authorities don’t want these bodies,” she said.
Russia has also been accused of using mobile crematorium chambers to conceal the true number of troops killed in the Ukraine conflict.
“These guys are carrying those cremation chambers for themselves,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said earlier this month, without providing evidence.
Russian state-run media is painting the invasion of Ukraine, which it calls a “special military operation,” as a success and news of the war is being heavily censored.
Several Russian servicemen seek help avoiding Ukraine war – lawyers
Dasha Afanasieva – March 30, 2022
FILE PHOTO: Russian servicemen march during a rehearsal for the Victory Day military parade in Moscow
LONDON (Reuters) – Several Russian servicemen are seeking legal help to avoid being sent to fight in the war in Ukraine, two lawyers said, after 12 members of Russia’s National Guard were fired for refusing to go.
Lawyer Mikhail Benyash said around 200 people had been in contact to ask what they should do in a similar situation.
Pavel Chikov, another Russia-based lawyer, wrote on Telegram that there were “analogous stories from Crimea, Novgorod, Omsk, Stavropol… The workers are appealing for legal help.”
Reuters could not independently confirm the rush for legal help. The National Guard did not immediately reply to an emailed request for comment.
Ukraine and Western officials have said that Russia’s forces are suffering from severely low morale in what Moscow calls its special operation to disarm and “denazify” its neighbour. The West has cast it as a poorly executed, imperial-style land grab.
In five weeks, Moscow has failed to capture any major cities and on Tuesday said it would sharply reduce operations near Kyiv and the northern city of Chernihiv, although on Wednesday attacks on Chernihiv continued.
On Feb. 25, a day into the invasion, a National Guard commander in the southern Krasnodar region and 11 men from his company refused to follow an order to cross the border to Ukraine, Chikov wrote in an earlier post.
The group said the order was illegal because they didn’t have their international passports and because their main job description was confined to Russia, Chikov wrote. They believed they would be breaking the law by going abroad as part of an armed group.
Reuters could not independently verify the account.
The servicemen were fired, the lawyers said, and went on to file a wrongful dismissal lawsuit. On Tuesday, however, only three of the 12 proceeded with their claim, according to Benyash, who is representing them.
Russia created the National Guard in 2016 to fight terrorism and organised crime. Since then, it has cracked down on peaceful anti-government protests and in 2020 was placed on standby by President Vladimir Putin to intervene in Belarus, which was squashing civil unrest of its own.
(Reporting by Dasha Afanasieva; Editing by Mark Trevelyan and Nick Macfie)
Britain: Russian units suffering losses, forced to leave Ukraine to resupply
March 30, 2022
Residents pass a rust-colored damaged Russian tank in the town of Trostsyanets
The British Ministry of Defense said in an update on Wednesday that Russian forces were suffering losses, forcing them to leave Ukraine “to reorganize and resupply.”
“Russian units suffering heavy losses have been forced to return to Belarus and Russia to reorganize and resupply. Such activity is placing further pressure on Russia’s already strained logistics and demonstrates the difficulties Russia is having reorganizing its units in forward areas within Ukraine,” the British Defense Ministry said in an update released through Twitter.
The British Defense Ministry said that Russia would likely defer to missile strikes and mass artillery to make up for their reduced ground maneuver capability.
“Russia’s stated focus on an offensive in Donetsk and Luhansk is likely a tacit admission it is struggling to sustain more than one significant axis of advance,” the ministry added.
The development comes as the Pentagon said on Tuesday that it did not believe a claim made by Moscow that its troops would be reducing military activity near the cities of Chernihiv and Kyiv, saying that Russia was instead “repositioning” its troops.
“We ought not be fooling – and nobody should be fooling ourselves by the Kremlin’s now recent claim that it will suddenly reduce military attacks near Kyiv or any reports that it’s going to withdraw all of its forces,” Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said.
“We believe this is a repositioning, not a real withdrawal, and that we all should be prepared to watch for a major offensive against other areas of Ukraine. It does not mean the threat to Kyiv is over,” Kirby noted.
The Russian invasion, now in its second month, has remained unsuccessful at seizing Kyiv. The Pentagon told reporters last week that the first Ukrainian city that was taken by Russia was no longer controlled by its forces.
Putin’s senior advisors are feeding him bad information about the Ukrainian invasion because they’re ‘too afraid to tell him the truth,’ a US official says
Natalie Musumeci and John Haltiwanger – March 30, 2022
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting in Moscow on Tuesday.Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP
A US official told reporters Putin is being fed bad information about Russia’s war with Ukraine.
“Putin is being misinformed by his advisors about how badly the Russian military is performing.”
The official said the advisors are “too afraid to tell him the truth” about the failures of the war.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is likely being fed bad information by his top advisors about Russia’s more-than-month-long invasion of Ukraine because they are “too afraid to tell him the truth” about the failures of the war, a US official told reporters, including NBC News and CNN.
“We believe that Putin is being misinformed by his advisors about how badly the Russian military is performing and how the Russian economy is being crippled by sanctions, because his senior advisors are too afraid to tell him the truth,” said the official, citing declassified intelligence.
“Putin didn’t even know his military was using and losing conscripts in Ukraine, showing a clear breakdown in the flow of accurate information to the Russian president,” the official added.
The official also said the US has “information that Putin felt misled by the Russian military,” according to CNN. “There is now persistent tension between Putin and the (Ministry of Defence), stemming from Putin’s mistrust in MOD leadership,” the official added.
Western officials told reporters on Tuesday Russian elites will likely blame each other for Russia’s “disastrous progress” in its war with Ukraine.
“It’s also likely that within the Russian system various elements are going to be blaming each other for the lack of success” in Ukraine, a Western official speaking on the condition of anonymity said.
The official added, “People are going to be being quite defensive about their own failures, and I think, looking to point the finger at others.”
Additionally, that official told reporters the West is “much less certain” that Putin “is getting an honest picture on the ground” in Ukraine.
“That’s one of the reasons why Western media, Ukrainian media, is important in continuing to make sure the reality of this conflict, and how it is causing not only death and destruction to the Ukrainians, but a great deal of death to the Russian forces as well,” the official said.
Putin launched Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24 with Russian troops surrounding and shelling several towns across the eastern European country, including civilian targets.
Putin’s opponents and critics have a history of dying in violent ways or finding themselves in a Russian penal colony, which could help explain why his advisors are apparently hesitant to provide the Russian leader with accurate intel.
Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, a top rival of Putin’s and Russia’s former deputy prime minister under President Boris Yeltsin, was gunned down on a bridge near the Kremlin in 2015. Nemtsov had been a vocal critic of Putin, particularly over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea in 2014.
He also worked to expose the involvement of Russian troops in a war in eastern Ukraine that began that same year. Putin had repeatedly denied that the Russian military had a presence in the Donbas region of Ukraine, despite solid evidence to the contrary.
Alexei Navalny, Putin’s most prominent critic, was poisoned with the Soviet era nerve agent Novichok in August 2020. The Russian opposition leader is now imprisoned in Russia on charges widely decried as politically motivated.
Navalny, who’s called for mass protests against Putin’s unprovoked war in Ukraine, recently had nine more years added to his sentence. The State Department ripped into Russia over the ruling, decrying it as “a disturbing decision” and “another example of the Russian government’s widening crackdown on dissent and freedom of expression, which is intended to hide the Kremlin’s brutal war, and unprovoked war against.”
Putin also signed a law in early March that could potentially land Russians behind bars for up to 15 years for spreading “false information” about the war in Ukraine.
Letter: Lessons to be learned from Ukraine tragedy
Peter Turner – March 29, 2022
The horrifying circumstances we see from Russia’s blatant attack on Ukraine has been heartbreaking to watch. This tragedy is ongoing and may well bring the entire world into a dark period that is beyond any event in human history.
One potentially unstable human being appears to control close to half the world’s nuclear capability. If he’s backed into a corner what will he do? Putin has the power to end human civilization as we’ve known it.
Before 1994, an independent Ukraine owned a sizable chunk of what is now Putin’s nuclear weapons capability. In exchange for promises from the U.S., Britain and Putin himself that they would protect Ukraine and honor its territorial borders, Ukraine turned over its nuclear weapons to Russia. We are seeing how that promise turned out. Clearly if the world survives this crisis all of us will want every country on earth to have nuclear weapons so they won’t be destroyed by a despotic bully.
Who would disagree with that?
The clear precedent is “to stop a bad guy with a gun you need more good guys with a gun.” Unfortunately, the more privately owned guns there are, the more dead and wounded people you get. For the person shot dead, it’s no different than human civilization ending.
No matter how the Ukraine nightmare ends, if you’re a citizen of Iran, Taiwan, Brazil, Mexico, Turkey and all the rest of the 187 non-nuclear armed countries in the world, you’re going to want some nukes. How would you tell them they don’t need them?
When will we act like we know we are all God’s children instead of just saying it and “beat our swords into ploughshares.” Imagine a world where 25 percent of all of human history’s productive capacity went to improving lives instead of weapons of war. Where would we be now compared to seeing Ukraine’s nightmare unfold?
Ships stranded in Ukraine as conflict slows UN rescue efforts
Jonathan Saul – March 29, 2022
FILE PHOTO: Ship is seen near Pivdenny sea port outside Odessa
LONDON (Reuters) – With more than 1,000 seafarers stranded on ships in Ukrainian ports and food supplies running low, the United Nations is pressing for their safe passage out of danger but security risks and disagreements are hobbling those efforts, maritime sources say.
Russia’s military took control of waterways when it invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, in what Moscow calls a “special operation”.
Since then at least 100 foreign flagged ships with over 1,000 seafarers have been stuck inside Ukrainian ports with food supplies running low, shipping officials say.
UN shipping agency the International Maritime Organization (IMO) said this month it would seek to create a safe maritime corridor to enable merchant ships and their crews to sail out of the Black Sea and Sea of Azov without the risk of being hit.
“The IMO Secretariat is working with both Ukraine and the Russian Federation to try and assist the safe departure of the ships and their crew,” an IMO spokesperson said.
“However, at present, the ongoing security risks preclude the option for ships to depart from ports in Ukraine.”
Multiple issues including the risk of mines is complicating efforts, sources with knowledge of the situation say.
In recent days Turkish and Romanian military diving teams have been involved in defusing stray mines around their waters, underscoring the broader dangers.
“Efforts to establish these safe blue corridors are extremely challenging,” the International Chamber of Shipping (ICS) said.
An ICS spokesperson added that it was trying to deliver provisions to affected vessels, “which are in grave danger of running out of food in the coming days as well as ensuring that vessels are not targeted for any kinetic strikes by any party”.
Five merchant vessels have been hit by projectiles – with one of them sunk – off Ukraine’s coast with two seafarers killed, shipping officials say.
London’s marine insurance market has widened the area of waters it considers high risk in the region.
In a circular letter issued to the IMO on Monday, Russia said it had established a humanitarian maritime corridor starting from March 27 “with the aim of ensuring safe passage” from the Ukrainian ports of Chernomorsk, Kherson, Mykolaiv, Ochakov, Odesa and Yuzhne.
Russia said the corridor, which would operate daily, represented an 80-mile long and 3-mile wide marine traffic lane from the assembly area.
“The Russian side calls on competent authorities of the Ukraine to provide for the safety and security of the merchant vessels and their crews transition to the assembly area,” it said in the circular.
Ukraine’s Maritime Administration is aware of Russia’s announcement, its deputy head Victor Vyshnov said, which was first made by Russian warships to commercial ships last week.
The IMO spokesperson said its Secretariat had circulated Russia’s communication.
But Vyshnov said any boundaries for the corridor announced by Russia had not been agreed by Ukraine.
“This is just a new sign of Russian propaganda,” he told Reuters.
“Due to the ongoing aggression against Ukraine, and Russian mine-laying activities at sea, no one can guarantee shipping safety in this region.”
Vyshnov said there were preconditions for the safe evacuation of ships.
“Russia must fully stop the hostilities, withdraw its troops and ensure the freedom and safety of navigation in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, including by carrying out mine-sweeping or allowing other littoral states to do this job,” he said.
(Reporting by Jonathan Saul; editing by Jason Neely)
Tucker Carlson Goes Big On Protecting Putin With Bizarre Warning
Josephine Harvey – March 29, 2022
Fox News host Tucker Carlson offered a warning on Monday about the repercussions of removing Russian President Vladimir Putin from power, and suggested that Islamic extremists would somehow get hold of the country’s nuclear weapons and use them on Americans.
“So, Russia has a large and restive population of Islamic extremists. Do we think it’s possible that with no one running the country ― because of course we have no chosen successor to Putin ― is it possible, if we did that, that one of those 6,000 nuclear weapons might wind up in the hands of some anti-American terror group and be used against our civilian population here?” he asked. “A nuclear weapon! Well, it’s not just possible, it’s likely.”
Earlier this month, a Mother Jones report revealed a leaked Kremlin memo that directed Russian state-sponsored media to use Carlson’s broadcasts “as much as possible” due to his criticism of the U.S. and NATO and defense of Putin.
Carlson’s scaremongering comments were in response to a speech Biden made in Poland, where he said of Putin: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
White House officials promptly clarified that the remark did not reflect a change in U.S. policy and that Biden was not advocating for regime change in Russia, but that Putin “cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region.”
Other than Carlson, the off-script remark was also blasted by foreign policy experts who warned it was dangerous and would play into Putin’s narrative.
Should Putin lose his grasp on power in Russia, or be assassinated, he would likely be succeeded by another member of the Kremlin elite.
Boxer Vladimir Klitschko Condemns Tucker Carlson and Others Opposing Ukraine Aid: ‘Blood Is on Your Hands’
Harper Lambert – March 28, 2022
Olympic gold medalist and former heavyweight champion boxer Wladimir Klitschko made a strong statement against conservative pundits who don’t believe America should lend support to Ukraine against the Russian invasion.
He spoke out during a Monday appearance on Newsmax TV’s “The Balance.” When host Eric Bolling asked Klitschko about American conservatives – such as Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens – who believe the U.S. should take an isolationist stance on the war, he replied that there’s blood on the hands of anyone who doesn’t stand with Ukraine.
“If you passively observe what is going on, and we do share the same principles of freedom and democratic principles, like the United States, like the Western world, so to speak,” Klitschko said. “If you are passively observing, you are part of this invasion. Blood is on your hands, too.”
He continued, “If you still have business and trade with Russia, and you don’t isolate Russia economically, you’re bringing bullets and rockets into the Russian army’s hands that kills, today, the innocent.”
Earlier in the segment, Klitschko – who is the younger brother of Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko – insisted that Ukraine would remain strong and persevere through the attack.
“We’re going to win this war, we’re going to defend our country, our homes our families, and our children,” he told Bolling. “Ukraine is a free nation and we will stand with it.”
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, Carlson and Owens have echoed Vladimir Putin’s justification of its military action as “self-defense.” Carlson has repeatedly aired a conspiracy theory stating that the U.S. has secret bioweapons labs in Ukraine on his television show. Owens pins the blame for the war on the United States, supporting Putin’s claim that Russia was defending itself against the eastward expansion of NATO.
Currently, the Russian army continues its attack on Ukraine’s forces in the east. Peace talks are scheduled to take place this week in Turkey between Putin and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Some Ukrainians believe Russia is targeting landmarks to erase country from the map
Conor Devlin – March 28, 2022
Kharkiv’s Fine Arts Museum was locked up tight and the workers had gone. It was after midnight on March 3, a week after the Russian army had invaded Ukraine. The two-story museum, with its 25,000 works of art, had seen no damage.
That changed in an instant. A Russian shell exploded nearby, shaking the building and shattering all its windows. Fortunately, the museum’s director, Myzgina Valentyna, and her staff had taken down the art and moved it to a secure location.
Kharkiv’s 17th century Holy Dormition Cathedral was not so lucky. A day before the museum was hit, Russian forces shelled the cathedral as residents hid inside. While no civilians were injured, the attack destroyed the church’s stained-glass windows and badly damaged some decorations.
Valentyna told NBC News the museum cannot be repaired right now. “The situation in the city is very, very difficult,” she said.
Image: Building of the Fine Art Museum damaged by shelling in Kharkiv (Oleksandr Lapshyn / Reuters)
Ukraine is home to seven UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and since the Russians launched their invasion, at least 39 landmarks across the country have been damaged, looted or reduced to ruins, according to the Transatlantic Dialogue Center, a Ukrainian political nonprofit based in Kyiv. On March 23, Mariupol’s city council confirmed via Telegram that the Russian military destroyed the city’s Arkhip Kuindzhi Art Museum, housing over 2,000 exhibits and an extensive collection of works by prominent Ukrainian artists. The fate of the artwork remains unclear.
Targeting historic monuments and cultural heritage sites is a war crime under international law, according to The Hague Convention of 1954. But that all seems to be part of Russia’s plan, some cultural authorities say. “They just want to erase from the map Ukraine — our heritage, our history, our identity and Ukraine as an independent state,” said Iryna Podolyak, Ukraine’s former vice minister of culture, who said Russia’s military seems to be targeting cultural heritage sites in addition to houses, hospitals and schools.
Fire trucks near the Dormition Cathedral after shelling by Russian forces of Constitution Square in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on March 2, 2022. (Sergey Bobok / AFP – Getty Images)
Collateral or intentional damage?
Russia’s military tactics have made it harder to determine whether landmarks are being specifically targeted or whether damage is a byproduct of attacks on the civilian population. Russian forces have shelled nonmilitary areas from long distances in an attempt to demoralize Ukraine and drive civilians out of cities.
Russia has framed the invasion as a rescue of ethnic Russians and a purge of “Nazi” elements from a territory where it has blood and family ties.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told U.N. diplomats via video message on March 1 that “as President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly emphasized, we treat the Ukrainian people, their language and traditions with unfailing respect.”
But on Feb. 21, Putin said in a speech, “There is no nationhood in Ukraine. … Contemporary Ukraine was completely created by Russia … by Soviet Russia.”
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, a professor in Jewish studies at Northwestern University, believes the damage is both collateral and intentional, but “is more likely to be called deliberate destruction.” He notes that Russian authorities have been confiscating textbooks on Ukrainian history from libraries in occupied areas and burning them.
“Putin is absolutely confident, as many Russian bureaucrats [were] in the 1860s,” said Petrovsky-Shtern, “that Ukrainian language doesn’t exist, that Ukrainian people do not exist, that Ukraine is a nonentity and can never be sovereign because there is no such country as Ukraine.”
By leveling the country’s landmarks, some experts argue, Putin will try to redefine Ukraine’s history and culture as Russian. “If we are speaking about Russian politics, during the last few years, we could say that the Russian president and government says there is no Ukrainian culture and everybody is all Russian,” said Igor Kozhan, director general of the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum in Lviv.
Monument of city founder Duke de Richelieu is seen covered with sand bags for protection in Odessa (Liashonok Nina / Reuters)
This reappropriation is part of Putin’s justification for his war of choice, a belief that Ukrainian cultural experts assert is pure fiction. “It is just the imagination of a sick person,” said Podolyak.
Ukrainians have also hurled the Nazi charge right back at the Russians, as they did Saturday after Russia allegedly damaged an important reminder of genocide. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense tweeted on March 26 that the Russians had “fired on and damaged” the Holocaust Memorial at Drobitsky Yar, site of a German massacre of approximately 15,000 Jewish civilians during World War II. “The Nazis have returned,” said the tweet. “Exactly 80 years later.”
Protecting landmarks
As Ukraine’s museums, monuments and heritage sites come under siege, Ukrainians are banding together to protect their landmarks. Peter Voitsekhovsky, an analyst at the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation, a nonprofit, said residents in Odesa had piled sandbags around the city’s famed 19th century Opera House and the iconic statue of Odesa’s founder, the Duke of Richelieu. Voitsekhovsky said that for Odesans, the Richelieu statue holds the same significance as the Statue of Liberty does for Americans. “With Ukraine’s rich history, there are so many places that are symbols for the soul of the nation,” he added. “But you cannot cover the whole country with all its temples, monuments and churches with sandbags.”
In Lviv, a city in western Ukraine that dates to 1237 and is a UNESCO world Heritage site, workers have covered historic statues in protective materials, installed metal sheets over the stained-glass windows in the town’s Latin Cathedral and removed religious icons from the churches. As the Russian army smashed across the border on Feb. 24, Igor Kozhan’s staff sprang into action, securing the windows, strengthening the walls and transporting the National Museum’s collection to a safe place.
Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum (Bernat Armangue / AP file)
Kozhan also helped draw plans to move the collection out of Ukraine to museums in Western Europe as needed. But he believes “the Russian army won’t be shown on our city streets.”
One of the most important heritage sites in all of Ukraine is St. Sophia’s Cathedral in Kyiv. Over 1,000 years old, this gold-domed church was once the center of Ukrainian Orthodox Christianity and is home to a spectacular collection of frescoes, icons and mosaics. But one mosaic stands out. It depicts the Virgin Mary on a gold background with her hands raised toward the sky.
Yuri Shevchuk, a lecturer of Ukrainian at Columbia University, explained that Ukrainians refer to this mosaic as the “Indestructible Wall.” Local legend says that as long as this wall remains standing, Ukraine will never perish.
Romney: NATO would rethink U.S. relationship if Trump wins in 2024
David Knowles, Senior Editor – March 29, 2022
Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said Tuesday in a CNN interview that if former President Donald Trump won the 2024 election, the NATO alliance would be significantly damaged. Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, said NATO members would wonder whether they could continue to count on the United States.
“If he were to come back as the U.S. president, I think it would represent a pretty dramatic departure for the world, and they would rethink whether they can count on the United States to lead NATO to lead other nations as they push back against China and against Russia,” Romney said
Sen. Mitt Romney. (Greg Nash/Pool via Reuters)
During his presidency, Trump downplayed the U.S. commitment to NATO and publicly criticized the alliance, primarily over the perception that member states were not contributing enough financial support. He also flirted with the idea of withdrawing the U.S. from NATO, according to former national security adviser John Bolton.
“In a second Trump term, I think he may well have withdrawn from NATO,” Bolton told the Washington Post in early March. “And I think [Russian President Vladimir] Putin was waiting for that.”
Trump’s critics often argue that Putin’s top strategic priority was to weaken the NATO alliance, and Trump was seen as an ally in attaining that goal.
As Putin massed troops along Ukraine’s borders with Russia and Belarus earlier this year and summarily declared two eastern regions of Ukraine as independent states, Trump lavished praise on Putin.
“I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, ‘This is genius.’ Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine — of Ukraine — Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful,” Trump said on “The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show.” “He used the word ‘independent,’ and ‘We’re gonna go out and we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna help keep peace.’ You gotta say that’s pretty savvy.”
As global opinion of Putin plummeted following the start of the Russian invasion, however, Trump sought to portray himself as NATO’s savior.
Former President Donald Trump holds a rally in Commerce, Ga., on March 26. (Alyssa Pointer/Reuters)
“I hope everyone is able to remember that it was me, as President of the United States, that got delinquent NATO members to start paying their dues, which amounted to hundreds of billions of dollars,” the former president said in a written statement. “There would be no NATO if I didn’t act strongly and swiftly.”
There is no evidence to back up Trump’s claim that NATO was in any danger of disbanding over the issue of dues.
In the run-up to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, NATO members banded together in their opposition to a Russian attack, and have acted largely in unison with regard to sanctions on the Russian government.
Asked whether Trump had permanently damaged NATO during his presidency, Romney responded, “Well, I think what’s happened to NATO is that they have said, ‘Can we rely on the U.S.?’ And is this America First idea, which is the president saying to everybody, ‘Hey, go off and do your own thing,’ I think that approach is one that frightens other members of NATO, and they wonder, are we committed to NATO and to our mutual defense, or are we all going to go off on our own?”
NEWS: @MittRomney tells me NATO would be permanently damaged if Trump is elected president again
Trump’s warm public approach to Putin does not appear to be going away. On Monday, Trump solicited help from the Russian autocrat to obtain damaging information about President Biden’s son Hunter.
While Trump hasn’t committed to run for a second term in 2024, he indicated at a political rally in Georgia over the weekend that he “may just have to do it again.”
