My letter to President Trump

On the folly of placating Russia: My Letter to President Trump et al. 

Christopher Bakes

Trial Attorney | Keynote Speaker | Many Topics, Including Yours

February 28, 2025

CHRISTOPHER J. BAKES

Attorney | 2020 West El Camino Avenue, Suite 700 | Sacramento, CA 95833

Email Christopher.Bakes@redacted* | Direct 916-646-0000 | Cell 415-722-0000

Admitted in the states of New York and California, in the District of Columbia, and to the United States Supreme Court.

February 21, 2025

VIA FEDEX

The President

The Vice-President

The Honorable Marco A. Rubio

The Honorable Lindsay Graham

Re: Ukraine and D-Day.

Dear Mr. President, Mr. Vice-President, Mr. Secretary, and Senator Graham:

As an attorney raised by the working class and taught by extraordinary Catholic clergy, I was raised and taught by the generation that had fought and won World War II, known to us as just “the War.” For us, one day symbolized the courage of that age. June 6, 1944, date of the Allied landings at the Normandy beaches to liberate Europe from a brutal, crude, and cruel dictator. The Allies won. Hitler was beaten.

Yet here we are today, in the year 2025, 80 years later. A brutal dictator again has his foot on the neck of Europe, because on February 22, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. It continues to occupy it. Russia bombs innocents and destroys their cities. But how and why? How did it turn out this way? Why are we still left with these last remnants of the war D-Day was launched to end?

Here is why. We the western Allies ended up leaving one dictator in place – Soviet Russia’s Joseph Stalin, with whom Adolf Hitler had co-started the War in the first place. Their 1939 pact was a warning to the world that here was not one, but two brutal dictators who would both need to be dealt with. We dealt with one but not the other. We left Stalin and Soviet Russia in place, dictator and aggressor state. Surely this would come back to haunt us.

It has, many times. Without American help, Hitler would have defeated Russia. But with American help, Russia was not defeated and went on to participate in the liberation of Europe, or so we thought. It was given a place at the Allied negotiating table as an equal. Treaties were struck and the postwar order was launched in this era of hope. But Russia promptly breached the peace of the postwar order. It renounced all of its treaty obligations. It refused to leave the countries it had “liberated” and imposed virulent communism on all of them, and then it did far more. It tried to starve West Berliners into accepting Soviet occupation (1948). It built the Berlin Wall (1961). It invaded Hungary in response to stirrings of freedom (1956). It ordered placement of nuclear weapons in Cuba for use against the United States (1962). It invaded Czechoslovakia just as it had Hungary (1968). It ordered the Polish freedom movement Solidarity banned and crushed (1982). And for 45 years after D-Day it continued to occupy “liberated” eastern Europe until finally, in 1989, Soviet Russia collapsed. Vladimir Putin has made no secret of his grief over this collapse. He wants it all back. He is Tsar and Stalin, predator of a kind now unknown in the Western countries.

Those in American leadership who over time boldly stood up to Soviet Russia are those that we today particularly honor. In this group there are two: John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. They inspired because their rhetoric rose above the moment to remind that freedom and liberty would defeat anything that Russia had on offer. John Kennedy’s 1963 Berlin speech about American freedom and liberty – “Ich bin ein Berliner” – and Ronald Reagan’s 1987 Berlin speech demanding that “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” were majestic precisely because they were both bold and soaring. Reagan and Kennedy are lionized. Their words on those two separate Berlin days are their most honored.

History has not been kind to the foolish Presidents who could not muster the right words or strength of will. George H. W. Bush had nothing to say when the walls of communism finally fell. George W. Bush all but ignored Putin’s 2008 invasion of sovereign Georgia. Barack Obama did nothing as Russia aided Syria’s use of chemical weapons after he had promised to act. He did little when Russia invaded and occupied Ukraine in 2014, yet another Russian breach of a treaty. These Presidents were rudderless, paralyzed and mute. Here were the lower performance tiers of the American Presidency.

Russia has an uncanny ability to make fools of American Presidents. But Russia in predator mode also manages to offer those of the presidential top tier an unmatched opportunity to call Russia out, reject its violence, call it for what it is, and demand that it end its predations, just as Presidents Kennedy and Reagan did. The final promise of D-Day will not truly be complete until a strong and noble someone deals forcefully and effectively with Russia, 1939’s “other dictatorship.” Russia has no justification in the modern age for its predations, its sabotage, its poisonings, its threats against neighbors, or its arrests of Americans.

After the War, the Western allies “deNazified” Germany – a nation that had spent only 12 years being Nazi. What are we to do with a Russia that has been predatory for centuries? I do not exactly know. But the first step is to remove it from Ukraine.

And no inglorious American exits. None of us can unsee Mr. Biden’s Afghanistan debacle.

Very truly yours,

Christopher J. Bakes

CJB:amf

*email and telephone numbers redacted