For the sake of balance, Kyiv Post is reprinting the view of a retired American Ukrainian military officer who supports Donald Trump in the US presidential election.
November 3, 2024
Articles and letters written in The Ukrainian Weekly in support of Kamala Harris were filled with emotional viewpoints, but they did not point to a realistic view of events. Some who do not like Donald Trump feel validated to make stuff up to make stuff happen.
I spent the 1990s in Ukraine with the United States Army and the United States Air Force on a variety of missions. I was in Ukraine when former U.S. President Bill Clinton managed to convince Ukraine to give up their nuclear weapons, not to the United States, but to Russia.
At meetings with Ukrainian generals, the U.S. warned Ukraine to look after their own best interests, but the Ukrainians said they trust Mr. Clinton and signed the Budapest Memorandum in 1994. This was the first step to war with Russia, as Mr. Clinton showed weakness and lacked leadership.
In 2007, U.S. President George W. Bush supported North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) membership for Ukraine. This would have eliminated any invasion by Russia in 2014 and 2022. However, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel blocked the move. Mr. Bush showed poor leadership and allowed Ms. Merkel to prevail.
In 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Crimea and the eastern provinces of Ukraine. At that time, Barack Obama was president of the United States and Joe Biden was the vice president. Mr. Obama abrogated the Budapest Memorandum by not adhering to its intent, and, in so doing, they bear responsibility for the integrity of Ukraine’s borders. Instead of helping the country, Messrs. Obama and Biden told Ukraine to “stand down.” Instead of offering significant aid, Mr. Obama sent blankets. Ukraine was shocked. This was another reason for war in 2022. Messrs. Obama and Biden betrayed Ukraine, and it showed Putin that America was not leading the free world.
Ukraine realized that it cannot trust the Democrats, so they began to train troops with newfound vigor. A friend of mine, who retired from the U.S. 1st Special Forces Group, was in Ukraine. He helped train the country’s Azov Brigade during the early days of the 2014 Russian invasion. The brigade continues to fight to this day.
Mr. Trump was elected president of the United States in 2016 and began to study geopolitical scenarios across the globe. He realized that NATO had become lazy and inefficient, that many countries were not close to providing the alliance with the required financial contribution of 2 percent of each country’s gross domestic product, and that military training was not taking place. These nations preferred to spend their defense allocations on social welfare programs. The warrior ethos was replaced by apathy and indifference coupled with drugs and hedonism.
After a routine conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Mr. Trump sent Ukraine more than 600 Javelins in 2017. Mr. Biden refused to help Ukraine in 2022. It was Mr. Trump who saved Ukraine in the initial weeks of the invasion.
The Democrats could not stomach Mr. Trump, though he improved the U.S. economy and told NATO members to shape up. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi decided to impeach Mr. Trump over his conversation with Mr. Zelenskyy, though Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter, sat on the board of directors of a Ukrainian company.
During Mr. Trump’s presidency, he sent the 10th Special Forces Group to help Ukraine. Poland was very helpful by sending groups of “GROM,” or Polish Special Forces soldiers, to train Ukrainian troops. Mr. Trump may have called Putin “smart,” which was a negotiation tactic, but he also took him to task.
In one conversation, Mr. Trump warned Putin not to attack Ukraine.
Months before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Mr. Zelenskyy begged Mr. Biden for military aid. Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris refused. They firmly believed that Ukraine would fall in three days, so why help? Thanks to Mr. Trump, Mr. Zelenskyy used the Javelins he received back in 2017 to save Kyiv.
How did Ukraine survive in early 2022? My friend from the 1st Special Forces Group was not surprised; he was proud of the Ukrainian military and how they used hit-and-run tactics. They morphed into a force that used fast-hitting, lethal tactics, but only when they got the supplies they needed.
Where do we stand today? Mr. Biden has been slow-walking aid to Ukraine since the beginning of the war. He was afraid of offending or provoking Putin. Somehow, they believed that a war of attrition would be the best option for Ukraine. Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris have blood on their hands for creating this stalemate.
Will Ms. Harris do better? Of course not. She is a carbon copy of Mr. Biden and his disastrous policies. Remember Afghanistan? The press wants you to forget, but Putin saw weakness in both of them. He will be happy to have Ms. Harris at the helm of the United States.
Americans of Ukrainian descent should all vote for Mr. Trump. He is not a perfect person, as no one is. However, he is a leader, though you may not like the structure of his sentences or his energy. His running mate, J.D. Vance, was not my first choice, but we have what we have. Mr. Trump is reaching out to Nikki Haley, and she will make a great secretary of the State Department. Ms. Haley knows international politics and she is a strong supporter of Ukraine.
Mr. Trump understands that the United States is up against an evil coalition of Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. We need peace in the world, but Russia must be defeated. U.S. industries must come home from China, especially pharmaceutical companies. North Korea must suffer the consequences of sending troops to Ukraine. Iranian bomb-making factories must be destroyed, and their nuclear weapons program has to be pulverized.
When Mr. Trump was president, there were no new wars. Mr. Trump planned to leave Afghanistan with honor, and not leave weapons worth over $85 billion in that country, which could have helped Ukraine. Mr. Biden did not care. That is why everyone needs to put Mr. Trump back in the White House.
Col. Roman Golash (retired) was deputy brigade commander of the 332nd Medical Brigade of the U.S. Army in Nashville, Tenn. Before that, he was assigned to a terrorist mitigation group with the U.S. Fifth Army. During mobilization in 2005, he was part of the First United States Army, training the 34th Infantry Division for duties in Iraq. He also participated in eight missions to Ukraine in the 1990s.
This opinion piece is reprinted with permission from the US publication The Ukrainian Weekly.
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/41563
Col. Roman Goulash has many interesting and truthful points, which deserve to be illuminated.
Although he claims that the Clinton administration managed to convince Ukraine to surrender its nukes, which is not true, Ukraine having been pressed to do so, many other things he mentions are true and should never be forgotten. Ukraine was deceived by Clinton, Busch, and Obama, and has seen very lackluster support from Biden, including his bizarre and militarily preposterous ban on striking enemy targets deep in his territory.
The Colonel is also being quite unfair to Harris, who, as vice president, is never really involved in any domestic or foreign policies. It’s anyone’s guess how she will act once elected.
Trump? It’s just as much of a guess, what he will and will not do in this war, if he gets elected. Certain people have confidence that he’ll be better than Biden. This would not be a hard thing to do.
Personally, I am very guarded about Trump, considering all the negative things that he has said about Ukraine, the positive things he’s said about Putler and mafia land, and also due to all the anti-Ukrainian people he’s got on his team. And not to mention Trump’s deteriorating mental capacity.
There is no doubt whatsoever about the voting choice of Russian-Americans; led by people like Michael Savage.
There are two prominent historians who understand more about the trajectory of Russia-Ukraine history than almost anyone else. They are Anne Applebaum and Timothy Snyder.
Ukrainian-Americans should study their body of work before voting. So should all Americans desiring for Ukraine to survive; or hopefully even thrive as a viable, free state.
Tim Snyder produced a video guide that sets out the known positions of Trump on Ukraine and Russia going back decades. It’s just a few minutes long :
https://snyder.substack.com/p/trump-and-ukraine-a-voters-guide?utm_source=podcast-email&publication_id=310897&post_id=150595153&utm_campaign=email-play-on-substack&r=1fx5so&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
The fact that Trump broke the law while in office should’ve disqualified him to run for office again. At least, the American voters should’ve disqualified him by not voting for the crook.
There is a lot of inaccuracies and misinformation in the generals statements, but regardless of how you feel make sure you vote and make your voice heard.
Correction: opinion of an American/Ukrainian military officer, not a general.
Correction: “Col. Roman Golash” is named in the italics at the end of the opinion piece.
Yeah I just ran back and saw it and corrected my corrective statement lol Sir Larry.🙂
Still waking up and in need of more coffee. Sir OFP mentioned his name also and I missed that too.🤣
😂 It was the silly autocorrect!
Lol
So much MAGAt delusion. Much of it has been discussed here before.
One I don’t think has been addressed: “no new wars”
But it was certainly not for lack of trying. Trump might not have started any wars, but he massively inflamed existing ones—and came close to catastrophic new ones.
Let’s review the record. Despite inveighing against “endless wars,” Trump massively escalated the country’s existing wars in multiple theaters, leading to skyrocketing casualties. In Afghanistan, he substantially upped the amount of airstrikes, leading to a 330 percent increase in civilian deaths. In Yemen, he escalated both U.S. counterterrorism activities and support for the devastating Saudi-led war against the Houthis. According to the United Kingdom’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism, there were 2,243 drone strikes in just the first two years of Trump’s presidency, compared with 1,878 in the entire eight years of the Obama administration.
Trump also came very close to tweeting the country into a nuclear war with North Korea in late 2017 and early 2018, a completely self-inflicted incident that seems to have been bizarrely memory-holed. Trump “didn’t merely threaten to attack North Korea if it possessed the ability to strike the U.S.,” wrote the Intercept’s Jon Schwarz. “He ordered the Pentagon to develop new plans, over the resistance of then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis, to do so.” According to former Pentagon official and Asia security expert Van Jackson, who wrote a book about the crisis, “The world was closer … to nuclear war, at that time than any time, since the Cuban Missile Crisis. And it was totally avoidable.”
In 2018, Trump bowed to Washington’s neoconservative hawks and withdrew from a working nonproliferation agreement with Iran, resulting in Iran scaling up both its provocative activities in the region and its nuclear program. According to current U.S. assessments, Iran could now make enough fissile for one nuclear bomb in under two weeks, should it decide to do so. Under the agreement Trump abandoned, it would’ve taken Iran at least a year.
The list goes on: Trump put the U.S. on a path to “great-power competition” with China, incited a failed coup in Venezuela, and increased support for reckless, repressive clients around the world. Indeed, Trump was seen as such a dangerous interventionist that Congress passed the first war powers resolution in history to try to end his support for the Yemen war. Less than a year later, Congress passed a second resolution to brush him back from a potential war with Iran after he OK’d the assassination of Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Commander Qassem Soleimani. Both measures passed with Republican support, making opposition to Trump’s militarism one of the very few areas of bipartisan agreement during his administration.
“Instead of offering significant aid, Mr. Obama sent blankets.”
That’s a lie – although President Obama only sent non-lethal aid (partly due to concerns that the anti-tank missiles could fall into the wrong hands), he did send a significant amount of aid, that included US personnel to train Ukrainian forces, Humvees, night-vision goggles, advanced radar, patrol boats, body armor, and humanitarian assistance. A lot more than just “blankets”.
Olga Oliker, the director for Europe and Central Asia at the International Crisis Group, told Foreign Policy that nonlethal aid is actually considered more helpful than the Javelins, even as Ukrainian officials have celebrated their arrival.
“While generals and politicians in Kyiv played up the Javelins, in my own experience, soldiers in the field talked more about getting insufficient quantities of the nonlethal aid that they really needed — secure communications, armored vehicles, counterbattery radars,” Oliker said.
https://www.businessinsider.com/republicans-leaving-out-key-detail-trump-javelin-sale-to-ukraine-2019-11
“Trump […] began to study”
Trump, study? LOL. Lost all credibility right there.
“Mr. Biden refused to help Ukraine in 2022.”
It’s been well documented here how hard President Biden worked to forestall the invasion.
“told NATO members to shape up.”
trumpkov had weakened NATO and vowed to pull the U.S. out of it if he won a second term.
“U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi decided to impeach Mr. Trump over his conversation with Mr. Zelenskyy”
Congress decided, not just Nancy Pelosi. And it was specifically over trumpkov’s attempt to coerce President Zelenskyy into announcing a phony investigation in order to hurt trumpkov’s political rival.
“In one conversation, Mr. Trump warned Putin not to attack Ukraine.”
Or so he claims; there’s no evidence of this.
“His running mate, J.D. Vance”
…is another Ukraine-hater. It seems likely that trumpkov wouldn’t make it through 4 years, which would put Vance in control.
“Mr. Trump planned to leave Afghanistan with honor”
LOL. As has been posted here in the past:
Let’s not forget some Afghanistan withdrawal facts:
trumpkov not Biden: Negotiated directly with the Taliban terrorists and excluded the Afghan army.
trumpkov not Biden: Drew down US forces from 13,000 to 2,500, making them vulnerable to attack.
trumpkov not Biden: Ordered the release of 5,000 Taliban fighters from prison, one of whom would become the new leader of Afghanistan.
trumpkov not Biden: Wanted to invite the Taliban leaders to Camp David on the anniversary of September 11th. Seriously.
trumpkov not Biden: Agreed to a May 1st exit from Afghanistan, then bragged that he didn’t need an exit strategy.
trumpkov not Biden: Refused to brief Biden’s incoming team on the situation in Afghanistan.
trumpkov not Biden: Shut down every airbase in Afghanistan except one, crippling the US’s ability to extract its assets safely.
“Americans of Ukrainian descent should all vote for Mr. Trump.”
Americans who support Russia should all vote for Mr. Trump.
Americans who support fascism should all vote for Mr. Trump.
Americans who support Ukraine should all vote for VP Kamala Harris.
Americans who support democracy should all vote for VP Kamala Harris.