This is a regular reminder that no US politician was nicer to Putin than Obama. (George W Bush runs a close second). Obama worked for years to disarm Ukraine before the 2014 invasion, forcing Ukrainians to give up large stocks of weapons precisely in the areas that Putin would claim. (Yes, Ukrainians were mega stupid to agree. But cheating stupid people and getting them killed is still not OK. There’s no defense in law based on the “yes, I murdered him but he deserved it because he was too trusting and dumb.”)
As a Senator for Illinois, Obama personally supervised the disarming of the region that borders – guess whom? – Russia.
In Donetsk, I stood among piles of conventional weapons that were slowly being dismantled,” Barack Obama, then a newly elected United States senator from Illinois, said in 2005 after his first foreign trip.
The future president visited the eastern Ukrainian city, the future hotbed of pro-Russian separatism, and helped secure $48m to fund the further destruction of 400,000 small arms, 1,000 portable anti-aircraft missiles and 15,000 tonnes of ammunition.
Here is photographic evidence:
Donetsk, eh? Donetsk has been under Russian control since 2014 as a result. As a resident of Illinois, I find it hard to understand why the senator of our state – and then the president of our country – would be so dedicated to disarming Ukraine. He probably thought Illinois had no bigger problems than Ukraine’s capacity to defend Donetsk.
Obama actually helped invest US money, our taxpayer money into disarming Ukraine. This doesn’t seem to bother anybody besides me, so I keep bringing it up because I can’t get over the absolute insanity of the US politics where we pay first to disarm and then to arm Ukraine, and this all happens within the same short period of time.
No photograph of this kind exists featuring Trump, by the way. To the contrary, Trump was the first US politician to start re-arming Ukraine in 2016.
Obama made it clear recently that Harris is going to continue whatever he started. More photographic evidence from Obama himself:
Now, attention, an important question: why would Putin not want Harris as president? Again, we have incontrovertible proof brought us yesterday by the Biden DOJ that delivered evidence of Russia funding Lauren Chen’s anti-Trump rhetoric.
Why, in the face of all this, aren’t we discussing whether Obama was a Russian asset? Not a spy, obviously, but definitely an asset. How else can we possibly describe all this? Russia annexed the Crimea and invaded the Donbass during the Obama presidency. The massacre of Ilovaisk where Putin blatantly defied the agreements with the US happened in 2014. There were no consequences to Putin over that. There was no Crimea, Donetsk, Ilovaisk or Lugansk during the Trump administration. I’d be the first person to wail to the skies if there were. What did Trump ever do for Russia that’s remotely approaching all this?
I criticize Trump all the time. I think everybody is tired already of my litany of complaints about Trump but I can repeat it if necessary. But on this issue, which obviously matters to me enormously, I just can’t see how Trump was worse for Ukraine than Obama.
To conclude, here’s the story of the Ukrainian photographer who took the famous picture of Obama at the weapons depot in Donetsk:
A local photographer named Sergey Vaganov took pictures of Obama in the arms depots.
A decade later, Vaganov fled a Russian-backed separatist conflict in Donetsk and, in March, barely survived the Russian siege of Mariupol.
“I was waiting for the relief [of death]. I had these half-suicidal thoughts,” Vaganov told Al Jazeera, describing how he and his wife, Iryna, waited out Russian air raids in their ice-cold apartment with windows shattered by shelling.
The siege of Mariupol took place in 2022, during the Biden presidency. Please, tell me some more about how it’s Trump Ukrainians should fear.
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