Dear Editor, 

“He just wants the war to end….Ukraine started this war….Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a dictator. He hasn’t held elections…. I will end this war on Day 1…. You should have ended it three years ago. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal….It’s foolish for Ukraine to expect to be allowed into NATO….It is expected for Ukraine to surrender territory to ‘resolve’ this conflict.” 

Donald Trump and his surrogates just threw Ukraine under the bus and gave away any negotiating points Ukraine could hope for. We saw with our own eyes that Russia invaded Crimea in 2014 and Ukraine in 2022. 

Zelensky was elected in a free and fair election, and Putin is the actual dictator, who has assassinated many of his opponents (think Alexei Navalny, the dissidents he had poisoned in the UK, multiple opposition leaders who mysteriously fell out of windows). Putin controls the media in Russia and holds mock elections.  There is mounting evidence that he is a war criminal. 

Ukraine has a long history of fighting to be an independent republic, first against the Soviet Union when millions were forced onto collective farms or sent to Siberia. An estimated 6 million died, between the gulag and famine. Later, when the Soviet Union dissolved…“Ukraine held the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world....With US intervention and negotiation, Ukraine returned all its nuclear warheads to Russia in exchange for economic aid and security assurances.”  

The US was signatory to this trilateral agreement, which guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

Later, in the Ukrainian presidential election of 2004, Yanukovych, a pro-Putin candidate, ran against Yushchenko, a pro-West candidate, who was poisoned but survived. Putin’s man lost.

 In 2010, with the help of Paul Manafort, a convicted felon, the Putin man won. (Trump pardoned Manafort’s eight felony counts during his first term.) Yanukovych then reneged on a pro-West agreement, accepted a $3 billion loan from Russia, and lied about the Stalin-forced famines of the 1930s. 

This caused massive protests to erupt in the streets, during what was called the “Orange Revolution” or the Revolution of Dignity. Yanukovych was forced to flee to Russia. Later he was tried and convicted in absentia for treason and embezzlement.  

That tipped Putin’s hand. He realized he had lost his puppet in Ukraine and couldn’t gain control by elections, so he decided to invade Crimea with thousands of un-marked soldiers.   

The US, with NATO and EU countries, began a series of sanctions against Russia for this illegal land grab, including seizing assets of Putin’s buddies.  

Putin threw his support behind Trump and sponsored thousands of bots which spread disinformation during the 2016 election, and Trump stunned the world by winning. Trump responded two years later in Helsinki when he denied the evidence of all US intelligence services that had concluded Russia had intervened in that election in favor of Trump. He took Putin’s word over 17 different intelligence services.  

Then, in 2022, Putin began the full-scale invasion of Ukraine that has been going on for three years.  Now that Trump is president a second time, he wants to reverse the sanctions placed on Russia that have been crippling their economy. The Russians are elated. 

Trump just pushed ahead with “peace” talks in Saudi Arabia between the US and Russia only, excluding both Ukraine and the EU .

My question is, what power does Putin hold over Trump that he spouts Russian propaganda and reverses years of cooperation with our allies? These allies fought alongside us in the wars in Viet Nam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Now he is turning his back on them and the international rules-based order that the US helped establish, which says you don’t invade an independent country. Trump bends over backwards to willingly accept this invasion and pretend somehow that Ukraine was responsible for it.   

It's terribly sad that we cannot trust our president to tell the truth that we can see with our own eyes… and his MAGA followers nod and murmur, “Amen!”

Bill Thibedeau

Gilpin County