The Best Christmas Bargain: A Free Ukraine

By Cliff Kincaid

December 5, 2022

As people buy bargains on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, America is getting one of the best bargains of all time – a free Ukraine and a humiliated Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, whose “neo-con” foreign policy of gobbling up former Soviet republics is on the rocks.

While the forces of freedom may be losing here at home, the forces of freedom in Ukraine are winning. This paradoxical outcome gives us hope during this Christmas season that America can be free again. I made this case in my recent column, “Saving America By Saving Ukraine.”

America couldn’t have been born without foreign support – specifically the French. That is why France is indeed our oldest ally. By the same token, Ukraine will forever be grateful that America was there for Ukraine. And the freedom movement can then expand into more of Europe, even Russia itself. And even into China.

We might even learn a lesson or two about freedom from the long-suffering people of Ukraine. They suffered through one forced starvation, ordered by Stalin, and are preparing to suffer through another phase of suffering ordered by former KGB colonel Putin. We must help them survive.

Currently, even under the impact of the Red Russian Army, backed by drones from Iran, the Ukraine resistance is holding its own and making progress. And all this is costing the United States several billion dollars. What a bargain!

Russia thought Ukraine was ripe for the picking.

As we note in our book, Back from the Dead: The Return of the Evil Empire, Russia in 1994 had signed an international document respecting Ukraine’s territorial integrity. The document, known as the Budapest Memorandum, was made in response to Ukraine giving up its Soviet nuclear weapons and returning them to Moscow. Then-Senators Barack Hussein Obama (D-IL) and Richard Lugar (R-IN) had traveled to Russia and Ukraine in 2005, urging Ukraine to destroy its conventional weapons stockpiles as well.

With the abandonment of its nuclear weapons and destruction of many conventional weapons, Ukraine was ripe for the first Putin invasion in February of 2014. That occurred under President Obama.

Since Biden has been trusting Russia as a player in negotiations for a new Iran nuclear agreement, the odds were that Biden was planning to trust Russia again on Ukraine. Remember that Biden had even encouraged a “minor incursion” into Ukraine.

But Ukraine didn’t comply. The people wanted their freedom, not membership in what Biden in the Wall Street Journal had called his “New World Order.”

Everybody knows that Biden should have given Ukraine far more military assistance, including war planes. He refused. With that kind of support, Ukraine could have forced a Russian retreat from the country months ago.

Still, Ukraine is winning. These people want an anti-communist future. They have toppled hundreds of Lenin statues and want a future without Lenin, Stalin, or Putin.

I sometimes hear from “conservatives” opposed to aid for Ukraine that there is too much corruption there. Yes, they are hobbled by corruption. But so are we. Money is wasted whenever government does anything. But having corruption does not mean we lose sight of what the ultimate fight is all about.

Undoubtedly, money has been wasted in this effort. We deserve and demand a full accounting. But enough arms and money are getting through to make a difference for freedom. And to repeat: except for some American volunteers going to war against Russia, the American Armed Forces do not have to sacrifice their lives and blood to make Ukraine free. The Ukrainians are fighting their own battles.

This is not “neo-conservatism.” This is old-fashioned military aid to a country that wants to be free.

It’s Putin exercising his own “neo-con” strategy of trying to expand his empire. And it’s failing.

I don’t think Biden ever thought Ukraine could be so successful. I think he wanted to tolerate that “minor incursion” and then make a deal with Putin. That would have made Biden’s proposed “New World Order” possible. But Ukraine did not want to fight just to make a deal. The people wanted the Russians out. And they are forcing Biden and Congress by their sheer determination to at least provide the weapons to make ultimate victory possible.

A desperate Putin’s war strategy now is to freeze Ukraine to death by bombing its power grid with Iranian drone weapons.

Writing in Chronicles, in an article entitled, Why Putin Will Have to Go, foregn policy expert Srdja Trifkovic says that the former KGB colonel has totally mismanaged his intervention. He writes: “It is unlikely that Putin can pull off a winter surprise in Ukraine. The Russian army could not hold the suburbs of Kiev in April and Kharkov in September, which were but an hour’s drive from the borders of Belarus or Russia. It abandoned the city of Kherson just five weeks after formally welcoming it into Russia, even though keeping its garrison supplied and reinforcing it was well within its logistic capability. Its capacity for major combined-arms operations is uncertain.”

Trifkovic concludes, “Putin is a failed manager, a security bureaucrat who had never had the capacity to become a statesman. He must go if Russia is to recover from the current impasse created by him, if she is to avoid becoming China’s supplicant, or a brutally carved-up Western colony.”

But Putin, of course, is already a junior partner to dictator Xi.

Victory is within Ukraine’s grasp and that means that Putin could be deposed, put on trial, and Russia’s oppressed population could once and for all reject Russian Communism. It could be the dawning of a new anti-communist age, with dictator Xi the next target and victim of the people.

After that, Biden and his New World Order could be consigned to the ash heap of history.

E-Mail Cliff Kincaid: kincaid@comcast.net