Friday, November 8, 2019

Has Presdient Trump Helped Ukraine?

U.S. President Donald Trump shakes hands with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky during a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Wednesday. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

Byron York, Washington Examiner: Testimony: How Trump helped Ukraine

One notable and little-reported conclusion emerging from the House Democratic impeachment proceedings is a consensus among some foreign policy professionals that President Trump's Ukraine policy has been an improvement over President Barack Obama's.

Ukraine was an occasionally hot issue in the 2016 campaign for all the wrong reasons. At the Republican convention, a false headline in the Washington Post, "Trump campaign guts GOP's anti-Russia stance on Ukraine," gave birth to a false narrative that candidate Trump, desperate to appease Vladimir Putin, would undermine U.S. support for Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression.

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WNU Editor: I know among my friends, family, and contacts in Ukraine, they all share the same opinion that President Trump has aided Ukraine more than anyone else. They also have trouble understanding the U.S. media and Democrat political narrative that President Trump is a risk to U.S. national security when it comes to Ukraine. I say this because from their point of view President Trump has been far more generous in aid than his predecessor President Obama. My answer to all of this is always the same. Welcome to U.S. politics.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

any solid evidence other than a friend here or there said this and that?

Anonymous said...

While the Obama administration was criticized for its refusal to provide lethal assistance to Ukraine, it did provide more than $100 million in security assistance, as well as a significant amount of defense and military equipment.

By March 2015, the US had committed more than $120 million in security assistance for Ukraine and had pledged an additional $75 million worth of equipment including UAVs, counter-mortar radars, night vision devices and medical supplies, according to the Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency.

That assistance also included some 230 armored Humvee vehicles.

Trump appears to be echoing a critique leveled at the Obama administration by the late Republican Sen. John McCain. "The Ukrainians are being slaughtered and we're sending blankets and meals," McCain said in 2015. "Blankets don't do well against Russian tanks."

While it never provided lethal aid, many of the items that the Obama administration did provide were seen as critical to Ukraine's military. Part of the $250 million assistance package that the Trump administration announced (then froze and later unfroze) included many of the same items that were provided under Obama, including medical equipment, night vision gear and counter-artillery radar.

Bob Huntley said...

The cookies, don't forget the cookies.