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- A former national security official said Trump is partially responsible for the war in Ukraine.
- Alexander Vindman cited Trump’s Ukraine scandal and the Capitol riot as inflection points.
- “We missed an opportunity to harden Ukraine against Russian aggression,” he told The New York Times.
Former Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who testified in former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial, said the division sowed by the Capitol riot paved the way for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine earlier this year.
“Starting just months after Jan. 6, Putin began building up forces on the border. He saw the discord here,” Vindman told The New York Times Magazine in an interview. “He saw the huge opportunity presented by Donald Trump and his Republican lackeys.”
“These folks sent the signal Putin was waiting for,” added Vindman, who previously served as director for European affairs at the United States National Security Council.
His comments come more than a month after Russian forces invaded Ukraine in the early hours of Thursday, February 24.
Multiple former Trump officials told The Times that the many scandals of Trump’s administration contributed to a geopolitical climate which allowed for Putin’s power grab in Ukraine.
Vindman, along with Fiona Hill, former senior director for Europe and Russia at the United States National Security Council, specifically cited Trump’s first impeachment trial — which dealt with allegations that Trump had withheld military aid from Ukraine in order to persuade Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to investigate his political opponent, President Joe Biden — as an inflection point.
The Republican-controlled Senate acquitted Trump in February 2020, which only served to “embolden” the president, according to former National Security Advisor John Bolton.
“This is Trump saying, ‘I got away with it.’ And thinking, If I got away with it once, I can get away with it again,” Bolton told The Times. “And he did get away with it again.”
Trump was impeached a second time in January 2021 on an incitement charge following the deadly Capitol riot. The Republican-controlled Senate acquitted him once more.
Vindman, who was removed from his NSC role after he testified against Trump, said he eventually came to see these individual events — the Ukraine scandal and Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election — as “part of a broader tapestry.”
“The domestic effects of all this are bad enough. But there’s also a geopolitical impact,” he told The Times. “We missed an opportunity to harden Ukraine against Russian aggression.”
Instead, Vindman said Ukraine became “radioactive” for the rest of Trump’s tenure, leaving the country without any “serious engagement” from the US.
“Putin had been wanting to reclaim Ukraine for eight years, but he was trying to gauge when was the right time to do it,” Vindman said.
Bolton echoed his sentiment, telling The Times that Trump’s Ukraine ordeal served to undermine Zelenskyy, who was new to office at the time.
“It made it impossible for Zelenskyy to establish any kind of relationship with the president of the United States — who, faced with a Russian Army on his eastern border, any Ukrainian president would have as his highest priority,” Bolton said. “So basically that means Ukraine loses a year and a half of contact with the president.”
Vindman, who is Ukrainian-American and a Soviet émigré, has previously been outspoken about the role he believes Trump and the Republican Party played in emboldening Russia to invade Ukraine.
In an interview with Salon last month, Vindman said Trump’s refusal to criticize Putin was one of the factors that led Putin to act. He also slammed former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Fox News host Tucker Carlson for praising Putin even amid the burgeoning conflict.
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