Trump didn't cause the Ukraine war

First of all, Russia had grabbed Crimea and started a long-running war in Eastern Ukraine in 2014, long before anyone had any idea that Donald Trump would run for president, let alone win. It clearly didn’t take Trump to give Putin the idea that he could get away with invading Ukraine — he invaded Ukraine and got away with it under the administration of Barack Obama, when, by the way, Joe Biden was vice president.

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It is now widely acknowledged that the sanctions back then were too timid, a concession that Obama officials let Putin off too lightly. Surely that must have figured into the Russian leader’s calculation of whether to invade yet again.

Then there’s the fact that Barack Obama steadfastly resisted providing Ukraine lethal aid — after it had already been invaded. Bipartisan opposition to Obama didn’t move him. He believed deeply in the appeaser’s logic that it would be too “provocative” to give Ukraine weapons simply to defend itself.

Again, Trump had nothing to do with this misbegotten decision; indeed, he criticized it.

Trump’s offense in 2019 was to delay military aid — including Javelin missiles — that Congress had approved for Ukraine, in a reversal of Obama’s policy. If Trump never should have engaged in this self-interested gamesmanship, he released the assistance by September 2019.

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