Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., wants to be clear: cutting off intelligence sharing with Ukraine “will cost lives.”
Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was responding to the revelation by CIA Director John Ratcliffe on Wednesday that the Trump administration is longer sharing intelligence with Ukraine, in line with the effort by the Trump team to give Russia leverage vis-à-vis not only Ukraine, but NATO.
“I think on the military front and the intelligence front, the pause that allowed that to happen I think will go away and I think we’ll work shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine as we have to push back on the aggression that’s there, put the world in a better place for these peace negotiations to move forward,” Ratcliffe said in an interview with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo.
The “peace negotiations” line is cover for getting Ukraine and Europe to sign on to the demands that Vladimir Putin has had since before he had his military launch its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and Ukraine is just the starting point for what Putin wants.
Not only does Putin not want Ukraine in NATO, he also wants NATO to withdraw military forces and assets deployed to former Soviet Eastern bloc satellite countries – and if you need to know the why there, it would be, to make it easier for him to do what he is doing to Ukraine to those countries.
Putin wants to rebuild the old Soviet empire, and he needs the US and the Western European powers to stand down.
He’s already coaxed Donald Trump to be on his side.
Trump tried to use a made-for-TV Oval Office event last week to get Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to accept a peace deal on Putin’s terms, which, specific to Ukraine, would include ceding territories illegally annexed by Russia during the three-years-and-counting invasion.
We all saw what happened when Zelensky balked at being told to sign over his country’s sovereignty.
The punishment for that has been a suspension of military aid from the US, and now this withdrawal of intelligence sharing.
“Instead of standing up to Putin, President Trump has given away American power to Russia – from voting at the UN with Russia and North Korea and against all of our allies, to directly negotiating with Russia at the highest levels while excluding Ukraine, to refusing to condemn Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship while unjustly calling the democratically elected Ukrainian president a ‘dictator’ and ejecting him from the White House,” Warner said.
We’re on the side of the invading autocrat now.
We’re the bad guys.
Share
Chris Graham
