WASHINGTON — About 15 years ago, I was with my son at a fencing tournament and I met a Ukrainian student then fencing at St. John's. We fell into conversation, and he said that he was going to be away for a while because he was going to go home and vote in a national election. This was in the middle of what became known as the Orange Revolution, in which a puppet of Vladimir Putin named Viktor Yanukovich, then the country's foreign minister, was running for president against a reformer named Viktor Yuschenko. It was a guns-or-knives proposition.
Yanukovich enlisted the security apparatus of the Ukraine government in his campaign. At one point, Yuschenko was poisoned with dioxin, probably at the hand of the state security service. The two men essentially tied in the eventual balloting, and a runoff was required in which Yanukovich was declared the winner, but the election was shot through with massive fraud. The country exploded. Mass protests erupted in which opposition demonstrators, swathed in orange, the color of Yuschenko's campaign, demanded (and got) a second, and fairer, runoff. That was the election in which my new friend was flying halfway around the world to vote. I told him he should be proud that he was doing so, and he said he was.
Not much went right with the government of Ukraine since then, and now, the country itself is under active military assault from Putin's Russia, a conflict in which 13,000 Ukrainians already have died. Russia already has annexed Crimea. And now the country finds itself in the middle of a political scandal in the United States as well. "Understandably," said Congressman Brendan Boyle, Democrat of Pennsylvania, "most of the focus has been on Trump's blatant criminality. But there's another important aspect of this which is why we approved this [military] aid in the first place. This is an incredibly important national security issue for the United States. It's not just quote-unquote foreign aid. It's about resisting Russian aggression. That's a part of the story that's not getting told, and it needs to be."
Boyle had joined with several members of the House Ukrainian Caucus—yes, there is one—out in front of the Capitol to voice their concerns that the current row over the president*'s shakedown of newly elected Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, with whom El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago met on Tuesday afternoon in New York, not only was a clear assault on the American constitutional order, but also a threat to an ally to leave that ally vulnerable to its former masters in Moscow. They raised the possibility that the current borders throughout Eastern Europe might also be threatened. "Ukraine," said Rep. Marcy Kaptur, Democrat of Ohio, "is the line of scrimmage in eastern Europe."
Immigrants from Ukraine and elsewhere in eastern Europe, many of whom reside in the congressional districts represented by Boyle and Kaptur as well as a number of big-city Democratic congrescritters, have been a fairly reliable Republican voting bloc ever since the days of Ronald Reagan, whom they saw as their deliverer against the domination of what was then Soviet Russia. Now, though, these latest developments, coupled with Trump's obvious coziness with Putin, might well crack a major fault line through that bloc, especially in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania. This possible migration became more plausible later on Tuesday, when the president* sat down with Zelensky on TV and proceeded to lose his shit again.
He spouted off about "corruption in the Ukraine," and how it was incumbent upon Zelensky to crack down on it, especially that phantom corruption involving the Bidens, whom he also accused, with no evidence whatsoever, of having been paid off by China. He went raving on about Hillary Clinton's "30,000 missing e-mails." He blamed Barack Obama for the annexation of Crimea by Russia. God alone knows what Zelensky thought of all of this. He is a former stand-up comedian, so maybe he thought he was sitting through some weird Andy Kaufman-esque bit. But the piece de la demence came toward the end, when the president* told Zelensky:
I really hope that you and President Putin can get together and solve your problem.
The look on Zelensky's face was priceless.
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Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
