There’s a popular saying about the war in Ukraine that goes something like this: “If the Russians stop fighting, the war ends. If the Ukrainians stop fighting, Ukraine ends.”
More than anything else, that simple aphorism highlights the nature of the most damaging conflict in Europe since World War II: Unprovoked military aggression by the authoritarian Russian Federation against a European democracy.
Russia started it in 2014 by illegally invading and annexing Crimea, while Russian leaders flatly denied the invasion. NATO members responded with relatively puny sanctions. Then in 2022, Russia went for the rest of Ukraine, after again repeatedly denying its army would invade.
But as the Russian Army grabbed new territory in eastern Ukraine, NATO countries responded. Subsequently, they’ve sent more than $175 billion worth of defensive weapons, according the United Nations. The lion’s share of that funding came from NATO members other than the United States.
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Those weapons — remember the Javelins and HIMARS? — effectively stalled the Russians’ advance. But now Ukraine is running low and needs more arms. The Russians are advancing, and the Ukrainians are begging.
And that was the subject of an April 20 vote in the House of Representatives to send $60.8 billion more in U.S. weapons.
The great news is, the $60.8 billion in additional aid easily passed with a strong bipartisan majority, 311 to 112.
But the three-member delegation from Western Virginia didn’t exactly shine with that ballot. Two of our congressmen, Reps. Ben Cline, R-Botetourt, and Bob Good, R-Campbell, voted against Ukraine aid.
Only Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, voted in favor of additional U.S.-made weapons for Ukraine.
At least one of them — Cline — also tried to stop all U.S. military aid to the beleaguered country, when he also voted for a (failed) amendment offered by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. It would’ve reduced U.S. military aid to Ukraine to zero.
With emails sent Thursday to each congressman’s office, I sought to better understand why they voted the way they did. But the lawmakers appear exceedingly shy about discussing that. Since the queries, their silence has been deafening.
So let’s look at their history, and past statements, to see if we can divine anything, eh? We’ll start with Cline, who’s represented the Sixth Congressional District since 2019.
On the issue of Ukraine aid, Cline seems to talk a good game, but often votes in the opposite direction. For example, consider what he said in 2022, shortly after the Russian invasion.
In advance of a Feb. 24, 2022 speech by President Joe Biden, Cline issued this tweet:
“I stand with the American people in our solidarity against Russian aggression and we pray for peace in Ukraine. As the President addresses the Nation this afternoon, he must impose all diplomatic and economic pressure on the Kremlin to send a strong and clear message to Russia and our enemies that an attack on a sovereign country will be met with swift and devastating consequences.”
Immediately following the speech, in an interview with WUSA-9 TV in Washington, D.C., Cline accused Biden of not doing enough for Ukraine. At the time, he wore a Ukrainian-flag lapel sticker.
“Europe is leading the way and Biden is playing catch up. You know, we have sanctions, but they have enormous holes in them,” Cline said. Later in the interview Cline said: “We need to go further … and be aggressive in order to tell Putin he has to stop and reverse course with Ukraine.”
But later that year, on Dec. 24, 2022, Cline voted against $45 billion in military aid for Ukraine (it passed, as part of a $1.7 trillion budget bill). And he bragged about that vote on his congressional website.
Cline also telegraphed his more recent April 20 vote against $60.8 billion for Ukraine when he appeared on the podcast “Real America’s Voice” with John Solomon in February.
“We have an administration that doesn’t know what success is, can’t define success in Ukraine, and wants to send more taxpayer dollars into this black hole of a proxy war,” Cline said.
Basically, Cline’s playing the same game on Ukraine that the gun lobby plays after the latest U.S. firearms massacre. He offers thoughts and prayers but little action that’s concrete to stanch the conflict. It comes across as woefully insincere.
The other No-to-Ukraine-aid vote came from Rep. Bob Good, representative in the Fifth Congressional District since 2021. He’s currently locked in a GOP primary battle for the Republican nomination with state Sen. John McGuire, a pro-Trump lawmaker who proudly attended the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, D.C.
By this past December, Good was also leader of the House Freedom Caucus, a group of conservative Republican lawmakers. And he vowed (inaccurately, it turned out) to hosts of the podcast “Point Counterpoint” that additional American arms to Ukraine was a non-starter.
“Support for Ukraine is dead on arrival in the House until if and when, uh, the Senate passes our outstanding strong border security bill,” Good said on the podcast.
Back in September, on an interview with CNN, Good didn’t even seem to understand why the Russia-Ukraine conflict was important to America.
“What is our direct national security interest to lead us to borrow from our kids and grandkids to further exacerbate our spending situation, our debt situation and to further deplete our own military reserves when this administration has depleted and weakened our military since he became president?” Good asked.
Those words echoed more than a few isolationist American politicians in the late 1930s who vehemently opposed America helping Europe contain Nazi Germany. And that’s what led us into World War II.
Perhaps Good should’ve been listening more closely to Rep. Morgan Griffith, who voted in favor of the $60.8 billion package for Ukraine weapons.
Griffith has represented the 9th Congressional District since 2011. Although he doesn’t have a perfect voting record on Ukraine aid, he’s been warning Russia about Ukraine going back to the invasion of Crimea in 2014. Back then he did an interview with WCYB-5 in Bristol.
“We need to be making sure that the Russians understand there will be a price to pay if they continue their aggressive expansionism and if they try to use their military force to overrun the rest of Ukraine or even the areas that have Russian-speaking people in large numbers,” Griffith said then.
And a little more than a month ago, at Graham High School in Bluefield, the congressman told students this:
(Griffith also told the students that the 9th District would benefit from helping Ukraine, because of all the arms manufactured at the Radford Army Ammunition Plant.)
Griffith’s right — that’s what the conflict boils down to. Obviously, he’s a student of modern European history.
In the late 1930s, American and European powers allowed Hitler to remilitarize the Rhineland (in violation of the Treaty of Versailles), annex Austria and part of Czechoslovakia, then conquer the rest of Czechoslovakia. All that happened before Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and launched World War II.
It would’ve been easier to stop Hitler in 1936 in the Rhineland. The problem was, nobody tried.
Here’s another way to frame Griffith’s statement to the high-schoolers:
It’s better to spend money on American weapons to help Ukraine now, than far more American money and blood when Putin continues his expansionist aims in Europe later.
What a shame that Cline and Good haven’t learned that lesson.