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Nevilledog

(51,203 posts) Mon Aug 2, 2021, 09:23 AM Aug 2021

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Alexander Vindman: What I Heard in the White House Basement

Link to tweet

Tweet text:
Adrienne LaFrance
@AdrienneLaF
“My head snapped up. I looked quickly around the table. Were others tracking this?”

What I Heard in the White House Basement
I knew the president had clear and straightforward talking points—I’d written them.
theatlantic.com
5:28 PM · Aug 1, 2021

One phone call changed my life.

On Thursday, July 25, 2019, I was seated at the table in one of the two Situation Rooms in the basement of the West Wing. The bigger room is famous from movies and TV shows, but this room is smaller, more typically businesslike: a long wooden table with 10 chairs, maybe a dozen more chairs against wood-paneled walls, and a massive TV screen. This was the room where President Barack Obama and his team watched a feed of the Osama bin Laden raid. This morning, the screen was off. We were all focused intently on the triangular conference-call speaker in the middle of the table. President Donald Trump’s communications team was placing a call to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, and we were there to listen.

I was a 44-year-old U.S. Army lieutenant colonel assigned to a position equivalent to that of a two-star general, three levels above my rank. Since July 2018, I’d been at the National Security Council, serving as the director for Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Russia. Recently, deep concerns had been growing throughout the U.S. foreign-policy community regarding two of the countries I was responsible for. We’d long been confused by the president’s policy of accommodation and appeasement toward Russia. But now there were new, rapidly emerging worries. This time the issue was the president’s inexplicable hostility toward a U.S. partner crucial to our Russia strategy: Ukraine.

Ukraine has been a scene of tension and violence since at least the Middle Ages. In 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, seizing the Crimean Peninsula, home to millions and representing nearly 5 percent of Ukraine’s territory, and attacking its industrial heartland, the Donbass, cleaving even more territory and millions of Ukrainians away from the capital, Kyiv.

By 2019, little had changed. Russia’s annexation and incorporation of the Crimea into the Russian Federation persisted, and Russian military and security forces and their proxy separatists continued to occupy the Donbass. Ukraine’s security was precarious, but the country’s importance as a bulwark against Russian aggression in Eastern Europe had only grown. The region could not have been more sensitive, volatile, or crucial to U.S. and NATO interests. Ukrainian leaders had recently assured National Security Adviser John Bolton that they were content to play the role of a buffer against Russian aggression; geography left them little choice. But they did request aid. Actually, they insisted that if Ukrainian blood were to be spilled to defend both the country’s independence and the freedom and prosperity of Europe, the least the West could do was support their efforts.

*snip*