On Sunday, April 13th, a Russian missile attack on a civilian neighborhood in the Ukrainian city of Sumy killed 35 people, including two children in a playground, and injured 117 others.

This followed by just nine days a similar attack in President Volodymyr Zelensky’s home town of Kryvyi Rih, in which 20 people — nine of them children — were killed, and another 70 or more wounded.

And on Monday, April 14th, Donald Trump blamed Ukraine’s president for having started the war . . . the very one the Russians refer to as their “special military operation,” and which the whole world witnessed as Russian troops invaded Ukrainian territory on February 24, 2022.

But, from some parallel universe in which Trump’s psyche apparently lives, he would have us believe that “Millions of people [are] dead because of three people. Let’s say Putin number one, let’s say Biden who had no idea what the hell he was doing, number two, and Zelensky.” [Yang Tian and Ian Aikman, BBC News, April 15, 2025.]

“You don’t start a war against someone 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles,” he continued, adding that Zelensky was “always looking to purchase missiles. When you start a war, you got to know you can win.” [Id.]

Ignoring the fact that not “millions of people” (as falsely stated by Trump) have been killed in this war to date, let’s instead focus on the intentional lie — perpetrated by Vladimir Putin from the very beginning — that Ukraine was in any way responsible for the decimation of its own country over the past three years.

That very lie has been picked up and repeated by Trump as he continues to court Putin as his new best friend. He even — after first describing the Sumy attack as merely “terrible” — said on Monday that he had been told Russia had “made a mistake.” [Id.]

Who allegedly told him, and why he chose to believe it, remain a mystery. But the Kremlin has said — without providing evidence — that it had actually targeted a supposed meeting of Ukrainian soldiers, and that 60 of them had been killed in the attack. [Id.]

And that, apparently, is good enough for Donald Trump.

*. *. *

Trump is right about one thing, though: You do not start a war against a country 20 times your size and strength. And Volodymyr Zelensky is smart enough to know that. Neither he, nor anyone else in Ukraine, invited Russia to invade their country; nor did they in any way pose a threat to Russia’s safety or sovereignty.

In truth, Vladimir Putin — still mourning the breakup of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” — wants nothing less than to seize Ukraine as part of Russia’s territory. He illegally claimed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, and still holds it; and since his invasion of 2022, he has similarly claimed the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions. He won’t be satisfied until he has all the rest as well.

To blame the victim — to suggest, without basis in fact, that Volodymyr Zelensky bears any responsibility for Vladimir Putin’s actions — is despicable and indefensible. It is akin to blaming Poland for Nazi Germany’s invasion of 1939.

And it requires an immediate apology.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
4/16/25