Morgan Murphy
Last weekend, Volodymyr Zelensky flew to the United States, courtesy of the U.S. Air Force. Instead of going immediately to Washington, D.C. to ask for more taxpayer dollars, as is his custom, Ukraine’s president visited the battleground state of Pennsylvania with Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro and Democratic Sen. Bob Casey.
That in and of itself was bad enough and violates the Hatch Act of 1939. Hatch prohibits executive branch employees (for example, the pilots and crew of that USAF plane) from participating in political elections. And yes, Sen. Bob Casey is in the election fight of his career according to recent tied polls this month from the Washington Post and Rasmussen Reports.
But Zelensky didn’t stop at election interference in a battleground state. Instead, he found time to do a fashion shoot in his trademark disaster-casual look of tee shirt and olive cargo pants for The New Yorker. Predictably, The New Yorker fawned over Zelensky’s “syrupy baritone” and threw hardballs such as, “many people [have compared] you to Winston Churchill … ” In that interview, Zelensky opted to directly criticize former President Donald Trump: “My feeling is that Trump doesn’t really know how to stop the war even if he might think he knows how.”
Imagine if during the presidential election of 1940, Winston Churchill came to the United States and criticized the Republican candidate running against President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Can you picture the great statesman asking America for lend-lease dollars while at the same time admonishing Wendell Willkie and his running mate?
You probably can’t fathom it, because Churchill wasn’t a tool.
But wait. There’s more. Zelensky went on to say of Republican Sen. J.D. Vance: “He is too radical” and “Let Mr. Vance read up on the history of the Second World War.”
What has so irked Zelensky about Trump’s running mate? I imagine it’s because has a pesky habit of lobbing inconvenient truth bombs about the conflict. These include:
Ukraine is corrupt: Vance said at the Heritage Foundation’s leadership summit last year: “Let’s not mistake the courage of Ukrainian troops on the ground with the fact that they have the most corrupt leadership and government in Europe … ” Vance is spot on — Ukraine is highly corrupt, according to Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index.
U.S. weapons going to Ukraine are not adequately tracked: Vance has repeatedly pointed out that Ukraine and the Biden administration have failed to keep track of “defense articles, severely limiting the ability to determine whether these were misused or stolen.” The U.S. Inspector General for the Department of Defense came to the same conclusion.
Russia will outgun Ukraine and NATO: This year at the Munich Security Conference, Vance called a shovel a shovel: “You don’t win wars with GDP or euros or dollars. You win wars with weapons, and the West doesn’t make enough weapons.” Again, the senator is right. Land battles are fought with artillery, what army grunts call the king of battle. Right now, the United States is making about 80,000 155 millimeter artillery shells a month. Russia is cranking out 500,000 per month. Name the weapon system and the manufacturing news is likewise bleak.
Ukraine is running out of soldiers: In a New York Times op-ed, Vance wrote: “Ukraine needs more soldiers than it can field.” Again, true. Russia has a three-to-one advantage in men who can be mobilized.
The U.S. is running out of our own stockpiles to defend our interests: Voting against cloture for this year’s National Defense Authorization Act, Vance said: “We cannot maintain this posture. President Biden recently admitted that we are running low on the artillery shells and materials we need to defend our national security and deter China in the Pacific … ” Here Vance was simply citing what the president had said on CNN.
Given this carpet bombing of truth, no wonder Zelensky must be hoping for a Harris-Walz victory. He immediately sidled up to Vice President Harris at a press conference on Thursday where the Democratic nominee pledged: “My support for the people of Ukraine is unwavering … I will work to ensure Ukraine prevails in this war.”
Translation: Harris will continue lavishing Ukraine with American tax dollars, regardless of the prospects for success or obvious threats to our own national security.
Morgan Murphy is military thought leader, former press secretary to the Secretary of Defense and national security advisor in the U.S. Senate.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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