Sun’s new part-owner Armstrong Williams supports Putin’s invasion of Ukraine
One of the new owners of The Baltimore Sun, Armstrong Williams, wrote an Op-Ed on March 24 in support of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
“If Nikita Khrushchev could arbitrarily transfer Crimea from Russia to Ukraine in 1954, what’s so terrible about [Russian President Vladimir] Putin reversing that in 2014?” Williams wrote.
He further suggests that he is “no longer certain Putin is the bad guy and Biden is the good guy in Ukraine. It’s complicated.”
Supporting a fledgling democracy in Ukraine against a brutal dictator is not complicated.
Putin invaded in 2014 and the US government, despite Vice-President Biden’s pleas, refused to provide weapons to help Ukraine. That was a mistake President Joe Biden did not repeat with Putin’s second invasion in 2022.
Ukraine willingly gave up its nuclear arsenal to Russia for what has proven to be worthless written assurances of independence from the Russians.
Putin is a bully we should not have appeased when he invaded Georgia in 2008 or Ukraine in 2014.
Williams treats this war as an internal problem to Russia, which has been devastating an independent democracy in Europe for 10 years. Ukraine has been a sovereign nation since 1991 when the USSR granted them independence on August 24th of that year. The US has a moral duty, an obligation, to help them.
Putin is spreading misinformation to influence the outcome in the run-up to our election in November, just as he has for the past several elections. He is trying to determine the outcome of our elections.
Why would anyone who believes in democracy support Putin’s attempt to take over a small neighboring nation?
The Sun is looking less like a newspaper and more like a propaganda rag.
Presumably, to be a Republican today means supporting Putin because Trump admires Putin and the GOP lemmings must follow their leader wherever he goes.
Putin is the thug who imprisons his citizens for saying the word “war” instead of special military action. No freedom of speech or press exists in Russia today. The state controls the media. That’s what dictators do. All the channels on the TV are state controlled and approved by the dictator.
There are no letters to the editor in Russia that oppose Putin. The people are not free to speak or to write against Putin.
It’s not complicated. Biden and the US are on the right side, the dictator Putin, his friends, and apologists, such as Mr. Williams, are all on the wrong side. Mr. Williams is choosing a side that is wholly predicated upon politics, not what is best for the US and peace in Europe.
Ukraine has many friends and those friends are our allies. NATO is perhaps the most important treaty agreement for US national security. It is the alliance of democracies with two new members(Sweden, and Finland) thanks to Putin’s invasion. One for all, all for one.
Ukraine is not a member but a friend of the alliance and a potential new member.
Democracy is always worth defending, including our own.
Dudley Thompson lives in Girdletree, MD., population 106. He was born, raised, and lived most of his life in Baltimore. He worked for the News-American on the advertising side until it closed in ‘86. His second career was teaching in juvenile jails for the Maryland State Department of Education. He holds a Masters in Liberal Arts from Johns Hopkins University, ‘77, and a B.A from the University of Maryland,’74.