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Retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and Trump impeachment witness Alexander Vindman mocked the former president on Thursday for what he saw as the Republican’s limited historical knowledge, after Trump seemed to describe just learning about WWII history during a recent campaign stop.
At a rally in Savannah, Georgia, on Tuesday, the former president took aim at Joe Biden’s vow the U.S. will continue supporting Ukraine until it finishes fighting off the invasion from Russia.
“Biden says, ‘We will not leave until we win,’” Trump said. “What happens if they win? That’s what they do, is they fight wars. As somebody told me the other day, they beat Hitler, they beat Napoleon. That’s what they do. They fight. And it’s not pleasant.”
Vindman, who served on the National Security Council, and whose family immigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union, took issue with these comments.
"First, I have to address this commentary," Vindman told CNN. "I mean, just the other day somebody told him about World War II? I mean, how preposterous is this? It is embarrassing that a former president would say, even use that kind of language, that he just learned about World War II and his false impressions of how the records of the Soviet Union performed, really at the backbone was support from the West in massive casualties that they took. But I think I would say that we would be facing a different kind of disaster. It wouldn’t be a complete collapse of the Ukrainians."
The Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany on the eastern front in 1945, four years after the Nazis had invaded and at the loss of tens of millions of Soviet troops and civilians.
Imperial Russia defeated a French invasion led by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1812.
Russia’s military record has been far from the parade of victories Trump seemed to be describing, however.
The Ukraine war, for instance, has stretched far longer than Russian war planners thought it would, and the Russian military has been bogged down in other quagmires before, including its campaign and eventual withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, as well as other major losses like the Cold War and WWI.
Trump’s attacks on the Ukraine war, which he often insists without evidence he would rapidly end, come as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris met with the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Trump has equivocated over whether he will meet with the Ukrainian leader, suggesting last week the pair would “probably” get together, a plan that then was reportedly scrapped, ABC News reports.
Trump further muddied the waters on Thursday, sharing a purported message from Zelensky seeking a meeting for Friday, where the Ukrainian insisted, “I believe it’s important for us to have a personal contact and to understand each other 100%.”
On Sunday, Zelensky said he doubted Trump could finish the conflict.
“My feeling is that Trump doesn’t really know how to stop the war even if he might think he knows how,” Zelensky toldThe New Yorker. “With this war, oftentimes, the deeper you look at it the less you understand. I’ve seen many leaders who were convinced they knew how to end it tomorrow, and as they waded deeper into it, they realized it’s not that simple.”
Zelensky has also called into question recent comments by Vance appearing to suggest the war could be ended with Russia keeping the Ukrainian land it has conquered, and seemed to suggest that Germany – not Russia – should lead the way in paying to rebuild the damage Vladimir Putin’s troops have wrought.
