Unmasking the Russia-First Fallacy

My interview with the Renew Democracy Initiative

Last week, Evan Gottesman, the Chief of Staff for the Renew Democracy Initiative (where I am a board member) interviewed me for their weekly Democracy Brief newsletter. I am reposting it for you here.

This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.

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Evan Gottesman (RDI): This book is about Ukraine, Russia, and the US, a subject about which you are both an expert and participant. You have a doctorate from SAIS, a master’s from Harvard, and fluency in multiple relevant languages. You were posted in Kyiv, Moscow, the Pentagon, and the White House. You were born in Ukraine and a witness of that fateful Trump-Zelensky call in 2019.

What was it like to approach this kind of project where you are both scholar and participant?

Alexander Vindman: In certain regards, it was easy. In other regards, it was more challenging. It was easier in the sense that I had command of the events I participated in. I’ve studied Russia as an adversary for a long time, and I recognize how U.S. policy missteps fueled the brewing confrontation between Russia and Ukraine. What was more challenging was putting the academic lens on to write my dissertation, which this book is based on, and fleshing out a methodology to understand and distill what really went wrong.

EG: And what went wrong?

AV: We consistently favored our relationship with Russia over our relationship with Ukraine. The US was constantly trying to achieve some sort of policy aim as Russia became adversarial. We were trying to prevent the relationship with Russia from spiraling downwards. Those were short-term approaches to either achieve something or to mitigate risk, but they actually drove the long-term crisis.

I was just arguing with somebody in my think tank about whether Ukraine should end up in NATO. And my colleague argued that if Ukraine is in NATO, doesn’t that mean that US troops are at greater risk of being drawn into war with Russia? And the answer is actually no. My colleague’s position has been the calculation all along the way, heading off short-term risks in order to avoid a crisis. That favors Russia and has actually emboldened it. If we had shown resolve along the way, we could have discouraged or deterred Russian aggression. And I think that is the part that is absolutely essential to note: our short-term risk mitigation measures often stack up adversely to our long-term interests.

Russia has no interest in direct confrontation with the US and Europe. We are too powerful in alliance, and NATO actually forestalls Russian aggression against Ukraine. It signals that Russia’s aggression will produce the opposite effect of what they are looking to achieve.

EG: Let’s come back to that central pitfall in our approach to Kyiv and Moscow, which was this Russia-first policy. Playing devil’s advocate: Was this unavoidable to some extent, given that Russia is simply bigger than Ukraine, it is the USSR’s successor, and it possesses the world’s largest nuclear arsenal?

AV: This is an interesting question. I think it’s important to work backwards: Having a Russia first policy didn’t help us avoid a confrontation with Russia or prevent Russia from becoming a bad actor. Putting Russia first because of all those criteria you named—largest country, significant military, nuclear power, economic player, and maybe regional hegemon—that we deferred to Russia even when it was adversarial to our interests, didn’t get us anywhere. It precipitated a geopolitical earthquake. Ukraine also met many of these criteria. Russia might have a yawning gap between itself and Ukraine, but Ukraine was the largest country by territory in Europe, had the third-largest nuclear arsenal in Europe, and a massive military-industrial base. So it had a lot of these criteria that should have captured our imagination with regards to understanding the differences between Russia and Ukraine.

I realized that maybe there was a justification for some of the wishful thinking about Russia in the 1990s when there were legitimate hopes about Moscow reconciling and integrating with the West. But relatively quickly after the Putin era begins, it becomes pretty apparent that Russia would only be willing to cooperate in areas of its own national security interests, stringing America along with our hopes and fears in other regards.

EG: What was the alternative?

AV: What we could have done as an alternative is double down on other countries, including with Ukraine, by making significant investments into those relationships. This is especially true as you get to Ukraine’s pro-democracy Orange Revolution in 2004–2005. The U.S. should have treated the post-Orange Revolution Yushchenko government with more care, investment, and attention, in order to harden Ukraine against Russian aggression and malign influence that was already being telegraphed by the Kremlin. Remember that the Orange Revolution—twenty years ago—was a result of Russian interference in Ukraine’s elections.

We should have made adjustments somewhere along the way. We could have had a policy review on Ukraine. We could have made some changes in how we treated Russia, too, conditioning things Russia wanted from us, like WTO membership. That could have forestalled Russian aggression. But instead, we just continued to go down the road of a Russia First policy.

EG: So we’ve talked about the practical considerations informing the Russia First policy: nuclear weapons, Russia’s size, and so on. But there was also something that you touch upon in the book that really jumped out, which is the lack of understanding of Ukraine as separate from Russia. And I would bet, in the American popular imagination, both inside the Beltway and beyond, there wasn’t much that really distinguished Ukraine from Russia, especially pre-2022. How did that play into this policy?

AV: Look, I was a victim of this to a certain extent. Although I was born in Kyiv, I grew up in New York as a Soviet Jewish refugee speaking Russian with my parents and celebrating my Russian ancestry because Russia was the cultural hegemon—the Soviet Union was Russia, Ukraine was “Little Russia.”

And there were also artifacts of the way Russia cast the Ukrainians as fascists, antisemites, partisans for Hitler—things of that nature. But Russia was supposedly the good actor. That’s the picture that Russia paints about itself. So I shared that kind of understanding growing up.

It really took quite a bit of education to learn the realities. To learn a complex thousand-year history. I had to understand Russia’s desire to dominate this particular territory over the last 350 years, the majority of which Ukraine has been struggling for its independence, or at least its own identity separate from Russia. I learned that things are not so simple when it comes to Ukrainian antisemitism, that Russia had its own deep history with pogroms, and that Russia used this narrative quite effectively to separate and divide different populations including the Jewish population from Ukraine.

From a Western perspective, Ukraine has only recently been independent since 1991, having been under Russian control from the middle of the seventeenth century onward. So it’s not a shock that you have to explain these things, but I think a lot of people have now kind of come around to understanding that these are two different peoples with different languages, different cultures, different ideologies, and different aspirations for their people.

It’s a little clearer now, but there are still plenty of those narrative artifacts. I contend with some of these narratives on a regular basis. It is complex, as you would imagine, the history of any two countries that have been in conflict for a long time would be.

EG: I definitely see that a lot—you talk about your upbringing in New York. I live in a part of the city where there are a lot of Russian-speaking people, and colloquially, we talk about “Russian neighborhoods,” “Russian stores,” “Russian restaurants,” even though the people are really Uzbek or Ukrainian or Jewish.

Your personal grappling with this dynamic mirrors a phenomenon that the Ukrainian leadership experienced, at least in that first decade post-independence. Ukraine’s leaders weren’t really nationalists. A lot of them were ex-Communist Party apparatchiks—people with business interests or a cultural, emotional affinity for Russia. So at least in the initial stage, how was the US supposed to engage separately with Ukraine when Ukrainian leaders hadn’t properly separated themselves from Moscow?

AV: That is true, and I’d say there was a tension inside Ukraine for a long time. There is this east-west divide, where the western Ukrainians definitely had a much, much stronger conception of Ukrainian nationality. Far less so for eastern and southern Ukrainians, who were Russian speakers. But there’s something to be said for the fact that Ukraine as a Soviet republic considered itself different from Russia. They voted in that manner in December of 1991, when Ukrainians supported a referendum for Ukrainian independence in overwhelming numbers. And Ukraine’s departure resulted in the demise of the Soviet Union.

So you had that tension there in the 90s. There were some compromises made to keep the country intact—compromises between the nationalists and the Russian-leaning officials with all their economic ties or cultural ties to Moscow. And the bargain that they made ensured that Ukraine would eventually undertake a project to build its nationhood. Which Ukraine did in the first ten years, slowly but surely. By the time you get into the 2000s, that independent conception of Ukrainian nationality was strong enough to support the Orange Revolution and reject the eastern-leaning vision.

You had enough of a national identity, whether Ukrainian language in schools, or a fuller understanding of Ukrainian history. That shift put wind in the sails of the Orange Revolution to break with this Eastern orientation and shift towards a vision of European integration.

You can maybe excuse some of the lack of understanding about Ukraine from the US, but by the time you get into the 2000s, it’s clear that this is a separate country charting its own course, wanting to be Western and Westernized.

And the United States missed a huge opportunity for purely parochial reasons under the Bush administration. We wanted Russia to be an ally in the War on Terror instead of seeing the big picture.

EG: To lay out this “missed opportunity”: The George W. Bush administration gets a new, pro-Western cohort of leaders in Ukraine at the end of the first term, but by the end of the second they fail in pretty spectacular fashion, with Russia invading one of the neighbors—Georgia. How did things end up that way?

AV: On the Russian side there is this desire to maintain their regional hegemony and global leadership that went unsatisfied because they lacked the underlying elements of national power. In the 1990s they still had military and nuclear forces, but they didn’t have the economic strength. Cohesion was limited. And in the West, there was this notion that Russia was no longer relevant. At times we would cooperate with them on things that aligned with US national security interests, like nuclear disarmament the same way we did with Ukraine. And then at other times, we dismissed their interests and concerns. It became quite acute when Russia felt like it was losing control over what it believed was a privileged sphere of influence—the Central Asian republics, the Caucasus, Moldova, Belarus, and Ukraine. The Baltics were slipping away to become members of the EU and NATO. So that resulted in a great deal of elite angst about carving out a place for Russia in the world, starting in its own backyard.

We basically left things in Russia’s hands with soft condemnation. But we could have made significant investments in the countries Russia was targeting. In some cases, like Ukraine, we had an obligation, because of the Budapest Memorandum, where Ukraine gave up its thousands of nuclear weapons for the promise of security and some sort of prosperity. There were also reasons for the West to engage with Kyiv on its own merits because Ukraine has massive quantities of rare earths or commodities that we wanted to tap into. Ukraine has all sorts of different agricultural resources that we learned are quite critical for the global food supply chain. There were a lot of different reasons why we could have built bridges with them. It wasn’t the easiest thing to do because Ukraine was in fact quite corrupt.It was a high risk proposition, but we’ve taken those kinds of high risk propositions before when it was in the national security interest.

We were almost paralyzed by the Russia First approach and the inability to be strategic in our thinking and recognize where things were going to end up. If we paid attention to what was going on in 2005, we would recall that Putin gives this famous Duma speech in which he alleges that the West is engaging in hybrid warfare, supposedly supporting these color revolutions to undermine both Russia’s influence in the region and ultimately Russia itself.

Sure, you couldn’t have predicted everything with 100 percent accuracy, but you could see the trend line. There were astute students who did. Dick Cheney and John McCain saw these types of things coming with Russian revanchism. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl also did all the way back in the 1990s during German reunification. So much of this was entirely predictable. We missed it because America was in a unipolar moment. Nobody could challenge us. Later, we had other things that were on our minds like the War on Terror, and we missed some seismic events unfolding.

So from that point forward, Russia really laid out the course towards confrontation. It didn’t operationalize it until 2008 because it didn’t have the means, but it was just a matter of time before it attacked a small country like Georgia.

EG: You make the case that the US could have taken a gamble on Ukraine. Ukraine was corrupt. There were issues, but we could have taken that gamble. Well, in the 2000s, we did take a gamble on a corrupt Eastern European country, but that country was Russia, on issues where we imagined that we might have alignment and then ultimately didn’t. After 9/11, we had the War on Terror, and the US felt we needed Russia for Afghanistan, we needed Russia for Iraq. Tell me a little bit more about the leap of faith we took with Russia.

AV: The reason that we had relations with Russia and Ukraine were initially for a combination of values and interests. We valued the idea of bringing these countries into the fold of democracies. And then there were hard interests, whether that is denuclearization or regional stability. In the 1990s, we resolved the question of Ukraine’s nuclear arsenal by basically compelling them to disarm and transferring the nuclear weapons to Russia. Russia gained both additional nuclear weapons and delivery platforms like bombers. By the way, Russia is using some of the delivery systems Kyiv handed to them under this arrangement thirty years ago to attack Ukraine today.

We gave up on part of that formula because the interest in engaging with Ukraine seemed less acute. While we kept up the pretense of shared interests with Russia, we only had a values-based proposition to continue to engage with Ukraine. Eventually, that values-based relationship also got undermined because Ukraine had its own deep challenges in its transition to democracy, particularly corruption. So we lost Ukraine on both fronts, the values and the interests front. But if you think about it, the same thing happened with Russia.

In my interviews for the book with both Bill Clinton and Al Gore, this line kept coming up of having to succeed in Russia and Ukraine, or at least in one or the other. But we succeeded with neither because we were so laser-focused on Russia and misguided on what we really could accomplish with them, both with regards to the values and interests.

Coming to George W. Bush’s administration: some people saw it differently. Vice President Dick Cheney was somebody that thought that it was important to invest in Ukraine to forestall Russia’s aspirations. But there were inflection points all along the way—signals that we should have been investing in Ukraine. And we just consistently failed to observe them.

EG: Moving up in the history, we’re now at the transition from Bush II to Obama in the US and then the transition from Yuschenko’s pro-Western government to Viktor Yanukovych’s more pro-Russian one in Ukraine.

This is where your academic research and personal experiences intersect, where your academic study combines with your own personal track—when you get your posting at the US Embassy in Kyiv. Being in Ukraine around that time, were you able to get a sense for why the pendulum swung back from the Western track with the Orange Revolution to a pro-Russian orientation under Yanukovych?

AV: I was personally following these events from even before that moment. I started focusing on the Foreign Area Officer career track probably about 2007. So I started paying attention more closely to how the Ukrainian government was functioning. I saw how this brand new democracy was experiencing a massive amount of infighting between its top politicians, between the president, the prime minister, the different factions, the pro-Russian faction, the nationalists, and so on.

That paralysis undermined the ability for Yushchenko to deliver on the promises of the Orange Revolution, one of which was economic prosperity. Ukraine was making progress on their Western course, but it was slow and unresponsive, and corruption was rampant.

Think about what else was going on during that period of time. We’re talking about a global recession in 2008. And you don’t have to look back more than a couple months in our own experience, when you have high prices and inflation, you have huge political reversals.

Then, you have Yanukovych. The Orange Revolution was fundamentally about Yanukovych trying to steal the 2004 election. Popular protests compelled a rerun of the election, which he lost. Back in 2004, he ran as a pro-Russian strongman. But then he rebranded himself as a pro-Western reformer with the notable help of folks like Paul Manafort and buckets of money from Putin to run a successful Western-style campaign. He won enough of a margin to come back in 2010 as the president.

There was a lot of hope that a second Yushchenko administration would lock in some of the gains, the Westernization, and reforms. That obviously didn’t happen. So it was another kind of missed opportunity. I wouldn’t advocate for the US to interfere in foreign countries’ elections. But between the heavy-handed Russian intervention in Ukraine’s elections and the complete absence of the US in supporting a Westernizing leader who was going to advance common US-Ukrainian interests, maybe there’s a balance we could have found. We don’t have to interfere in an election, but we can expose Russian malign influence and corruption.

EG: In 2012, you were assigned to the US Embassy in Moscow, on the heels of Obama’s “reset” of US relations with Russia. You had seen the Ukrainian side–how did things look from Russia?

AV: It was a heady time in 2012. This was relatively early in Putin’s third term as president. There were significant irregularities in the Russian election, large-scale protests, and Putin continued to paint the US and US Ambassador McFaul as the culprits, bad actors undermining the Russian leader and Russian sovereignty.

But there was not yet a break in the US-Russia relationship. It was quite tense. You could see the direction, the trend line. We have attempted to do resets on a couple of different occasions. Of course, there was the notable one that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attempted to deliver. It was just another effort to see if there was a way to move past the animus and normalize relations, but it never really amounted to much.

Putin was very, very upset about what happened in Libya with his predecessor Dmitry Medvedev’s tacit support for what ended up being regime change. So after that, Putin wanted to assert his own power. He wanted to challenge the US leadership role and expose what he thought was bad behavior by the US.

We were headed in the direction of confrontation. But when I was in Russia, the US still did military-to-military exercises with the Russians—significant exercises. The conflict didn’t come to a head until 2013 or 2014, when Russia took a plan off the shelf and invaded Ukraine, occupying Crimea and some critical, densely-populated portions of eastern Ukraine.

In a lot of ways, that was a seminal moment. We couldn’t stick our heads in the sand, but we were still dragged back by this basic notion that we can’t burn our relationship with Russia. We are still resistant to supporting Ukraine. We’re still arrested by this history of Russia-first.

EG: Readers who are familiar with the timeline will know that as you get to 2012, 2013, the clock is ticking. We’re counting down to the revolution in Ukraine, then Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and the war and the Donbas. So is there a point of no return where the US still could have turned things around or the Ukrainians could have turned things around? Certainly, the Russians have agency too.

AV: 2008 was an important moment in this regard. The lack of response to Russia’s military aggression against Georgia really emboldened Putin to believe that military means were effective to achieve his aims.

In the book, I recall how both John McCain and Hillary Clinton recognized the importance of that moment. I would say 2014 was another important moment where an assertive response led by the US and NATO could have potentially limited Russia’s occupation and territorial seizure to Crimea but that didn’t happen. Or in eastern Ukraine, we could have helped by providing some additional material support to signal that if Russia were to continue its military aggression, it would come with significant consequences—because Russia’s military was still quite weak then. None of these things happened.

There were opportunities really throughout, I think it became much more tenuous by the beginning of 2022, when the kinds of signals that Putin was receiving from the US fractured, the US became distracted, and Ukraine’s military not doing nearly enough to harden itself against the threat of full-scale war. That’s when you really reached the point of no return.

I end up arguing with myself because there were points along the way even after the war started in 2022 where things could have ended up differently. Russia was extremely off balance in the winter and spring of 2022, after the Ukrainians successfully expelled Russia from Kyiv. Russia didn’t have a theory of victory. They were reeling, and it took them some months to figure things out. If we had come in heavy in support of Ukraine during that window, I think that Russia could have been compelled to negotiate from a position of weakness. Now we are in a different situation with the new administration.

EG: Before we get to Trump, walk us through the unfulfilled promise of the Biden administration.

AV: The Biden administration was underwhelming in its support of Ukraine. It seemed like it did a lot, but it was consistently a day late and a dollar short. Support for Ukraine came piecemeal and didn’t allow Ukraine to maximize what in the armed forces we call “mass,” bringing all these resources to bear at a critical moment so they could achieve some military battlefield victory. Biden didn’t do that.

The Biden administration was also very, very fearful of some sort of accident or miscalculation with regard to Russia. Those are, in my view, quite misplaced notions just because Russia is itself deathly afraid of a fight with the United States. A fight with America is the last thing Russia would want, but it will bluff as far as it can. That has paid off for Russia, so it is in their interest to do so.

Now you have a moment in which the Trump administration could either deliver peace through strength, be muscular in its response to Russian aggression, and warn China about the consequences of military aggression in Asia. Or you get what we currently see unfolding, which is a massive bout of appeasement.

EG: Your book is called The Folly of Realism. Are the current events, with Trump seemingly capitulating to Putin, the logical endpoint—perhaps taken to its extreme—of 30 years of Russia First? Is this the “realism” that you criticize in the title of the book?

AV: I think so. We will have the wildest swing towards transactional short-termism, Russia First policies. If your only consideration is how to avoid the immediate threat of war, then you don’t think about the consequences of Russian success in Ukraine. Russia then garners strength to pursue additional territory and eventually, you end up where you don’t want to be. So we have the extreme Russia First policy unfolding. But I also think that there will be a pendulum swing in the opposite direction where the US is absolutely compelled to stake out its position and ensure that Russia doesn’t have any misconceptions about where American interests lie—maybe with some higher risk because the Russians have been trained to believe that they can get away with anything.

EG: What do we lose in the meantime?

AV: The question in the meantime is do we have a NATO four years from now, or does Trump wreck it with this wild swing towards Russia First? What kind of damage does it do? If some of these guardrails remain, we could end up in a position where we could build back, but we are in for four years of massive instability and increased aggression, not just by Russia in Ukraine, but in other parts of the world and by other authoritarian regimes taking their marching orders in a similar way.

EG: Stepping back in time a few years, after Kyiv and Moscow, you were sent to Washington—assigned first to the Pentagon and then to the White House. You actually helped author something of an alternative policy, a national security policy agenda that Trump actually signed off on in his first term. Of course, he probably didn’t read it. What was your proposal—and where might we have ended up if Trump had acted on it?

AV: If Trump’s deeds matched his words, if he demonstrated an interest in US national security policy, we could have ended up in a situation where Russia was warned off from a full-scale war. That is almost a far-fetched notion because Trump is a creature that is consistently catering to Putin.

But let’s go ahead and imagine a world in which my strategy gets implemented, but it’s not with Trump at the helm. This is a completely alternate universe. You would have a scenario in which we made significant investments in Ukraine, we made significant investments in NATO’s eastern flank, and where Russia doesn’t see an interest in launching a war.

The reason that Russia launched this war in the first place is that they didn’t think the US was going to levy any kind of consequences. They thought the Ukrainians were going to fold, that this was going to be a three-day war. If they knew that Ukraine was backed by the US, that the resources were going to pour in, that there were going to be sanctions, they wouldn’t have undertaken this war. And I think in that kind of situation, we wouldn’t be facing the threat of a major spillover in Europe or a China that’s entertaining adventurism in the Pacific. I think it’s going to take a completely different approach going forward. Not this transactional realist approach, but something like what I lay out with regards to neo-idealism to really dig us out of this hole that Trump and the decades of a Russia-first policy before him resulted in.

EG: As much as you and I would like that alternate reality, we are in the reality that we are in, with Trump and Hegseth and Vance. And they’ve put everything on the table already, saying Ukraine is not going to join NATO. They are not going back to 1991 borders. I wonder if there is a lesson to be drawn here from Ukraine’s denuclearization. Ukraine was never going to keep its nukes—it didn’t have the infrastructure to maintain them. But we didn’t need to make them hand those weapons over without Russian concessions. Likewise, Ukraine was probably not joining NATO or recapturing all of its territory tomorrow. The question is whether those things can be used for leverage. Does that make sense?

AV: It absolutely does. The way I look at it is, you are going into the car dealership and saying “Let’s start with the sticker price and I’m happy to pay more.” That is not a negotiating tactic. I’ve been writing about the fact that Ukraine is unlikely to liberate all of its occupied territory, especially Crimea. I made the call in January of 2023 that this was not in the cards. But stating that this is a foregone conclusion for Ukraine and not that Russia is in violation of international law, engaging in military aggression to seize a neighbor’s territory—that’s a huge breach of our policy. And then this NATO policy has been in place since Bucharest in 2008. The idea that the US would make the unilateral decision that Ukraine was not going to ultimately join NATO—even if it’s not on the horizon—those are things you might potentially give away to compel Russia in negotiations if Ukraine wants to in exchange for Russia returning some occupied territory and ending hostilities.

So what does Russia do now? Russia says, “OK, no Ukraine in NATO, and we even annexed those four Ukrainian territories—we’re going to want the rest of those territories, even the areas under Ukrainian control.” That’s the position that Russia is going to take at minimum. It’s also probably going to make a demand about Ukrainian neutrality. It’s going to make a demand about Ukraine disarming. Those are really non-starters, but this is where we are because of a ham-handed approach from an administration that’s really bad at deal-making.

There’s something to be said about how Trump works. He’s generally effective at coercing small and medium-sized countries to do his bidding. Why? Because of the disparity in power, the threat of military force, and the threat of economic tariffs or pressure. He’s not particularly effective at negotiating with large states. The Chinese called his bluff. They reciprocated with tariffs. The Russians will call his bluff. They will not willingly back down on what they believe is in the national security interest. They have to be compelled to do that. So what you have is a scenario in which Trump could score some small wins, but when it really matters, when US national security is on the line, he is highly ineffective at securing our interests. We’re living in a far more dangerous world and we’ll be here for the next four years.

EG: I guess we have to strap in. And on that note, I have one last point I’d like to cover—a car chase you were involved in on the Russia-Ukraine border. I’ll be honest: Fast and Furious action is not what I was expecting when I opened this book. Tell us about that.

AV: So this happened when I was stationed at the US Embassy in Moscow. As an attaché, you are assigned to the embassy, but your parent organization is the Defense Intelligence Agency and your mission is to collect and report on what is going on. My duty at that point in time as the attaché team’s expert on ground forces in Russia and Ukraine was to report on what the Russians were doing.

EG: This was during the 2014 war right?

AV: Yes, this was in 2014.

EG: When the Russians were denying they had any troops in Ukraine.

AV: Yeah. Denying that they had any troops in Ukraine, saying that this was all an internal Ukrainian civil war. And I had taken many trips to the border to get an awareness of what was going on, what the Russians were doing. And on this particular trip, my objective was to catch them red-handed—to find a smoking gun. And I positioned myself in a way where I could catch Russia lying about their invasion of Ukraine. In this particular scenario, they didn’t want to be caught lying, so a car—from the Russian security services—tried to obstruct me and actually run me off the road.

But if you want to get all the nuance and color of this very interesting episode, you’ll have to read the book.

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I’m proud to serve on the board of the Renew Democracy Initiative. RDI is dedicated to unmasking and confronting the alliance of dictators threatening freedom around the world and inspiring Americans and those in other free countries to value and protect their own democracies. RDI has been doing some amazing work for Ukraine for the past three years. Please consider subscribing to keep up with their analysis and advocacy.