Letters

Ukraine’s Poisoned Chalice

I was stunned and dismayed by Michael Brendan Dougherty’s views on the Ukraine war presented in his recent article “Our Costly Iraq Success” (April 3). To claim that Russia launched its invasion to “reverse a NATO military buildup on [Putin’s] border” is to slavishly repeat Kremlin propaganda. This “buildup” existed only in Putin’s and Dougherty’s imaginations. Ukraine has indeed been interested in cooperating with NATO, but this interest was generated primarily by Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014. Dougherty then makes the lurid claim that Russia had a legitimate interest in destroying Ukraine’s stock of weapons of mass destruction, unlike the U.S. in Iraq. He seems not to know that, in 1994, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees from Russia.