The Man Who Lost Avdiivka
My excuses for doing nothing for six months are way better than his
Hello, readers! I hope you are well.
Native Cpeaker has been on hiatus since February, haitus from writing, but from from drawing weekly illustrations for Tribune Content Agency and not from regular English lessons with my Ukrainian students.
Also, I went back to Capitol Hill to advocate for Ukraine in April in the Ukraine Action Summit. The seven-month period between Summits happened to bracket the grim period of aid cutoffs imposed by America First extremists in Congress. Many of my drawings refer to this. Here are a few. More drawings to come in the next couple of weeks.
Delayed Effects ©2024 William L. Brown. The Republican Party hard-core MAGA wing, at the direction of Donald Trump, pressured House Speaker Mike Johnson to delay voting on a foreign-aid funding bill. The delay halted the flow of weapons and ammunition. The extremists were only interested in using the issue to score domestic political points. They paid no heed to the consequences: Ukraine’s loss of life, infrastructure, and territory, the effects of which continue even now.
Also since February I sold a house. Then I bought a house. Now I’m waiting for contractors to have the time to make it livable. These activities have taken much of my attention. Long-term readers will know I was a displaced person. I fled Ukraine on the brink of the full-scale invasion. See past Native Cpeaker articles to get the full story and those of my Ukrainian friends and students. My last article was an update about some of them and I promised more. I will get to that on a later date. This and the next few articles will update my illustration work.
But first I will thank my family and friends who helped me find temporary places to live when I encountered America’s housing shortage on my arrival two years ago, and who advised and sympathized in the intense real-estate dealings over the last six months.
State of the World, ©2024 William L. Brown. It’s been a bleak year around the globe, not just Ukraine. This has created additional problems for Ukraine as it seems the world can only focus on one story at a time, and the media loses interest in old stories, such as Russia’s war on Ukraine, that do not quickly resolve. This makes fund-raising for humanitarian aid more difficult. I’ve personally experienced two occasions when people asked “Is that still going on?” when I mentioned the war.
No!, ©2024 William L. Brown. As Russia made advances on the battlefield and Ukraine began to run out of ammunition, the Speaker of the House refused to bring the foreign-aid bill up for a vote, effectively stopping the flow of weapons and ammunition to Ukraine.
In October 2023, the MAGA wing of the Republican Party deposed their Speaker of the House for the sin of bipartisanship. They installed representative Mike Johnson as Speaker under orders from former-president Trump to strike no deals with Democrats and table the foreign aid bill that had already passed the Senate. All Congressional bills must pass both the Senate and House to become law.
The bill included 60 billion dollars in aid to Ukraine. The House is Republican-majority so the only way the bill could pass was if some Republicans voted for it, but funding Ukraine aid goes against the MAGA wing’s America First isolationist ideology. So, Johnson stalled the bill, refusing to bring it up for a vote.
Ironically, most of the aid-package billions would go to American factories to build the weapons. For the most part, we send weapons, not cash. A lot of those weapons are surplus. We are emptying our defense closets of old weapons and passing them on to Ukraine like a thrift-store donation. And like a thrift-store donation, we’re claiming the value of those old weapons as our contribution. We’re paying ourselves to make new weapons. So, we’re not handing Ukraine a check for 60 billion dollars. The dollars mainly go back into our own pockets and we give them stuff that, on paper, is worth $60 billion.
That and other arguments were useless, the MAGA-ists were only focused on their domestic agenda. Let foreigners die and democratic countries fall, their only goal was to have a talking point that’ll help them win the next US presidency.
Out of Ammo, ©2024 William L. Brown. Stopping aid was not just a financial matter, it literally meant Ukraine ran out of ammunition. Artillery shells were rationed on the front.
Umbrella, ©2024 William L. Brown. More rockets and drones were able to penetrate Ukrainian defense as they ran low on Patriot missiles supplied by the US. Civilians died and energy infrastructure was destroyed.
Mike Johnson, ©2024 William L. Brown. The town of Avdiivka was lost to the Russian advance, largely due to lack of ammunition, because US aid stopped. It was all down to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson who refused to allow a vote on the pending aid package already passed by the Senate. Ukrainian soldiers died, territory was seized and the war effort was set back because of Mike Johnson, and the people who gave him his orders, or as he prefers to characterize it, threatened to depose him as Speaker if he allowed the vote.
It’s particularly galling to see the Republicans, who made such a show of holding the other party’s politicians and officials responsible for the attack of the US Embassy in Benghazi and the abandonment of Afghanistan, wave aside responsibility for an act that demonstrably helped Russia wage war. People died, territory was lost, infrastructure was destroyed, and the war’s course was tilted in Russia’s favor. If Democrats had done something like this, there would be Congressional hearings, treason charges, and a media wild-fire.
Hero, ©2024 William L. Brown. Finally in late April, stirred by Iran’s missile/drone attack on Israel, Speaker Johnson allowed a vote on the foreign aid bill, making a show of “doing the right thing,” after doing the wrong thing for half a year..
The bill included aid for Israel and Taiwan. America Firsters don’t want to send US dollars to Ukraine or Taiwan, though they do for Israel. Johnson claimed to be swayed in favor of defending Ukraine by various means: a CIA briefing about battlefield losses as a result of aid delay, his son’s acceptance to the Naval Academy, lobbying by Ukraine’s president Zelensky and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and fervent praying. Also, he may have been influenced by Ukraine-advocate-supplied documentation of Russian repression of Baptists in occupied Ukraine.
Johnson was much praised for his turn-around. Ukraine advocates thanked him sincerely. Personally, I’m thankful he finally did the right thing. BUT, I won’t thank him for doing the right thing after such an unconscionable, deadly delay. He’s supposedly a Christian. Seems like a true Christian’s response - when it is explained that your action (or inaction) is killing people - would be to immediately stop., not pray over it for awhile. That’s some strange Christianity.
The crucial conversion may have been due to another Johnson. Former UK prime minister Boris Johnson reportedly made the case to former president Trump in early April that it would hurt him politically if he allowed Ukraine to fall. For whatever reason, Speaker Johnson allowed the vote to happen two weeks later and he was not deposed for it.
To me, Mike Johnson will always be The Man Who Lost Avdiivka.