We must confess, here at PoO, that we might bridle when told we have posted something that was incorrect and we should put things right. We are apt to want to stick to our guns – until the evidence shows how wrong we were.
But we hasten to rectify our posts without quibbling when the person who is correcting us – the “President of the United States”, for example – threatens to tariffy us if we don’t do his bidding.
In accord with that policy, we are accepting that…
In accord with that policy, we are accepting that…
- We were wrong to have disparaged Russia’s Vladimir Putin as an autocratic tyrant;
- We were wrong to assert or suggest that Russia invaded Ukraine.
This week he advised us to shred everything we were led to believe happened in Ukraine and accept his truth.
Fair to say, not all our colleagues in the journalism business are willing to accept his version of events.
The BBC, for example, posted an article headed …
Fact-checking Trump claims about war in Ukraine
Claim: Zelensky is a ‘dictator without elections’
Trump initially drew attention to the fact that Ukraine has not held a presidential election since 2019, when Zelensky – previously a comedian with no political base – swept to power.
He repeated the claims in a Truth Social post in which he accused the Ukrainian leader of being a “dictator without elections”.
Zelensky’s first five-year term of office was due to come to an end in May 2024. However, Ukraine has been under martial law since the Russian invasion in February 2022, which means elections are suspended.
Ukraine’s martial laws were drafted in 2015 – shortly after Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula and years before Zelensky and his Servant of the People party came to power.
Independent observers from the OSCE said the 2019 election had been “competitive and fundamental freedoms were generally respected”.
Zelensky won 73% of the vote in the second-round run-off.
Zelensky has vowed to hold a new election once the conflict ends and has yet to confirm that he intends to stand. Some experts have observed that holding elections in Ukraine before the conflict ends would be practically impossible, as Russian attacks on many cities persist and millions of citizens are displaced abroad or living under Russian occupation.
And so on…
Claim: ‘I hate to say it, but he’s down at 4% approval rating’
President Trump also claimed that Zelensky’s approval rating has fallen to 4%.
It’s unclear what source the president was citing as he didn’t provide evidence. We have asked the White House to clarify this.
Official polling is limited and it is extremely difficult to carry out accurate surveys during a time of war. Millions of Ukrainians have fled and Russia has occupied around a fifth of the country.
However, some polling has been possible to carry out by telephone. A survey conducted this month found that 57% of Ukrainians said they trusted the president, according to the Ukraine-based Kyiv International Institute of Sociology.
However, that was down from 77% at the end of 2023, and 90% in May 2022 – suggesting that the president has suffered a drop-off in his popularity.
Some other polls suggest Zelensky trailing his nearest rival, former army chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi, in the first round of any future election, indicating the two would face each other in a run-off.
There’s more on Zaluzhnyi being a rival to Zelensky on the BBC link.
Then there’s this –
Claim: ‘You should have never started it’
Ukrainian authorities expressed dissatisfaction over not being part of Tuesday’s talks in Riyadh. But Trump dismissed these concerns, telling reporters that Ukraine had had three years to end the war, before appearing to blame Kyiv for starting the conflict.
“You should have never started it,” he said. The Kremlin has previously accused Ukraine of starting the war against Russia.
“It was they who started the war in 2014. Our goal is to stop this war. And we did not start this war in 2022,” Russian President Vladimir Putin told US talk show host Tucker Carlson in February 2024.
Ukraine didn’t start the war. Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, having annexed Crimea in 2014.
The annexation came after Ukraine’s pro-Russian president was ousted by popular demonstrations.
Trump has subsequently denounced Zelenskiy as a “dictator” and warned he had to move quickly to secure peace or risk losing his country.
Some commentators say Trump has upended U.S. policy on the war, as he ended a campaign to isolate Russia with a phone chat with Putin and talks between senior U.S. and Russian officials that have sidelined Ukraine.
Indeed.
He’s upending our history books, too.
Here at PoO, anticipating our being arrested for having heretical books in our library, we have started a bonfire.
We might have to get rid of our computers, too, lest we be tempted to try to find out which countries (according to the lefties who gather this sort of stuff) have been invaded by the US.
One article seriously misled us by saying:
While the Russian invasion of Ukraine dominated headlines in early 2022 and the countries Germany invaded were a vital part of World War II, the United States has itself been an aggressor on many occasions. Instances of the United States invading non-U.S. territory range throughout the country’s history, from the 1805 Battle of Derna in what is now Libya to the 2001-2021 takeover and occupation of Afghanistan.
But definitions are important:
No single list of countries the U.S. has invaded can be considered truly comprehensive for the simple reason that there exist many differing definitions of precisely which military actions can be classified as an invasion. For example, if one counts only the times the U.S. has declared war on another country and fought on foreign land, there would be 11 instances of invasion spread across five wars.
When the definition of an invasion extends to any significant hostile incursion into another country’s territory, even if war were not officially declared, the list could include several more entries.
A list compiled by Dr. Gideon Polya of La Trobe University in 2013 included 70 countries.
Let’s go further: what happens if the definition of an invasion is expanded to include any instance in which US forces interacted with a foreign country or territory—including areas in the Western Hemisphere that were foreign territories at the time but are now US states.
In that case, one could cite hundreds of incidents since the founding of the country.
In fact, according to historians Christopher Kelly and Stuart Laycock, the United States has been “militarily involved” with every country on the globe but three: Andorra, Bhutan, and Liechtenstein.
A more comprehensive tally of the United States’ international “use of force” incidents is recorded in a table published in this article and compiled from multiple previously published lists, including those created by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the Global Policy Forum.
But many covert operations lack a known official record, and so will not appear on this list.
On the other hand, the list can be misleading.
The CRS counts any event of any size, even those that were just a small posse entering another country to pursue a criminal. The CRS also expressly states that the legality of the events on the list has not been taken into consideration—for instance, if the U.S. sends troops to protect its embassy during a civil war or deploys a deterrent force into a country whose neighbor is amassing troops on its border, the act would likely be considered welcome by some participants and an invasion by others.
As such, the source lists (and in turn, the list below) include many events which may or may not fit one’s definition of an invasion. For instance, peacekeeping missions in which the U.S. was (arguably) invited into non-U.S. territory, humanitarian missions such as disaster relief efforts, or WWII battles in which the U.S. landed on the shores of a Pacific island such as Vanuatu—technically an invasion—in order to repel Japanese forces already occupying it.
Your PoO team – having taken on board the caveats – was fascinated to learn of US incursions in our part of the world.
Military action in Fiji is recorded in 1840-41 (retaliation for attacking American explorers), 1855 (retaliation for ”preying upon US citizens and sailors”) and – again that year – 1855 (retaliation for murder of American traders).
Much more fascinating is that the US launched a military action in 1841 in Kiribati – yes, Kiribati, although it was then called Taputeoiea (Tabiteuea) or Drummond’s Island.
This was retaliatory action in revenge for the murder of an American sailor.
One military action on the list which we did know about was the American invasion of Grenada in 1983.
Except – of course – we might have been misled by historians into thinking President Reagan was concerned about the safety of hundreds of US citizens attending a medical school on the island.
After an official request from the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, President Reagan decided to intervene to protect the medical students, to restore democracy to the tiny nation, and to eliminate an ever-increasing Cuban presence on the island. The Department of Defense began to work on plans for an invasion, code named Operation Urgent Fury.
The media fed us that line, too.
But PoO has been slipped a copy of the Gospel According to St Donald and we find the historians’ account might be wrong.
Yes, American forces did land on the island and quickly sorted out the baddies from the goodies.
But this was the inevitable response of Grenada having the gall to mount an invasion of the USA (which, fair to say, didn’t get far).
According to the media and historians’ accounts, the US joint task force formed to conduct the operation on Grenada was led by Vice Adm. Joseph Metcalf III, the commander of the U.S. Navy Second Fleet. On his staff were U.S. Air Force officers Maj. Gen. Robert B. Patterson and Brig. Gen. Richard L. Meyer, who advised Admiral Metcalf on airlift and strategic and tactical airpower forces.
But that does not mention the heroic role played by …
Guess who?
Yep. Trump was in the first wave of airdropped Rangers who managed to clear a runway to enable C-141s and C-130s to begin landing and unloading troops and cargo and he was involved in freeing 138 medical students held at a nearby campus.
Has he ever mentioned his Medal of Honor and Purple Heart?
Not Trump. He’s much too modest to want us to know about his medals.
And while promoting his image as a Man of Peace, he is disinclined to put the record straight about who invaded whom in the Caribbean when Reagan was sitting in the White House.
He may well say our copy of the Gospel According to St Donald is a fake. But it looks good to us.
Bob Edlin is a veteran journalist and editor for the Point of Order blog HERE. - where this article was sourced.
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