DeLauro: Trump Wants To Abandon Ukraine

“The past few weeks have been among the most shameful in our nation’s history,” U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro said at a somber Friday press conference. ​“Trump is willing to sacrifice the freedom of an entire nation so that he can be seen as closing what is in his mind just another real estate deal.”

With these words, which she delivered with deep emotion, DeLauro’s second-floor City Hall press conference doubled as a kind of spirit-raising rally to support local officials and the Ukrainian community.

“He is isolating Ukraine and treating it as a pariah instead of an ally. I believe he wants to abandon Ukraine,” she said. ​“At this time in history, every supporter of liberty should be a friend of Ukraine.”

Her remarks come at a time that appears to be a low point in the endgame of Russia’s three-year war in Ukraine. The Trump administration has cut off, or paused, humanitarian, military, and intelligence aid and, most recently, threatened to revoke legal status for 240,000 Ukrainian refugees who fled the war with Russia to the U.S.

“This will be litigated,” DeLauro added, with reference to the refugees, ​“and I will be with you. With [behavior like this], who will believe that we stand for anything?” she asked rhetorically.

U.S. and Ukrainian officials are scheduled to meet next week to try to find a way to end the war, following a blowup at the White House that saw President Trump and Vice President JD Vance berate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for being insufficiently grateful for U.S. support.

Following DeLauro’s remarks, the same somber and often personal notes, though rounded out with gritty optimism, were sounded by a range of other speakers who took to the dais, decorated in the yellow and blue colors of the Ukrainian flag, over the course of a 75-minute presser.

Mayor Justin Elicker, like DeLauro, delivered a full-throated defense of Ukraine and bemoaned Trump’s betrayal of democracy: ​“For the first time in my life I am ashamed of the American president and what our country has become to the world. … Many are asking, as I am, how we can support a brutal, land-grabbing dictator.”

“Ronald Reagan is turning in his grave,” he said.

The president of Ukraine House at Yale, Daria Figlus, reminded her fellow Ukraine advocates how Ukraine has been the target of Russian imperialism, as she put it, for the last hundred years. She said her group’s mission now, in the third year of the war, is to ​“speak the truth, fight disinformation, and keep the narrative alive on campus.” 

She cautioned that as Ukraine is losing critical resources, it is no time for forgetting either the Ukrainian people’s plight or, as importantly, ​“how it [the outcome of the war] is related to American freedom.”

Myron Melnyck, one of the leaders of the relief effort centered on the New Haven Ukrainian community at St. Michael the Archangel Catholic Church on George Street, said the moment calls for more defense of the free press at a time when there are so many presidential distortions of the facts that then spread on media. ​“So the press is a bulwark and there’s not enough attention to the press. True journalism doesn’t get through enough and without good journalism there’s only propaganda.”

Carl R. Harvey, the commander of the Ukrainian Veterans of America Post 33 in Orange, reported on the ongoing local effort he’s part of that continues to send largely medical supplies to four hospitals in western Ukraine. To date, that’s included 14 containers bearing $2.5 million of humanitarian and medical supplies and equipment.

In a detail that suggests the war is as vicious now as it was in the beginning, Melnyk added that the most recent shipment request to a field hospital near the front line was not medical equipment but an early warning system for drones and missiles. 

Unlike hospitals in Lviv and other cities that have been recipients of medical equipment, the mobile field hospital is not in a city (which provides klaxons and alarms of incoming attacks) but near the battle lines and there are no warnings at the various locations where the hospital stages. Now, Melnyk said, they will have a chance to move patients to safety before an attack.

And Eugene Babij of the Ukrainian American Cultural Center of Connecticut, in Cromwell, said for the past weeks, ever since Trump’s inauguration, ​“I dread waking up in the morning because he [Trump] will have done something [injurious] to Ukraine.” 

He said he had reached the point sometimes when he didn’t want to get up at all and he had to take a step to make himself feel better.

So one morning, two weeks ago, he put together four sheets, clarifying goals and objectives, as if he were personally among the negotiators: What Zelensky Wants, What Trump Wants, What Putin Wants, What Europe Wants. 

“Once something is written down,” he said of his exercise, ​“it doesn’t bother as much. It makes you feel better. And yet he comes back every day with something terrible.”

Many of the speakers finished their remarks with ​“Slava Ukraini,” which is both a greeting and declaration of national sovereignty, and it translates as ​“Glory to Ukraine.” Participants responded with a rousing ​“Heroiam slava,” which translates as ​“Glory to the heroes.”

DeLauro’s speech in full will be available at the congresswoman’s site later today. In a first, DeLauro’s press spokesperson Anthony Afriyie said her remarks are also translated into Ukrainian.