'They can win this': Columbus retired Army general on Ukraine, Republican 'whining'
When Retired U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Arnold first visited Ukraine last year, he was struck by how much the landscape resembled Ohio’s.
“You see cornfields, soybean fields, wheat fields … The temperate climate, the change in flat terrain to rolling (hills). … You think you're in Ohio,” Arnold told a crowd of Rotarians, university students and others during a talk last week at Otterbein University.
“Except, Ohio does not have this going on,” he said as a picture flashed on a screen behind him, showing incinerated cars after a Russian cruise missile attack on Kyiv last year.
Arnold, 58, of Upper Arlington, is a former U.S. Army Special Forces officer with three combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. After retiring from the Army, he became a firefighter and emergency medical technician, and was inspired to visit Ukraine in early 2022 to work with medics after hearing about the Russian massacre at Bucha, a Kyiv suburb.
Arnold has since made three trips to Ukraine, and is aiming to raise $2 million for Frontline Medical, a nonprofit within the Columbus Foundation, to train and supply Ukrainian medics.
At the same time, he has a message for Washington after Congress failed to include any funding for Ukraine in the stopgap funding bill passed at the end of September.
“Right now Ukraine is defending our democracy in the United States and all of its principles. And that is worth the investment of weaponry,” he told The Dispatch. “They can win this. There's no doubt in my mind that military victory on Ukrainian terms is the only way this war ends.”
Stories from Ukraine
Arnold’s presentation at Otterbein University included stories of civilians and medics he met in Ukraine who related to him stories of resilience, as well as Russian atrocities.
He visited a mass grave in Izyum, where Ukraine officials told him they uncovered 466 bodies — most of them women.
In the city of Kherson, which Ukraine liberated from Russian control last November, he met Anna Alexandrivisya, a middle school teacher who said a third of her students had been taken to Russia or Crimea as part of a wave of Russian abductions.
“She's dealing with a bunch of distraught parents. She said the Russians took everything out of her school…(and they removed) all the Ukrainian language school books and made a ritual of publicly burning them,” he said.
Arnold also recounted meeting front-line medics in Ukraine with little or no formal training.
“Half of the casualties who died of their wounds could have survived had Ukrainian medics been thoroughly trained,” he told The Dispatch.
Arnold said he is raising money for Frontline Medical so that it can assist the Ukrainian Military Medical Academy, which is establishing more than 20 geographically dispersed training sites to improve services.
A call for commitment from Washington
The U.S. has provided Ukraine with around $113 billion in security, economic and humanitarian aid since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
The Biden administration has called for Congress to provide $24 billion in new funding, but former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and some other Republicans refused to include the funding in last month’s stopgap spending bill. The future of American support for Ukraine remains uncertain after House Republicans removed McCarthy from the speaker's seat and had not chosen his successor as of early Wednesday afternoon.
Ohio’s Sen. Sherrod Brown has supported the additional funding for Ukraine, but his junior colleague Sen. J.D. Vance has been skeptical.
“The American people deserve to know what their money has gone to. How is the counteroffensive going? Are the Ukrainians any closer to victory than they were 6 months ago? What is our strategy, and what is the president’s exit plan?” Vance wrote in a recent letter to the White House.
Arnold said Republicans’ fiscal concerns about Ukraine are short-sighted.
“As much whining as a few Republicans have made, we are providing roughly 1% of our defense budget to Ukraine…Why not provide 5% of the defense budget to the people who are fighting for democracy?”
(Since the full-scale Russian invasion in February last year, the Biden administration has committed more than $43.9 billion in security assistance to Ukraine, which amounts to about 2.8% of U.S. defense spending over the two fiscal years.)
Regarding Ukraine’s lack of expected progress in this year’s offensive against Russia, Arnold blamed a lack of equipment.
“The long range attack and armored personnel carriers — the bulk of that stuff doesn't show up until late this year or next year…so there was no way that the Ukrainians had a chance to finish this war this year,” he said.
But Ukrainians remain indefatigable, he said.
“They made it crystal clear to me that they are not interested in stopping until all Russians are out of all of Ukraine.”
More: A year after Russia invaded, Ukranians are still picking up the pieces in Columbus area
Peter Gill covers immigration, New American communities and religion for the Dispatch in partnership with Report for America. You can support work like his with a tax-deductible donation to Report for America at:bit.ly/3fNsGaZ.
pgill@dispatch.com
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Columbus retired Army general talks Ukraine, Republican 'whining'
