Ex-White House staffer Vindman says Biden has done 'too little, too late' to deter Russian invasion

The former U.S. Army officer who oversaw Ukraine policy in the Trump White House criticized the Biden administration for doing “too little, too late” to deter a Russian invasion of that country and predicted it will be “catastrophic” for the United States and its European allies.

Retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who last week sued four former Trump associates for conducting a campaign of “intimidation and retaliation” against him, also expressed fears that a Russian incursion into Ukraine could rapidly escalate into a military and cyber conflict far beyond that country’s borders.

“This could very well not end up being a limited war,” Vindman said in an interview for the Yahoo News “Skullduggery” podcast. “We already have NATO allies — the Baltics, Poland, the U.K. — saying that they’re prepared to support Ukraine. Russia has to contend with that. There’s a chance that based on the fact that there are safe havens outside of Ukraine, the Russians might feel like they’re backed into a corner, especially if they’re suffering heavy casualties and need to respond.”

Equally worrisome, Vindman said, is what he called “the spillover effect.”

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“So you could envision it as a legitimate scenario — this is not a far-fetched hypothetical — in which Russia conducts a major cyber offensive against Ukraine in preparation for its conventional war. It seeks to attack and disrupt Ukrainian critical infrastructure communications, power grids, all the kinds of utilities.” That, he said, is “absolutely going to spill over as they have in the past to Europe and to the U.S. Then the U.S. is forced to respond. ... That could escalate very quickly, too easily, the entire European theater. ... It has the very real possibility of spilling over in a big way, whether that’s in cyber or in actual military confrontation. It has the real probability of really destabilizing Europe because thousands and thousands of refugees are going to be flowing into Europe. It has the real probability of potentially expanding with greater Russian aspirations, casting eyes on the Baltics or something of that nature. And all these things are really detrimental to U.S. interests.”

Vindman’s sharp words about the Biden administration during the “Skullduggery” interview was especially noteworthy given the high-profile role he played as a star witness against Trump in his first impeachment proceeding, prompting vicious attacks on his loyalty and character by the president’s allies. As a National Security Council official, Vindman listened in on the July 25, 2019, phone call Trump had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which the president asked the newly elected foreign leader to do him a favor by launching investigations into Joe Biden and the Democrats.

But while top Democrats praised Vindman at the time for blowing the whistle on Trump’s conduct, and reporting the phone call to a White House lawyer, the former Army officer didn’t hesitate to call out Biden and the White House for failing to more forcefully respond to the Russian threat to Ukraine. “The senior policymakers didn't seem to come around to this threat until really quite late,” Vindman said. “You only start seeing [them] take things seriously in the November and December [2021] time frame.”

And when they did, he added, the Biden White House mainly spoke about sanctions and other nonmilitary responses that likely have had little impact on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s calculations about what he can get away with. “We should have been providing Ukrainians with a lot more advanced military capability,” Vindman said.

But Biden’s biggest mistake in Vindman’s view was to publicly take off the table the idea that U.S. combat troops would help defend the Ukrainians.

“Imagine if we dispensed with our strategic ambiguity around Taiwan? How would that affect the Chinese calculus around conducting an operation in Taiwan? Probably advance it, right? It’s the same thing here. We didn't need to do that.”

Vindman’s lawsuit, filed last week in federal court in Washington, D.C., accuses Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and two other White House aides — social media director Dan Scavino and communications aide Julia Hahn — of a conspiracy to discredit him with leaks and memos that were fed to conservative media outlets as retaliation for testifying against Trump about the Zelensky phone call.

In the lawsuit, he draws a direct line between those alleged actions and what he describes as the organized effort by Trump and his allies to intimidate former aides from testifying against him in the Jan. 6 investigation.

“So, I mean, it’s a pretty darn comprehensive effort to encourage or compel actors to carry the president’s water,” Vindman said. “If enablers feel the pain, suffer the consequences of participating in this corrupt enterprise in this case, then they will think twice. They will think twice about the benefits and they will think twice about the cost. And that’s why this case, I think, is so important.”