City Councilwoman Kristin Richardson Jordan was excoriated on social media Friday after blaming the United States for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in several fact-challenged tweets about the lead-up to the war.
In a thread that’s overwhelmingly sympathetic to Russia’s head of state Vladimir Putin, the Harlem Council member wrote that “NATO broke its promise” by “continuously expanding eastward and threatening Russia by encircling it militarily.”
“Had Washington and Brussels taken Russia’s security concerns seriously, this war wouldn’t be happening,” she wrote. “The U.S. and E.U. knew the consequences of provoking Russia with NATO expansion and proceeded anyway because they do not suffer, the Ukrainian and Russian people do.”
Richardson Jordan appeared to be referring to diplomatic talks between American and Soviet officials around the time of the reunification of Germany in 1990. Over the years, Russian officials have cited a purported statement from U.S. Secretary of State James Baker to then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to the effect that NATO did not intend to expand its membership eastward. But at the time, the Soviet Union and the Soviet-aligned Warsaw Pact still existed, leading Western officials and scholars to counter that NATO expansion outside of East Germany, wasn’t even a topic of diplomatic conversation.
Years later, even Gorbachev acknowledged that the subject did not come up.
“The topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was never discussed; it was not raised in those years,” he was quoted as saying in the Russian newspaper, Kommersant, in 2014. “I am saying this with a full sense of responsibility. Not a single Eastern European country brought up the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact had ceased to exist in 1991.”
Richardson’s pro-Kremlin tweet storm almost immediately drew denunciations online.
“So very strange that some progressives twist into knots to defend an authoritarian mafia state that just invaded a neighboring country,” wrote Garrett Watson.
Will Saletan tweeted that Richardson Jordan was rationalizing “war crimes” and suggested that the progressives who backed her run for Council should take note.
“To progressives: This is a good time to take stock of who’s for peace — and who, in the guise of peace, is willing to rationalize war crimes, as long as they’re committed by an enemy of the United States,” he tweeted.
Richardson Jordan also falsely stated that in 2014 the “U.S. helped overthrow Ukraine’s democratically elected leader in an illegal coup, helped install a fascist government and empowered a far-right military all with the goal of destabilizing Russia.”
Ukraine’s leader at the time, President Viktor Yanukovych, was in fact ousted after the nation’s parliament voted him out of office.
But the Councilwoman did not stop there with her misinformation.
“This is the tip of the iceberg,” she wrote. “The U.S. and NATO have a violent history destabilizing the region, such as when it facilitated the breakup of Yugoslavia after bombing Serbia for 78 days.”
Serbia at the time was led by the dictator Slobodan Milosevic, who died in 2006 after being indicted on war crimes charges and genocide.
Even Richardson Jordan’s colleagues in the City Council pushed back on her statements.
“With due respect, I have visited the mass graves at Srebrenica and the beautiful city of Sarajevo,” Councilman Keith Powers wrote in response to her “tip of the iceberg” tweet. “Our intervention was meant to help prevent one of the largest genocides in modern history.”
Councilwoman Inna Vernikov, a southern Brooklyn Republican who was born in Ukraine, called her colleague’s tweets “infuriating.”
“She’s being a propaganda mouthpiece for Putin,” Vernikov said. “It’s complete lies. Russia doesn’t have any legitimate security concerns to invade Ukraine. I have no idea what my colleague is reading, but what she’s tweeting is propaganda and false.”
Vernikov said she spoke Friday with friends in western Ukraine who are in the middle of helping refugees from other war-torn regions of the country resettle.
“There are innocent people who are dying, men, women, and children who are crying, who are being bombed, who are being terrorized. It’s absolutely infuriating that one of my colleagues would say something like this,” she said.
