NYC Councilwoman Kristin Richardson Jordan blames Ukraine for Russian invasion
She’s blamed the victim!
Hard-left City Councilwoman Kristin Richardson Jordan took to Twitter on Friday to say who she believes is responsible for Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine — and it’s Ukraine.
It’s the latest in a string of controversial remarks from the freshman Harlem lawmaker.
“Had Washington and Brussels taken Russia’s security concerns seriously this war wouldn’t be happening,” she claimed. “No country wants or deserves to have foreign powers placing missiles right on its borders.”
“In 2014, the US 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,” she added. “The US has been sending the Ukrainian military weapons ($650M in military assistance this past year alone) which have ended up in the hands of neo-nazi militias like the Azov Battalion.”
She was heavily criticized during her first month in office, in January, for repeatedly offering her condolences to the dead cop-killer who murdered two police officers in her district.
Many of the tweets sent by Richardson Jordan were nearly identical to baseless claims made by Russia’s authoritarian leader, Vladimir Putin, and other top officials at the Kremlin in recent weeks.
Most of the thread was virtually identical to another series of tweets published the night before by Twitter user @bxcommie, who describes themselves on the website as “Queer, revolutionary Chicano NYC public school teacher. Free all political prisoners & prisoners of war! #FreeThemAll”
“We must oppose any and all wars in which poor and working people fight and die for the rich,” the user wrote at 10:22 p.m. on Thursday, in the first tweet of their thread. “People don’t want war. Only governments controlled by the military industrial complex want war.”
Richardson Jordan sent an identical tweet at 10:35 a.m., which also served as the first tweet of her thread.
The second tweet from @BXCommie’s read: “Had Washington and Brussels taken Russia’s security concerns seriously this war wouldn’t be happening. No country wants or deserves to have foreign powers placing missiles right on its borders.”
Richardson Jordan’s second tweet was identical — with just one change: a line break between the first and second sentences.
“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,” @bxcommie wrote in the third tweet.
The councilwoman’s third tweet was exactly the same, down to the punctuation.
All told, The Post found that at least eight of Richardson Jordan tweets were either identical or substantially similar to the earlier thread.
The lawmaker did not return requests for comment.
Get the latest updates in the Russia-Ukraine conflict with The Post’s live coverage.
Additionally, Richardson Jordan borrowed tweets contain wantonly inaccurate retellings of history.
For instance, Ukraine’s democratically elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish, a fact that stands in sharp contrast to Russian attempts — echoed by Richardson Jordan — to associate his government with fascists and Nazis.
Several of his relatives died in the Holocaust.
In the tweets, the councilwoman also deemed Ukraine’s 2014 widespread uprising against Putin ally Viktor Yanukovych as illegitimate.
Yanukovych was tossed from power by Ukrainians, who poured onto the streets to protest endemic corruption and Yanukovych’s decision to more closely align Ukraine with Russia.
The revolt was a culmination of tensions that had built in the country since his disputed win in 2010.
That was Yanukovych’s second bid to lead Ukraine after eventually losing a contest in 2004 to Viktor Yushchenko, an opponent of the Kremlin.
Yushchenko was famously poisoned in the midst of the 2004 campaign, leaving him permanently disfigured.
Putin seized a small but important piece of Ukraine — Crimea — in 2014, after Yanukovych was deposed. Then he began bankrolling proxy forces in two small parts of eastern Ukraine, violence that the councilwoman — like the Kremlin — blamed on Ukraine.
“The ethnically Russian Donbass region (Donetsk and Luhansk ) has been under heavy violence and shellings from the Ukrainian military for the last 8 years,” she wrote.
Those two regions are the same ones Putin recognized as republics in February, which created the pretext for the Kremlin’s all-out assault on Ukraine.
The United States and its allies have provided Ukraine with defensive weapons and military training.
But there is no evidence to support Kremlin claims that Kyiv has any interest or designs on weapons of mass destruction or other long-range offensive weaponry.
Richardson Jordan also attacked the West for its intervention in the Balkans war in the 1990s — an intervention launched by allied forces to stop Serbia’s genocide.
“This is the tip of the iceberg,” she wrote in 1999. “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. Ignoring or excusing the U.S.’ role in this crisis is ahistorical and chauvinist.”
The country’s then-dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, was indicted by The Hague for war crimes but died before the completion of the trial.”
Richardson Jordan’s own colleagues were quick to criticize her.
“With due respect, I have visited the mass graves at Srebrenica and the beautiful city of Sarajevo,” wrote Council Majority Leader Keith Powers (D-Manhattan). “Our intervention was meant to help prevent one of the largest genocides in modern history.”
The lawmaker was widely mocked on social media for her claims and wrote: “To be clear the current actions of Russia are not acceptable, obviously, just saying there is a larger historical context that we should also be aware of.”
