To the Journal editor:

The many lies contained in Andrew Napolitano’s piece (“My weekend in Moscow) on the March 15-16 Mining Journal’s editorial page cannot go unchallenged.

His piece reminded me of the song “Springtime for Hitler,” from the broadway musical, “The Producers.” I had no idea that Putin was so warm and fuzzy. Tell that to Navalny, Yushenov, Politkovskaya, Litvinenko and the dozens of other political dissidents Putin has killed.

Contrary to Napolitano’s lies, Ukraine’s 2014 Euromaidan revolution was not orchestrated by the U.S. State Department, CIA, or MI6. It was a spontaneous uprising of the Ukrainian people in reaction to a highly corrupt Putin stooge, President Viktor Yanukovych.

When Yanukovych tried to abandon Ukraine’s Association Agreement with the European Union to move closer to Russia, Ukrainians filled the streets to protest. Russian snipers killed hundreds of protestors but freedom-loving Ukrainian’s prevailed.

Putin then promptly invaded Crimea and four provinces of Ukraine’s Donbas region (18% of Ukraine’s territory). Notwithstanding Russia’s 2014 invasion, Ukraine continued to move closer to NATO and the West and this resulted in the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022. This history has been turned on its head by Trump and his sycophants when they slander Ukrainians and say Russia didn’t invade Ukraine. Napolitano and Trump are truly Putin’s useful idiots, an expression used by Stalin to describe American Soviet apologists of the 1930s.

According to Napolitano, Moscow is “cleaner, happier, and friendlier.” Paradoxically, for Napolitano, if a Russian calls the “Special Military Operation” invasion of Ukraine, a war, they can get 15 years in prison. Under Putin’s lockdown of Russian society, you’d better be happy — or else!

Napolitano defames America’s leadership of the free world as egotistical exceptionalism. America’s global leadership has kept the world at peace for 80 years — since the end of World War II — the longest stretch of great power peace since the birth of Christ (Larry Summers, former treasury secretary).

To break with NATO and the democracies of Western Europe and side with a killer regime like Russia is the geopolitical mistake of the ages and as a country we will pay dearly.