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Walt Zlotow – Chicago Tribune misleads its readership with Bob Kustra’s imaginary commentary ‘What Ronald Reagan would do today for the people of Ukraine’.

Walt Zlotow  West Suburban Peace Coalition  Glen Ellyn IL, 13 July 26

It’s fitting Tribune commentator Bob Kustra would go all the way back to 1980’s “virulent anti-communist” Ronald Reagan to argue Reagan would have squandered another $175 billion to keep Ukraine destroying itself in America and NATO’s lost proxy war to weaken, isolate Russia from the European economy.

Kustra is clearly locked in virulent 1980’s anti-communist ideology that he’s transferred to non-communist Russia, ignoring 35 years of NATO expansion that doubled NATO membership to keep Russia isolated and fearing NATO’s nukes on its doorsteps. This was after the USSR vanished into the dustbin of history.

 Kustra imagines Russia had nothing to fear from adding Ukraine to NATO, a red line of Russian security concern that Russian leader Putin had been warning the US and NATO about since 2007. Kustra has apparently erased the US promoted Ukraine coup in 2014 that toppled Russian leaning Ukraine President Victor Yanukovych, provoking a civil war in the Donbas that killed thousands of Russian leaning Ukrainians there.  In Kustra’s worldview, Obama didn’t greenlight the coup, Trump didn’t gift Ukraine with hundreds of millions in weapons to polish off the Donbas separatists. and Biden didn’t ramp up NATO membership to Ukraine and tell Russia it was none of their damn business.  

Claiming Reagan would still be arming the collapsing, failed Ukraine state is preposterous. Reagan spending $20 million in black market smuggling networks to inundate Poland with “1eaflets, posters, magazines, newspapers and radio break-ins” is a quantum leap away from funding a war with $175 billion that has near utterly destroyed Ukraine in their lost war the US provoked. As conservative as Reagan was. he was foremost a pragmatist in foreign affairs. He was out of office and battling mental decline when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 so everything Kustra offers is conjecture. But Reagan’s record argues strongly he’d never have engaged in the madness Obama, Trump in term one and Biden did to send Ukraine to the scrapheap of nations.

Bob Kustra knows better. So does the Chicago Tribune. Its readership deserves something a tad better than Bob Kustra’s ‘The Russians are coming, The Russians are coming.’

July 15, 2026 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | media, USA