Alexander Vindman on U.S. foreign policy toward Russia and Ukraine.

Retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman is perhaps best known for blowing the whistle on Donald Trump’s efforts to coerce Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky into investigating Joe Biden and Biden’s son. That happened during Trump’s first presidency, when Vindman served on the National Security Council; his revelations were key to Trump’s first impeachment.

But when he spoke at the Harriman Institute in October 2025, Vindman said that faults in U.S. policy toward Russia long predate Donald Trump’s arrival in the White House.

“The practice that has been carried out over the course of the past 35 years, by and large, by both parties, has been a highly transactional, shortsighted approach,” he told the Harriman audience, in a talk that traced the policies of six U.S. administrations in office since the Soviet collapse in 1991.

Vindman said that a major example of this was the U.S. government’s pattern of “deferring to Moscow,” while consistently turning a blind eye toward Russia’s aggression in the region, from the war in Chechnya to Russia’s war in Georgia in 2008 and its annexation of Crimea and invasion of Eastern Ukraine in 2014. “We could have been a lot more condemnatory, a lot more conditional with regards to our engagement,” he said.

Vindman said policy problems started early on, with the United States allowing the denuclearization of Ukraine, which had inherited 4,000 nuclear weapons after the Soviet collapse only to give them up to Russia in 1994 in exchange for security guarantees from the United States, United Kingdom, and Russia.

Ambassador Victoria Nuland, chief of staff to the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State at the time of Ukraine’s denuclearization, moderated the event. “The question I’ve asked myself a lot is, did we make a mistake?” Nuland said. “Was there a deal to be had where [Ukraine] could have retained at least a small nuclear arsenal for their own protection?”

Vindman didn’t offer a specific answer to Nuland’s questions, and he acknowledged that at the time, Ukraine lacked the financial capacity to maintain even a small nuclear arsenal.

But, he added: “I could say this with significant certainty. If Ukraine had even a small nuclear arsenal, almost certainly they wouldn’t be the victims of Russian war.”

Vindman’s critique of U.S. policies is covered in detail in his 2025 book, The Folly of Realism: How the West Deceived Itself About Russia and Betrayed Ukraine. Vindman retired from the U.S. Army in 2021 after suffering harassment from Trump and his followers. He pursued a doctorate at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and Folly of Realism grew out of his dissertation research. It focuses on critical moments in history: the end of the Soviet Union, the denuclearization of Ukraine, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, NATO expansion, and the Russia-Georgia war, through the Russian annexation of Crimea and its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“The reason that we seem to have been caught up in this moment,” he said, “is that we consistently succumb to misplaced hopes and misplaced fear.”◆

Featured photo: Alexander Vindman speaking at a March 2024 press conference at the U.S. Capitol in support of funding for Ukraine. Photo by Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA via AP