Now that Russia has invaded Ukraine — forcing over 50,000 Ukrainians to flee their country or seek shelter underground amid the shelling of major cities — the Green New Deal can now officially be renamed the Red New Deal.  At the writing of this, 198 Ukrainians have been killed in Russia's attacks, with three victims identified as children.  Over 1,000 people have been wounded.

Vitaly Skakun, a Ukrainian Marine battalion engineer, gave his life fighting the Russian invasion by helping destroy the Henichesk bridge in the Kherson region to help stop the advancement of Russian tanks.

On Snake Island in the Black Sea, 30 miles off the coast of Ukraine, thirteen Ukrainian border guards told an invading Russian warship to "go f--- yourself" when ordered to stand down and surrender.  All thirteen soldiers were killed.

None of this had to happen.  Although Hillary Clinton and the Democrat media complex are doing all they can to distract the issue by projecting things on Trump — insisting he's siding with Putin and giving him aid and comfort — the reality is that the majority of Americans believe that Putin wouldn't be invading Ukraine if Trump were still president.  As reported in the National Review:

A new Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll survey released Friday found that 62 percent of those polled believed Putin would not be moving against Ukraine if Trump had been president. When looking strictly at the answers of Democrats and Republicans, 85 percent of Republicans and 38 percent of Democrats answered this way. ... A majority of Americans polled — 59 percent — also said they believed that the Russian president moved on Ukraine because Putin saw weakness in President Biden.

It's President Biden's feeble presence and support of a dangerous green energy policy that has opened the door for Putin to invade Ukraine.  Time Magazine used nonsensical cover art last June to suggest that Joe Biden had Vladimir Putin in his sights, running a story by Brian Bennett titled "How Biden Plans to Get Tough on Putin during Their Geneva Summit."  But as it turns out, it was Kyle Smith's recent article for the National Review — "No One Fears This Pathetic Old Geezer" — that was much more accurate:

Biden and whoever is giving him orders about what he's allowed to do are running the administration like a woke blog. After gathering half a century of experience, supposedly mastering the intricacies of Washington, D.C., and using that expertise to be wrong on more or less every big foreign-policy question over that period, Biden's focus is primarily on issuing dumb young-adult taunts to his detractors by, for instance, appointing Merrick Garland attorney general (then watching Garland treat angry parents at school-board meetings like al-Qaeda), nominating for comptroller of the currency a woman who expressly argued for driving fossil-fuel companies out of business, and nominating to the Fed another woman who said much the same thing. Biden tried to use executive action to hamstring fossil fuels by imposing a "social cost" calculation on their actions, then, when a court struck this down, froze (again) new drilling on federal lands.  Imagine what all of this self-sabotaging looks like to Vladimir Putin.

Ironically, Smith's article was published the day before Putin invaded Ukraine, so we now have a better picture of what this self-sabotaging looks like.  

"It is Biden's anti-fossil-fuel policies, his strangulation of American energy production, that not only are causing surging prices but, in so doing, are underwriting Putin's aggression in Ukraine," wrote Andrew McCarthy after listening to Biden's initial Russia-sanctions presser.

Exactly.

Not so long ago under President Trump, America was energy independent.  We now depend on Russia for 7 percent of our oil imports — about 595,000 barrels per day.  Incredibly, instead of ramping up America's own production of oil as energy prices have soared, Biden urged Putin to turn up his oil production.  Likewise, Europe is dependent on Russia for 40 percent of its gas and 25 percent of its crude oil.  Even more mind-boggling, while Putin was amassing troops around Ukraine, Democrats nixed Ted Cruz's Nord Stream 2 sanctions bill, which would have put a crimp in Putin's ability to control the West's energy.  Now retaliating against Russia could cause Putin to turn off the taps — sending oil prices even higher and leaving Europe without power.  

Not that you'll hear Hillary Clinton, or AOC, or any other delusional green energy Democrat admitting as much.  Better to push the idiotic narrative that Trump and Mike Pompeo are Putin-praising stooges, and that Trump-loving Republicans are cowards compared with Ukrainians and anti-Putin Russians.

Leftist propaganda is especially nauseating during times of war, and the inability of Democrats and the mainstream media to self-reflect in such a dire situation speaks volumes about what they actually stand for.  Can anyone see the irony in Putin insisting his main reason for invading Ukraine is to root out bogeyman Nazis and white supremacists?  Where might he have heard this before, and why might he have thought the West would buy in to it?  Perhaps it might help his cause to alter his mission to include rooting out Ukrainian Trump-supporters and MAGA hat–wearers?

Victor Davis Hansen said it best on a recent episode of Watters World.  "We're going to look back on AOC's insane efforts and people in 'The Squad' and the hard left to shut down voluntarily almost 3 million barrels a day of oil production.  That's not just a green pipedream; that results in deaths.  Real deaths.  People die when you do that."

Image: Dimitri Rodriguez via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.