During the Democrats’ partisan impeachment hearings on Thursday, their witness Fiona Hill, a former White House official, testified she was concerned that a hold on aid might endanger Ukraine’s security. But in 2015, Hill penned an op-ed in the Washington Post arguing that providing lethal weapons to Ukraine would be a mistake.
In both her closed-door testimony last month and her public hearing on Thursday, Hill said she was concerned about Ukraine’s safety and stability as it defends itself against Russia should President Trump continue to withhold aid. But while she was the director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution a few years prior, Hill wrote an op-ed titled “How aiding the Ukrainian military could push Putin into a regional war,” in which she strongly disagreed with the idea that “increasing the Ukrainian army’s fighting capacity … would allow it to kill more rebels and Russian soldiers.”
Fiona Hill wrote an op-ed in 2015 for the Washington Post in which she argues against providing lethal military aid to Ukraine #FoxNews #ImpeachmentHearing pic.twitter.com/V5w6CM13da
— Bret Baier (@BretBaier) November 21, 2019
“It is hard to find effective alternatives to the current sanctions policy, but if we plunge headlong into sending weapons, we may lose our allies, and we may never have the opportunity to get things right,” Hill wrote.
Other witnesses who testified before the House Intelligence Committee admitted that Trump’s policy of denying lethal defensive assistance to the Ukrainians has been more effective than President Barack Obama’s policies in Ukraine and Russia.
Hill also previously testified that she has absolutely no direct knowledge of both the phone call with Ukraine and why the aid was withheld.
