State Department: Ukraine Has 'Significant' Human Rights Issues

Terence P. Jeffrey on Apr 24, 2024

"The government," said that 2021 report, "generally failed to take adequate steps to prosecute or punish most officials who committed abuses, resulting in a climate of impunity."

The 2023 report on human rights in Ukraine made virtually the same assertion: "The government often did not take adequate steps to identify and punish officials who may have committed abuses."

"Civil society and media noted corruption remained common at all levels in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, influencing judicial and law enforcement institutions, the management of state property and state companies, and state regulation," said the State Department.

The appropriate question for the U.S. Congress is not whether Ukraine and Russia protect human rights. As the State Department's report makes clear, they do not. The question is whether it is in the interests of the American people to involve itself in the conflict between these two nations.

George Kennan, one of the greatest American diplomats of the last century, explained how American foreign policy should and should not work in his 1951 book "American Diplomacy." It was a chronic mistake in American foreign policy, he argued, to take a "legalistic-moralistic" approach.

"As you have no doubt surmised, I see the most serious fault of our past policy formulation to lie in something that I might call the legalistic-moralistic approach to international problems," Kennan wrote. "This approach runs like a red skein through our foreign policy of the last fifty years."

"It is the belief that it should be possible to suppress the chaotic and dangerous aspirations of governments in the international field by the acceptance of some system of legal rules and restraints," he said.

The U.S. Congress cannot control the war in Ukraine or determine its outcome.

But in a nation where the federal debt is now $34.59 trillion and federal spending is projected to hit $6.94 trillion in this fiscal year, Congress can -- and should -- turn its attention to ending the deficit spending and bringing down that debt.

Terence P. Jeffrey is the investigative editor of the Daily Caller News Foundation. To find out more about Terence P. Jeffrey and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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