“[The Soviets] preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth; they are the focus of evil in the modern world.”

-- Ronald Reagan, March 1983

Look folks, I don’t share many political beliefs with the late President Reagan, but the way he characterized the USSR pretty much sums up how I feel about Russia today under Putin’s so-called “leadership”: Pure, concentrated, totalitarian evil.

The Cold War was a challenging time to be an American. I still remember the drills we did in school, having to hide under our desks when we heard the sirens. Looking back on this today, I’m honestly not sure how hiding under a desk was supposed to save us from a nuclear blast, but I guess that's beside the point.

Reagan also said this about nuclear weapons: “I just happen to believe that we cannot go into another generation with the world living under the threat of those weapons and knowing that some madman can push the button some place.” 

Well, a couple of generations have come into the world since then, and here we are, still living under exactly that threat. 

It’s been more than 30 years since the Cold War ended, but somehow, nothing has changed. The Russian government is still our enemy, both sides are still sitting on nuclear arsenals capable of destroying the world 10 times over, and in Putin we have a madman with his finger on the button.

Fortunately, our superior military, stronger economy, and better diplomatic ties to the rest of the world mean that Russia is unlikely to ever attack the United States directly – even Putin knows that would be suicide.

Unfortunately, we have less control over how Russia treats the rest of the world.

In Ukraine, we are witnessing atrocities and war crimes committed daily by what’s left of Putin’s army of thugs. The entire world is rightly disgusted by their senseless and brutal attacks on innocent civilians, including elderly people, pregnant women, and young children.

But what we aren’t talking about are the other elephants in the room – Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland … these countries all border Russia, they are all former members of the Soviet Union, and they are all current members of NATO.

Citizens of these countries have thrived under democracy, and they are terrified that they’ll be Putin’s next targets for invasion, that they’ll be sucked back into the hellish totalitarian dictatorship that is Russia.

As Americans, we also need to be wary of a move like that by Putin and Russia, because it would automatically trigger Article 5 of the NATO charter: “An armed attack against one or more of [us] … shall be considered an attack against [us] all.”

When the United States was attacked on September 11^th, 2001, our NATO allies did not flinch –they joined us in battle as we hunted down and killed everyone that was responsible for those attacks, including, of course, the murderous mastermind himself, Osama Bin Laden.

I served side-by-side with my NATO brothers and sisters from the Baltic countries in many of those battles, and I have nothing but respect for them to this very day.

The idea that Putin might invade one or more of those countries is not a pipe dream, it could very well happen, and if it does, we will be obliged to defend them in a much more direct way than we have helped defend Ukraine. That would put us in a much more dangerous spot than we are in today.

I’m not writing this to scare you, I’m writing it to make you aware of some very real possibilities that Putin is almost certainly considering … and for which President Biden and his Pentagon advisors are no doubt planning contingencies at this very moment.

I have faith that they’ll do everything in their power to prevent such a thing from occurring, but the fact is, Putin clearly isn’t rational, and he’s being lied to by his generals about the losses he’s already incurred in Ukraine.

It’s impossible to guess what he might do next, but we must be prepared for anything.

One last thing – I started this email by quoting President Reagan, and I did that to highlight something I think is important.

Ronald Reagan was a Republican through-and-through. I hated his politics and disagreed with him on just about everything … but he was still an American, and believe me, folks – he would not be a Republican if he were alive today, because today’s Republican party is full of honest-to-goodness traitors.

The fact is, Ronald Reagan wouldn’t even recognize today’s Republican party or its supporters.

Reagan would never have supported Trump, nor would he have stood idly by as Russian puppets like Marjorie ‘Trainwreck’ Greene (“Let’s just let Putin have Ukraine so the war will end quicker!”), Madison ‘Drug-Fueled Orgies’ Cawthorn (“President Zelenskyy is a thug and Ukraine’s government is evil!”), Lauren ‘Breitbart’ Boebert (“The U.S.A. and Canada need to be ‘liberated’ just like Ukraine!”), and so many others who seem to have sworn an oath to the Kremlin rather than to America work to turn our country into something that resembles Putin’s Russia.

These are the people that No Dem Left Behind is trying to unseat from the halls of Congress, and history will judge us all by whether not we succeed.

So, please chip in and help us kick these traitors to the curb, for democracy’s sake.

Sappers clear the way, Airborne all the way!

--Retired Major Richard Ojeda