Republicans used to back Ukraine. Then came middle fingers in Alabama.
“The hostility shocked me,” recalled Reznick, 44, whose late father was Ukrainian. “I felt it then — the shift.”
She had been trying to collect a couple hundred dollars for food and medicine — food and medicine! Yet somewhere along the way, even a stay-at-home mom’s little charity effort outside a northern Alabama grocery store became mired in another American culture clash.
To many Republicans here and across the country, “Support Ukraine” is now a liberal cause — a costly diversion from more pressing domestic issues, such as securing the southern border. Some think European allies should bear the responsibility for stopping Vladimir Putin’s takeover, casting Kyiv’s potential ruin as not America’s problem. Others suspect aid funds might be landing in the wrong pockets. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) claimed this month, without evidence, that U.S. tax dollars meant to help Ukrainian forces have vanished in an “enormous theft.” Then he slammed Ukraine as “one of the most blatantly, notoriously corrupt places in the world.”
It’s a far cry from the display of unity two years ago, when Putin launched his invasion and politicians from both sides of the aisle scrambled to arm Kyiv, Reznick thought. Billions of aid dollars flowed through her city, Huntsville, a defense industry hub with an Army base one local official called the “center of gravity for supporting the Ukrainians.”
Plenty of conservatives in this community, a purple dot in a sea of bright red, are proud of that distinction. The president of the county’s GOP men’s club, for instance, describes himself as a “Mitt Romney Republican” and openly blasts Putin an enemy of freedom.
The mood among the MAGA devotees, however, has lately veered toward mistrust, said Reznick, a Democrat. Her circle, she acknowledges, is a “progressive bubble,” but still, she had never dreamed of being confronted outside a Trader Joe’s or anywhere else in Huntsville.
She could understand why her neighbors wouldn’t want to spend money on a war overseas. She could understand heartbreak over this nation’s woes. But the nastiness? The way Tuberville had insulted an already battered Ukraine?
“It’s unbelievable,” she said.
By all accounts, her dad’s home country was losing ground to Russia and dangerously short on gear needed to fight back.
Tuberville was one of the two Republican senators from Alabama blocking that gear. They had opposed the latest foreign aid package that includes $61 billion for Ukraine, which was ultimately able to pass the Senate with bipartisan support, Reznick had noted with relief, yet now looked doomed to languish in the House.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has refused to bring the package up for a vote until “we take care of our own first,” raising concerns that it could be held up through spring, if it survives the congressional standoff at all.
Such resistance has become increasingly popular among right-leaning voters, according to a December poll from the Pew Research Center: Nearly half of Republicans said the United States, Kyiv’s single largest defense backer to date, is providing too much aid to Ukraine, a steep climb from the invasion’s earlier stages. Just 16 percent of Democrats shared that view.
Reznick blames the shift on former president Donald Trump, who has expressed admiration for Putin, criticized Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky and declined to say which side should win the war.
She was alarmed when, at a rally this month, Trump said he would let the Russians do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO allies that didn’t spend enough on defense. Conservatives who had rushed to protect Ukraine, meanwhile, flipped to follow his lead. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), after visiting Kyiv last May, urged Biden to “do more” — and then voted against doing more, explaining, “I talked to President Trump today and he’s dead set against this package.”
Now Trump was railing online against aid for Ukraine “WITHOUT THE HOPE OF PAYBACK,” and Reznick was in the library, checking her email one late February morning to see if Huntsville’s congressman, Rep. Dale W. Strong (R), had responded to her pleas for help.
Strong once backed support for Kyiv, too, before pivoting to say at a news conference last year that his concern “is about the southern border.”
“Nothing,” Reznick said, refreshing her inbox.
So she unpacked her markers and began work on another poster for a Ukraine rally the next morning at a downtown park, wondering who would show up and what they would say.
***
That evening, two women who would not be attending the Ukraine rally were chatting at a fitness studio across town.
Cindy Prylinski was finishing her front-desk shift and thinking, as she often did, about her 30-year-old daughter who lives hundreds of miles away in a much bigger city.
She didn’t like strangers knowing which city. She worried about someone targeting her daughter, hurting her daughter.
“This country doesn’t feel safe anymore,” she said as her clients streamed out of a ballet barre class.
No one she knew had been targeted or hurt, but coverage of the southern border was spooking her. Prylinski, 64, pictured unvetted folks slipping into Texas with drugs and guns and making their way to God knows where.
“We shouldn’t be in Ukraine when our own borders aren’t closed,” she said. “We should worry about our own country, about the cartels.”
Her favorite media personalities — Glenn Beck, a conservative radio host, and Mike Lindell, chief executive of MyPillow — hammered the topic relentlessly, and at some point, Prylinski had grown suspicious of anything to do with Ukraine.
Yes, she knew the aid money was an economic boon for Huntsville and the thousands of workers here who design, assemble and ship out military weapons.
“But we could redirect that money,” she said, “to the invasion on our own border.”
Where had the aid dollars actually gone, anyway? Prylinski could see no impact. Were Biden and the Democrats secretly pocketing some of the money? She believed they had stolen the 2020 election, so that wasn’t out of the question.
“I don’t trust ’em as far as I can throw ’em,” she said.
One of her clients, Stacy Oberman, 56, an engineer now lacing up her tennis shoes, agreed that they shouldn’t trust the left. Democrats, she thought, were courting immigrants to “buy votes.”
She also harbored some skepticism toward Zelensky. Were things really as dire as he had been saying?
“Is Zelensky bluffing?’ she asked.
Trump had recently posted that no aid should be given to any country “unless it is done as a loan,” and Oberman thought that sounded like a better idea, one that prioritized America’s financial health.
“If this country collapses in five years,” she said, “there will be no more aid for anyone.”
Over the last two years, both Oberman and Prylinski have seen people standing around Huntsville with signs in support of Ukraine, among other causes they saw as liberal.
Some people yell at them and flip them off, Prylinski had noticed.
“And that’s never okay,” she said.
The yellers, she thought, should save their anger for Biden and the Democrats.
“Not people expressing their freedom of speech,” Prylinski said.
**
She draped blue and yellow flags on the gazebo at Big Spring Park. She taped signs to a table: “ARM UKRAINE. CALL YOUR CONGRESSMAN.”
She fixed a red beaded crown in her blonde hair, one similar to traditional accessories she had seen people wear in her Ukrainian home city, Kharkiv, which had lately been constructing schools in underground bunkers.
Anya Kuklis, 41, had helped organize dozens of “Support Ukraine” rallies and charity events in Huntsville since the war began, but this one, on the invasion’s second anniversary, felt especially urgent as America’s aid package seemed to be in jeopardy of falling apart.
“Call Dale W. Strong,” she advised anyone who would listen, passing out blue and yellow beaded bracelets.
Kuklis moved here 14 years ago for her husband’s job. Over the last year, like Reznick, she had spotted her first middle finger — then a few more — while standing outside a church with her own “Support Ukraine” sign, trying to direct traffic to craft or bake sales.
On a good day, she and her friends raised $3,000 to cover food and medicine for Ukrainian soldiers. They would PayPal the money to her cousins in the region, one of whom was a soldier.
A lot of people, she was touched to see, were still passionate about that mission. Donations weren’t dropping off. The group’s blueberry lemon lavender bread remained a hit.
Things had taken a painful turn last summer, though, when a man rolled up and mockingly tossed pennies at her feet.
Kuklis chose to focus on what happened later that day, when another man parked his car and handed her a $100 bill. He was from Iraq, he explained, so he understood the horrors of war.
“Trying to look at the positives,” Kuklis said.
That was easy to do on this Saturday when the sun was shining, making up for the occasionally fierce gusts of wind, and she counted at least a hundred people — including a teary-eyed Reznick — bursting into a chant of “Slava Ukraini!” (Glory to Ukraine!)
No middle fingers. No pennies.
Not everyone was chanting along, though. Behind them, families strolled beside the park’s canal, mostly minding their own business and tossing crumbs to ducks.
Virginia Spicka, 26, was hanging out with her 2-year-old son, her 17-month-old daughter and 57-year-old mother, who, much to her gratitude, was making sure their stroller wasn’t blowing into the water.
“Let’s put this way over here in the grass,” her mother said, laughing.
They had been talking about the nursing student who had been found dead two days earlier in a Georgia university town, a tragedy that had dominated conservative media. The nursing student had been out for a jog by herself, and now Spicka was worried about her sister, who loved to run solo.
Federal immigration officials had confirmed that the man accused of murdering the young woman had entered the country illegally from Venezuela.
“That is what we need to be worried about,” Spicka said. “The border. Not Ukraine.”
Her kids looked eager to feed the ducks. They just had to find change for a dollar, since the crumb dispensers around the park accepted only quarters.
“Maybe I can take this to the Ukraine rally,” said her mother, flashing the dollar, “since they’re getting so much money.”
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