Harlem Lawmaker Takes Heat For Comments on Russia-Ukraine War

HARLEM, NY — A Harlem lawmaker faced a firestorm of criticism Friday for a series of tweets about the Russian invasion of Ukraine — but she told Patch hours later that she stood by her comments, which she described as a critique of imperialism.

Kristin Richardson Jordan, a socialist elected to the City Council last year in Central Harlem's District 9, took to Twitter Friday morning, posting a series of 14 tweets that laid blame for the burgeoning conflict on "governments controlled by the military industrial complex."

"Had Washington and Brussels taken Russia’s security concerns seriously this war wouldn’t be happening. No country wants or deserves to have foreign powers placing missiles right on its borders," Richardson Jordan wrote, echoing Russian President Vladimir Putin's explanations for his aggression toward Ukraine.

In a subsequent tweet, Richardson Jordan criticized Ukraine's 2014 revolution that helped usher in a pro-Western government as an "illegal coup" — a phrasing that also mirrors language used by Putin and by Ukraine's ousted pro-Moscow president.

(A 2016 poll found that most Ukrainians supported the revolution, while about a third agreed with the "coup" assessment.)

Richardson Jordan's comments were shared widely on Friday, drawing criticism from at least one colleague on the City Council and being labeled by one journalist as a "pro-Putin take on the invasion of Ukraine."

But Richardson Jordan insisted Friday afternoon that her critics had missed the point.

"The point of the tweet was to say that the U.S. and NATO are not blameless in the invasion," she told Harlem Patch in an interview. "It was certainly not to say that it was acceptable or okay for Russia to invade. But the simplified narrative that it is just evil Russia invading Ukraine and that we played no role in it is simply historically inaccurate."

Also drawing fierce pushback was a followup tweet by Richardson Jordan that criticized NATO's 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia as "destabilizing." That bombing, critics noted, was carried out amid fears that Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic planned to commit genocide against Albanians in Kosovo.

Though she had not yet had time to wade through the avalanche of responses, Richardson Jordan said she stood by the comments and felt they had been misinterpreted.

"I stand by it, and I actually question if some of the feedback is in good faith or if it is not, in fact, people who understood exactly what I meant," she said.

The tweet thread had been a collaboration between Richardson Jordan and a volunteer who sometimes co-authors her "international posts," she said. The sources for her claims, linked at the bottom of her thread, included the websites Black Agenda Report and the Black Alliance for Peace. (The former is a left-wing news and commentary site, while the latter is an anti-war nonprofit led by Black intellectuals and activists.)

Richardson Jordan, 35, was elected last year after narrowly prevailing over incumbent Bill Perkins in a crowded Democratic primary. She will be up for re-election next year.

Amid the firestorm, Richardson Jordan appended a final tweet to her thread Friday afternoon, emphasizing that Russia's actions were "not acceptable" — a clarification that she hoped would make the rest of her comments "idiot-proof," she told Patch.

She added that she had been moved by a moment during Thursday's meeting of the full City Council, when members took time to "hold space for the loss of life" in Ukraine.

"I don’t want me pointing out the larger context of imperialism and trying to add some complexity to what I think has been a simplified, very pro-U.S. narrative to be confused with not having a deep sense of the humanity of the Ukrainian people," she said.

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