Protesters turned out Monday at the Downtown Pittsburgh office of US Sen. Dave McCormick with chants and personal letters urging him to show more support for Ukraine.
The chants shifted back and forth between Ukrainian and English: “Slava Ukrainyi! Glory to Ukraine! Haryum Slava! Glory to the heroes!”
The protesters said they were unhappy with how President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance treated Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy during an Oval Office meeting last week. Trump and Vance berated Zelenskyy for not showing enough gratitude at their meeting. Zelenskyy left shortly afterward, with an agreement on developing Ukrainian mineral deposits unsigned and future security guarantees unsettled.
“What happened last week was, for me, one of the most disturbing events in this ongoing narrative,” said demonstrator Lesya Jurkovsky, who was born and raised in Ukraine. She’s now an American citizen who started a nonprofit to support children traumatized by the war.
“A meeting that should have been an opportunity for respectful dialogue and factual decision-making,” she said, “was instead murdered by a complete lack of political professionalism.”
Valerie Klauscher, a third-generation Ukrainian American, said she didn’t have any hope of convincing Trump to change his mind about Ukraine: He had shown time and again that he was a “useful idiot” for Russian President Vladimir Putin, she said. But Klauscher hoped to hear more directly from McCormick.
“We can make our legislators' lives miserable if they don't stand up for Ukraine. We can show up with our blue and yellow flags everywhere Dave McCormick goes,” she said. “And we can show up where he doesn't go, like here to this office or to a town hall.”
A spokesperson for McCormick didn’t respond to a request for comment Monday afternoon. But during his campaign for Senate against Democrat Bob Casey last year, he said he supported continued military assistance for the country.
“We made a promise,” McCormick said during a Pittsburgh campaign event last August. “How we respond to that promise will inform what our allies like Australia, Japan, NATO and others think about our promises.”
Gregor Thum, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh who studies the region, told the crowd that Putin was threatened by the democratic resilience shown by Ukraine.
“Ukrainians are the challenge to Putin's claim that democracy, the rule of law and civil society are just Western principles that cannot be applied to Russia and its people,” he said.
“Not only Ukraine's independence and freedom is at stake here,” he added. “At stake is the entire rule-based order established after the Second World War.”
Pittsburgh resident Rebecca Weiss came to the protest Monday with her sister and niece after watching “the horrible diplomacy” at last week’s White House meeting. But she has gone to other protests in Squirrel Hill since Trump was inaugurated and said that meeting was one of many reasons for her to speak out against the Trump administration.
“It’s just another thing in line,” she said.
