On November 3, 2026, midterm elections – known as the “midterms” – were held in the United States. They ended in a crushing defeat for the Republican Party and a decisive victory for the Democrats.
One of those who suffered a fiasco was Congresswoman Victoria Spartz (Kulgeiko) – the first Ukrainian woman in the U.S. Congress.
She also turned out to be one of the most ardent Trump supporters and, paradoxically, an enemy of Ukraine, who caused considerable harm to her first homeland and, evidently, her second as well.
24 Channel reminds viewers who Victoria Spartz is and highlights some interesting moments from her biography. This text was first published in 2025; now, following the 2026 elections, it has been updated and significantly expanded.
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How Most Ukrainians Learned of Spartz’s Existence
On May 9, 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden, in a solemn ceremony in the Oval Office of the White House, signed the “Lend-Lease Act for the Defense of Democracy in Ukraine,” which had been unanimously approved by the Senate a month earlier and by the House of Representatives 10 days prior, with a vote of 417 to 10.
Standing alongside the president during what seemed at the time to be a historic event was Victoria Spartz, a Republican congresswoman from Indiana. She was wearing a buttoned-up, almost military-style suit, under whose jacket a blue-and-yellow scarf was hidden.
Biden signs the Lend-Lease bill for Ukraine: watch the video
Speaking about the bill, President Biden paid special attention to Spartz, asking how her family was doing and later presenting her with the pen he had used to sign the document.
That was the very moment when most Ukrainians learned of Ms. Spartz’s existence and realized that she is of Ukrainian descent and the first Ukrainian woman in Congress. Biden, meanwhile, asked whether her relatives in Ukraine – who were caught in the crossfire of Russian bombs and missiles – were safe.
Who Is Victoria Spartz and How Did She Become an American: A Biography
Ms. Spartz’s maiden name is Kulgeyko. She was born on October 1, 1978, in the town of Nosivka in the Chernihiv region. It is a very ancient town, mentioned even in chronicles, with a glorious history, and in the 21st century, it gained yet another reason to be proud of itself and its outstanding native daughter. At least that’s how it seemed in 2022.
The media enthusiastically recounted details of the congresswoman’s biography, emphasizing her Ukrainian heritage, mentioning her great-grandfather who died during World War II, her living grandmothers, and much more.
She is very loving, yet demanding. People love her dearly because she cares about everyone; she knows everyone and takes an interest in them. She was raised to understand both her own people and strangers alike, and to help them,
– journalists tracked down Victoria Spartz’s grandmother, Lyubov Sorokolit, who spoke about her granddaughter (the quote is presented in the original).
Victoria spent her childhood and youth in Ukraine, but moved to the U.S. at age 22. This was facilitated by a chance encounter on a train to Moscow, where the student Kulgeiko was traveling to visit her aunt. A young American named Jason Spartz was also traveling on that same train. He spoke neither Ukrainian nor Russian, and because of this, he nearly went hungry because he couldn’t explain to the dining car staff what he wanted.
The Ukrainian woman helped the American tourist place his order, and that marked the beginning of their romance. The couple quickly formalized their relationship and moved to Indiana – more specifically, to the town of Noblesville in Hamilton County.
A story about Victoria Spartz (Kulgeiko)’s hometown: watch the video
In the U.S., Victoria Spartz gave birth to two children – daughters Anna-Liliana and Victoria-Ingrid – obtained U.S. citizenship (2006), and earned a new degree.
The education she received in Ukraine (at the country’s leading economic university – KNEU, which at the time was still commonly referred to by its Soviet-era name “Narkhoz,” where Ms. Victoria studied for four years) – left her no choice as to which career path to pursue. Spartz continued her studies and earned a master’s degree in accounting from Indiana University in Indianapolis.
For a time, she taught, but later joined the family business. The state of Indiana is known for its agriculture, and the Spartz family was quite successful in this industry. That is how Victoria Spartz became a millionaire.
He’s a really good man. They’re such hard workers – they have forests and two lakes, but they work day and night. And she’s just the way she should be – she’ll get behind a combine or whatever needs to be done,
– Victoria Spartz’s grandmother says in an interview about Victoria Spartz’s husband and about Victoria herself.
In addition to the family business, Ms. Spartz worked in public service and built a successful career there as the chief financial officer of the Indiana Attorney General’s Office. The next logical career step was politics.
Ukrainian immigrants in the U.S. have traditionally leaned toward the Republican Party, and Victoria Spartz was no exception. Another possible explanation for Spartz’s allegiance to the Republicans is that her home district, Indiana’s 5th District, has traditionally elected Republicans since 1993.
In 2017, she won the state Senate election, and three years later she was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming the first Ukrainian woman in Congress.
In one of her first speeches in office, Victoria Spartz declared that she would fight for all that is good and against all that is bad. Today, these words sound very ironic, given what happened next:
I look forward to contributing to making the U.S. a beacon of freedom and hope for people around the world, as well as promoting the free market and the rule of law in countries suffering from corruption and oppression. My warmest greetings to the Ukrainian people!
Spartz was proud of her Ukrainian heritage and used it in her political struggles. At the time, she positioned herself as a neoconservative fighting against leftists (her slogan was “Stop Socialism!”), and who knows better than anyone the suffering that the left brings than those from the former USSR?
As you can tell from my accent, I grew up in socialist Ukraine, but I’ve built my American dream here in Indiana. In Congress, I will support President Trump to stand up to the socialists
“The Hawk Lady,” Russia’s Invasion, and Criticism of Biden
With the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of her native Ukraine, Victoria Spartz became very active – she harshly condemned the occupiers, but even more so, the Biden administration’s sluggishness in providing aid to Ukraine. It must be acknowledged that there was a lot of truth in Spartz’s words – the Americans were indeed in no hurry to provide her compatriots with weapons and were dragging their feet in every way possible. Instead, the congresswoman from Indiana demanded the provision of HIMARS, ATACMS, and other means necessary to repel the aggression.
Spartz wore a blue suit and a yellow blouse as her signature outfit, consistently evoking the Ukrainian color palette and highlighting Ukraine. Since the start of the full-scale invasion, Spartz has visited Ukraine several times and then returned to the U.S., advocating for increased aid and speaking about how proud she is of the courage of the Ukrainian people.
She was also one of the lobbyists for the Lend-Lease Act (which was a demand made by Republicans to Democrats, who didn’t like that Ukraine was receiving everything for free). That is precisely why Biden invited the Ukrainian woman to the White House for the signing of the Act and presented her with a pen, which is considered a great honor in the U.S.
This was Victoria Spartz’s moment of glory; in the eyes of many Ukrainians, she reached unprecedented heights and stood shoulder to shoulder with “our own” who had achieved incredible success “over there.” And there were quite a few of them – let’s recall, for example, Kvitka Tsysyk, Omelyan Pritsak, Jack Palance, Chrystia Freeland, and Wayne Gretzky (the now-famous hockey player is ashamed of his Ukrainian heritage and claims that his grandfather, who was from the Brest region and spoke Ukrainian for most of his life, was Russian – 24 Channel).
Deconstructing the Myth of Victoria Spartz
So what happened next? Well, in July 2022, Ms. Victoria gave the following interview.
Victoria Spartz’s Controversial Interview: Watch the Video
In it, Victoria Spartz demonstrated that she has absolutely no understanding of what is happening in Ukraine; she attacked everyone – from the government to the military – and repeated all the well-known disinformation and stereotypes. To summarize this stream of consciousness briefly, it goes like this: Ukraine is bad, Ukrainians are even worse, the government is simply useless, the military fights poorly, people in the rear live poorly, businesses operate incorrectly, and people behave badly.
It’s no surprise that after a half-hour shitstorm from the American woman, the interviewer – the always calm and level-headed journalist Serhiy Sydorenko – after unsuccessful attempts to extract any concrete facts from his interviewee (in particular, explanations for her failed lobbying attempts in Ukraine), began to actually yell at Spartz.
But there were other interviews as well. In particular, Spartz spoke with journalist Yuriy Butusov. He played along with her and created a “warm bath effect” to elicit accusations against President Zelenskyy and his right-hand man, Yermak. Spartz didn’t hold back and unleashed a whole barrage of hate speech, which did great harm to Ukraine, as it contributed to social division and sowed despair among the people – something that is deadly dangerous in wartime.
Most importantly, Spartz provided no evidence to back up her accusations – only emotions and hate. However, this was more than enough for her interviewer, and in the months that followed, Spartz’s statements from the interview fueled numerous scandals. I wonder what the author thinks about this interview now?
Victoria Spartz’s interview with Yuriy Butusov: watch the video
How Spartz Consistently Began to Seek Revenge and Harm Ukraine
As early as her summer 2022 interviews, Spartz said she was offended by Ukraine and hinted that she would take revenge. In the months that followed, she had other things on her mind – she was running for re-election to Congress. The blue-and-yellow “media hawk,” who at the time seemed to have an impeccable reputation, faced no problems in this regard. In November 2022, Spartz won by a wide margin in her home 5th District of Indiana and was elected to the House of Representatives for the second time.
- Having secured her seat in Congress, Spartz immediately sprang into action – or, more accurately, set out to take revenge on Ukraine. She began constantly accusing Ukraine of corruption and, at every opportunity, sought to harm us and block aid. In December 2022, she did not vote in Congress to allocate $12 billion in aid to Ukraine.
- At the same time, Spartz wrote a letter to the FBI, accusing the Ukrainian government of interfering in the U.S. electoral process. Spartz chose the Office of the President and its head, Andriy Yermak, as her main targets.
Back in the summer of 2022, she sent two official letters to the White House in which she explicitly stated that Yermak is a Kremlin agent and demanded that U.S. authorities investigate the ties between Zelenskyy’s right-hand man and Russia.
She subsequently escalated her accusations and began claiming that Ukraine had begun smuggling weapons received from the U.S. Later, American blogger Tucker Carlson would expand on this claim and take it to absurd extremes.
The White House apparently dismissed all of this as the ramblings of a “crazy woman,” but just to be on the safe side, they conducted an investigation, which confirmed that all of her accusations were false. The Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, responding to Spartz’s allegations, stated that she had fallen prey to Russian propaganda.
In Kyiv, they tried to reconcile with Victoria Spartz and even invited her to a meeting with the president, but that didn’t change anything. In the capital of her former homeland, the politician behaved in a notably cold manner; she did not smile and even in group photos always stood off to the side, away from Zelenskyy. At the same time, Spartz did sign a joint letter from members of Congress asking the U.S. president to provide Ukraine with cluster munitions. This fact may indicate that Spartz was experiencing an internal conflict of principles.
During that period, Victoria Spartz was indeed undergoing significant changes, and her conflicts were not limited to Ukraine. She was constantly clashing even with members of her own team – who could not withstand the constant harassment and resigned – while Spartz herself earned the unofficial title of “the worst boss for aides and political advisors,” with a corresponding reputation in Washington. Compounding this were problems with sponsors and the Ukrainian community in the U.S., which refused to tolerate Spartz’s disruptive behavior.
As a result, in February 2023, Spartz publicly announced that she did not plan to run for re-election and wanted to end her political career.
It has been an honor to represent Indiana in the U.S. Congress, and I am grateful for the strong support I have received on the ground. In 2024, I will have served seven years in elected office and more than ten years in Republican politics. I have won many tough battles for the people, and I will work hard to win a few more over the next two years. However, being a working mother is difficult, and I need to spend more time at home with my two high school-aged daughters, so I will not be running for any office in 2024
But she lied and quickly changed her mind. In February 2024, she announced that she realized “the work isn’t done” and would run for Congress. This shocked her colleagues in Indiana, as she joined the campaign just a few days before the candidate registration deadline.
Donald Trump became the savior of Victoria Spartz’s political ambitions; he dared to run for a second term despite numerous lawsuits against him and the insurrection he personally orchestrated, which led to the storming of the Capitol.
In 2021, Spartz distanced herself from those events; although she voted against Trump’s impeachment, she did not support Trump’s attempts to challenge the election results in Pennsylvania and Arizona.
In Congress, Spartz effectively joined the group of Trump supporters known as the “Freedom Caucus” and orchestrated a conservative revolution in the House of Representatives in the fall of 2023. With her active participation, Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted, and the lower house descended into chaos. Victoria Spartz was one of the initiative’s instigators and architects – she did not hesitate to call McCarthy a “weak speaker,” even though he had participated in her election campaign a year earlier and urged people to vote for the Ukrainian woman.
After Speaker McCarthy’s ouster, Trump supporters effectively paralyzed the work of the House of Representatives and blocked the allocation of military aid to Ukraine for half a year. This led to a crisis on the front lines in Ukraine and allowed the Russians to achieve significant gains in the Donbas, while the Ukrainians suffered losses and were forced to retreat, losing several strategically important cities.
However, the deaths of her former compatriots could neither move nor stop Victoria Spartz – she had found her calling as a scourge from heaven for Ukraine. Even when Donald Trump ordered Republicans to unblock aid to Ukraine and vote for a compromise bill, Spartz tried to slip her “time bombs” into it.
What Spartz demanded:
- to remove the provision on Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA), which allows the White House to send weapons directly from U.S. military depots;
- to remove the provision for a $7.8 billion loan to the Ukrainian economy;
- prohibit the U.S. president from writing off Ukraine’s debts;
- to remove $481 million in social assistance for refugees;
- prohibit countries affected by the war in Ukraine from purchasing weapons from manufacturers to support Ukraine.
Fortunately, these amendments did not pass – Congress members “cut them out” – and thanks to this, we are still receiving U.S. military aid, even though the Trump administration has not provided us with a single cent.
Interestingly, a surreal scene unfolded during the vote, as supporters of Ukraine waved blue-and-yellow flags in front of Spartz and other Trump supporters. For Viktoria Kulgeiko, who was born in the Chernihiv region, this was likely a shock.
A Star of the MAGA Movement and Controversial Statements About Ukraine
Victoria Spartz quickly became a passionate supporter of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, at times even more so than the quintessential Trump supporter, Marjorie Taylor Greene. On November 5, 2024, contrary to her previous statements, she was re-elected to the House of Representatives and won alongside Donald Trump. It was a triumph for Victoria Spartz.
Her claims of unprecedented corruption in Ukraine, “dictator Zelenskyy,” and “bad Ukrainians” who steal American aid and sell it to who-knows-who, total “betrayal,” and inevitable defeat fell on fertile ground and sprouted into this entire “narrative” that we now constantly hear from Trump, Vance, Witkoff, and others.
In fact, Spartz repeated the same thing during a conversation with a journalist from The Telegraph, stating that Ukrainians should cede territories and demand Zelenskyy’s resignation.
Controversial statements by Congresswoman Victoria Spartz in an interview with The Telegraph:
- “I don’t understand how Ukraine can demand to keep its territory. If it were winning, that would be a completely different matter…”
- “There are no easy solutions. President Trump inherited this situation, so now he has to deal with it,” she said, accusing Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, of failing to provide Ukraine with sufficient aid to win the war.
- "As I said two years ago, the best thing is to win wars as quickly as possible. 'As long as it takes' usually doesn’t end well for democracies."
- “They’ll have elections, and if they re-elect him (Zelenskyy – 24 Channel), they’ll lose the rest of the country.”
- “My primary duty as a U.S. congresswoman is to protect America’s interests. Anyone who crosses the ocean becomes, first and foremost, an American.”
Ms. Spartz didn’t stop there; she decided to comment on the final article and try to justify the headline that caused such an uproar. She did so in the best traditions of the current administration – that is, she launched a brutal offensive.
She accused The Telegraph of conspiring against her and implicated the President of Ukraine personally. And, as often happens in such cases, she only dug herself into a deeper hole:
It’s no surprise that the British media are just as dishonest as the American media, so let me set the record straight. I’ve expended a tremendous amount of energy trying to help the Ukrainian military prevail in their brutal struggle against Russia. Unfortunately, if your country is run by morons and crooks like Zelenskyy and his puppet parliament, it’s a losing battle. Putin may be evil, but he’s no idiot. The current reality on the ground is that Ukraine is unable to recapture its territories, but it also cannot agree to give them up permanently. Therefore, the only solution that can be achieved with U.S. help is a temporary one, which will give each side time to regroup. The final outcome of this war will have to be decided later, and not just on the battlefield. I wouldn’t be surprised if Zelenskyy is paying The Telegraph for fake headlines so he can keep making money off the blood of the Ukrainian people. I am proud of my Ukrainian heritage of true warriors, not the cowards of Zelenskyy’s mafia, which is destroying patriots.
The scandalous interview sparked a wave of outrage among Ukrainians, who have already begun comparing Spartz not to Kvitka Tsisyk, but with Valentina Matvienko (Tyutina), who renounced her Ukrainian heritage and is now one of the organizers of Russia’s genocidal war against Ukraine.
Kyiv responded in detail to Congresswoman Spartz, who had suggested that Ukrainians come to terms with the loss of territory
Even the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs had to respond to the statements made by their former compatriot. Ministry spokesperson Heorhiy Tykhyi offered a very accurate assessment of Ms. Spartz’s actions:
Unlike Victoria, our entire homeland has always been and will remain Ukrainian.
Victoria Spartz’s current fellow citizens also weighed in on her actions – during a recent March meeting with constituents in the state of Indiana, she attempted to defend the senseless actions of the Trump administration and its favorite, Elon Musk.
How Victoria Spartz Was Booed in Indiana: Watch the Video
In response, the Americans booed her mercilessly and drove her into a rage – Ms. Victoria literally screamed in fury, having learned what it feels like to be considered a traitor and a villain. What’s more, Spartz is now doing this on both sides of the Atlantic.
Victoria Spartz’s Fiasco
Retribution for the first Ukrainian woman in Congress who voted against aid to Ukraine came on November 3, 2026, in the election.
She supported Trump and the MAGA movement so aggressively that she became firmly associated with the president in the eyes of voters. And while this used to mean a guaranteed victory at the polls, it has now become a recipe for defeat.
So Spartz had to answer for the war in Iran unleashed by Trump, his flirtation with Russia, and his humiliation at the hands of Putin – and most importantly, for the skyrocketing prices and diesel at over $6 a gallon.
Spartz is set to lose the 2026 election / CNN screenshot
In Indiana’s 5th District, Democrat J.D. Ford defeated the Chernihiv-born candidate.
With 99% of the votes counted, he has 51.7%, while Spartz has 48.4%.
And although the count was not yet complete, the Trump supporter had already conceded defeat.
Spartz concedes / Screenshot of the Trump supporter’s post on X
But once again, she refused to take responsibility herself, instead blaming it on circumstances beyond her control.
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