[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 32 (Thursday, February 16, 2023)]
[Senate]
[Pages S452-S454]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                UKRAINE

  Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I would like to expand on my recent 
comments on the need to stand up to Putin to prevent future aggression 
and the death and suffering it causes. Specifically, I would like to 
address the calls from well-meaning people for a diplomatic solution.
  Many people understandably want an end to the killing in Ukraine. I 
certainly do. So why not sit down and talk? As I have said before, we 
tried that after 2014, and it didn't work. We ended up with a full-
scale invasion a year ago.
  More fundamentally, it is important to consider what there is to 
negotiate over. To start with, what is the nature of the disagreement? 
In other words, assuming you could get Putin or his representative to a 
negotiating table, what are the opposing positions and the potential 
middle ground?
  Vladimir Putin has continued to repeat his original stated war aims, 
``demilitarization and denazification.'' Denazification in the context 
Putin uses it clearly means regime change. It is pretty clear that 
Putin thought he could take out the current elected government and 
install a puppet regime. President Biden publicly released the 
intelligence we had to that effect before the war began, which I think 
was a smart move.
  Demilitarization means that Ukraine has to give up its right to 
defend itself, allowing Russia a free hand to intervene with force if 
Ukraine ever again tries to assert its right to act independently of 
Russia.
  Obviously, President Zelenskyy cannot ever agree to meet those two 
demands. No President of a sovereign country could. Of course, in 
Putin's mind, Ukraine is not a sovereign country. That is the problem. 
Putin repeats a false version of history that says Ukraine is an 
artificially created country and rightfully part of Russia.
  Ukraine has a long history of independence before it was ever 
conquered by Russia, in fact long before Russia even existed. But, for 
decades, Putin has pushed a warped, imperialistic view of history that 
is all too common among Russians.
  When Putin repeatedly invokes Peter the Great, we should be 
concerned. Remember, Peter the Great was a Russian expansionist emperor 
who conquered lands like Finland and the Baltics from Sweden.
  It may be comforting to buy into Putin's propaganda that he feels 
concern for the people in parts of Ukraine where they speak Russian and 
that perhaps those people want to be Russian. That makes his motives 
seem like they might have some justification. It also lulls us into the 
belief that Putin will be appeased once he cleaves off a chunk of 
eastern Ukraine. There is absolutely no reason to believe that, nor has 
Putin actually said that. The Russian Federation in its current borders 
has subsumed many non-Russian ethnicities and languages from past 
imperial conquests. Not speaking Russian never stopped them before.
  In 1939, the Soviet Union attacked Finland in the Winter War despite 
its language and culture being very, very different from Russia. It was 
a nakedly imperial quest to reconquer lost territory of the Russian 
empire. Finland fought back and kept its independence, but Russia kept 
a big chunk of Karelia. This is an area that spoke a dialect of Finnish 
and was not historically Russian in any deep cultural or linguistic 
sense. Sadly today, in that region, Karelians maintaining their native 
language and culture represent a tiny minority of the population. Over 
the years, it has been thoroughly russified.

[[Page S453]]

  In Ukraine, mass graves and reports of widespread rape from areas 
liberated from Russian occupation should suffice to dispel the myth 
that Ukrainians welcome occupation or that Russians see Ukrainians as 
brothers. The fact that many people in eastern Ukraine speak Russian 
never made them Russian, just as English-speaking Irish citizens do not 
long to be governed by London. Eastern Ukraine was subject to a policy 
of russification under the Russian Empire and then under the Soviet 
Union, when many Russian workers were imported to the area.
  But it should be clear to everyone now that the Ukrainian national 
identity cannot be easily suppressed, regardless of the language they 
speak at home. Still that does not stop Russians from trying. Thousands 
of Ukrainian children from Russian occupied areas in eastern Ukraine 
have been forcibly deported to Russia and adopted into Russian 
families. Members of the Putin regime talk openly about how these 
children came with pro-Ukrainian attitudes but have now been 
brainwashed to adopt pro-Russian sentiments. This alone meets the 
definition of genocide.
  In Putin's 2007 Munich Security Conference speech, his critique of 
the United States included the assertion that we seek a unipolar world 
where we impose our values on others, and called for a multipolar 
world--in other words, one with different spheres of influence.
  When Putin talks about countries like Ukraine and other formerly 
Russian dominated countries, it is clear that he sees them as either in 
his sphere of influence, or someone else's. Putin cannot accept that 
Ukrainians might want to leave behind the corrupt, Russian dominated 
post-Soviet system where oligarchs get rich and the average person's 
economic and political freedom are limited.
  Putin talks about ``NATO expansion'' into the Baltics as though NATO 
is a rival empire. In reality, the Baltic countries begged to join 
NATO. And they were admitted at a time of naive optimism in the West 
that Russia was becoming a peaceful democracy. The Baltic countries are 
actually a useful case study to understand how many Russians think 
about their former imperial subject countries.
  This month, Estonia and Lithuania celebrate the 106th anniversary of 
the birth of their republics in their current independent form. It is 
important to understand that the Baltic countries are historically 
Western in their culture and outlook. Like Ukraine, they experienced 
attempts at russification, during the Russian Empire and the Soviet 
Union, including importing of Russian-speaking workers, threatening 
their unique cultures and languages. After regaining their freedom from 
Soviet occupation in 1991, the Baltics quickly built thriving, free 
market democracies.
  Given their history, it is natural that they sought to protect their 
way of life from Russian domination by joining the most successful 
defensive alliance in history. Putin and many Russians speak with 
resentfulness about the Baltics. Their very existence as prosperous, 
Western-style free-market democracies not dependent on Russia 
politically or economically is clearly threatening.
  Russian state media tries, absurdly, to convince Russians that their 
prosperity is due to development efforts under the Soviet occupation or 
that they are about to become failed states any day now. Many Russians 
are convinced that their joining NATO makes them U.S. puppets, 
reflecting the spheres of influence worldview.
  Again, joining NATO was their fervent wish, not some policy of 
expansion for expansion's sake on the part of NATO, and their 
populations are some of the most pro-American anywhere in the world. 
Putin dismisses the wishes of his smaller neighbors as irrelevant to 
great power geopolitics. He thinks they are inevitably pawns to be 
bartered over by big empires. Given our origin as a tiny collection of 
Colonies seeking independence from a powerful empire, Americans ought 
to think differently.
  Putin is threatened by NATO expansion not because he believes NATO 
countries might attack the Russian Federation. Our NATO allies 
bordering Russia did not host any long-term deployments of troops from 
other allies before Russia's 2014 invasion of Ukraine. Multiple NATO 
allies have since provided small rotational forces to our eastern flank 
allies intended to deter Russian aggression. Those forces have 
naturally grown since the full scale invasion of Ukraine in February. 
But, frankly, they are still insufficient to repel the kind of full-
scale invasion we saw in Ukraine, much less pose any kind of threat to 
Russian territory.
  Putin's military leaders, for all their mistakes in Ukraine, are not 
stupid. They do not see NATO as a military threat to current Russian 
territory. Rather, Putin sees NATO as a threat to his dream of 
reconstituting the Russian Empire. President Macron of France has 
suggested offering Putin security guarantees. That plays into Putin's 
false propaganda that he faces any kind of threat from NATO.
  When Putin talks about security guarantees, he has made clear that he 
means a dismantling of NATO in areas he sees as his rightful sphere of 
influence, enabling him to bully them. Keep in mind that, when he 
invaded Ukraine initially in 2014, Ukraine was militarily neutral, but 
seeking closer economic relations with the European Union. In February 
2014, months of popular protests by ordinary Ukrainians culminated in 
what Ukrainians call their ``Revolution of Dignity.'' The Ukrainian 
President at the time yielded to pressure from Putin and refused to 
sign an association agreement with the European Union after it passed 
overwhelmingly in the Parliament.
  The Ukrainian Parliament ultimately voted to remove the President. He 
then fled to Russia, but not before violent confrontations between 
special riot police and protestors. Putin has falsely claimed this was 
a U.S.-sponsored coup rather than a grassroots rejecting of his 
meddling in Ukraine's sovereign affairs. Russia then invaded Eastern 
Ukraine and Crimea.
  To be clear, the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine had nothing to do 
with NATO, the U.S., or any military threat to Russia. Rather, 
Ukraine's decision to seek closer economic ties to Europe threatened 
Putin's sense of entitlement to have Ukraine dominated by Russia.
  Putin has said ``true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in 
partnership with Russia.'' This reflects his notion that Ukraine can 
never be truly independent. In his mind, Ukraine is either in Russia's 
sphere of influence, which he sees as its natural state, or it is 
somehow controlled by shadowy Western forces. We should not fall into 
the same imperialistic trap of sidelining or minimizing the wishes of 
Ukrainians. President Biden has said, ``nothing about Ukraine without 
Ukraine,'' and he must stick to that.
  We must also be clear-eyed about what is and is not possible to 
negotiate with Putin. As I have said before, Putin only understands 
strength and weakness is provocative. As Ursula von der Leyen, the EU 
Commission President and former German Defense Minister under Angela 
Merkel said, ``We should have listened to the voices inside our Union--
in Poland, in the Baltics, and all across Central and Eastern Europe- 
they have been telling us for years that Putin would not stop.''
  President Biden should take that lesson to heart as well.
  Estonian Prime Minister Kallas puts it this way: ``History shows that 
appeasement only strengthens and encourages aggressors and that 
aggressors can be stopped only with force. As the prime minister of 
Estonia, a frontline NATO country that endured half a century of Soviet 
occupation, I know what peace on Russia's terms really means. Russian 
peace would not mean the end of suffering but rather more atrocities.''
  I wish it was possible to negotiate with Putin to put an end to 
Ukraine's suffering. But what he wants is domination of Ukraine, and 
that is not ours to offer.
  We have only two options left. We could sit on the sidelines and 
watch Ukraine get slowly crushed, which would embolden Putin and open 
the possibility that he would eventually attack one of our allies. Or 
we can support Ukraine's victory and independence.
  As I have said before, backing a Ukrainian victory comes with costs 
and risks. But the risks and costs of not stopping Putin now will be 
much higher. That makes repelling Russia's invasion of its sovereign 
neighbor in the U.S. national interest.
  The Russian threat will not go away, so for our national interest and 
in the

[[Page S454]]

interest of long term peace in Europe, supporting a decisive victory 
for Ukraine is the right thing to do.

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