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