[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 4]
[Senate]
[Pages 4799-4800]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                 RUSSIA

  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, sometimes it takes a sudden, flagrant 
breach of international order to dispel a President's naivete about an 
adversary. The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had that effect on 
President Carter, and one can only hope that Russia's annexation of 
Crimea will have a similar impact on President Obama.
  Only recently the President was describing his Russian reset--those 
were his words--as a success. In other words, he was still calling the 
reset a success after Moscow had done the following things--and I think 
it is worth recalling the litany of things Vladimir Putin and Russia 
have done notwithstanding President Obama's hopeful intention to reset 
that relationship. Here is what Moscow has done:
  They brutalized domestic human rights activists.
  They tortured and murdered anticorruption whistleblower Sergei 
Magnitsky.
  They unleashed a barrage of anti-American propaganda.
  They threatened to target U.S. missile defense sites with offensive 
weapons.
  They vetoed numerous United Nations resolutions regarding Syria, 
where Bashar al-Assad has now killed roughly 150,000 civilians. They 
vetoed those resolutions. They also ignored U.S. demands to stop aiding 
Bashar al-Assad, period. It is well known and documented that Russia 
regularly sends weapons to Assad to use on his own people.
  Russia has denounced U.S. sanctions against Iran as undisguised 
blackmail. This is a country seeking a nuclear weapon that would 
destabilize the entire region--and perhaps worse--in the Middle East.
  Russia has expelled USAID from their country and pulled out of the 
Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program designed to reduce the 
threat of nuclear weapons.
  Russia has also banned American citizens from adopting Russian 
children and offered asylum to NSA leaker Edward Snowden.
  That is quite a list. As you can see, while President Obama said he 
wants to reset that relationship with Russia, Vladimir Putin has 
basically thumbed his nose at the United States and the international 
order. Yet none of that has kept President Obama from calling this 
relationship with Putin and Russia a success.
  If we consider the three biggest U.S. diplomatic victories often 
attributed to this reset the President likes to talk about--greater 
Russian cooperation in Afghanistan, the New START arms control treaty, 
and the Russian support for U.S. sanctions in Iran--only the first one 
looks like a genuine, durable achievement from the vantage point of 
March 2014.

[[Page 4800]]

  The New START treaty was a dangerous giveaway. In addition to 
jeopardizing U.S. missile defense plans, it reduced the number of 
American nuclear launchers and warheads while allowing Russia to 
increase the size of its own arsenal.
  As for the Iran sanctions endorsed by the U.N. Security Council 
members in June of 2010, these were less significant than the 
unilateral U.S. sanctions that Congress forced upon President Obama 
despite his objections in December 2011. For that matter, the 
administration has now unilaterally decided to loosen U.S. sanctions--
and thereby relinquish some of the best leverage we have on Tehran--to 
keep them from crossing that red line and acquiring a nuclear weapon. 
What did we get for that? We got minor concessions and more hollow 
promises.
  As with other U.S. adversaries, the Iranians are watching Ukraine to 
see how President Obama responds. In the modern era, cross-border 
military invasions of sovereign States have been a blessedly rare 
occurrence. Yet Vladimir Putin has now launched two of them in less 
than 6 years. The Secretary General of NATO has called Russia's armed 
seizure of Crimea ``the gravest threat to European security and 
stability since the end of the Cold War.'' Europe remembers the primary 
location for two world wars during the last century. They remember, and 
they remember what happened in 1938 which, unfortunately, bears an 
eerie resemblance to some of the initial steps being taken by Vladimir 
Putin and Russia today, and they remember what happened after that, 
casting the world into a terrible war in which millions of people lost 
their lives in World War II.
  President Obama's initial response was to sanction 11 Russians and 
Ukrainians, leaving Putin's inner circle and his favorite oligarchs 
untouched, and they drew mocking rebukes from the Kremlin. Last 
Thursday, the President decided to ramp up the sanctions by issuing new 
sanctions that did go a little further, targeting four oligarchs and 16 
government officials, including Putin's Chief of Staff, along with a 
prominent Putin-linked financial institution.
  In addition, President Obama declared he had now signed a new 
Executive order. Remember, the President said he has a phone and a pen. 
Well, he has been using them--not necessarily working with Congress but 
he has been using them. He has issued a new Executive order that gives 
us the authority to impose sanctions not just on individuals but on key 
sectors of the Russian economy. The problem with that is that sanctions 
imposed on Russia's economy are going to hurt Europe and invariably end 
up inflicting damage even on the U.S. economy. But I hope the President 
uses this authority to send Putin a message and finds a way to thread 
the needle to exact the costs he said he would exact on Putin for this 
lawless act.
  In my view, the sanctions should also target Rosoboronexport. This is 
a State-owned Russian arms dealer that has been supplying the Assad 
regime and Syria with weapons, and it has become the Grand Central 
Station of corruption. The U.S. Pentagon has inexplicably been buying 
Mi-17 helicopters from Rosoboronexport to supply the Afghan military, 
despite numerous alternatives. I am happy to report the senior Senator 
from Indiana Mr. Coats has introduced an amendment that would terminate 
these contracts and prohibit all business dealings with companies that 
cooperate with Rosoboronexport, and I am a proud cosponsor of that 
amendment. I hope the majority leader, as Senator McConnell, the 
Republican leader, implored this morning, will allow an open amendment 
process so reasonable amendments designed to improve this bill will be 
allowed to be voted on.
  As America responds to Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, 
sanctions will remain a critically important tool, but sanctions alone 
are not enough. They should be accompanied by at least three other U.S. 
policy moves.
  First, the United States needs to assess the military needs of 
Ukraine and other Eastern European countries and then swiftly 
dispatch--or facilitate the purchase of--whatever resources may be 
required. Offering military ration kits rather than serious military 
assistance is a joke. It is a bad joke, and it is an insult to our 
friends in Kiev and freedom-loving people within the orbit of Russia.
  Second, we should enhance and expand our European missile defense 
system with upgrades such as a new X-Band radar and more capable 
interceptors. We should also increase our overall missile defense 
budget. This is something Putin hates but which is a legitimate 
expenditure of self-defense monies to help keep the world safer, 
particularly from the threat of an Iranian missile.
  Third, we should dramatically accelerate the approval process for 
U.S. companies seeking to export liquefied natural gas. Congress can 
take the lead here by amending the 1938 Natural Gas Act, an antiquated, 
Depression-era law that has become an obstacle to economic growth and 
U.S. foreign policy interests. Even in the short term, most of our LNG 
exports would go to Asia, it is true, rather than Europe, but it would 
increase overall the supply, and expediting and expanding those exports 
would increase that global supply, help push down prices, and signal to 
Vladimir Putin that Washington is determined to squeeze his gas 
revenues and break his energy stranglehold on Eastern Europe. That is 
why members of both political parties have called for boosting and 
accelerating LNG exports as quickly as possible. Those can begin to 
flow from the United States as early as 2015, thus increasing supply, 
alleviating dependency on other sources, and send a very important 
message to Mr. Putin.
  All of the actions I have described would send a powerful message to 
Moscow and help maximize our diplomatic leverage in the current crisis. 
The March 20 sanctions were a good start. The legislation that is 
crafted by my friend from Tennessee, the ranking Republican on the 
Foreign Relations Committee, along with Senator Menendez, the chairman, 
are a good start, but there is more that can be done and should be 
done. I hope the majority leader will allow a reasonable and rational 
process to allow other Members in the body to participate by adding 
their constructive ideas to this legislation, which will pass by the 
end of the week, but I think there are a multitude of good ideas that 
could be added to it to make it even stronger and send an even more 
effective message to Vladimir Putin and, hopefully, discourage him from 
acting further in his naked aggression in Ukraine.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Schatz). The Senator from Tennessee.
  Mr. CORKER. Mr. President, I wish to ask about my time, but before 
the Senator from Texas leaves, I wish to thank him for his comments and 
his involvement in this issue. I appreciate his coming to the floor. I 
think this is an important issue for us to be debating and I firmly 
support the open amendment process that has been alluded to.
  If I could, I wish to inquire as to how much time is remaining at 
this point.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. There is 4 minutes remaining on the Republican 
side.
  Mr. CORKER. I was afraid that might be the case. I wonder if I could 
ask unanimous consent to speak for 8 minutes or so.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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