Ukraine

Floor Speech

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Mr. WICKER. Madam President, I thank the distinguished majority leader for working with the distinguished minority leader and with Senator Graham for bringing this important legislation to the floor tonight.

It says what many of us have been saying for a long time and which I wish the President of the United States, our Commander in Chief, would explicitly say tonight or tomorrow: that Vladimir Putin is a serial war criminal and that he should be investigated by the war crimes authorities internationally, brought to justice, and made to pay not only for his genocide and war crimes of the last 2\1/2\ weeks but also for Aleppo and Grozny and the tens of thousands--tens of thousands--of innocent civilians that he has killed by his desires out of some other century to conquer his neighbors.

I was mentioning 1938 and 1939. When Hitler went into the Sudetenland, he told naive Western governments: That will be the end of it. If we get that, we will have peace in our time.

And some leaders of the allies were convinced that that was true.

Vladimir Putin hasn't even said he is going to stop with Ukraine. So who in the world thinks that if he gets away with this, he will stop there? I don't believe he will, and here is why: Not only Aleppo, not only Grozny, but this is a man who, without question, poisons his political opponents. When they leave the country to get medical treatment, he causes them to be charged for breaking the terms of their parole and puts them in prison. That is his political opponent, Mr. Navalny, who had the temerity to be a candidate for President against Mr. Putin.

We are talking about the Vladimir Putin who authorizes the assassination of former members of the Russian Government because they have the temerity to oppose him. We are talking about the very same person in Vladimir Putin who jails persons for years and years who dare to oppose him or disagree with him publicly, who invents enormous lies and gets some people even in the West to believe it when he broadcasts the enormous lies through his monopoly of the media.

This man can be stopped in this Ukrainian war, and we are going to hear tomorrow morning from a courageous leader who has risen beyond the expectations of so many people in the free world, President Zelenskyy, and I intend to be there along with my colleagues wishing him the best.

I think I can say for our delegation that we might have nuances on how these things can be done, but we are united on ideas, like getting the Polish MiGs somehow into the hands of the Ukrainian fighter pilots who can then use them to win the war, the equipment from other NATO countries and European countries enhancing Ukraine's air defense, and sending more troops to harden the borders and the eastern flank of our NATO Allies.

I would say to the President of the United States: Mr. Biden, you have been too risk averse, too late from time to time, from step to step on all of the sanctions that we have needed, on the delivery of weapons.

We brought the administration along, but they have been a day late or a couple of days late or a week late. It is time for us to show international leadership on this. Even today, almost 3 weeks into the war, we have not yet dropped the full load of sanctions on Russia. We need to do that, and I call on the President and the administration to listen to those of us who were just in Eastern Europe.

History shows that weakness breeds war, instead of pacifying tyrants, weakness emboldens tyrants like Vladimir Putin. The good news is that with the help of NATO and Western arms, the Ukrainian military has defied all expectations. The intelligence reports that we have heard on the public media--this is nothing secret--was that in 3 or 4 days the Ukrainian military would be overrun by this vast Russian military behemoth.

That has not happened, in fact. These people, defending their homeland, defending their country, through the leadership of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, have shown courage. They refuse to flee, and they have rallied the American people and the entire world in a lesson of leadership.

If President Zelenskyy survives until the morning, I will be cheering him from Capitol Hill on his remarks, just as the British Parliament did last week. This war is far from over. Suffering and dying refugees will continue every day, and I call on President Biden to recognize that Vladimir Putin is not simply at war with Ukraine, but they are at war with the entire free world, and this is our best opportunity to stop him. Our Baltic allies in NATO understand this. They know they can be next on Putin's kill list.

Now is our moment to make sure this is the last time that Putin and his band of war criminals invade a sovereign country. We watched it happen with the Transnistria. We watched it happen with the Republic of Georgia, in South Ossetia, and in Abkhazia. We watched it happen with the Donbas and with Crimea.

It is time to stop Vladimir Putin's expansionism. We should be enabling the Ukrainians to defend their own airspace, and we have not yet done all we can do. We need to be creative, but we need to take calculated risks because the future of the rules-based world order is at stake.

Western deterrence has so far failed, and now Putin is thinking he can succeed in shredding the rule book of the post-Cold War international order. It is up to us, and it is up to our Commander In Chief to restore faith in that order and to protect the free world.

And I am glad to be joined on the floor with my friend the distinguished senior Senator from Connecticut and was honored to join him and our other colleagues on the trip this last weekend to Eastern Europe.

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Mr. WICKER. The Senator from Connecticut is correct to commend the massive efforts to prevent the humanitarian suffering in Ukraine and in Poland.

The dozens of nongovernmental organizations, such as the World Food Kitchen, the USAID Agency, a part of our Federal Government, the World Food Programme, the diplomatic corps, both of the United States and our allies, and certainly our American military, the 82nd Airborne.

But let me conclude by making this profoundly important point: What we have heard tonight on both sides of the aisle are bipartisan calls for us to do more.

In this system that we have under our Constitution, we have one Commander in Chief at a time, and we have heard from Democrats and Republicans tonight on the floor of the U.S. Senate that we need to do more. This administration needs to do more. This Commander in Chief can do more and needs to do more to help this small country preserve their freedom, to win against this war criminal and his unprovoked aggression, and to preserve the international order that has governed civilized nations for decades and decades.

I hope the administration is hearing the bipartisan message that we bring back from our observations and that we are hearing from our constituents.

I yield back to my dear friend from Ohio.

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