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Floor Speech

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Mr. GRAHAM. Madam President, we will get into this in a minute, but I want to respond to something that was said just a few minutes ago.

What would it cost America if Putin continues to slaughter Ukraine and gets away with it? What kind of world do you want to live in?

Let's see if I have got this right. I can understand not wanting to get involved in wars. If you have ever been in one, if you have ever been in a war zone for any time period, you understand war is a horrible thing. If you have ever been in the military, you understand some of your buddies don't come back when you have wars.

But what I don't understand is this idea that not only are we not going to engage in a war against a thug and a bully like Putin but, when somebody like Ukraine is fighting like tigers, we are not going to help them either.

So this idea about this aid package costing too much, put it in the context of what happens to the world if Putin continues to rewrite the map of Europe. If we don't get Ukraine right, then China will invade Taiwan. And 90 percent of all the semiconductors and high-end chips come out of Taiwan.

Why do you have the cops? Because if people go up and down the streets breaking into stores and ransacking the community, nobody wants to live there. I would rather have the rule of law versus the rule of gun. Sometimes, you have to pay a price. Ukrainians are paying the ultimate price. They are fighting like tigers. They are dying by the thousands to stand up to an enemy of the United States and mankind.

Putin is a war criminal by any reasonable definition, and if you think he is satisfied with Ukraine, you are miscalculating him like we did in the last century with Hitler. In June of last year, Putin talked about the Russian Empire being recreated. Well, it is just not Ukraine that he considers a legal fiction; it would be Moldova. And when you look at his view of recreating possibly the former Soviet Union, there are NATO nations in his crosshairs.

What does it matter to the United States, if Europe is in a constant state of turmoil, that you have Russia toppling one democracy after another? It means a lot to us. We can't live in a world that way--or at least, I choose not to live in a world that way.

To the American people, $40 billion is a lot of money, but if we can stop Putin in Ukraine, it would be the best money you could ever spend. Let's don't be penny wise and pound foolish. They are running out of ammo. They are kicking the Russians' ass all over Ukraine. They are doing the fighting on behalf of freedom itself, and we should be the arsenal of democracy. The EU should spend more. The Germans are giving lethal weapons. Everybody can do more.

And there is a problem with baby formula. I would like to get more baby formula on the shelves, but letting Putin win in Ukraine doesn't help the problem of babies here in America. If you care about raising your children, you need formula, but you need a world where you can travel and trade without chaos.

Who is going to run the world in the 21st century: the communist dictatorship in China, people like Putin, or a world order where the rule of law really matters more than the rule of gun?

So this package has been stalled, but it will get over the finish line.

To the people in Ukraine, Senator Paul's request to have an inspector general overseeing the money actually makes sense to me. I don't know why we didn't do that before, but his argument that this package is way beyond what the market should bear misses the point of what we are engaged in here.

The outcome of Ukraine matters because if you don't stop Putin there, he keeps going. This doesn't end. Have you learned nothing from World War II? Go watch a movie about World War II. How many people appeased Hitler to the point that 50 million people eventually died? Putin is not going to stop in Ukraine unless somebody stops him.

Here is the good news: His army was oversold; and with the weapons we have delivered to Ukraine, plus our allies, the Ukrainian military and citizenry are dismantling the Russian military. It would be an enormous blow for freedom and stabilize the world if we could stop Putin in Ukraine. And the Ukrainians are not asking us for soldiers; they are asking us for weapons.

And if you don't think Russia under Putin is a foe to the United States and all we believe in, you haven't been paying attention to what has been going on for the last 20 years.

So we have a moment in time here to go all in in terms of economic assistance. Their economy is in shambles because they are under siege. They are fighting like tigers. The weapons we have given them, they have put to good purpose. The Democrats and Republicans are now united around the idea that it is a good thing to help Ukraine.

To my Republican colleagues who vote against this package, what is your alternative? Don't go to Poland anymore. Don't go to Ukraine and say: We are with you. If you vote against this package--and there are a million reasons to vote against anything--you are missing the point. The world hangs in the balance here. If we don't get Ukraine right and stand up to Putin, there goes Taiwan.

I am tired of being lectured to by people who have no understanding of the world in which we live. The mistakes of the last century are being played out on our screen every night.

So to those who believe that we can just let it go in Ukraine, boy, you are going to be in for a rude awakening. The world is going to be turned upside down, and the converse is true.

If we can stop him in his tracks, help the Ukrainians, who are doing all the fighting and dying, then China is less likely to go into Taiwan.

This is one of the biggest moments in the 21st century. Where are you? Whose side are you on?

Oh, it is too much here; it is too much there. To one Senator who will remain nameless on our side, why don't we have money for food? There are 227 million people in the world knocking on famine's door. Between droughts and wars all over the world, the World Food Programme run by Governor Beasley from South Carolina is completely under siege. Forty-something countries in the world have over 50 percent of their grain supply coming from Ukraine, and they are out of production right now.

It is in our interest, ladies and gentlemen, to help people when they are starving so they don't do the things that they may do to feed their families that are bad for us. What would you do to feed your family? Would you take money from Al Qaeda and ISIS if it was the only source of money available to feed your family? So we live in a very dangerous time where one thing affects the other.

This package was put together quickly, and I am sure there are things in this package that could be done better. But we are living in realtime here. The President's ability to send weapons really expires in a couple of days.

So what I hope will happen is that we will unite around the idea that Putin is the bad guy and the Ukrainians are the good guys, and if we lose this war, we are going to regret losing this war because it won't end in Ukraine.

So to my two colleagues on the Democratic side, thank you both. You have done something that is hard for people around here to do. Talk about victory, victory for Ukraine--Senator Blumenthal, there has been no stronger voice of standing up to Putin and making him pay a price. How many people does he have to murder? How many war crimes does he have to commit until we realize this needs to stop?

We had this same experience with Adolf Hitler. People excused his behavior, wrote it off as he just wants to get German-speaking territories back. No. He wrote a book about what he wanted to do. He wanted to kill all the Jews and remake Europe and create a master race for people on planet Earth, in his own image.

What is Putin trying to do? A bit less ambitious: create the Russian Empire in the former Soviet Union anew, crush democracies that have had a chance to go a different way. And are you surprised that the Ukrainians are fighting? Who the hell would want to live under Putin's thumb? Would you? Would you want to live in Putin's Russia? Would you want him to be your leader if you didn't have to? People who have gone down the communist road are literally willing to die because they don't want to raise their children that way.

So we are going to have a discussion here in a moment about some things that we can do that will matter beyond money. The American taxpayer should not be the only source of help to the Ukrainian people. Count me in for that.

There is a proposal that was left out of this bill that would empower the Department of Justice to go after Putin and all of his cronies and take from them their yachts and their villas and their dachas, sell it, and put the money into Ukraine to buy bullets. That got left out of the package.

To the American people, I get it. Other people should be doing more. There is a bipartisan consensus here that, with additional resources in the hands of the Department of Justice and some legal changes, we could go after billions of dollars of ill-gotten gain and ply it back into the Ukrainian war effort--money coming from thugs and thieves in Russia--to help the brave people in Ukraine. But that fell out of the package.

To my colleagues in this body, what the hell are you thinking? Why would you do that? Why would you take out of the package the ability to hunt down the oligarchs and take their stuff away from them--that they bought with stolen money--to help the Ukrainian people, another source of revenue other than the American taxpayer? We are not going to let that go.

Finally, there is an idea that Senator Blumenthal and I have that maybe it is time to label Russia a state sponsor of terrorism. Why? Because they are.

After 20 years of mass murder on an industrial scale, the Wagner Group is roaming the planet, which is a proxy, according to our Treasury Department, of the Russian military. They are in Africa today doing all kinds of horrible things. Russia is propping Assad up, who is one of the four countries that are considered state sponsors of terrorism.

Without Russia, Assad would have fallen. So we have an idea that doesn't cost any money to designate Putin's Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism, and it would allow and waive sovereign immunity so people who are a victim of his terrorism could take him to court. And it would put Putin in a club that he deserves to be in--Iran, North Korea, Syria. We would add Russia. We couldn't get that in the package. We are not going to stop.

It would be good to let the Ukrainian people know that we see Russia in the hands of Putin as a terrorist state. We would like to tell everybody who is on the fence, America has made a decision about Putin and there is no going back. If he is still standing when this is all done and we forgive and forget, the worst is yet to come.

So from my point of view, Putin's Russia needs to end. The Russian people need to fix this problem. Until they do, we need to keep all the sanctions in place and up the ante. Labeling Putin's Russia a ``state sponsor of terrorism'' is a good place to start. Going after the ill- gotten gains of the oligarchs to help the war effort is a good thing to do.

We are not going to quit here.

To the people of Ukraine: Most people in this body--not all--are with you because we understand your fight makes our world in America a safer place and a better place to live.

I will ask a question to my colleague from Connecticut. Why does he think Russia is a state sponsor of terrorism and what can we do to make that happen?

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Mr. GRAHAM. Yield for a quick question?

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Mr. GRAHAM. Number one, Senator Whitehouse has been talking about this 3 years that I know of. Long before Putin invaded Ukraine, when we were in charge of the Judiciary Committee, we had several hearings about autocracy, about ill-gotten gains, people stealing money from their country, but particularly in Russia. So I want to thank you for understanding this issue better than anybody I know and been talking about it for years.

Now, we have a moment here, and to my colleagues over here, this is a moment in world history. This is not about, I don't like this part of the bill, and I don't like that part of the bill. It is about you are either going to help Ukraine or not, and perfectly so. Whatever imperfections in this bill that exist, the worst possible outcome is to say no to the people of Ukraine because it is not exactly the way you would have done it.

Now, if you want to say no to the people of Ukraine because you don't care about what happens in Ukraine, that is a different conversation. Please come down here and say that. If you believe that the outcome in Ukraine has no effect on the national security interest of the United States, if you believe that Putin will stop after Ukraine and China is not watching, come down here and say it.

The reason nobody will do that--I doubt--is because you would be crazy. But you can say it. The floor is yours. Come down here and make the argument that Ukraine is not connected to world events and that Putin would be satisfied with dismembering that country and stop. He is not.

You know, Hitler wrote a book. Somebody should have read it. This guy gave a speech and for 20 years has been acting on that speech. So the people around him, the oligarchs--and Senator Whitehouse is the oligarchs' worst nightmare--have been living large off the system created in Russia where everybody gets a piece of the action except the Russian people.

We have got a chance where the world is galvanized, and Attorney General Garland, who I have been working with on this, has been very good, needs some changes in the law to make this more effective.

About seizing yachts, you have got to have a reasonable belief that the yacht is part of a criminal enterprise, an ill-gotten gain. You seize the yacht, and you ask people to come forward to contest your assertion. If they don't, then it proves all you need to know. If they have got a good counterclaim, then they win in court.

But right now, you have got this game where you have to find a specific person, which is crazy. Seize the yacht if there is reasonable evidence it is part of one of these enterprises. This bill that we are talking about would do that.

And why it didn't get in the package, I don't know. But I want to ask Senator Whitehouse one final question: How much money does he think could be gathered up if we unleashed law enforcement throughout the world to go after these oligarchs, and what would be the signal we would be sending throughout the world if we actually did this?

Would it make the world a better place? What is his view?

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Mr. GRAHAM. I can't say it any better. Just to wrap this up, I believe that if there were a vote tomorrow designating Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism, we would get 90 votes in the U.S. Senate. I will ask Senator Whitehouse to comment on that. I think we could take his idea, his kleptocracy regime, and embolden the Department of Justice and others to make it easier to go after these assets. If we had a vote on that concept, we would get 90 votes.

So what is frustrating is that in the desire to get aid and bullets and help into the Ukraine, we left out two provisions: state sponsor of terrorism and permissions to go after the ill-gotten gains of the Russian oligarchs and plow it into Ukraine to help them.

But what I want you to know is that the process did not accommodate these two provisions. But as you can tell from this discussion, we are not going to stop. To my colleagues in this body, we are not going to stop. Everybody is going to stand up one way or the other here pretty soon.

I have talked to the Speaker of the House. She is very sympathetic to the idea about Russia being a state sponsor of terrorism. I will talk to Kevin McCarthy. I think the bipartisanship here exists in the House. You should see it.

So just finally, Senator Whitehouse, can he assure the people of Ukraine, can he assure the oligarchs, can he assure Putin, that we are not going to stop?

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