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Floor Speech

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Mr. CRUZ. Madam President, I rise today to lay out exactly why I intend to vote for the aid package to provide our Ukrainian allies with the weapons and support they need to fight Vladimir Putin's invasion.

First, it is important to understand why--thanks in large part to President Joe Biden--we are in this dangerous situation to begin with. What is maddening about Russia's invasion of Ukraine is that it was utterly preventable. This did not have to happen, and it was caused by two specific mistakes by Biden and his administration. The first mistake was Biden's catastrophic surrender and withdrawal in Afghanistan. The second mistake was Biden's weakness and appeasement on display and his capitulation to Putin on the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline.

Putin didn't just wake up yesterday and decide he wanted to invade Ukraine. In 2014, Putin previously invaded Ukraine, but he stopped short of invading the entirety of the country. Why is that? The reason is simple: Russia's principal source of revenue is oil and gas, which is transported via pipelines that go directly through Ukraine. Putin knew that when the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline was complete, he could invade Ukraine and not have to worry about potentially destroying Ukrainian energy infrastructure because he would have in place an alternative pipeline to get his gas to market.

Last spring, President Biden formally waived the sanctions that Congress had put in place on Nord Stream 2, sanctions that I authored, bipartisan sanctions that passed this body twice and that President Trump signed into law twice. Last summer, President Biden surrendered to Putin, lifted the sanctions, allowed Putin to build the pipeline, and announced a deal with Germany to allow the pipeline to be completed. When he announced that deal, that capitulation, the governments of both Ukraine and Poland put out a joint statement saying: Mr. President, if you do this, Vladimir Putin will invade Ukraine.

In August, Biden surrendered in Afghanistan. In September, Nord Stream 2 was physically completed, and then Putin began building up his forces on Ukraine's border. Even then, our Ukrainian allies pleaded with us: Sanction Nord Stream 2 now so that Putin will know he can't turn it on later. The President, the Prime Minister, Parliament, and civil society of Ukraine all said so again and again and again.

I authored a new set of sanctions mandating immediate sanctions, which the Ukrainian Government formally called on the Senate to take it up and pass it. The Biden administration fought tooth and nail against those sanctions in January. I remember standing right here and saying: Mr. President, if you do this, we will see Russian tanks rolling toward the streets of Kyiv.

Sadly, 44 Democrats voted with President Biden against sanctions on Russia, against sanctions on Putin; and the appeasement from the White House and 44 Democrats led, within days, to the invasion of Ukraine.

That being said now, the difficult question is what should we do now that this war is unfolding and, specifically, whether it is in America's vital national security interests for Ukraine to fight and defeat Putin's invasion. My conclusion is that, yes, it is.

There is no doubt, $40 billion is a large number; and although much of that spending is important--in fact, some of it is acutely needed in the military conflict--I would have preferred a significantly smaller and more focused bill. But our Ukrainian allies right now are winning significant victories with the weapons and training that we provided them already, and it is in our national interest for them to keep doing so. They will not be able to fight Putin and have any chance of prevailing if we cut off military assistance.

So why is this in America's national security interest? The answer lies in some questions that my fellow Americans are rightly asking. They are asking: What would Russia's invasion of Ukraine mean for our problems here at home, including, for example, food and energy? They are asking: Is the cost of this bill really necessary? They are also asking: Isn't China our biggest long-term enemy?

These are all entirely legitimate questions. They are important to ask. They are the same questions I asked myself before deciding how to vote on this bill. Another question Americans are rightly asking is: Why aren't we doing anything about our problems here at home?

I emphatically agree that President Biden and congressional Democrats have failed on the issues here at home that Texans and Americans rightly care about and we should fix. Right now, we have a raging border crisis that President Biden won't do a damn thing about. We have skyrocketing inflation. We have gas prices at record highs. We have a baby formula shortage that has left parents all over the country scrambling to try to feed their babies. These are real problems that the Democrats caused and now refuse to even try to fix; and in multiple instances, such as the gas prices, these are problems that Democrats have deliberately made worse, inflicting pain on millions of Americans.

All of that can be true at home, and it doesn't mean the world has suddenly become safe and that our enemies do not mean us harm. At the same time that we need to secure our border and address the domestic crises, we also need to stand up and confront the very real threat posed by Russia and by China. We can't let the fact that Biden and the Democrats have created massive domestic and economic failures cause us to ignore threats to U.S. national security posed directly by Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

On the question ``Why is what Russia does in Ukraine relevant for our national security,'' I want to answer this by making four points.

No. 1, what Putin is trying to do is to reassemble the Soviet Union and, beyond the Soviet Union, the Russian Empire from even earlier. If Putin succeeds in doing so, it would be disastrous for global stability and for American security.

The Cold War between America and the Soviet Union was incredibly costly and incredibly dangerous. We don't want to see Russia become the Soviet Union once again. When the Soviet Union was big and strong and mighty with a much bigger military, the lives of Americans and the lives of our allies were in much greater jeopardy.

It is overwhelmingly in America's interest to prevent Putin from reassembling the Soviet Union, because we do not want our enemies to become stronger and use that strength against us.

No. 2, Putin is trying to seize control of energy. If he is successful, it will be felt by Americans filling up their cars with gas or trying to heat their homes in the winter. We have already seen what Putin has done with Nord Stream 2, and he is not going to stop there. We don't want to see a world where Putin controls energy.

No. 3, the United States made a formal commitment to help Ukrainians defend themselves. Why is that? Well, after Ukraine successfully declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States signed an agreement called the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. Under the terms of the agreement, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in exchange for explicit assurances that the United States would protect Ukraine's territorial sovereignty. Ukraine had the third largest nuclear arsenal on the face of the planet, and they voluntarily, willingly, gave it up. And we made a promise in exchange for that.

And No. 4, if we don't provide Ukrainians with weapons and they don't defeat Putin, Putin will be emboldened and may well eventually invade a NATO country that the United States has a treaty obligation to defend. That would be an incredibly serious escalation that nobody wants to see.

Some have further asked, ``Why should America keep these commitments?'' Why should we keep our commitment in the Budapest Memorandum? Why should we keep our treaty commitments to the NATO countries? And the answer is, because one of the ways we protect American national security is, when we make an agreement with a country, when we make a formal agreement, a treaty, we honor our commitments.

We want countries to know that America stands by our friends and that we stand by our word and that our treaties mean something.

If countries learned that under weak and feckless Presidents our formal binding documents aren't worth the paper they are written on, it undermines the ability of any President of the United States to negotiate agreements with our friends and allies to keep Americans safe.

Another question I have heard is, why so much money? Sure, it is important to help Ukraine win, but why should we spend so much? Again, I would have preferred for this to be a smaller bill. But, in fact, enormous amounts of money are both justified and necessary. Of this $40 billion, there is $9 billion for replenishing our own stockpiles, American stockpiles which have been badly depleted in recent months as we sought to help our Ukrainian allies.

We are already beginning to see the risks and effects of depleted stockpiles. Just a few weeks ago, Taiwan's Ministry of Defense announced there would be dramatic delays in the delivery of some weapons, including howitzers and Stingers. Making sure we have the weapons we need to defend ourselves is incontrovertibly a good thing, and $9 billion of this $40 billion, I do not know a Senator in this body who could reasonably object to replenishing our own military stores and weaponry to keep America safe with America's military.

There is also $10 billion in this bill for Ukrainian weapons and training, and altogether, $24 billion in military funds in this bill. Ukrainian weapons and training--the very things they have been using to defend themselves and that if we don't replenish, will cause them to collapse.

The Ukrainian military right now is using tens of thousands of artillery rounds and ammunition every couple of days. Already last month, there was a growing concern that Ukrainian forces engaged in heavy ground combat against Russian units would quickly go through that amount of ammunition.

They have largely burned through the stockpiles of Russian-style ammunition they are familiar with and used in the opening weeks of the war. And last month, U.S. officials assessed that 40,000 rounds of artillery were only expected to last a few days. New efforts to resupply our Ukrainian allies are critical.

There is also about $5 billion for food in this bill. Ukraine is rightly known as the bread basket of Europe. It is the sixth top exporter of wheat in the world, and there is a growing risk of global famine because of the disruption Russia's invasion is causing in Ukraine.

Devoting money now to stop countless people from starving to death in famine is a wise and prudent investment for American national interests.

Then there is $9 billion in economic support funds for the Ukrainian government. Will a certain portion of that money be wasted? Absolutely. Will there be corruption? Almost certainly. If it were up to me, I would cut that amount from this bill. Might some of it end up funding a yacht for an oligarch? Very possibly. But unfortunately, this is what happens when Democrats have control of Congress and write the bill.

When you have a bill authored by a Democratic White House and a Democratic Senate and a Democratic House, the result is you get waste and corruption and pork and fat and bloat in a bill.

So the question facing each of us Republicans is whether you are willing to cut off the missiles and cut off the bullets that we are sending to Ukraine and allow Putin to win simply because there is a portion of this bill that is waste and corruption that the Democrats have insisted on.

The reality is that a Putin victory in Ukraine will be much, much more expensive for American taxpayers in the long run than this bill. And let me underscore that point. If Putin wins, the consequences for America and American taxpayers will be hundreds of billions of dollars.

From a purely fiscally conservative view, ensuring that the Ukrainians have enough military equipment to defend themselves and to give Putin punishing defeats is overwhelmingly in our interest. And let me underscore as well: It is the Ukrainians doing the fighting. I do not want to see U.S. servicemen and women in harm's way. There is a reason I have vocally opposed a no-fly zone in Ukraine, because that would unreasonably increase the chances of an American pilot in an American jet engaging in combat with a Russian pilot in a Russian jet, and that escalation is not justified.

But ensuring the Ukrainians have the weapons to defend themselves is very much in our own national security interest.

And now I want to talk about a question that many Americans have not necessarily been asking but that is of staggering importance to our national security. And that is, ``What does the war in Ukraine have to do with China?'' The answer is, ``An enormous amount.''

Last summer, we watched the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan unfold. We watched the surrender to the Taliban from Joe Biden. We watched the incompetence of this administration in abandoning Americans and leaving them behind, abandoning Bagram airfield before we evacuated.

When that happened, all across the globe, America's enemies looked to Washington and took a measure of the man in the oval office, and, tragically, they concluded that President Biden was weak and feckless and ineffective. And a weak American President is dangerous.

When the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan happened, I said publicly that the chances of Putin invading Ukraine just rose tenfold. I also said, at the same time, the chances of China invading Taiwan just rose tenfold.

We have now seen the first of these two things happen, because Putin understood the disastrous surrender and withdrawal in Afghanistan to mean that President Biden was weak, and weakness is provocative.

If Putin wins in Ukraine, it will confirm to Xi in Communist China that he can confidently invade Taiwan and that America will be too weak and feckless to stand with our allies.

But if Ukraine defeats Putin with the help of American weapons and military aid, Xi will see aggression as a recipe for failure and that the United States has the strength of will to stand by its allies to ensure that they have what they need to defend themselves.

China is--mark my words--the most dangerous geopolitical adversary of the United States for the next 100 years. China has the military might of the Soviet Union with a much, much stronger economy and an economic engine.

China also carries out policies of murder and torture and genocide and slavery and lies and deception. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be catastrophic for American national security. Right now, today, over 90 percent of the world's most advanced semiconductor chips come from Taiwan. If China were to conquer Taiwan, it would give the Chinese Communist Party a stranglehold on the global supply of semiconductors.

After that, if Xi wanted to turn off the supply of semiconductors to Americans, he could do so instantly. It is simply irresponsible to allow that to happen, and it is impossible to overstate the catastrophe that would impose on Americans.

Overnight, it would be impossible to acquire or repair pretty much everything we rely on in modern life: Cars, planes, medical devices like pacemakers, clean water, refrigerators, all rely on semiconductors--of course, so do vehicles, boats, tanks, missiles that we rely upon for our national defense.

And even if China didn't turn off the supply of those chips, they would be able to control what went into them, including potentially planting spyware and espionage directly and immediately threatening American security.

And it goes without saying, the Chinese Communist Party would also immediately control the price of semiconductors and what they go into, which would drive up the cost of pretty much everything to Americans.

If you think $40 billion is a lot of money, just wait and see the disaster if the Chinese communists lock up semiconductors on the world stage and use them to extract monopoly profits from Americans while simultaneously spying on us using those same semiconductors.

Just as we don't want to see a world in which Putin controls energy, we should not want to see a world in which Xi controls semiconductors.

I began this speech by talking about the consequences of failing to stop Nord Stream 2. I very much wish that these consequences had not come to pass, but the terrible reality is that President Biden failed in Afghanistan and failed again with Nord Stream 2, which played the decisive role in shaping the current crisis.

The reason we should help the Ukrainians defeat Putin by giving them weapons is the same reason we need to keep our thumb on China. And it is not what some of my colleagues on the Republican side have said: It is not to defend democracy across the globe; it is not to defend international norms. That sort of empty nonsense is the sort of things John Kerry says.

The reason we should support our Ukrainian allies who are fighting and killing Russian soldiers is because it protects American national security, it keeps America safer, and it prevents our enemies from getting stronger, from threatening the safety and security of Americans, and from driving up the costs, the economic damage to Americans, by hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars.

America needs to be strong--strong enough to stand up to Putin, strong enough to stand up to communist China, strong enough to defend the greatest Nation in the history of the world.

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Mr. CRUZ. Will the Senator yield for a question?

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Mr. CRUZ. Just a moment ago, the Senator from Ohio made reference to the alleged existence of the so-called Putin wing of the Republican Party.

I would like to ask the Senator from Ohio, Is it accurate that the Senator from Ohio and 43 of his Democratic colleagues in January of this year voted against sanctioning Nord Stream 2, sanctioning Russia, sanctioning Putin, despite the fact that Ukraine begged the Senate to pass those sanctions and Putin invaded Ukraine just days after 44 Democrats sided with Russia and Putin?

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