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Floor Speech
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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I am sorry. The Presiding Officer seems to have the misfortune of being out here every time I come to the floor to speak. I regret that, and I feel sorry for him.
I am glad to be out here with my colleagues, today, on both sides of the aisle. We have heard the Senator from Mississippi refer to what he described as the greatest words of wisdom that came from Ecclesiastes. Those were words of wisdom.
I think another set of great words of wisdom came from Ronald Reagan, who said, ``Peace through strength.'' Peace through strength is what Ronald Reagan represented.
I know the President, last night, had a less clear message to the American people. I know that he said that he was the greatest President in American history. George Washington, I think, was second on his list.
For most of us in this Chamber, I think we probably would say Ronald Reagan earned a place there, even those of us who disagreed with him. One of the reasons was that he did what he said when it came to the national security interests of the United States of America. Because we have been following that path of peace through strength in a bipartisan way, the American people have been extremely generous in their support of the Ukrainian people since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
The American people have earned a profound debt of gratitude from free people all over the world, including in the United States. Their courage and our weapons and the weapons of our allies have held Putin's army at the gates of Europe. Nothing else has. They have shown that democracies will stand up to defend themselves and will not roll over to dictators, whether they are in Moscow or Beijing.
But unlike us and unlike the rest of the world, the Ukrainians actually have paid a huge human toll. They have had almost 400,000 casualties. They have had over 40,000 deaths in this war. Their cemeteries are bulging with new graves that are piled high with flowers that testify to the sacrifice of the Ukrainian people in every community in Ukraine. Anybody who has been there has seen them. It is impossible to avoid the cemeteries that have piled up with soldiers who have been willing to pay the ultimate sacrifice on the frontlines of this war in Ukraine.
I delivered a speech just a few days ago, which the Presiding Officer may have had the misfortune of hearing, discussing President Trump's false accusation that Ukraine started this war with Russia.
To my colleagues who say it doesn't matter what the President says, that it is only the outcome that matters--be patient about this great negotiator who learned everything at the heels of Mr. Cohen while he was doing commercial real estate in New York--some of us are worried about it because words do matter, especially the words that the President utters.
Could you imagine anybody on this floor defending a President who said that Taiwan had invaded China when China had invaded Taiwan? That would be ridiculous. That would be absurd. But that is the situation that we face today. It is no different than that. It is identical to that.
He has called President Zelenskyy a dictator--the freedom fighter who is leading this battle and who has led this battle at Ukraine.
Ronald Reagan would turn over in his grave if he knew that the President has invited Russia to rejoin the G7, which is a group of the world's most powerful democracies--democracies--that suspended Russia after Putin invaded Ukraine for the first time in 2014. By the way, are we supposed to believe that he didn't invade Ukraine then; that he was invited in somehow to Crimea? Is President Trump really fooled by the little green men that Vladimir Putin sent there after his administration held supposed peace talks in Saudi Arabia without even the decency to include Ukraine, which has had more than 400,000 casualties?
Every single one of these statements and decisions have emboldened Putin. You can see it in the newspapers in Russia. You can see it on TV. And they have weakened Ukraine's negotiating position, profoundly undermining our own national security.
How this war ends will determine whether Putin sets his sights on our NATO allies, like Poland and the Baltics; whether dictators like China's Xi Jinping test our resolve by invading their neighbor, Taiwan; whether the post-World War II international order that the United States built and is today frittering away under this President's leadership remains intact; whether the United States can continue to provide the leadership on behalf of free nations all over this world and democracies all over this world that our parents and grandparents had the decency to sacrifice and build for us; whether we are going to face another conflict in this world that is actually started by a tyrant but ended by democracies.
The last thing we should be doing is undermining Ukraine's negotiating position and ours when we have this much at stake.
I know the Presiding Officer has spent his life in negotiations in the private sector. I have spent time--not as much as the Presiding Officer. I certainly have spent time in these negotiations as well. Our discipline, when I was in the private sector negotiating these deals, was that we would let every deal die at least three times because our theory was no deal worth doing could be done the first time or the second time. I can see the Presiding Officer probably--he probably said it is five times before you can do it. But the point is, you wouldn't undermine your own negotiating leverage while you are going into a deal.
Today--today--the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency went on FOX News and told the world that we had shut down our intelligence- sharing with Ukraine. We met--I don't know if I can say. I am on the Intelligence Committee, let me be careful what I say. Today, the United States of America has said we have cut off Ukraine.
I don't know what anybody is doing in this Chamber if they are not coming here saying the United States of America should not be cutting off Ukraine's intelligence in midstream, in the ramp-up to a negotiation. If you come out here on this floor and say it is the right thing to do; that you, in the private sector, would make an equivocally idiotic, compromising, self-defeating move in a negotiation like this, come and defend it out here. Come and tell us how that is peace through strength.
We shut off our offensive cyber with respect to Russia and got nothing back from them. Ronald Reagan is turning over in his grave at a national security strategy that, I guess, has been concocted in the realm of social media and cable television but has nothing to do with the national security interests of the United States. It can't be defended.
I want to also say, while I have the floor and for the record--and I hope people will look it up--I have never met President Zelenskyy where he hasn't started the meeting by thanking the American people and ended the meeting by thanking the American people. He has done it in every meeting that I have been in. But I don't want us to lose sight of the fact that we also hold a profound debt of gratitude to him and to his soldiers and to the Ukrainian people.
The President doesn't seem to understand that. The President seems to think: Oh, my gosh, they are doing us a favor by using our weapons.
You are in tough shape; your country is in tough shape, he stated the obvious in that embarrassing interaction in the Oval Office the other day, where he couldn't even keep his temper for 5 minutes on the global stage.
The Ukrainians are not just fighting for Ukraine; they are fighting for democracy. They are fighting for Europe. They are fighting for freedom. They are fighting for the international order that we created, that we led after the Second World War.
Should NATO pay its share? Yes, it should. But we are not some charity case. We have benefited from the casualties that Ukraine has suffered. We have benefited from the exposure of the weakness of Putin's corrupt army. We have benefited from Xi Jinping's new knowledge that if a dictator tries to invade another country, the free world will stand together, until Donald Trump became President of the United States.
I want to say again, Mr. President, to you and to all of my colleagues here today, the United States has turned off our intelligence to the Ukrainian people. They are not in retreat. They are on the frontlines of this war today, in the middle of winter, on the steps of Europe, where 16 million people were killed by Hitler and Stalin, when my mother was born in Warsaw--a Polish Jew in 1938, the year before Hitler invaded Poland. And we turned off their intelligence.
They are killing more Russians there every month than they were 6 months ago. This is a catastrophe.
The other night when we had the budget reconciliation, I had a request for an amendment that simply would have said that it was the sense of the Senate that Russia invaded Ukraine; that Russia had started this war. I wanted to ask my colleagues just the basic question: Can we agree that Russia started the war in Ukraine? That seems like a shocking question to ask. I hope every schoolchild in America knows that that is true. Yet the President of the United States has said that Ukraine started this war. There are people around this city these days who are suggesting that Russia didn't start the war; that Ukraine started the war.
And I am not even talking about people like the new head of Intelligence for the Trump administration who has taken the view that Ukraine had what was coming to them, who tweeted out at 11:30 the night that Putin's tanks invaded Ukraine, a peaceful country--for the first time in Europe since World War II, a dictator invading a peaceful country--who took to social media to say that Ukraine had it coming to them. I am not even saying that; I am saying people who are unwilling to say that Russia invaded Ukraine when it launched an unprovoked, an unjustified, full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, following their already illegal annexation of Crimea and their illegal occupation of parts of the Donbas. So that is all my resolution says, and that is it.
That may seem like a basic and remedial task. I am sorry it is necessary.
I want to remind every schoolchild in America who started this war and whose side we are on and what the legacy of Ronald Reagan's peace through strength is all about.
This is a measure that will not in any way disrupt the progress in negotiations. I think quite the opposite. I think quite the opposite. I want us to assure ourselves that we are all clear here about who started this war.
I want us to fulfill our responsibility to the American people. We are not here to repeat untruths from the Oval Office. We all have a patriotic responsibility to live up to. The President does as well.
I want us to demand, on behalf of the American people, that the United States lead for the sake of the Ukrainian people and for our national security and for the security of the world.
That is why this is not just a matter of how worried people in NATO are; it is how worried people in Southeast Asia are because they know if we don't get our act together here and support Ukraine, support our allies in Europe, the same thing could happen there. And China could invade Taiwan, and we could have an American President who claims he is the best President in American history, with George Washington second, saying that Taiwan invaded China.
I want us to avow, as Ronald Reagan proclaimed 40 years ago, that ``freedom is America's core'' and ``[w]e must never deny it nor forsake it.'' That is what we risk today by withdrawing our support for Ukraine, allowing the President to promulgate falsehood after falsehood about who started this war and what is going on with this war.
If we abandon Ukraine, we are going to abandon the core of who we are.
This is a simple question. It is not a partisan one. And the answer couldn't be clearer.
Res. 114, which was submitted earlier today; further, that the resolution be agreed to and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.
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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, let me say--I know my colleague from Vermont is here, so I am not going to go on, but I would just like to respond to my friend from Wyoming by saying that it is shocking to me that tonight, in the Nation's Capital of the wealthiest country in the world, the place that we think of as the freest country in the world, our intelligence sharing with Ukraine, which has been one of the most effective means of their ability to prosecute the war in Ukraine against Russia, has been shut off by the United States of America. And our arms have been shut off to some degree as well, in the middle of winter, while they are sacrificing on the frontlines for freedom and for democracy.
It is shocking that we are in the position that we are in, and I hope, for the sake of our kids and for our grandkids, for the sake of the allies that we have all over the world, for the sake of democracy and freedom in this world, that we pull together as a Senate and articulate the importance of pursuing this negotiation out of a position of strength and not of weakness.
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