Provision of Costs of Loan Guarantees For Ukraine

Floor Speech

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Mr. HARRIS. Mr. Speaker, thank you for yielding me time to speak on this bill before us.

Mr. Speaker, the situation in Ukraine is important to all of us, but for me it has a personal aspect. My mother, now 90 years old, escaped from Ukraine and the Communists after World War II. She understood firsthand how Joseph Stalin suppressed freedoms and liberties in Ukraine--much as Mr. Putin desires to do likewise now.

We are faced with a situation in which a new Government of Ukraine is being threatened with Russian expansion into its sovereign territories. It is as if the Budapest agreement of 1994, which involved both Russia and the United States, had not guaranteed Ukraine safe borders from invasion. It is as if the Cold War never ended. Perhaps to Mr. Putin and other Russian nationalists it never has.

Ukraine, situated between Russia and the rest of Europe, is of obvious strategic and economic importance, not only to Russia but to the United States and Western Europe.

That is why this bill is so important. It allows Ukraine to be allowed access to ESF funding. The ESF was established to, ``provide assistance to allies and countries in the transition to democracy.''

Mr. Speaker, that is exactly the situation in which Ukraine finds itself today--in need of our help to advance democracy and resist the invasion, economically and physically, from Russia, attempting to relitigate the Cold War. We can't let that happen. They desperately need these loan guarantees. For the sake of freedom, democracy, and international justice, I urge passage of this bipartisan effort to help our friends in Ukraine.

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