Murkowski speaks out on Ukraine, NATO and danger of Putin; Sullivan goes along with whatever Trump says on a given day
“We all want this war to end, but it cannot end on Russia’s terms,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski said Tuesday.
“If it does, we should expect nothing more than a temporary respite before the resumption of hostilities. Why are we going to start trusting and believing Putin’s word now, given his track record? We’ve seen this before and the appeasement of tyrants does not bring peace. Russia started this conflict and it’s critical for us to stand with Ukraine to end it, not just because it’s right, but because it’s necessary.”
Murkowski spoke at length on the Senate floor Tuesday against the decision by President Donald Trump to side with Russia, though she did not spell out the betrayal in those words. Her entire speech is worth reading as she clearly summarizes the dangers created by Trump doing Putin’s bidding.
She said that in 2005 Putin said the collapse of the Soviet Union was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th Century.
“He has never hidden his ambitions from that statement,” Murkowski said. “When Putin says the ‘ongoing collapse of Western hegemony is irreversible,’ he means us. He means our allies and the broader narrative about the decline of Western influence. He wants NATO to be divided and he wants the United States isolated. This works to his advantage. He just probably didn’t expect that America was going to do it for him,” she said.
Seven other senators, both Republicans and Democrats, spoke that day about Trump siding with Putin, but Sen. Dan Sullivan, who never hesitated to complain about Putin during the Biden administration, has a new approach.
Sullivan never criticizes Trump, even when it means that Sullivan has to abandon positions that he claimed to hold, such as supporting Ukraine instead of Russia.
The video of the speeches by Murkowski and the others is posted below.
And what of Sen. Dan Sullivan?
His new position is that whatever Trump says on Ukraine and Russia is correct, regardless of whether Trump is contradicting himself, lying or catering to Putin. His default setting is to be a Trump yes man.
Sullivan pontificated at length about all this on a right-wing Anchorage talk show on March 7, dispensing with the disastrous Trump Oval Office meeting in one sentence and catchphrase borrowed from his press release.
Then Sullivan expounded on a 2024 supplemental bill in the last Congress that had money for Ukraine, a matter that is irrelevant to Trump’s sudden abandonment of Ukraine:
“Yeah look that Oval Office meeting it was a missed opportunity from my perspective. You know some people don’t agree with it, but I’ve been a supporter of trying to get, not just Ukraine, but our allies in Israel, our allies in Taiwan and the Indo-Pacific to push back against this authoritarian aggression, whether it’s Russia, whether it’s Iran with Israel, whether it’s China with Taiwan and other of our allies in Asia. And you know that’s why I supported this national security supplemental, which was by the way Mike (Porcaro) mostly about getting our ability to produce weapons for America,” Sullivan said.
“That was mostly about enhancing, rebuilding our industrial base which is really atrophied in terms of our ability to produce weapons. I mean we can’t build ships. Biden was more focused on climate change. His Secretary of the Navy literally was more focused on climate change than shipbuilding. You can’t make this stuff up.
(Biden’s Secretary of the Navy said Sullivan did make that stuff up.)
Sullivan’s radio monologue continued:
“So the Trump team is gonna get back to lethality and war fighting, not this woke stuff that infected our Pentagon. I’m not gonna talk about it too much here, but I, I, I certainly, uh, trying to figure out how to the say this, tried to encourage at a very high level, the Ukrainians to get back here and, and um, negotiate and, and bring a proposal to the administration. You’re seeing that that’s happening now.”
“And I do think that the Ukrainians should sign this mineral deal. By the way, Mike, the one thing that the press didn’t report on. Guess who’s idea the mineral deal was in the first place? It was, it was Zelensky’s. Zelensky came and met with a number of senators in the fall. I was in the meeting. He was the guy who proposed the mineral deal. You know you have the liberal media saying ‘Oh Trump’s trying to impose this on the Ukrainians.’ It was Zelensky’s idea in the first place. I know that cause I heard him pitch it,” he said.
Porcaro said the mineral deal was a good idea.
“It’s a good idea,” Sullivan repeated. “So I think all of this is gonna happen. These kind of negotiations go up and down. And you saw Trump put out a statement, I think today, saying hey, if Russia doesn’t get to the table soon, we’re gonna crush them with sanctions. So what he’s trying to do and I know this for a fact, he’s trying to bring these parties together, end the war, um and stop the fighting. And when one party is not looking like they’re doing it, he, you know he’ll take action in one way. But I think getting the Ukrainians with the high level top Trump officials soon on this is positive. You saw President Zelensky put that statement out. It’s back where it should be and you know I’m closely monitoring it.”
That was on March 7. Zelensky may have proposed a mineral deal, but he did not propose that Ukraine should hand over $500 billion in mineral money.
The BBC reported March 5 that the terms of the mineral agreement were in dispute.
"The U.S. administration started with a deal that challenged Ukraine's sovereignty, then pushed an exploitative one that would bankrupt the country," Tymofiy Mylovanov, former minister and head of Kyiv school of economics, told the BBC.
"Now, they've shifted to a reasonable deal with co-ownership and no direct claims on past aid. That could actually benefit Ukraine,” he said.
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