Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2024

Floor Speech

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Mr. TURNER. Mr. Chair, when Ronald Reagan stood in front of the Berlin Wall and said, ``Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,'' he did so not because we were in opposition to just the Soviet Union and Russians. He did so because we were in opposition to authoritarianism. We were in opposition to communism.

Now, that wall fell, but it didn't fall because the Soviet Union took it down. It fell because they merely didn't shoot the people who were doing so. When it fell as a result of Ronald Reagan's words and a call to the world, the line between authoritarianism and democracy marched all the way to the border of Russia.

Right now today, Putin has told us straight up he wants to move the line of authoritarianism back. He wants to reclaim that land, not just Ukraine, but Poland, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, eastern Europe, and the Baltics.

We must support democracy or freedom. If we don't, ours is at risk. Ronald Reagan's words are meaningless if we allow Russia to reestablish authoritarianism and move that line of democracy back to where the Soviet Union had claimed eastern Europe and had imposed authoritarianism on people's lives.

This is not just an American mission. The world is with us. Democracies are with us. This chart shows the amount of contribution of the total aggregate of all aid. This is up on my official website, by the way. If you click on ``Ukraine,'' you will see these, along with a report that verifies this information. The United States is not the major contributor of total aid.

What is more important, when you get to military aid, the United States is less than half of all military aid. The world's democracies are standing against Russia for democracy, against authoritarianism, and the United States, the light of the world for democracy, needs to be there and needs to support the Ukrainian people against these atrocities.

If you go to my website, you will see the documentation that supports this. We are $42 billion. Our democracy allies are over $50 billion. We need to stay in the fight by supplying Ukrainians the weapons that they need for them to be in the fight, the fight for democracy.

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